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.

Wilson Quinn was 18 years old in 1965, when the lustrum began, and was in the right place at the right time for first-hand participation in the hippie experience. In his case, that soon developed into the spiritual hippie experience. He later went on to earn a Master of Arts degree from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and thereafter a Ph.D. in the History of Culture from that university, focusing on esotericism and the perennial philosophy. In 1989, after separate occupations in the fields of esotericism and ethnohistory, in that order, he earned a law degree and for the last several decades has practiced law in both the private and public arenas.