Articles of Aquarius
By Wilson Quinn


Ever since the late 1960s, the hippie experience in the English-speaking world has been misunderstood. Commentators have vilified hippies, mischaracterized them, applauded them, marginalized them, and romanticized them. Even worse, none of these commentators ever understood that the hippie experience was not unified, not monolithic, but was comprised of different elements or facets. For these and other reasons almost all such accounts, and all attempts at explaining the hippie experience, fall wide of the mark.

At last comes a book, Articles of Aquarius, that for the first time places the hippie experience in the context of its times, and explains in a way understandable to readers the underlying principles and energies that propelled it to the visibility it attained. The lustrum of 1965 to 1970 was an extraordinary and miraculous time of creative and spiritual energy broadcast across the planet. In a collection of twelve essays, the author carefully and fairly recounts the differences and the interplay between political, social, and spiritual hippies of this extraordinary time, and traces a number of accepted beliefs and trends in today’s culture to their roots in the hippie experience.