My home town of Vancouver has long been a West Coast haven for New Agers. The city is known affectionately as “Lotus Land,” and local residents are accustomed to seeing shops brimming with the accouterments of New Age life–Wicca supplies, pentagram candles, healing stones, ritual and divination objects, and the like. And no one here blinks twice when they read billboard notices for “Shamanic drumming and dreaming circles,” “Wolfsong Chanting for the Spring Equinox,” or “Seminars on Past Life Regression. ” It’s just part of modern life in a society committed to diversity.

I enjoy reading these notices and occasionally browsing through these shops as much as the next skeptic. But I draw the line when New Agers begin practicing their manufactured rituals in real archaeological sites, insulting the spiritual beliefs of Native Americans and other aboriginal groups, and inflicting serious damage on the ruins they profess to revere. This is exactly what happened recently in an archaeological open-air museum in Villahermosa , Mexico. According to the newspaper reports, authorities at La Venta Park Museum caught three individuals, including one American, performing a New Age ritual on the famous giant Olmec heads displayed there.

The Olmecs, as you may recall, preceded the classic Maya culture. They founded a great state in Central America ruled by powerful kings, discovered the secret of producing chocolate from cocoa, and may even have devised the famous Mayan calendar. Moreover, they carved more than a dozen colossal heads from blocks of basalt–portraits, perhaps, of their great rulers.

Just how much the New Agers in Villahermosa knew about the Olmec is unclear. But they began merrily anointing some of these magnificent heads with an oily substance one archaeologist described to me as “green slime. ” It has badly stained the celebrated sculptures, and authorities at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History estimate that it will cost $25,000 to try to restore them to their “pre-ritual” appearance–an attempt that may ultimately fail. In addition, the Mexican government is now contemplating moving the giant heads out of the park and replacing them with replicas. All this has infuriated Mexican archaeologists and the local residents, who regard the New Agers as vandals who have desecrated an important part of their history.

I certainly share their sense of frustration and anger. But it is by no means the only such story I have heard about New Agers’ “rituals. “Several years ago, when I was in Chaco Canyon National Historical Park in New Mexico, a park service archaeologist told me of another bad incident. It happened in one of the great kivas– a giant circular chamber where Puebloan peoples gathered for ceremonies and rituals. On the summer solstice, a New Age group turned up and began performing a rite of some sort in the kiva. Unfortunately, in the midst of this, one of them suddenly died. Native Americans in the region, particularly the Navajo people who worked in the park, were appalled:in Navajo tradition, the dead are greatly feared for their power to do harm. So the park service removed several inches of top soil from the kiva and invited Native American ritualists to perform cleansing ceremonies at the sacred Puebloan site. This they did. But a year later, at summer solstice, the widow of the dead man crept back into the park and scattered the ashes of her husband in the great kiva. Once again the park service had to purify the site.

These are very troubling cases of cultural insensitivity in the New Age crowd. For years, archaeologists have simply tried to ignore their solstice ceremonies and other shenanigans, hoping that eventually they would go away. But that hasn’t worked. So now I think archaeologists and park officials need to get on the case, particularly at sites that attract New Agers. I’d personally like to see them talking more to these groups, educating them about the cultures who built the sites and the importance of these monuments to local residents today.

It won’t be easy. But it’s a start.

This entry was posted by Heather Pringle on Friday, January 30, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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