COLUMN ONE : Bad Vibes Rock New Age Mecca : Modern mystics seeking psychic energy in Sedona, Ariz., are clashing with conservative churches, American Indians and the U.S. Forest Service.

SEDONA, Ariz. —  There has always been something mystical and magnetic about the towering red rocks and mesas here.

First, the Indians were drawn to them. They still call the land sacred, the place where the Great Spirit Mother birthed the human race. Then, Hollywood discovered the buttes in 1920 and used them to film the Zane Grey epic, “Call of the Canyon.” Ever since, dozens of movie cowboys have been riding off into the Sedona sunset. And more recently, hundreds of artists and retirees, inspired by the mild climate, verdant hills and soaring sky, have settled here.

But Sedona is no longer Shangri-La.

Tranquillity has been jangled by a new breed of pilgrim: seers and seekers who have turned this picturesque central Arizona hamlet into the nation’s capital for metaphysical freethinkers.

“The New Age Mecca?” snorted Southern Baptist preacher Joe Berna. “It’s a spiritual battleground!”

Indeed. Although an uneasy truce exists between many New Agers and town folk, conflicts have broken out between metaphysical groups; between New Age practitioners and conservative, fundamentalist churches; between New Agers and the U.S. Forest Service, and between forest rangers and the Sierra Club.

The Sedona New Age community is a loosely knit, liberally defined association of spiritual seekers, psychic counselors, craftspeople and shopkeepers.

Although many eschew the New Age label, the metaphysically oriented tend to favor Eastern religions and define deity as the universal spirit within humanity. They look for guidance from within and believe each individual creates his or her own reality.

Every month, thousands of spiritually hungry tourists trek to the spectacular formations by bus, limo, Jeep, hot-air balloon and llama. Their goal: tune in the psychic energy that purportedly pulsates from within at least half a dozen power centers, or vortexes.

Psychics say that Sedona rivals Stonehenge and the Bermuda Triangle as the world’s top “power” spot, radiating an unseen mystical energy reputed to enhance consciousness, make it easier to recall past lives, even communicate with space beings.

The Community Church for the New Age functions as an unofficial Chamber of Commerce for the melange of metaphysical bookstores, Tarot card readers, UFO “contactees” and holistic healers. Not to mention the “goddess” groups that empower the feminine aspect of God within women, and trance channelers, or mediums, who purportedly receive messages from other levels of consciousness and ascended entities.

“This is the only city in the U.S. that has 80 channels but no TV station,” quipped Jim Bishop, a big-city journalist who moved here six years ago to write and teach. “It’s a metaphysical Disneyland.”

“Transmute now--avoid the rush,” said Joy Starr of Angels, Art & Crystals, advertised as “the best little crystal shop in Sedona.” Many New Agers believe crystals possess special energies that can be programmed for such purposes as healing, consciousness-raising, prosperity and clairvoyance.

Just the sort of qualities needed in a place where the pursuit of good feelings has resulted in plenty of ill will.

At the center of it all are the New Agers, a small though growing minority of the city’s 7,720 residents. Without visiting the metaphysical shops or taking the trails to vortex sites, the casual tourist would scarcely notice them.

Then add a spicy cast of characters:

* American Indians. They want the land and their customs left undisturbed. Reuben Snake, director of the Native American Religious Freedom Project, calls the New Agers “pseudo-Indians exploiting our culture” and trying to imitate Indian religion.

* Conservative local ministers. They are convinced that New Agers are Satan-inspired and that their freewheeling, anything-goes philosophy threatens to undermine the community’s moral stability.

* Forest rangers. They are worried about the crush of tourists who are upsetting the environment, testily pointing out that the scenic power vortexes are on federal land. They complain that in erecting stone altars known as medicine wheels, conducting secret ceremonies by light of the full moon and blazing trails into the virgin wilderness for meditation sites, metaphysical enthusiasts are defacing the buttes’ beauty and trampling the delicate desert’s ecosystem.

* Environmentalists. They are suing the rangers. Local Sierra Club members shudder at the thought of asphalt paving, RVs and a dump station at stunning Red Rock Crossing, possibly the most-photographed spot in Arizona. The Sierra Club is seeking to halt a campground project there that the Forest Service says is necessary to control burgeoning tourism.

Meanwhile, Sedona’s business community profits.

The town’s 300 realty agents are turning brisk land sales, six Jeep-tour companies bounce tourists over scenic trails at up to $50 per hour per person, and owners of the new luxury hotels, resorts and restaurants are cashing in. Hundreds of clients and guests are moving to Sedona for good.

“An enormous number of environmental refugees are coming in here from Southern California,” Bishop said. Most new residents have moved here during the last 10 years, nearly doubling the Greater Sedona population to about 14,000. After Arizonans, said veteran realty agent Andy Hughes, the greatest number of buyers--about 25%--are from California. Sedona is 120 miles north of Phoenix and 460 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

It’s easy to appreciate Sedona’s enchantment.

“They call it red-rock fever,” said Jacquie Solomon, a realty agent for Coldwell Banker who specializes in New Age clients.

Visitors describe such visual delights as the fiery cleavage of sheer cliffs towering above Oak Creek Canyon as it is caught in the setting sun’s final rays.

“Step outside and you’re in the bosom of Mother Nature,” said Solomon, who moved from Manhattan. She said she recently stayed overnight in a cave and heard Indians from ages past “moan and chant.”

“I was more afraid of the bats,” she said.

Even the more traditional religious sites draw tourists. Joe Ripper is caretaker for the Chapel of the Holy Cross, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Roman Catholic monument and church that juts from a 1,000-foot spur of crimson sandstone south of town. Ripper says 150,000 visitors a year come there, more than a few seeking to bridge the spiritual gap that institutional religion hasn’t seemed to fill.

“One guy rode all the way here on his bicycle from Nova Scotia to look for God,” Ripper said. “He found him.”

Patrick, “the Sedona storyteller”--who holds forth in the Sacred Circle Room at the Crystal Castle four nights a week--thinks “spirit is reflected back through a vibration of energy here. And people are touched.”

The alleged vibrations at the vortexes are the biggest metaphysical attraction. They also seem to be the source of Sedona’s greatest controversy.

For one thing, nobody seems to know exactly how many vortexes there are. Some say four; others say up to nine.

Some say that no list should omit the busy junction of Arizona 179 and U.S. 89 in the heart of this two-stoplight town. That is where, they half-facetiously suggest, horsepower energy convulses into a negative vortex.

Can vortex energy be measured scientifically?

Anthropologist-archeologist-mystic Warren Cremer, who conducts vortex tours, speaks about a “fluxmagnetometer” that measures electromagnetic energy on the “fault lines . . . where there are energy leaks.” Unfortunately, the battery for the device has gone dead, he says, and “scientists aren’t much interested in truth, anyway.”

Pete A. Sanders Jr., whose biography sheet identifies him as a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in biomedical chemistry and a minor in “brain science,” gives scientific explanations of vortexes--at $20 a person. His lectures are sponsored by the Free Soul Psychic Education Program, one of 250 groups in Sedona’s New Age cooperative network.

We can’t measure the energy technologically--yet--he said, constructing flowcharts with a felt-tip pen. Vortex energy is “on a deeper dimension,” based on the arcane “superstring” physics theory, which holds that there are unobservable dimensions, he tells a classroom of seekers.

No matter. What most have really come for is Sanders’ technique to “turbo-boost your consciousness and quantum leap at the vortexes.”

A visitor from Santa Monica said she feels something at the Airport Mesa Vortex, one of the four best-known centers.

“It felt like warm energy going to and from my hands,” Mona Hammer said as she stepped from the center of a medicine wheel, a circle and spokes made of small rocks placed on the red earth at the designated vortex point.

Others who have been to the Sedona vortexes say that they have had metaphysical experiences ranging from direct contact with spirits, visions and healings to clairvoyance and telepathy. Some say that they just felt good there.

Bishop, the Sedona journalist-pundit, has no quarrel with those who want to get in touch with themselves at vortexes. But, he distinctly dislikes the “bus droppers.”

He explains that these are the tour groups that “just leave them out there in the rocks with a peanut butter sandwich and a stick and suggest that if they just sit there long enough they will get energy from the Earth.”

And the extraterrestrials. “The line is crossed with the extraterrestrials,” he continues, lighting his pipe.

Old-timers here call them “woo-woo foo-foos” and “moon puppies.”

These are the “alien sighters,” who say that there’s going to be a spaceship landing tonight at Bell Rock Vortex, and Ashtar, Prince of the Universe, is coming to collect virgins.

Bishop elaborates. “However, virgins aren’t too plentiful out there, and Ashtar, so the story goes, now brings with him ‘commandettes,’ comely women seeking the company of attractive men, also in short supply, for a moment of dalliance. . . .”

Can’t come to Sedona? No problem. You can “touch the power of Bell Rock” by calling a 900 number and receiving “live psychic readings . . . from the ancient site where psychics perfect their gifts.” The service is available 24 hours a day--at $2 per minute.

Bishop is among those who resent the commercial angle driving much of the New Age emphasis in Sedona. He estimates that up to 30% of every dollar spent here is related to the vortexes.

Apparently, nobody ever heard of the vortexes here until 1980, and even that discussion sparks controversy.

The way Page Bryant, a local author and psychic counselor, tells it, that was the year her inner guide, Albion, led her to the Sedona vortexes. Later, Bryant produced an audiotape about vortexes and wrote “The Earth Changes Survival Handbook,” a New Age work that popularized the concept.

Soon after, the first vortex tours in Sedona began, and in August, 1987--pinpointed by the Mayan calendar as a transition time to “a new era of consciousness”--10,000 believers descended upon the peaceful town. They chanted, prayed and hummed up a storm, seeking to usher in the so-called “Harmonic Convergence.” The event put Sedona on the psychic map.

But Richard Sutphen, an author, hypnotist and psychic trainer from Malibu who has been leading large tour groups to Sedona since 1983, charges that Bryant stole his work. Sutphen said he hired Bryant to speak at a psychic seminar he conducted in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1980, adding that he made a detailed vortex presentation there, several months before Bryant’s reported revelations from Albion.

Bryant counters that you don’t need a crystal ball to see that in fact Sutphen spirited the information from her tape.

In any case, Bob Gillies, district ranger for the Coconino National Forest, wishes the whole vortex thing had never crystallized.

What most infuriates Gillies is a 200-foot-diameter medicine wheel that mystics have constructed of lava chunks near scenic Schnebly Hill Road. His workers have disassembled the wheel several times, only to have it reappear again almost overnight.

“We’ve really got better things to do,” said Gillies, whose staff of 12 oversees 220,000 acres being pressured by an estimated 5 million to 6 million visitors a year.

To build the wheel, rows of rocks that had settled through centuries of rain into a rippling lava flow pattern had to be disturbed. Though the medicine wheel at Schnebly Hill is the largest, Gillies estimates that hundreds are scattered through public land in his district. Rangers dismantle about 20 a week but lately have essentially left the Schnebly wheel alone, hoping that devotees will gather there rather than spoiling the landscape with new wheels.

Gillies is also disturbed that people with candles have smudged the prehistoric symbols and paintings on the walls of caves in the area. And he is upset that in Boynton Canyon, a vortex point, one of his workers found the remains of coyotes apparently used in ritual sacrifices.

Gillies thinks the freedom of religion issue, raised by some New Agers, is bogus.

“I’m not here to debate their beliefs,” Gillies said, bouncing along in his Jeep. “No one is denying them the right to meditate. But a medicine wheel is just as unacceptable as if someone were to erect a Star of David or a cross or spray-paint ‘Jesus Saves’ out there. . . . This is everybody’s land--not just yours or mine. . . . My concern is for resource protection.”

Sanders and other New Agers say that they are trying to cooperate with the Forest Service and that they discourage disturbing, destroying or removing artifacts or natural resources that are on public property.

The Indians say that the land should be kept the way their predecessors left it.

“Do not deface or pollute the air or the ground,” said Theodore J. Smith Sr., tribal chairman of the Northern Tonto Apaches and Yavapai Tribe of Camp Verde. “Go in and do the spiritual things, pray to God and then move on.”

The conservative Christian ministers wish that New Agers would move clear out of town.

“We’re not battling with people, but a demonic phenomenon,” said the Rev. Robert Kirkpatrick, who is moving to Kansas this summer from Sedona’s Wayside Chapel. “New Agers are POWs in Satan’s camp.”

Berna, the outspoken Baptist, warns believers not to mix such things as psychic visions, crystal-wearing and goddess worship with New Testament Christianity.

New Agers “are looking in the wrong place and finding the wrong god,” he said.

But to the Rev. Wyona Nilson of the Oak Creek Church of Religious Science, people here “tend to get hung up on what the Bible says and what the Bible is.”

In fact, the clergy of Sedona’s 27 churches have split into two groups over the New Age issue. Evangelical leaders tend toward combat; mainline and liberal ministers lean toward live and let live.

Meanwhile, Sedona’s official Chamber of Commerce would like to work a little magic and restore the pristine image of this town before the advent of vortexes, woo-woos and moon puppies.

Longtime realty agent Hughes, who left his lawn mower and snow shovel in Kansas City to come here in 1973, is leading the charge. He is heading up Western Americana Week next June 28-July 5 with flag day, an apple pie contest, a mothers’ march against drugs, a Roger Williams concert and a dazzle of fireworks with Cathedral Rock as a backdrop.

The extravaganza, he hopes, will display a wholesome side to Sedona.

“Sedona,” summed up town sage Bishop, “may not be sacred ground, but it sure is fertile.”