BANNING, California – Marilyn Ferguson, whose best-selling book “The Aquarian Conspiracy” helped establish the New Age movement by tying together its disparate threads, has died. She was 70.
Ferguson died Oct. 19 at her home in western Riverside County. She is believed to have died of a heart attack, her son, Eric, told the Los Angeles Times.
“The Aquarian Conspiracy,” published in 1980, was the first comprehensive analysis of the various unconnected efforts – such as scientists investigating biofeedback, midwives running alternative birthing centers and a Christian evangelist promoting meditation – that would coalesce into the New Age movement.
She cast these activities as a cumulative force seeking to break away from mainstream Western attitudes toward medicine, psychology and spirituality.
“After a dark, violent age, the Piscean, we are entering a millennium of love and light – in the words of the popular song ‘the Age of Aquarius,’ the time of ‘the mind’s true liberation,’” Ferguson wrote in the book.
Fritjof Capra, the New Age figure and physicist who wrote the “Tao of Physics,” said Ferguson was a vital figure among those striving together to create an alternative consciousness.
“She was a very important coordinator and networker in this whole movement,” he told the Times.
Ferguson was born in Grand Junction, Colorado, on April 5, 1938. She moved to Los Angeles in 1968 where she studied psychology and gathered information about new research in hypnosis, meditation and extrasensory perception that she explored in her book “The Brain Revolution” (1973).
She also created the “Brain/Mind Bulletin,” a New Age journal that she published for 21 years until 1996.
In 2005, she released a follow-up to the “The Aquarian Conspiracy” called “Aquarius Now.”
Associated Press – November 2, 2008
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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posted November 6, 2008 at 10:15 am
I guess I appreciate her contribution to this movement. But I think the death of Michael Creighton is more significant. His books and a few of his movies have plumbed some interesting spiritual issues. But a death is a death, and Ms Ferguson made her mark, too.
posted November 6, 2008 at 10:42 am
Old saying, deaths come in threes. Ferguson, Studs Terkel, and now Creighton. They all left books with stories to teach and contemplate on. Lives lived leave their mark on this world.
posted November 6, 2008 at 11:15 am
Never heard of this woman, but then I’ve never heard of many “famous” folks.
For her family, sympathy.
posted November 6, 2008 at 11:21 am
“It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear . . . . It’s like being between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to.”
~ Marilyn Ferguson
I don’t know anyone who has not read The Aquarian Conspiracy in my generation
posted November 6, 2008 at 11:43 am
A bumbling mistake on my part. The author’s name is/was Michael Crichton. This is further testimony that I should not attempt multi-tasking.