Back in the days before the internet took off as an effective means of opposing new age fraud, an American woman, Marlo Morgan, pulled off possibly the most brazen, stupid and above all, bizarre scam in the long history bizarre new age scams.
It’s a story that illustrates the damage that can be done by a “positive” message. Nobody dies in this story, but the entire indigenous population of Australia gets its identity quite literally stolen, and suffers a bizarre but pernicious form of cultural assassination. And of course, tens of millions of fans world-wide lose their cash and devalue their brains.
Very simply stated, Marlo Morgan travelled to Australia in the late 1980s and returned with a bizarre story about meeting a hitherto unknown Aboriginal tribe, travelling with them through the desert for about three months, learning their secrets and being chosen by them to be the final guardian of their culture and their messenger to the world.
Marlo Morgan: rugged adventurer, Guardian of Aboriginal culture
There are a few problems with her story, however. For example, the tribe doesn’t exist and Marlo actually spent her time working in a pharmacy in Brisbane, not wandering about in the desert, but more on that later. Read the rest of this entry ?
