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New Age

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description: Religious studies scholar Paul Heelas characterised the New Age movement as "an eclectic hotch-potch of beliefs, practices and ways of life" which can be identified as a singular phenomenon through th ...
Religious studies scholar Paul Heelas characterised the New Age movement as "an eclectic hotch-potch of beliefs, practices and ways of life" which can be identified as a singular phenomenon through their use of "the same (or very similar) lingua franca to do with the human (and planetary) condition and how it can be transformed."[6] Similarly, historian of religion Olav Hammer termed it "a common denominator for a variety of quite divergent contemporary popular practices and beliefs" which have emerged since the late 1970s and which are "largely united by historical links, a shared discourse and an air de famille."[7] Sociologist of religion Michael York described the New Age movement as "an umbrella term that includes a great variety of groups and identities" but which are united by their "expectation of a major and universal change being primarily founded on the individual and collective development of human potential".[8] Adopting a different approach, religious studies scholar Wouter Hanegraaff asserted that "New Age" was "a label attached indiscriminately to whatever seems to fit it" and that as a result it "means very different things to different people."[9]
Many of those groups and individuals who could analytically be categorised as part of the New Age movement nevertheless reject the term "New Age" when in reference to themselves.[10] Thus, religious studies scholar James R. Lewis identified "New Age" as a problematic term, but asserted that "there exists no comparable term which covers all aspects of the movement" and that thus it remained a useful etic category for scholars to use.[11]
York described the New Age movement as a new religious movement (NRM).[12] Conversely, Heelas rejected this categorisation; he believed that while elements of the New Age movement represented NRMs, this was not applicable to every New Age group.[13] Hammer identified much of the New Age movement as corresponding to the concept of "folk religiosity" in that it seeks to deal with existential questions regarding subjects like death and disease in "an unsystematic fashion, often through a process of bricolage from already available narratives and rituals".[7] York also heuristically divides the New Age movement into three broad trends. The first, the "social camp", represents groups which primarily seek to bring about social change, while the second, "occult camp", instead focus on contact with spirit entities and channeling. York's third group, the "spiritual camp", represents a middle ground between these two camps, and which focuses largely on individual development.[14]
Terminology of the "New Age"
The term "new age", along with related terms like "new era" and "new world", long predate the emergence of the New Age movement, and have widely been used to assert that a better way of life for humanity is dawning.[15] It has, for instance, widely been used in political contexts; the Great Seal of the United States, designed in 1782, proclaims a "new order of ages", while in the 1980s the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed that "all mankind is entering a new age".[15] It has also been widely used within various forms of Western esotericism. For instance, in 1809 William Blake described a coming era of spiritual and artistic advancement in his preface to Milton a Poem by stating: "... when the New Age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right ..."[16] In 1864 the American Swedenborgian Warren Felt Evans published The New Age and its Message, while in 1907 Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson began editing a weekly journal of Christian liberalism and socialism titled The New Age.[17]
History
Antecedents


Two nineteenth-century esoteric philosophers greatly influenced the New Age movement: Helena Blavatsky (left) and G.I. Gurdjieff (right)
The New Age movement is a form of Western esotericism,[18] and thus has antecedents stretching back to southern Europe in Late Antiquity.[19] As such, it has various antecedents within the esoteric milieu. Some of the New Age movement's constituent elements appeared initially in the 19th-century metaphysical movements: Spiritualism, Theosophy, and New Thought and also the alternative medicine movements of chiropractics and naturopathy.[4][20] The author Nevill Drury claimed there are "four key precursors of the New Age", who had set the way for many of its widely held precepts.[21]
One of the earliest influences on the New Age movement was the Swedish Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), who professed the ability to communicate with angels, demons, and spirits.[22] Another early influence was the German physician and hypnotist Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), who claimed the existence of a force known as "animal magnetism" running through the human body.[22] A further major influence on the New Age movement was the Theosophical Society, an esoteric group co-founded by the Russian Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891). In her books Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky claimed that her Society was conveying the essence of all world religions, and it thus emphasised a focus on comparative religion.[22]
A further influence was New Thought, which developed in late nineteenth century New England as a Christian-oriented healing movement before spreading throughout the United States.[23] An additional influence was George Gurdjieff (c. 1872–1949), who founded the philosophy of the Fourth Way, through which he conveyed a number of spiritual teachings to his disciples. A fifth individual whom Drury identified as an important influence upon the New Age movement was the Indian Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), an adherent of the philosophy of Vedanta who first brought Hinduism to the West in the late 19th century.[24]
A new age shrine.
New Age shrine in Glastonbury, England
Popularisation behind these ideas has roots in the work of early 20th century writers such as D. H. Lawrence and William Butler Yeats. In the early- to mid-1900s, American mystic, theologian, and founder of the Association for Research and Enlightenment Edgar Cayce was a seminal influence on what later would be termed the New Age movement; he was known in particular for the practice some refer to as channeling.[25] Another prominent influence was the psychologist Carl Jung,[26] who was a proponent of the concept of the Age of Aquarius.[27][28][29] Former Theosophist Rudolf Steiner and his Anthroposophical movement are a major influence. Neo-Theosophist Alice Bailey published the book Discipleship in the New Age (1944), which used the term New Age in reference to the transition from the astrological age of Pisces to Aquarius.[citation needed]
Hanegraaff believed that the New Age movement's direct antecedents could be found in the UFO cults of the 1950s, which he termed a "proto-New Age movement". Many of these new religious movements had strong apocalyptic beliefs regarding a coming new age, which they typically asserted would be brought about by contact with extraterrestrials.[30]
From a historical perspective, the New Age movement is rooted in the counterculture of the 1960s.[31] This decade also witnessed the emergence of a variety of new religious movements and newly established religions in the United States, creating a spiritual milieu from which the New Age movement drew upon; these included the San Francisco Zen Center, Transcendental Meditation, Soka Gakkai, the Inner Peace Movement, the Church of All Worlds, and the Church of Satan.[32] Although there had been an established interest in Asian religious ideas in the U.S. from at least the eighteenth-century,[33] many of these new developments were variants of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism which had been imported to the West from Asia following the U.S. government's decision to rescind the Asian Exclusion Act in 1965.[34] In 1962 the Esalen Institute was established in Big Sur, California.[35] It was from Esalen and other similar personal growth centers which had developed links to humanistic psychology that the human potential movement emerged, which would also come to exert a strong influence on the New Age movement.[36]
Meanwhile in Britain, a number of small religious groups that came to be identified as the "light" movement had begun declaring the existence of a coming new age, influenced strongly by the Theosophical ideas of Blavatsky and Bailey.[37] The most prominent of these groups was the Findhorn Foundation which founded the Findhorn Ecovillage in the Scottish area of Findhorn, Moray in 1962.[38]
All of these groups would create the backdrop from which the New Age movement emerged; as James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton point out, the New Age movement represents "a synthesis of many different preexisting movements and strands of thought".[39] Nevertheless, York asserted that while the New Age movement bore many similarities with both earlier forms of Western esotericism and Eastern religion, it remained "distinct from its predecessors in its own self-consciousness as a new way of thinking."[40]
Early development
Wooden barrel house in forest with surrounding footpaths
This barrel house was the first dwelling constructed at the Findhorn Ecovillage.
The counterculture of the 1960s had rapidly declined by the start of the 1970s, in large part due to the collapse of the commune movement,[41] but it would be many former members of the counter-culture and hippy subculture who subsequently became early adherents of the New Age movement.[39] The exact origins of the New Age movement remain an issue of debate; Melton asserted that it emerged in the early 1970s,[42] whereas Hanegraaff instead traced its emergence to the latter 1970s, adding that it then entered its full development in the 1980s.[43] This early form of the movement was based largely in Britain and exhibited a strong influence from Theosophy and Anthroposophy.[44] Hanegraaff termed this early core of the movement the New Age sensu stricto, or "New Age in the strict sense".[44]
In the latter part of the 1970s, the New Age movement expanded to cover a wide variety of alternative spiritual and religious beliefs and practices, not all of which explicitly held to the belief in the Age of Aquarius, but which were nevertheless widely recognised as being broadly similar in their search for "alternatives" to mainstream society.[44] In doing so, the "New Age" became a banner under which to bring together the wider "cultic milieu" of American society.[18] Hanegraaff terms this development the New Age sensu lato, or "New Age in the wider sense".[44] This probably influenced several thousand small metaphysical book- and gift-stores that increasingly defined themselves as "New Age bookstores".[45][46]
1971 witnessed the foundation of est by Werner H. Erhard, a spiritual training course which became a prominent part of the early movement.[47] Melton suggested that the 1970s witnessed the growth of a relationship between the New Age movement and the older New Thought movement, as evidenced by the widespread use of Helen Schucman's A Course in Miracles (1975), New Age music, and crystal healing in New Thought churches.[48] Some figures in the New Thought movement were sceptical, challenging the compatibility of New Age and New Thought perspectives.[49]

Crop circles appear in New Age thought
Several key events occurred, which raised public awareness of the New Age subculture: the production of the musical Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (1967) with its opening song "Aquarius" and its memorable line "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius";[50] publication of Linda Goodman's best-selling astrology books Sun Signs (1968) and Love Signs (1978); the release of Shirley MacLaine's book Out on a Limb (1983), later adapted into a television mini-series with the same name (1987); and the "Harmonic Convergence" planetary alignment on August 16 and 17, 1987,[51] organized by José Argüelles in Sedona, Arizona. The Convergence attracted more people to the movement than any other single event.[52]
The claims of channelers Jane Roberts (Seth Material), Helen Schucman (A Course in Miracles), J. Z. Knight (Ramtha), Neale Donald Walsch (Conversations with God) (note that Walsch denies being a "channeler" and his books make it obvious that he is not one, though the text emerged through a dialogue with a deeper part of himself in a process comparable to automatic writing), and Rene Gaudette (The Wonders) contributed to the movement's growth.[53][54] Relevant New Age works include the writings of James Redfield, Eckhart Tolle, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Christopher Hills, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, John Holland, Gary Zukav, Wayne Dyer, and Rhonda Byrne.[citation needed] The first significant exponent of the New Age movement in the U.S. has been cited as Ram Das.[55] A core work in the movement was the 1975 publication A Course in Miracles.[56]
The Holistic aspect of the New Age movement moved into the mainstream with The Mandala Society's first Holistic Health Conferences that were ever presented along with a medical school. This was at the University of California, San Diego beginning in 1975 and continuing for ten years. Every year about 3,000 health professionals and educators participated in over thirty workshops focused on the many different aspects of Holistic Health. The first National Holistic Education Conference was presented with the University of California, San Diego, in 1979. These conferences were created and directed by David J. Harris who also created the National Center for the Exploration of Human Potential in 1968 for Dr. Herbert Otto and Dr. Abraham Maslow. The name was changed to The Health Optimizing Institute in 1992 and is one example of the Human Potential Movement's contribution to the New Age.
Beliefs and practices
Main articles: Spirituality and List of New Age topics
Although there is great diversity among the beliefs and practices found within the New Age movement, according to York it is united by a shared "vision of radical mystical transformation on both the personal and collective levels".[57] The movement aims to create "a spirituality without borders or confining dogmas" that is inclusive and pluralistic.[21]
Theology, cosmology, and the Age of Aquarius

New Age meditation group at the Snoqualmie Moondance festival, 1992
Most New Age groups subscribe to the view that there is an Ultimate Source from which all things originate; this source is often, although not always, referred to as God.[58] Various creation myths have been articulated in New Age publications outlining how this Ultimate Source came to create the universe and everything in it.[59] In contrast, some other New Agers have emphasised the idea of a universal inter-relatedness that is not always emanating from a single source.[60] The New Age worldview emphasises holism and the idea that everything in existence is intricately connected as part of a single whole,[61] in doing so rejecting both the dualism of Judeo-Christian thought and the reductionism of Cartesian science.[62] It emphasises that the Mind, Body, and Spirit are interrelated[4] and that there is a form of monism and unity throughout the universe.[20] It attempts to create "a worldview that includes both science and spirituality"[63]
The New Age movement typically views the material universe as a meaningful illusion, which humans should try to use constructively rather than focus on escaping into other spiritual realms.[64] This physical world is hence seen as "a domain for learning and growth" after which the human soul might pass on to higher levels of existence.[65] There is thus a widespread belief that reality is engaged in an ongoing process of evolution; rather than Darwinian evolution, this is typically seen as either a teleological evolution which assumes a process headed to a specific goal, or an open-ended, creative evolution.[66]
A common belief among the New Age movement is that humanity has entered, or is coming to enter, a new age known as the Age of Aquarius,[67] which Melton has characterised as a "New Age of love, joy, peace, abundance, and harmony[...] the Golden Age heretofore only dreamed about."[68] Prominent New Age theorist Marilyn Ferguson for instance describes this period as "a millennium of love and light".[69] In accepting this belief in a coming new age, the movement has been described as "highly positive, celebratory, [and] utopian",[70] and has also been cited as an apocalyptic movement.[71]
According to this world view, the planet goes through large astronomical cycles which can be identified astrologically; the prior two thousand years were described as the Age of Pisces, which is now giving way to that of Aquarius.[72] The Age of Aquarius is not viewed as eternal, but it is instead believed that it will last for around two thousand years, before being replaced by a further age.[72] There are various beliefs within the movement as to how this new age will come about, but most emphasise the idea that it will be established through human agency; others assert that it will be established with the aid of non-human forces such as spirits or extraterrastrials.[73] Participants in the movement typically express the view that their own spiritual actions are helping to bring about the Age of Aquarius.[74]
Self-spirituality and channeling
The New Age movement exhibits a strong emphasis on the idea that the individual is the primary source of authority on spiritual matters.[75] Thus, it exhibits what Heelas termed "unmediated individualism",[75] and reflects a world-view which is "radically democratic".[76] As a result, there is a strong emphasis on the freedom of the individual in the movement.[77] This emphasis has led to some ethical disagreements; while some New Age participants stress the need to help others because all are part of the unitary holistic universe, others have disagreed, refusing to aid others because it is believed that it will result in their dependency on others and thus conflicts with the self-as-authority ethic.[78] Nevertheless, within the movement, there are differences in the role accorded to voices of authority outside of the self.[79]
"In the flood of channeled material which has been published or delivered to "live" audiences in the last two decades, there is much indeed that is trivial, contradictory, and confusing. The authors of much of this material make claims which, while not necessarily untrue or fraudulent, are difficult or impossible for the reader to verify. There are, however, a number of other channeled documents which address issues more immediately relevant to the human condition. The best of these writings are not only coherant and plausible, but eloquently persuasive and sometimes disarmingly moving."
— Academic Suzanne Riordan, 1992.[80]
Although not present in every New Age group,[81] a core belief of the movement is in channeling.[82] This is the idea that humans beings, sometimes (although not always) in a state of trance, can act "as a channel of information from sources other than their normal selves".[83] These sources are varyingly described as being God, gods and goddesses, ascended masters, spirit guides, extraterrestrials, angels, devas, historical figures, the collective unconscious, elementals, or nature spirits.[83] Hanegraaff described channeling as a form of "articulated revelation",[84] and identified four forms: trance channeling, automatisms, clairaudient channeling, and open channeling.[85]
Prominent examples of channeling in the New Age movement include Jane Roberts' claims that she was contacted by an entity called Seth, and Helen Schucman's claims to have channeled Jesus Christ.[86] The academic Suzanne Riordan examined a variety of these New Age channeled messages, and noted that they typically "echoed each other in tone and content", offering an analysis of the human condition and giving instructions or advice for how humanity can discover its true destiny.[87]
For many New Agers, these channeled messages rival the scriptures of the main world religions as sources of spiritual authority,[88] although often New Agers describe historical religious revelations as forms of "channeling" as well, thus attempting to legitimate and authenticate their own contemporary practices.[89] Although the concept of channeling from discarnate spirit entities has links to Spiritualism and psychical research, in the New Age movement the Spiritualist emphasis on proving the existence of life after death is absent, as is the psychical research focus of testing mediums for consistency.[90]
Healing and alternative therapies
Another core factor of the New Age movement is its emphasis on healing and the use of alternative therapies.[91][92] The general ethos within the movement is that health is the natural state for the human being and that illness is a disruption of that natural balance.[93] Hence, New Age therapies seek to heal "illness" as a general concept which includes physical, mental, and spiritual aspects; in doing so it critiques mainstream Western medicine for simply attempting to cure disease, and thus has an affinity with most forms of traditional medicine found around the world.[94] The concept of "personal growth" is also greatly emphasised within the healing aspects of the New Age movement.[95] The movement's focus of self-spirituality has led to the emphasis of self-healing, although also present in the movement are ideas that focus on both healing others, and healing the Earth itself.[96]

Reiki is one of the alternative therapies commonly found in the New Age movement.
The healing elements of the movement are difficult to classify given that a variety of terms are used, with some New Age authors using different terms to refer to the same trends, while others use the same term to refer to different things.[97] However, Hanegraaff developed a set of categories into which the forms of New Age healing could be roughly categorised. The first of these was the Human Potential Movement, which argues that contemporary Western society suppresses much human potential, and which accordingly professes to offer a path through which individuals can access those parts of themselves that they have alienated and suppressed, thus enabling them to reach their full potential and live a meaningful life.[98] Hanegraaff described transpersonal psychology as the "theoretical wing" of this Human Potential Movement; in contrast to other schools of psychological thought, transpersonal psychology takes religious and mystical experiences seriously by exploring the uses of altered states of consciousness.[99] Closely connected to this is the shamanic consciousness current, which argues that the shaman was a specialist in altered states of consciousness and which seeks to adopt and imitate traditional shamanic techniques as a form of personal healing and growth.[100]
Hanegraaff identified the second main healing current in the New Age movement as being holistic health. This emerged in the 1970s out of the free clinic movement of the 1960s, and has various connections with the Human Potential Movement.[101] It emphasises the idea tha the human individual is a holistic, interdependent relationship between mind, body, and spirit, and that healing is a process in which an individual becomes whole by integrating with the powers of the universe.[102] A very wide array of methods are utilised within the holistic health movement, with some of the most common including acupuncture, biofeedback, chiropractic, yoga, kinesiology, homeopathy, iridology, massage and other forms of bodywork, meditation and visualisation, nutritional therapy, psychic healing, herbal medicine, healing using crystals, metals, music, and colours, and reincarnation therapy.[103] The use of crystal healing has become a particularly prominent visual trope in the movement.[104] The mainstreaming of the Holistic Health movement in the UK is discussed by Maria Tighe. The inter-relation of holistic health with the New Age movement is illustrated in Jenny Butler's ethnographic description of "Angel therapy" in Ireland.[92]
"New Age science"
The New Age movement typically rejects rationalism, the scientific method, and the academic establishment, although at times employs terminology and concepts borrowed from science and particularly the New Physics.[105] Instead it typically expresses the view that its own understandings of the universe will come to replace those of the academic establishment in a paradigm shift.[105] A number of prominent influences on New Age movement, such as David Bohm and Ilya Prigogine, came from backgrounds as professional scientists.[106] Conversely, most of the academic and scientific establishments dismiss "New Age science" as pseudo-science, or at best existing in part on the fringes of genuine scientific research.[107] Hanegraaff identified "New Age science" as a form of Naturphilosophie.[108] In this, the movement is interested in developing unified world views to discover the nature of the divine and establish a scientific basis for religious belief.[106]
Figures in the New Age movement – most notably Fritjof Capra in his The Tao of Physics (1975) – have drawn parallels with theories in the New Physics and traditional forms of mysticism, thus arguing that contemporary science is proving ancient ideas.[109] Many New Agers have adopted James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis that the Earth acts akin to a single living organism, although have expanded this idea to include the idea that the Earth has consciousness and intelligence.[110]
Quantum mechanics, parapsychology, and the Gaia hypothesis have been used in quantum mysticism to explain spiritual principles.[111] Authors Deepak Chopra, Fritjof Capra, Fred Alan Wolf, and Gary Zukav have linked quantum mechanics to New Age spirituality, which is presented in the film What the Bleep Do We Know!? (2004); also, in connection with the Law of Attraction, which is related to New Thought and presented in the film The Secret (2006). They have interpreted the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, quantum entanglement, wave function collapse, or the many-worlds interpretation to mean that all objects in the universe are one (monism), that possibility and existence are endless, and that the physical world is only what one believes it to be. In medicine, such practices as therapeutic touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, and naturopathy involve hypotheses and treatments that have not been accepted by the conventional, science-based medical community through the normal course of empirical testing.[112][113] New Age thought often includes references to the paranormal and to parapsychology.[114]

The New Age movement is a religious or spiritual movement that developed in Western nations during the 1970s. Precise scholarly definitions of the movement differ in their emphasis, largely as a result of its highly eclectic structure. Nevertheless, the movement is characterised by a holistic view of the cosmos, a belief in an emergent Age of Aquarius – from which the movement gets its name – an emphasis on self-spirituality and the authority of the self, a focus on healing (particularly with alternative therapies), a belief in channeling, and an adoption of a "New Age science" that makes use of elements of the new physics.
The New Age movement evolved from an array of earlier religious movements and philosophies, in particular nineteenth-century groups such as the Theosophical Society and Gurdjieff. It also incorporates strands from metaphysics, perennial philosophy, self-help psychology, and various Indian teachings such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Yoga[1] In the 1970s, it developed a social and political component.[2] Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational psychology".[3] The term New Age refers to the coming astrological Age of Aquarius.[4]
The New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from monotheism through pantheism, pandeism, panentheism, and polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy; particularly archaeoastronomy, astrology, ecology, environmentalism, the Gaia hypothesis, psychology, and physics. New Age practices and philosophies sometimes draw inspiration from major world religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Chinese folk religion, Christianity, Hinduism, Sufism (Islam), Judaism (especially Kabbalah), Sikhism; with strong influences from East Asian religions, Esotericism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Idealism, Neopaganism, New Thought, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Universalism, and Wisdom tradition.[5]

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