Marilyn Ferguson (April 5, 1938, in Grand Junction, Colorado – October 19, 2008) was an American author, editor and public speaker known for her 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy, which is connected with the New Age Movement.

She eventually earned several honorary degrees, served on the board of directors of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and befriended such diverse figures of influence as inventor and theorist Buckminster Fuller, spiritual author Ram Dass, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine[1] and billionaire Ted Turner.

At its peak in the 1980s the publication had a worldwide base of some 10,000 subscribers, ranging from academics and intellectuals to schoolteachers and storekeepers, and helped to popularize the ideas of such notables as Prigogine, neuroscientists Karl Pribram and Candace Pert, physicists Fritjof Capra and David Bohm, psychologist Jean Houston and many others.

In an early commentary in the newsletter Ferguson described her first glimmers of what she called "the movement that has no name" - a loose, enthusiastic network of innovators from almost every discipline, united by their apparent desire to create real and lasting change in society and its institutions.

Her attempt to compile and synthesize the patterns she was seeing eventually led her to develop a second newsletter, Leading Edge Bulletin, and found its culmination in The Aquarian Conspiracy (J.P. Tarcher, 1980), the seminal work that earned her a lasting global reputation.

Unabashedly positive in its outlook, the book was praised by such diverse figures as philosophical writer Arthur Koestler, who called it "stunning and provocative," commentator Max Lerner, who found it "drenched in sunlight," and United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Robert Muller, who described it as "remarkable" and "epoch-making."

Psychologist Carl Rogers credited her with having "etched, in unforgettable vividness, the intricate web of changes shaping the inevitable revolution in our culture," and said the book "gives the pioneering spirit the courage to go forward."

Before long the book was being credited as "the handbook of the New Age" (USA Today) and a guidepost to a philosophy "working its way increasingly into the nation's cultural, religious, social, economic and political life" (New York Times).

"[3] It was inaccurately alleged that Ferguson, herself raised and confirmed a Lutheran, had written the book at the behest of the Stanford Research Institute with the goal of overtaking western culture with Eastern mysticism.

Indirectly supporting both Ferguson and her critics, the New Age movement, as popularly understood, did thrive in the 1980s and into the 1990s, though this was partially through such pop-cultural manifestations as the autobiographical works of actress Shirley MacLaine and the "Harmonic Convergence" festival of 1987.

The Los Angeles Times described her as a "galvanizing influence,"[4] and quoted her U.S. publisher, Jeremy P. Tarcher, who described his own personal epiphany when he first met with Ferguson and recognized the potential of the information she had collected.

At her death, Chopra wrote, Ferguson could rest in the knowledge that "a watershed had been crossed," and that her "leaderless revolution" had steadily gained force around the world in the generation since the book was written.