New Age Believers Greet a New Day : For Many, Harmonic Convergence Becomes Personal Celebration

High on this mountain in a spot known as the Ski Bowl, about 50 true believers formed three concentric circles Friday evening in preparation for the mysterious weekend event they are calling the harmonic convergence.

New Age spiritualists and philosophers, linking the prophecies of American Indians with the intricate workings of the ancient Mayan and Aztec calendars, for months had been predicting a special alignment of the planets and constellations on Sunday and today. That alignment, they said, would usher in either untold cataclysms or a new period of harmonic human spirituality.

“I want you to focus for the awakening,” implored Emile Canning, leading the group on the mountain, one of several “sacred sites” around the world said to be most receptive to electric vibrations from space.

“For the awakening,” they sighed in unison.

“They say in the prophecies that 144,000 sun dancers, 144,000 filled with light, filled with the sun, will bring on the New Age,” he encouraged. “Allow yourself to become one of the 144,000, one of the dancing suns.”

The oms began, a lilting chant that dipped and rose in the clear mountain air. A few outstretched hands waivered as if propelled by the tone. After two minutes, the chanting ended abruptly, as if on cue. A rumble sounded overhead. Heads rose.

Across the sky bolted two jet fighters flying from behind the surrounding mountain range.

It was, perhaps, a less-than-auspicious beginning to the prophesied watershed in human history, in which Earth was to begin entering a new phase that would restore the planet’s “solar and galactic resonance.”

But to the mountainside chanters, and to many of the estimated 5,000 people who jammed the mountain’s slopes at daybreak Sunday, harmonic convergence proved not to be so much a question of an uncertain reality and epoch-making change as a celebration of human harmony.

“I don’t know much about the Mayan calendar, and to tell you the truth, I don’t care,” explained one, Joyce Mauriello, an administrative assistant at the San Francisco French Bread Co. “It’s not about that. It’s just a festival of love.”

The weekend, she said, would be whatever anyone wanted it to be; the important thing was perception.

And so it was.

As the sun jutted over the mountain’s jagged ridges Sunday morning, 40 “convergers” held hands in a circle, their eerie chants cutting through the cold morning air. A New Age wizard, too deep in a trance to give his name, held his staff to the sun. Others clung to rocky outcroppings, meditating on peace at 6:30 a.m. For Faun, who said she had no last name or birth date, the dawn Sunday brought the destruction of all cars, all cities and all factories. Not for anyone else, she admitted; for most people, the cars that lined the road to the mountaintop were as real as ever.

But they weren’t for her. Neither was her home in Santa Cruz, or Santa Cruz for that matter. “I’m never coming down from the mountain,” she declared as she blew her reed pipe. “I’m sure there’s plenty to eat up here. Maybe I’ll kill someone. No, I better not do that. It’s not my right.”

The city of Mount Shasta, at the base of the mountain, was abuzz with word of a strange apparition that had appeared on the TV screen of writer Diane Boettcher. After watching “Maimi Vice” and “Crime Story” on Friday night, Boettcher (“being real spiritual,” she joked) turned the channels in search of news about the harmonic convergence.

A Light That Blossomed

Before her, she claimed, appeared a bright light that blossomed into what she called an angel. Indeed, what could roughly be interpreted as a luminescent body with triangular glowing wings could be seen on the screen of her RCA 19-inch set Sunday morning, interrupted occasionally by horizontal bars.

Don Lovett, who described himself as a TV engineer from Amboy, Minn., in town for the convergence, was called in to check out the set. He pronounced the figure “an apparition materializing itself outside the rules of generated video signals.”

“I just hope she never leaves,” Boettcher said.

For a few, the cataclysms were very real and had already started.

Michael John, a former Idaho farmer and would-be novelist, said he saw them in the record flooding that hit Chicago on Friday and in torrential rains sweeping through Louisiana and Florida. The natural disasters to come, he said, will just be Mother Earth “shaking off the flea” of mankind’s destruction of the environment.

But that, of course, is too great for the individual to perceive, he said Saturday evening as a group of 250 formed circles to sing, chant and meditate on world peace and rebirth.

‘A Leap of Faith’

“We’re all taking a leap of faith gathering just to stand in a circle,” said John, “but there’s more to it than meets the eye. If I could see out of all the eyes that are gathering now around the world, I would really be high coming down from this mountain.”

John and others insisted that the importance of the event will lie with what comes out of it: a spiritual renaissance, a rebirth of creativity that many likened to the ‘60s--but of much greater import. “The ‘60s was born from the war (in Vietnam),” he explained. “When the war was over all the hippies forgot what it was all about: world peace and harmony. It was a renaissance diverted by a war.

“We won’t be diverted now,” he said.

He planned to go down the mountain tonight and continue his quest to convince an airport--any airport--to let him paint a mural on its runway.

Mt. Shasta actually made a smaller-than-expected contribution to the tide of 144,000 New Age believers many had predicted would mark the event worldwide. Rumors that the mountain would be closed to convergers may have scared some away or persuaded them to converge at home, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman said.

The mountain made a quick comeback despite the rumors. Friday night, rangers counted 1,000 people scattered among five major campsites and several smaller encampments on Shasta’s slopes. By Saturday afternoon, the number had doubled, and dawn Sunday lifted crowd estimates to 5,000, Otrin said. A heavy weekend under ordinary circumstances brings 300 to the mountain, he said.

Some of the dawn revelers came from the city of Mount Shasta’s 11 motels and two bed and breakfasts. The community’s 275 hotel rooms and four mobile home parks and private campgrounds were all packed. Convergers spilled into accommodations in neighboring Weed and McCloud.

Daniel Zelinger, a volunteer at Mount Shasta’s harmonic convergence office, tried to get a word in edgewise Friday evening over the constantly ringing phone and the visitors wandering in and out in search of information about weekend events.

“Fifty people an hour come through this office,” he said.

Mt. Shasta is California’s primary “sacred spot” for the convergence, he explained. When the Karuk and Shasta Indians passed the mountain, they prayed “all around and all around and all around but never on top.” According to Zelinger, Indian lore has it that one climbs the mountain only to die.

Modern Myths

A more recent myth holds that the mountain is home to the seven-foot-tall Lemurians, descendants from the inhabitants of Atlantis, said Gregg Gunkel, a Siskiyou County educational consultant. Spiritualists say the circular clouds that descend on the mountain are spaceships loading and unloading passengers.

Gunkel, a Mount Shasta resident, said most locals are used to and welcome big-city visitors coming for spiritual regeneration. But not everyone is hospitable. The Mount Shasta Herald has been printing letters to the editor warning that “thousands are coming to your community to advance the Kingdom of Satan,” and that “Harmonic Convergence (participants) are Satan worshipers who sacrifice small children as a part of their rituals.”

“Those letters make me sick,” said Bruce Batchelder, owner of Mt. Shasta Rentals, insisting that they represent a very small minority of the community of 3,328.

Gunkel added that most residents side with the sentiments expressed by Ted Marconi, who was quoted in the local paper as saying, “I’m all for (harmonic convergence). I plan to have my harmonica in the back of my convertible throughout the whole thing.”

The Mt. Shasta gathering was among the biggest around the world. At Chaco Canyon, N.M., about 1,000 stood amidst sagebrush and chasima bushes as leaders led chants and prayers, beat on drums, rang chimes and lit incense. And about 900 took part in Iroquois purification and water-healing ceremonies at Terrapin Point in Niagara Falls, N.Y. And as the sun rose over the Great Pyramids on Egypt’s Giza Plateau, about 45 people danced, chanted, prayed, meditated and beat drums.

Jose Arguelles, an art historian who popularized the convergence and wrote “The Mayan Factor: The Path Beyond Technology,” met with his family at sunrise near Boulder, Colo. They put out a fire at their camp to symbolize the end of the old cycle. Then he blew a conch shell 144 times.

“It’s everybody’s time to do what feels right and get in touch with the energies of the Earth and the energies of the universe,” he said.

At Mt. Shasta, events of the weekend ranged from convergence workshops to channelings, when famous dead personalities purportedly made their harmonic wishes known through designated mediums. Some talks were on the house; others were a bit more pricey.

For $20 on Saturday, a channeler would tune in “Christ”; “John the Apostle” would make an appearance Sunday for $35 per witness.

Zelinger insisted that the event list that filled every hour of the weekend was not what harmonic convergence was supposed to be all about--that listening to leaders, dead or alive, from now on was beside the point.

Nancy, a young Englishwoman who asked that her last name not be mentioned, had another interpretation. “A lot of people gathered together Sunday morning to see something very beautiful,” she said. “But it happens every morning.

“The sun rose.”