When John Muir, a wilderness mystic and founder of the Sierra Club, wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” he was reflecting on his profound relationship with California’s pristine alpine wilderness. But Erik Davis posits something further. In his kaleidoscopic history of spiritual California, The Visionary State, Davis proposes that Muir was also making room for an innovative, new “rootless tradition.” California dreaming, it seems, has it own dream logic.

As Davis dances us through a colorful web of cultural migrations, we befriend a zany cast of spirited individuals who intersect and collide underneath the legendary California sunshine. The cast of characters bears him out. We meet spiritual intellectuals like Alan Watts, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Aldous Huxley; deep ecologists like John Muir and Julia Butterfly Hill; popular visionaries like Starhawk and Carlos Castenada; science fiction visionaries like Philip K. Dick and L. Ron Hubbard; famous yogis like Indra Devi, Ram Dass, J. Krishnamurti, and Paramahansa Yoganananda; even the indefatigable Greta Garbo plays a role. We also explore Pentecostalism, Mormonism, televangelism, ufo cults, chakra cleansing, hot springs, hippies, acid tests, chemists, Burning Man, insider artists, surfers, Dionysian vintner cults, techno-geeks, rocket scientists, and visions of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Stories outrageous and often tragic rocket us through California as the spiritual imagination blossoms within the material bosom of the wonderland. Structures are built. People congregate. Dramas erupt as human folly inevitably wreaks havoc upon the dreams. But in true California spirit, it’s all good. Davis has a cellular approach to Buddhist inspired notions of impermanence. For him, and for his “rootless tradition”, the path is about the ride, the cascade. And it’s quite a ride. Take for example, the heroic rise and fall of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson:

After her daughter nearly died during the 1918 influenza pandemic, McPhearson decided she needed to settle down. God gave her a vision of a golden bungalow out west, and so she packed up her mom and kids in an Oldsmobile seven-seater and headed to Los Angeles. She may have been the first woman to make the drive without a man around, and certainly the first to do so in a vehicle plastered with the admonition “Jesus Is Coming Soon—Get Ready.” Using Los Angeles as a home base, the increasingly flamboyant McPhearson mounted massive revivals across the West. In the summer of 1921, she packed San Diego’s Dreamland Boxing Arena with some rope-a-dope evangelism, and as the weeks passed and the streets clogged with her fans, she moved the revival up the hill to Bilboa Park, where the U.S. Marines were called in to control a thirty-thousand-person crowd that still managed to rush the stage.

Over several pages of photographs, we follow McPhearson’s vaudevillian sermons replete with all-brass jazz band, costumes, props and acrobatics, her prolific use of radio, and the rumors of the scandalous romance that may or may not have lead to her subsequent nervous breakdown. And that’s just a snowflake in the eye of a storm.

The Visionary State is beautifully illumined via the strange and wonderful color photography of San Francisco-based photographer, bookmaker, and installation artist Micheal Rauner, making it suitable for coffee tables, hipster libraries, and serious scholars alike.

What gripped me most in the book were the tales of people, outrageous, passionate, possessed, juxtaposed by photographs that serve as only carcasses and skeletons and remains. We see only structures and mountains of rock and tree, never see portraits or sketches of these dreamers and builders and artists and personages. The Visionary State team teases us, forcing us to question our own surroundings and ponder — what will remain after we too shall pass away?

The nebulous crux of what Erik Davis describes as “California consciousness” is a tactical strategy for coping with the collision of cultures that is an inevitable feature of globalization. The perennially rising profits in New Age markets point towards an increasing cultural urgency in our search for those elusive pieces of authenticity, truth, and freedom. Davis demonstrates a new way to thinking about these ideals; ways that he sees embodied in the beauty of the setting California sun.

Photos: Michael Raunner

The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape (Hardcover, Chronicle Books)
by Erik Davis, Michael Rauner (Photographer)

Cost: $40.00

Where To Buy: Amazon