Maybe I could, too. The first time Sondra drew the Prema Agni on me—before I knew her well enough to respect her, if not necessarily share her beliefs—I felt a surge of vertigo, a spiral of twitches running down my spine. Weeks later, Sondra told me that when Derek draws the Prema Agni, people shudder, weep, and fall down—not unlike Christians who are “slain in the spirit,” an experience known to strike even nonbelievers.

Derek is no mystic. Ex–Irish Army, ex-Catholic, working-class in spirit if no longer in income (he can earn $45,000 with a single workshop, although he gives much of it away), he lives in Dublin like an ordinary guy, with an ordinary family. On the phone, he makes jokes, asks me about my background, talks about pop music. But he is “so fucking evolved,” Sondra says—she and Derek both love the word fucking, because “it grounds you”—that while he teaches a workshop, “his consciousness can be off having a Guinness somewhere.” One of her ambitions is to join Derek—a married man with whom she is deeply, chastely, in love—for a pint on the astral plane. But she’s not that powerful.

Actually, though (Sondra also likes that word, its marriage of skepticism and belief), actually, she will be soon. Things are happening in other dimensions. Channels are opening. It’s no coincidence, her friends tell me, that I’m writing about Sondra. The power is growing. Someday soon, she’ll join the metaphysical Derek. Sai Baba, too, and Jesus, Krishna, Merlin, all the ascended masters, like a great big dinner party. Sondra doesn’t normally drink, but when that happens, she’ll raise a glass. It’s going to be fucking amazing.

Before I could interview Sondra further, I needed to be healed. “It will clear you,” Sondra told me. Later, both she and Derek would declare that God, not New York Magazine, had sent me to be their gospel writer, but at the beginning, Sondra was wary. “I don’t want to come off sounding crazy,” she said. So she decided to let me experience the energy for myself. And I did, after a fashion.

Sondra began my healing with an “Emotional Cord Cutting.” This entailed my standing very still while she swiped a foot-long blade up and down, very fast, inches from my body. She paid special attention to my crotch, which is only natural—it’s there, she pointed out, that we form many of our most unhealthy attachments, emotional and otherwise. Sondra invented this healing herself. It costs $95.

Once my emotional cords had been cut, I lay for two hours on a cold table in a cement-floor studio above the Park Slope Tea Lounge, which Sondra rents from a yoga center by the hour. She worked me over with a battery of energy services—the rising star, divine energy healing, etheric surgery—“ancient healing modalities” revealed to her or other teachers she admires. But as far as I could tell, she wasn’t even there. Occasionally, I heard the rustle of her silk jacket, a special garment she wears to perform healings. Once, a finger traced a hard line from my right shoulder to my collarbone, but Sondra later said she hadn’t touched me anywhere but my knees and abdomen. I shivered through most of the session. Sondra later said it’d been so hot in the room she’d been sweating.

Money is the means by which the New Age proves itself a religious movement that has a place in the economy of belief.

The next day, I got the flu. I was down like a sedated hippo for a week. Sondra called. She said it was a healing crisis. I was lucky, she said; a lot of people experience such crises emotionally, but it’s quicker and easier to get the negative energy out through the body. Price tag for the whole affair: $395. Sondra comped me.

I mention these sums not to cast doubt on the authenticity of the services rendered. You don’t have to be a moral relativist to recognize that “true” and “false” are empty categories when you’re trying to understand other people’s mysteries. The light flashing off the blade, the bead of orange at the tip of a stick of incense slashing along with the knife, the sweetness of its smoke, the look of concentration that makes Sondra’s giant brown eyes flutter and draws her pretty face into a scary look of loose-jawed concentration—it all made for sensual accoutrements to what could, for some, be a persuasive metaphor. Viewed from another perspective, Sandra’s healing services are no sillier nor more profound than the idea that by dunking yourself in water, you experience death and resurrection, or that by beating yourself on the chest every Yom Kippur, you really take responsibility for a whole community’s sins.

If Sondra’s Cord Cutting lacks the historical pedigree of better-known rituals, it is no less “real.” In fact, it may be Sondra’s steep rates that are proof of her spirit guides’ full arrival in the pantheon of American gods; money is the means by which Sondra and other New Age healers show themselves to be a religious movement that’s within the economy of belief. “Some people have this misconception that spiritual work is real only if it’s free of charge,” Sondra told me early on in what she’d come to call “our work” together. “Great. Cardinal Law will help you for free.” She doesn’t have to add the tacit disclaimer: With him, there are all sorts of long-term hidden costs.

It’s no heresy to say that most religions come with a price tag. The grammatical truth of the world’s scriptures as usually read is not, as atheists sometimes insist, imperative, a command, but rather conditional: the cosmic “If.” If you obey these rules, rewards will follow. It’s all about the deal. Money always changes hands. From client to Sondra, from churchgoer to collection plate, from a corporation back to its institutional investors.

And practitioners such as Sondra found their client base expanded by the ranks of the marginally “spiritual”—real-estate agents who wanted properties “healed” of the “bad energy” lingering from those who fled the city, working-class stiffs who decided that in “a time of war” it’s okay to be emotional about one’s “inner pain,” former fundamentalists who believe they can’t live without some kind of spiritual practice, not anymore.

Such people stand at a convergence of trends: the mainstreaming of therapeutic language, the collapse of conventional Christianity’s good manners and carefully drawn private-public boundaries, and the economic validation of spiritual entrepreneurs such as Sondra, who makes more money now than she did in the early nineties as a young litigator for Davis Polk & Wardwell, a powerful corporate law firm. How much is that? Two or three clients a day, from $150 to $300 an hour, plus the occasional workshop that’ll bring in thousands of dollars for a day’s work. Do the math. Ask her accountant. Enough that she buys what she wants (not much) and gives as much as she wants—enough to empty her bank account twice in the past few years—to an orphanage in India.