“My Brother, the Insect”: Ethnographic Research on the Indigo Children, Their New Age Cosmologies, and Spiritual Guides

Abstract

This article reflect upon fieldwork among the ‘Indigo Children’, the researcher’s encounter with them as self-identified non-ordinary beings, and the changes in the researcher through the ethnographic experience.  The ‘Indigo Child’ is a concept that emerged at the beginning of the 1980s: self-proclaimed psychics, channellers and therapists such as Nancy Ann Tappe, Lee Carroll, Jan Tober, and Doreen Virtue wrote books explaining the Indigo Children as a more spiritually evolved generation.  They are described as being here to bring about a golden age of higher consciousness and advanced human evolution.  The Indigo Child concept is presented through examples of special or psychic children in the primary texts of the community.  It is also expressed by individual adult adherents of the concept who identify themselves, or their own children, as Indigo. 

 

During fieldwork amongst the Indigo Children accounts were received of their relationships with entities seemingly representing “non-ordinary realities†(Harner, 1992), including spirit guides and Ascended Masters, which have historical antecedents including Spiritualism and Theosophy.  Other non-ordinary entities described during interviews will be presented as examples of the diversity of non-ordinary entities in the Indigo community and discourse. Moreover, an examination of the Indigo Children’s place within the wider cosmologies that they are describing suggests that they are distancing themselves from mere ‘normals’ and are redefining themselves as non-ordinary beings.  This article will therefore consider the issues around writing ethnography about these self-defining non-ordinary beings, and will argue that there is a methodological similarity with the anthropological study of spirit possession. This article therefore contributes to a wider discussion on the study of non-ordinary realities among contemporary anthropologists and religious studies scholars.