1948 – living · A portrait
After reading a channeler's books, a woman began to feel a presence in meditation. She and her husband called it Abraham. Forty years later, the law of attraction it taught them is a worldwide business.
After reading Jane Roberts's Seth books and visiting a channeler in Phoenix, she began to feel a presence during meditation. She and her husband Jerry called it Abraham — a name, they said, chosen by a group speaking as one.
By the next year she was speaking Abraham's answers aloud. The Hickses began offering quiet, private sessions to friends and acquaintances curious about the voice she said spoke through her.
The original cut of the film The Secret featured her as one of its teachers, explaining the law of attraction to a mass audience for the first time. A dispute with the filmmakers removed her from later editions.
Jerry Hicks, her husband and partner in the work for over three decades, died of cancer that month at eighty-four. Esther has continued the public sessions and publishing since.
She still leads public workshops and publishes new material, continuing after Jerry's death. Her books on the 'law of attraction' remain widely read, and the phrase itself has become common shorthand across self-help culture, used well beyond anyone who could say where it came from.
Who or what speaks as Abraham cannot be checked from outside; it rests on her account alone. Critics of the law of attraction as she teaches it point to its harder edge: if thought creates reality, illness, poverty and misfortune can be read as something the sufferer brought on themselves — a reading she has pushed back on.