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Paglia's analysis is, to me, rather pedestrian. She ought to drop the pop-history readings and go for a study of comparative religion. Heck, she might be forced to actually READ a Bible.

One problem was that the more the mind was opened to what was commonly called “cosmic consciousness” (a hippie rubric of the sixties), the less meaningful politics or social structure became,

It amazes me how few take the hint from this obvious and ubiquitous consequence.

The true cults that proliferated in the American sixties and early seventies resemble those of the Hellenistic and imperial Roman eras. Such phenomena are symptoms of cultural fracturing in cosmopolitan periods of rapid expansion and mobility. ...Hence, the cult phenomenon even at its most bizarre demonstrates the sociological dynamic of the birth of religions, as they flare up, coalesce, and strengthen or sputter out and vanish.

Wrong Camille... REbirth. It's that OLD old time religion, as it started in Babylon. The revival is intentional.

Mystery religions, which generally produced fewer and less monumental stone or chryselephantine idols, offered personal salvation through initiation into an enlightened group bound by some special secret, often involving the promise of an afterlife, a recompense for present miseries.

A consequence of the paradigm of human divinity coupled with the lack of a guiding written text, such as the Bible. Thus anyone could start and justify their own group on claims of higher spirituality by thowing in a few twists because there was no set of codified principles to contradict such an act. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity held together because of written texts and organized hierarchy, the former being the more important.

You will note that it wasn't long after translating and printing the Bible that the Reformation began. As soon as the written word was available, the people looked at the hierarchy and found it wanting.

The major Mediterranean mystery religions—of Dionysus, Demeter, Isis, and Mithras—anticipated, influenced, or vied with Christianity.

That would be JUDEO-Christianity. They both go back well before the time of Christ.

But this time (in the 60s) the nascent religions faltered under the pitiless scrutiny of modern media.

I prefer to call it an attack. See Gramsci.

But the titanic, all-enveloping sound of rock was produced by powerful, new amplification technology that subordinated the mind and activated the body in a way more extreme than anything seen in Western culture since the ancient Roman Bacchanalia. Through the sensory assault of that thunderous music, a whole generation tapped into natural energies, tangible proof of humanity’s link to the cosmos.

This is just goofy. It filled a void in the groin that begins in the heart.

I stopped there. It's really a pretty lame effort.