The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

by Eugene McCarraher

Max experienced an epiphany. As he remembered the episode some years later, a white-bearded man appeared out of a cloud and nodded, “as if to say, ‘It’s all right. I will come.’ ”69 The man in the cloud soon arrived, and Max finally understood “the grand scheme of things.” A week after his vision, anticipating “something wonderful,” his friend Conrad Rooks (heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune) introduced Max to Swami Satchidananda, an Indian yogi then living in Sri Lanka. (Though Max was reluctant to help Rooks make a movie with the Swami, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, he relented when his friend handed him “a very large check.”) Under the Swami’s guidance, Max took his first lessons in yoga and opened up a “vast creative reservoir,” an “interior space” that seemed “just as vast as the enormity of outer space”; indeed, “they seemed to be one and the same.” Although the Swami was supposed to return to Sri Lanka, Max insisted that he remain and share his spiritual enlightenment with other Americans. (Bringing the Swami to the United States was, Max later claimed, “the most spiritual and patriotic thing I have ever done.”)70 Max’s spiritual renewal—sanctified by very large checks—was a truly Aquarian moment. After meeting the Swami, “all the planets lined up for me”; the acres of diamonds once promised by the Protestant God were now sown by yogi.