Susannah Crockford - Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona

EDITED BY Kathryn Lofton AND John Lardas Modern

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SUSANNAH CROCKFORD

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77791-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77807-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77810-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226778105.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Crockford, Susannah, author.

Title: Ripples of the universe : spirituality in Sedona, Arizona / Susannah Crockford.

Other titles: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona | Class 200, new studies in religion.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. |

Series: Class 200 : new studies in religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020051232 | ISBN 9780226777917 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226778075 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226778105 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: SpiritualityArizonaSedona. | SpiritualitySocial aspectsArizonaSedona. | OccultismArizonaSedona. | Religion and cultureArizonaSedona. | Sedona (Ariz.)Religious life and customs.

Classification: LCC BL2527.S44 C76 2021 | DDC 204.09791/57dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051232.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For the people of Sedona, love and light

Figure 1. Sedona, Arizona.

Were an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Karl Rove, in Mark Danner, Words in a Time of War, 2007, p. 17

Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.

Richard Feynman, in What is Science?, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City, 1966

Look how cute you are, purred Vixen du Lac as she met me in the parking lot of the Super 8 motel to take me in her dark green Subaru to the Cosmic Portal. Sixty-five years old, with wispy frosted blond hair and plump pink lips, she was very friendly. It was my first day in Sedona, and Vixen had met me off the shuttle bus from Phoenix. Driving at breakneck speed, using her knee on the steering wheel, making rattling and clicking noises to the music on the radio, chattering frenetically, she introduced me to Sedona. It was a paradise I would find hard to leave, a sacred place, a space between spaces. Frequency allows you to connect to everything that already is. She was an esoteric scientist, working on sonic harmonics. An MIT scientist tested her with a magnetometer and found she was on the same frequency as the vortexes. You should not drink tap water unless it had been mechanically and energetically purified. They were spraying chemtrails a lot today. The year 2012 was an important one, the ascension was imminent. The crystal ships were coming to take us back to the stars.

The Cosmic Portal was what Vixen called her house. I had contacted her via her website two weeks previously. She responded promptly, offering a variety of packages with ascending prices for my special stay. The house itself was a small, one-floor building, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a fenced-in backyard of bare scrub and prickly pear cacti, and a garage. It was a building that in many respects resembled its neighbors in West Sedona. Inside, it was cluttered with crystals, stones, offerings, paintings, Buddha statues, roses made from toilet paper, little pink hearts with the letter M written on them, and two cats and a dog.

Vixen told me that the house was a temple, energetically, she qualified, so as to foreclose the possibility that it was used as a house of worship. What she meant was that it was built on a vortex, the focal point of which was under the garage. This room was no longer used for cars but was renovated into an extension of the interior living space, becoming the place where she did her energy work. It was a meditation room, with many crystals of different colors, a vibrant painting with splashes of bright primaries, a couple of prints by the psychedelic artist Alex Grey, angel figurines, candles, incense, pipes, and two yoga swings hanging in the middleto help tone your bum, she advised me. She stood me on the point between the yoga swings where the vortex was and asked, Can you feel it?

Vixen du Lac was born in the Bronx, in New York City. Prior to moving to Sedona, she ran a pet resort in Colorado. After the end of a difficult marriage and a robbery of her home, she arrived in Arizona with minimal belongings five years before I met her. In her own words, she had to start all over again with no money at age sixty. Before Colorado she had lived in Los Angeles, where she was a great burlesque queen, who also acted in a few soft-core porn movies. In Sedona, she worked as a psychic and pet psychic, offering readings for a fee. When I was there, she did this from her home, but she had previously worked in one of the new age stores in the Uptown district. However, she made a distinction between herself, a real practitioner, and the corporate or commercial practitioners who were only in it for the money. She associated Uptown with the phony side of Sedona. Money corrupted spirituality, in her opinion, and she spoke often about how spirituality was not for sale. Although she rented out the spare room in her house to guests, she claimed not to make a profit, barely keeping a roof over her head. She saw herself as helping others, helping their souls. She had been given her psychic gifts to help people, not profit from them.