Esther & Jerry Hicks

Esther Hicks (born 1948) and her husband Jerry Hicks (1927–2011) were American authors and speakers who, beginning in the mid-1980s, built a teaching enterprise around material Esther says she “channels” from a non-physical collective intelligence she calls “Abraham.” Jerry, a former entertainer and Amway salesman, had a longstanding interest in success literature—particularly Napoleon Hill—and the couple’s framework drew explicitly on Jane Roberts’s earlier “Seth” channeling and the broader New Thought tradition.

Through workshops, audio recordings, and books such as Ask and It Is Given (2004), they developed one of the most systematized modern statements of the law of attraction. Their historical importance is twofold.

First, they coined and popularized the very term “Law of Attraction” in its now-dominant sense, supplying the conceptual and emotional architecture that Rhonda Byrne would later compress into The Secret—indeed, Esther appeared in the film’s original release.

Second, they introduced a distinctive psychological instrument: the “Emotional Guidance Scale,” which reframes emotion not as a byproduct but as a real-time feedback gauge of one’s “vibrational” alignment with desire.

This made the abstract idea of “matching frequencies” operational and trackable, giving the internet-era movement its core self-monitoring tool.