Ferguson, Marilyn (1938-)

New Age publisher, editor, and author. Ferguson was born April 5, 1938, in Grand Junction, Colorado, and is known for her best-selling book The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and SocialTransformation in the 1980s (1980), touted as "the New Age watershed classic." In 1973 she wrote The Brain Revolution, and her study for the book led her to found a newsletter, the Brain/ Mind Bulletin in 1975. Her interest in human potential expanded through the rest of the decade and into the New Age movement. She came to believe that society was undergoing a profound paradigm shift, a change in the basic metaphor used to explain life. She documented the rationale for her new belief in The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), in which she uses a conspiracy metaphor to postulate a consciousness revolution as distinct from a political, economic, or religious revolution. Through this quiet revolution an informal network of enlightened individuals is creating radical change in modern culture, based on a greatly enlarged concept of human potential.

Sources:

Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1980.

——. The Frontiers of Mind Research. New York: Taplinger, 1973.

Ferguson, Marilyn, and Michael Ferguson. Champagne Living on a Beer Budget. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1968.

Taylor, Peggy. "Life at the Leading Edge: A New Age Inter-view with Marilyn Ferguson." New Age 8, no. 1 (August 1982): 30-35, 52-53.