One day the Condor and the Eagle will fly wing-tip to wing-tip

The pub was disappointingly empty, so I took my first pint of the evening upstairs, where some sort of New Age society was holding a public talk and discussion. I gave the woman seated just inside the meeting room my £5 entry fee and found a spare seat at the back next to a big bloke with a beard. In the five minutes or so before the talk began, I counted 47 other people in the room, all of them white. Five chaps had advanced male pattern baldness, another had very obviously dyed hair (black). The total number of beards was six, including a goatee. Average age, at a guess, was 50. About ten people were over 70. Only three people had chanced a check or patterned jumper, dress or top; the rest wore plain — boring shades of brown mainly. Only one person was morbidly obese. The atmosphere was mindful and middle class. Gender proportions were about even. I asked the chap I had sat next to what the talk was about. He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket and kindly read the title out to me. It was: ‘The Prophecy of the Condor and the Eagle — rebalancing masculine and feminine’.

‘Golly,’ I said. ‘If you want my opinion,’ he said, looking at me significantly, ‘the CIA are behind all this New Age nonsense.’ The reasoning part of my brain struggled to work out why the CIA would go to all that trouble. The best it could muster was, ‘To deflect us from questioning geopolitical inequalities?’ ‘Precisely,’ he said darkly.

The talk began. A woman aged about 55 stood up and introduced herself as an ‘integrative psychotherapist’ and ‘ecopsychologist’. That is to say, she said, that she believed that we human beings in the atomised, technology-obsessed west can only be truly healed of our madness when we reintegrate with the living planet earth and its (or her) remaining indigenous peoples.