What happens when a shop peddling matters of the infinite brushes up against its own mortality? After 41 years of selling books on reincarnation, past lives, and eternal life in the Pleiades, Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood will close in October unless an eleventh-hour rescue occurs, with someone swooping in to buy the business and move it to a new location. The Bodhi Tree created a template for New Age browsing when it opened in 1970. By the ’80s, stores like it would pop up all over the country. The Bodhi Tree, more successful, more well known, outpaced them all. To linger in its stacks today beneath the prayer flags and dangling pyramids is to take a refresher course on a wave of spiritualism that rolled across the Left Coast. Alchemy, channeling, astral projection, TM, the I Ching, angels, auras, miracles, UFOs, crop circles, runes, Kabbalah, tantra, mantra, tarot, Wicca, and Tibet: It’s a caboodle of sunshiny spirituality as endemic to L.A. as palm trees and celebrity scandal. Without a church or singular text, the New Age—in all its heterogeneous forms—lacked a center, as did its sponsor town. If one did exist, it was the Bodhi Tree.

A half century ago Southern California claimed more swamis, mediums, and yogis than any other city west of the Hudson. The antiguru Krishnamurti was in Ojai refining meditation technique, and on Mount Washington, Sri Daya Mata (formerly Rachel Faye Wright of Salt Lake City) was busy expanding the Self-Realization Fellowship. Pasadena had its Theosophical Society, created in part by a self-proclaimed psychic and alleged con artist named Helena Blavatsky, and out in Trabuco Canyon, Swami Prabhavananda—a spiritual guide to Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley—ran a monastery for the Vendanta Society. If it smelled of incense, masala, or reincarnated souls, it had an address near L.A.

Yet it was easier to run into Krishnamurti than to run across his writings. Phil Thompson and Stan Madson once spent sever...