I suppose another take on Marianne Williamson and the neomystic turn generally is it’s a turn inward. It takes all the energy floating about that had been aimed at society and structure and turns it to self and sensibility. And that’s a thing that happens, and you’d kind of expect it to happen around now, and diverted into culture the energy can even get pretty golden-agey as the dialectic grinds towards synthesis.

That’s the social unrest of the 60s diverting into the “Me Decade” 70s and “Morning in America” 80s. That’s the revolutionary period of the 1910s being suppressed in the First Red Scare and yielding to the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance.

That’s second-wave feminism falling to an ‘80s pincer move between cultural conservatives and S&M postmodernists – falling as a sociopolitical project. And then its themes got turned inward and coopted and reemerged in the 90s as Wicca, as Lilith Fair, as lesbian chic, as riot grrl, as Xena and Scully and Buffy, as the music I think of as VH1core chick-rock – Shawn Colvin, Natalie Merchant, Meredith Brooks, Paula Cole. As a sensibility, a subculture, a product, an aesthetic (that could be digested into more products, into Target collections and remodeling TV about shiplap and healthy relationships)