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Out of this mystical melange, hippie communities are developing clearly identifiable sects, with their own clergy, formal meetings and even liturgy. These groups borrow unabashedly from all three main strands of the psychedelic faith. The Neo-American Church, whose pastors are known as "boo-hoos" (the absurd title is meant to keep "an element of humor in our institutional affairs"), uses prayers from Buddhism, Tantric Yoga and Mohawk moccasins in its pseudo-marriage ceremonies. One popular center of hippie worship in Los Angeles is the Oracle-Cosmic Joy Fellowship, whose prelates are known as "coordinators." At its regular services, worshipers sit cross-legged in an incense-clouded room festooned with Indian print cloths, statues of Buddha and votive candles, holding hands and ecstatically chanting "Om" (a Hindu word signifying "the ultimate religion").
Confused & Eclectic. The goal of religious hippies is union with God, whom they envision as a "cosmic consciousness." Despite its bizarre aspects, a surprising number of clergymen see the hippie faith as a genuine spiritual impulse. "Hippieness has all the marks of a new religious movement," writes Harvard Theologian Harvey Cox, in, of all places, the current issue of Playboy. "It has its evangelists, its sacred grottoes, its exuberant converts." He suggests that the hippies' quest for warmth and love is a warning to Christianity. Other churchmen quite rightly question the spiritual validity of an undigested mixture of drug-induced visions, skimmed Orientalism and nature worship. Even Cox concedes that the hippies' "confused and eclectic" theology contains "very little corrective to just plain self-indulgence."
*One problem is that the traditional ritual requires the presence of a naked virgin and there aren't many of them in communal crash pads.