“The Almighty dollar,’ Washington Irving wrote, was the “great object of universal devotion” among Americans. Tocqueville described moneymaking as the “prevailing passion.” And though the object of their craving sometimes changed, Tocqueville noticed that the emotional intensity persisted. This was why tightfisted Yankee merchants would break down in penitential tears and convert to Christ, why sober Ohio farmers would abandon their homesteads and join Utopian communes. Because Americans were so bound up in the struggle to get ahead, Tocqueville concluded, they rushed “unrestrained beyond the range of common sense” when cut loose. Thus did a materialistic nation beget so many “strange sects,” each striking out on such “extraordinary oaths to eternal happiness.”

Yet even Tocqueville might have flinched at the spectacle of thousands of adult men, most of them well-to-do and college-educated, chanting before bonfires and pounding on drums, growling and cavorting in imitation of foxes and bears, plunging naked into baptismal mudholes, and smudging their faces with ashes—all of them following a path blazed by the poet Robert Bly in the final decade of the twentieth century.

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