A prophecy cancelled

James Redfield´s "The Celestine Prophecy" is a best selling novel from the 1990´s. According to Wiki, the last time somebody bothered checking it had sold 5 million copies worldwide - but I think Wiki until recently gave a much higher, two-digit, number! 

Be that as it may, "The Celestine Prophecy" has even been translated into Swedish ("Den nionde insikten"), and I actually heard about the book during its heyday. I say "actually" (with some surprise), since at the time I was almost entirely uninterested in the New Age, and certainly didn´t bother with the finer details of it (such as who´s who in the new agey publishing business). So I suppose James Redfield´s book really was extremely popular, since even I got to know about it! I did read it around 2000 or so, and recently re-read it (after the film adaptation *purely by chance* showed up in my YouTube recommendations). I admit that I wasn´t particularly moved, but then, I´m still not a New Age believer...

The plot and characters of Redfield´s novel are very weak, and the real point of the story is obviously to convey the New Age spiritual message (or at least part of it). The main character and first person narrator, who remains unnamed but has some similarities to the author, travels to Peru in South America in search of a mysterious manuscript which contains nine "insights" about the human condition. The Catholic Church and the Peruvian military want to destroy all copies of the manuscript. Through various incredible chance events, the narrator meets other seekers looking for the lost document, and these people expound at some length on various New Age themes. The semi-dramatic climax comes at the (wholly fictitious) ruins of "Celestine", an ancient Mayan (!) settlement in the Peruvian jungles, where the narrator and his new friends temporarily gain supernatural powers. 

While Redfield apparently said explicitly that his story is "parable" (it´s a novel, after all), there is no doubt that many New Age believers take scenarios such as this one quite literally. Hidden scriptures, lost civilizations, Catholic conspiracies to suppress The Truth...we heard it all before. Typically New Age is also the complete disregard for archeological or anthropological context, not to mention the heavy anachronisms. The ancient prophecy is written in Aramaic by Mayans in Peru around 600 BC - an impossibility - and yet sounds 100% adapted to 1990´s California! (This is also a form of Anglo-American cultural arrogance, in which the colored races exist only as raw material for Anglo-American fantasies and projections.) While the parable probably works for a New Age audience, it sounds extremely weird to those of us who care about that context thing. Why would the Catholic Church (or the military) in Peru bother with some New Age fluff peddled by gringos? Why would ordinary Peruvians give a damn? 

That being said, I admit that "The Celestine Prophecy" could work as an introduction to some aspects of the New Age. It discusses synchronicity, "energy", mystical experiences, and cosmic evolution towards the Divine. There are also long expositions on pop psychology, sometimes touching on gender relations and child rearing. Jesus is said to have been the first person who could really open up to the evolutionary energies of the Divine. Beauty, especially natural beauty, is seen as central for spiritual enlightenment. The perspective is optimistic. If people learn to practice the nine insights, Earth could become an Utopia, in which a much smaller human population than today live in harmony with nature, while also having access to cities with high technology. Indeed, all production and distribution is automated, making it possible for the utopians to fully concentrate on spiritual evolution. There is constant tension in the book (as in real life New Age) between attempts to sound "scientific" (as when the occult "energy" is used to make plants grow faster under controlled conditions) and a more forthrightly supranaturalist worldview.  

I can´t say I liked "The Celestine Prophecy". It feels very American, White, and privileged middle class. In Peru, the narrator constantly meets upper class people, sometimes foreigners, who own spacious latifundias and are sympathetic to the metaphysical message. While a few of the seekers are poor and/or "Indians", most seem to be well-educated Western scientists or equally well educated Peruvian priests (who live at large missions). No ordinary Joe goes to Peru to cavort with the local smetanka, perhaps telling us something about the intended readership of the novel? And what about the (weird) advice to generously give money to spiritual people? 

But the most obvious problem with the nine insights today is, of course, the strong belief in progress and modernity. The similarity between dreams of free energy (through fusion and so on) and the "energy" from the Divine Source is perhaps not a co-incidence! The utopian vision was difficult to believe in already 30 years ago, and is completely impossible today. There may be this or that spiritual insight even in New Age, who knows, but in general, I´m afraid the Age of Aquarius have been cancelled...