Ripples of the Universe

Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona

Susannah Crockford

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226778105
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Ask a random American what springs to mind about Sedona, Arizona, and they will almost certainly mention New Age spirituality. Nestled among stunning sandstone formations, Sedona has built an identity completely intertwined with that of the permanent residents and throngs of visitors who insist it is home to powerful vortexes—sites of spiraling energy where meditation, clairvoyance, and channeling are enhanced. It is in this uniquely American town that Susannah Crockford took up residence for two years to make sense of spirituality, religion, race, and class.Many people move to Sedona because, they claim, they are called there by its special energy. But they are also often escaping job loss, family breakdown, or foreclosure. Spirituality, Crockford shows, offers a way for people to distance themselves from and critique current political and economic norms in America. Yet they still find themselves monetizing their spiritual practice as a way to both "raise their vibration" and meet their basic needs. Through an analysis of spirituality in Sedona, Crockford gives shape to the failures and frustrations of middle- and working-class people living in contemporary America, describing how spirituality infuses their everyday lives. Exploring millenarianism, conversion, nature, food, and conspiracy theories, Ripples of the Universe combines captivating vignettes with astute analysis to produce a unique take on the myriad ways class and spirituality are linked in contemporary America.

1

The Rocks Were Screaming at Me

Agency, Nature, and Space

It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet already my own history sounds like another country.

—Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise, 2002, p. 74

Phoenix is the main entry point to Arizona for many travelers arriving through one of Sky Harbor’s four terminals. They encounter the span of a sprawling desert city rising from the dust on the backs of air-conditioning, water piped hundreds of miles from the north, and petroleum-fired transportation.1 The grids of ochre dirt and artificial green form neighborhoods that form suburbs that form the swelling metropolis that eyes the encircling plains rapaciously. Heading north, I-17 climbs steadily from the low Sonoran desert of saguaros and creosote to the high desert of prickly pear cactus and sagebrush through undeveloped exits with inauspicious names such as Bloody Basin and Horsethief Basin that memorialize Arizona’s cattle ranching past. Exit 179 leads through rolling hills to reveal the stunning red crags rivuleting the earth around the base of the Mogollon Rim, green trees swooping up over succulents grandly announcing the presence of fresh water. The town of Sedona settled smugly in the sandstone canyons, a modern-day tourist playground of turquoise and adobe gated communities, time-shares, hotels, and spas. On the outskirts, at the base of the hills, wherever the view is poorest, sit little manufactured houses and double-wide trailers, the lower-income homes that resemble the surrounding communities of Cottonwood, Cornville, and Jerome more closely than the high-value architectural gems that gird and mount the mesas and buttes of Sedona.

Running up through Oak Creek Canyon, following the path of the creek, the ponderosa pine grow thickly, and the human settlement thins to a few motels, campgrounds, and high-end restaurants and homes nestled at the ascending elevations. The narrow switchbacks choke with traffic every sunny weekend as visitors from every direction descend on the riparian coolness of Oak Creek Canyon, bathing in the natural swimming holes, bringing a cooler with the kids to sit on the banks and drink beer under the shade of the pines, a luxury absent in more southerly settlements. The canyons back onto the Mogollon Rim, the bottom edge of the Colorado Plateau, the tail end of the Rocky Mountains. Between the Rim and the base of the volcanic mountain ridge known in English as the San Francisco Peaks, named by Franciscan missionaries after their patron saint, squats the city of Flagstaff, the largest urban area in northern Arizona, home to a university, an observatory, and a ski resort. The railroad skirts the south side of Flagstaff; the Santa Fe Railroad follows the 39th parallel all the way to the Pacific and brought this settlement and the neighboring cities of Winslow, Holbrook, Williams, and Ash Fork into being. Parallel to the railroad runs its obsolescence: Route 66, the Mother Road of America’s mythic itinerant past, now called I-40, although meandering dirt remnants of the old 66 still putter through the landscape alongside the newer road. North yawns the Grand Canyon, a four-hundred-mile gap in the earth; to the east, the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest; between them the expanse of the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the continental United States.

This particular corner of Arizona has a number of spaces called sacred by different peoples at different times for different reasons. Sedona was considered a sacred site by everyone I spoke to; even people who were not interested in spirituality would mention that it was sacred to Native Americans or that its beauty was a sign of God’s presence. Among those who followed a spiritual path, the vortexes were the most frequently cited reason for why they considered Sedona sacred.2 Sedona is an example of the social production of the sacred in recent historical memory, a recorded and visible process of sacralization. The concepts of vortexes, energy, and nature are given specificity in this particular cultural context through the lens of spirituality. The physical and sacred space is reinscribed with a new religious history, rewriting and co-opting Indigenous history and practice, and claiming what has been stolen and settled as rightful inheritance.3

The vortexes are swirling energy spirals calcifying certain rock formations and other locations in Sedona, imbuing these physical entities with agency. It is a tactile experience to my interlocutors; it can be felt. Since mass is an illusion created by energy vibrating at certain frequencies in cosmologies of spirituality, the presence of beautiful, even sublime features in the landscape inculcates the high vibration of energy in that area. The beauty of nature is a physical substantiation of the special energy. Vortexes, energy, and nature are interconnected and interdependent concepts in processes of sacralization in this context. The influences of Transcendentalism and the longer history of nature religion in America are evident.4 This chapter interrogates the spatial connection between “the sacred” and “nature” in the social construction of American landscape, in which sacred space is closely identified with nature. It analyzes the capitalist material production of “nature” as a separate, preserved space that is not altered by humans that determine the priorities and regulations of land use. It inquires into the uneven distribution of resources for the production of nature in capitalism.

Sedona is rich in “natural amenities” such as forest, fresh water, canyons, and mountains.5 This attracts tourists. The spiritual scene also acts as a tourist pull through the crystal stores in Uptown and vortex tours.6 The beautiful landscape, talk of vortexes, and presence of other spiritual seekers are mutually reinforcing in creating the imaginary of Sedona as a sacred space composed of special energy. My interlocutors often began their spiritual path by visiting Sedona as a tourist. They were struck by the feeling of the place, its ambience. Then they moved to Sedona to live in the sacred, describing a mystical “call” from the energy of the land itself. Nature wants them there, but they find continual frustration from the human environment: too much traffic, onerous local ordinances, and overcrowding at well-known sites. Other people spoil nature.

The kind of nature desired has had the humans removed in a historical process of emptying the land of its previous or current human and non-human occupants.7 It has been demarcated as an area for escape from others. It is an area where humans do not live, only visit, an imaginary space where something called “the environment” is separate from and needs to be protected from the impacts of the living creatures it encompasses. The government regulates spaces according to this utopian ideal through the National Park, National Forest, and National Monument system of land designations.8 Conservation aims to fix this point into the landscape.9 To create separate spaces for the sacred in the United States, this required the removal of people, both literally and figuratively, in a process of structural violence. The term “structural violence” brings awareness to the negative effects of social structures that systematically harm and disadvantage individuals. In ideating nature as sacred through the concept of energy, spirituality forms part of these inequitable social structures. Spirituality overwrites Indigenous land claims and sovereignty, building on the history of imperial aggression in the area that is reproduced in the fragility of the claims to that land and its sacredness.

Vortexes Everywhere

The vortexes are specific natural sites in Sedona that are different on an energetic level, according to my interlocutors. The energy of these sites is characterized as having a spiral pattern, described in the literature by local Sedona authors variously as spiritual or psychic or “subtle,” and it is said to enhance spiritual practices, such as meditation, healing, and channeling.10 Energy is used as a way of describing a sensorial relationship with certain geological formations.11 It is figured as flowing in lines, called ley lines, that crisscross the earth in a grid, and the intersections of this grid form vortexes. These points are concentrations of energy, sometimes called “power spots” or likened to the chakras of the earth.12 The energy of the vortexes is further categorized as being masculine or feminine, electromagnetic or electric, yin or yang.13 These qualities are experienced, felt, rather than measured or seen, as a tingling sensation, a heightened emotional sensitivity, or a rush of new ideas and insights.14 Vortexes make spirituality tangible. They offer a sacralization of nature in Sedona, as they are inextricably linked to the landscape. It is a sacrality that emanates from the earth itself.

There are four Sedona sites in particular named as vortexes: Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, Airport Mesa, and Boynton Canyon. This was apparently engineered to service the needs of tourists, many of whom want to know specifically where the vortex is, in terms of a place on a map, a specific stop on their itinerary of Sedona.15 Locals more often told me that the whole area was a vortex or that there were innumerable vortexes of varying sizes to be found around the town. The special energy spreads over the whole area, with the vortexes as different access points to it. In the first place I stayed—“the Cosmic Portal”—I was told there was a vortex under the garage floor. Even though this was part of the built environment, it still contained a vortex that came from the earth beneath the house and not the garage floor itself. Still, the manner of discernment was the same; my host at the Cosmic Portal, Vixen du Lac, asked if I could “feel” it. She told me that vortexes were everywhere, not just in Sedona, and showed me pictures of the orbs that gathered around vortex sites.16 She told me the special energy of vortexes has a way of making things happen how you need them to, which is often not how you wanted them to happen. How you want things to happen is a product of your ego, whereas manifestation creates what you truly need, and the vortex enhances the power of manifestation. The personal is connected to the cosmic through manifestation, which compresses the gap between consciousness and matter, between what you think and what happens.

Figure 6. Airport Mesa—the vortex is said to be on the mound.

Above all, vortexes are felt. A pressure on the third eye, maybe, the spot between the brow ridges, but everyone feels the energy differently. The idea of the sacred was based on feeling. My interlocutors felt that Sedona was special. “Vortex” and “energy” were just attempts to translate that into words. It was the emotional experience that validated it as a real thing. Feelings had their own ontological validity. If something was felt, it was real. There was no dismissal of “just a feeling”; a feeling was as real as something empirically perceived. This follows the primacy of intuition, heart wisdom, over logic.

The spaces that engender these feelings had their own histories, however. Philip, a videographer, told me that the original site of the Airport Mesa vortex was said to be on the flat top of the mesa, where the airport is located. This caused considerable disruption to the functioning of the small, private airport when people would walk along the runway with maps looking for the vortex. So the owners of the airport “moved” it. They got all the local vortex maps changed to say that the vortex is a rock outcrop about halfway up the road that leads to the airport. That is where the vortex is now located, and people go up there and say they feel the special energy. This suggests that only once a site is named as sacred is it then felt as such. Naming in this context is a magical act of transformation where the name “vortex” grants power in cosmologies of spirituality through its linkage with the concept of energy. Energy is not only a description of the sensorial relationship with the landscape, but a creative concept that allows people to color their experience there in a certain way. This particular story also implies that any aspect of landscape could be constructed as sacred. It was told for a specific reason: to undercut the accepted reality of the vortexes in Sedona, to make clear that the speaker was not taken in by this label as so many others in the town were.

This is not to suggest that Philip thought the notion of Sedona’s special energy was invented, rather that the idea of there being four specific vortexes in Sedona was seen by people in the spiritual community as an introductory idea for those new to spirituality, especially tourists. It is simpler to direct a new arrival looking for a vortex to a specific location, such as Cathedral Rock, which is also the most photographed spot in Arizona, according to Forest Service data.17 It is an easier climb than Bell Rock, a gentle incline with only a few spots of scrabbling over boulders that most visitors can achieve. It is the image of Sedona that is disseminated in tourist brochures and websites, attracting the 3–4 million tourists that visit each year. Unlike the other three of the “big four,” the vortex has a specific locus, a dome of volcanic rock near the central spire, that can be climbed onto, rather than the vortex being the whole rock. It is a visible, impressive, iconic rock formation that can easily supply the answer to the question “What is a vortex?”

It is perhaps this iconicity that made it the frequent site of ceremonies and spiritual practice that I observed while in the field. Often on hikes up there, I would see people meditating or doing yoga on the volcanic dome; occasionally I spotted scattered human ashes. A monthly drum circle was held there, and I attended a number of ceremonies there for solstices and other astrological or numerologically significant dates. When I asked about the name, my interlocutors likened the two tall columns of rock flanking a spindle to a cathedral. One of the local legends I was told was that it was originally called Court Rock by nineteenth-century settlers, and Courthouse Butte, which is beside Bell Rock, was called Church Rock; the names were confused later on, and Court Rock became Cathedral Rock.18 This story was deployed by those who wanted me to know they understood that the vortexes, and by extension the sacredness of Sedona, were a recent human invention. The name is a way of associating it with the sacral quality it gradually acquired.

Figure 7. Cathedral Rock, taken from the perspective of Red Rock Crossing.

The notion that Sedona is a maelstrom of invisible yet potent spiritual energy is also relatively recent and can be traced in historical accounts to the second half of the twentieth century. However, in accounts by local authors who are invested in spirituality, the vortexes are credited with a much older heritage. The vortexes were known to Native Americans, who held the whole area sacred, and were known about by psychics and mediums living in Sedona who did not publicize them.19 Toraya Ayres described the emergence of “new age” activities in Sedona through the support of a realtor called Mary Lou Keller, who had a building on Hillside in the 1960s where she let people hold spiritual activities for free. In Keller’s own account, the vortexes were known to Native Americans and then Ruby Focus, a group now called Rainbow Ray Focus that is still present in Sedona, came with channeled information about the vortexes and bought property adjacent to the Airport Mesa vortex through Keller in 1963.20 She said this is the origin, despite other claims. The usual attribution in vortex guidebooks is to Dick Sutphen and Page Bryant, a pair of psychics who claimed to feel the vortexes in 1980s.21 Sutphen made a career out of holding workshops on Sedona’s vortexes aimed at developing psychic abilities, and published books about the vortexes and their powers. According to Ayres, Sutphen and Bryant only “publicized” the vortexes, along with Pete Sanders, another well-known Sedona psychic.22

There are two narratives here: one historical, which traces the vortexes through a sequence of local psychics who chose to talk about and publicize the vortexes in Sedona from the 1960s onward; the other mythological, claiming that the vortexes are a real and natural part of the landscape, their continuing existence going beyond recorded white American history to Native Americans. This can be seen as a claim intended to give the spiritual energy of Sedona authenticity and legitimate it through reference to the Indigenous peoples of the area.23 After all, if the energy of Sedona is real, it stands to reason that others before the ...