Handbook of New Age (Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion)

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Handbook of New Age

Studies BrillofHandbooks Religion inon Africa Contemporary Religion Supplements to the Journal of Religion in Africa Series editor

James R. Lewis Edited by

Paul Gifford School of OrientalVOLUME and African 1 Studies, London Deputy Editor

Ingrid Lawrie The Mirfield Centre

VOLUME 30

Handbook of New Age Edited by

Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Handbook of New Age / edited by Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-90-04-15355-4 ISBN-10: 90-04-15355-1 (alk. paper) 1. New Age movement. I. Kemp, Daren. II. Lewis, James R. III. Title. BP605.N48H355 2007 299’.93—dc22

2007060500

ISSN 1874-6691 ISBN 978 90 04 15355 4 © Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Editors’ Preface ...........................................................................

vii

INTRODUCTION Defining the New Age ................................................................ George D. Chryssides The New Age Movement and Western Esotericism ................. Wouter J. Hanegraaff The Origins of ‘New Age’ Religion Between the Two World Wars ............................................................................. Steven Sutcliffe Beyond Millennialism: The New Age Transformed ................. J. Gordon Melton

5 25 51 77

NEW AGE AND SOCIAL-SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH Quantitative Studies of New Age: A Summary and Discussion ................................................... Liselotte Frisk The Psychology of the New Age ............................................... Miguel Farias and Pehr Granqvist Producing and Consuming New Age Spirituality: The Cultic Milieu and the Network Paradigm ..................... Adam Possamaï New Age Diffuse Communities .................................................. Dominic Corrywright

103 123 151 167

NEW AGE, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY New Age and Business ............................................................... Martin Ramstedt Science and the New Age .......................................................... James R. Lewis

185 207

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contents

Truth, Authority and Epistemological Individualism in New Age Thought .................................................................. Christopher Partridge Old Myths, New Mythicising ..................................................... Anna E. Kubiak Power Trips: Making Sacred Space through New Age Pilgrimage ............................................................................... Adrian Ivakhiv

231 255 263

GLOBAL ASPECTS OF NEW AGE Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth: The Local and the Global in Glastonbury, ................ Marion I. Bowman Hawaii in New Age Imaginations: A Case of Religious Inventions ................................................................................ Mikael Rothstein A Latin American New Age? ..................................................... María Julia Carozzi The Spiritual World: Aspects of New Age in Japan ................. Inken Prohl

291 315 341 359

NEW AGE AND WORLDVIEWS New Age Religion and the Sceptics ........................................... Olav Hammer The New Age Movement as an Astrological Minority Religion with Mainstream Appeal ......................................... Michael York Holistic Health and New Age in Britain and the Republic of Ireland ................................................................................ Maria Tighe and Jenny Butler Paganism and the New Age ....................................................... Melissa Harrington Christians and New Age ............................................................ Daren Kemp Contributors ................................................................................ Index ...........................................................................................

379 405 415 435 453 473 475

EDITORS’ PREFACE Handbook of New Age is both a testament to the now securely-established discipline of New Age scholarship—revisiting some of the well-known authorities and the growing academic consensus—as well as an indication of the vast breadth of disciplines on which newer students of New Age draw—from archival research to participant observation, from empirical psychology to Japanese studies. The present volume may usefully be compared with Perspectives on the New Age (Lewis & Melton eds 1992), the first ever academic anthology of New Age studies to be published, which was co-edited by one of the co-editors of the present collection, James R. Lewis. Perspectives is still frequently cited by scholars of New Age (including those in this Handbook), and has stood the test of time well. Some of the challenges encountered in the study of New Age were first sketched out to a wider audience by Lewis’s opening chapter in Perspectives. George D. Chryssides’ chapter in this Handbook fulfils a similar methodological function, but in addition to foresight, benefits from the hindsight that is gained from reviewing over two decades of research. Many of the difficulties that beset early studies of New Age are far from fully resolved today—not least the appropriateness, definition and scope of the term ‘New Age’ and the reluctance of practitioners to use it—but there are now a number of tried and tested coping mechanisms and partial solutions, as shown not just in Chryssides’ chapter, but throughout this collection. In Perspectives, the history and origins of New Age were generally well understood and agreed, perhaps largely thanks to sceptical and hostile Christian critics keen for polemical reasons to show that New Age is far from new.1 J. Gordon Melton (himself a Christian minister, but one who refrains from such polemics), also co-editor of and contributor to Perspectives, had at this early stage already meticulously documented the history and range of specific New Age movements in his New Age Almanac (Melton et al. 1991), which remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of the phenomena. Melton’s influential

1

See the contributions by Hammer and Kemp to this volume.

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editors’ preface

work on New Age continues to be wide-ranging, as his contribution to this Handbook shows. However, two authoritative historians of New Age—Wouter Hanegraaff and Steven Sutcliffe—had not even completed their doctoral studies when Perspectives was published. Their archival and comparative historical research has provided the detail and nuances that earlier histories of New Age lacked, as is apparent from their chapters in this volume. Although there were already a number of academic authorities on New Age before the publication of Perspectives, very few of them had employed quantitative statistical techniques. The majority approach was qualitative, at best based on first-hand fieldwork with New Age practitioners, and at worst based mainly on secondary sources. As Liselotte Frisk points out in her chapter in the Handbook, the lack of quantitative studies of New Age is still a drawback in the discipline today, although there are at least a handful of studies that have embarked on such a path. There are, of course, methodological difficulties to be overcome, but we may now hope for further statistical enquiries that will enable direct comparisons between populations. Psychological studies are not yet well-known in the New Age literature, but as shown in Miguel Farias’ and Pehr Granqvist’s chapter on the psychology of New Agers, there is a respectable and growing body of such research, to which they have made a number of original contributions. In fact, the empirical approach taken is perhaps so underutilised that Farias and Granqvist feel obliged to ask their readers to try and keep an open mind in the face of what might seem to some as simple reductionism. While empirical psychologists have only recently joined the New Age debate, sociologists discovered New Age as a field of study around the time Perspectives was published in 1992. Michael York’s doctoral thesis on the sociology of the New Age and Neopagan movements was submitted in 1991, and was the first such study to receive wide acclaim, even before its publication in 1995. All subsequent studies of the sociology of New Age are variations on the theme of York, as is evident even in the diverse approaches taken by Adam Possamai and Dominic Corrywright in their contributions to this collection. And indeed, both Possamai and Corrywright bring new refinements to our understanding of the sociology of New Age—Possamai with the notions of perennism and the network paradigm, Corrywright with the notions of diffuse communities and the web. If the first module of New Age studies to be written was its history,

editors’ preface

ix

the second module was undoubtedly commentary on the interaction of New Age with mainstream cultures. Paul Heelas was an early student of the influence of New Age, or self religion as he then called it, on the world of business training seminars. Martin Ramstedt brings this stream of the discipline up-to-date with observations of alternative spiritualities in the workplace. New Age science was also critically examined before New Age studies entered academia, as exemplified especially in the works of Martin Gardner (e.g. 1988) and David Hess (1993). James R. Lewis’ chapter gives an overview of this facet of New Age scholarship. A paper that achieved clarity in some of the theoretical issues confronting scholars of New Age is Christopher Partridge’s study of truth, authority and epistemological individualism, which is deservedly reprinted in this collection. In particular, Partridge’s chapter covers the long-standing debate among students of New Age, as to whether New Age is modern or postmodern—or both. Two aspects of New Age culture that are not often studied are space and myth. New Age and myth is perhaps a more amenable subject, but few approach it with such style as Anna E. Kubiak. Adrian Ivakhiv is one of very few New Age academics who have specialised in the study of New Age geography. Allied to Ivakhiv’s approach is the study of New Age in specified locations. Of course, any fieldwork has geographical limits; and not all scholars of New Age have written up their fieldwork with the global context in mind. Marion Bowman shows how this should be done in a reprint of her study of the local and global in Glastonbury, England. When local traditions are also minority, ethnic, native or aboriginal, these traditions may have particular sensitivities over issues of cultural appropriation and cultural colonialism. Most frequently in New Age studies, such issues are tackled with reference to Native American traditions, but in this volume, Mikael Rothstein takes a similar approach with Hawaiian religion. Cultural differences can also be seen to affect the impact of New Age in Latin America in María Carozzi’s chapter. Similarly, there are specific local influences in the nature of New Age in Japan, as Inken Prohl shows. Perspectives also included a section on the international dimensions of New Age, and it is surprising given such an early suggestion of the fruitfulness of this comparative approach, that more international studies of New Age have not been undertaken in the intervening years. Often, though, the specific cultural localities of New Age are not

x

editor’s preface

geographical but movement-related. This is perhaps not surprising given that New Age is usually understood as a contemporary social movement, rather than a national or ethnic religious tradition. Yet again, despite the early pointer given in Perspectives with its section on comparative studies of New Age, the interactions of New Age with other socio-religious movements is not a major area of study. Sceptical responses to New Age are part of the implicit mainstream cultural background of which any student of New Age should be aware. Olav Hammer makes this backdrop explicit in his careful study of scepticism, mainly in Sweden. Perspectives included a chapter on New Age astrology, and this is such an important allied movement that Michael York tackles the subject again in this volume. Another crucial movement associated with New Age is the holistic health movement, examined in this volume by Maria Tighe and Jenny Butler. The number of academic studies of Neo-Paganism may be disproportionate to the number of Neo-Pagan practitioners, and most studies of New Age since York (1995) have acknowledged the difficulties in understanding the relationship between Neo-Paganism and New Age. Melissa Harrington summarises this relationship in detail. There is a case for suggesting that hostile Christian studies of New Age pre-dated academic studies of the movement. Certainly there were two chapters on Christian approaches to New Age in Perspectives, and these both focused on evangelical, pentecostal and charismatic approaches to New Age. Yet Christian approaches to New Age are not limited to such styles of Christianity, and Daren Kemp’s chapter shows the variety of such approaches. It has been a pleasure to bring the contributors together in this way, and we hope the volume will prove worthy of this comparison with Perspectives on the New Age. Enjoy the Handbook of New Age. References Gardner, M., 1988. The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. Hess, D., 1993. Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. Lewis, J.R. and J.G. Melton, eds, 1992. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany: SUNY. Melton, J.G., J.R. Lewis & Aidan Kelly, eds, 1991. New Age Almanac. Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press. York, M., 1995. The Emerging Network. A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION A persistent set of issues in the field of New Age studies involves such questions as: What exactly do we mean by ‘New Age’? Where do we draw the boundaries between New Age and non-New Age? Should we use a term other than ‘New Age’? Is it even meaningful to talk about the many different ideas and practices lumped under the label New Age as if they were components of a unitary phenomenon? In the opening chapter, “Defining the New Age”, George D. Chryssides addresses these questions systematically and argues that ‘New Age’ is still a meaningful label. Western Esotericism has been identified as the dominant influence out of the many different religious and intellectual currents feeding into the New Age synthesis. There are, however, many nuances to this tradition and its impact on contemporary spirituality that escape the casual observer. In his “The New Age Movement and Western Esotericism”, Wouter J. Hanegraaff carries out a systematic analysis of this connection, while detailing the differences between ancient Gnosticism, traditional Esotericism, post-Enlightenment occultism, and what Hanegraaff refers to as New Age in a restricted sense and New Age in a general sense. Many observers have identified the early 1970s as the period when the New Age Movement as such began. As reflected in the title of his chapter, “The Origins of ‘New Age’ Religion between the Two World Wars”, Steven Sutcliffe examines the spiritual ferment of the interwar period in Europe, finding that many of the characteristics of the New Age emerged at this time. Some New Age-like traits of this earlier ‘quest culture’ were, for example, a concern with spiritual experience, an ideology of spiritual development, and the ideal of ‘seekership’. Sutcliffe also demonstrates that many of the key themes in the work of Alice Bailey—generally regarded as at the forefront of the New Age Movement—derive from the specific historical context of the interwar period. As a millennialist movement focussed on an imminent golden age of peace and light, the New Age had peaked by the end of the 1980s. Furthermore, by the 1990s, many of the key people and groups involved in characteristically New Age activities had backed away from the label

4

introduction

‘New Age’. In “Beyond Millennialism: The New Age Transformed”, J. Gordon Melton examines the transformation of the movement as it transitioned from a millennialist to a post-millennialist phase. The longer range impact of the New Age Movement of the 1970s and 1980s was dramatic growth of the older occult-metaphysical subculture, and a recasting of traditional occult practices in terms of contemporary psychology.

DEFINING THE NEW AGE George D. Chryssides “Always start by defining your terms,” students are often told. Dictionary definitions are seldom attention-grabbing, and the meaning of one’s key terms may already be obvious to the reader. Indeed, any reader who purchases a volume about New Age must plainly have a working knowledge of what the term means—so why bother to define it? There are a number of important reasons to start with definitions. First, as Socrates, whose life’s work consisted largely of attempts to formulate definitions of key concepts, ably demonstrated, there is a world of difference between knowing what a concept means and being able to articulate a definition. Second, there is a difference between a dictionary definition and the defining characteristics that emerge through scholarly discussion: key concepts in a field of knowledge are usually more complex and subtle than can be summarised in a few dictionary phrases. Third, attempting a definition—in this case of ‘New Age’—enables us to bring out the various salient features of the movement, and to help ensure that key aspects are not neglected. Fourth, there are important comparisons and contrasts to be made between New Age, alternative spirituality, New Religious Movements (NRMs) and New Social Movements (NSMs), and hence an attempt to define one’s subject matter is a useful exercise in conceptual mapping, enabling us to draw conclusions about what belongs to the field of New Age studies and what lies outside. Finally, discussing definitions is important where a term’s meaning is contested: as will become apparent, the expression ‘New Age’ admits of different meanings, and indeed some writers have suggested that the concept is not a useful one, since it lacks any clear meaning whatsoever. At an intuitive level, many readers would claim to recognise the ‘New Age’ when they see it. It manifests itself in shops that specialise in Tarot cards, crystals, incense, alternative remedies and books on ley lines, the paranormal, astrology, and eastern and esoteric spirituality. It appears in the form of magazines such as Kindred Spirit, Caduceus and Resurgence, and in local directories providing advertisements and addresses for the services of Reiki healers, yoga teachers and various

6

george d. chryssides

psychic consultants. It has its centres, either in practitioners’ owned or hired premises, or in renowned towns such as Glastonbury or Totnes. There are also characteristic events, such as Mind-Body-Spirit festivals and psychic fairs. How can one find a definition of ‘New Age’ that will serve to bring so many different features together? One major difficulty in defining ‘New Age’ is that different writers draw different boundaries. Paul Heelas, for example, includes a significant number of what he calls the ‘self religions’: groups like Landmark Forum (also known simply as The Forum, formerly est or Erhard Seminar Training) and Programmes Limited (formerly Exegesis). Some writers trace the New Age back to William Blake (1757–1827); others see it as originating in the ‘hippie’ counter-culture in the USA in the 1960s, while the scholar of the New Age, Wouter Hanegraaff, places it later still, regarding it as beginning in the second half of the 1970s. Some authors claim that, if there ever was a New Age Movement, it is now finished, while others aver that it is still with us. A further problem relates to the supposed constituents of the New Age. If it supposedly includes homoeopathy, eastern religions, ley lines, deep ecology, angels, channelling, Tarot cards, astrology and NeuroLinguistic Programming, what do such interests have in common? If there is no common essence, do they at least have a relationship? If they have common or related features, what is the point in conjuring up a term to refer to them collectively? The Scope and Diversity of the New Age Although the Theosophical Society is not normally considered to be part of the New Age Movement, its eclectic ideas have significantly contributed to the development of the New Age phenomenon. In particular, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), Alice Bailey (1880–1949), Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), and Dion Fortune (1890–1946), all of whose writings still feature significantly on the Mind-Body-Spirit shelves of bookshops, were at one time Theosophists, although all except Fortune abandoned the Theosophical Society. Bailey’s ideas relate on the one hand to Theosophy’s founder-leader Helena P. Blavatsky’s ‘Ascended Masters’—advanced spiritual beings who are now free from the cycle of reincarnation and who continue to guide humans on Earth from their celestial abodes. In particular, Bailey

defining the new age

7

claimed contact with a spiritual guide by the name of Djwahl Khul, whom she claimed to be the ultimate author of many of her writings. On the other hand, Bailey was influenced by Christianity, although she developed her own idiosyncratic interpretation in the two-volume Discipleship in the New Age (1944, 1955), and The Reappearance of the Christ (1948). The first bears obvious noteworthiness for Bailey’s use of the expression ‘New Age’; the second develops ideas of a spiritual evolution towards a new world religion in which the teachings of Buddha and Christ would be fused. Christ would return some time towards the end of the twentieth century, enabling the Ascended Masters to draw closer to humanity, thereby ushering in a new era of heightened spiritual awareness. Krishnamurti, Steiner and Fortune demonstrate in different ways the diverse interests of the subsequent New Age Movement. Having rejected the Theosophical Society’s endeavours to present him as new world teacher Maitreya and avatar, Krishnamurti claimed to be bound by no tradition, and preached a message of non-violence, teaching that peace was not achievable by socio-political means, but only by a transformation of the self, cultivating the virtues of goodness, love and compassion. Krishnamurti saw the importance of education in selfdevelopment, and established numerous schools in India, Britain and the United States. Steiner, even more than Krishnamurti, is associated with education, and the Steiner school emphasises a holistic approach to education, stressing the importance of the development of the spiritual and physical aspects of the individual, as well as his or her intellect. The Anthroposophical Society, founded by Steiner, promoted a form of ‘Christian occultism’ (as Steiner himself called it), whereby individuals were encouraged to rediscover the divine powers, which they had lost. Jesus Christ, Steiner taught, showed humanity the way in which this can be accomplished. Dion Fortune’s ideas were less Christian-centred than Steiner’s: for her Jesus Christ was only one of a number of Ascended Masters of whom she claimed to have visions. An esotericist, Fortune combined occultism and magic with Tarot, Kabbalah and neo-Paganism. Particularly significant is her association with the town of Glastonbury, which she visited regularly, and where she contemplated the Celtic underworld that allegedly lived beneath the Glastonbury Tor. Her Avalon of the Heart (1934), re-issued as Dion Fortune’s Glastonbury, remains in print. More recently, the New Age became associated with the 1960s ‘hippie’ movement, which began in the USA and percolated into Canada and

8


Britain. The hippies were the youth counter-culture, coming initially from US college campuses, and rejecting ‘The Establishment’. Set against the background of US involvement in Vietnam, a favourite hippie slogan was ‘Make love, not war,’ and the twin values of ‘love’ and ‘peace’ were declared in preference to the materialism and perceived authoritarianism of the West’s dominant culture. They attracted publicity for their unconventional dress, which was in keeping with their ‘psychedelic revolution’, involving bright colours and ‘flower power’ designs. Men grew long beards and women typically wore long dresses. Their interests included drug-taking—particularly cannabis and LSD—rock music, eastern philosophy and religion. Their lifestyle was typically either communal or nomadic. Significantly, the hippies’ interests extended to the environment, and their celebration of Earth Day in 1970 received media publicity. The hippie movement was shortlived, however: although a few neo-hippie groups remain, the movement virtually disappeared in the early 1970s. The younger generation of the 1970s and later seemed more interested in a conventional lifestyle, forging careers and seeking material prosperity. Some mention should be made of the ‘New Age’ travellers, if only to highlight the fact that they have really little bearing on the ‘New Age’ movement discussed here. The New Age travellers took their rise from free music festivals in the 1970s, for example the Windsor Park Free Festival, and other festivals at Glastonbury and Stonehenge. They journeyed between one festival and another, using vans, buses, caravans and lorries, and pitching improvised tents in which to spend the night. Their activities attracted considerable opposition from local communities, and there were many arrests. Their interests, however, were predominantly musical rather than spiritual. Much more influential in the development of the New Age Movement was the Findhorn community. Established in 1962 by Peter and Eileen Caddy on the banks of the Moray Firth, the community began as a horticultural experiment. When the poor soil and climate nevertheless succeeded in producing remarkable crops (some cabbages weighed as much as 40 pounds), this success was attributed to supernatural beings, known as ‘devas’. Particularly important in the development of New Age philosophy were Sir George Trevelyan (1906–1996) and David Spangler, both of whom had leading roles in shaping Findhorn. Trevelyan’s interests were varied. He founded the Wrekin Trust in 1971, but is almost equally significant for his role in establishing the


9

Teilhard de Chardin Society, the Soil Association, and the Essene Society. He preferred the term ‘Aquarian Age’ to ‘New Age’, a preference that was reflected in the title of his book A Vision of the Aquarian Age (1977). The Wrekin Trust was a centre for ‘spiritual education’, and Trevelyan’s vision was, as he put it, ‘a vision of wholeness’ entailing ‘the essential unity of all life’. When David Spangler later joined the Findhorn community in 1970, the programme of seminars commenced, spanning a range of topics including yoga, personal development, creative writing and healing, among many others. Spangler’s own philosophy was essentially Christian, although he tended to reject institutional religion. In common with Christianity, Spangler proclaimed an eschatological hope, but he expected a transformation in the physical world, when there would be a new evolutionary stage in the life of the universe, with renewed self-discovery and personal development. In contrast with Alice Bailey’s Christian-derived New Age philosophy, Spangler believed that this New Age would not arrive inevitably, but required human awareness and effort to bring about. An important landmark in New Age philosophy was the publication of Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy (1982). This book was important for a variety of reasons. First, it is unmistakably utopian: Ferguson argued for a ‘paradigm shift’ which she believed was about to take place in the human mind and brain, in human spirituality, and with a new emergent culture. Ferguson perceived a need for a transition in spirituality from its past emphasis on tradition, authority, faith and ritual, to a new spirituality that relied on direct knowledge, experience, ‘adventure’ and human wholeness, a spirituality which would emphasise meditation, healing and recognition of one’s inner divine nature. Not only would such changes take place in the individual, but they would be accompanied by social and political transformation. Ferguson’s importance lies not only in her utopian agenda but in her analysis of how she perceives the operation of this movement. Like Trevelyan, she prefers the term ‘Age of Aquarius’ to ‘New Age’, but the concept is much the same. The word ‘conspiracy’ in the title is significant, because for her it connotes ‘breathing together’—the original meaning of the term. The ideas of the Aquarian Age are not to be found in any single organisation or ideology, but are to be found in various sources that breathe together symbiotically. For Ferguson, the New Age is not another religion or a new single movement, but a

10


Segmented Polycentric Integrated Network (SPIN), or more accurately, a SPIN of SPINs. The ideas come together at various junctures: in books, in magazines, in special interest groups, and at various events and festivals. Objections to the Term ‘New Age’ The preceding outline of the history of term ‘New Age’ highlights the range of interests that the movement espouses. Yet it is precisely this diversity that has caused some critics to take the view that these interests are too diverse to be encapsulated profitably by a single concept. I propose to consider a number of objections that have been made to the use of the term ‘New Age’ in order to determine whether or not it should have currency. ‘The New Age is a Hotchpotch of Disparate Ideas’ The first line of criticism is that the term ‘New Age’ covers too great a variety of concepts to be of use. Critics such as Peter Lemesurier, Lowell Streiker and Rosalind Hackett variously describe it as “an extraordinary mish-mash of ideas . . . having little connection with each other”, a “hodgepodge”, and “very eclectic, drawing on the (often contradictory) ideas and teachings of a host of (alternative) Western traditions . . . as well as of teachers from Eastern religious traditions” (Lemesurier 1990; Streiker 1990:46; Hackett 1992:216; cited in Heelas 1996:2). It is as if a beachcomber devised a collective noun to designate, say, all the objects that he or she had found in the course of a day: one might come up with a noun, but unless there is purpose to the grouping of such objects, or unless they bear some common set of features or at least a family resemblance, the use of any such term seems pointless. As Steven Sutcliffe argues, ‘New Age’ is a construct—that is to say, a term created by outsiders to bring together artificially a number of disparate ideas that may not be linked by their exponents. It is therefore a term that “lacks predictable content . . . and fixed referents” (Sutcliffe 2002:29). Thus, Heelas wishes to include Human Potential organisations such as Landmark Forum (formerly est—Erhard Seminar Training) and Exegesis; Wouter Hanegraaff (1996) notes that Transcendental Meditation, The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and the Osho organisation have at times appropriated the label ‘New Age’, as has the UFO-religion The Aetherius Society.


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‘New Age Cannot be Defined as Alternative Spirituality’ A further line of attack on definitions of New Age comes from Jeremy Carrette and Richard King in their book, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (2005). Carrette and King’s polemical attack is predominantly a critique of New Age practices, and this aspect of their book falls outside the scope of this chapter. For the purposes of the present discussion, I shall consider their critique of the notion of ‘spirituality’, for, if they are right in claiming that such a concept is too nebulous to be of value, it follows that the incorporation of ‘spiritual’ as a descriptor of New Age is inappropriate. Carrette and King complain, quoting Mick Brown, the author of The Spiritual Tourist (1998), that ‘spirituality’ is “a kind of buzz-word of the age”. Echoing Dorothy Rowe (2001), they contend that it is “a Humpty Dumpty word” (Carrette & King 2005:32), a concept without any clear unambiguous fixed meaning. Following Walter Principe, the authors trace the history of the term ‘spiritual’, identifying four key stages of its development. First, there is “early biblical” usage, entailing making sense of life morally, and disciplining one’s carnal nature; second, early Christian Hellenism used the term ‘spirit’ as being diametrically opposed to ‘matter’ in a metaphysical dualism; third, there is a use in ecclesiastical parlance, which distinguished between ‘matters temporal’ and ‘matters spiritual’—terms which defined ownership and jurisdiction; finally, following the Protestant Reformation, there arose a tendency to equate the ‘spiritual’ with the inner life of the soul in contrast with the authority of the Church: the doctrine of the ‘priesthood of all believers’ entailed the possibility of finding the divine within oneself, rather than communicated through intermediaries such as priests, saints or the Church. Carrette and King perceive the present-day use of the term ‘spirituality’ and its accompanying ‘privatisation of religion’ as emerging from the Romantic movement. Theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher laid emphasis on ‘feeling’ as the key characteristic of religion: an inner awareness, rather than blind faith in ecclesiastical authority. The authors see the inner quest for the divine as subsequently manifesting itself in the exploration of oriental religions, and subsequently taken over by capitalism, by selling of books, tapes and spiritual paraphernalia, as well as the use by capitalist organisations of spiritual techniques for managerial training—for example the use of the I Ching in decision making, or meditative practices for stress relief.

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‘New Age is Neither an Emic Nor an Etic Category’ A third line of objection is Steven Sutcliffe’s contention that ‘New Age’ functions neither as an emic nor an etic piece of terminology. Etically, it is a construct, but emically it is not readily found as a self-description by those who are within the movement. Sutcliffe notes, for example, that in the bibliography of Wouter Hanegraaff ’s important and detailed book on the New Age Movement, only six out of several hundred titles actually use the phrase ‘New Age’. Sutcliffe does concede that there are some instances of emic use of the term, for example by Alice Bailey, George Trevelyan and David Spangler, the 1960s ‘New Age travellers’, and in the celebrated musical Hair, which affirmed the ‘dawning of the Age of Aquarius’. However, as Sutcliffe points out, the important emic uses of the term ‘New Age’ lie well in the past, and do not typically reflect what is currently to be found in so-called ‘New Age’ circles. The New Age no longer consists of some neo-Christian expectation based on William Blake or Alice Bailey. Even Spangler, who was closely associated with the origins of the Findhorn community, and wrote Revelation: The Birth of a New Age (1971), came to recant on the notion that some new paradise was around the corner. Sutcliffe concludes that emic uses of the term ‘New Age’ are “optional, episodic and declining” (Sutcliffe 2003:197). The use of the term itself has declined, and indeed—as he insists—“there is and has been no New Age Movement” (Sutcliffe 2003:208). ‘The New Age has Disappeared’ A further line of attack is the suggestion that the ‘New Age’ phenomenon itself has disappeared. As has been shown, the movement took its rise in the US counterculture of the 1960s, when hippiedom, ‘flower power’, freedom from authority and utopian expectations were all the rage. Today, the shelves in bookstores that promote the ideas associated with New Age are labelled ‘Mind-Body-Spirit’, and the latter term is used for the various festivals that are currently held in British cities and elsewhere. The hippies are passé, and so is their ideology. They were politically left-wing, rejecting the capitalist system and becoming society’s ‘drop-outs’ in the belief that by so doing they could bring about a new social utopia. Few hippies are still around, and the New Age, far from being in opposition to a capitalist system, has become a multi-million dollar industry, to the extent that critics such as Jeremy Carrette and Richard King (2005) have criticised it for its support of


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capitalist ideology. The ‘radical common sense’ advocated in Marilyn Ferguson’s Aquarius Now (2005) is more of a recipe for personal material prosperity than for any spiritual journey. New Agers no longer seem to expect a dawning Age of Aquarius, which will accompany the planetary transition from Pisces—the age of Christianity—to Aquarius—the New Age. Even David Spangler retracted his utopian claims, stating that the New Age was “an idea, not . . . an event” (Spangler; cited in Sutcliffe 2004:114), and that its importance lay not in the destination, but in the journey (Kemp 2003:3). A Defence of ‘New Age’ I shall now consider some possible rejoinders to the criticisms stated above. It should be observed that, because of his sustained attack on the concept ‘New Age’, Sutcliffe endeavours to avoid directly using the term, always placing it in quotation marks, in order to indicate his disapproval of the term as a coherent designator. However, although the substitution of “ ‘New Age’ ” for “New Age” serves to indicate the problematical nature of the term, Sutcliffe nonetheless appears to use the expression ‘New Age’ with no obvious difference from those writers on the topic who employ it without any quotation marks, and Sutcliffe appears to have no difficulty in identifying the subject-matter that is typically associated with the term ‘New Age’. This being the case, why not simply drop the quotation marks, and continue to talk about New Age instead of ‘New Age’? The only possible reason for doing so would be that the removal of the quotation marks would serve to contradict the author’s thesis that ‘New Age’ is an unintelligible concept. Yet his ability to use the expression ‘New Age’ (with quotations) implicitly acknowledges that the concept is perfectly capable of being understood. If this is indeed the case, then we ought to be able to move towards some kind of definition. Certainly the concept ‘New Age’ is a theoretical construct. However, the term’s nature as a construct does not necessarily undermine its usefulness or employability. Scholars continue to write about Hinduism, for example, usually in the full knowledge that the term is a western etic piece of vocabulary imposed by nineteenth-century westerners to cover a number of vastly different spiritual practices focused on different forms of deity. While it is useful to remember that the term is a construct, it

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has become so embedded in western thinking that it would be difficult to change it, and there is a clear advantage in having a term that draws together a set of religious worldviews that bear family resemblances to each other, and which serves to differentiate a cluster of religious ideas and practices from Buddhism, Sikhism and Islam. I turn now to the issue of spirituality. Are Carrette and King right in regarding this concept as being too vague to be used in the context of New Age and Mind-Body-Spirit? The fact that a concept is nebulous does not necessarily entail that it is useless, and indeed Carrette and King grossly exaggerate the fluidity that pertains to the notion of spirituality. They cannot seriously believe that it is a Humpty Dumpty concept meaning literally anything at all: this is simply false, and to point out that its meaning has developed over the centuries is an observation that could be made about many words that are in current usage. They may well be right in claiming that the concept is in need of much further analysis, but that in itself is no reason to discard it as being devoid of meaning. Clearly, it is not realistic within the scope of this chapter to propose a concept of spirituality that can be guaranteed to withstand academic scrutiny, but it is possible to make some remarks about the term that will serve to show that it at least contains some substantial content. Most importantly, those who use the term ‘spirituality’ imply that there is something (or maybe Someone) that exists beyond the empirical realm—whether it is God, Brahman, buddhas and bodhisattvas, or some kinds of spiritual beings such as Ascended Masters or devas. Additionally, spirituality requires more than simple belief in the existence of such beings: in some sense they are capable of being experienced, and interact with human beings, whether by being ‘channelled’, or through the practitioner’s personal experience. Spirituality typically expresses itself in ritual, and the New Age is renowned for its multiplicity of ritual acts, whether these are prayers, meditations, spell-castings, or Tarot readings. Finally, spirituality is about finding meaning in one’s life: receiving guidance for life, obtaining answers to questions about why we are here, what the purpose of life is, and what may happen after we die. All these proposed components of spirituality no doubt need further discussion and clarification, but they constitute an important part of what the spiritual life entails, and it is simply false to suggest that the term ‘spirituality’ can genuinely mean whatever one wants it to mean, or—less sweepingly—that it is devoid of clear meaning. Having said this, one must be wary, however, of simply using the


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expression ‘alternative spirituality’ or, worse still, ‘alternative religion’ as a synonym for, let alone a definition of ‘New Age’. The word ‘alternative’ raises the question, ‘Alternative to what?’ If it were to be suggested that ‘alternative spirituality’ is to be understood as spiritual ideas and practices that constitute alternatives to traditional mainstream Christianity, then such a term would have to encompass other major world faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism. While it is certainly the case that books and paraphernalia relating to certain forms of Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism frequently occupy shelf space in the Mind-Body-Spirit section of many book stores, neither those who have been brought up in these traditions nor western converts to them can be regarded as ‘New Agers’. By contrast, the New Ager is better characterised by an eclecticism that commits him or her to no one specific expression of spirituality; religions typically offer firm answers to spiritual questions, whereas the New Ager is often described as a ‘seeker’ who perhaps derives more spiritual nourishment from the search itself than from what, if anything, he or she actually finds. I shall now turn to the ‘emic/etic’ line of objection. It is surely evident that the term ‘New Age’ has been used both ‘emically’ and ‘etically’. Emically, significant numbers of spiritual seekers have adopted the designation ‘New Age’ as a self-description. Thus, in a Canadian census in 1991, some 1200 people accepted the label ‘New Age’; in a similar census in New Zealand, 1212 citizens adopted the label. (531 described themselves as ‘Other New Age religions not classified elsewhere’, and a further 681 accepted the designation ‘Spiritualism and New Age not further defined’, where ‘Spiritualism’ was given as a separate category).1 Two authors cite a survey carried out in Maryland, which claims that 6 per cent of Maryland’s population identifies with New Age ideas2 (Naisbitt and Aburdene 1990:280). These may constitute a sizeable proportion of each country’s population, but these are self-descriptions by individuals. Etically, the term is applied by various external commentators on the New Age, including Christian evangelical critics and by academics.

1 Data taken from New Zealand national censuses, based on self-identification, down to denominational level. Total 1996 population: 3,616,633. Listed in table as “Other New Age religions not classified elsewhere.” From VisionNet Census 1999; original source: Statistics New Zealand; cited at www.adherents.com. 2 See also www.adherents.com.

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Examples include Wouter Hanegraaff and Michael York, and university courses incorporating the term ‘New Age’ are run in various British and US institutions. The above points effectively rebut the idea that the New Age is passé. New Age shops continue to survive—that is to say, specialist retail outlets that market literature and artefacts relating to the themes that I have identified above as pertaining to the New Age. Their proliferation is such that Carrette and King can refer to the phenomenon as an “explosion” and a “cultural addiction” (2005:1). Major bookstores may have renamed their shelves ‘Mind-Body-Spirit’, but the subjectmatter is the same. However, the fact that the New Age has changed in the past few decades remains an unconvincing argument for denying it an identity. Many movements change over time: one only has to consider Britain’s major political parties as cases in point. The New Age emphasis on spiritual quest positively lends itself to change and innovation. Equally, the absence of a unified or agreed worldview need not deter us from regarding the New Age as a coherent concept. Many organisations and movements thrive on debate and disagreement. A university is an obvious example, where debate and competing hypotheses are the very essence of academic life. Movements such as the feminist movement, although less institutionalised, admit of competing opinions: thus there are feminists who advocate positive discrimination rather than strictly equal opportunities; there are ‘separatists’ who believe in setting up exclusively female environments for women to build confidence, while other feminists hold that women should be able to relate to men on equal terms; there are ‘unadorned’ feminists, while others believe that women may legitimately maintain a feminine identity with traditionally female attire and cosmetics. Yet the presence of all these divergent positions within feminism does not entail that ‘feminism’ is not a movement or a useful concept. If it is argued that ‘New Age’ differs from feminism in that the latter is a single unified movement, this is not the case. Different feminists have different interests, spanning women’s suffrage, women in the workplace, women in education, anarcho-feminism, separatist lesbian feminism, eco-feminism and ‘difference feminism’. (The last of these celebrates the gender differences between male and female.)


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The New Age as a SPIN Of course, the New Age Movement is a much wider complex than the feminist movement—which can be construed as forming merely a part of ‘New Age’ thought—which is why writers like Ferguson have employed the notion of SPIN as a characterisation. Although it has been argued that the New Age Movement lacks a unified worldview, ideology and organisation, I believe that, not withstanding criticisms of such notions, the various concepts of cultic milieu, SPIN and web, proposed respectively by Colin Campbell, Marilyn Ferguson and Dominic Corrywright, offer an instructive means of understanding the New Age phenomenon. Campbell defines his notion of the “cultic milieu” as the “sum of unorthodox and deviant belief systems”. These are espoused by a “cultural underground”, and the overlapping structures of these ideas find outlets in magazines, books and meetings among others. Campbell was writing in 1972, considerably before the New Age became a topic of academic interest. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that his idea of a “sum of unorthodox and deviant beliefs systems” is proposed somewhat uncritically, and is somewhat of an overstatement. If we were to take “sum” to mean ‘totality’ of unorthodox beliefs and practices, this would include belief in the Earth’s flatness (there still exists an International Flat Earth Society), Holocaust denial, or sadomasochism. Campbell, however, qualifies the cultic milieu’s parameters by stating that they emphasise first-hand spiritual experience (sometimes popularly labelled “the mystical”), a rejection of established religion, an absence of dogma, which encourages seeker-ship, and a preparedness to combine such ideas with the non-religious. The notion of “belief systems” in this context also needs critical examination: in most cases, Campbell’s “cultural underground” does not offer grand systems, but—more often than not—artefacts (such as crystals), services (healing, meditation), ideas (‘Jesus lived in India’), or technologies. Marilyn Ferguson takes the notion of the cultural milieu rather further in the concept of a SPIN of SPINs. The Segmented Polycentric Integrated Network (SPIN) is a concept devised by Luther P. Gerlach and Virginia H. Hine (1970). The SPIN’s ‘segmentation’ lies in the fact that there are different areas of interest within the New Age: Ferguson specifically discusses the areas of religion, medicine and health care, and education. The Findhorn community, influenced by Trevelyan’s multifaceted interests, has promoted a similar range of topics, spanning ecology, horticulture, spirituality and education. These areas of

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interest each have their own organisational segments: for Trevelyan these included the Soil Association, the Essene Society and the de Chardin Society, among others. It is possible, of course, simply to pursue in isolation one or two of the interests commonly associated with the New Age: parents may simply send a child to a Steiner school, or a spiritual seeker might find solace in a Buddhist meditation group. Such people, according to the SPIN definition, are not New Agers, since they do not make use of the polycentric network: they are simply supporters of alternative education and a minority religion respectively. These single organisations in themselves do not merit the description ‘New Age’, since they lack the feature of integration. As we have seen, Trevelyan emphasised the notions of ‘wholeness’ and ‘unity of life’—ideas that are typically associated with the New Age, and which very much lend themselves to the kind of integrated networking that goes on within it. Thus ‘spiritual education’ is not something that can be isolated from specific religious writers and spiritual groups such as de Chardin or the Essenes. Both these forms of spirituality have implications for humanity, how to care for our planet, and the future of humankind upon it. This in turn links with ecology and organisations like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the Soil Association. As Corrywright (2004) points out, there are various ‘network hubs’, ‘nodes’ or ‘gateways’ that help to integrate and promote such ideas. He cites the journal Resurgence, and points to organisations such as Schumacher College and the Findhorn Foundation. Other ‘links’ can be topographical, for example the town of Glastonbury. Part of Corrywright’s ‘web’ also involves organisations that may lack the diversity of New Age beliefs and practices, but which promote one particular type of spiritual that may be of interest to New Age seekers. He cites Sharpham House as an example: this is a Buddhist community situated near Totnes, which provides lectures, courses, meditation sessions and retreats, but does not limit its programme to committed Buddhists. Sutcliffe, however, emphatically rejects any such attempt to encapsulate the movement, pointing out first, that the New Age’s early stages did not consist of such any such network, and that Gerlach and Hine’s examples were Pentecostalism and Black Power, both of which are “clearly-demarcated social movements” (Sutcliffe 2003:199). Sutcliffe’s argument here is less than convincing, however: the fact that New Age did not begin as an integrated network does not entail that it has not become one now, and if Gerlach and Hine chose clearly-defined social


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movements as examples of SPINs, it does not follow that more complex and seemingly nebulous movements cannot be thus defined. Towards a Definition of New Age We are now in a position to move towards a possible definition of New Age. In endeavouring to understand the phenomenon, it is important to distinguish the New Age from several phenomena that it plainly is not. The New Age is certainly not a religion. Paul Heelas writes: “Some see the New Age Movement as a New Religious Movement (NRM). It is not. Neither is it a collection of NRMs” (Heelas, 1996:9). Somewhat paradoxically, Heelas is inclined to talk about “New Age movements” as if they are clusters of individual spiritual and self-improvement groups. Thus, he identifies (a) an “est family”, (b) groups offering specialised trainings but do not belong to this family, and (c) trainings “which do not appear to have such strong connections with particular New Age movements” (Heelas 1996:63). The first category includes some of Scientology’s enterprises; the second embraces Rajneesh (now Osho), the Emissaries of Divine Light, and Transcendental Meditation; while the third relates to business organisations that have been inspired by ideas associated with New Age. This classification is somewhat puzzling, since The Forum (formerly est), Rajneesh/Osho, and Scientology tend to be self-contained, avoiding links with New Age networks. The tendency to regard the New Age Movement as an NRM or a cluster of NRMs no doubt stems from the brief history of the academic study of both areas. The term ‘NRM’ remains somewhat unsatisfactory, and is still imprecisely defined, encompassing a range of disparate spiritual groups of different vintages and backgrounds, and academic study has largely gone along with the Anti-Cult Movement’s concepts of ‘cult’ and ‘New Age’. Thus FAIR News states, The umbrella term “New Age” covers a vast range of groups some of which seem to have little to do with the actual ushering in of the New Age of Aquarius. Many have ecological traits, others deal with alternative medicine, and most of them belong to the “fringe” rather than to the category of destructive cults. (FAIR News 1989:8)

As I have argued, New Agers’ interests travel wider than any single religion, and indeed the New Ager is typically characterised by a rejection of the notion that any single religion can claim monopoly

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of answers to spiritual questions. This is especially true of two types of religion. The first is Paganism and its associated phenomenon of ‘goddess spirituality’. Mind-Body-Spirit stores may stock their quota of books on the present-day revival of these traditions, but those who espouse Paganism frequently take exception to being labelled as ‘New Agers’. Although it assumes a variety of forms, individual Pagans follow the practices that pertain to their chosen tradition, in contrast with the variety of spiritual practices that are taken up by New Agers, such as crystal therapy, Tarot, I Ching, and the many others. Secondly, and importantly, much of the New Age Movement tends to reject Christianity, at least in its traditional institutionalised forms. A cursory glance at the Mind-Body-Spirit bookshelves will confirm an interest in Buddhism, Hinduism, philosophical Taoism, western Sufism and neo-Paganism, but not in the Bible or the traditional Christian classics. No doubt this is partly due to the Judaeo-Christian notion that their God is a “jealous God” (Exodus 20:5) who demands total allegiance, and for whom any New Agey quest is unnecessary and reprehensible. Having said this, it is noteworthy that one important feature of New Age interest lies in the alternative ‘gospels’ and their commentators. Christianity’s canonical gospels may not be of great interest to New Agers, but books like Levi H. Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1985) and Holger Kersten’s Jesus Lived in India (1986) have been best-sellers. At the time of writing, the present author was interested to note that several Glastonbury booksellers were promoting various new titles on Mary Magdalene, no doubt prompted by Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (2003). It is not difficult to see why these alternative lives of Jesus Christ should be popular in New Age circles. Some of them, such as Dowling’s Aquarian Gospel and Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles (Anonymous 1985), are supposedly channelled. They purport to provide esoteric knowledge, yielding new information about Jesus that the Christian Church either does not know, or—if writers like Dan Brown are to be taken seriously—wilfully withholds. The notion that Jesus might have had a female disciple in Mary Magdalene lends obvious support the New Age celebration of the feminine, and simultaneously questions the presumed celibacy attributed to Jesus by the Church. Thus these alternative lives of Jesus assume an anti-establishment anti-authoritarianism. In addition, the suggestion that Jesus may have had exchanges with Hindu and Buddhist sages underlines the eclectic nature of the New Age, placing these various religions in a syncretistic blend.


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Reciprocally, mainstream Christianity has typically rejected the ideas of the New Age Movement. Norman L. Geissler, writing from a Protestant evangelical standpoint, asserts that the New Age is “the most dangerous enemy of Christianity in the world today” (Geissler 1984; cited in Berry 1988:3). Part of the concern about the New Age no doubt lies in its nebulous nature: since it is never totally clear where the boundaries of New Age lie, some Christians fear that New Age ideas and paraphernalia can invade their faith by stealth. The author recently attended a counter-cult meeting at which some attendees voiced disquiet about a woman who was wearing a skirt bearing a ‘sun’ design. Was the pattern simply decorative, or was it a New Age symbol? Concern has been expressed about the well-known ‘Trinity knot’, often regarded as a traditional Christian symbol, and which appears on the front of the New King James Version of the Bible. Constance Cumbey notes that it is used on the cover of Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy (1982), and contends that it is gnostic rather than Christian. A Christian author on the Internet points out that it features on Dorothy Morrison’s The Craft: A Witch’s Book of Shadows, as well as on Aleister Crowley’s ‘Hierophant’ Tarot card. The design can also be construed as three interlocking sixes, as in the ‘number of the Beast’. More soberly, the official Christian critiques of New Age philosophy tend to be negative. Responses from mainstream churches in recent times have come from the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Methodist Church and the Church of Scotland, among others. While acknowledging commendable features such as the care of the Earth, they find a number of problems with the New Age. These include its panentheist tendencies and its location of divinity within the self, thus precluding notions of alterity, divine grace and sin. The preoccupation with eastern religions, pre-Christian spirituality and extra-biblical documents, it is claimed, runs counter to Christian revelation and to its identification of Christ with the historical Jesus to whom the canonical gospels testify. The New Age’s relativism and interest in Esotericism also attract criticism. Having said this, it is worth noting that there exist some Christians who view the New Age more positively, maintaining that it is possible to learn from and engage in dialogue with it. Examples include New Age Catholics, the Christaquarians, and Christians Awakening to a New Awareness (CANA), all of which seek to attract Christians who are either finding it difficult to belong to traditional institutional Christianity, or who believe that New Age spirituality can enhance

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one’s understanding of the Christian faith. Individual authors who have sought to explore the New Age within a Christian framework include Daren Kemp, Adrian B. Smith, Don MacGregor, and of course Matthew Fox, whose Creation Spirituality (1991) has become a religious classic. Some individual Christian churches have sought to build bridges with the New Age: one notable example is St James, Piccadilly, in London, where prominent New Age speakers are regularly invited, and spiritual practices such as circle dancing, Zen meditation and labyrinth walking are encouraged. In my Exploring New Religions (1999), I attempt to identify a number of salient features which can be associated with the New Age, and which serve to define it. There is an optimistic view of the self, even to the extent of identified the self with a ‘God within’, allied to which there is a belief in the desirability of self-improvement or ‘empowerment’, which manifests itself in a variety of ways. One such manifestation is the emphasis on health and healing—physical, mental and spiritual—which expresses itself in alternative medicine, as well as spiritual practices such as various types of meditation. Belief in the self ’s potential also incorporates the development of personal skills such as positive thinking, assertiveness and methods of wish-fulfillment. There is a questioning of traditional authority, particularly the long-established authority of the male-dominated Christian Church. The questioning of traditional religion results in an eclectic approach to a variety of forms of religious expression, ranging from eastern spirituality to neo-Paganism and shamanism, as well as an uptake of practices such as divination, mediumship and witchcraft, of which the Church has characteristically disapproved. In place of obedience to authority, there is a heightened emphasis on activities associated with the ‘right hand side of the brain’: intuition, creativity, imagination, compassion, healing, the celebration of the feminine, and so on. While it must be acknowledged that the so-called ‘New Age Movement’ is not a single movement, but more of a counter-cultural Zeitgeist or, in Gerlach and Hine’s terminology, a SPIN, I have argued that the term possesses both emic and etic currency, and that New Age (or its cognate Mind-Body-Spirit) is still alive and active. The New Age will no doubt continue to change, and even, in time, die out. Academic study of the New Age Movement will no doubt change too. As has been the case with New Religious Movements, academic research has become increasingly specialised, and the same may happen with the New Age


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Movement. However, to study it in its various components would run the risk of ignoring the ways in which its elements interconnect and overlooking the holism that it so constantly emphasises. References Anonymous, 1985. A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, CA: Foundation for Inner Peace. Bailey, A., 1944/1955. Discipleship in the New Age. 2 vols. New York: Lucis. ——, 1948. The Reappearance of the Christ. New York: Lucis. Berry, H.J., 1988. New Age Movement. Lincoln, N.E.: Back to the Bible. Brown, D., 2003. The Da Vinci Code. London: Bantam. Brown, M., 1998. The Spiritual Tourist: A Personal Odyssey Through the Outer Reaches of Belief. London: Bloomsbury. Campbell, C., 1972. “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularisation.” In Hill, M., ed, 1972. A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 119–136. Carrette, J. & R. King, 2005. Selling Spirituality: The silent takeover of religion. London: Routledge. Chryssides, G.D., 1999. Exploring New Religions. London: Cassell. Church of Scotland, Board of Social Responsibility, 1993. “Young People and the Media.” Edinburgh: Church of Scotland, Board of Social Responsibility. Corrywright, D., 2004. “Network Spirituality: The Schumacher-Resurgence-Kumar Nexus”. Journal of Contemporary Religion 19.3 311–327. Dowling, L.H., 1985. The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. Romford, Kent: Fowler. FAIR, 1989. “New Age”. FAIR News, Summer. Ferguson, M., 1982. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time. New York: Putnam. Fox, M., 1991. Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Geissler, N.L., 1984. “Background of the New Age Movement.” In The New Age Movement, cassette 1 of 3. Dallas: Quest Tapes. Gerlach, L.P. & V.H. Hine, 1970. People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Hackett, R., 1992. “New Age Trends in Nigeria: Ancestral and/or Alien Religion?” In Lewis, J.R. & J.G. Melton, eds. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany: SUNY, 215–231. Hanegraaff, W.J., 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: Brill. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. Hill, M., 1972. A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5. London: SCM. Kemp, D., 2003. The Christaquarians? A Sociology of Christians in the New Age. London: Kempress. Kersten, H., 1986. Jesus Lived in India: His Unknown Life Before and After the Crucifixion. Shaftesbury: Element. Lemesurier, P., 1990. This New Age Business: The Story of the Ancient and Continuing Quest to Bring Down Heaven on Earth. Forres: The Findhorn Press. Methodist Church’s Faith and Order Committee, 1994. “The New Age Movement: Report to Conference 1994”. Mission Theological Advisory Group, 1996. The Search for Faith and the Witness of the Church: An Exploration. London: Church House Publishing. Morrison, D., 2001. The Craft: A Witch’s Book of Shadows. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn. Naisbit, John & Patricia Aburdene, 1990. Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990s. New York: William Morrow and Co.

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Pontifical Council for Culture, Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, 2003. “Jesus Christ, The Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the New Age.” Principe, W., 1983. “Toward Defining Spirituality.” Sciences Religieuses/Studies in Religion 12 127–141. Rowe, D., 2001. “What Do You Mean by Spiritual?” In King-Spooner, S. & C. Newnes, eds. Spirituality and Psychotherapy. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS. Smith, A.B., 1990. God and the Aquarian Age: The New Era of the Kingdom. Great Wakering, Essex: McCrimmons. Spangler, D., 1971. Revelation: The Birth of a New Age. Forres: The Findhorn Foundation. Streiker, L., 1990. New Age Comes to Mainstreet. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Sutcliffe, S.J., 2003. Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices. London: Routledge. Trevelyan, G., 1977. A Vision of the Aquarian Age. London: Coventure. York, M., 2003. Historical Dictionary of New Age Movements. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT AND WESTERN ESOTERICISM* Wouter J. Hanegraaff For several decades now, and increasingly since the 1990s, the study of Western Esotericism has begun to be recognised as a domain of academic research in its own right (Hanegraaff 2004). In this context, the term ‘Western Esotericism’ is understood as an umbrella term covering a specific set of historical currents in western culture.1 One problem that scholars in this field have to deal with, however, is the fact that the term ‘Esotericism’ (without the adjective ‘western’) is also used according to several quite different definitions (Hanegraaff 2005b). Thus there exists a long-standing trend of understanding ‘Esotericism’ as a generic typological concept that can be applied cross-culturally as an analytic tool (Hammer 2004). Furthermore, by religionist authors in particular, the term is used quite frequently as referring to some kind of allegedly ‘universal’ religious dimension, favourably opposed to the merely ‘external’ face of religious institutions and their theologies. The first two meanings are academically quite legitimate, whereas the academic qualifications of the third are doubtful (Hanegraaff 2001a). But most relevant in the present context is yet a fourth, popular rather than academic usage: if one goes out and asks the average passer-by what ‘Esotericism’ means, he or she is likely to mention the New Age movement. In common parlance, the terms ‘New Age’ and ‘Esotericism’ indeed tend to be used interchangeably, as near or complete synonyms, so that

* This is a revised and updated version of an article originally published under the title, “The New Age Movement and the Esoteric Tradition” (Hanegraaff 1998b). The research was supported by the Foundation for Theology and Religious Studies in the Netherlands (STEGON), founded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). 1 As demarcated in the new academic journal Aries (published twice a year by Brill academic publishers) devoted to the study of Western Esotericism, the field includes, “the revival of hermetism and the so-called ‘occult philosophy’ in the early modern period as well as its later developments; alchemy, paracelsianism and rosicrucianism; christian kabbalah and its later developments; theosophical and illuminist currents; and various occultist and related developments during the 19th and 20th centuries”.

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the academic student of Western Esotericism is forced to explain again and again the differences between the popular and the technical usage(s) of the term. Furthermore, even when he or she successfully gets the point across, other problems follow in its wake. One may explain that ‘Western esoteric’ currents existed long before the New Age movement, so that the two domains cannot be synonymous; but to account for the precise nature of the relationship between both is far more difficult. If the New Age movement is a contemporary phenomenon historically connected to much older ‘esoteric’ traditions, many people draw the conclusion that one may gain an adequate idea of what Western Esotericism is all about, by imagining modern New Age beliefs and practices transposed back into an earlier period. Such an idea, while very common, is wholly unhistorical: Western Esoteric currents and beliefs have in fact been thoroughly transformed under the impact of new developments in the wider society, particularly those in the wake of the Scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. As a result, there yawns a huge cultural and epistemological gulf between contemporary ‘New Age’ types of Western Esotericism and their pre-eighteenth century predecessors. While there can be no doubt about the historical continuities between Western Esotericism and the New Age movement, this continuity consists by virtue of an ongoing process of reinterpretation. Ideas are changed (sometimes dramatically, sometimes very subtly) according to the cultural context in which they are perceived; and over the course of time the context itself is transformed by these changed ideas. In order to gain a balanced perspective, one has to follow the development both of the ideas and of their cultural contexts. In this chapter, I will not be able to do more than give a very general impression of the conclusions to which such an approach may lead (see extensive discussion in Hanegraaff 1996). First, I will provide a general overview of the New Age movement. Second, I will outline the main avenues by which New Age is connected to Western Esotericism, with an eye to the continuities as well as the differences between both. The Stages of New Age The Proto-New Age Movement Speaking about a movement without founders and without an institutionalised organisation, it is always precarious to mark a beginning in time. Recognising this, it nevertheless makes sense to begin the story

the new age movement and western esotericism

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of the New Age movement in the 1950s. In this period one finds, both in Europe and the United States, many groups of people who are fascinated by the mystery of the UFO phenomenon. Some of these so-called ‘flying saucer clubs’ were concerned with scientific research, but many of them developed into religious cults based on an occultist belief system. Most of them held strongly apocalyptic beliefs. They believed that very soon the world would be hit by unheard-of catastrophes, such as earthquakes, floods, famines, epidemic diseases and so on. These disasters would completely disrupt civilisation. Spiritually highly-evolved beings, living in higher dimensions or on other planets and knowing what would come to pass, were now trying to warn humanity. They did this by appearing in their spacecraft, and communicating with human beings by paranormal means. Those who followed their teachings would be picked up by flying saucers and brought to safety. Following the apocalyptic period, they would become the pioneers of a new civilisation that would be built on the ruins of the old. A New Age of peace and prosperity would begin, in which humanity would live according to the universal spiritual laws of the universe. I refer to these groups as the ‘proto-New Age movement’. The New Age in a Restricted Sense These apocalyptic UFO-cults were based on the conviction that modern western society was corrupt without hope of a cure. A similar rejection of the ruling order is to be found in the alternative countercultural communities, which have flowered since the 1960s. Many of these communities took over the beliefs of the UFO-cults. Perhaps the bestknown is the Scottish Findhorn community, but many more existed. Within these alternative communities, the apocalyptic expectations of the original UFO-cults were slowly transformed. What emerged can be characterised as a ‘pioneer attitude’: people tried to live ‘as if ’ the New Age had already arrived. In this way, they hoped to be a source of inspiration to others, and thus to contribute in an active way to the coming of the New Age. In other words: the emphasis gradually shifted from an attitude of passive expectation of the Big Event, to an active attitude of trying to help create the New Age.2 Elsewhere (1996) I have

2 This change of attitude is described for example by the ‘theologian of Findhorn’, David Spangler (1984, ch. 4). Spangler (1977) is a foundational source of the New Age in a restricted sense.

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suggested that we refer to this movement of idealistic world-reformers as ‘New Age in a restricted sense’. In terms of its basic ideas, this movement was rooted in England rather than in the United States. Its worldview was based strongly on elements of Anthroposophy and modern Theosophy, with particular emphasis on the teachings of Alice Bailey. In this movement, the expectation of the New Age (or ‘Age of Aquarius’) was of central importance: all activities and speculations revolved around this central theme. This New Age movement in a restricted sense still exists as a subgroup within the New Age movement in a general sense; but as a result of the commercialisation of the latter, representatives of New Age have increasingly tended to deny association with the label ‘New Age’.3 Characteristic examples of the New Age in a restricted sense are David Spangler, George Trevelyan, Benjamin Creme, and the so-called Ramala community in Glastonbury, England. Some more recent New Age-currents, such as the Creation Spirituality of the American priest Matthew Fox, show a certain affinity with this original, idealistic New Age movement. New Age in a General Sense (or Classic New Age) The ‘New Age in a general sense’ emerged when, by the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, more and more people began to perceive an inner connection between the various kinds of alternative ideas, initiatives and practices that had flowered since the 1960s. Marilyn Ferguson, playfully alluding to the idea of the Age of Aquarius, referred to this emerging network of like-minded individuals as the ‘Aquarian Conspiracy’. Her book of the same title (Ferguson 1982) is still widely regarded as the manifesto par excellence of the New Age movement. However, this is correct only to a certain extent, for the volume appeared too early (in 1982) to be a completely adequate reflection of the movement as it actually developed during the 1980s. In any case, the term New Age (rather than Aquarian Conspiracy) became popular during the 1980s as a general term for the whole complex

3 See David Spangler’s attack on the “New Age glamour” of figures such as Shirley MacLaine (Spangler 1988a, 1988b). This tendency of turning away from the label ‘New Age’ has become widespread during the 1990s. It was identified already in Lewis (1992:1–2); see also Bochinger (1994:103, 115, 128, 517); Heelas (1996:ch. 1); Hanegraaff (2002a: esp. 253, 260). Sutcliffe (2003) gives much attention to the same point, but his conclusions are problematic, for reasons explained in Hanegraaff (2005).


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of ideas and activities approximately covered by Ferguson; the term seemed appropriate because they were all seen as ways to create new ways of living, on foundations different from those of the dominant culture. One special development was the idea, with reference to the work of the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, of a new holistic paradigm, which should replace the outdated mechanistic paradigm of Cartesian and Newtonian science. As a whole, this New Age in a general sense has a strongly American colouring. In contrast with the original movement, Theosophical and Anthroposophical ideas are no longer particularly prominent; instead, one finds a very strong influence of the characteristically American Metaphysical Movements with their Transcendentalist backgrounds, including the New Thought movement and a certain type of religiously-oriented psychology and alternative therapies. The specific expectation of an Age of Aquarius is found widely, but is not by any means as prominent and central as in the original movement. The Aquarian Age became just one of the many themes which characterised the New Age movement in a general sense. Thus, it became possible to be a New Ager without being preoccupied with the coming of a new era. Since the second half of the 1980s, finally, the New Age in a general sense was discovered by the business world; and the increasing commercialisation of the movement began to erode its original potential as a counter-cultural force. The American movie actress Shirley MacLaine emerged during the 1980s as perhaps its most popular representative. The Next Age? It has been suggested for some time now that ‘the New Age is over’, and what has taken its place has been labelled as the “Next Age” (Introvigne & Zoccatelli 1999). I consider the assumed decline of the New Age movement largely an optical illusion. More and more people involved in ideas and practices that were referred to as New Age during the 1980s have come to distance themselves from the label in more recent years—usually they prefer to say that they are interested in ‘spirituality’. This does not mean that the beliefs and practices traditionally referred to as New Age religion no longer exist or are losing popularity; it merely means that many of its adherents or sympathisers no longer like the traditional label. Another argument sometimes adduced to demonstrate the end of the New Age is a perceived decline in the number of specialised New Age bookshops and centres. However, at the same

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time one may notice a steady increase of New Age literature on the shelves of regular bookshops, nowadays under the label Mind-BodySpirit (Puttick 2005); and it is predictable that specialised New Age centres for ‘healing and personal growth’ will become less necessary to the extent that at least part of their therapeutic services are becoming more acceptable in mainstream medical and psychological contexts. Far from signalling a decline of New Age perspectives and practices, then, what we are facing is a development in which the New Age as a counter-cultural movement opposed to mainstream and establishment perspectives is gradually assimilated into the mainstream so as to become a significant dimension of the general spiritual landscape of contemporary western society. Such a development does not mean that the New Age movement has failed—on the contrary, it is the predictable outcome of commercial success. If a term like the Next Age is useful at all, I suggest it should be taken to refer to the historical stage of an increased assimilation of New Age perspectives and practices into mainstream culture, rather than as suggesting that the consumer has lost interest in those perspectives and practices. The Pseudo-New Age Finally, mention should be made of what might be called a ‘New Age in an incorrect sense’, or pseudo-New Age. In common parlance, a variety of ‘alternative’ movements and tendencies tend to get mixed up with and incorrectly associated with the New Age movement. Increasingly, the term New Age has come to be used as a highly general label for whatever is seen by outsiders as vaguely spiritual, alternative or ‘soft’. Thus, New Religious Movements of all sorts (popularly referred to as sects or cults) tend to be presented as New Age, even when they have little or nothing in common with the latter’s central body of ideas (Hanegraaff 2001b:21f ). Likewise, a variety of older occultist movements, such as modern Theosophy or Anthroposophy, are frequently referred to as New Age, although the undeniable influence of these movements on the emergence of the New Age movement by no means implies that they are themselves part of that movement. Such anachronistic use of the term New Age is connected with the tendency among some critics to dismiss the New Age movement as, actually, ‘old age’. What is meant is that the New Age movement is merely a regressive phenomenon, characteristic of the tendency to return to old, outdated,


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pre-scientific superstitions.4 Such an interpretation is highly misleading, as it reflects simplistic ideas about the relation between tradition and innovation, based on questionable assumptions about secular progress. As suggested above, and further developed below, the New Age movement is rooted in traditional esoteric worldviews; but it is equally evident that many important aspects of the New Age could not possibly exist outside the specific cultural constellation of western society in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is not possible to understand the New Age phenomenon without recognising that it is a typical western and contemporary phenomenon rooted in much older, pre-scientific religious traditions. The development of the New Age movement (or movements) since the 1950s is not devoid of its ironic, or if one wishes, its melancholic sides. The proto-New Age of the 1950s and the New Age in a strict sense of the 1960s–1970s firmly believed in imminent radical change. And change has come indeed—but not of the kind that these pioneer New Agers had hoped for. The world-reforming idealism of the original New Agers was swallowed up and largely neutralised during the 1980s by the dynamics of a much broader spiritual market-place, the potentials of which were quickly discovered by the commercial world. One might say that the New Age movement has become the victim of its own success: far from having fundamentally changed our materialist consumer society, it has itself become merely another manifestation of that same society. New Age ideas and practices have succeeded in reaching a mass audience, but at the price of being assimilated into the very ‘system’ that the original pioneers had wanted to replace. Manifestations of the New Age Movement Anybody who attempts to investigate the literature on sale in standard New Age bookshops, in order to find out what the movement is all about, is likely to come away bewildered and confused. The apparent variety is overwhelming, and at first it may seem impossible to bring any

4 Thus, for example, Küenzlen, who described the New Age as “a gnostic-esoteric amalgam, occultism, yes: obscurantism, . . . pagan-magical pieces of scenery, . . . fluttering mythologisms” (Küenzlen 1986:38, author’s translation).

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sort of order in all the tendencies, which have become associated with the label New Age. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the varieties of New Age religiosity as far as they are documented in publications, fall into a few, clearly demarcated categories. Each of them may be further divided into sub-categories; and a certain extent of overlap between the main ones has to be recognised. But allowing for this, what finally emerges is still a reasonably clear picture, which can help us reduce the New Age phenomenon to manageable proportions.5 Channelling This current is based upon the belief that some people are able, under certain circumstances, to act as a ‘channel’ for information from sources other than their normal everyday selves. Most typically, these sources are identified as discarnate ‘entities’ living on higher levels of being, but the complete range of channelled sources mentioned in the literature contains almost everything to which some kind of intelligence might be attributed. In many cases a trance state appears to be required, during which the entity takes possession of the medium’s body to communicate either by the speech organs or (less usual in the New Age context) by automatic writing. However, some of the phenomena classed as channelling do not seem to involve trance at all, notably the cases of inner dictation in which the medium hears a voice dictating messages which she or he writes down in a fully conscious state. The only common denominator of all the various phenomena which New Agers refer to as channelling appears to be the fact that people receive information (messages) which they interpret as coming from a source other than their own normal consciousness. It might be added that this source is believed to represent a level of wisdom or insight superior to that of most humans (although it is not necessarily, or even usually, regarded as all-knowing and infallible). Communication with such sources is sought for the purpose of learning and guidance. In contrast, communication with spirits of the recently departed, as in classical nineteenth century spiritualism, is uncharacteristic of New Age channelling.

It should be noted that the following overview is based upon my pre-1996 research into the New Age movement, and is presented in much greater detail in Hanegraaff (1996). New trends and developments have of course appeared in the meantime, but as far as I can judge, these might suggest certain modifications but do not (as yet) necessitate a radical revision of my categories. 5


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The background of channelling is the widespread New Age belief in progressive rebirth, both on Earth and in ‘higher realities’. Human beings are believed to develop and evolve through a succession of earthly incarnations, until they reach a point where they pass on to higher spheres of existence. Here, too, they keep developing their innate potential, thus rising to ever-higher levels of insight and wisdom. From such a superior level of spiritual evolution, they may decide to take up contact with those who are still incarnated on Earth, and they do this by way of channelling. Some entities only give lectures through their channels; many others engage in discussions with their audience. The subjects covered include complicated metaphysical systems, reflections on moral issues, therapeutic advice, or predictions about the near future (of course with special attention to the coming of the New Age). In the United States in particular, channelling became a popular practice during the 1980s. Many channelling mediums work on a small scale, functioning as a kind of therapist who gives channelled advice to individuals. Others attract a larger following, and a few have become well-known media personalities. Many believe that channelling is a latent ability which in principle can be developed by anyone, and therefore publish do-it-yourself channelling guides teaching readers how to employ meditation and visualisation techniques so as to get into contact with their ‘inner guide’. It must be emphasised that the complete corpus of literature based on channelled communications represents one of the most fundamental sources of the New Age belief system. Although most New Agers would say that the only reliable source of spiritual authority is one’s own inner self, the New Age movement could arguably be characterised as a religion based on revelation(s) (Offenbarungsreligion): a close analysis reveals that many of its central ideas can be traced to quite specific channelled sources. Healing and Spiritual Growth This title covers the huge and diverse field of alternative therapies, psychological theories and medical practices, which have become associated with New Age. In spite of their dazzling variety, they all have two general characteristics in common. Firstly, none of them is focused exclusively on either the physical or the mental domain, such as is the case in mainstream approaches to health. While official medical practice in the contemporary West make a sharp distinction between physical and psychological problems, the alternative therapies regard

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the human being as an integral whole. Both body and psyche are aspects of one encompassing reality. In the final resort, this reality is regarded as spiritual rather than physical. For the practice of healing, this implies that psychological problems are reflected on the physical level; for example, in the form of so-called energy blockages in certain parts of the body, which result in physical dysfunctions of various kinds. Conversely, a good physical condition is regarded as an obvious condition for healthy psychological functioning. In the treatment of any kind of problem, attention must be given both to the physical and to the psychological dimension. Secondly, all New Age therapies assume that the process of healing is directly related to the process of spiritual development. Psychological and physical problems ultimately result from a lack of spiritual harmony; and, conversely, their effect is to block the natural development toward such harmony. Healing in the broadest sense of the word is thus a necessary part of the process of spiritual development toward complete inner harmony or enlightenment; and, conversely, spiritual growth leads to the resolution of psychological traumas and their physical results. The complete process of ‘healing and spiritual growth’ takes many lives, which means that one may have to deal in one’s present life with psychological or physical problems, which have originated in previous incarnations. In combination with the belief in the mind as the ultimate source of healing (as well as of illness), this way of thinking frequently leads to the belief that everybody has created his or her own illnesses, and can thus ‘take responsibility’ for his or her healing by positive thinking. One of the central concepts encountered in many of these alternative therapies is the theory of the chakras: seven ‘subtle’ centres of energy transformation located horizontally in the body. In many healing practices these chakras function as the conceptual foundation both for the unity of mind and body (because as ‘subtle centres’ they are in between both), and for the unity of healing and spiritual growth (because successively ‘opening the chakras’ is synonymous with attaining enlightenment). The more theoretical aspects of the healing and growth movement form a relatively independent domain, traditionally referred to as transpersonal psychology. This psychological school emerged from humanistic psychology, and is based on the conviction that a complete, encompassing view of the human psyche is possible only by taking into account the wide field of so-called transpersonal experiences. These include mystical experiences, paranormal perceptions, and ‘altered


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states of consciousness’. Transpersonal psychologists believe that these experiences represent not just autonomous, but superior levels of psychological functioning. They therefore refute the tendencies of traditional psychological schools to reduce these experiences to the status of mere subjective hallucinations. Against this background, separate mention should perhaps also be made of the relatively autonomous phenomenon of New Age (neo-)shamanism, which has spread widely in the wake of Michael J. Harner and his Foundation for Shamanic Studies (see von Stuckrad 2003). Neo-shamanic rituals are based upon the inducement of ‘altered states of consciousness’—mostly by means of drumming—which enable the practitioners to make an inner ‘travel’ to transpersonal domains, where answers can be found to various questions related to healing and personal growth. Holistic Science There is a strong interest in the New Age movement for modern developments in the natural sciences, physics in particular. New Agers generally believe that their spiritual worldview is confirmed or at least strongly supported by the newest results of scientific research and that, conversely, the natural sciences might profit from taking spiritual perspectives more seriously. Ultimately, it is believed, science and spirituality are simply different roads leading to the same goal. In this context, New Age thinkers are fascinated by modern scientific theories, quantum mechanics in particular, which seem to demonstrate that the mechanistic worldview of classical science is no longer tenable. It is assumed that when these new scientific theories become fully dominant, and their holistic implications are generally understood, this will lead to a momentous paradigm shift. The consequences for our general culture will be no less momentous than those which resulted from the scientific revolution. Thus, the idea of the emerging ‘new paradigm’ is the scientific parallel of the New Age idea. One of the first, and still one of the best-known exponent of New Age holism was Fritjof Capra. His New Age classic The Tao of Physics (Capra 1983/1975) is an attempt at demonstrating far-reaching parallels between modern physics (especially in the form of Capra’s favourite so-called bootstrap theory) and oriental mysticism. Capra believes that both point to one and the same worldview; thus, what the new physics is discovering now has been known in the East for many centuries. Very influential as well is the intellectually more profound work of David

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Bohm (1983). Bohm’s theory of the ‘implicate order’, combined with theories of neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, has led to the formulation of the so-called holographic paradigm (Wilber 1985). This is a holistic theory par excellence, which implies that the whole universe is mirrored in each of its smallest parts. Yet another form of New Age science focuses on formulating theories of evolution—for example, the school associated with Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine (Prigogine & Stengers 1985), according to which evolution takes place not gradually but by sudden, discontinuous leaps to a new and higher level of organisation. Applied to western society, or even to humanity as a whole, this theory can be used to support the belief that a New Age may suddenly and unexpectedly come into existence. And finally we find several New Age theories with a predominantly biological background. Well-known is Rupert Sheldrake’s neo-vitalist theory of “morphic resonance” (Sheldrake 1987), and James Lovelock’s so-called Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock 1987). According to the latter, our planet Earth behaves like a living, self-regulating organism; and many New Agers conclude that it therefore is a living, and even an intelligent organism. New authors and books along these general lines have kept appearing into the twenty-first century. New Age Neopaganism As a general term, ‘Neopaganism’ covers all those modern movements which are based on the conviction that what Christianity has traditionally denounced as idolatry and superstition actually represented a profound and meaningful religious worldview, and that a ‘pagan’ religious practice can and should be revitalised in our modern world. Current world problems, particularly the ecological crisis, are regarded as a direct result of the loss of pagan wisdom about man’s relationship to the natural world. Recovery of this wisdom is regarded as urgently needed. The type of Neopaganism associated with the New Age movement is rooted in the current of modern witchcraft or Wicca, founded by the Englishman Gerald Gardner. Wicca spread to the United States in the 1960s, where it took on new forms, particularly under the impact of the women’s spirituality movement. The resulting development is usually referred to as the Goddess movement. While Wicca originally focused on the polarity of masculine and feminine forces in the universe, represented by the Goddess and her partner the horned God, the Goddess movement focused on the feminine aspect only. Wicca


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originally looked for its roots to the so-called burning times: the period of the witch persecutions. Many adherents of Wicca believe that there actually existed a pagan fertility cult in those times, the members of which were victimised by the inquisition. The Goddess movement, on the other hand, sees itself as a modern revival of an ancient matriarchate. That modern scholarship dismisses both the medieval witch-cult and the pre-Christian matriarchate as romantic myths hardly affects these beliefs. For some neopagans the academic world is itself a manifestation of the patriarchate, which is why they simply refuse to take it seriously; others feel that, in the end, Neopaganism is not dependent on historical roots for being ‘authentic’. The nature of the relation between Neopaganism and the New Age movement is not undisputed. Neopaganism is a relatively autonomous subculture, even within the alternative movement as such, and many neopagans have a particularly strong dislike of the label New Age. In terms of basic worldviews, New Age and Neopaganism are best seen as two thought complexes, which may theoretically be distinct but show a very large overlap in practice. When I speak of New Age Neopaganism, what I mean is only this overlap. New Age in a Restricted and a General Sense This last category of New Age literature in fact encompasses several relatively distinct groups. As remarked earlier, the New Age in a restricted sense is still recognisable as a relatively autonomous aspect within the New Age in a general sense. For many representatives, such as David Spangler or George Trevelyan and other authors in the same tradition, the expectation of the New Age of Aquarius is still the centre of attention. Others, such as Matthew Fox, speak less about the coming of a New Era but attempt to develop a new form of spirituality, which is related to the New Age in a restricted sense in terms of basic inspiration. A rather similar world-reforming idealism is also found in the group of authors whose central concern is the development of a ‘new paradigm’, as an alternative to the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, which is held responsible for the current global crisis. Best known is Fritjof Capra’s bestseller The Turning Point (Capra 1983/1982), but this is only one of the most visible examples among a whole series of comparable books. Finally, there are several authors who are best characterised as representatives of the New Age in a general sense. The best-known early manifesto, as noted earlier, is Marilyn Ferguson’s

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Aquarian Conspiracy (1982); the best-known representative of the New Age as it actually emerged during the 1980s is Shirley MacLaine; and one might mention James Redfield (with his series of best-selling Celestine Prophecy books) as typical of the 1990s. In sum, all examples belonging to this final category have to do with people who are somehow centrally concerned with New Age in the sense of a new era which will soon begin; or in the sense of a new way of life which should lead to such a new era; or in the sense of a new paradigm which will change our whole view of reality; or, finally, in the sense of a convenient general label for an alternative view of life. Unity vs Diversity in the New Age Movement I have presented a wide spectrum of ideas and activities, all belonging to the New Age movement in a general sense. The reader might be forgiven for concluding that although these categories perhaps bring some order, the New Age movement as a whole nevertheless displays little unity or structure. Certainly, there is an enormous difference between, for example, Shirley MacLaine’s New Age channels, crystals and reincarnation stories, on the one hand, and David Bohm’s sophisticated philosophy of nature, on the other. Likewise, a huge gap exists between the world-affirming Neopaganism of a politically and socially active modern witch such as Starhawk, on the one hand, and the Christianised neo-Vedanta of the channelled text A Course in Miracles, on the other. These are just some random examples. It is essential to recognise the great variety of New Age beliefs, but nevertheless there are several reasons to speak of one movement. Firstly, all forms of New Age thinking are concerned with developing alternatives for the basic, accepted values of modern western society. Presumably, the character of the ‘Age of Aquarius’ will be determined precisely by the ways in which it differs from the old culture, the ‘Piscean Age’. In other words, the New Age movement as a whole is based on a pervasive cultural criticism directed against the dominant mainstream values of the modern west. Some of this criticism is formulated explicitly; some of it is implicit in New Age practices and goals. This makes it possible to define the New Age movement indirectly, that is to say, in a negative sense, not in terms of what its adherents believe (for, again, these beliefs are very diverse), but in terms of what they reject. Whatever their differences, all New Agers would agree that modern


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western society is dominated by two pervasive tendencies: dualism, on the one hand, and reductionism, on the other. Dualism is especially associated with the heritage of mainstream Christianity; reductionism with modern forms of scientific rationalism. The most important forms of dualism assume a sharp separation between mind and matter, humanity and nature, and humanity and God. In each of these cases, the New Age movement asserts that the dualism in question is false and misleading. Mind and matter, firstly, are merely different manifestations of one fundamental substance. This substance is usually thought of as spiritual in some sense, meaning that matter is essentially one of the manifestations of ‘mind’. Secondly, humanity is intimately connected with the whole of nature, which is itself permeated by spirit. Thirdly: nature, humanity and God are, in their deepest essence, one. God is the source of being whose creative energy permeates and sustains all, and human beings are in their innermost being one with this source. In all three cases, dualism is an illusion which leads to alienation and which should be overcome by holistic awareness. When New Agers use the word gnosis, what they mean is precisely such a profound insight in the wholeness of reality, which overcomes alienation by reuniting the human individual with the All, or God. Reductionism may take at least two forms; and in both cases the New Age alternative is, again, holism. Reductionism, in the sense of materialism, means that spirit is reduced to matter and thus denied an autonomous existence. Spirit is no more than an ultimately illusory epiphenomenon of purely material processes. The New Age alternative is the precise opposite: ultimate reality is wholly spiritual instead of material, and matter is a manifestation of mind instead of the reverse. According to a second aspect, reductionism manifests as a tendency toward fragmentation: integral wholes are reduced to separate fragments or ‘basic building blocks’. The New Age movement, in contrast, emphasises that wholes are not mechanistic but organic. The whole of reality is more than the sum of its separate parts; and the same goes for smaller parts of this whole, such as human beings. In sum, all forms of New Age religiosity are united in their presentation of holistic concepts as alternatives to the dualism and reductionism perceived as dominating modern western society. It must be added that although this holistic orientation is universal throughout the New Age movement, the precise forms of New Age holism are very far from uniform. Many different proposals compete for prominence, which may

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share a concern with wholeness in some sense but are often very different in other respects. It must be concluded that New Age adherents are generally in agreement about their diagnosis of what is wrong with modern western culture, but that they suggest a wide variety of treatments. New Age holism, in other words, should never be understood as a theory. At the most, it is a vision; and New Agers try to realise this vision by many different avenues. New Age and Western Esotericism That all expressions of New Age are based on a shared culture criticism, which proposes holistic alternatives to dualism and reductionism, is one argument which supports speaking of one movement. But this same culture criticism also provides us with a clue to understanding the relation between New Age and traditional Esotericism; and this, in turn, makes it possible to define the relative coherence of New Age religiosity with more precision. Some years ago, the scholar of ancient Gnosticism, Gilles Quispel proposed to analyse the European cultural tradition by distinguishing between what he called its three “basic components” (Quispel 1988:9). These he referred to as “reason”, “faith” and “gnosis”. Although this distinction has several potential pitfalls (Hanegraaff 1998c:19–21), it can well be defended as long as it is taken in an ideal-typical and heuristic sense. Mainstream Christianity, as represented by the Churches, is based on “faith” in divine revelation as mediated by Scripture and/or tradition. Different from this is the longstanding western tradition of rational inquiry, which goes back to ancient Greek philosophy and has culminated in an intellectual tradition, which supported the emergence of modern science. Different from both “faith” and “reason”, however, is the tradition, which may conveniently be summarised by the term “gnosis”. This third component is characterised by the primacy accorded to experience (of God and the Self ) over mere reason and faith. This typology is quite useful in order to put the “culture criticism” of the New Age movement into perspective. It is evident that the mainstream of western culture has been based on the two pillars of “faith” and “reason”: the Christianity of the churches, on the one hand, and philosophical rationalism, on the other (and, of course, on the developments which emerged from their various combinations). The “gnosis” component, in contrast, has widely been perceived as highly problem-


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atic since the beginning of the Christian era, and has frequently been rejected as unacceptable from the perspectives of “faith” and “reason”. As a result, it became a reservoir for all those ideas, which have been felt to be incompatible with the dominant trends of western culture. It is only natural, therefore, that modern people who feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with mainstream western culture should turn for inspiration to what they perceive as a tradition of gnosis. A first indication that this has indeed happened is the strong emphasis of the New Age movement on personal, inner experience of the ‘self ’ as the ultimate authority of truth and as the only means to understand one’s true relation to the universe and God. The New Age movement has even been defined as “self-religion” (Heelas 1982, 1996). In this sense, the New Age movement is evidently based on “gnosis”; and this gnosis implies a rejection of at least one type of dualism discussed above: that between human beings and God, creature and Creator. For “gnosis” in its traditional late-antique context likewise referred to the discovery that human beings are in their deepest essence one with divine reality. Adherents of New Age thinking have themselves shown an increasing interest in traditions of gnosis but, so far, most of their attention has been focused on the gnosticism of late antiquity. It is significant that they have strongly emphasised the importance of “gnosis” as knowledge of the Self and of God, while largely ignoring the strong dualistic tendencies in ancient gnosticism. Given the anti-dualism which I highlighted as essential to New Age religiosity, one would in fact expect a much stronger interest in the hermetic tradition and, especially, in its ‘holistic’ manifestations since the Renaissance period. Such an interest is, however, not (yet) evident. The explanation (apart from the romantic attraction of a ‘peaceful and mystical’ religion cruelly suppressed by a ‘violent and dogmatic’ state church) lies in the simple fact that ancient Gnosticism has enjoyed wide publicity, especially following the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, while Renaissance hermeticism is still comparatively unknown even in New Age circles. There are some signs that this might be beginning to change; but there can be little doubt that, at this moment, few New Age adherents would recognise the names of Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno or Jacob Böhme while many of them have heard of the Gospel of Thomas or the Cathars. If there is a connection with Western Esotericism, then, New Agers themselves are still largely unaware of it. It is true that many of them will affirm that their spiritual beliefs are in line with ancient traditions of universal wisdom that have been kept alive over the centuries by the

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initiates of esoteric traditions. However, very few New Agers have any clear idea about the nature of these traditions. Nevertheless it seems evident that the central belief systems, both of Western Esotericism and of the New Age movement, might technically be characterised as holistic gnosis; and this is not a coincidence, for New Age religiosity is in fact rooted in Western Esotericism. This emphatically does not mean that Renaissance hermeticists and New Age adherents share the same worldview. As already stated in the introduction to this chapter, at the very least the two are separated by a deep cultural gulf known as the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Western Esotericism flowered from the fifteenth century at least, its sources can be traced back to late antiquity, and it is based on pre-Enlightenment assumptions. The New Age movement, on the other hand, is definitely post-Enlightenment, not just in a chronological sense but in its very way of perceiving and reflecting upon reality. In their very rejection of a narrow ‘Enlightenment rationality’, New Agers are yet deeply influenced by the very traditions they reject (cf. Godwin 1994). Whenever they borrow traditional esoteric concepts, they interpret these from a distinctly twentieth century, secularised perspective. The Secularisation of Western Esotericism The essential watershed in this development is the period of the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. The movements of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism are therefore essential for understanding the emergence of New Age thinking. To round off this overview, I would like to identify five new, modernist aspects, which have been of crucial importance in the complex development of successive reinterpretations. In each case we are dealing with a factor that is not part of traditional Western Esotericism, but has been added to it during the nineteenth century. Each of these additions has decisively influenced the way in which the New Age movement interprets esoteric ideas. Occultism First of all, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw the emergence of occultism. Contrary to common usage, I would argue that the terms ‘Western Esotericism’ and ‘occultism’ should be clearly distinguished; and that ‘occultism’, furthermore, should not be con-


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fused with the ‘occult sciences’. According to the now widely-accepted historical usage of the term, Western Esotericism refers to a cluster of specific currents (the revival of hermetism and the so-called ‘occult philosophy’ in the early modern period as well as its later developments; alchemy, Paracelsianism and Rosicrucianism; Christian kabbalah and its later developments; theosophical and illuminist currents; and various occultist and related developments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to and including popular contemporary currents such as the New Age movement). The so-called occult sciences (magic, alchemy, astrology) are, of course, intimately connected with Western Esotericism in this sense. The term ‘occultism’, on the other hand, should better be used only for post-Enlightenment developments of Western Esotericism. It can be defined as the product of a collision between two different and inherently incompatible worldviews: the organicist worldview of Esotericism based on ‘correspondences’, on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment worldviews based on ‘instrumental causality’, on the other. What happened is very simple and, indeed, predictable. Inevitably, esotericists living in the post-Enlightenment period were themselves profoundly influenced by the new rationalism, positivism and scientism. In defending their esoteric views they therefore used a terminology which would be understandable to contemporaries and made sense to themselves. The result was a conflation of two systems of thought, as a result of which original esoteric ideas underwent subtle but far-reaching changes. To all such modern adaptations of Western Esotericism, which have flowered since the nineteenth century, I refer as ‘occultism’. Of special importance with respect to the New Age movement is the modern Theosophical tradition (including its more ‘Christian’ offshoots founded by Rudolf Steiner and Alice Bailey). These forms of occultism provided the basic ideas of the ‘New Age in a restricted sense’. However, in many studies of the New Age movement this Theosophical influence is overemphasised at the expense of a second one. The ‘New Age in a general sense’, with its strong American flavour, cannot be accounted for by the modern Theosophical tradition only. Here, the phenomenon of Transcendentalism, the most important American manifestation of Romanticism, is particularly important. The general affinities between Western Esotericism and Romanticism (Hanegraaff 1998a; McCalla 2005) are one reason why American Transcendentalism could provide a religious and philosophical context in which various occultist or quasi-occultist movements flourished. Most important in that respect is

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the nineteenth century movement known as New Thought, as well as the many related phenomena which have been referred to, somewhat misleadingly, as the Metaphysical Movements. Several scholars have analysed this American spiritual scene of the nineteenth century, in which Transcendentalism, New Thought and Metaphysical Movements were closely interwoven. It is to this context that one should look in order to understand the cultural backgrounds of the New Age in a general sense. In analysing the New Age from a historical perspective, one should always emphasise the importance of reinterpretation in contrast to mere continuity. Ideas do not move through history unchanged: what ‘continues’ is never simply ‘the original idea’ but, rather, the original idea as perceived through the eyes of later generations. Thus the highly complex historical development in the course of which Western Esotericism changes into occultism can definitely not be accounted for in terms of a simplistic continuity of ‘the’ esoteric tradition.6 The developments outlined above already demonstrate this. There are, for example, certain historical connections between Esotericism, occultism, the Theosophical Society, Alice Bailey’s adaptation of Theosophy and the New Age in a restricted sense. And there are such connections between Esotericism, European Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, various kinds of American alternative movements and the New Age in a general sense. Obviously, any such summary of the historical ‘chain’ amounts to an extreme simplification: in each case it is only certain elements of each given phenomenon which are focused on by later interpreters, to the exclusion of others. Each generation not only reinterprets ideas of the past, but also makes its own personal selection while adding innovations of its own. With respect to the past, it generally selects what suits its purposes while simply disregarding the rest. The Oriental Renaissance During the period of Romanticism, there was an increasing interest in oriental cultures and their religious beliefs. The result was a romantic vision of ‘the East’, and of India in particular, as the homeland and

6 Note that while originally I used the term “the Esoteric Tradition”, I no longer do so in my more recent work.


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treasure house of a superior spiritual wisdom. Such romantic conceptions of oriental religions lived on in modern Theosophy as well as in various American movements. Special mention must be made of Indian missionary movements, particularly the Ramakrishna mission and its best-known representative Vivekananda, who made a great impression during the World Parliament of Religions at the end of the nineteenth century. The influence of oriental ideas on the ideas of the New Age movement is far from insignificant, but it is important to understand the precise nature of this influence. It is often assumed that many New Age beliefs have originated in oriental religions. Generally speaking, this is incorrect. What one finds are oriental ideas as perceived by Western Esotericists, occultists, Romantics and contemporary New Agers. Throughout, oriental conceptions have been adopted only to the extent that they could be assimilated into already existing, western frameworks. And these frameworks were either occultist or Romantic in nature, that is to say, they were of western origin. Evolutionism An instructive example is the New Age idea of reincarnation, which can also be used to illustrate the third innovative factor, which I would like to emphasise, evolutionism. Although a belief in reincarnation is found already in some manifestations of eighteenth century Western Esotericism, it seems that the new influence of oriental religions has been the chief reason for its popularity. However, a closer look at New Age reincarnationism demonstrates a crucial difference with its oriental parallel. In the official teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, reincarnation is essentially something negative. By reaching enlightenment, one is freed at last from the tyranny of the ‘wheel of rebirth’ and no longer needs to be reborn in the flesh. In the New Age movement, however, as in modern Theosophy, reincarnation is a positive process. The prospect of many lives after this one is regarded not as a doom but as a promise. It is seen as an attractive alternative to the essentially static heaven or hell of traditional Christianity, because it ensures infinite possibilities of further spiritual evolution. Thus, it is true that an oriental concept of reincarnation has been assimilated into occultism, but only by virtue of being reinterpreted in the characteristically western terms of romantic evolutionism. In this context, reincarnation has become something very different, even antithetic to its oriental model. In general, the factor of ‘evolutionism’ is the third innovative factor,

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which I would like to emphasise here. Again, evolutionism is essentially a new addition to traditional Western Esotericism. Its influence is not restricted to contemporary western reinterpretations of reincarnation and its underlying concept of spiritual growth, but is also found, for instance, in New Age conceptions of world history culminating in the Age of Aquarius. Psychologisation A fourth essential innovative factor consists of the influence of modern psychology on how the New Age movement has come to understand esoteric concepts. In general terms, New Age religiosity is characterised by the double phenomenon of a psychologising of religion combined with a sacralisation of psychology. The psychologisation of religion is usually assumed to imply that religion is ‘all in the mind’, i.e., that religious beliefs are merely subjective. Characteristic for New Age religiosity is that it indeed assumes that religion is ‘all in the mind’, but that this does not lead to atheist conclusions. This is because, under the influence of Jungian psychology in particular, the mind itself is assumed to have a sacred dimension. Thus, New Agers concur with the characteristic modernist tendency to understand religion in psychological terms, but they do not reduce religion to psychology. On the contrary: the gods reappear, alive and potent as ever, from the depths of the collective psyche. To New Agers, this means that the question whether divinity is ‘real’ or only ‘in the mind’ is ultimately a meaningless question, because it assumes a false dualism between mind and ‘external’ nature. In this way, New Agers believe that, far from undermining religion, they have reached a higher and more mature perspective on the true nature of religion. Humanity has progressed to the point where divinity is no longer located outside the mind, but in it. Jung’s well-known interest in gnosticism and alchemy has of course made it particularly easy for the New Age movement to assimilate traditional Western Esoteric elements and give them a psychological and religious meaning at the same time. The question of the validity of the Jungian interpretation of Gnosticism and alchemy does not have to concern us here. It is important to note, however, that the Gnostics and alchemists themselves certainly did not interpret their beliefs and practices in psychological terms but in religious ones. That the alchemical process is actually a reflection of the dynamics of the unconscious is an idea of the twentieth century and, as such, alien and inconceivable


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to the worldview of the traditional alchemists (Principe 2005). This conclusion may be extended to the general problem of the relation between New Age and Western Esotericism. Traditional esotericists did not think in psychological terms; New Agers, on the other hand, find it almost impossible not to do so. Market Economy To the four main aspects of the ‘secularisation of Western Esotericism’, perhaps a fifth one may be added that became dominant only after World War II, and is fully characteristic of the New Age movement of the 1980s and 1990s: the impact of capitalist market economy on the domain of spirituality. Increasingly, the New Age movement has taken the shape of a ‘spiritual supermarket’ where religious consumers pick and choose the spiritual commodities they fancy, and use them to create their own spiritual syntheses ‘fine-tuned’ to their strictly personal needs. The phenomenon of a spiritual supermarket is not limited to the New Age movement only, but is a general characteristic of religion in (post)modern western democracies. Various forms of New Age spirituality are competing with more traditional forms of religion (including the Christian churches as well as other great religious traditions such as Islam or Buddhism) and with a great number of so-called New Religious Movements, popularly referred to as ‘cults’. However, in this universal battle for the attention of the consumer, the New Age movement enjoys certain advantages over most of its competitors, which seem to make it the representative par excellence of the contemporary ‘spirituality of the market’. Whereas most other spiritual currents that compete for the attention of the consumer in modern society take the form of (at least rudimentary) organisations, enabling their members to see themselves as part of a religious community, New Age spirituality is strictly focused on the individual and his or her personal development. In fact, this individualism functions as an in-built defence mechanism against social organisation and institutionalisation: as soon as any group of people involved with New Age ideas begins to take up ‘cultic’ characteristics, this very fact already distances them from the basic individualism of New Age spirituality. The stronger they begin to function as a ‘cult’, or even as a ‘sect’, the more other New Agers will suspect that they are becoming a ‘church’ (i.e., that they are relapsing into what are considered old-fashioned patterns of dogmatism, intolerance and exclusivism), and the less will they be acceptable to the general cultic milieu of New

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Age spirituality. Within the present social context of a democratic free market of ideas and practices, the New Age’s strict emphasis on the Self and on individual experience as the only reliable source of spiritual truth, the authority of which can never be overruled by any religious ‘dogma’ or considerations of solidarity with communal values, functions as an effective mechanism against institutionalisation of New Age religion into a religion. This essential individualism makes the New Ager into the ideal spiritual consumer. Except for the very focus on the Self and its spiritual evolution, and the general holistic orientation, there are no constraints a priori on a New Ager’s potential spiritual interests; the fact that every New Ager continually creates and re-creates his or her own private system of symbolic meaning and values means that spiritual suppliers on the New Age market enjoy maximum opportunities for presenting him or her with ever-new commodities. As indicated above, that New Age as a spiritual supermarket caters to an individualist clientele primarily interested in personal ‘growth and development’ is not only a fact of social observation but also reflects beliefs that are basic to the movement. At the symbolic centre of New Age worldviews, one typically finds not a concept of God but, rather, the concept of ‘the (higher) Self ’, so that New Age spirituality has indeed sometimes been dubbed Self Religion. The basic symbolism of the Self is linked to a basic mythology, that narrates the growth and development of the individual soul through many incarnations and existences in the direction of ever-increasing knowledge and spiritual insight (Hanegraaff 1999). Strict concentration on personal spiritual development rather than on communal values is therefore not considered a reflection of egoism but, rather, of a legitimate spiritual practice based on ‘listening to your own inner guidance’: only by following one’s inner voice one may find one’s way through the chaos of voices that clamour for attention on the spiritual supermarket, and find one’s personal way to enlightenment. Conclusion Unquestionably there are strong and essential historical connections between various Western Esoteric traditions and the New Age movement. These connections are highly instructive and they merit serious study. But the fact that the contemporary New Age movement has a mental horizon which includes the religious world of the Orient, that


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it interprets Western Esotericism from distinctly modernist and secular frameworks (instrumental causality; evolutionism; psychology), and functions within a ‘free market of ideas’ typical of modern western democracies, means that traditional Western Esotericism and New Age are nevertheless ‘worlds apart’. In general, the New Age can be defined as a movement based on popular culture criticism expressed in terms of a thoroughly secularised Esotericism. References Bochinger, C., 1994. “New Age” und moderne Religion: Religionswissenschaftliche Analysen. Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser. Bohm, D., 1983/1980. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London & New York: Ark. Capra, F., 1983/1975. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Glasgow: Flamingo, Fontana. ——, 1983/1982. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. Toronto etc.: Bantam Books. Ferguson, M., 1982. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. London etc: Paladin, Grafton Books. Godwin, J., 1994. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany: SUNY. Hammer, O., 2004. “Esotericism in New Religious Movements.” In Lewis, J.R., ed., The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 445–465. Hanegraaff, W.J., 1996, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden etc.: E.J. Brill [US paperback Albany: SUNY, 1998]. ——, 1998a. “Romanticism and the Esoteric Connection.” In van den Broek, R. & W.J. Hanegraaff, eds. Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times. Albany: SUNY, 237–68. ——, 1998b. “The New Age Movement and the Esoteric Tradition.” In van den Broek, R. & W.J. Hanegraaff, eds. Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times. Albany: SUNY, 359–82. ——, 1998c. On the Construction of “Esoteric Traditions.” In Faivre, A. & W.J. Hanegraaff, eds. Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion. Leuven: Peeters, 11–61. ——, 1999. “New Age Spiritualities as Secular Religion: A Historian’s Perspective.” Social Compass 46.2, 145–60. ——, 2001a. “Beyond the Yates Paradigm: The Study of Western Esotericism between Counterculture and New Complexity.” Aries 1.1 5–37. ——, 2001b. “Prospects for the Globalization of New Age: Spiritual Imperialism versus Cultural Diversity.” In Rothstein, M., ed. New Age Religion and Globalization. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 15–30. ——, 2002a. “New Age Religion.” In Woodhead, L. et al., eds. Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations. London & New York: Routledge, 249–63. ——, 2004. “The Study of Western Esotericism: New Approaches to Christian and Secular Culture.” In Antes, P., A.W. Geertz & R. Warne, eds. New Approaches to the Study of Religion, vol. I: Regional, Critical and Historical Approaches (Religion and Reason 42). Berlin & New York: De Gruyter, 489–519. ——, 2005a. “Spectral Evidence of New Age Religion: On the Substance of Ghosts and the Use of Concepts.” Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies 1 35–58. ——, “Esotericism.” In W.J. Hanegraaff, ed., in collaboration with A. Faivre, R. van

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den Broek & J.-P. Brach. Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, Leiden etc.: Brill, 336–340. Heelas, P., 1982. “California Self-Religions and Socialising the Subjective.” In Barker, E., ed. New Religious Movements: A Perspective for Understanding Society (Studies in Religion and Society 3). New York/Toronto: Edwin Mellen. ——, 1996. The New Age Movement. Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell. Introvigne, M. & P.L. Zoccatelli, 1999. New Age—Next Age: Una Nuova Religiosità Dagli Anni ’60a Oggi. Firenze: Giunti. Jantsch, E., 1980. The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution. Oxford etc.: Pergamon Press. Küenzlen, G., 1986. “New Age: Ein neues Paradigma? Anmerkungen zur Grundlagenkrise der Moderne.” Materialdienst EZW 49.2 60–69. Lewis, J.R., 1992. “Approaches to the Study of the New Age Movement.” In Lewis, J.R. & J.G. Melton, eds. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany: SUNY, 1–12. Lovelock, J.E., 1987/1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCalla, A., 2005. “Romanticism.” In Hanegraaff, W.J., ed. in collaboration with A. Faivre, R. van den Broek & J.-P. Brach. Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden etc.: Brill, 1000–1007. Prigogine, I. & I. Stengers, 1985/1984. Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. London: Fontana. Principe, L.M., 2005. “Alchemy I: Introduction.” In Hanegraaff, W.J., ed. in collaboration with A. Faivre, R. van den Broek & J.-P. Brach. Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden etc.: Brill, 12–16. Puttick, E., 2005. “The Rise of Mind-Body-Spirit Publishing: Reflecting or Creating Spiritual Trends?” Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies 1 129–49. Quispel, G., ed., 1988. Gnosis: Dederde Component van de Europese Cultuurtraditie, Utrecht: Hes. Sheldrake, R., 1987/1981. A New Science of life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation. London: Paladan Grafton Books. Spangler, D., 1977/1976. Revelation: The Birth of a New Age. The Park, Forres: Findhorn Foundation. ——, 1984. The Rebirth of the Sacred. London: Gateway Books. ——, 1988a. The New Age. Issaquah: Morningtown Press. ——, 1988b. Channeling in the New Age. Issaquah: Morningtown Press. Stuckrad, K. von, 2003. Schamanismus und Esoterik: Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Louvain: Peeters. Sutcliffe, S.J., 2003. Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices. London & New York: Routledge. Wilber, K., ed., 1985. The Holographic Paradigm and other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science. Boston & London: Shambhala.

THE ORIGINS OF ‘NEW AGE’ RELIGION BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS* Steven Sutcliffe After the war of 1914–18, wherever I went, no matter whether in England, on the Continent, in America or the far East, conversation was likely to turn to supernatural subjects. It looked as though many people were feeling that their daily lives were only an illusion, and that somehow there must somewhere be a greater reality. (Landau 1935:4)

The interwar period in Europe, 1918–1939, has arguably been understudied in the history of religion; certainly in the history of alternative and non-official religion. But it is a key period in explaining the roots of 1960s developments in ‘new age’, and 1980s developments in ‘holistic’ religion, as well as of the roots of Wicca, and hence of the twentieth century Pagan revival more widely. The period is therefore historically determinative of powerful currents in recent Anglophone religious history.1 It is marked on the whole by a conservative Christian establishment, particularly in the UK (Wilkinson 1978; Mews 1994) but also, according to Winter (1998), in Europe more widely, where denominations tended to cope with reactions to the carnage of the western front through appeal to the authority of tradition. But there was also a more diffuse reaction to the perceived stasis of ‘organised religion’—a phrase increasingly used—in the shape of re-invigorated demand for new religious sources and resources. A ‘quest culture’ emerged, structured by the role of the ‘seeker’, the social institution of ‘seekership’, a supply of exotic religious authorities, and a new concern with ‘mystical’ experiences and ‘occult’ exploration. Within this culture, seekers pursued a distinctively modern, psychologised, ‘post-Protestant’ form of religion, which they increasingly referred to as ‘spirituality’ and set over against dominant traditions. In addition to * This chapter develops material first presented in Sutcliffe (2003:31–54), and is published with the permission of Routledge. 1 This chapter is confined to ‘new age’ religion. It is based largely on anglophone sources and on UK evidence, and should be supplemented by other contextualised histories.

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the quest culture of middle and upper class social elites, a more popular religious culture consolidated around astrology, divination, healing and positive thinking. Hence the ‘non-official’ religion of the interwar period, like religious formations generally, was heterogeneous, affected by class, gender, ethnicity and other social variables and marked by internal debates over nomenclature and interpretation. As a cluster of self-consciously ‘alternative’ religious attitudes in the face of both establishment Christianity and secular culture, non-official religion was expressed pre-eminently as popular religion: that is, as a set of informal, non-professional practices, legitimated by self-elected ‘lay’ authorities, and disseminated in ad hoc networks whose nodes rarely grew beyond the size of a small group. A ‘quest culture’, both elite and popular, was not entirely new. The Edwardian period (1901–10) had been exposed to the ‘magickal’ exploits of Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), in addition to witnessing what one commentator called a “rising psychic tide” of “enthusiasm, trance and ecstasies” promoted by various “seers and soothsayers and prophets” (Mead 1913:236). Spiritualists and Theosophists had fashioned the skeleton of a post-Protestant cosmology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its expressions of ‘occult’ and ‘spiritual’ religion were predicated on the role of the practitioner as a quasi-scientific ‘experimenter’, and of religious practice as a ‘search for truth’ in a re-sacralised but recondite cosmos. This existing culture of non-official religious experimentation acquired salience under the intense conditions of the interwar period, in which the utopian idea of a ‘new age’ emerged as a common unit of currency across economic, political, cultural and religious domains. As I have argued in detail elsewhere (Sutcliffe 2003), the so-called ‘new age movement’ of the later twentieth century can be traced back, through networks of use and exchange of the emblem ‘new age’, to a widespread interwar debate amongst intellectuals and popular ‘experts’ alike on the shape of the coming ‘new order’, ‘era’ or ‘epoch’. A distinctive element in this debate, especially in its ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ aspects, is the discourse on ‘new age’. While this was already in use in certain Theosophical sources, it acquired a particular form in the writings of a Theosophical Christian, Alice Bailey, in the 1930s; the later connotations of ‘new age’ very largely derive from this context and cannot be reliably reconstructed before the interwar period. The partial exception, inviting further detailed research, is the Order of the Star in the East (OSE), a Theosophical organisation set up in 1911 to foster messianic interpretation of, and devotion to, its central figure,

the origins of ‘new age’ religion

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Jiddu Krishnamurti. Dixon writes that the OSE’s “expectation of a new race and a new Messiah produced a millennialist anticipation of a New Age” (Dixon 2001:139). But while boasting at its peak in the 1920s an impressive membership—30,000, according to Campbell (1980:128)—the OSE was formally dissolved in 1929 by its leader, Krishnamurti. It therefore lasted only 18 years and its influence beyond 1929 has been negligible, even amongst Theosophists, many of whom have looked askance on its messianism, and favoured Krishnamurti’s own radical ‘break’ with the cult of ‘world teacher’, which the OSE had created around his personality.2 In contrast, in 1932 Alice Bailey began to produce a distinctive ‘new age’ discourse that was independent of a messianic leader, yet succeeded in tapping into a generalised eschatological sensitivity—of which interwar discourses provide manifold examples. The lines of descent of Bailey’s ‘new age’ discourse amongst particular user groups in the 1940s and 1950s can be traced into the 1960s and 1970s; in some cases, especially in connection with her teaching organisation, the Arcane School (see below), into the present period. Of course, there had also been scattered modern use of either the trope ‘new age’, or a broadly utopian or millennialist surrogate, before the period in question, and independently of Theosophy: for example, Crowley’s claim that his ‘magick’ had inaugurated a ‘new aeon’ in 1904, or William Blake’s use of the phrase ‘new age’ in the preface to his 1804 poem ‘Milton’ (Hanegraaff 1996:95, footnote 6). But such uses were relatively isolated and idiosyncratic, with little acculturating power. It might also be argued that the apocalyptic fervour of marginal social groups has periodically generated not dissimilar popular millenarianisms (Cohn 1957; Harrison 1979). However, apart from the obvious difficulties of comparing pre-industrial and post-industrial historical contexts, these groups differ markedly in social status from contemporary ‘new age’ religion. The “holistic milieu” mapped (in small-town England) by Heelas and Woodhead (2005), for example, is typically a “revolt of the unoppressed”, to appropriate Musgrove’s (1974:19) felicitous characterisation of post-1960s counterculture, in marked contrast to the plebeian character of the popular millenarianisms reconstructed by Cohn and Harrison. However, the fact that the connotations of the trope ‘new age’

2 For a vivid memoir of the ‘spiritual ferment’ of the OSE between 1911 and 1929, see Lutyens (1957), and for a detailed cultural history, see Dixon (2001); for Theosophical responses to OSE messianism and its aftermath, see Schuller (1997).

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permeate across institutional and audience divides qualifies dogmatic identification of Alice Bailey as its unique author. Interwar connotations include Modernist metanarratives on a ‘new order’ in art and aesthetics, the folk recovery of a resacralised, animist cosmos in the face of a culture of death and mourning (Winter 1998) and—most directly—a utopian rhetoric, across ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ boundaries, of a new world of material and emotional security to offset past horrors (and future anxieties). In short, the phrase ‘new age’ evokes the manifold uncertainties, but also possibilities, of the moment. And that moment, while redolent of the interwar period, is not confined by it. Simply put, as Heelas (1996:15) points out, the term ‘new age’ has been widely used in modern economic, political and cultural discourses alongside “similar formulations such as ‘new times’, ‘new era’ or ‘new world’ … to convey the idea that a significantly better way of life is dawning.” Evidently, the multiple cultural referents and historical ‘portability’ of the trope entail that eschatological questions of whether the ‘new age’ will be secular or religious, (human) made or (divinely) revealed, and when exactly it will ‘come’ (if not already ‘here’), typically remain open. Such ambiguity, even nonfalsifiability—for how can a ‘new age’ be conclusively disproved?—only augments the trope’s richly connotative power. Nevertheless, there are cumulative grounds for locating the origins of ‘new age’ religion in the interwar period, and in the 1930s in particular, since we find here both a distinctive context and a distinctive discourse. In what follows I map some principal currents in the non-official religious formations of the period in which I then locate Alice Bailey’s authoritative discourse on the coming ‘new age’. I argue that an increasingly self-conscious constituency of non-official religious practitioners formed the prime audience, by the 1930s, for Bailey’s modernist yet ambiguous utopian trope. In due course, via circuitous but traceable routes, these seekers transmitted it to the postWorld-War-Two ‘baby-boom’ generation. Context: Conflict and Reconstruction The often-repeated calling for a ‘New Age’, heard both before and after the war, can refer either to a practically conceived plan for social betterment, or to a religious revelation. (Webb 1976:28)

In the 1930s, Europeans had barely recovered from the so-called ‘Great War’ of 1914–18, which cost Britain 800,000 lives (more than half


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under the age of thirty), France more than a million and a half, and Germany nearly two million, before international conflict was again rearing its head (Hobsbawm 1995:26). The human casualties, material damage, political instability, territorial extension and psychological impact of this first ‘world’ war—supposedly “the war that will end war”, according to H.G. Wells in 1915 (Wilkinson 1978:188)—was on a scale and intensity hitherto unknown. “Never again” (Plowman 1936:1ff ) became the motto. But fresh anxieties followed the Armistice. The economic ‘slump’ of 1929–34 generated unemployment on an unprecedented scale in the USA, Germany and the UK. Revolution in Tzarist Russia in 1917 vanquished the ancien régime in favour of an unprecedented ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’, or USSR. A wave of economic-political projects ensued, from Lenin’s New Economic Policy (1921) and Stalin’s Five-Year-Plans (1928 onwards), to Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ in the USA (1933), and from varieties of Fascism in Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany, to proposals for the radical economics of Social Credit in Canada and the UK. Many in particular were sympathetic to the Fascists’ intoxicating mix of strong leadership, planned corporate economy and national-cultural renewal. A rhetoric of ‘world crisis’ attended this combustible mix of anxiety and excitement. Its futurist thrust and brittle edge is vividly captured in 1933 by the popular English philosopher and broadcaster, C.E.M. Joad: The nineteenth century believed in progress, yet, believing also that it knew the main lines upon which progress would proceed, it was little interested in what was to come . . . Our interest [is] in what is to come, which expresses itself in a constant stream of books and pamphlets on every possible aspect of the future . . . This looking forward is, I suggest, an outcome of the felt uncertainties of the present. We have come, we feel, to a definite break in the tradition of our civilisation. The nineteenth century was the end of an epoch; we, it is increasingly evident, are at the beginning of another. ( Joad 1933:23–4)

But what Joad called the “felt uncertainties of the present” increasingly included not only hopes for a ‘better future’, but awareness of the potential for renewed world conflict. As Hobsbawm (1995:35) puts it, by the 1930s “a new world war was not only predictable, but routinely predicted.” One response to the pressure of these conditions was to embrace innovation for innovation’s sake. Reconstructing the impact of the ‘Great War’ on formations of modernity, Eksteins (1990:16) writes of a “preoccupation with speed, newness, transience, and inwardness—with

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life lived, as the jargon puts it, ‘in the fast lane’”. This shock of the new manifested in popular and elite cultures alike. The 1920s was popularly dubbed the ‘jazz age’—for example, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)—named after a new form of dance music3. In ‘high’ art, Dada and Surrealism propagated semiotic play: Marcel Duchamp displayed a signed urinal in 1917, and René Magritte, in his painting L’usage de la parole (1928–9), depicted a smoker’s pipe infuriatingly entitled “ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“this is not a pipe”). A useful index of tensions between new aesthetic, cultural and political orders is the fate of A.R. Orage (1873–1934), a gifted but restless literary editor influenced by Theosophy and Nietzsche, who with Holbrook Jackson took over a literary journal entitled The New Age in 1907 and turned it into an idiosyncratic organ of contemporary ideas. Their first issue contained an editorial statement, which Webb (1980:206) describes as a “hymn to the Life Force”. Acknowledging the existence of a “universal will of life”, the editors write that their journal’s remit will henceforth be to “co-operate with the purposes of life” and the forces of “the new contemplative and imaginative order”. Orage published many influential voices in The New Age—literary, economic and political (Mairet 1936; Martin 1967). But in 1922 he abruptly renounced his editorship and moved to a religious community of international émigrés near Paris under the direction of G.I. Gurdjieff, one of many independent gurus proselytising in Europe in the wake of the 1914–18 conflict. The psychological turmoil of many interwar intellectuals who tried to reconcile socio-economic and religious utopias is encapsulated in Orage’s introspective remarks on his own career change: “It would be saying too much to affirm . . . that I resigned from the New Age and from active participation in social reform in order to find God. I only wish that my motives could be as clearly conscious as that would imply.” (Mairet 1936:90) In the political realm, revulsion at the carnage of the western front, coupled with internationalist and co-operativist aspirations, were brought together under the rubric of the League of Nations, set up in 1919 to broker a fragile peace. Its political successes were limited: it had

3 The etymology of ‘jazz’ is uncertain—one derivation is from Black American vernacular for sexual intercourse. In another use, by c1935, ‘jazzy’ meant ‘brightlycoloured’, ‘loud’.


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neither sufficient commitment from its constituent states, nor recognised international jurisdiction, to enforce its recommendations. Perhaps more significant was the idealistic, even utopian, capital invested in the League. For example, the popular writer H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was a supporter of the League, and he expounded visions of social progress and technological innovation in books like Men Like Gods (1922), The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933). Like other European utopian/dystopian narratives of the interwar period,4 Wells’ writings were preoccupied with the impact of new economic, cultural and political orders. The Shape of Things to Come paints an epic vision of the future (from 1929 to 2106) in which a new world war causes sustained global chaos. A group of intellectuals then instigates a world state. Following a thirty year plan and a world council, a utopian settlement is finally achieved. The Shape of Things to Come epitomises pronounced trends in 1930s attitudes. The ‘world council’ and related totalistic solutions envisaged by Wells had clear affinities with the aspirations of the League of Nations and reflected key obsessions of the 1930s: the need for social and economic planning, the role of ‘strong’ individuals and cadres to take decisions in the face of the paralysing stasis of ‘mass society’, and a desire to create an international basis for the rule of law. In The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for World Revolution (1929), Wells proposed a model of a diffuse network5 of thinkers and activists working towards practical realisation of a ‘world state’. In an address to Young Liberals in Oxford in 1932, Wells went further, calling for a ‘liberal fascism’ (Coupland 2000) by which he meant the strategic use of ‘fascist’ means—that is, leadership by an elite, such as the airmen and the intellectuals represented in The Shape of Things to Come—to realise ‘liberal’ ends of economic abundance and political stability. In the didactic closing sentences of The Shape of Things to Come: 4 In the UK, see E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1928), A. Huxley, Brave New World (1932), Lord Samuel, An Unknown Land (1942; “planned and largely written before the war”); in continental Europe, see E. Zamyatin, We (1920) and H. Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1945). For a convenient summary of interwar English utopias, see Morton (1978: chapter 7); for a critique of H.G. Wells’ authoritarian utopianism, see Carey (1989:118–151). 5 Compare in the context of ‘new age’ religion Alice Bailey’s new group of world servers (see below) and Marilyn Ferguson’s post-1960s model of an Aquarian conspiracy (Ferguson 1982).

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steven sutcliffe [H]istory must . . . continue to be a string of accidents with an increasingly disastrous trend, until a comprehensive faith in a modernised WorldState . . . takes hold of the human imagination. When the existing governments and ruling theories of life, the decaying religious and the decaying political forms of to-day, have sufficiently lost prestige through failure and catastrophe, then . . . will world-wide reconstruction be possible. And it must needs be the work, first of all, of an aggressive order of religiously devoted men and women who will try out and establish and impose a new pattern of living upon our race. (Wells 1974/1933:493)6

A rather different, but equally idealistic, response to contemporary European uncertainties came from the Pacifist movement in the 1930s. It can be argued that interwar pacifism was modelled upon a similar notion of the morally heroic individual differentiating herself from within a ‘mass’ consciousness, in order to combine with like-minded others in exemplary group witness and practice. The pacifist ‘new order’, however, would be built on elective ethical repudiation of war. In October 1934 the Anglican clergyman ‘Dick’ Sheppard (1880–1937) wrote an open letter to British newspapers requesting sympathisers to send him pledges of support for a resolution that “we renounce war and never again, directly or indirectly, will we support or sanction another” (Ceadal 1980:177). Sheppard’s initiative evolved into the Peace Pledge Union in 1936; by October 1937 it had gathered 120,000 pacifist pledges (Ceadal 1987:91). High-profile supporters including Aldous Huxley, Vera Brittain, John Middleton Murry and Bertrand Russell (ibid.). But rational individualism and religious conscience were sometimes uneasy partners in the pacifist coalition. For example, Max Plowman (1884–1941) became a conscientious objector after surviving the Battle of the Somme, and was later secretary for the Peace Pledge Union. But unlike Bertrand Russell and other secular radicals, his model of pacifism was predicated upon the renewal of a vitalistic, subjective experience of religion. “New religion will only come about through the self-examination of him who desires it,” he wrote in an article called “The Test of Religion” in 1937, since “the recovery of vital religion lies at the heart of every insurgent problem of modern life” (Plowman 1942:59). In The Faith called Pacifism (Plowman 1936) 6 For a history of the (qualified) acculturation of Fascist values and ideas in the UK between the wars, such as (for a time) influenced Wells and (many) others, see Pugh (2006).


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he argued that pacifism should be based upon a “religious attitude . . . in which the individual himself accepts the burden of the incarnation of new value” (ibid.:40). The pacifist “faith”—his choice of word is significant—required “conversion” (ibid.:44) to a position which held “a religious reverence for the human spirit” and “the sacredness of human consciousness” (ibid.:48). The practical goal of pacifism would be a “solid phalanx of people”—admittedly “numerically negligible”—which would nevertheless “provide a nucleus for the new way of life which man must find or perish” (ibid.:58). The idealistic initiatives of Orage, Wells, Plowman and others came against the backdrop of substantial cultural and political change. This included the election of the first Labour government in Britain in 1924 and full suffrage for women in 1928. And despite popular images of a period mired in widespread unemployment—defined by economic ‘slump’ and ‘Great Depression’—and in muddled, even cowardly ‘appeasement’ of Nazi Germany, there were material gains, especially for middle-class consumers. Stevenson and Cook argue that: alongside the pictures of dole queues and hunger marches must be placed those of another Britain, of new industries, prosperous suburbs and a rising standard of living . . . For many salaried people affluence began not in the 1950s but in the thirties, when it became possible for an average salaried person to buy his own house, usually on a mortgage, run a car, and begin to afford a range of consumer durables and household goods hitherto considered quite out of reach. (Stevenson & Cook 1994:11, 13)

In this process of embourgeoisement, house building and home ownership expanded, as did travel by road and rail. Vigorous circulation of mail—four items were posted weekly by each British adult—signals an emergent mass communication culture. The publishing boom included intense newspaper circulation battles, paperbacks, book clubs and library schemes. Weekly cinema audiences in the mid-1930s averaged nearly twenty million (Thorpe 1992:107), and most homes had a wireless. This new popular consumer culture vied for attention with the totalistic solutions of utopian thinkers and technocratic planners, encouraging the pursuit of richly differentiated yet volatile subjectivities in everyday life. Religion was no exception.

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steven sutcliffe Non-Official Religion: ‘Occultism’ and ‘Spirituality’ in Elite and Popular Culture The British soldier has certainly got religion; I am not so sure, however, that he has got Christianity. (Army chaplain in 1917, cited in Winter 1998:64) Like thousands of other ministers and clergy, I had glibly uttered the second-hand truths and consolations of religion. But now I learnt what no college or university could possibly have taught me: that in religion second-hand truth is futile. (Davies 1961:107)

The interwar years are a key period in the development of non-official religion in twentieth century Anglo-American culture. In this section I map expressions of non-official religion, which bolstered the emergence of a self-conscious constituency of ‘seekers’ practising a hybrid, popular, post-protestant form of religion increasingly called ‘spirituality’. Shaped by improvements in communication and the migration of populations, this constituency functions as a prime interpretive community to receive Alice Bailey’s seminal ‘new age’ message in the 1930s. ‘Mysticism’, preferably ‘comparative’, was one point of interest for seekers, evinced by the popularity of Evelyn Underhill’s survey, Mysticism (Underhill 1911), which by 1930 had gone through twelve editions. By then it was ‘fashionable to regard oneself both as a ‘Mystic’ and a ‘Modernist’, as the historian of modern Catholic heterodoxy, Peter Anson (1964:343), remarks. Here I focus on the related field of ‘occultism’, organised around the notion of ‘spiritual development’ (Webb 1976:15). Occultism’s introspective psychology, closely related to the interests of ‘mysticism’, combined with belief in a re-enchanted, animist cosmology to form a receptive loam for Bailey’s prophecies of a ‘new age’. Theosophy and Spiritualism are premier organisational indices of this occult worldview in the period. These class-differentiated, competing ideologies were then at the height of their twentieth century membership and influence. The aestheticised dispositions in the Theosophical movement, originating in the work of the Theosophical Society under Blavatsky and Olcott from 1875 (Campbell 1980), were bound up with a series of progressive political causes from women’s suffrage to Indian independence. “To be a Theosophist,” recalls one female practitioner, “you had to take part in all the big problems and questions that were going on around you in society” (Akhtar & Humphries 1999:19). In Webb’s (1976:46) gloss, “Theosophy was Progressively respectable;


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often Christianity was not.” Drawing eclectically and strategically upon Hindu and Buddhist sources, Theosophy proposed a multi-layered cosmos within which humankind could explore its ‘occult’ or ‘hidden’ potential. The main section of the Theosophical Society, based in India, reached a membership peak in 1929 of some 45,000 worldwide (Campbell 1980:128). The movement also supplied a lingua franca for non-aligned ‘occultists’, evident in the clusters of ideas, beliefs and practices eagerly discussed in the pages of British journals like The Quest and The Occult Review. The parent Theosophical Society also generated several influential schismatic movements, including Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society in Germany in 1913 and Alice Bailey’s Lucis Trust in the USA in 1922 (the future matrix of ‘new age’ discourse); and it strongly coloured the Liberal Catholic Church, a secession within the Old Catholic Church, from 1918 (Anson 1964:342–67). Theosophy also influenced the development of Buddhism in England: the Buddhist Lodge of the Theosophical Society was set up in 1924 by the English Buddhist convert, T. Christmas Humphreys (1901–83). Originally a “confirmed and deeply practising Christian” (Humphreys 1978:31), his commitment was shaken by his brother’s death on the western front. Before embracing Buddhism, Humphreys “tried available religions”, including Roman Catholicism, the Religious Society of Friends and the local Theosophical Lodge (ibid.:38–43). His occult approach to Buddhism was not unique: Alan Watts (1915–73), a prolific populariser of ‘oriental’ religion and later a hero of the ‘Beat’ movement in the USA, partly learnt his trade as editor, from 1936, of the Buddhist Lodge’s journal Buddhism in England (later renamed The Middle Way). But Watts was also contributing articles to publications like the Occult Review, The Modern Mystic and New Britain (Snelling et al. 1988:13), and he frequented Watkins’ bookshop in central London, where the founder’s son served as Watts’s “trusted adviser” on “the various gurus, pandits, and psychotherapists then flourishing in London” (Watts 1973:107). Through the careers in the occult milieu of figures like Humphreys and Watts, the new Buddhist Lodge reflected wider currents in non-official interwar religion.7

A Theosophical flavour to Anglophone Buddhism is one outcome, glimpsed in Humphreys’ eccentric exposition of the Buddhist doctrine of anatta/no-self, in which he postulates a “greater Self ” that can be accessed beyond the perishable everyday ego; see also the plates of Blavatsky and other Theosophists in Humphreys (1978), and of Olcott, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, in Humphreys’ influential Pelican paperback, Buddhism (1951). 7

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Theosophy partly defined itself over and against a perceived ‘vulgar’ search for material proofs of survival after death such as defined the more plebian Spiritualist community, an equally prominent star in the non-official religious constellation (Oppenheim 1985; Barrow 1986). Within the trenches of the 1914–18 war “a host of spiritualist images, stories, and legends proliferated . . . about the dead . . . [and] about magical forces affecting the living” (Winter 1998:65). Interest in Spiritualism was boosted by the post-war culture of bereavement, when war memorials quickly became “part of the landscape” (ibid.:79) and pilgrimages were organised to war cemeteries at Ypres and Verdun (ibid.:52). In the late 1920s there were around one quarter of a million practising Spiritualists and some two thousand Spiritualist societies in the UK alone, according to Nelson (1969:161). Unlike the middle and upper class affinities of Theosophy, Spiritualism was favoured by working class and lower-middle-class communities. Like Theosophy, however, interwar Spiritualism was a revival rather than an innovation: a revisionist consolidation of existing trends in Victorian and Edwardian occult cosmology. Theosophy and Spiritualism therefore provided tangible institutional bases for the acculturation of occult cosmology in twentieth century Anglo-American society. Despite differences and some rivalry, both movements expounded the recondite, magical powers of the individual in an expanded cosmos. And they had affinities with existing folk beliefs: as Hazelgrove (2000:23) puts it, interwar Spiritualism found reinforcement in “a variety of fugitive and fragmented supernaturalisms buried in modernity”. Astrology in the form of the ‘horoscope’ was one popular face of folk belief: its stellar blueprints challenged traditional Christian theodicy in the uncertain moral order, which followed the 1914–18 war. R.H. Naylor cast the first UK newspaper horoscope in the Sunday Express for the newly-born Princess Margaret in 1930; a regular column followed in the Daily Express in 1931. There were inevitably many levels of engagement with astrology and related practices, from the recreational to the psychotherapeutic. In 1935 the Daily Express published a compendium called The Book of Fortune-Telling: How to Tell Character and the Future by Palmistry, Cards, Numbers, Phrenology, Handwriting, Dreams, Astrology, Etc. (Daily Express 1935). The volume promised the reader that “you are quite sure of being in demand at all parties and gatherings if you can put on a mysterious air and read the future!” (ibid.:5). Psychological diagnosis and historical forecasting were more respectable applications of astrology, the former vigorously defended by the Theosophical astrologers ‘Sephariel’ and


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‘Leo’, by Alice Bailey in her posthumous Esoteric Astrology (1951), and by the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung, who studied astrology and I Ching extensively in the period (Main 1997:11–14). Astrology could span both everyday concerns of love and happiness and theories of meaningful coincidence and hidden significance. The inscrutable workings of Fate were the common denominators. As one member of a London astrological society in the 1930s recalled, “[P]eople were feeling the need for additional information to help them plan their lives. It gave clues that you got nowhere else” (Akhtar & Humphries 1999:112). In sum, the charismatic but hidden powers of the individual in a reanimated cosmos were the common features of non-official religion in the interwar period. Theosophy and Spiritualism helped to popularise an ideology of ‘spiritual development’ (Webb, op. cit.) in the face of what H.G. Wells called, “the present wide discredit of organised religions” (Wells 1933:24). The preferred religious role was no longer ‘member’, ‘congregant’ or ‘communicant’, but ‘seeker’. Quest Culture Vast numbers of thoughtful and even spiritual people are turning away from ‘organised religion’ and looking in other directions for a sure foundation upon which to build their lives. (Baker-Beall 1932:300) I was asking myself constantly the same questions that most younger people around me seemed to be asking themselves … Was our earthly life a complete whole or was it merely a stage in a much longer journey? Was the belief in karma and in reincarnation more satisfactory than that in the Paradise and Purgatory of the Christian Church? . . . Ought we to follow the conventional ethics of our day or try to discover ethics that might have a more spiritual significance? (Landau 1935:31)

An important influence on interwar occultism was the influx of various ‘eastern’ and ‘oriental’ gurus—to use the colonialist vocabulary of their audiences—to urban centres like Paris, London and New York. This was at least a ‘second wave’ of modern migration into Anglophone societies, following the pioneering visits of Vivekananda, Soyen Shaku and others to the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893. Amongst this new wave were the Indians Jiddu Krishnamurti, Mohandas Gandhi and Meher Baba, celebrated by their followers as

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modern mahatmas (literally, ‘great souls’). Each in his way—as politician or messiah—illustrated counter-hegemonic forces unsettling European colonial establishments, both religious and political. Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was leader of the Order of the Star in the East, which—as noted above—commanded the majority of the 45,000 membership of the wider Theosophical movement in 1929 (Campbell 1980:128). As one woman remembered Krishnamurti then, “He was young, he spoke with fervour and he spoke with belief . . . He was to us a world teacher, the new Messiah” (Akhtar & Humphries 1999:21). In 1931, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) visited London to negotiate on Indian constitutional reform. He made a strong impression in cinema newsreels and newspaper photography by wearing sandals and homespun clothing, promulgating a philosophy of satyagraha (non-violent direct action) and the Bhagavad-Gita, and choosing to stay in London’s impoverished East End. Gandhi was followed in 1932 by Merwan Shehiar Irani, or ‘Meher Baba’ (1894–1969; literally, ‘Compassionate Father’). Meher Baba came from a Zoroastrian background. He took a vow of silence in 1925, claiming to be the avatar for the present age, just like Krishna, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad had been in their time and place. His messianic teachings are recorded in Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India (1951/1934). Brunton (1898–1981), born Raphael Hurst, was a journalist who published a series of books from the 1930s onwards: titles such as The Secret Path (1935, subtitled ‘A Technique of Spiritual Self-Discovery for the Modern World’) and A Search in Secret Egypt (1936) indicate Brunton’s interests in ‘spiritual development’ and his target audience of ‘seekers’. In 1930 Brunton visited Meher Baba at his colony near Ahmednagar, shortly before his departure for Europe. The guru tells Brunton he has a “world-wide message” of “universal spiritual belief ” to deliver: “As Jesus came to impart spirituality to a materialistic age, so have I come to impart a spiritual push to present-day mankind” (Brunton 1951:34). Apocalypse is forecast: “I shall break my silence and deliver my message only when there is chaos and confusion everywhere, for then I shall be most needed . . . when both East and West are aflame with war” (ibid.:35). Fortunately, however, global conflict will be short-lived: international acceptance of Meher Baba as messiah will restore world peace. “A long era of unique peace, a time of world tranquillity” will ensue, characterised by “universal brotherhood” and “disarmament” (ibid.:36). Meher Baba’s arrival in London in 1932 brought a spectacular inter-


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view on the front page of the Sunday Express in which he claimed, “I am one with God. I live in Him like Buddha, like Christ, like Krishna” (Landau 1935:131). Meher Baba thus joined a series of new religious authorities proselytising in the heart of post-Enlightenment Europe. This religious culture was surveyed by journalist Rom Landau, in God is My Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters and Teachers. Reprinted seven times between 1935 and 1939 alone, Landau’s book documents a ‘drawing room culture’ of intense temperaments and societal ennui located at the elite end of the spectrum of non-official religion. Tellingly, Landau represents his “mystics, masters and teachers” in an exoticised, orientalist mode: in effect, as “wise men from the East”. Included in his survey alongside Meher Baba and Krishnamurti are the Greek-Armenian G.I. Gurdjieff; his Russian follower, P.D. Ouspensky; the Austro-Hungarian founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner; and an Estonian aristocrat, Count Hermann Keyserling, founder of a School of Wisdom in Darmstadt. Not only teachings and practices but ethnic origins are at some variance to the staid British profile of clergy and congregation of the period (Mews 1994) and demonstrate the impact of population displacement and transcultural communication in the wake of the war’s globalising force. More familiar to Landau’s readers were his Christian representatives: the American-Swiss Frank Buchman, founder of the Oxford Groups movement; and George Jeffreys, Welsh principal of the Elim Pentecostal Church. However, a common appeal to ‘lay’ authority, concern with ‘spiritual experience’ and stress on the potency of religion in these evangelical Christian movements aligned them quite closely with the functionalist tendencies of Landau’s exotic “wise men”: namely, religion’s ability to work. For example, two key practices of Buchman’s Oxford Groups were “group sharing” and “inner guidance”, described in a popular exposition of the movement by a writer with the apt pseudonym, ‘Layman with a Notebook’ (1933:27–35, 65–72).8 These were key evangelising methods, designed to spread “God’s Plan”: that is, “a new world order” (ibid:3; in the name of “Christ, the King”). Similarly, George Jeffreys’ concern with the everyday healing power of “spiritual rays” in Elim Pentecostal theology (e.g. Healing Rays, Jeffreys [1932]) connotes the Significant continuities in non-official religion can be seen from the fact that both practices were imported into daily practice in the ‘new age’ colony at Findhorn, Scotland, from 1962; two of that colony’s main founders had been involved with the Oxford Groups’ later incarnation as Moral Re-Armament (Sutcliffe 2003:59, 78–9). 8

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kind of empirical occult energies familiar in Theosophically-inspired literature of the period, such as Alice Bailey’s five-volume series, A Treatise on the Seven Rays (from 1936). “Healing Rays!” exclaims Jeffreys (1932: facing page 1): “We have been conscious of them as we have ministered in His Name, and have come under their vivifying, healthgiving and invigorating properties.” Through its popular presentation of new voices, God is My Adventure targeted a developing public appetite for mystical, occult and ‘vital’ religion. By the close of the 1930s, dedicated Spiritualist, psychic and occult book clubs (Nelson 1969:162) were mining the popular readership opened up by Penguin paperbacks in 1935. A steady flow of periodicals came off the presses, including dedicated Spiritualist and Theosophical journals, and independent publications like G.R.S. Mead’s The Quest (1909–1930) and The Search (1931–4), which spawned their own readers’ societies. Other journals were more eclectic and transient, such as The Shrine of Wisdom—“a quarterly devoted to synthetic philosophy, Religion and Mysticism”9—and Proteus, concerned with “Dream analysis, Psychic phenomena, scientific astrology and herbalism.”10 The most tenacious twentieth century occult periodical was The Occult Review, published by Rider for nearly fifty years from 1905, and distributed in the UK, USA and Australasia. A typical interwar issue included articles on astral travel, occult sources of healing, commentaries on ‘eastern’ religious texts such as the Bhagavad-Gita, interpretations of karma and reincarnation, and profiles of contemporary gurus. Advertisement pages included local groups and societies and services such as astrology and clairvoyance. Spiritualism and Theosophy were the enduring influences, the former usually as an object of critique by partisan editorials, which invariably critiqued fraudulent mediums, mused on teachings of ‘the Masters’, and discussed the potential of occultism to furnish a modern functional ‘spirituality’. For example, a 1932 editorial, entitled “Linking Up”, describes “true occultism” as, “the science of spirituality” which has “no concern with creeds, either religious or theosophical”. It proposes setting up a “Spiritual League” to co-ordinate “scattered spiritual units” exploring “inner life and its manifold problems”.11 These “scattered spiritual units” were clearly 9 10 11

The Shrine of Wisdom, 1920 2.1, Autumn. Advertisement in The Search Quarterly, 1931, Vol. 1. “Linking Up”, Occult Review LVI/1, July 1932, 2ff.


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meant to include The Occult Review’s readers. Addressed in this way, the private hermeneutics of solitary readers could be reconfigured as a vital contribution to a common occult praxis, since in the materialist metaphysics of occultism, the ‘life of the mind’ was no metaphor but a real location in which to perform mental work to change the world. Compelling evidence that these and other texts functioned as a practical resource for a geographically dispersed readership can be found in the preface to the 1945 revised edition of God is My Adventure. Here, Landau attributes his book’s success to a healthy market amongst “seekers” for “the spiritual experiences of a fellow seeker”, so long as they do not feel “pontifically forced by the author into accepting a certain point of view”; this is because “in spiritual research the utmost personal freedom is a sine qua non” (Landau 1945:7). Landau’s new preface is clearly addressed to a distinctive readership: an audience who consider themselves “seekers” yet avoid closure in their occult “research”. The fact that God is My Adventure was reprinted eleven times in as many years is evidence of the buoyancy of the market. Similarly, Brunton’s A Search in Secret India (1934) had been reprinted six times by 1938. Further evidence of the vitality of print culture in non-official religion is the London publisher Rider’s sixty-four page book catalogue from the late 1930s. The subject headings within the catalogue illustrate contemporary market niches (many of which have expanded and diversified into the present period): for example, one quarter of the contents is categorised under ‘Spiritualism’, and around one fifth under a combination of the headings ‘Occult’ and ‘Psychology’ (Bowen nd: endpapers 64pp). Another strong heading is ‘Mind and Body Handbooks’, including titles such as Self-Reliance, The Secret Power and Studies in Self-Healing. The latest titles could either be obtained direct from the publisher or browsed in specialist bookshops: for example, ‘Atlantis’ and ‘Watkins’ in central London. The owner of the former, Michael Houghton, led his Order of the Hidden Masters in the shop’s basement; the proprietor of the latter, John Watkins senior, had been a student of H.P. Blavatsky. Such establishments not only supplied books but functioned as contact points, even ritual venues, in a common ‘seekership’ culture.

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steven sutcliffe Alice Bailey’s ‘New Age’ Man is emerging into an era of peace and good-will, but a great effort is needed to force wide open the Door leading into the New Age. (Alice Bailey, letter, The Occult Review, 1932)12

“I work under no labels,” wrote Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) in the Occult Review in 1935. Bailey was born into a wealthy Manchester family and received a privileged Anglican Christian upbringing (Sinclair 1984; Sutcliffe 2003:46–49). Bailey encountered the Theosophical Society in California, which she described as “the opening of a new spiritual era in my life” (Bailey 1973:133); she became editor of the Theosophical Society magazine, The Messenger. Around 1919, she claimed occult contact with a “Master” called Djwhal Khul, known thereafter as “The Tibetan”. This contact marked the beginning of Bailey’s career as a clairaudient “secretary” for the Tibetan’s scripts. Controversy in the Theosophical Society concerning the legitimacy of these new revelations prompted Bailey’s departure in 1920. She continued a sustained ‘secretarial’ practice until her death in 1949.13 Bailey’s contact with a Master was both traditional and innovative. As mysterious, superhuman, semi-divine figures, the Masters had entered occult lore by the second half of the nineteenth century, and were given a special place in Theosophical cosmology by H.P. Blavatsky. Speculation concerning their identity and plans peppers the interwar pages of The Occult Review. “Who, then, are the Masters?”, asks one editorial, replying: “They are God-realized beings, whether embodied or disembodied . . . constituting a spiritual Brotherhood whose task it is to foster every budding germ of spirituality in man . . . and by Their inspiration to forward the upward development of the human race.”14 According to Sinclair (1984:15), the Masters “exert their influence on behalf of the spiritual maturing of all sentient beings [and] the general welfare of the whole planetary life”. This patrician vocation is accomplished through a “chain of communicating relationships stretching through the dimensions of consciousness”, akin to a “network along Occult Review LV/2, 1932 125, from a 5-page letter entitled “Fear: A World Problem”. 13 There is a substantial corpus: the quantity of text ‘received’ from the Tibetan comes to 9,271 pages, and Bailey also published several texts under her own name. 14 Occult Review LXIII/4, October 1936 236. 12


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whose grid enlightened ideas can pass into manifestation” (ibid.:41). A reverse vector in this neo-platonic “chain of being” also holds: students can, with proper training, follow this “grid” back to its source, treating it as a “pathway of ascent or liberation from the frustrating limitations of the human state” (ibid.:16). Thus the Masters are not remote “Gods-in-paradise” (ibid.:47), but beings who have “progressed a bit further than some of us . . . in terms of handling themselves and finding out what life may be all about” (Sinclair 1984:47). As such, the Masters constitute role models for the “advanced human being”: the ideal agent for “the magical work of the new age” (Bailey 1991a:610). Legitimated by her occult source, Bailey set up the Lucis Trust in New York in 1922. This developed into three linked projects: the Arcane School, World Goodwill, and Triangles.15 The foundation institution, the Arcane School, was set up in 1922 as a private correspondence school, offering “training in new age discipleship”.16 This offers further evidence of ‘seekership’ culture in the period, since those contacting Bailey apparently “wanted to know more about meditation and how to practise it” and “asked for guidance in their search for truth”.17 Men of Goodwill was set up in 1932 to engage in political and cultural debates, including in the early 1940s championing the cause of the United Nations as a new international organisation to replace the discredited League of Nations. Renamed World Goodwill in the 1950s, it promotes the idea of a “new group of world servers”: a group “of all races, classes and creeds” who “serve the Plan, humanity, the Hierarchy and the Christ”. From this project came the idea of “Units of Service”, small groups of meditators quietly promoting Bailey’s vision (Sutcliffe 2003: chapter 6). In 1945, Bailey’s most familiar text, the “Great Invocation”, was published.18 Its closing line, “Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth,” encapsulates interwar preoccupations with accessing superhuman power to restore a lost universal order or Plan. Bailey’s organisation thus almalgamated three contemporary cultural currents: secular ‘planning’, Theosophical cosmology and—as we shall see—Christian millennialism. She shared interests in psychology, social engineering and international relations with H.G. Wells and other utopians. Her occult cosmology and epistemology are indebted 15 16 17 18

Leaflet: Lucis Trust (London nd). For a note on Triangles, see Sutcliffe (2003:48). In the words of the standard advertisement in the endpapers of Bailey’s texts. The Arcane School: Entrance Papers (London nd:2). Composed in the mid-1930s, it is the last of three Invocations (Bailey 1944:xvi).

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to Theosophy; she acknowledged that “none of my books would have been possible had I not made a very close study of [Blavatsky’s] The Secret Doctrine” (Bailey 1973:215). But Bailey also drew on a millennialistic Christology influenced by her youthful Anglicanism. Where Blavatsky was explicitly anti-Christian, Bailey was merely dismissive of her early fervour, describing her younger self as a “rabid, orthodox [and] exceedingly narrow-minded Christian” (Bailey 1973:1). Like Annie Besant and other post-Blavatsky Theosophists, Bailey was anti-ecclesial rather than anti-Christian: an important distinction, which allowed her to infuse a latent evangelical piety into her occult cosmology. Thus the Great Invocation fervently prays, “May the Christ return to Earth”; in 1936 she wrote “the Christ is being born today in many a human being” (Bailey 1991b:45); and in 1947, “no man has ever been saved by theology, but only by the living Christ” (idem). This millennialistic thrust is central to her distinctive ‘new age’ discourse. According to Bloom (1991:2), Bailey’s output contains 285 passages referring to a ‘new age’. Three of her book titles are explicit on this score: the two volumes of Discipleship in the New Age (1944, 1955) and Education in the New Age (1954). Her first reference comes in 1932: We are now one people. The heritage of any race lies open to another; the best thought of the centuries is available for all; and ancient techniques and modern methods must meet and interchange. Each will have to modify its mode of presentation and each will have to make an effort to understand the underlying spirit which has produced a peculiar phraseology and imagery, but when these concessions are made, a structure of truth will be found to emerge which will embody the spirit of the New Age. (Bailey 1987/1932:4)

A 1936 volume, Esoteric Psychology, supplies the missing millennialistic dimension: “There will be a pouring in of light upon mankind, which will alter his conditions of living [and] change his outlook upon world affairs” (Bailey 1991b/1936:276). This “advent of Christ” may take the form of “an actual physical coming” or a “tremendous inflow of the Christ principle” (ibid.:46). The Reappearance of the Christ (1948) is devoted to this exegesis. Proper education of the individual is a crucial factor in preparing for this new dispensation. In 1932 Bailey wrote, “The individual must be given his full heritage, and special culture provided which will foster and strengthen the finest and the best amongst us, for in their achievement lies the promise of the New Age” (Bailey 1987/1932:27–8). Such


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‘strengthened’ individuals will act as a ‘bridging body of men’ between eastern and western cultures. They will be “practical men of affairs with their feet firmly planted on earth and yet, at the same time . . . mystics and seers, living also in the world of spirit and carrying inspiration and illumination with them into the life of every day” (ibid.:45). A Treatise on White Magic in 1934 modelled such individuals as a “new group type” who possess the following highly developed powers: “a universal touch, an intense sensitivity, a highly organised mental apparatus, an astral equipment . . . responsive to the higher spiritual vibrations, a powerful and controlled energy body, and a sound physical body” (Bailey 1991a:416). These “pioneers of the New Age” are enjoined to organise themselves into loose networks of “little groups” which “spring up here and there . . . as a man in this place and another in that place awakens to the new vision” (ibid.:426). In the first volume of Discipleship in the New Age, Bailey (1944:786) dates the beginning of this group work to 1931. Later described as “seed groups in the New Age” (Bailey 1957:26), these cells are “not interested in dogmas or doctrines” (Bailey 1991a:426) but in “world needs [and] world opportunities” and “the initiation of humanity into the spiritual realities” (ibid.:427). The sum of this programme in occult education will be an “oligarchy of elect souls” that will “govern and guide the world” (Bailey 1991a:400). Bailey’s discourse therefore served to harness to a singular end—the coming ‘new age’—the many disparate, potentially fissiparous ‘quests’ pursued by seekers in the wider occult culture. Her programme offered a hierarchy of ascending cadres, from the humble “unit of service” meditators to the supernatural pantheon of Masters, each in their place functioning as a guide or placeholder for those coming after. The result can be read both as a neo-platonic chain of being leading back to the divine source, and as the power of social hierarchy to bring structure and direction to the popular egalitarianism of seekership culture. Conclusion: The Emergence of ‘New Age’ Religion Between the Two World Wars This chapter has shown the development between the two world wars of a potent utopian discourse by Alice Bailey on an imminent ‘new age’, which fused existing secular, Theosophical and Christian elements.

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At the core of the discourse was a causal link between the cultivation of subjective and ‘spiritual’ states of awareness by an avant-garde group, and the achievement of trans-national—‘world’—economic and political order. The exposition is patrician, and the privileging of social elites—inscribed in the language of ‘oligarchy’, ‘race’ and ‘spiritual hierarchy’—is in some tension with the democratic ideology of more recent forms of religion which derive from this and related sources (for example, the post-1960s ‘holistic milieu’ portrayed by Heelas & Woodhead 2005). But as I have shown, Bailey’s discourse took shape in a particular historical context, marked by changing economic theories and social policies, an idealistic internationalism and—not least—by the double shadow of war—past and future. Bailey was familiar with non-official religious constituencies, especially the occult ‘spirituality’ of social elites, and there is clear evidence that her message of a ‘new age’ was principally directed, and received, here. Her mature adult career is intimately bound up with the events of the 1920s and 1930s, during which she set up institutions—a correspondence school, an educational project, a meditation network—to propagate a distinctive ‘new age’ vision. Bailey’s expositions of group work and ‘spirituality’ are consistently related to secular, modern criteria of efficiency and effectiveness, and her occult hermeneutic invariably seeks to correlate with scientific and political events. For example, a 1950 publication retrospectively claimed that the League of Nations had been invisibly guided by the “Masters” (Sinclair 1984:42), and in 1947 she wrote that “the release of the energy of the atom” at the bombing of Hiroshima signalled the dawning of the ‘New Age’ (Bailey 1991b:279). Esoteric and exoteric, or psychological and historical, realms were for Bailey, as for other occultists, inextricably interlinked, but their relationship needed to be revised: the former was really the ‘inner’, ‘spiritual’ cause of the latter. European reconstruction could therefore only properly be realised as the outcome of ‘psychic’ or ‘spiritual’ growth. Social and economic recovery had to be reformulated as the organic end of properly valorised and co-ordinated subjectivities, rather than a function of sterile technocratic schemes. This vision of the causative power of ‘inner’, occult realities is encapsulated in a magisterial millennialistic passage published posthumously in 1960, reminiscent of H.G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come: All the post-war planning . . . and the seething turmoil reaching throughout all levels of the human consciousness, plus the inspiration of disaster and suffering, are blasting open hitherto sealed areas in the minds of men,


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letting in illumination, sweeping away the bad old conditions. This is symbolised for us in the destruction of ancient cities, and by the intermixture of races through the processes of war; this also signifies progress, and is preparatory to great expansions of consciousness [which] will, in the next one hundred and fifty years, completely alter the manner of man’s thinking; they will change the techniques of religion; they will bring about comprehension and fusion. When this work has been accomplished, we shall record an era of world peace, which will be symbolic of the state of the human spirit. (Bailey 1991b:278)

Bailey’s vision of a looming ‘New Age’ emerged in a particular period in twentieth century history: within a considerable turn in interwar Anglophone religion towards popular and alternative beliefs and practices, articulated by seekers in small groups, employing a meta-religious discourse on ‘spirituality’. The range of interests in this non-official religious culture—‘secret’ lore, ‘esoteric’ schools, ‘occult’ powers, ‘mystical’ experiences, ‘psychic’ abilities, ‘oriental’ wisdom—anticipates a shift in the function of religion from cementing traditional communities to legitimating new identities, with a bias towards the middle and upper social classes and towards post-protestant dispositions. This turn to the legitimation of bourgeois identities must be set in the context of significant economic, social and cultural change, overshadowed by memory of one world war and anticipation of another. Under such constraints, the notion of religion as a mysterious, recondite quest—not just for oneself, but with elective fellows, and in preparation for a ‘new age’—offered an expanding population of ‘seekers’ an empowering role in their everyday lives to counter the emergent totalitarianisms of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin on the one hand, and the perceived doctrinal dullness and social conformity of the traditional Christian churches on the other. References Akhtar, M. & S. Humphries, 1999. Far Out: the Dawning of New Age Britain. Bristol: Sansom & Co/Channel 4 Television. Anson, P., 1964. Bishops at Large. London: Faber and Faber. Bailey, A., 1944. Discipleship in the New Age Volume I. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1948. The Reappearance of the Christ. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1954. Education in the New Age. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1955. Discipleship in the New Age Volume II. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1957. The Externalization of the Hierarchy. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1973. The Unfinished Autobiography. New York: Lucis Publishing Company.

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——, 1987/1932. From Intellect to Intuition. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1991a/1934. A Treatise on White Magic. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1991b/1971. Ponder on This. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. Baker-Beall, E. 1932. “Occultism as a Guide to Life.” Occult Review 56.5 299–306. Barrow, L., 1986, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bloom, W., ed, 1991. The New Age: An Anthology of Essential Writings. London: Channel 4 Television/Rider. Bowen, P.G., nd[ca. 1938]. The Occult Way. London: Rider. Brunton, P., 1935. The Secret Path: A Technique of Spiritual Self-Discovery for the Modern World. London: Rider. ——, 1935. A Search in Secret Egypt. London: Rider. ——, 1951/1934. A Search in Secret India. London: Rider. Campbell, B., 1980. Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Carey, J., 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber. Ceadel, M., 1980. Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith. Clarendon Press: Oxford. ——, 1987. “The Peace Movement between the Wars: Problems of Definition.” In Taylor, R. & N. Young, eds. Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 73–99. Cohn, N., 1957. The Pursuit of the Millennium. London: Secker and Warburg. Coupland, P., 2000. “HG Wells’s ‘Liberal Fascism.’” Journal of Contemporary History 35.4 541–558. Daily Express, 1935. The Book of Fortune-Telling: How to tell Character and the Future by Palmistry, Cards, Numbers, Phrenology, Handwriting, Dreams, Astrology, Etc. London: Daily Express Publications Davies, D.R., 1961. In Search of Myself. London: Geoffrey Bles. Dixon, J., 2001. Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. Baltimore, MY: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eksteins, M., 1990/1989. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. London: Black Swan. Ferguson, M., 1982. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. London: Paladin/Granada. Hanegraaff, W., 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture. Leiden: Brill. Harrison, J., 1979. The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hazelgrove, J., 2000, Spiritualism and British Society Between the Wars. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. Heelas P. & L. Woodhead, 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell. Hobsbawm, E., 1995/1994. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Abacus. Humphreys, C., 1978. Both Sides of the Circle: the Autobiography of Christmas Humphreys. London: George Allen and Unwin. Jeffreys, G., 1932. Healing Rays. London: Elim Publishing Company. Joad, C., 1933. Guide to Modern Thought. London: Faber and Faber. Landau, R., 1935. God is My Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters and Teachers. London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson Ltd. ——, 1945. God is My Adventure. London: Faber and Faber. “Layman with a Notebook”, 1933. What is the Oxford Group? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lutyens, E., 1957. Candles in the Sun. London: Rupert Hart-Davies.


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Main, R., ed, 1997. Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal. London: Routledge. Mairet, P., 1936. AR Orage: A Memoir. London: J.M. Dent. Martin, W., 1967. “The New Age” under Orage. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mead, G.R.S., 1913. Quests Old and New. London: G. Bell. Mews, S., 1994. “Religious Life between the Wars, 1920–1940.” In Gilley, S. & W. Shields, eds. A History of Religion in Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, 449–66. Morton, A.L., 1978. The English Utopia. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Musgrove, F., 1974. Ecstasy and Holiness: Counter Culture and the Open Society. London: Methuen. Nelson, G., 1969. Spiritualism and Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Oppenheim, J., 1985. Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plowman, M., 1936. The Faith Called Pacifism. London: J.M. Dent. ——, 1942. The Right to Live: Selected Essays. London: Andrew Dakers. Pugh, M., 2006/2005. “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars. London: Pimlico. Schuller, G., 1997. Krishnamurti and the World Teacher Project: Some Theosophical Perceptions (Theosophical History Occasional Papers, Vol. V). Fullerton, CA: Theosophical History. Scott, C., 1935. An Outline of Modern Occultism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sinclair, J., 1984. The Alice Bailey Inheritance. Wellingborough: Turnstone. Snelling, J., D. Sibley & M. Watts, eds, 1988/1987. The Early Writings of Alan Watts, London: Rider/Century. Stevenson, J. & C. Cook, 1994/1977. Britain in the Depression: Society and Politics 1929–1939. London: Longman. Sutcliffe, S., 2003. Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices. London: Routledge. Thorpe, A., 1992. Britain in the 1930s: The Deceptive Decade, Oxford: Blackwell. Underhill, E., 1957/1911. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. London: Methuen. Watts, A., 1973. In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965. London: Jonathan Cape. Webb, J., 1976. The Occult Establishment, La Salle, IL: Open Court. ——, 1980. The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky and their Followers. London: Thames and Hudson Wells, H.G., 1933. The Open Conspiracy and Other Writings. London (no publisher). ——, 1974/1933. The Shape of Things to Come. London: Corgi/Transworld. Wilkinson, A., 1978. The Church of England and the First World War. London: SPCK. Winter, J., 1998/1995. Sites of memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

BEYOND MILLENNIALISM: THE NEW AGE TRANSFORMED* J. Gordon Melton The term New Age refers to a wave of religious enthusiasm that emerged in the 1970s and swept over the West through the 1980s only to subside at the end of the decade. As with other such enthusiastic movements, however, it did not just simply go away, but like a storm hitting a sandbar, it left behind a measurably changed situation among those elements of the religious community most centrally impacted. Study of the movement was hindered, in part, by its perceived relationship to the older world of the occult. Historically, the world of occultism was not one to be understood, so much as denounced. Much of the history of western scholarship has been shaped by the desire to move beyond magic and occultism, which was equated with the crudest forms of superstition and supernaturalism. In one sense we already understood gullible people who were attached to occult superstitions. This perspective was institutionalised in the anti-pseudoscience movement (cf. Shermer 1997; Gardner 1988; Gordon 1988) and the competing Christian counter-cult movement (cf. Hoyt & the Spiritual Counterfeit Project 1987; Amoto & Geisler 1989). Thus it was that only as the New Age peaked and began to fade that studies outlining the New Age movement’s place in the rapidly changing religious scene in the modern West were published. However, beginning in the 1990s, a series of books on the New Age appeared from which some overall perspective can be constructed (e.g. Melton, Lewis & Kelly 1990; Lewis & Melton 1992; Kyle 1995; Heelas 1996; Hanegraaff 1996).

* An earlier version of this paper was first presented at a conference on “New Age in the Old World” held at the Institut Oecumenique de Bossey, Celigny, Switzerland, 17–21 July 2000.

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j. gordon melton Toward a Definition of the New Age

It is a more-than-helpful exercise to confront a few of the issues that emerge in gaining some common perspectives on the New Age. First, we need to make a sharp distinction between the New Age and that class of religious groups that are variously termed New Religions, cults or sects. As a whole, New Religions are small, relatively new religious organisations distinguished by their intrusion into a dominant religious community from which they make significant dissent. A New Religious Movement brings people together around a singular history, belief, practice, and leadership. The great majority of New Religions are sectarian, that is, they are new variations on one of the older major religious traditions. Hare Krishna is a sect of Hinduism, the Divine Light Mission (now known as Elan Vital) is one of the many Sant Mat groups, and the AUM Shinrikyo was a Buddhist organisation. Many New Religions are Christian sects that adhere to the great majority of traditional Christian beliefs but either dissent on one or two important doctrines and/or champion a different lifestyle (communalism, separatism, high-pressure proselytisation, sexual freedom, etc). Most of the remaining groups attempt to create a synthesis of two or more of the older religious traditions, the Unification Church being the most notable example. In sharp contrast, the New Age movement was never a single organisation, but originated as an idea spread by a group of Theosophical organisations that shared a common lineage in the writings of Alice A. Bailey. Movement leaders never challenged the integrity of these organisations or of anyone’s attachment to them. In this regard, in its earliest stages, the New Age movement was much like the Christian ecumenical movement prior to the formation of the World Council of Churches. Without attacking the integrity of the various churches, Ecumenism looked for a Christian community that could give a more visible expression to the shared oneness among Christians in the object of Christian worship. As the New Age movement grew, some Theosophical groups became enthusiastic supporters, some were mildly accepting, some indifferent, and a few were quite hostile. A similar spectrum was presented by different Christian denominations to the ecumenical movement. Much of our confusion about the New Age also derives from the different ways we use the term ‘movement’. As applied to New Religions, ‘movement’ generally refers to the dynamic and informal nature of

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many first generation religious organisations that are still in the process of rapid change and the creation of the structure that will carry them into the next generations. As applied to the New Age, however, ‘movement’ refers to its likeness to broad social movements such as the Civil Rights movement or the Peace movement. These movements include a bewildering array of people devoted to the cause but very diverse in their institutional affiliations, definition of particular goals, and adherence to variant strategies on reaching common ends. As the New Age developed it reached out from its beginning among the Baileyite groups of the United Kingdom, to speak to the hundreds of Theosophical groups and soon invited the entire spectrum of magical, metaphysical, Spiritualist, and other occult groups to consider its basic vision. In the process of its spread, many individuals not previously associated with any of these older groups became excited about the New Age ideal and formed entirely new organisations to add their energy to the cause. Thus, it is best to see the New Age, not as an organisation itself, but as an effort to bring older organisations and the people associated with them together and constitute a new sense of oneness among them. As the New Age movement matured through the 1980s, it could also be compared to contemporary Evangelicalism. Evangelicalism exists as a number of conservative Protestant denominations that doctrinally represent a spectrum from Presbyterianism to Pentecostalism. Some of these denominations are quite small and some Evangelical groups consist of but a single congregation (there being a strong anti-denominational theme within Evangelicalism). The Evangelical movement is also served by a number of schools, missionary agencies, specialised ministries, ecumenical associations, and publishing houses that are independent of any one denomination while trying to work with all of them or at least a particular set of them. In like measure, the New Age consisted of many different groups, some large international bodies, some smaller, and many consisting of but a single centre. The movement as a whole was served by a number of schools, publishing houses, specialised organisations, networking services, and outreach groups that attempted to serve New Age adherents across their allegiance to a particular occult/metaphysical ‘denomination’. Because of the movement’s minority status and anti-institutional biases, New Age organisations tended to be far more fragile than similar Christian organisations in the West.

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j. gordon melton The New Age in Historical Perspective

It was an important clue to unravelling the nature of the New Age movement to note that all of the primary elements constituting the New Age had been around for a century or more prior to the emergence of the movement. That is, there was very little about the New Age that was new. Astrology predates any written records we have. Meditation is integral to all religious traditions. Channelling, under different names, is present in the ancient records, including the Bible, and has continually popped up generation by generation. We are all familiar with the practice of assigning occult meanings to crystals through the now thoroughly secularised practice of giving and receiving birthstones. Most New Age health practices (chiropractic, naturopathy, etc) were products of eighteenth and nineteenth century science, though some, such as herbalism and Chinese medicine, are rooted in prehistory. Even the idea of a ‘New Age’ has been around for at least two centuries, it having emerged prominently among Rosicrucian and Masonic groups who supported the French and American revolutions. From Masonry, it actually made its way onto the seal of the United States. Early in the twentieth century, it became integral to the thelemic magick of Aleister Crowley in his proclamation of the “New Aeon” of Horus the Crowned and Conquering Child. Taking seriously the fact that there was little new in the New Age was the first step in understanding what was distinctive in this new movement. The second step has come in the assembling of the history of western Esotericism, a religious alternative that has continually reappeared under variant modes generation by generation in western culture. In recent centuries, the religious history of the West has been dominated by the study of the Christian movement, its rise to dominance and its contribution in building the culture of Europe and North America. The displacement of Christianity as the single word on the religious life of the West in this century, however, has allowed a fresh look at western intellectual history, both in terms of the radical divisions within the Christian community and the diversity of religious life. A most important insight in this new view of western history has been the definition of western Esotericism and the various esoteric perspectives that were offered as alternatives to orthodox Christianity through the centuries (Faivre 1994). Western Esotericism can be traced to the various Gnostic groups of the second century of our Common Era and to various groups


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that emerged through the first millennia of the Christian Era (such as the Manicheans and Bogomils). Prior to the break up of western Christianity at the time of the Reformation, the history of these groups is fragmented, as they were frequently suppressed out of existence, and the relationship of various esoteric currents and groups to one another remains a matter of intense debate. However, beginning with the emergence of Christian Kabbalism during the Reformation, there has been an unbroken presence of different esoteric currents that was spread in the writings of outstanding proponents, such as Paracelsus (1493–1541) and Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), and by a handful of organisations, such as the original Rosicrucian groups formed in the seventeenth century and through speculative Freemasonry, that emerged to prominence in the eighteenth century. During the Enlightenment, Esotericism warred with the new science, the latter challenging traditional occult notions just as it did religious ones. However, in the wake of the Enlightenment and contemporaneous with the rise of science and technology, a new form of Esotericism emerged with several trained scientists—the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1733–1815) and Swedish metallurgist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)—taking the lead in articulating its perspective. Much of the older Esoteric thought (at least in its popular manifestations) died with the Enlightenment, but we now can trace the steps by which a new ‘scientific’ Esotericism was born through the nineteenth century. The post-Enlightenment occult revival culminated in the formation of a spectrum of new organisations that went under names such as the First Church of Christ, Scientist, the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the National Spiritualist Association, to mention only a few of the more prominent. Through the nineteenth century, a number of outstanding thinkers would supply the intellectual dimension of the now rapidly growing tradition. Building on Mesmer and Swedenborg would be writers such as Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803), Eliphas Levi (1810–75), Pascal Beverly Randolph (1825–75), Helena Blavatsky (1831–91), Emma Hardinge Britten (1823–99), and Gérard Encasse (1865–1916). These thinkers operated on a spectrum between those like Franz von Baader (1765–1841) who tried to emphasise the similarity of Esoteric thought with Christianity, to Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), president of Theosophical Society, who formally converted to Buddhism. While having many differences, the modern Esoteric thinkers tended to agree on several points that distinguished them from orthodox

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Christians. First, they tended to view God primarily in impersonal terms rather than as a Father. In speaking of the Divine, they were more comfortable with ideas of principle and law, rather than love and community. Also, the Divine was ultimately so transcendent as to be unknowable. Hence, on a practical level, they shifted the emphasis away from God and possible interaction with Him/Her/It to the beings that inhabited the realms that were located between this lower physical world and the ultimate Divine reality. These beings went under a variety of names from gods/goddesses to angels to spirits to Ascended Masters. They also emphasised the means by which we could interact with these realms either by visiting them (astral travel), communicating with their inhabitants (channelling/mediumship, meditation), or controlling them (magic). As it developed in the latter-half of the nineteenth century, Esotericism was recast in light of Newtonian science and its emphasis on natural law and Darwinian evolution. One can see both operating in the “Declaration of Principles” adopted in 1899 by the National Spiritualist Association, which affirmed that “the phenomena of Nature, both physical and spiritual, are the expression of Infinite Intelligence” and that living in accord with such expression constitutes true religion. The tiny Esoteric community expanded internationally as a succession of popular movements swept across the western world. Enthusiasm for Swedenborg’s thought led to the founding of the Church of the New Jerusalem. Then the Magnetist movement introduced the idea of a subtle power that underlay and gave life to the cosmos. The direct apprehension of that power is possibly the most commonly shared experience within the larger Esoteric community. The Magnetist movement gave way to Spiritualism, which became the seed ground for both Theosophy and Christian Science. As Theosophy grew, it also divided into numerous factions. At the same time, it provided initial training for a host of new teachers who would go on to found their own movements, most prominently Guy W. Ballard (1878–1939) and Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949). Christian Science would give birth to New Thought that in typical fashion also divided into a spectrum of denominations from the very Christian-oriented Unity School to Religious Science, which stripped itself of uniquely Christian language. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Western Esotericism, heretofore carried by a relatively small number of organisations, developed numerous organisational expressions that represented the


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differing currents of Esoteric thought. Through the 1880s and 1890s, these organisations made a significant leap forward in opening space in western culture for occult thought. During the first seven decades of the twentieth century, we can now trace the growth of the Esoteric community as each of its major components spread across North America and western Europe. Spiritualism, for example, had jumped the Atlantic and would enjoy notable success in Great Britain and France. From its headquarters in India, Theosophy established centres in all the major European cities. Rosicrucianism flourished through a variety of independent groups, and the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis would grow into possibly the largest Esoteric group in the world. Alice Bailey’s Arcane School spread through the English-speaking world, and following the death of its founder, gave birth to several dozen new groups. The “I AM” Religious Activity founded by Guy Ballard also parented numerous groups, among them several 1950s flying saucer groups. The majority of the several hundred splinter groups that formed out of the relatively few Esoteric groups that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century were built around what today we call channelling. Within Spiritualism, channelling was called mediumship. Madame Blavatsky received her monumental work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), from the Mahatmas. Alice Bailey served as the spokesperson for Djwhal Khul, the Tibetan Adept. Guy Ballard was the messenger of St Germain, Jesus and a host of Ascended Masters. George King, George Van Tassell, and Truman Betherum received communications from various inhabitants of the flying saucers who seemed remarkably similar to the Theosophical masters (Bjorling 1992). The orientation to channelling, to some extent, also accounts for the continued splintering of the Esoteric community. As adherents to various movements emerge as channels, they tend to leave (or be pushed out of) the group in which they discovered their channelling abilities and found a new community constructed around their immediate experience. The orientation of most modern Esoteric groups upon a single channeller and her/his channelled information from otherwise hidden realms also accounts for another dominant attribute of the esoteric tradition, its tendency toward ahistoricity. Esoteric groups lack a sense of history. History tends to begin anew for the participant with the contact that s/he or a particular teacher makes with the higher invisible realms, and all that preceded that contact is dismissed as irrelevant. There is little appreciation by most teachers of participating in the flow of a

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stream of belief and practice that originated in the ancient past or having received their overall worldview from more mundane pre-existing sources such as a previous generation of teachers. The esoteric community also supported and nurtured all the various forms of the divinatory arts. Through Protestantism and then the Enlightenment, the older forms of divination were dealt an almostfatal double blow. Many went out of existence altogether and others almost disappeared. However, astrology began a comeback through the nineteenth century as a set of stargazers learned the language of astronomy and mathematics and integrated the evermore-exacting measurements of planetary and stellar movements in preparing horoscopes for their clients. On the heels of astrology, palmistry and Tarot card-reading found new life. Palmistry found its scientific anchor in medical and anthropological studies of physiological variations, and the acceptance of fingerprinting as a police tool. The Tarot had been integrated with Kabbalistic thought by Eliphas Levi and became an integral part of the magical system of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Numerology found new life in the scientific quest to quantify all data. While many of the early attempts to relate Esoteric thought and practice to science may seem naïve to us today, they were quite in keeping with the spirit of the times and paralleled similar efforts in the Christian community to incorporate insights from biology, psychology, and sociology. Just as the Christian dialogue with science has reached new levels of sophistication decade by decade, so has that within the Esoteric community. The point of this brief excursion into history is to emphasise that as the 1970s began, a healthy, if relatively small, community, the product of the various currents of Western Esotericism, had spread across the West. It was present in all the major urban centres with particular strength in places such as Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, Milan and Geneva (site of the European headquarters of the Arcane School). What would become the New Age movement was born within a select number of Esoteric groups and would first broadcast its message to this community of Western Esotericists. The New Age spread quickly because there already existed an audience who had accepted the basic worldview upon which the New Age movement was constructed and who were open to the new vision that it brought.


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So What’s New About the New Age? Twentieth century Esoteric thought had been graced with a sense of optimism. Though small by the world’s standards, it exuded a belief that its day had come. Christianity had begun as a very small community in the Mediterranean basin, and had subsequently enjoyed two millennia of success. But its day was over, and at the beginning of the new century many were confident that they were watching its death throes. Esoteric teachings would now arise to take its place. One symbol of that shift from the older Christian era was the arrival of a new Saviour figure. That idea especially came to the fore in the Theosophical Society during the presidency of Annie Besant, who placed her faith in Jiddu Krishnamurti as the vehicle of the World Saviour. Her vision crashed to the ground when in 1929 Krishnamurti resigned his exalted state. Subsequent attempts to name a new Messiah and prepare a community to receive him would lead to the current effort of Benjamin Crème to make us pay attention to Maitreya (a Buddhist figure that had been united with Jesus in Theosophical thought). A second symbol of hope had been the Aquarian Age. The idea that humanity was entering a new astrological age symbolised by Aquarius somewhat paralleled the idea of a coming Messiah. As the new Saviour signalled the end of the reign of Christianity, so the coming Aquarian Age would supersede the Piscean Age, symbolised by the movement that had taken a fish as its symbol. The New Age movement would begin with a variation on the hope for the coming Aquarian Age. When initially announced in the mid 1970s, the New Age was seen as a vision of a coming new era defined by the transformation of our broken society—characterised by poverty, war, racism, etc.—into a united community of abundance, peace, brotherly love, etc. The energy to make the change, which, it was believed would occur over next generation, was a new release of cosmic energy. This influx of cosmic energy was caused by (or at least signalled by) the changing stellar configuration at the end of the twentieth century. The role of work was less well understood about the original vision of the New Age as articulated by David Spangler, the movement’s primary architect/theoretician. For the New Age to appear, groups of people would have to receive the cosmic energy and actively redirect it to their neighbours and an ever-increasing population of people would have to unite their efforts to create the coming New Age (Spangler 1976).

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The New Age vision could be seen as a positive progressive millennialism. It offered to the larger occult community the hope that early in the twenty-first century, a new society dominated by occult wisdom would arise. It is this single idea that gave the movement its name and proved powerful enough to energise previously existing Spiritualist, New Thought and Theosophical adherents to work together, and to bring large numbers of people with no previous relationship to the occult to their cause. As the movement progressed, Spangler’s simple idea, that the New Age would soon arise as energised people worked for it, came under some scrutiny. Through the 1980s, people were aware that in spite of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people identifying with it, they were still a miniscule segment of the whole. They might constitute the largest segment of the alternative religious communities in the West, but were still small compared to, for example, contemporaneous Christian revival movements. They seemed to be making little impact upon the growing forces of secularisation. While Christian groups were building multiple cable television networks, the New Age had only a minimal presence in either television or radio. Also, while possessing global aspirations, New Age leaders were very wary of building global institutions, or for that matter, any organisations that had the power to bring about the changes they sought. Sociologically, their organisational phobia operated as a built-in self-limiting mechanism. The New Age would not come by any ordinary means. Then how? One writer, Ken Keyes, drawing on what we now know to be a false report of what some anthropologists had reportedly seen while observing monkeys on an isolated Japanese island, suggested that if we could assemble a representative sample of the population who possessed a better, higher idea, then that idea would as if by magic quickly spread through the general population. If a critical mass of people who possessed, for example, a peace consciousness could be assembled, then the idea who explode around the world. Keyes’ idea, was spread in a small booklet called The Hundredth Monkey (1982), of which more than a million copies were printed and distributed between 1982 and 1984. It would lead to a variety of mass events, the most famous and successful being the Harmonic Convergence of 1987 when New Agers gathered at selected sacred sites around the world. Those calling for the gatherings looked for a symbolic 144,000 who would be the critical mass needed for a collective shift in consciousness


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on the planet. The Harmonic Convergence would turn out to be the largest single coordinated event expressive of the New Age. On a lesser note, the progressive millennialism of the majority of New Agers was challenged by several more classic apocalyptic visions. For example, Ruth Montgomery, whose series of books of channelled material were best-selling New Age titles, offered a vision of widespread destruction as the instrument pushing the New Age to the fore. In her book, Aliens Among Us (1985), she suggested that a Golden Age would only be realised following a massive shift of the Earth’s magnetic poles that she predicted would occur in 1999. The pole shift would destroy civilisation as we know it (along with a third of the world’s population). It was her belief that a number of space beings had taken over the bodies of humans, and that these aliens would build the New Age on the ruins of the old. By 1999 Montgomery’s prediction had long since been discarded. Whatever the mechanism of its arrival, the New Age transformation of the whole society would be heralded by the personal transformation of individuals and their adoption of a life-style of continued transformation into a total spiritual being. Such transformed people would provide the leadership for the coming New Age. Questions naturally arise, of what does such transformation consist, and how may it be obtained, and how may transformation be sustained? These questions were answered in a multitude of ways; however, some general directions were offered. For some, transformation begins with physical or psychological healing. New Age literature has abundant examples of such healings, and the stories follow much the same spectrum from the mundane to the spectacular that are found in Roman Catholic and Pentecostal literature. (I am currently monitoring a colleague’s research into stories from a ‘New Age’ community in the state of Washington that has produced a particularly rich set of healing stories.) For others, possibly the majority, transformation began with a spiritual awakening and/or the adoption of a radically new worldview. These accounts are very similar to Christian stories of conversion and mystical encounters. New Age groups provided a social context promoting transformative experiences and provided the means by which these could be facilitated. Across the movement, the initially transformed individual could find a range of what were termed ‘tools of transformation’. For example, for those suffering from various forms of physical and mental problems,

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the movement offered a range of alternative therapies. These included various alternative medicines (homeopathy, naturopathy), body work (chiropractic, massage), diets (vegetarianism), and psychotherapies ( Jungian, past life therapy). These therapies, led by professionals who were seeking wider recognition within the larger society, evolved into a parallel and overlapping movement, the holistic health movement, which sought legitimisation of these different therapies with government and medical authorities. The heart of the New Age has been interaction around the different tools of spiritual transformation. Organisations great and small invited participation in a spectrum of spiritual practices designed to produce altered states of consciousness that are the precondition for a variety of unusual spiritual experiences. These tools ranged from the ingestion of psychedelic substances, at one end of the spectrum, to kundalini yoga, intense breathing exercises, and chanting, to the most popular single tool, meditation. These psychoactive practices provided most people with a more intense spiritual experience than that available in the average synagogue or church service. The movement also provided mediated experiences for those who for whatever reason wished to have more content in their spiritual life than that provided by their own spiritual highs produced by meditation and yoga. Channels and those who practice the various older occult arts—such as astrology, Tarot, and palmistry—provide such mediated experiences. For those who have made their own initial contacts with spiritual reality through meditation, a broader picture of the spiritual world and some guidance in spiritual development can be added by sitting at the foot of a channeller, who is in contact with evolved spiritual beings. These evolved beings are considered to speak authoritatively about the larger spiritual world, in which they reputedly reside, and provide overall spiritual guidance for the believer. One alternative teaching accepted by most New Agers is a belief in reincarnation. For those who need more immediate insight about a very personal or particular problem, the old divinatory arts are readily available and appear actually to have been one of the first New Age practices to be accepted. Once we began surveying the public in the 1970s, we discovered that upwards of 20 to 30 per cent of Westerners had a positive attitude toward astrology. While it utilised and promoted the older forms of occult practice, the New Age at the same time had a profound effect upon them. It changed them from simple divinatory arts into tools of transformation.


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The change is not simply cosmetic. For example, astrology was lifted out of the older deterministic context in which it had previous resided and placed in an open system. Rather than going to an astrologer to divine the future, astrology is now used as a tool in self-understanding. Rather than show what will necessarily occur, one’s fate in the stars, one now learns about talents, potentials, and auspicious forces in the psyche, which may be utilised in creating one’s future. Mediums, that used to make contact with deceased relatives, are now approached for guidance on significant life decisions. The New Age in effect transformed the whole occult world. It also gave occultism an entirely new and positive image in society and to did away with popular notions tying it to Satanism and black magic. It is significant that we no longer talk about the occult, but about the New Age. At the same time it is significant that we identify the New Age as another competing religious system, not the special world of anti-Christian activity. However, in spite of its success, by the end of the 1980s, the New Age had come to an end as the vision upon which it had been built dissolved back into the ethers from which it had emerged. The death of the New Age was not a spectacular event and it was several years before its obituary was written and eulogies delivered. The Death of the New Age The New Age movement had received a significant boost in the fall of 1987, only weeks after the Harmonic Convergence, when actress Shirley MacLaine’s autobiographical book, Out on a Limb (1983), was brought into millions of American homes via television. The best-selling book had described her entrance into the New Age and the two-part made-for-television movie vividly portrayed all of her psychic adventures including a memorable out-of-the-body experience. MacLaine went on to teach a set of well-attended and expensive New Age classes, the income which was used to set up a still vital New Age village at Crestone, Colorado. However, even MacLaine could not relieve the general feeling that signs of the transition into the New Age had failed to appear. The first widespread admission of the loss of the New Age vision occurred in 1988. In the spring, without significant fanfare, a number of prominent spokespersons of the movement, seemingly without prior consultation

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with each other, published statements confessing their loss of belief that the New Age was imminent. No less a personage than David Spangler, the person who had originally projected the vision of a New Age authored several articles announcing his loss of faith. Not long afterwards, the bottom fell out of the crystal market, and prices dropped radically as investors tried to recover part of their loss. Possibly the most visible sign of the demise of the movement was the disappearance of references to a ‘New Age’ in the literature that continued to be put out by former New Agers. By 1990 it was noticeable in the United States that the spirit had departed and that disappointed believers were looking for a new direction. Having missed the demise of the New Age, scholars also failed to document the ferment accompanying the revision of the New Age worldview. However, in hindsight, we now see that it progressed in very typical fashion, and can be fruitfully compared to the Millerite movement. In the 1830s William Miller announced that Christ would return in 1843. Christ did not return, and several immediate attempts were made to adjust his calculation and suggest that he was off by six months or a year. However, when 1844 passed with no visible Christ, a wave of disappointment swept through the movement that had spread across North America. While a few people, including Miller himself, abandoned their faith, the great majority sought for the kernel of truth in what Miller and his colleagues had taught. They were not ready to simply abandon the new life they had found. Over the next two decades various segments of the community suggested different courses of action. One part of the community persisted in revising Miller’s calendar and projecting new dates for Christ’s appearance. As each date failed, a new denomination emerged as part of the community abandoned date-setting. While most of these groups remain small and unknown outside of the United States, one, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, has become an organisation of some global significance. A second part of the Millerite community claimed that Miller was essentially correct. In 1844, Christian had indeed taken the first step in his reappearance on Earth. He had left heaven, but had been delayed with a task that had to be completed on the way to Earth, the cleansing of a heavenly sanctuary. Once that task is completed, in the very near future, He will visibly appear. The Seventh-day Adventists adopted this view and gradually settled into a more conventional church life, also in the twentieth century becoming a world church of note (Nichol 1944).


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In the wake of the disappointment of the non-appearance of the New Age, through the 1990s, we can see the same two reactions to the disappointment that occurred among the Millerites in the 1840s. It is estimated that three- to five-million people identified with the New Age during the 1980s, the great majority of them being new adherents, not previously identified either with Theosophy, New Thought, astrology, or related phenomena. They did not simply abandon their faith, but looked for ways to cope. At the same time, thousands of people had adopted a New Age career as a channeller, holistic health practitioner, publisher/editor/writer, or workshop teacher. The disintegration of the movement would place all of these people out of work. They had every reason to perpetuate the movement. An immediate reorientation for New Age believers had been offered by Spangler, New Age publisher Jeremy Tarcher, and others in 1988. They suggested that what had held them in the movement through the previous decade of waiting for the New Age to appear had been the personal transformation they had experienced. They now realised that their own personal, spiritual enlightenment and new self-understanding was the valuable asset that they had received from participation in the movement, ultimately of such worth as to make the loss of the New Age vision of relative unimportance. Even though there was little reason to believe that a New Age would appear as a social phenomenon, there was every reason to continue personal processes leading to healing, awareness, and mystical union. The great majority of professionals in the movement were practitioners of various occult arts concerned with facilitating individual growth and healing. They appeared quite willing to fall back into older occult metaphysical systems that utilised more spatial metaphors rather than evolutionary historical ones. At the personal level, the appropriation of psychic experience was very like psychic awakenings at any point in time. It is apparent in the post New Age era that many are content with this approach. It is also apparent that as occurred in the post-Millerite era, new leaders not ready to abandon millennialism in toto have arisen to suggest new directions. Post-New Age Millennialism Among the more prominent new date-setting schemes is that being promoted by Solara, a guru/teacher now residing in Montana. She appeared in the late 1980s with a new post-Harmonic Convergence

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programme that would lead people, not into the New Age but to Ascension.1 Ascension is one new goal symbol replacing the New Age in the minds of post-New Age believers. She called people’s attention to a new symbol, “11:11”. She described Eleven-eleven as the insertion point of the Greater Reality [God] into human existence. As she called attention to 11:11, people began to see it everywhere, from calendars (11 November) to digital clocks. When 11:11 appears to you, she suggested, it is a divine wake-up call to your soul. The 11:11 symbol also called attention to a massive event of importance to all humanity. The year 1992, Solara asserted, would launch a 21-year period during which humanity could take a step forward in evolution, a step into the Greater Reality. People could move from entrapment in the illusion of duality and ascend into Oneness. According to Solara (in her several books beginning with The Star-Borne: A Remembrance for the Awakened Ones [1989]), more than 144,000 people worldwide joined with her and some 500 followers gathered at the Great Pyramid in Egypt at 11:11pm (Greenwich Mean Time) in activities coordinated to open a Doorway or Bridge between our world of duality and the Greater Reality. During the period between 11 January 1992 and 31 December 2011, these two realms will overlap. Within the Doorway, there are eleven Gates, similar to locks on a canal. By passing through each gate one is gradually lifted to a higher level of consciousness. Gates will open successively through the years of the open 11:11 Doorway. Each gate symbolises a specific identifiable change in one’s individual consciousness. Upon entering the first gate, which was made possible on 1 January 1992, believers experienced a healing of our hearts (emotions). The second gate was symbolic of a fusion of our deepest desires with our spiritual aspirations. Its opening on 5 June 1993 was accompanied by a massive coordinated global ritual. The third Gate was opened with three distinct rituals in 1997 and the fourth Gate in 1999. The remaining openings are spread out over the fist decade of the new century. Many of the people who have adopted the 11:11 symbol are associated directly with Solara and her Star-Borne Unlimited organisation. However, after learning of the 11:11 programme, many have assumed a role in the 11:11 program in independent parallel organisations such

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http://www.nvisible.com


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as, the Star-Esseenia Temple of Ascension Mastery,2 headquartered in San Pedro, California; The 11:11 Spiritual Guardians,3 or Quantum Awakening4 in Dandridge, Tennessee, to name but a very few. Through the Internet, the 11:11 concept has spread internationally and provided an alternative vision for those who gave up on the New Age. Ascension As noted above, through the 1990s ‘Ascension’ was a popular term superseding ‘New Age’ as a label around which former New Agers could reoriented their hopes of the future. Like ‘New Age’, Ascension is a symbol to which many conflicting images can be attached; however, the new term also indicates a subtle but very real shift in thinking (Stone 1994; Stubbs 1992; Nobles 1993). As New Age was basically a collective symbol indicating vast changes in society, but carrying implications for the individual, Ascension is the opposite, basically a personal symbol, with possible broader social implications. In terms of the occult world, it emerged early in the New Thought movement and then was adopted by Guy Ballard (King 1935) as a major emphasis of the “I AM” Religious Activity. In Ballard’s Christianised Theosophy, there was little place for resurrection since embodied existence was a lesser state, and the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection were largely ignored in favour of a total focus on his Ascension. The goal of “I AM” practice is the gradual raising of the consciousness and refining of the body so that one can escape death and consciously ascend. It was assumed within the “I AM” Movement that Ascension would be limited to those who engaged in the spiritual exercises that Ballard advocated. However, through the “I AM” and the organisations that grew out of it, such as the Church Universal and Triumphant, teachings on Ascension entered the larger occult community. It is of particular importance that in the 1950s, several people integrated “I AM” teachings with interest in flying saucers. Several groups channelling messages from a reputed hierarchy of extraterrestrials, provided a new conduit for occult teachings in general, and the idea of Ascension in particular, to spread among the general public.

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http://www.star-esseenia.org http://1111spiritguardians.com http://www.thequantumawakening.com

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Through the 1980s, channels oriented to both the Ascended Masters and extraterrestrials became a defining element of the New Age. The original New Age vision had been derived from and shaped by channelled messages, and thus it is not surprising that channellers would take the lead in redefining the post-New Age. The most prominent group of channellers who have come to the fore in elevating the idea of Ascension are those loosely associated with the periodical Sedona: Journal of Emergence. This magazine began in 1989 in Sedona, Arizona, a revered location among New Agers as a sacred site of global significance. During the decade many New Age practitioners had relocated to Sedona, and the magazine presented their common message (Dongo 1988; Dannelley 1991; Sutphen 1986). Initially, Ascension is a personal goal. In the “I AM” teachings, it is a sign of personal accomplishment. Ballard believed that individuals could ascend instead of die, and included an episode in one of his early books describing an ascension he claimed to have witnessed. This belief led to the adoption of vegetarianism and the living of a celibate life as a necessary discipline preparing the body for the Ascension process. Ballard’s own premature death led to a revision of that belief. Now, almost all “I AM” groups teach that Ascension is of the soul at the time of bodily death. As Ascension teachings spread in the late 1980s, teachers emphasised the soul’s self-understanding, spiritual awakening, and personal development, all of which led to an attunement with the cosmos. But channellers also began to suggest the possibility of a global or planetary Ascension. Integrated through the many and variant offerings from the hundred or more channellers who contribute to the Sedona Journal, is a belief that a large group of people (though certainly a tiny minority of the world’s population) are in the midst of a significant transformation of consciousness. The transformation is described variously, but essentially will lift them to a new way of seeing the world in its essential unifying and loving reality. As these people attain this new state they will be a magnet through which the whole world will ascend, eventually come to the truth of this higher consciousness. What is evident in this post-New Age message is the lack of a timetable by which the planetary ascension will occur, though everywhere there is the hint and hope that it will occur in this century. Second, there is the realisation that for the present only a relative few will be engaged in activity focused upon their Ascension, though the work of this group will ultimately have planetary implications. What one finds


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in the post-New Age is the successful shift of those who abandoned the millennialism of the 1980s to a post-millennial perspective which has now projected the long-term gradual spread of the higher consciousness that has been the perennial goal of occult activity. This transition from the ‘premillennialism’ of the New Age to the contemporary Ascension/spiritual emergence movement that has followed it, is nowhere better demonstrated than in the international bestselling books by James Redfield. Redfield, a psychological counsellor, had been attracted to the New Age during the 1980s, and became an avid reader of New Age and human potentials books. By the end of the 1980s he had become so absorbed in this material that he quit work and concentrated upon creating a synthesis of everything he had learned. The result was a novel, The Celestine Prophecy, self-published in 1992. The book would win no awards for either plot or character development, but was a hit with people previously attracted to the New Age. Picked up by a major publisher, it soon topped the News York Times non-fiction bestseller list, and was subsequently translated into a number of languages. Sequels appeared annually through the remainder of the decade. In The Celestine Prophecy (1994), Redfield laid out his perception that a growing (if unspecified) number of people are engaging in a new spiritual awakening that is permeating the population. A critical mass of people are coming to view their life as a spiritual journey. They are gaining some psychic awareness and making contact with the universal energy that undergirds the universe. At some time in the near future all of these people will gain a collective understanding of what is happening to them and arrive at a common vision of the course of humankind in this century. Eventually whole groups of people will experience the higher vibratory states that others call Ascension (though Redfield himself does not use the term). In his second novel, The Tenth Insight (1996), Redfield poses the goal of spiritually evolved individuals cooperating on the creation of a new global spiritual culture. Conclusion Through the 1990s, what was called the New Age movement in the 1980s made a transition from the premillennial vision of an imminent golden age of peace and light to a postmillennial vision of a small group of people operating as the harbinger of the future evolution or

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Ascension of humanity into a higher life. The New Age movement led to a dramatic growth of the older occult/metaphysical community, recast the older occult practices in the light of contemporary psychology, and created a much more positive image for occultism in western culture. The transition of the 1990s, in the wake of the disappointment that the New Age had failed to make an appearance, has allowed the gains of the 1980s to be consolidated. Under a variety of names, the older occult community has been established as an alternative faith community (or more precisely, a set of alternative communities) which share a common hope for their own prosperity in the twenty-first century as well as their meaningful role in the evolution progress of humanity. The New Age may have died, but the community it brought together continues to grow as one of the most important minority faith communities in the West. While showing no signs of assuming the dominant religious role in the West, it is reclaiming and resacralising a small part of the secularised world. In the future, it will add its strength to those causes that it shares with other faith communities (peace, environmentalism) and, as the religious community becomes ever-more pluralistic, have an increasing role in inter-religious dialogue and cooperation. References Amoto, J.Y. & N.L. Geisler, 1989. Infiltration of the New Age. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers. Anonymous, 1991. The Sedona Guide Book of Channeled Wisdom. Sedona, AZ: Light Technology Publishing. Balmforth, D.N., 1996. New Age Menace: The Secret War against the Followers of Christ. Bountiful, UT: Horizon Publishers. Basil, R., 1988. Not Necessarily the New Age: Critical Essays. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. Bjorling, J., 1992. Channeling: A Bibliographic Exploration. New York: Garland Publishing. Brown, M.F., 1997. The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dannelley, R., 1991. Sedona Power Spot, Vortex, and Medicine Wheel Guide. Sedona, AZ: R. Dannelley with the Cooperation of the Vortex Society. Dongo, T., 1988. The Mysteries of Sedona. Sedona, AZ: Color Pro Graphics. Faivre, A., 1994. Access to Western Esotericism. Albany, NY: SUNY. ——, 2000. Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism. Albany, NY: SUNY. Faivre, A. & J. Needleman, eds, 1992. Modern Esoteric Spirituality. New York: Crossroad. Gardner, M., 1988. The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.


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Gordon, H., 1988. Channeling into the New Age: The Teachings of Shirley MacLaine and Other Such Gurus. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. Hanegraaff, W.J., 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: Brill. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement: Celebrating the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Hoyt, K. and the Spiritual Counterfeit Project, 1987. The New Age Rage. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company. King, G. [pseudonym of G.W. Ballard], 1935. The Magic Presence. Chicago: Saint Germain Press Klimo, J.K., 1998. Channeling: Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Kyle, R., 1995. The New Age Movement in American Culture. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Lewis, J.R. & J.G. Melton, eds, 1992. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany, NY: SUNY. Marrs, T, 1988. Mysteries of the New Age: Satan’s Design for World Domination. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books. Melton J.G., J.R. Lewis & A. Kelly, eds, 1990. The New Age Encyclopedia. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Company. ——, eds, 1991. New Age Almanac. Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press. MSI, 1995. Ascension. Edmonds, WA: SFA Publications. Nichol, F.D., 1944. The Midnight Cry. Tacoma Park, MD: Review and Herald. Nobles, A., 1993. Get Off the Karmic Wheel with Conscious Ascension and Rejuvenation. Malibu, CA: Light Transformation Center. Redfield, J., 1994. The Celestine Prophecy. New York: Warner Books. ——, 1996. The Tenth Insight. New York: Warner Books. ——, 1997. The Celestine Vision: Living the New Spiritual Awareness. New York: Warner Books. ——, 1999. The Secret of Shambhala: Search for the Eleventh Insight. New York: Warner Books. Saliba, J., 1999. Christian Responses to the New Age Movement: A Critical Assessment. London/ New York: Geoffrey Chapman. Shermer, M., 1997. Why People Believe Weird Things. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company. Solara, 1989. The Star-Borne: A Remembrance for the Awakened Ones. Charlottesville, VA: Starborne Unlimited. ——, 1996. How to Live Large on a Small Planet. Whitefish, MT: Starborne Unlimited. Spangler, D., 1976. Revelation: The Birth of a New Age. San Francisco: Rainbow Bridge. ——, 1977. Towards a Planetary Vision. Forres, Scotland: Findhorn Foundation. ——, 1980. The New Age Vision. Forres, Scotland: Findhorn Publications. Stone, J.D., 1994. The Complete Ascension Manual: How to Achieve Ascension in This Lifetime. Sedona, AZ: Light Technology Publishing. Stubbs, T., 1992. An Ascension Handbook: Channeled Material by Serapis. Livermore, CA: Oughten House Publications. Sutphen, D., 1986. Sedona: Psychic Energy Vortexes. Malibi, CA: Valley of the Sun Publishing.

NEW AGE AND SOCIAL-SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

NEW AGE AND SOCIAL-SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH Because it is an amorphous movement without clear boundaries, the New Age presents unusual obstacles to attempts at measuring the phenomena. In “Quantitative Studies of New Age: A Summary and Discussion,” Liselotte Frisk systematically surveys not only existing quantitative studies, but also other kinds of surveys containing specific items that might be useful to researchers. Her overview is especially sensitive to some of the problems faced by efforts to design adequate measures of ‘New Age’. Is involvement in the New Age correlated with certain personality traits that set New Agers apart from other people? In “The Psychology of the New Age,” Miguel Farias and Pehr Granqvist survey their own empirical research and the research of others on this topic. The picture that emerges from these studies is not only that movement participants have a distinctive psychological profile, but also that this profile differs significantly from the profile not only of non-religious people, but also of participants in traditional religions. Departing from traditional church-sect-cult typologies, contemporary sociologists approach the New Age in terms of a ‘network’ or ‘web’ model. In “Producing and Consuming New Age Spirituality: The Cultic Milieu and the Network Paradigm,” Adam Possamaï adapts prior theorising about the structure of the cultic milieu to propose a model for understanding affinities within New Age networks. This model utilises the audience cult/client cult/cult movement distinction for the producers of New Age spirituality, and puts forward a distinction between illumination, instrumentalilty and entertainment to describe the differing motives of the consumers of alternative spirituality. Many outside observers have characterised the New Age as an example of the demise of community in the contemporary world. In “New Age Diffuse Communities,” Dominic Corrywright argues that, in fact, the New Age embodies new forms of community that he refers to as web-communities. After analysing the notion of ‘community’, Corrywright uses a case study of the PoV to provide some concrete examples of community within a New Age organisation.

QUANTITATIVE STUDIES OF NEW AGE: A SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION Liselotte Frisk Quantitative methods handle information by converting it to numbers and figures. Typically, quantitative studies handle many units of data. Quantitative data could, compared to qualitative data, seem bare and shallow. Qualitative methods, on the other hand, gather thorough and deep information about a limited number of subjects. Ideally, qualitative and quantitative methods complement each other, as they generate different kinds of knowledge. One advantage with quantitative methods is that they allow us to generalise from the groups or individuals investigated: the data can be constructed to be representative for larger populations. Another advantage, compared to qualitative studies, is that quantitative methods allow analysis of relationships between different variables. Statistical techniques, for example factor analysis or similar methods, can be used to inform a totally different order of understanding than is possible with qualitative methods. Quantitative studies may use different sources of data: various forms of records or statistical material, documents, or live observations. The most common data source for quantitative studies is, however, survey studies such as questionnaires or structured interviews. This chapter will summarise and discuss quantitative studies of New Age. New Age is a relatively young research field, and quantitative studies have, for reasons discussed below, often not been the first choice for researchers of New Age. However scarce, I have identified three different kinds of quantitative studies to be common in New Age contexts, and will review, compare and discuss the most important studies in each group. Firstly, there are surveys distributed to individuals identified as being New Age-oriented, aimed at investigating beliefs, practices, attitudes, background or other variables. Secondly, there are studies using other kinds of material, for example observations of the number of New Age participants and church participants in a certain town, or content analysis of books or newspapers to find out to what degree they may be

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New Age-oriented. Thirdly, there are surveys intended to be representative for whole populations. These studies could be used for identifying, among other things, New Age orientations, New Age believers or New Age practitioners, although this is often not the primary goal. I also intend to identify and discuss the problems with existing quantitative studies of New Age, and discuss possibilities for future research. Surveys of New Age Individuals There have been a few quantitative surveys of individuals identified as being New Age-oriented. The most well known study in this group was conducted by Stuart Rose in 1994–95. He distributed 5,350 questionnaires to subscribers of the widest-selling New Age magazine in the UK, Kindred Spirit, with each questionnaire containing 205 questions. Nine questions were open-ended and the rest were tick-box type with preset answers. Often, however, space was allowed to insert individual answers, making also qualitative interpretation and categorisation possible, the result then being coded for statistical analysis. The response rate was 17%, with 908 questionnaires returned, which is quite a respectable return. The purpose of the study was “to put a finger directly on the pulse of what the New Age is all about” (Rose 2005:9–11). The questions dealt with the respondents’ views on New Age and spirituality; use of certain practices like meditation, acupuncture, channelling, or healing; use of astrology and experiences of paranormal phenomena; participation in New Age workshops, lectures, festivals or retreats; subjective positive or negative changes following the adoption of New Age ideas and practices; ecological awareness and political ideas; use of drugs; teachings, ideas or books which had influenced the respondents; and the respondents’ gender, marital status, age and occupation (Rose 2005:355–57). The study has many similarities with another survey conducted in Sweden in 1995 (Frisk 2000; Frisk 2003). A questionnaire was distributed to all people participating in activities arranged by five different New Age groups. These groups were chosen on the ground that their activities scored high in an earlier study investigating what activities were most commonly mentioned in a Swedish New Age magazine (Frisk 1997). The groups chosen centred around channelling, rebirthing, A Course in Miracles, healing and energy work. The questionnaire focused on five

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questions: who is engaged in the New Age environment (gender, age and education); how is one engaged (beliefs and practices); ‘conversion’ (e.g. circumstances at time of first contact with New Age, and parents’ world view or religion); life style (vegetarianism, use of alcohol, tobacco, drugs); and politics and society (e.g. voting in political elections). The response rate varied between 60–85%, depending on the attitude of the workshop leader and his/her willingness to let the research project be presented (Frisk 2003). Like Rose’s questionnaire, the most common type of answer was of the tick-box type with possibilities to add independent answers, with some open-ended questions making some qualitative interpretations possible. In spite of the different conditions of the two studies, several results coincide. Over two thirds in Rose’s study believe that western society is entering a new era (Rose 2005:23), while 69% in the Swedish study believe there is a new age dawning (Frisk 2003:246). 70% in Rose’s study were women (2005:84), 83%1 in the Swedish study (2003:243). Rose finds a male bias towards the practice of meditation and ritual activities, together with social concerns, while there was, in his study, a female bias towards activities to do with healing, divination and bodywork. Women also appeared to be more involved in a greater number of core New Age activities than men (Rose 2005:85). In the Swedish study, women scored much higher on belief questions than men (Frisk 2000:70), and had also tried a lot more of the activities identified as New Age (Frisk 2000:75). Especially, more women had been engaged in healing, channelling, crystal therapy, Reiki, Tarot and affirmation, while there were more men in a largely intellectual activity as A Course in Miracles (Frisk 2000:75). Rose finds that almost 60% of the respondents were in the age group between 35–54 (Rose 2005:87), while Frisk finds that the average age of respondents was 42 years (Frisk 2003:243). Frisk finds that although all kinds of education and professions are represented, there is a small bias towards higher education and professions where higher education is a prerequisite (Frisk 2000:59–60). Rose has similar findings (2005:93). Great similarities were also demonstrated in the frequency of attending New Age events in a 12-month period: 85% of the Swedish respondents participated in workshops twice a year or more seldom (Frisk 2000:76), with 82% in the UK (Rose 2005:101). A difference

1

The rate of women varied in the five different groups from 74 to 97%.

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was found between the two studies concerning participation in lectures, which may be attributable to differences in data collection methods: the Swedish material was gathered from lectures and other activities, but the British material consisted of readers. In Sweden, 47% participated in lectures once a year or more seldom (Frisk 2000:76), and 74% in the UK (Rose 2005:101). Engagement with New Age seemed, therefore, to be mainly private in both studies. Use of drugs seemed to be more frequent in the UK: 38% had used cannabis at some point in their lives (Rose 2005:102), but only 18% in the Swedish material (Frisk 2000:77). Rose finds that 86% of the participants believe that God is mostly present in the New Age ideas and activities (Rose 2005:172), while Frisk finds that 97% believe in either a personal God or a spirit/life force (Frisk 2003:244). A third study comparable to the studies of Rose and Frisk was conducted in 1999 by Dominic Corrywright. Corrywright’s study was primarily qualitative, but also included a questionnaire in addition to participant observation, analysis of literature and interviews. The questionnaire was distributed at one seminar and one workshop, and to readers of a New Age newspaper who in a previous readers’ survey had indicated interest in participating in the research project. The response rate was 50–59%, bringing in altogether 65 questionnaires, of which 60 were included in the database. Some questions were the same as in Rose’s study, and the result of these roughly corresponded to Rose’s results. Some interesting results were that no core set of beliefs could completely define the field of New Age spiritualities (although 82% considered the area of healing and personal growth important), and that only 58% considered the idea of a God or a Goddess important to their spirituality. This latter result is considerably less than in the studies of Rose and Frisk. Corrywright’s sample was too small to allow use of statistical techniques (Corrywright 2003). A fourth study was made by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead in the UK in 2001. They distributed a questionnaire to people active in the holistic spiritual milieu in one town, Kendal, UK. 252 people completed the questionnaire (2005:153). They found that 80% were female (2005:94), 55% were aged between 40 and 59 (2005:107), and 57% had a university or college degree (2005:93). These results coincide with the results of Rose and Frisk. Other questions included which holistic therapies the respondents had tried, and if they considered this to have a spiritual dimension or not; reasons for participating in holistic therapies; belief in for example God, reincarnation, heaven,


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hell, power of prayer, and healing power; definition of spirituality; and spiritual/religious experiences. 43.1% believed humankind is entering a new age of spiritual evolution, 41.9% believed in reincarnation, 57.6% believed in God, 30% in a personal God, 51% in some sort of spirit or life force.2 These figures are lower than for similar questions in the studies of Rose and Frisk, which may be attributable to the fact that people with lower engagement with the New Age participated in the survey. This hypothesis is confirmed in that only about half of the respondents in the Kendal study considered the different New Age activities to have a spiritual dimension.3 This means that many of the respondents may have been involved in these activities for other than spiritual reasons, for example health reasons, and thus did not score higher on typical New Age belief questions. A fifth important study was made by Pehr Granqvist and Berit Hagekull in 2000. They constructed a scale to assess New Age orientation and to test an emotional compensation hypothesis. The study group included 193 participants from upper secondary school classes, Christian youth groups and New Age establishments in Stockholm. Using factor analysis, the New Age orientation scale was shown to be one-dimensional. New Age orientation was also found to be linked to attachment insecurity and emotionally based religiosity, and the writers conclude that attachment theory may make an important contribution to highlight predisposing factors for New Age orientation. Of the New Age sample (50 people), 76% were female, with an average age of 34.9 years. The participants were drawn from vegetarian cafés, alternative bookstores and health medicine centres, assumed to be of interest to individuals exhibiting a significant New Age orientation. The response rate was 83%. The New Age orientation scale was constructed with 22 questions, based on ten partly overlapping content areas: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Intuition as a reliable source of knowledge A belief that a new age is approaching A belief in the efficacy of alternative treatments A belief in parapsychological and occult phenomena An emphasis on personal development and spirituality

These figures indicate that “spirit or life force” was not always interpreted as “God” in this study. The problem with terminology and formulating adequate questions and answer possibilities is further discussed below. 3 www.kendalproject.org.uk. 2

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6. A favourable evaluation of pseudopsychological and pseudophysical jargon 7. An emphasis on nature and cosmos as animate 8. An emphasis on eastern holism, activities, and beliefs 9. A favourable evaluation of religious syncretism and of practices of “forgotten” cultures and traditions 10. An emphasis on being an open seeker. Efforts were made to phrase each statement so that only the most dedicated seekers would agree strongly, distinguishing between those who believed that, for example, acupuncture, using herbs, or psychotherapy may be beneficial, and those who thought that primal and reincarnation therapies and Reiki healing were at least as effective as regular medical treatments; and between those who believed that there might be some truth in the psychoanalytic notion of projection as a defence mechanism, and those who believed that the world is an illusion similar to a projection screen. The response possibilities were six, on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree (Granqvist and Hagekull 2001). A sixth statistical study was made by Daren Kemp, who in 1998–99 investigated three New Age Christian groups in the UK (2003:235). Among other kinds of material, also a postal questionnaire was used (2003:3), with a response rate of nearly 60% (2003:13). The purpose of the study was to find out if there is a movement of New Age Christians. The data confirmed this hypothesis to a great extent, but as the movement was not conscious of itself as a movement, the hypothesis was rejected for the time being (2003:3). The questionnaire—which varied slightly between the groups—included, besides background questions such as age, gender, and education, direct questions about adoption of New Age ideas or practices (for example reincarnation, astrology, and Tarot cards), and also questions about the nature of God and Christianity (2003:223–34). Some questions were copied from Rose’s study. It was concluded that the New Age Christian groups shared many characteristics with New Age groups, although to a lesser degree, and may well be contrasted with the evangelical grouping used as a control group (2003:212). The last study summarised here is that conducted by Michael York on New Age and Neo-Paganism. Michael York distributed in 1990 a questionnaire both to participants in a New Age lecture, and to a few Neo-Pagan groups, with the purpose of developing a profile of New


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Agers and Neo-Pagans respectively. He also had three control groups.4 Questions included the usual background questions, but otherwise mainly centred around attitudes to issues like nuclear energy, abortion, and AIDS, as well as familiarity with and attitudes towards New Age, Neo-Pagan movements and New Religious Movements. The response rate was good, with 45% of the questionnaires to the New Age group returned, a total of 50 questionnaires. As to their profile, 69% of the respondents were aged between 30 and 49, and 71% were female, results which are comparable to the other studies. Asked about their belief in God, 33% believed God to be an impersonal force, 6% a real personality, and as many as 52% marked the possibility of “other” (the remainder marked “don’t know”) (York 1995:179–221). Studies Based on Material other than Individual Questionnaires Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead observed rates of participation in holistic spiritual activities and church worship respectively in the town of Kendal, UK in 2000. As they also needed longitudinal data to test their hypothesis of an on-going spiritual revolution, they used national church statistics for determining earlier participation rates in church worship, and for the holistic spiritual milieu interviews with long-standing participants in this milieu, old brochures and flyers, and a trade phone directory listing. Their conclusion was that in a typical week in 2001 there were five times as many people involved in the congregational domain as there were in the holistic milieu (7.9% against 1.6%). But they suggest that if the holistic milieu continues to grow at the same rate as it has done since 1970, and if the congregational domain continues to decline at the same rate as it has done during the same period, a spiritual revolution will take place within the next 30 years, the holistic milieu becoming larger than the congregational domain (Heelas & Woodhead 2005:33–48). There are also other quantitative studies of religious participation, but where New Age or holistic spirituality was categorised together with New Religious Movements.5 One such study was conducted in 4 The control groups seemed peculiarly chosen: among them a centre for people facing the challenge of AIDS, and a group of ten lawyers plus one non-lawyer husband. 5 Some sociologists do not distinguish between New Age and New Religious Movements, see for example Paul Heelas (1996).

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Sweden in 1999. All known religious and spiritual congregations or groups received a questionnaire6 with the question how many people participated in any worship or social gathering during a specific Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Only 0.3% of all participation visits were visits to New Age or New Religious Movements groups (Skog 2001:21). There are, however, reasons to suspect that not all holistic spiritual groups were sent the questionnaire. For example, no alternative therapeutic groups were involved in the study. Also, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are traditional days of activity for the traditional religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism), but many forms of holistic spiritual activity take place between Monday and Thursday. This would concern, apart from alternative therapy, for example courses in yoga, meditation, or Qi Gong. Another factor to keep in mind, is that one third of the questionnaires sent out to the alternative groups were not returned, for unknown reasons. As the questionnaire was directed towards religious groups, several “spiritual” groups may have found no reason to answer (Frisk 2001). Other studies may also include quantitative data or methods, but not as major parts. One example is Elizabeth Puttick (2005), comparing Mind-Body-Spirit book publishing from 1998 to 2002, exploring the central role of publishing and the media in the recent explosion of holistic ideas and practices into the mainstream. Another is Lars Ahlin (2001), who analysed articles related to New Age in one Swedish national morning newspaper and one weekly magazine from 1975–1995, classifying them in different categories. Surveys of Whole Populations There have not been many national or international studies with the purpose of identifying people with an explicit New Age-orientation. One national survey, representative of the Dutch population, was, however, made in Holland in 1998 by Dick Houtman and Peter Mascini. This study was designed to measure Christian, New Age and non-religious orientation respectively. New Age was operationalised by several variables. The variables were, first, degree of involvement in reincarnation, 6 As the questionnaire was distributed to groups, not to individuals, the study is presented in this section rather than the previous section.


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astrology, New Age, yoga and oriental religions, and degree of agreement with beliefs in holism, spiritual transformation, syncretism and perennialism. Those involved in the first five practices proved to agree most strongly with the other items as well, which suggests that both series of questions seemed to measure roughly the same phenomenon. A second kind of question dealt with beliefs concerning the nature of transcendental consciousness (a personal God, higher force controlling life, don’t know and there is no God or higher force). Christians were expected to choose the first alternative, New Agers the second, and non-religious persons the third and fourth. A third type of question asked about church membership. The respondents were then, based on these three kinds of questions, classified into four religious types: non-religious (35%), Christian (44%), New Age (14%) and a mixed Christian/New Age type (7%) (the last type was excluded from the final analysis). The purpose of the study was to study secularisation and religious change. The conclusions were that there are no indications that the decline of the Christian tradition has been caused by a process of rationalisation, but that decline of the Christian tradition and the growth of non-religiosity as well as New Age are caused by increased levels of individualisation (Houtman & Mascini 2002). Michael Donahue published in 1993 a study intended to investigate the relation of New Age beliefs to the religiosity of Protestant believers in the USA. A survey, measuring a variety of religious, social, personal, and demographic factors, was distributed to nationally representative samples of pastors, coordinators of Christian education, Christian education teachers, adults, and youth in six denominations. The survey also intended to include New Age beliefs. Donahue was, among other things, interested in whether a scale of New Age beliefs could be factor-analytically defined. A total of 561 congregations participated (62% of those invited), and 65% of the randomly chosen adults chose to participate. A total of between 3,450 and 3,500 respondents answered each question, and there were 504 questions. Some questionnaire items were selected as potentially related to a New Age ideology. Donahue gives the examples of: human nature is basically good; I believe in reincarnation; I believe in astrology; through meditation and self-discipline I come to know that all spiritual truth and wisdom is within me; I am in charge of my own life—I can be anything I want to be; it is possible to communicate with people who have died; an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs

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independent of any church. By factor analysis, Donahue showed that there emerged a consistent New Age belief factor, based on these seven belief statements. There was also a question about the relation between God and the world. There were some interesting findings about relations between New Age beliefs and religiosity, for example that a theologically liberal position is associated with these beliefs. Core New Age beliefs such as astrology and reincarnation were infrequently reported (7–9%), but attitudinal statements supportive of New Age ideologies (“human nature is good”, “I am in charge of my own life”, or “all spiritual truth is within me”) were endorsed by nearly a third of the respondents (Donahue 1993). An early investigation of the religious and spiritual lives of the “baby boomers”—the generation born between 1946 and 1964—was made by Wade Clark Roof at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. Not discussing the concept of New Age in itself, Roof, however, showed that exposure to the counterculture (e.g. involvement in drugs, rock concerts and demonstrations) was related to several other items often discussed in connection to New Age. Roof conducted telephone interviews with a representative selection of the American population in four states, and then in-depth interviews with some of the subjects, thus combining quantitative and qualitative methods. The response rate was 60%. Questions included social background, religious participation, moral values, and attitudinal items. Roof cross-tabulated many items in different ways. Roof showed that the religious involvement of the boomers changed drastically over time—as children they were as religious as the generations before them, but in their early twenties the great majority had dropped out of the religious institutions. This phenomenon Roof showed to be related to the degree of exposure to the counterculture. Instead, however, the baby boomers adopted other spiritual paths. 14% practised meditation (increasing to as much as 29% of the better educated), 60% preferred to explore many different religious teachings (69% of the better educated) while 28% preferred to stick to one faith. 26% believed in astrology, and 28% in reincarnation. Those most exposed to the counterculture were far less likely to be conventionally religious—and much more likely to think of themselves as spiritual (Roof 1994). There are also the national market polls in different countries, which sometimes include questions that could be related to New Age. For example, MORI, the British national market poll organisation, in January 2006 found that 28% of the British population believed in


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astrology, 43% in telepathy, 56% in premonition/ESP, 18% in fortune telling/Tarot, and 23% in reincarnation.7 Internationally, in recent decades, two large quantitative studies have been conducted, partly related to religion, spirituality, and moral values, in which a limited number of the questions could relate to core themes of New Age. One such study is the European Values Study, which expanded to the renamed World Values Survey, conducted in 1981, 1990 and 1999/2000 in several countries, making longitudinal and geographical comparisons possible (Halman et al. 2005:11). For example, in Sweden in 1982,8 17.4% believed in reincarnation, increasing in 1990 to 19.8% and in 1999 to 22.3%. In the year 2000, 44.2% of Europeans were found to believe in telepathy, 24.4% in reincarnation, and 19.1% claimed to have a lucky charm (EVS 2000).9 Similarly, the European RAMP study (Religious and Moral Pluralism) in the 1990s (Gustafsson & Pettersson 2000:11–13) had a few questions of interest for our purpose. Examples of questions that could relate to New Age are, for example, questions about reincarnation, belief in horoscope and lucky charms, and one question about spirituality. Not much of the results has yet been published, but the question about reincarnation scores quite low in this study, compared to the EVS study (Barker 2004). The reason for this is further discussed below. Concerning spirituality, 50% of Europeans consider themselves to be a spiritual person. Eileen Barker’s analysis shows that various different things are meant by spirituality (Barker 2004). Problems with Quantitative New Age Studies What is New Age? Who is a New Ager? The basic problem with all studies of New Age is the question of definition, as there is no common agreement about what New Age is. As it is an etic notion (i.e. defined by outsiders rather than insiders), not even self-definition by different individuals or groups could be used as a criterion. Some scholars have focused on one essential trait as the characteristic trait of New Age, e.g. healing (Frisk 1997; York 2005:29),

7 8 9

Statistics taken from www.mori.com/polls/2006/s060117.shtml. Statistics taken from www.worldvaluessurvey.org. Data kindly supplied by professor Thorleif Pettersson, Uppsala University.

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self-spirituality (Heelas 1996), or the literal significance of the concept of New Age, that a new age will be coming (Melton 1988:35–6). New Age has also been likened to a “smorgasbord”, where everyone is free to compose his or her own plate (Frisk 1997). But what is presented on this “smorgasbord” in the first place—what is New Age and what is not—has remained problematic. The studies reviewed in this paper all define and operationalise New Age in different ways. Different questions are asked in different studies, focusing on beliefs and practices concluded by the researcher to be typical for New Age. Michael Donahue is aware of the problem, when he suggests that further research should focus on finding a more cohesive measure of New Age beliefs (1993). Bearing this serious limitation in mind, one of the major advantages of quantitative methods is the possibility of constructing statistical scales, shown by factor analysis or other similar methods to measure a single dimension. In this way, different items could at least be shown to belong together, thereby suggesting that a kind of definition of New Age orientation could be possible. This perspective is demonstrated by Granqvist and Hagekull in the paper discussed above as well as in the study by Michael Donahue. Also Houtman and Mascini could, by statistical methods, show that those affirming involvement with five certain practices, also agreed most strongly with certain statements. It could, however, be questioned whether the orientations thus shown accurately capture New Age or are wide enough to include, for example, followers of Spiritualism or some eastern religions as well (Kemp 2004:84). This method obviously captures “something”, but whether this “something” should be called New Age or not could well be a subject of discussion. Structurally, the great difference between, for example, a Christian congregation and New Age, is that New Age has no organisation and no membership. Not only is there a problem with what should be considered the characteristics of New Age, but also where to draw the borders between individuals who are supposed to be engaged in New Age and individuals who are not. Daren Kemp remarks rightly, that studies cannot be compared on a similar basis, if no agreement of a tool of measuring New Age affiliation is found (Kemp 2004:83). As there are no clear borders of New Age, individuals could be engaged on different levels, some very engaged, and some just a little. As the different surveys, discussed above, located respondents in different ways, respondents from different studies will have represented different levels


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of engagement in New Age, which will inevitably have caused some of the differences in the results. Subscribers of a New Age magazine differ from participants of New Age lectures and workshops on engagement level, and even more so, participants in various alternative therapies differ from each other, and from participants of New Age lectures and workshops (further discussed below). How Granqvist and Hagekull found their New Age sample from “New Age establishments” in Stockholm is not even discussed in their paper (Granqvist & Hagekull 2001). But as the latter individuals were several years younger than the samples of Rose and Frisk, there must have been some important difference. One study where choice of respondents was not a problem, is that made by Kemp (2003), as he investigated New Age Christian groups with clear membership. The study of Heelas and Woodhead included people who used holistic therapies, but who did not consider these activities spiritual. It could be argued that these people should not be included in the New Age at all. According to Rose, one third of the British people tried out alternative therapies between 1984 and 1987. Holistic therapies clearly overlap and are a part of New Age, but not everyone participating in these therapies could be considered a New Ager. Stuart Rose writes that an individual can purchase therapies without subscribing to the more expansive New Age ideologies which might incorporate them. Rose claims that it is not possible to separate out different types of healing processes and label some New Age and others not, but that it is possible to create a differentiation between the two by addressing the reasons why individuals choose the healing processes they do. The difference, says Rose, clearly rests in the motivations each individual has in adopting their healing path. If there is an effort to reach what is claimed to be the Higher Self, and if this is accompanied by feelings of unconditional love and compassion combined with a sense of Self-responsibility,10 then it can be argued that the motivation is indeed New Age. However, if the same healing processes are used simply to repair or entertain the body, they should not be seen as being used for New Age purposes. Just because a person might treat themselves with acupuncture and aromatherapy does not automatically make either the treatments or the user New Age (Rose 2005:198–202).

10

To describe New Age in this way is peculiar to Rose (2005).

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Granqvist and Hagekull (2001) also note this difficulty and try to distinguish between people who believe that, for example, medicinal use of herbs is beneficial, and those who believe that Reiki healing is at least as effective as regular treatments. Their method of differentiating between engagement levels in alternative medicine, however, differs quite radically from the method of Stuart Rose referred to above. It is clear that it is the individuals with lower engagement in the New Age which are the most difficult to track down and find criteria for. What should be the minimum criteria for New Age participation? In the EVS study, 24.4% were shown to believe in reincarnation. This result could be used for claiming that about one quarter of the population in Europe is New Age-oriented. Of course, this conclusion is questionable. Questions and Answers? Quantitative studies are often characterised by a distance between the researcher and the respondent. The respondents often just receive a paper with questions and tick-boxes. There is nobody to interact with, to discuss different interpretations, reservations and nuances in questions and answers, and no one to ask for clarification. Small differences in the formulation and understanding of questions and possible answers might generate huge differences in results. One example is the study of Heelas and Woodhead, discussed above, where 57.6% answered that they believed in God, but on another question in the same study 30% answered that they believed in a personal God, and 51% that they believed in some sort of spirit or life force. Thus it seems that almost one third of the people believing in a higher power would not have been found if there had been only one question formulated as a yes/no question about belief in God. In a qualitative study, however, by discussion and communication, different nuances of belief in God or spirit had definitely been identified. Another problem with formulation is that questions may be leading. It is easy to predict the answer to a question formulated as “Do you believe that spirituality can be experienced without love, or is love always present in spirituality?” (Rose 2005, 169; 355). Formulated in another way, the result would surely have been different. Quantifying may mean different things. In the least complicated cases, you simply count e.g. how many books are sold. In other cases, there


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are definite yes/no answers, for example a question in a survey if you are a man or a woman. This kind of question is of course easier to answer than another kind of yes/no question, such as the one about belief in God. In more complicated cases, the respondent may be asked to measure, for instance, how important God is for him/her, by using a scale from 1 to 5. A question about, say, belief in God, could generate completely different answers, if there is a simple yes/no possibility, or if there are possibilities of several different answers. One well-known example of this is the EVS question about reincarnation, where the respondent was asked whether or not he/she believed in reincarnation. In another question, the respondent was asked about belief in resurrection. This resulted in some people marking belief in both. In the RAMP study, however, the respondents were asked to choose between reincarnation and other possibilities, with the result that less than half of the respondents affirmed that they believed in reincarnation compared to the EVS study (Barker 2004). Thus the way answers are permitted may radically influence the result. Sometimes there are indications that something may be wrong with the question or the response alternatives. Michael York asked about belief in God, and received 52% marking the response “other”. This means something must have been unhelpful in the formulation of the question. What did the respondents mean by “other”? In this case, qualitative interviews could have been interesting as a complement. Formulation of questions and possibilities of answers is thus very important in quantitative studies, and might be a crucial source of error. There are also different possibilities in accounting for the results, which might make a bias. As in qualitative studies, where quantitative studies include open-ended questions, the answers have to be interpreted and categorised, with the same dangers of mistake or misrepresentation. Another important source of error with respect to representativity in quantitative surveys is ‘falling off ’, i.e. that some people choose not to participate. Quantitative studies are supposed to be representative for whole populations. Questionnaires do show different frequencies of answer depending on, for example, the method of distribution. Stuart Rose received back only 17% of the questionnaires he distributed, and of course we have to ask: what about the 83% who did not answer? Are the 17% who answered representative of the whole group, or not? A common example for a case where the respondents clearly would not be representative for the whole group, is if the questionnaire is distributed

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and returned electronically. Respondents would, in this case, be sure to be younger and more often male than in the group as a whole. Lack of Longitudinal Data Some data does not say much when standing alone. Is x% little or much? We need comparative data to make the figures mean something. In some cases, for example to be able to say something about increases or decreases, longitudinal data is absolutely necessary. Longitudinal data is, however, often lacking for New Age, as New Age is a new research area. We have almost no reliable data before 1990. Heelas and Woodhead needed longitudinal data for their study, and tried to create it with different methods like studying old telephone directories, brochures and flyers, and interviewing long-standing participants in the holistic and spiritual milieu. However creative and interesting the attempt, their method was of course not very reliable. To measure the same thing, the method has to be the same. These possibilities are so far lacking in studies of New Age, but may open in the future, of course if the same surveys are systematically used again. Conclusion Quantitative methods are uniquely valuable to religious studies in at least two ways. One, they supply information about the size of different religious phenomena in relation to general populations. By longitudinal studies, quantitative methods may supply empirical evidence for increases or decreases of different variables over time, allowing empirical data, for example, to validate larger sociological theories about social and religious change. Two, by using statistical techniques on quantitative material, additional knowledge is generated by relating different variables in different ways. For instance, factor analysis can show apparently distinct items to be related. So far, however, the unique potential of quantitative methods has not been much used in existing studies of New Age. The main problem is that most scholars of New Age are not statisticians, and do not employ anything beyond the most rudimentary statistical techniques. Further use of advanced quantitative methods could often have thrown much more light upon relations between different variables, than has been achieved in existing studies of New Age. One of the most important


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things for future quantitative studies of New Age is to start using and integrating more advanced statistical techniques. The problem of defining New Age is at the core of the studies discussed in this paper. To be comparable, surveys have to study the same thing. However, New Age is not an easy phenomenon to define. Definitions are not ‘right or wrong’, but rather ‘more or less useful’. To use different definitions of New Age may not be wrong, depending on the purpose of each study and other circumstances. But what is definitely needed—and often today lacking—is reflection about the definition problem, and that the standpoint taken has to be a conscious choice. From that departure point, there may come into being different ways of thinking about the definition problem, different perspectives about how to conceive New Age, and a reflected and conscious choice from each researcher to use a certain perspective in each study. In this matter, quantitative statistical methods might in the future play an important role, as there thus are empirical ways to show at least that certain different clusters of beliefs or practices are related. However, some voices have been heard recently, claiming that maybe there is no such thing as ‘New Age’, that it might be a scholarly or media construction (e.g. Sutcliffe 2003). From this specific standpoint, it could be questioned whether there is any point in labelling a statistically defined cluster of beliefs or practices as ‘New Age’ or not. Personally, I would argue for the value of identifying, by statistical techniques, different orientations in popular religiosity, but that the concept of New Age in itself may today be meaningless (Frisk forthcoming). More research on popular religiosity as a whole is needed, starting from the perspective of the grassroots and not from a construction of what New Age or something else should be. In this research, large quantitative studies, using all the possibilities of statistical techniques, would be a most valuable contribution. As there is no defined New Age membership, another difficulty with the quantitative studies reviewed here is that there are different levels of engagement in New Age. This circumstance has also to be illumined from different angles. New Age engagement can only be discussed in terms of more or less. As in the case of defining New Age, a more conscious reflection and discussion about this matter has to take place, before choosing material for a study. Statistical methods may also be used, to account for different levels of engagement and presenting the data in different ways.

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A subculture related to New Age, where different levels of engagement are visible, and where more research definitely is needed, is the area of alternative or holistic therapies. More work needs to be done on the different possibilities of attitude and perspective which are possible for an individual here, the differences and similarities between different therapies, and the potential relation to New Age. It may be possible, like Stuart Rose attempts, to differentiate between a mere physical motivation and a motivation which ‘goes further’, but what this ‘further’ may mean needs to be further investigated. As time passes, the possibilities for longitudinal studies about New Age will increase, as will the possibilities of saying something empirically grounded about increases or decreases of different elements related to New Age. This is also an important area where work needs to be done. Finally, there needs to be more communication and cooperation between quantitative and qualitative studies of New Age. Used together, they could add up to much more than the sum of both. Qualitative studies could be used to refine questions in quantitative studies, which could be used to add figures to the qualitative ones. So far, research has often stopped with one kind of study. To sum up, large quantitative research projects about New Age are definitely called for. More reflection and awareness is needed concerning questions of definition and selection. Further, full use of the potential of statistical techniques would add new dimensions to the study of New Age, especially if supplemented with qualitative studies. And, ideally, this research should encompass popular religion as a whole. In this way, new ways of understanding what a phenomenon like New Age might be, may dawn. References Ahlin, L. 2001. New Age —Konsumtionsvara Eller Värden Att Kämpa För? Hemmets Journal och Idagsidan i Svenska Dagbladet Analyserade Utifrån Mary Douglas Grid/Group-Modell och Pierre Bourdieus Fältteori. [New Age—Article of Consumption or Values to Struggle For?] Lund: Lunds Universitet. Barker, E., 2004. “The Church Without and the God Within: Religiosity and/or Spirituality?” In Jerolimov, D.M., S. Zrinaak & I. Borowik, eds. Religion and Patterns of Social Transformation. Zagreb: IDIZ (Institute for Social Research in Zagreb). Corrywright, D., 2003. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations into New Age Spiritualities. Bern: Peter Lang. Donahue, M., 1993. “Prevalence and Correlates of New Age Beliefs in Six Protestant Denominations.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 32.2 177–84.


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Frisk, L., 1997. “Vad är New Age? Centrala Begrepp och Historiska Rötter.” [“What is New Age? Central Ideas and Historical Background.”] Svensk religionshistorisk årsskrift 6 87–97. ——, 2000. “New Age-Utövare i Sverige: Bakgrund, Trosföreställningar, Engagemang och ‘Omvändelse’.” [“New Age Participants in Sweden: Background, Beliefs, Engagement and ‘Conversion’.”] In Carlsson, C.-G. & L. Frisk, eds. Gudars och Gudinnors Återkomst: Studier i nyreligiositet. Umeå: Institutionen för religionsvetenskap. ——, 2001. “Nyreligiositet vid Millennieskiftet—Försumbar Eller Flyr den Våra Mätinstrument?” [“New Religiosity at the Turn of the Millennium—Insignificant or is it Escaping our Methods of Measurement?”] In Skog, M., ed. Det Religiösa Sverige. Gudstjänst- och Andaktsliv Under ett Veckoslut Kring Millennieskiftet. Örebro: Libris. ——, 2003. “New Age Participants in Sweden: Background, Beliefs, Engagement and ‘Conversion’.” In Rothstein, M. & R. Kranenburg, eds. New Religions in a Postmodern World. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. ——, forthcoming. “Globalization: An Important Key Factor in Contemporary Religious Change.” Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies. Granqvist, P. & B. Hagekull, 2001. “Seeking Security in the New Age: On Attachment and Emotional Compensation.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40 529–47. Gustafsson, G. & T. Pettersson, 2000. “Projektpresentation och Översikt.” [“Project Presentation and Synopsis.”] In Gustafsson, G. & T. Pettersson, eds. Folkkyrkor och Religiös Pluralism—Den Nordiska Modellen. Stockholm: Verbum. Halman, L., R. Luijkx & M. van Zundert, 2005. Atlas of European Values. Tilburg: Tilburg University & Brill. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Heelas, P. & L. Woodhead, 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Houtman, D. & P. Mascini, 2002. “Why Do Churches Become Empty, While New Age Grows? Secularization and Religious Change in the Netherlands.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41.3 455–73. Kemp, D., 2003. The Christaquarians? A Sociology of Christians in the New Age. London: Kempress Ltd. ——, 2004. New Age: A Guide—Alternative Spiritualities from Aquarian Conspiracy to Next Age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Melton, J.G., 1988. “A History of the New Age Movement.” In Basil, R., ed. Not Necessarily the New Age: Critical Essays. Buffalo & New York: Prometheus Books. Puttick, E., 2005. “The Rise of Mind-Body-Spirit Publishing: Reflecting or Creating Spiritual Trends?” Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies. 1 129–49. Roof, W.C.R., 1994. A Generation of Seekers. The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Rose, S., 2005. Transforming the World. Bringing the New Age into Focus. Bern: Peter Lang. Skog, M., 2001. “Sverigeräkningen 2000.” [“Swedish Religious Statistics 2000.”] In Skog, M., ed. Det Religiösa Sverige. Gudstjänst- och Andaktsliv Under ett Veckoslut Kring Millennieskiftet. Örebro: Libris. Sutcliffe, S.J., 2003. Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices. London & New York: Routledge. York, M., 1995. The Emerging Network. A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. London: Rowman & Littlefield. ——, 2005. “Wanting to Have Your New Age Cake and Eat It Too.” Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies 1 15–34.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEW AGE Miguel Farias and Pehr Granqvist Ten years after the publication of two major monographs on the New Age by Hanegraaff (1996) and Heelas (1996), which aptly described its practices and beliefs and framed them within a historical and sociological context, the time has come to add the contribution of empirical psychological research to the study of the New Age. In this chapter,1 we will focus on social-psychological, personality, and developmental research which we have independently carried out in Britain and Sweden using participants drawn from New Age settings and other groups of religious and non-religious people. We have used a variety of techniques including standardised interviews, statistically validated questionnaire scales and laboratory tasks. Although working independently, we both started out with a similar hypothesis about the New Age—namely that the psychological characteristics of New Age individuals would differ in many ways from those of traditional religious people, whereas in other ways (e.g. attachment history with parents) they would be similar to those of sub-groups of religious individuals. Our studies have confirmed these ideas and, put together, our data challenge an underlying assumption in the scientific research of religion, which claims that different forms of religious/ spiritual practices and beliefs fulfil the same motivational functions and draw upon the same cognitive and emotive resources (e.g. Boyer 2001). Further, our research sheds a different light on many indigenous claims of individuals involved in the New Age, which emphasise, for instance, the primacy of spiritual experience over belief, and the sense of an autonomous, free and powerful self. Thus, in the course of this chapter, we will describe studies which highlight a significant

1 The authors would like to thank Anna-Kaisa Newheiser for her comments on a previous draft of this chapter. Miguel Farias’ research on the New Age was supported by a scholarship from the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation. His current research at the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind is supported by the Templeton Foundation. Pehr Granqvist’s research on the New Age was supported by a grant (1999–0507:01,02) from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and by a Sasakawa Young Leaders’ post-doctoral fellowship.

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discrepancy between such claims and what can be asserted from an empirical psychological perspective. Although we have not carried out longitudinal studies, where individuals are accompanied across a span of years, our cross-sectional research strongly suggests that there are partly biological factors (i.e. personality and cognitive dispositions) and early environmental factors (relating to attachment to parents) which underlie endorsement of New Age ideas and practices. In this chapter we will summarise our empirical findings, first by focusing on partly constitutional factors such as cognitive styles and personality, and second by describing developmental precursors to the New Age. We will start out by briefly mentioning some motivational aspects associated with the New Age, such as individualist/collectivist orientations and values, which have been a matter of considerable sociological debate (see Bruce 2000; Hedges & Beckford 2000; Rose 1996). What we will report and discuss may be mistakenly understood as blind reductionism both by readers personally involved in the New Age and by many researchers in this area. Such is not the case. We acknowledge that there are societal and historical factors, as well as demographic ones such as age and gender, which play a fundamental role in our understanding of what the New Age as a social movement is. Yet, just as sociological and historical factors cannot be dismissed, we argue that neither can the psychological factors considered here. Furthermore, on the basis of the findings to be reported, one cannot disconfirm (or confirm) supernatural claims, such as that people may become involved in the New Age as a result of having an encounter with spiritual beings. Nevertheless, even though it is not our aim or within our possibilities to challenge such claims, our evidence regarding the characteristics of individuals involved in the New Age strongly suggests that there are basic underlying processes of cognition and emotion, related to a particular pattern of personality traits and attachment organisation, which may make some individuals more likely to report such unusual experiences and participate in the New Age. At this stage, we would simply like to ask those readers that might find our empirical approach too reductionist to try keeping an open mind to the evidence we will present.

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Personality and Cognitive Characteristics of Individuals in the New Age Motivational and Social-Cognitive Factors Our research into the personality and cognitive characteristics of people involved in the New Age came about, somewhat unexpectedly, as a consequence of two previous studies conducted by one of us. These studies compared motivational and social-cognitive aspects of New Age participants, practising Catholics and atheists (see Farias 2004). For each study we included about 150 participants (50 per group), recruited at various places in Oxford and London. New Age participants were recruited at ‘alternative centres’ (e.g. Alternatives in London),2 Catholics after Sunday mass, and atheists were contacted through a subject panel used for general psychological research at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. The first study aimed to explore what people valued most in life (motivational goals), how individualist or collectivist their values were, and how they described themselves as individuals (Farias & Lalljee submitted). The theory and instruments used were drawn from cross-cultural psychological studies of individualism/collectivism (see Cousins 1989; Schwartz 1992, 1994; Triandis 1995, 1996). The results indicated that the New Age group’s individualist orientation was similar to that of the atheist group, differing from the more collectivist orientation of Catholics. Both New Age participants and atheists emphasised more than Catholics values of self-direction, stimulation and hedonism. These values are generally characterised by motivations towards independent thought and exploration, novelty and excitement seeking, and sensuous gratification. Moreover, New Age participants attributed more importance to values of universalism—which can be described as motivations towards understanding, tolerance, and a concern for the welfare of humanity and nature—than did Catholics and non-religious people. These results are in line with previous characterisations of the New Age as being individualist but also concerned with self-transcendence (Heelas 1996). However, the most intriguing result of this study came from the social-cognitive analysis of how people defined themselves. Participants were asked to give twenty self-definitions in reply to the question ‘Who am I?’. Their responses were then scored across a concrete-abstract 2 A well-known weekly evening alternative lecture series held at St James’s church, Piccadilly.

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continuum which included physical and social descriptions (e.g. ‘I am tall’, ‘I am fit’, and ‘I am a student’, ‘I am a psychologist’) on the concrete side; on the abstract side there were psychological attributes (such as ‘I am honest’ or ‘I am a hard worker’) and global references to an abstract self (e.g. ‘I’m a human being’ or ‘I am a link in a chain’). Our results showed that New Age participants gave far more global abstract self-descriptions than did the other two groups. Furthermore, many of these were highly abstract descriptions in which the individual tended to see him-/herself as a process, a metaphor or part of a universal force. Examples of such descriptions included ‘I am a bridge’, ‘I am connected’, ‘I am a changing thing’, ‘I am an illusion’ and ‘I am an awakener’. We named the combination of individualist motivations and highly abstract self-descriptions found in the New Age group ‘holistic individualism’. The term holistic was used in reference to the strong universalism values and the highly abstract cognitive style of self-definition employed by the New Age group. Holistic individualism describes a somewhat paradoxical social-psychological frame, as New Age individuals tend to see themselves connected to a larger universe of being and, yet, the nature of this connection is highly personal and abstract rather than socially embedded. Following from these results, a second study was devised where we investigated autobiographical descriptions of significant life episodes and the types of explanations people gave to events in their lives (see Farias & Lalljee 2006). For the autobiographical narratives participants were asked to write about a ‘high point’ in their lives, such as an episode where extremely positive emotions like joy or great happiness were experienced. These narratives were analysed using a simple scoring system centred on two main modalities of human motivation, one stressing the autonomous organism as an agent while the other entailing the individual in cooperative communion (Bakan 1966; McAdams, Hoffman, Mansfield & Day 1996). While Catholics and atheists emphasised agency and communion themes equally, individuals in the New Age group reported twice as many agency as communion themes in their autobiographical life stories. We also found that the type of agency more frequently used by New Age participants centred on ideas and feelings of being magically or paranormally empowered by a non-material force or entity. The autobiographical focus on agency motivations, particularly associated with empowerment, suggested that the New Age ideas and experiences of being connected to a larger non-material reality lead


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the individual towards engagement with abstract forces and processes rather than to direct interactions with others and the world. The second part of this study provided further evidence that the New Age idea of abstract connectedness is not just a static belief but rather a cognitive process, which underlies the way in which New Age participants perceive and interact with the world. Participants were asked to comment on a set of vignettes depicting everyday life events by answering the question, ‘How would you interpret this event?’ All answers were coded for naturalistic, religious and magical types of interpretation. Thus, for the first vignette which read, ‘You meet someone for the first time but that person seems extremely familiar to you, as if you had met somewhere before,’ a typical naturalistic explanation would be, ‘Perhaps I had seen them before in a street, shop or television.’ A religious explanation would focus on God’s agency (e.g. ‘God wanted me to meet this person and maybe she is in need.’) Magical explanations, on the other hand, would describe paranormal or metaphysical processes, such as, ‘Our souls have probably met before,’ or ‘We have similar/compatible energies or frequency of vibration so resonate with each other giving a feeling of familiarity.’ Based on previous studies of naturalistic and religious explanations of everyday life events (Lupfer, Brock & DePaola 1992; Weeks & Lupfer 1996), we expected participants—including religious ones—to show a higher frequency of naturalistic explanations, as compared to religious explanations. We also expected New Age participants to show a higher frequency of magical explanations than the other groups. Both hypotheses were confirmed but it still was surprising to find that New Age participants made twice as many magical as naturalistic causal attributions. On the other hand, religious interpretations were seldom used in general, even by Catholics. Overall, these results led us to consider that New Age individuals had a highly associative cognitive style, which made them perceive events in their life in a tightly connected way (via supernatural forces or entities). These two studies led us to shift the direction of our research from the exploration of motivational and social-cognitive factors to the personality and cognitive-perceptual literatures, in particular to the study of magical thinking or ideation. This change of shift was greatly facilitated by two streams of literature: first, the impressive set of recent neuropsychological, neurological and cognitive studies on magical thinking conducted by Peter Brugger and colleagues (Brugger & Graves 1998, 1997; Brugger et al. 1993), which consistently showed

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an association between this type of thinking and neurological factors (Pizzagalli et al. 2000); and second, the life-long work of Gordon Claridge and collaborators (Claridge 1997) on schizotypal personality traits, a main feature of which is the disposition to unusual perceptual experiences and other cognitive experiences, such as hallucinations and magical interpretation of events. In the following sections we will briefly describe the conceptual framework and evidence on the cognitive and personality dispositions associated with magical thinking and proceed to report a study which tested the association between New Age endorsement and such dispositions. Magical Thinking and Schizotypy The array of magical and paranormal beliefs present in the everyday explanations of individuals involved in the New Age is illustrative of their concern with the existence of an intimate connectedness between all things, visible and invisible. Concepts such as karma or the idea of synchronicity ( Jung 1972/1952) are employed in such a way as to allow the individual to establish a virtually unending network of connections. Thus, it is possible to explain practically any trivial event as if filled with rare significance. The New Age motto, ‘Nothing happens by chance,’ is taken quite literally, as it leads the individual to cognitively seek a hidden magical significance behind daily events. Whilst these beliefs, like other paranormal ones such as telepathy, are not alien to traditional religiosity, they have tended to be de-emphasised as the focus is laid on submission to the divine: ‘God knows best.’ However, in the New Age, we are all gods and active creators of reality. Such differences could be understood as no more than a sort of metaphysical disagreement; however, the studies described so far seem to indicate otherwise. The high frequency of magical attributions suggests that people in the New Age, more than just sharing a set of beliefs, possess a personality and cognitive disposition which makes them particularly prone to search for meaningful connections between seemingly distant and unrelated objects and events. It has been reported that magical thinking and unusual perceptual experiences are fundamental components of schizotypal personality traits (Mason, Claridge & Williams 1997). There are two main models of schizotypy. The quasi-dimensional view of schizotypy originates in the medical tradition; it considers schizotypy and normality to be


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discontinuous, emphasises its genetic basis and treats it as part of a ‘schizophrenia spectrum’ of psychotic disease. The other model proposes a fully dimensional perspective on schizotypy and considers that schizotypal traits are not necessarily pathological but represent personality variation. This is the model, which was adopted in our study of the New Age. Claridge and collaborators (Claridge 1997) are the most important proponents of the latter model and have demonstrated that normal subjects show the same cognitive indicators as found in clinical psychotics in a range of studies. Claridge (2001) has also considered the example of spiritual experiences which, like creativity, are an example of ‘healthy psychoticism’, i.e. a form of schizotypal personality which lies on the healthy side of the psychotic continuum. Two of the most commonly used instruments in the measurement of schizotypy are the Schizotypal Personality Scale (STA) and the Magical Ideation Scale. The first instrument was developed by Claridge and Rawlings (reported in Claridge & Broks 1984) to measure schizotypy as a personality continuum. Its items describe a series of experiences and beliefs, which include magical ideation, unusual perceptual experiences and paranoid ideation and suspiciousness (Hewitt & Claridge 1989). The other instrument is Eckblad & Chapman’s (1983) magical ideation scale, which taps magical and paranormal ideas and experiences. Both scales have been extensively used with cognitive and neuropsychological tasks. The magical ideation scale has recently been correlated with a series of tasks and indices including olfactory perception, EEG wave patterns and semantic priming. These studies reported positive correlations between magical ideation and left temporal lobe dysfunction (Mohr, Röhrenbach, Laska & Brugger 2001), a loosening of semantic network functioning, which is characterised by making frequent connections between notclosely related words (Pizzagalli, Lehmann & Brugger 2001), and an overactivation of the right hemisphere (Pizzagalli et al. 2000). Studies with the STA have shown that highly schizotypal subjects have difficulty in suppressing irrelevant material from conscious awareness (Williams & Bleech 1997) and show a ‘leaking’ of preconscious activation, which normally needs to be suppressed, into current awareness (Evans 1997). This means that these people are more susceptible to perceiving stimuli (visual or semantic) at a lower threshold of awareness, which is usually inhibited in the process of selective perception of our environment.

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Related Concepts: Cognitive Looseness and Thin Boundaries The cognitive mechanism associated with pre-conscious ‘leaking’ or ‘decreased inhibition’ of perceptions into conscious awareness has been referred to as a process of cognitive looseness. Brugger and colleagues have reported that people endorsing magical thinking and paranormal beliefs were able to make stronger semantic associations between remotely connected words (Brugger & Graves 1998; Gianotti et al. 2001; Mohr et al. 2001) and to see more meaningful patterns in a visual display of random dots (Brugger et al. 1993). In this last study, the authors argue that such a cognitive disposition, which leads the individual to make close associations between random stimuli or events, can also account for the emergence of magical and paranormal beliefs. Such a cognitive mechanism is associated with the presence of schizotypal personality traits and might also be correlated with the New Age sense of abstract connectedness and magical explanations. A number of related concepts have been put forward in an attempt to explain this mechanism which leads to uncommon perceptions and beliefs. Thalbourne & Delin (1999) have proposed the notion of transliminality, referring to individual differences in the extent to which ideas and emotions are able to cross the threshold of conscious awareness. They report that people with a higher perception or sense of transliminality tend to have better dream recall, to have a greater number of spiritual experiences, and to believe in the paranormal. More recently, Claridge (2001) quotes Anthony’s (1987) concept of ‘skinlessness,’ referring to a supersensitivity of perception, thinking and feeling. Another related concept is that of boundaries, proposed by Hartmann (1991). This concept refers to mental and emotional boundaries, which on one side of the continuum—thin boundaries—seems to tap into a particular hypersensitivity and fluidity between thoughts, feelings and states of consciousness. A person with thin boundaries would be characterised as tending to blend thoughts and feelings, to make fluid associations between events, to be hypersensitive in terms of emotion, to be particularly susceptible to daydreaming and fantasy, and to report experiencing unusual experiences such as clairvoyance. Hartmann’s (1991) Boundaries Questionnaire comprises perceptual, cognitive, emotive and interpersonal factors, accounting for a variety of personal characteristics such as vivid imagery, feelings of synaesthesia (e.g. ‘seeing’ words or ‘feeling’ sounds), fluctuating identity, fragility and isolation. Hartmann, Harrison & Zborowski (2001) review a set


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of studies conducted using the Boundaries Questionnaire, where thin boundaries were shown to correlate with ‘transliminality,’ hypnotisability and suggestibility, insecure attachment (see section below) and openness to experience. Hartmann (1991) summarises the distinction between thick and thin boundaries as the difference between insulation and connectedness. This sense of connectedness is of a cognitive and emotive kind but does not extend into the interpersonal domain, as people with thin boundaries typically find it difficult to feel part of a group. This characterisation seems quite adequate as a description of individuals involved in the New Age, whose sense of magical interconnection is a heuristic for everyday life, while their practices do not oblige them to engage in the type of group membership characteristic of traditional religiosity. Oxford Study: Personality and Cognitive-Perceptual Predictors of the New Age In contrast with the previous studies we didn’t use specific New Age, religious and atheist groups but a sample of 99 non-selected participants who came into the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University to take part in personality research. As measures of the New Age we included the New Age Orientation scale (Granqvist & Hagekull 2001), and a scale of New Age practices, adapted from Höllinger (2000); see also Höllinger and Smith (2002), which asked about the frequency of practices such as yoga, Reiki, Tarot reading and consultation with a psychic. A brief scale of traditional religiosity was also included. Personality questionnaires comprised the schizotypal personality, magical ideation and boundaries scales. A laboratory task that measured cognitive looseness with a visual association test was also utilised. In this task, a random display of 100 dots changing every 4,500 milliseconds was shown to participants on a screen for a period of 10 minutes in a dimly lit room. Participants were told that they would be looking at changing patterns of dots, some of which were random and some of which were programmed to show something, and they were then instructed to report whether they saw something recognisable (e.g. a figure or a scene). This procedure was used for the first time by Jakes & Hemsley (1986) in a study of psychosis and hallucinatory predisposition, and was later adapted to study delusional perceptions and beliefs in extrasensory perception (Brugger et al. 1993). The results showed significant correlations between adherence to New Age ideas and practices and the schizotypy personality scale, thin

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boundaries, magical ideation and a loose cognitive-perceptual style measured by the visual task. This loose style indicates that people more inclined to endorse New Age ideas perceived more complex patterns (e.g. figures of animals, people speaking, or angels dancing) than other people when looking at random dots. Amongst the several factors, (female) gender, magical ideation and thin boundaries were the most reliable statistical predictors of involvement in the New Age. In contrast, traditional religiosity was found to be unrelated to the personality measures and experimental task. (For a full description of the results, see Farias, Claridge & Lalljee 2005.) All in all, this study suggests that individuals involved in the New Age possess a disposition that is characteristic of schizotypal personality, particularly relating to magical ideation. Adding to the correlations between the schizotypy and the New Age measures, the results from the visual task and the Boundaries Questionnaire are strong indicators of the presence of underlying structures which may dispose the individual to experience unusual perceptions and magical/paranormal beliefs and experiences. The association between New Age practices and thin boundaries is particularly interesting, as this latter scale taps into a sense of social alienation, of not belonging to any particular group, a particularly associative thinking style, but also an emotional vulnerability or hypersensitivity. All this is characteristic of what is taught in the New Age, be it in the form of workshops where one develops one’s emotional sensitivity (in contrast with strict rationality, which is criticised); visualisation and free association techniques are also often used to ‘unleash’ unconscious capacities; paranormal and channelling faculties are trained and rituals are devised to ward off negative influences. It is also important to remember the loose and non-collectivist social context associated with such practices, as the individual tends to roam from group to group and workshop to workshop, rather than establish a tight social network, like in traditional forms of religion. Another piece of evidence, which substantiates this last study, describes a strong association between the New Age and absorption (Granqvist, Fredrikson, Unge et al. 2005; Granqvist & Larsson in press). Absorption is a personality disposition to be totally focused in experiencing a certain object (either outside oneself, or a memory or aspect of oneself), and has been found to correlate with suggestibility and hypnotisability (Tellegen & Atkinson 1974). Absorption has also been linked to dissociative (see further below) and paranormal experiences (Roche & McConkey 1990), and there is evidence for its moderate genetic heritability (Finkel & McGue 1997).


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Personality traits and cognitive dispositions are substantially constitutional and partly genetic in origin (see Plomin & Caspi 1999). Although there is a degree of flexibility throughout one’s life, abrupt changes occur very seldom. This is not deterministic in a strong sense, however, but simply probabilistically so. The data we currently possess do not allow for a definitive portrait of the ‘New Age personality,’ because it cannot be totally ruled out that involvement with the New Age is a cause of the psychological pattern observed. Likewise, an individual with a disposition to magical thinking and schizotypal personality traits need not hold New Age beliefs or engage in New Age practices—although a person with such characteristics would have a higher probability of being involved in the New Age. Environmental factors necessarily play a strong role in adhesion to the New Age. Life experience is crucial to make personality dispositions more or less salient, and to lead people into or away from the New Age. Whilst most people involved in the New Age usually talk of their ‘journey of spiritual exploration’ occurring in adulthood, there are now empirical indications suggesting that the life experiences, which make an individual more likely to be attracted by the New Age, start much earlier. In the next section of this chapter we will report on a number of such environmentally originating, developmental precursors to the beliefs, experiences and mental states involved in the New Age. Attachment and the New Age Contextual Background The study of attachment and the New Age was initiated as a side-track to ongoing projects examining the applicability of attachment theory for understanding more traditional forms of religiosity and spirituality, particularly believers’ perceived personal relationships with the divine (e.g. Granqvist 2006; Kirkpatrick 2005). Studies on attachment and religion had documented differential pathways for the development of religiosity in relation to individual differences in attachment. First, security of attachment had been linked to a religiosity that is socially based on parental religiosity and reflects extrapolation of attachment experiences with reliably sensitive and emotionally available parents to the perceived relationship with a loving God (the correspondence hypothesis). The social basis of religion was most clearly seen in findings showing that individuals with secure attachments tended to embrace religion to the extent their parents had during the offspring’s upbringing.

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If the offspring did come to embrace religion, their religiosity tended to be temporally stable and the perceived God-relation tended to have attributes similar to secure attachment. Second, insecurity of attachment had been related to religiosity via emotional compensation for states of insecurity, wherein God was utilised as a surrogate attachment-like figure (the compensation hypothesis). This was evidenced, for instance, by a higher proportion of marked religious changes and conversions precipitated by life-periods of distress. Our studies on attachment and religion were conducted in Sweden, which is a highly secular country by the standards of substantive religion definitions. In fact, less than 10% of the Swedish population meets established criteria for confessing Christians (Stark, Hamberg & Miller 2005). However, while traditional, organised forms of Christian religiosity were well in the process of substantial decrease in the population, there had been a recent upsurge in more private, individualised forms of spirituality, most notably in the New Age movement (Hammer 1997). This change in the spiritual landscape has been documented in large parts of the western world, and especially in the northern and central parts of Europe (e.g. the Netherlands, UK, Denmark; e.g. Houtman & Mascini 2002). Therefore, we felt that a set of investigations parallel to the attachment and religion studies should be conducted, to examine whether individual differences in attachment security were related to embracement of the New Age. Given that most individuals in northern Europe who embraced the New Age at the time had not been socialised in a New Age context by their parents and that perceptions of a relationship with a loving God are not at the forefront of New Agers’ spirituality, we initially expected insecure attachment to predict embracement of the New Age. To understand the bases of these predictions, a brief introduction to attachment theory is necessary. An Overview of Attachment Theory Attachment theory, as formulated by Bowlby (1969–1980) and extended by others (e.g. Ainsworth, Waters, Blehar & Wall 1978; Main, Kaplan & Cassidy 1985), is a well-established framework for the study of child-parent relations and their implications for development. Drawing from evolutionary and control systems theory, mammalian offspring are assumed to possess an attachment behavioural system, which is sensitive to activation based on natural clues to danger (e.g. separation from the caregiver) and manifest in offspring behaviours (such as


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crying and following) that increase proximity to a caregiver. Based on caregiver responses to such behaviours, the offspring develops internal working models (IWMs), or mental representations of self and others, which guide her/his interactions with others. The theory also describes four different qualities of attachment, which are thought to represent behavioural manifestations of IWMs already in infancy (Ainsworth et al. 1978; Main & Morgan 1996): secure; insecure/avoidant; insecure/ ambivalent; and insecure/disorganised attachment. These qualities of attachment are not genetically heritable (Bokhorst et al. 2003) but result from environmental factors (e.g. caregiver sensitivity to offspring signals) (Ainsworth et al. 1978; De Wolf & van IJzendoorn 1997). Later in development, IWMs can be inferred from speech and other representational products (Main, Kaplan & Cassidy 1985). Attachment Qualities In early childhood, secure attachment is characterised by a flexible balance between attachment and exploration. When distressed, secure children turn to their caregivers, who help them to handle the distress, thereby giving them increased confidence for exploration while demonstrating that other humans are available in times of need and that distress can be managed (Cassidy 1994). In adulthood, when interviewed with the Adult Attachment Interview (“AAI”) (Main, Goldwyn & Hesse 2003), individuals judged secure with regard to attachment provide discourse surrounding their own attachment biographies that is internally consistent and maintains coherence regardless of whether their attachment-related experiences were primarily positive or negative. Thus, if a caregiver is globally described in positive terms such as ‘loving’ and ‘caring’, the individual is able to recall specific memories, which convincingly support that global portrayal. Such interviews are labelled ‘continuous secure’, as the current state regarding attachment corresponds to the coder’s inferences of the interviewee’s experiences. When attachment experiences are inferred to have been substantially negative and the interviewee nevertheless maintains coherent discourse, the transcript is labelled ‘earned secure’. Such transcripts often express an avowal of the need to depend on others and an attempt at understanding the parents. Hence, they imply a positive valuing of attachment. Besides adult attachment research using the AAI, long-term romantic relationships have been conceptualised in terms of attachment (Simpson

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& Rholes 1998) and individual differences in romantic attachment have been described (Brennan, Clark & Shaver 1998). Secure romantic attachment is characterised by ease in getting close to others and comfort with dependency. In contrast to secure attachment, insecurity in early childhood is characterised either by defensive exploration at the expense of attachment in response to rejecting caregiving (avoidant attachment) or passive clinginess intermingled with angry behaviours in relation to an inconsistent caregiver (i.e. at the expense of exploration; ambivalent attachment). In this chapter, the characteristics of ambivalent attachment are particularly noteworthy, as will be evident later. Adult interviewees assigned an ambivalent (or ‘preoccupied’) classification in the AAI show responses that indicate an on-going, mentally preoccupying anger against the parent (e.g. directly addressing the parent in an angry context as if she/he were present) and/or vagueness of mental processes concerning attachment (e.g. self-parent misidentifications, child-like speech). In addition, preoccupied speakers often present an image of authoritativeness surrounding psychological issues, conveyed in overused phrases and clinical jargon (‘psychobabble’; e.g. ‘My mother has a lot of material around her psychological issues’), which often serve to denigrate parents in the interview. In the context of romantic relationships, ambivalent/preoccupied attachment is characterised by anxiety surrounding the prospect of abandonment and insufficient love from one’s partner. Finally, a fourth, insecure/disorganised quality of attachment has been described (see Main & Morgan 1996). The disorganised child’s behavioural strategy is thought to break down during stress. This is believed to be due to a paradoxical injunction: the child has made repeated experiences of fright without solution in relation to a caregiver who is acting frightening or frightened, but to whom the child is ‘programmed’ to turn during attachment activation (e.g. Hesse & Main 2000). Such a breakdown is manifest in behaviours such as prolonged ‘freezing’ with a trancelike facial expression or moves towards the caregiver inexplicably interrupted by the child moving in circles, falling prone, fleeing, etc. Similarly to disorganised infants who lapse in behavioural organisation, adult interviewees assigned a disorganised classification lapse in linguistic organisation regarding attachment, either specifically in discussions surrounding abuse and loss through death (unresolved), or at a more global level in the interview (cannot classify). The most common


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example of unresolved speech consists of striking lapses in the monitoring of reasoning, as in the belief that a dead person remains alive in the physical sense (e.g. ‘My mother speaks to me on a daily basis,’ said by an interviewee whose mother had been dead for many years) or in considerable spatial-temporal confusion surrounding a traumatic event (e.g. a given parent is said to have died when the interviewee was 8, 10, and 12 years old). A ‘cannot classify’ assignment is made for interviewees who fail to rally an organised stance in the interview or alternate between incompatible stances, for instance, both highly angry and highly idealising speech surrounding parents. In romantic relationships, the conceptual counterpart of disorganised attachment (fearful-avoidant), is characterised by both high anxiety and high avoidance (of closeness and dependency). Avoidance and anxiety are typically thought of as antithetical strategies that, when combined, lead to romantic attachment disorganisation (e.g. wanting closeness but at the same time avoiding it). Predictions Concerning Attachment and Embracement of the New Age In the background context to the study of attachment and the New Age, we have already noted that, in line with the compensation hypothesis, insecure attachment was expected to be linked to embracement of the New Age. However, there were additional reasons for this expectation. These boiled down to a more specific expectation that disorganised and ambivalent/preoccupied qualities of attachment would be important precursors to involvement in the New Age (Granqvist & Hagekull 2001; Granqvist, Ivarsson, Broberg & Hagekull in press). Below, we present the reasons for these expectations. Disorganised Attachment Childhood abuse, a robust precursor of disorganised attachment (Main & Morgan 1996), is associated with adult paranormal and related experiences (Eisen & Carlson 1998; Lynn & Rhue 1988; Reinert & Smith 1997), which are also frequently found in the New Age. Moreover, George & Solomon (1999) reported that mothers classified disorganised tended to attribute supernatural powers to their offspring (e.g. psychic power and special connection with the deceased). Similarly, 6-year olds who had been classified disorganised as infants occasionally referred to invisible agents of action in interviews about child-parent separation (Kaplan 1987).

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In addition, Hesse, Main, and van IJzendoorn (see Hesse 1999) devised a self-report scale that listed various anomalous experiences and beliefs (e.g. surrounding astrology, precognition, contact with the dead, spiritual possession, psychic powers, telepathy and reincarnation), many of which are core New Age concepts, and found scale scores to be related to disorganised speech in the AAI (see also Main & Morgan 1996). Moreover, disorganised attachment in infancy (Carlson 1998), disorganised speech in adulthood (Hesse & van IJzendoorn 1999) and high scores on our New Age orientation scale (Granqvist et al. 2005; Granqvist & Larsson 2006) had each been found, as expected, to be linked to a propensity to enter absorbing and dissociative mental states. Dissociation can be characterised as a break-down in the individual’s normal attentional processing, which results in anomalous shifts in consciousness. Examples of dissociative states are depersonalisation (the feeling that part of one’s self or one’s body are detached from other parts, e.g. out-of-body experiences), derealisation (the feeling that aspects of reality are not real or that aspects of unreality are real), and selective amnesia (e.g. that a pronounced part of one’s life is lost from memory). The fact that disorganised attachment and New Age embracement shared this correlate with dissociative states suggested that the two might be related as well. Finally, given the resemblances between New Age phenomena and unresolved/disorganised attachment within the AAI (e.g. personal contact with the dead and spiritual possession), persons assigned this classification should be over represented in the New Age movement. Ambivalent/Preoccupied Attachment Inconsistent responsiveness on behalf of the caregiver to the child’s needs leads the offspring to develop an ambivalent pattern of attachment, characterised by the child maximising its attention on the caregiver through displays of passive helplessness and exaggerated expressions of negative affect, especially anger. As noted, this combination of passivity and anger is characteristic also of ambivalent/preoccupied adults within the AAI system. Individuals with such a disposition to maximise their (negative) attention on attachment were hypothesised to be particularly receptive to parts of the popular psychology discourse associated with the New Age movement, for instance that on ‘toxic parenting’ and encounter groups, because such discourse permits and even encourages the expression of preoccupation. Another reason for expecting ambivalent attachment to be related to New Age endorsement came


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from a study of 6-year-olds, in which Main (1991) reported indices of difficulties understanding the privacy of thought (cf telepathy) as well as belief in paranormal phenomena in ambivalent children. Finally, given the resemblances between New Age phenomena and preoccupied attachment within the AAI classification system (e.g. ‘pop psychology’ and psychological jargon), persons assigned this classification should be over represented in the New Age movement. Below, we present results from three sets of studies that have addressed these predictions. Empirical Findings on Attachment and the New Age Estimated Attachment History No studies have hitherto been conducted examining longitudinal relations between attachment in childhood and embracement of the New Age later in development. However, two Swedish studies have taken the ‘short track’ and retrospectively estimated participating adolescents’ and adults’ attachment histories. In those studies, focus was not on how the adult as a child had organised him-/herself around the parent, but rather on estimates of the parent’s sensitivity to the offspring’s needs. In the first study (Granqvist & Hagekull 2001), we found, as expected on the basis of the compensation hypothesis, that adults (n = ca 50) drawn from New Age settings (e.g. ‘alternative’ bookstores and health centres) retrospectively reported a more insecure attachment history than did adolescents (n = ca 200) drawn from the general population, who in turn reported a more secure attachment history. Also, higher scores on our continuous New Age Orientation Scale (NAOS) were related to retrospective reports of a more insecure attachment history with parents, both in the adolescent group and the adult New Age group. The validity of retrospective self-reports of attachment history is of course questionable. Therefore, in a follow-up study (Granqvist et al. in press), we utilised an independent AAI-coder’s coherence-based inferences regarding interviewees’ probable experiences with parents in childhood (the coder was, of course, blind to New Age orientation). Such inferences had previously been found longitudinally predictable from independent, behaviourally based infant attachment classifications (Main, Hesse & Kaplan 2005). Participants were 84 adults drawn from religious and spiritual groups. The results of this study also supported the compensation hypothesis. Both parents (and especially the mothers) of high New Age scorers were judged substantially less loving and more

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rejecting and role-reversing—in sum less sensitive—than parents of participants who scored low on the New Age scale. Current Romantic Attachment Links between self-reported romantic attachment and indices of New Age embracement have also been investigated in two studies. In the first study, as expected on the basis of the considerations above, high New Age scale scorers also scored higher in romantic attachment disorganisation (i.e. fearful avoidance) than did low New Age scale scorers (Granqvist & Hagekull 2001). In the second study, conducted in Belgium, Saroglou, Kempeneers & Seynhaeve (2003) found a greater interest in reading spiritual/esoteric books, which are common in New Age circles, among adults who scored high in ambivalent/preoccupied attachment as compared with others. Current State of Mind within the AAI Although the above findings are converging in support of the compensation hypothesis, self-reports of attachment history and romantic attachment are vulnerable to a host of defensive biases (e.g. social desirability, impression management). Also, even if independent judges made coherence-based estimates of probable experiences with parents in the AAI study described, the inferences were still retrospective, they did not address the interviewee’s current state with regard to attachment, and they are not as well-validated as the AAI (state of mind) classification. In fact, AAI classifications are both longitudinally predictable from the same individual’s attachment classification as an infant and longitudinally predictive of how an adult interviewee’s child will organise his/her behaviour around the adult/parent (see Hesse 1999). For example, a prospective mother with a secure classification has approximately a 75% chance of raising a child with secure attachment, whereas a corresponding percentage of prospective mothers with an insecure classification will raise a child with an insecure attachment. Hence, the question of whether New Age endorsement is linked to solid assessments of the hypothesised attachment qualities remains to be answered. In the one study that has addressed that question, the answer was affirmative (Granqvist et al. 2006). Higher New Age orientation scores were linked, first, to unresolved (i.e., disorganised surrounding trauma) states within the AAI. Second, individuals assigned a preoccupied (M = 3.25 on the New Age scale) or globally disorganised (i.e., cannot classify; M = 4.16) category scored substantially and significantly higher


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on the New Age scale than did remaining participants (M = 2.16). The results for the globally disorganised group (n = 5) were particularly striking. Every participant with such a classification scored above the mean on the New Age scale (for details, see Hesse & Granqvist 2005). Discussion of Attachment and the New Age We have thus seen that the few studies conducted on attachment and the New Age have uniformly and strongly supported the compensation hypothesis. Individuals who, according to self-reports or independent judges, have experienced parental insensitivity while growing up are particularly inclined to endorse the New Age. Moreover, those who currently embrace the New Age are more likely than those who do not to be disorganised or preoccupied/ambivalent with respect to attachment, in the AAI as well as with respect to their romantic partnerships. It is worth noting that both of these attachment states represent serious forms of insecure attachment. They are both associated with elevated suffering (e.g. anxiety and dissociative states), particular clinical psychiatric diagnoses (e.g. anxiety disorders, borderline personality disorder) and with transmission of correspondingly serious insecure attachment to the next generation, who are likely to develop elevated behavioural and emotional problems as a consequence (Hesse 1999). While most of these issues could not be addressed in the AAI study described above, the New Age scale was positively related to loneliness, though not to states of anxiety or depression (Granqvist et al. in press, data not presented). In future research in this area, it will be important to investigate whether parental New Age endorsement, like preoccupation and disorganisation (van IJzendoorn 1995), predicts ambivalence and disorganisation in their children. The findings and conclusions on attachment and the New Age are important and raise a number of additional questions for future research and intervention. For example, individuals taking part in the New Age may have spent years, and considerable financial resources (e.g. Heelas 1999), trying to make sense of their ‘toxic parents’, ‘dysfunctional families’ and the like, before now (finally) having the sense that they have developed some of their ‘inner potential’ and achieved a certain degree of authoritativeness concerning psychological issues in general, and perhaps their own personal experiences in particular. Has that ‘work’ been entirely in vain or even detrimental? To address such questions, it is necessary for future studies to employ longitudinal

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(pre- to post New Age involvement) designs. We would caution, however, that as considerable investments are typically made in the New Age, psychological assessments should not be based on self-reports (e.g. of mental health), which risk primarily tapping a subjective legitimisation of the spiritual investment (i.e. cognitive dissonance), but rather on independent modes of assessment. While awaiting the results of such studies, we hypothesise that involvement in the New Age does not serve a functional compensation, especially not in promoting increased security of attachment. The reason for this speculation, besides the insecure states of mind described among New Age individuals, is that the inclinations of preoccupied (e.g. preoccupying anger, self-absorption) and disorganised (e.g. dissociative states, irrational states regarding death) individuals is not counteracted, but even encouraged and allowed a more or less full expression within the New Age and in the company of other individuals with similar inclinations. To encourage people involved in the New Age instead to seek out professionals in mainstream, traditionally evidence-based therapy may be naïve, as traditional standards for ‘evidence based’ (e.g. randomised trials, comparisons with placebo effects) may be dismissed in the New Age as a dogmatic relic from ‘the age of reason’. Still, it may be worth a try (cf. Lilienfield, Lynn & Lohr 2003; McLaren 2004). The empirical one-dimensionality of the New Age orientation scale in conjunction with the theoretical heterogeneity of the scale items suggests that the average person attracted by the New Age endorses beliefs and engages in activities that, for example, on the one hand imply determinism/fatalism (such as the belief in fortune-telling and astrology) and on the other an almost unlimited degree of individual freedom (such as the ‘personal development’ discourse or the belief that every individual ‘chooses’ his/her parents). Such contradictions constitute a direct parallel to the notion of incompatible strategies regarding attachment in globally disorganised (i.e. cannot classify) AAI transcripts. Hence, global attachment disorganisation seems to have a parallel in the New Age in an incoherent set of beliefs regarding the conditions and prospects of the individual’s life as such. We opened the section on attachment and the New Age by noting that previous studies on attachment and religion had uncovered two developmental pathways to religion. As should be clear now, the pathway to the New Age is part of the emotional compensation pathway (i.e. via experiences from insensitive parenting and insecure attachment). Further attesting to the similarity between the New Age and emotion-


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ally compensating aspects of religion, New Age scale scores have been positively related to an emotionally based religiosity, wherein God is sought out as a source of distress regulation, and negatively related to religiosity as socially based in the parental relationship (Granqvist & Hagekull 2001). However, New Age endorsement and the emotionally compensating aspects of religiosity are differentially related to current attachment organisation. While we have seen that New Age endorsement is associated with the most serious forms of insecurity within the AAI-system, more traditional aspects of religiosity, whether compensatory or not, are typically not related to state of mind classifications within the AAI (Granqvist et al. in press). This suggests that some individuals who have suffered attachment-related adversities and sought God to compensate may in fact have achieved a certain degree of earned security from doing so (cf. effects from meeting a secure love partner or a therapist; Main et al. 2003). This, in contrast, cannot be said for those who have come to embrace the New Age. While speculative at this point, one important reason for the discrepancy between these spiritual domains in relation to attachment may be that (theistic) religion contains a surrogate attachment-like figure (i.e. God), with whom the individual may establish perceptions of a personal, nurturing relationship that helps him/her derive a sense of security, comfort and direction in life, and partly frees the individual from a self-absorbed focus on his/her own sufferings. Hence, that relationship would serve important self-integrating functions that would not be served equally well if the individual was on his/her own, in a void of subjectivist values, trying to understand him-/herself without sorting out incompatible beliefs and forming functional surrogate attachments. Thus, the development of earned security presumably requires more than the “celebration of the self ” (Heelas 1996) that is primarily involved in the New Age. General Discussion and Conclusions In this chapter, we have considered a number of psychological characteristics tied to individual New Age endorsement. These characteristics have concerned developmental precursors, concurrent experiential states and constitutional correlates such as motivational goals, personality aspects and cognitive styles. A summary of these characteristics is provided in Table 1.

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Table 1: Documented and hypothesised psychological characteristics of individuals adhering to the New Age Constitutional factors and correlates Biologicala: Motivation: Personality: Cognitive style:

Left temporal lobe dysfunction; overactivation of the right hemisphere (especially the temporo-limbic regions) Individualist goals (rather than collectivist); agency (rather than communion) Schizotypy; thin boundaries; absorption/suggestibility Magical thinking; loose connections; abstract self-understanding

Environmental/Developmental precursorsb Parental insensitivity to child’s needs (rejection, role-reversal and/or frightening/frightened behaviours) Traumatic loss and/or abuse Insecure attachment organisation (disorganised and/or ambivalent/pre-occupied) Experiential correlates Dissociative mental statesa Elevated subjective suffering (e.g. loneliness) ‘Bursts’ of feelings and creativitya Notes: a Hypothesised based on inferential, rather than direct, evidence; b As of yet, only directly investigated in relation to New Age adherence in crosssectional studies.

Besides the psychological characteristics studied to date in relation to New Age endorsement, we have added to the table a few characteristics that we hypothesise to be involved and that will be important for future studies to address. Most importantly, time is now ripe to address the biological correlates of New Age endorsement. As we noted earlier, genetic heritability explains a moderate to substantial part of the variance in personality characteristics (Plomin & Caspi 1999), some of which were considered here in relation to New Age endorsement (e.g. schizotypy, absorption). More specifically, results from molecular genetic and neurological studies suggest that related patterns of thinking and experiencing, such as magical ideation and a propensity to enter dissociative states, can be understood against the background of left tem-


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poral lobe dysfunction and overactivation of the right (temporo-limbic) hemisphere. Future studies should address whether such a pattern of molecular genetic and neurophysiological alterations can be observed in relation to New Age endorsement as well. An important question for future studies is whether the environmental attachment factor and the genetic basis of the personality aspects underlying New Age endorsement are independent or interdependent causes of New Age belief and practice. It could be that a combination of genetic predispositions and disorganised attachment is required to set the individual up for strong involvement in the New Age, but it could also be that one of the two suffices. Of course, to test such models requires a relatively large data base as well as considerable research funding. In the meantime, twin and adoption studies could easily incorporate the New Age orientation scale to test the relative contribution of genetic heritability and environment in explaining New Age variance. Although the studies we have conducted describe how personality, cognitive and early developmental factors play a substantial role in adherence to the New Age, in order to avoid genetic fallacies (i.e. attribute ontological falsity to an experience because of its psychological or physical causation), we wish to distance ourselves from attempts to explain away metaphysical beliefs and spiritual experience as nothing but epiphenomena of the brain. In a recent experiment, one of us has in fact found results that cast serious doubt on one of the major proposals of neurotheology (i.e. that paranormal experiences result from electric discharge in the temporo-limbic brain regions; e.g. Persinger 2003) and has emphasised the multifactorial nature of mystical and related experiences (see Granqvist et al. 2005). One finding of this study that is relevant for the current chapter is that New Age orientation predicted mystical and other unusual experiences, unlike the experimental application of weak, complex magnetic fields to selected brain areas. Such predictive results were not found for traditional religiosity, which converges with the conclusions from the studies presented here, namely that the psychological correlates of New Age endorsement are distinct from those of traditional religiosity. Finally, we hope that the studies and ideas described in this chapter may serve as a warning for psychologists and social scientists not to treat all systems of supernatural beliefs as reflecting the same kind of emotive, cognitive and motivational processes. Our research shows that this is not the case. The differences found are not just quantitatively significant but seem to be associated with profoundly diverse—and to

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PRODUCING AND CONSUMING NEW AGE SPIRITUALITY: THE CULTIC MILIEU AND THE NETWORK PARADIGM Adam Possamaï The search for adequate conceptualisation and understanding of New Age spirituality is fraught with difficulties if pursued within the theoretical perspectives of sociology, which shed light on the role of religion in modernity. The focus on commitment to, and nevertheless identity formation within, collectivities like churches, sects, and cults is a theme in the ‘modern’ sociology of religion which can lead us astray when we address New Age spirituality. Indeed, New Agers move through fluid networks rather than settled collectivities (Possamaï 2005a). The sociology of religion—if it wants to open itself to this late-/postmodern world—must now accommodate new concerns with multiple interpretations of reality, shifting identities, diversity, consumer culture and pluralism. Therefore, the task of this chapter is to revise the notion of cult and cultic milieu (C. Campbell 1972) and adapt it to our late-/ post-modern and network society, which is in symbiosis with consumer culture. Indeed, studies by Heelas (1999), Salamon (2001), Van Hove (1999) and York (1999) underline a strong correlation between New Age, neo-liberal capitalism, and globalised consumer culture which has seen increasing prominence within late-/post-modern societies. It can be argued that these spiritualities are part of the cultural logic of late capitalism (Possamaï 2003). This logic has been analysed by Jameson (1991) who claims that there are three periods in the development of capitalism. These are: first, market capitalism, which is characterised by the growth of industrial capital in largely national markets, from about 1700 to 1850 CE; second, monopoly capitalism in the age of imperialism, which coincides with the period when European nation-states developed international markets, exploiting the raw materials and cheap labour of their colonial territories; and third, and most recently (from the 1960s), the phase of late capitalism, which is that of multinational corporations with global markets and mass consumption, creating the world space of multinational capital. Moving towards an analysis of culture in this phase of late capitalism, Jameson argues that, previously, modernist culture could be

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judged against certain dominant standards—for example, the distinction between high culture and low culture—and might even be oppositional or shocking, whereas postmodernist culture—a culture symptomatic of this ‘late’ phase of capitalism—is fully commodified and tends to be judged in terms of what gives instant pleasure and makes money. In Possamaï (2005b), I argue that these spiritualities under investigation are a type of hyper-consumerist religion. They consume all types of products and messages across a vast array of religions, and the choice is in the hand of the consumer. Whereas hypo-consumerist religions, such as religious fundamentalism, although they are still consumerist, tend only to consume what is offered from within their own religion; and the choice for the consumption of a product and/or message has to be agreed by a type of authority outside of the self. For this chapter to revise the notion of cult and cultic milieu by adapting it to our late-/post-modern and network society, I will thus regard postmodern culture as the culture of consumer society and will consequently refer to the production and consumption of spirituality as an indicator of New Age networking. Cults and the Network Paradigm Claiming that these spiritualities are part of consumer culture is only the very beginning of the solution as there are clear problems when dealing with New Age spirituality. First, the term lacks a clear denotation (York 1995) and creates problems when used in the field (Possamaï 2005a). Indeed, as Lewis realises: “[B]ecause individuals, institutions, and periodicals who formerly referred to themselves as ‘New Age’ no longer identify themselves as such, studies built around a distinction between New Age and non-New Age . . . become more complex” (Lewis & Melton 1992:2). Further, this term also lacks a clear denotation in the academic literature (Kemp 2004; Sutcliffe 2003) and among the likes of the New Age spokespersons listed by York (1995:48–88),1 such as Shirley MacLaine and Edgar Cayce.

It is not my intention to summarise the works by Ram Dass, Edgar Cayce, Ruth Montgomery, Shirley MacLaine, etc.; for such an analysis, see York (1995) which analyses spokespersons of New Age spirituality in a descriptive way and discusses the fact that some of these people tend to eschew the designation ‘New Age’ (ibid.: 49). 1

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While it could be argued that the term New Age is dead, this popular and often misused word seems very much alive (Possamaï 2005a). Another problem is that the term is very often used as a meronymy— that is as the single descriptor for a range of distinguishable religious phenomena of which it is only a part. For instance, York (1995) separates Neo-Paganism from New Age. In Possamaï (2005a), I argued that New Age and neo-paganism are only parts of a larger spirituality, which I have called perennism and which includes more than these two sub-groups. Perennism2 is a term born from the cultural transactions between emic and etic categories, which attempts to respect the local reality of the participants I interviewed in Possamaï (2005a). It is used as a heuristic tool to describe Alternative Spiritualities, a term used in preference to the hermeneutically deficient term ‘New Age’ (Possamaï 2001). Perennism has three characteristics and is defined as a syncretic spirituality which interprets the world as monistic (the cosmos is perceived as having its elements deeply inter-related—it recognises a single ultimate principle, being, or force, underlying all reality, and rejects the notion of dualism, e.g. between mind and body); whose actors are attempting to develop their Human Potential Ethic (actors work on themselves for personal growth); and whose actors are seeking Spiritual Knowledge (the way to develop oneself is through a pursuit of knowledge, be it the knowledge of the universe or of the self, the two being inter-related). For the sake of this chapter and of clarity, I will continue to employ the oft-misused term ‘New Age’ instead of the more precise, but not commonly used, term of perennism. Second, the classic studies in sociology of religion such as those on New Religious Movements and the church-sect-cult typology are not adequate when dealing with the amorphous nature of these new spiritualities (Heelas 1996; Introvigne & Melton 1996; York 1995). These concepts have been created in sociology to describe more classical religious groups. For example, and in a nutshell, churches are formal organisations with a hierarchy of (paid) professionals which profess to embrace all (if not a large part) of a society; sects are smaller and exercise more control over their members than other religious

2 This word, even if inspired by Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1946), is used as a sociological tool, and should not be confused with this philosophy. For this reason, I have chosen ‘perennism’ (based on the Latin root) rather than ‘perennialism’ (based on the English word) because ‘perennialism’ is often used as a synonym for perennial philosophy (see Faivre 1992; Heelas 1996).

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organisations; whereas cults are small loosely knit groups organised around some common themes and interests. The term New Religious Movement is often used to explain the boom of new religious groups since the 1960s counter-cultural revolution and are often classified as world rejecting or world-affirming. There are many shades of grey with these definitions and a more detailed analysis of these terms can be found in York (1995). Suffice is to say for this chapter that these classical terms in sociology of religion (except the sociological concept of ‘cult’ which will be revised below) are not perfectly adapted to religions and spiritualities emerging from this late capitalist world. The main reason is because within these spiritual groups, there are no religious, economic or political institutions, which propound a ‘New Age’ vision of reality. There are no ecclesiastical elites, no manifestos which can move crowds, no structured organisations to spread ‘New Age’ ideas, but ‘New Age’ is nevertheless here. It is found in a social space in which there is much social effervescence, but it is elusive. ‘New Age’ is underground, a shifting network in form, oriented to the present, and characterised by unstable rationality. Further, Sutcliffe (2003) in his analysis of the ‘New Age’ in the UK points out two different time periods in the elusive practices of these spiritual actors. Before the 1970s, the ‘New Age’ currents tended to be ascetic, puritanical and other-worldly, whereas after, they became emotionally expressive, hedonistic and firmly this-worldly. Those before the 1970s tended to be subcultural pioneers and were serial seekers; those after are countercultural baby boomers and multiple seekers. A ‘serial’ seeker has changed religious or spiritual allegiance, typically more than once. Adhesion to each ‘spiritual path’ may last months, years or decades, and any number of sequential affiliations may be pursued over the course of a life-time . . . In contrast, multiple seeking proceeds multi-directionally and synchronically: an array of spiritual resources are exploited more or less simultaneously. Ideas, methods and techniques are decontextualised and reconstituted in new settings and adventurous juxtapositions. (Sutcliffe 2003:204)

For the sake of this chapter, ‘New Agers’ in general will thus be regarded as multiple seekers; which makes the task of pinpointing them to one, or to even two or three, group(s) a difficult task. One way to move around the difficulty of sociologically understanding these spiritual actors’ movements and organisation is to move to a network paradigm, which is reflected in the field as well. Indeed, as one of my informants, Judith, said:


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Judith: I’m a solitaire. Interviewer: you don’t belong to any group? Judith: No. I don’t belong to any coven [a specific type of group for NeoPagans], no. I don’t belong to any rigorously defined group any more than most people would say. Somebody may be a computer programmer and they belong to the group of computer programmers but they don’t necessarily know them. But they’ll have a lot of friends who are. They’ll all put together. And if somebody’s particularly good at some particular part of that job then they’ll probably teach the others. If they’re particularly strong in some other area the information is passed on. And it is more about information being passed on. It’s a network I suppose more than anything else. A bit of a web.

Another informant, Elizabeth, commented on the same topic: I suppose what characterises the New Age movement to me is a networking thing. Where you can just turn up to a place like Confest3 on your own and meet lots of people and immediately identify with them.

One way to face these theoretical problems is thus to shift to a paradigm within sociology which accommodates the fluidity of New Agers, i.e. the network paradigm. This paradigm includes concepts such as the Bund (Hetherington 1994), neo-tribes (Maffesoli 1988), situationalistic networks (Lipovetsky 1987), the Segmented Polycentric Integrated Network (York 1995), and the web (Corrywright 2003). Explaining these terms is beyond the scope of this chapter, and I will thus work more specifically with that of the Bund, the reason being that this concept seems to be more appropriate to describe the affective and intuitive forms of associations of New Agers (see Possamaï 2000). The term Bund was first used in this technical sense by Schmalenbach in the 1920s. Hetherington (1994) summarises it as: An elective form of sociation, in which the main characteristics are that it is small scale, spatially proximate and maintained through the affectual solidarity its members have for one another in pursuit of a particular set of shared beliefs. (1994:2)4

The Bund has its solidarity more focused on affective-emotional links. It is elective and for its members: “Schmalenbach shows that it is an

3 Confest is a bi-annual gathering of alternative lifestyle and spiritualities, and radical political movements, held in Australian bushland and often comprising 8,000–10,000 people (see St. John 2001). 4 A longer definition is presented in Hetherington (1994:16) but it complicates the phenomenon unnecessarily.

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intentional act of joining together with strangers that is the basis of their common feeling and mutual solidarity” (Hetherington 1994:13). The term Bund has, as its central theme, affect and emotional elements, which appear to explain why ‘New Agers’ mix with certain groups and not others (Possamaï 2005a). The nature of these affinity networks is elective, affectual and spontaneous. They are characterised by fluidity, periodic assemblies and dispersals. In our late-/post-modern world, these networks are not static but are dynamic in a plurality of lifestyles and proliferating identifications. It is also within these affinity networks that ‘New Agers’ shift their taste and identities, and consume spiritualities. Moving towards this network paradigm is not enough. A more precise sociological understanding of what happens within and between these networks is required for the sake of theoretical advancement. To reach this goal, I would argue that the notion of cult is still valuable. Readers should be reminded that the word ‘cult’ has a strong pejorative connotation in everyday life (e.g. Dillon & Richardson 1994; Richardson 1993), whereas the terms ‘New Religious Movements’ (NRMs) and ‘Minority Religions’ are more objective appellations used by scholars to describe the same phenomenon. In popular usage, ‘cults’ tend to refer to religious groups with an authoritarian leadership, which suppress rational thought, organise deceptive recruitment techniques and coercive mind control, and isolate members from conventional society and former relationships. It is a word often used to scare, to worry, and to sell in the milieu of sensationalist journalism. For Barker (1986:332), the term became highly derogatory after the mass suicide/murder of followers of Jim Jones in Guyana. While numerous NRMs had prior to this been treated on a case by case basis, following the deaths, they have all tended to be negatively referred to as ‘cults’, even if there is considerable diversity among them. If most anti-cult movement pronouncements tend to be about ‘destructive cults’, they also have the tendency to lump many new religious groups together, as though they were a single entity, “the sins of one being visited on all” (Barker 1995:297). However, in some sociological research as presented below, the word ‘cult’ has been used as a synonym for ‘New Religious Movements’ and should thus not be understood negatively. I will argue below that the sociological work on ‘cults’ could describe various cells within the network paradigm, and thus should not be forgotten. As York (1995) claims in the conclusion of his book, the challenge to have a “viable sociological tool that is applicable to


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contemporary late twentieth-century developments and study” is to combine the church-sect-cult typology and various theories on cults and New Religious Movements with the network paradigm.5 The Cultic Milieu Another way to describe the form of association of ‘New Agers’ which takes into account their fluid form of aggregation is that of the cultic milieu. This term was coined by Colin Campbell (1972) who refers to it as the cultural underground of society. It includes all deviant belief-systems and their associated practices, e.g. unorthodox science, deviant medicine, the world of the occult and the magical, mysticism, and alien intelligences. A major flaw of this concept is that it focuses on the belief that there is a lack of organisation in this cultic milieu; accordingly it does not take into consideration more organised cults (York 1995). The task for this chapter is thus to take the more organised cults into account, and to combine these cults and the cultic milieu with the recent network paradigm. As a first step towards this, Stark and Bainbridge (1981a; 1981b; 1985) provide a typology which includes three levels of cult activities claiming to cover the whole cult environment; in this typology (see below), cults vary in terms of their level of organisation. However, Stark and Bainbridge’s perspective tends to focus more on the production of spiritualities and takes less into consideration the different modes of consumption of these spiritualities, i.e. the plurality of reasons why ‘New Agers’ shop in these cults. ‘New Agers’ do not consume spirituality passively, and they do not necessarily take it for granted. Following de Certeau’s (1988) analysis, the production of spirituality is indeed not received passively, but is contested and again re-appropriated. If we compare spirituality to a message, there is a resistance from the original message and as de Certeau writes about texts in general, “The reader takes neither the position of the author, nor an author’s position. He invents in texts something different from what they ‘intended’ ” (ibid.: 169). Indeed, as described in Possamaï (2005b), ‘New Agers’ no longer accept a religious ‘set menu’ offered by ‘traditional religions’—and even by New Religious 5 His claim is more elaborate than this; but this is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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Movements—but are more interested in a ‘religion à la carte’. They free themselves from ascriptive bonds and thus, presumably, weaken social ties to any particular religious group. This type of subjectivism dictates that one should find one’s own path and includes for example experimenting and exploring spiritual practices, reading a great number of books until one feels confident enough to decide which spiritual path to follow. For serial seekers, this exploration can take many years and it is stressed that time is sometimes necessary before finding the most suitable path. ‘New Agers’ are seekers (Balch & Taylor 1978:54–55) and they network. They shop around in these cults—and in the cultic milieu—and they consume spiritualities on offer. Their inner self appears to be the arbiter of their spiritual quest. The actors focus on constructing their own identity, their own personality, and on generating their own knowledge. These consumers are mobile and their tastes fluctuate. They are part of what Bauman (1998) calls post-modern religions; they consume products to gather and to enhance sensation. Explaining the cultic milieu only with reference to the production of spirituality does not aid in the understanding of the movements of ‘New Agers’ among ideal-types of cults. A way to explain this networking would be thus to focus more specifically on the movements of ‘New Agers’ between what is produced and what is consumed. Thus, to provide a more comprehensive look at cults—some more organised than others—within the cultic milieu, I wish to build a two-dimensional model—production and consumption of spirituality. I will apply three works (Stark & Bainbridge 1985; B. Campbell 1978; Gillen 1987) which are highly significant for the understanding of cults. First Axis: Production of Spirituality Stark and Bainbridge’s (1985) conception of cults is especially relevant for the description of the cults’ structure, i.e. their type of organisation which produces spirituality. They propose a typology of three ideal-types of cult: the audience cult, the client cult and the cult movement. Audience cults are the most diffuse and least organised kind of cult. They often do not gather physically but produce cult doctrines entirely through magazines, books, newspapers, radio, and television. There are virtually no aspects of formal organisation to these activities. They “deal in myth, weak magic, and esoteric entertainment. Audience cults


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operate primarily through the mass media but sometimes attract crowds of consumers to lectures, fairs, and the like” (Stark and Bainbridge 1981a:430). These audience cults will be involved mainly in what Danny L. and Lin Jorgensen (1982:375) call psychic fairs; a synonym with ‘New Age’ festivals. The obvious function of psychic fairs is to make money and disseminate information, yet they also provide a crucial basis for social network and solidarity. In the course of psychic fairs, members of the community make new friends, exchange ideas and services, reaffirm established relationships, develop business arrangements, present positive images to the public, make converts, and recruit members. However in this kind of fair, I find not only audience cults but also sometimes client cults that are more organised, but which also need to sell their ‘spiritual’ products. Client cults are considered by Stark and Bainbrige (1985:26) as audience cults organised among those offering the cult service. No successful effort is made to weld the clients into a social movement or to have their all-embracing mobilisation. The leaders dispense magical services—e.g. those of astrologers, Tarot card readers, psychics, healers, water dowsers. The authors compare the relationship between those promulgating cult doctrine and those partaking of it as the relationship between therapist and patient or between consultant and client. “Indeed, client involvement is so partial that clients often retain an active commitment to another religious movement or institution” (ibid.: 26). Cult movements (ibid.: 29–30) are full-fledged religious organisations. Many of them are very weak organisations; others can function much like conventional sects and attempt to cause social change. The degree to which these movements attempt to mobilise their members differs considerably within this ideal-type. However, unlike the other cult types, these movements tend to provide a meaning of the universe for their members. Stark and Bainbridge summarise their typology as follows: “In general, cult movements are higher in tension with the sociocultural environment, because they present more total challenges to conventional beliefs and practices than do client cults (which focus on narrow areas of human concern) and audience cults (which tend merely to offer vague vicarious satisfactions and entertainment)” (1981b:322).

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Bruce Campbell (1978) defines his ideal-types of cults through the way they handle the tension between the sacred within and the profane. He posits two ideal-types: the illumination cult and the instrumental cult.6 Campbell developed this typology to describe different forms of aggregation, whereas I will ‘paraphrase’ his typology to analyse the different modes of consumption in the cultic milieu. Campbell describes what I call the teleology of the being, i.e. that ‘New Agers’ will try to reach what they believe is the ultimate way of being; and this will influence their mode of consumption. If a ‘New Ager’ believes his or her salvation is extra-mundane, by developing his or her divine spark he or she will consume certain means in relation to this soteriology, e.g. yoga for meditation. If a spiritual actor fixes a goal in the intra-mundane to reach a state of well-being, of realisation, he or she will consume other mediums, or he or she will consume the same means but with a different conception, e.g. yoga to diminish stress. Paul Gillen (1987) also draws attention to another kind of teleology offered by some cults, namely entertainment, e.g. use of yoga to socialise and have fun. Because of these various teleologies, the ‘New Ager’ will shop around cults to find what can help him or her. There is not one teleology or mode of consumption shared by spiritual actors, but many; those are what this axis explores, through the concepts of illumination cult, instrumental cult and entertainment cult. The illumination cult, referred to by others as the mystical form of cults, corresponds to Troeltsch’s technical mysticism: a timeless, universal religion concerned with the development of the eternal self. This type emphasises detachment from the personality and the search for direct inner personal experience of the divine within (B. Campbell 1978:233). Campbell suggests that this kind of cult gives to its members a belief in a sacred within that influences their teleology for illumination, i.e. a mystic, a wise man, a wise woman, a sage, a saint, etc. Spirituality is here an end in itself, and will be consumed to fulfil this goal. Thus, by ‘illumination’, I refer to a quest for a direct inner personal experience of the divine within, or for a greater individual potential.

6 He also posits the service-oriented cult which is on aiding others for their spiritual growing. But because this cult tends to be found to a greater or lesser degree in all cults, I will posit the service-oriented cult as a non-independent type, and therefore, I will omit it from my work.


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The instrumental cult, referred to by others as the self-adjustment type, offers the individual techniques by which to better himself or herself and his or her place in the world. Inner experience is sought for its effects, its ability to transform the everyday empirical personality so that it can better meet the demands made upon it (ibid.: 233). The teleology of a member is to become a more ‘powerful’ person in the intra-mundane and focus attention, not on an inner experience, but on concrete effects, e.g. to develop intelligence, charisma, and to feel better in the body. The spirituality consumed, in this sense, is a means to external ends. Thus, by ‘instrumental’, I refer to some techniques an individual uses to better himself or herself, and to become more effective and efficient in worldly pursuits. The entertainment cult is a concept borrowed from Paul Gillen (1987) which originally dealt with the pleasure of Spiritualism. Some people will involve themselves in a cult to develop their higher self (illumination cult) or to gain more power (instrumental cult), but others will go to some meetings just for a good time. Gillen describes the context of the Spiritualist cult and in his observations, he realises that “spirit messages entertain in many ways, but most distinctively by the evocation of a suggestive indeterminacy. Like the patterns of the Rorschach test, they provoke interpretation but refuse to support a definite meaning” (ibid.:226). He also describes the activity of the medium as an attempt to hold the interest of his or her audience, like a television channel will do to raise its ratings. In other research, Luhrmann argues that people turn to modern magic, “because they seek for powerful emotional and imaginative religious experience, but not for a religion per se” (1993:222). Heelas also refers (1993:111) to yuppie-like people who consume a more Disney-esque—i.e. entertaining—spirituality. The Grid The first axis shows the level of organisation of the cults (audience, client and movement) and describes the production of spiritualities in the cultic milieu. The second axis describes the reason behind the consumption of these spiritualities (illuminational, instrumental and entertainment). The crossing of these axes results in nine ideal-types of cult which are at the meeting place between the production and consumption of spirituality, and which cover the whole cultic milieu. New Agers mainly network among these ideal-types and it will be impossible to associate any of them with strictly one ideal-type.

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Shape/Teleology Cult Movement Client Cult Audience Cult

Illumination ↔ ↔ ↔

Instrumental ↔ ↔ ↔

Entertainment ↔ ↔ ↔

This figure describes what the cultic milieu is.7 It is an imaginary place of many cults with different organisations and teleologies which offers a space for spiritual actors to network. Some of them attract members, others, clients or patients, and others, spectators. In this milieu, many needs (e.g. seekership of spirituality, healing tools, having fun) of ‘New Agers’ are fulfilled: however, these needs vary. One person might visit a cult movement, e.g. the Theosophical Society, to develop his or her ‘higher’ self and another one might just enjoy the talks and workshops that this society offers. On the other hand, someone on a ‘deep’ spiritual path might go to an audience cult to discover new techniques of enlightenment. Accordingly, these nine types of cults portrayed within the grid demonstrate not only the different reasons why ‘New Agers’ use them, but also the plurality of spiritual actors who evolve in the cultic milieu. However, even if ‘New Agers’ could be described as being involved in a cultic milieu, they are not restricted to it. The cultic milieu, being underground, is not the only place ‘New Agers’ visit to enrich their spirituality (Possamai 2005). During 1996–1997, I interviewed 35 inhabitants of Melbourne, Australia, who would ‘commonly’ be described as ‘New Agers’. They were involved in many spiritual practices, however each individual tends to specialise in one specific type of activity, such as astrology, automatic writing, (westernised) Buddhism, channelling, crystals manipulation, feminist spirituality, meditation, naturopathy, numerology, palmistry, Reiki, Spiritualism, Tantrism, Tarot cards, or urban shamanism; this list actually understates the diversity of practice. ‘New Agers’ from my sample might have been born in a particular religion or been atheistic, but none of them follow the steps of their primary agents of socialisation. They can be atheist, and sud7 Colin Campbell (1972), who coined the expression “cultic milieu” refers to an “instrumental-expressive orientation axis” which is included in my “illuminationinstrumental-entertainment orientation axis”. Campbell also bounds the cultic milieu with a “religion-science axis” which is not reflected in my grid. Including this third dimension will take us too far afield.


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denly meet someone, read a book or have a mystical conversion to become interested in alternative spiritualities. They may have also been socialised into a strong religious background, but they always conflict with the ecclesiastical authority. They may even have been educated in an alternative spiritual environment, but they still rebel against their (religious) habitus. On their spiritual paths, after having rejected their spiritual establishment, my informants have visited many ‘New Age’ and non-‘New Age’ groups and often continue to experience tension and conflict within those groups (e.g. born again Christians, Transcendental Meditation, Scientology), because they want to find their own subjective religion. The movements of these ‘New Agers’ seeking their spiritual path are not restricted to the cultic milieu. Some ‘New Agers’ sometimes go to church or are interested in Buddhism and visit its temples. They can sometimes join a sect and stay in it for a few months. When one of my informants, Tom, said in his interview that the best way to learn spirituality was to “get out into life and live it”, he was referring to a life beyond a cultic milieu. On the other hand, people belonging to a more traditional faith like Catholicism might network in a cultic milieu as well for their own spirituality. Even if the amount of people from traditional faiths involved in the cultic milieu is small (Bainbridge 2004; Heelas & Woodhead 2005), it nevertheless happens. Conclusion The church-sect-cult typology fails to describe adequately the form of aggregation of ‘New Agers’. This chapter has explored the sub-type of cult and has analysed its diversity in what the cults have to offer (production of spirituality) and for what reasons people join them (consumption of spirituality). These sub-types also map out the movements of ‘New Agers’ within this spiritual market. This new look at the cultic milieu has emphasised the affinity-networking of ‘New Agers’ across all the different types of cults, but this networking is far from being limited to cults and the cultic milieu alone.

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NEW AGE DIFFUSE COMMUNITIES Dominic Corrywright The social reality of contemporary communities in a global context is that of change. Significant changes in the ways that communities cohere and morphose are occurring in the modern, post-industrial and technological world. The fragmentation and diffusion of communities is recognised by many social commentators as the process of the dissolution of fundamental building blocks of society—the consequences of which are evident in the growth of the social ills of modernity. The paradigm for this perspective is entropic. Collapse is intrinsic to solidity; as Marx observed, “All that is solid melts into air.” The argument of this chapter recognises this process but theorises an alternative model for these changes. Communities from this new perspective are in transformation, one central element of which is increased diffusion. However, transformation does not signify disintegration, rather it suggests the emergence of new structures which attain new positions of balance. The core argument of this chapter is that New Age exhibits the key features of these novel diffuse communities. Most New Age communities are not the same as, nor even equivalent to, the notion of a circumscribed community based in a specific geographical locality. Whether this notion of community is centred on a physical location such as, for example, a sacred site or temple, or indeed a virtual location such as the cyber sites for New Age spirituality proliferating on the world wide web, geographic specificity is not essential to New Age communities. There are, it should be conceded, a number of significant geographical locations or centres for New Age ideas. Across the post-industrial, technological world there are a growing variety of individual network locations that host the manifold holistic practices of the New Age, from specialist learning centres such as the Esalen Institute at Big Sur in California, to retreat centres, from Adelaide in Australia, to São Paulo in Brazil, to the Greek island of Zakynthos. In the UK, for example, Findhorn in North Scotland is a specific community that functions as a central network hub for New Age courses (Sutcliffe 2000); Glastonbury in Somerset is a town that hosts multiple New Age organisations and groups (Bowman 2000); Kendal

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in Cumbria has recently been the subject of extended ethnographic study as a centre for a diverse range of activities that relate to New Age and alternative health (Heelas, Woodhead et al. 2005); Totnes and the area around Dartington where the Schumacher College is located and the magazine Kindred Spirit is produced is also a focal area for Buddhist retreat centres such as The Barn, Sharpham Trust and Karuna Trust (Corrywright 2004b). These places and others like them form important nodes in the web of New Age spiritualities. Such centres, distributed across the world with international visibility and participants, feed the New Age community in its widest sense. Yet withal this evidence indicating the primacy of geographically situated communities, the central hypothesis of this chapter is that the most accurate definition of New Age communities is not related to a specific site, building, township or institution. New Age communities are predominantly fragmented, non-localised networks. They are communities of the cultural diaspora. Organisationally, the New Age is best represented by the model defined by Gerlach and Hine in 1970 (and accepted by many scholars of the New Age, such as Michael York [1995] as the most accurate typological construct for New Age) as a Segmented Polycentric Integrated Network or SPIN. Some recent research has been directed at developing this model using the more organic and appropriate metaphor of the web. The morphology of New Age spiritualities’ beliefs, practices and communities is akin to a web, or rather webs within webs. This is a nodal network that is multivocal, plural and decentred. Its functionality requires a systems methodology to comprehend the activities of its participants (Corrywright 2003; 2004a). The relationships between these communities, systems or networks are complex and ever-changing. The element of change and the shifting patterns of the network communities of New Age and alternative spiritualities are set against a backdrop of an increasingly static formation of a globalised world. This relationship, between flux and staticity has been the subject of philosophical reflection from Heraclitus to Henri Bergson but is perhaps being more efficiently examined today in the work of social theorists such as Manuel Castells. Castells has characterised the conditions of ( post)modernity as system of ‘flows’ and networks: “The material foundations of society, space and time are being transformed . . . dominant functions are organised in networks pertaining to a space of flows that links them up around the world” (1996:476).

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Castells’ vision of transformation in society ironically resonates with notions of transformation within New Age and alternative spiritualities (though in a very different direction, for Castells’ Marxist materialism opposes the spiritual essentialism of the New Age). Yet Castells’ account of change offers a model for the processes that seem to be emerging in the changing structures of community evident among the diffuse communities of the New Age. Moreover, Castells incorporates within his model one of the most significant points of reticulation between members of diffuse communities, namely, the world wide web. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture. While the networking form of social organisation has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure. (1996:469)

New Age or alternative spiritualities offer scholars of religions some of the most interesting phenomena of contemporary religiosity. The basic categories, assumptions and models that work with significant success for the traditional religions are not applicable to New Age spiritualities. The search for unified belief systems, of orthodoxies, within New Age communities reveals such diversity that some scholars have misrecognised the phenomena as eclectic, superficial and simplistic. Rather, though, a methodology that affirms the primacy of praxis and considers comparatively, the historical formulation of religious groupings will discover a fecund set of phenomena of dynamism, depth and resonance for practitioners and scholars of religion alike. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate another aspect of this exciting field and uncover further novel expressions of our religious culture in the communities evolving within the area known as New Age or alternative spiritualities. The two ways in which I will examine this subject are firstly through an analysis of the meanings of community in this context, secondly by illustrating my interpretation with an example of the diffuse communities in the New Age. Models and Meanings of the Idea of Community A student essay noted, “In a society which is radically growing in size and population through means such as the global economy and e-commerce, the whole concept of community has been eradicated.”

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This negative appraisal of the destruction and end of community is reminiscent of Alasdair MacIntyre’s gloomy vision of the decline of communities. In After Virtue (1981), MacIntyre considers that modern western civilisation is at the same juncture of development as the Roman imperium before it slid into the Dark Ages. It is a period marked, one might say, by a crisis of community: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us” (1981:263). Indeed, the crisis of imploding and dispersing communities is at the heart of many contemporary concerns, secular and religious. One need only recollect the urban conflicts across the post-technological world, from wars in Srebenica and Kosovo at the end of the twentieth century, Baghdad and Basr at the start of the twenty-first century, racially motivated riots starting in Paris and spreading across France in 2005, and violence on the streets of any major city across the world from Los Angeles to Washington, Berlin to Bristol, or read again through the conclusions of the Church of England’s first Faith in the City report in 1985, reviewed ten years later with the same assertions, and reiterated again in 2003 by the Commission on Urban Life and Faith1 to support the thesis that communities are in decline. Of course, these real examples of dissolving communities are in accord with postmodern notions of fragmentation and fractured discontinuities. The failures of the urban housing projects of the 1950s and 1960s in cities across the modern urban world are evidence of the mistakes of the modernists in architecture as much as in social planning. One may conclude from this that community as a social concept is dying or dead. In fact it would be hard to disagree that from a strictly lexical definition of community, certain aspects of the term are obsolete. That is to say, as recourse to the Oxford English Dictionary illustrates, certain modes of the idea of community are no longer existent. But before resorting to OED definitions it is worth making a brief digression into realms of meaning and the commensurability of conceptual systems in order to give a theoretical framework for the changes in both the concept and actual existence of community.

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www.cofe.anglican.org/info/socialpublic/urbanaffairs.


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Steve Bruce makes a telling point to support the secularisation hypothesis in his analysis of the weakness of the following version of a well-known type of proposition: “Many Christians interpret the decline of the churches as an expression of the modern lack of faith in institutions of any sort, rather than as a lack of faith” (1995:47). Declaring that society remains religious despite radically reduced church-going is like, Bruce points out, someone who claims to be a “big football fan” yet who is not a member of a supporters club, is unsure of what team she or he supports, has not seen a match for twenty years, does not read the reports in the newspapers, cannot name any famous footballers and never plays. “At some point,” Bruce explains, “. . . it becomes clear that ‘football fan’ is here being used in an unusual manner” (idem). One might say that such propositions die the ‘death of a thousand qualifications’. The question is: have communities similarly died the death of a thousand qualifications? Or, in other words, have the dysfunctions of modern communities brought an end to the functionality of the term community? Such a question is more than linguistic nicety. Without some form of community we will indeed descend into the dark ages predicted by MacIntyre. But the key here is the idea of ‘some form’ of community. Both the social existence of communities and the linguistic definition of the concept are undergoing radical change in our contemporary world. We may illustrate the way this change can be conceptualised with reference to Wittgenstein’s notion of how we construct a “world picture” and, implicitly, to Donald Davidson’s explanation of the relationship between different “conceptual schemes” (1984/1974). Famously, Wittgenstein explained the creation of world pictures through the notion of language-games. But his worlds and games were not conceived as existing in a timeless vacuum they are subject to change. Wittgenstein explained how concepts change and adapt in this way: A meaning of a word is a kind of employment of it. For it is what we learn when the word is incorporated into our language. If we imagine facts other than as they are, certain language-games lose some of their importance, while others become important. And in this way there is an alteration—a gradual one—in the use of a vocabulary of a language. When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change. (1969:61–5)

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Over time then, we can see how the nature of a word such as community may change in response to the external conditions to which it is applied. It may not be that the diffuse New Age communities exist in Bruce’s “unusual manner”. It may be that these communities are indicative of a new usual manner. The change here is not, it will be clear, the kind of seismic radical change proposed by Thomas Kuhn’s notion of “paradigm shifts” (1962). But Wittgenstein’s gradual change offers an explanation of the way apparently disparate conceptual systems are commensurable, at least historically. It is also an excellent way to describe how New Age communities may at once appear so different from a traditional understanding of community—particularly as geographically unified—yet remain commensurable with certain aspects of the tradition of what is considered to constitute a community. Given the commensurability of apparently disparate notions of community, we may proceed to the content of a definition of community. If we were to accept a crude and a-historical understanding of language such as that proposed by seventeenth and eighteenth century grammarians or even early twentieth century logical positivists, the delineation of the concept community would rule out the New Age variants. Traditionally, the concept community means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: I. . . . a quality or a state . . . II. A body of individuals . . . The body of those having common or equal rights or rank . . . A body of people organized into a political, municipal, or social unity: a. A state or commonwealth. b. A body of men living in the same locality. c. Often applied to those members of a civil community, who have certain circumstances of nativity, religion, or pursuit, common to them, but not shared by those among whom they live; . . . d. the community: the people of a country (or district) as a whole; the general body to which all alike belong, the public. e. A body of nations acknowledging unity of purpose or common interests . . . A body of persons living together, and practising, more or less, community of goods. (selected OED definitions 2006)

Fortunately, the OED avoids straightjacket definitions and is responsive, as we should be, to the changing currency of words. This first set of definitions pertains to community as “a body of individuals.” While removing certain categories we can add others, such as the notion of a community that is a network of individuals. We will also find that the set of definitions given by the OED of community as “a quality or a state” is more relevant to the diffuse communities of New Age spiritualities.


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The quality of appertaining to or being held by all in common; joint or common ownership, tenure, liability, etc.; as in community of goods . . . Common character; quality in common; commonness, agreement, identity . . . community of interest: identity of interest, interests in common . . . Social intercourse; fellowship, communion . . . Life in association with others; society, the social state. (selected OED definitions 2006)

The lack of strong structures of unity continually militates against any notion of a closed community. New Age or alternative communities are open systems that are subject to change and are better considered in terms of extended families of networks rather than normative nuclear units. Yet these diffuse communities grow out of traditional communities, though MacIntyre would probably not conceive them as ideal forms of new civil and moral community. From one perspective, secularisation theorists could conceive these New Age communities as a last gasp of declining religiosity. Thus, the diffuse communities can be perceived to be fading communities. But one might assert that the paradigm of thought for this perspective is entropic. That is to say, communities are considered to be in dissolution and the diffuse communities of the New Age merely signify this process of dissolution. Fragmentation and diffusion as the postmodernists would have it are, ironically, features of the paradigm of old positivist science. However, an alternative new scientific paradigm is available in Ilya Prigogine’s notion of “dissipative structures” (1971; 1997).2 In essence, Prigogine’s argument, which was applied to chemical processes (and for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1977), explains the movement from simple to higher order structures. Certain structures are “closed” systems, where there is no internal transformation. Other structures, such as living beings and cultural systems, Prigogine has noted, contain continually transforming energy. This energy and the complexity of these structures lead to instability, but instead of collapse and entropy, the systems move into a higher order. These systems are dissipative structures. The diffuse communities of the New Age or alternative

2 Prigogine’s theory was appropriated by Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspircay (1982) to support her thesis that the major cultural shifts and changes in the brain she purports represent New Age transformations can be explained by a ‘scientific’ theory. For example: “The theory of dissipative structures offers a scientific model for the transformation of society by a dissident minority like the Aquarian Conspiracy” (1982:166).

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spiritualities can then be seen as indicative of this shift to higher order, or we may simply say, non-hierarchically, different order structures of community. Prigogine’s depiction of dissipative structures is a model, just as is Newton’s third law of thermodynamics, the notion of entropy. Today it is possible to say Prigogine’s concept more accurately models complex systems than the entropic model; tomorrow the history of science would tell us another world picture will emerge and supersede the idea of dissipative structures. Nevertheless, the model of dissipative structures currently fits the emergent diffuse communities rather better than the model of dissolving and disappearing communities. Both the dissipative model and the shifting currency of the very word community reflect models being developed in new social movement theory. Much has been written on the validity and range of the term ‘movement’ as applied to New Age studies (e.g. Kemp 2004:88–97). Kemp has rightly identified a lacuna in scholarly representations of New Age as a movement: “[I]t is surprising that new social movement theory, a well developed area in sociological theory . . . has not been more often applied to New Age” (2004:92). This may, in part, be the result of an oversight of new social movement theorists whose eyes have been on political and social movements such as CND, the ‘green’ movement or Jubilee 2000, rather than religious movements (e.g. Della Porta & Diani 1999; Mayo 2005). But it is also the result of the different emphases of different disciplines—where scholars of religion highlight doctrine and practice sociologists have focused on social organisation and functionalist representations. Furthermore social movement theory grows out of a globalisation discourse that, in Peter Beyer’s words, examines “a global society whose dominant, but by no means exclusive, structural features are differentiated societal systems centered on function or technique” (1998:3). While New Age studies have undoubtedly paid heed to both globalisation and functionalist representations of New Age and alternative spiritualities, the primary focus has been antagonistic to theorising that tends to monolithic and homogenised characterisations; rather the trend in New Age studies has been to emphasise the heterogeneous elements of the area by investigating the differentiated nature of groups through case studies and ethnographic fieldwork. New social movement theory has, as Kemp points out, a prima facie case to represent New Age and alternative spiritualities. The areas of interest of the new social movements overlap with those of the New Age diffuse communities. The primary features of new social


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movements identified by theorists have an “[e]mphasis upon issues of identity, ideology and culture, issues of social integration and cultural reproduction, rather than upon the material issues around production and distribution that had been seen as the bread and butter of class conflict in capitalist societies” (Mayo, 2005:61–2). Moreover, new social movement theories provide accounts not only of the interests of these new social groupings but also the dynamic nature of their existence. Such social groupings do not have the solidity and staticity of pre-industrial and industrial social movements. They arise, develop and morphose in response to the fluctuating interests of membership, a membership which rarely has fixed requirements to join and exhibits significant fluidity of activity and commitment. To summarise then, there are three premises about how the diffuse communities of New Age or alternative communities are shaped and how they function. Firstly, New Age communities are not all geographically static; many can be defined as diffuse communities. Secondly, New Age diffuse communities are not reducible to doctrinal unities. Thirdly, New Age diffuse communities are indicative of a shift in the nature of community, not towards the end of community as a functional notion, but towards different kinds of community. The Diffuse Communities of the New Age The example used here to illustrate these phenomena requires a little background explanation. First, it is necessary to introduce a neologism, the term “web-community” which can be taken as shorthand for the diffuse communities of the New Age or Alternative spiritualities. The organisation that I have chosen to illustrate the notion of web-communities is called Psychology of Vision (“PoV”). PoV is what Marilyn Ferguson has called a psychotechnology (1987)—that is, an approach that is informed by psychological principles which are instrumental in rationale, and are generally focused on achieving some form of holistic, spiritual integration. PoV is based in Kaneohe, Hawaii, where its two co-founders, Chuck and Lency Spezzano, live. However, there are a number of national organisations that carry out PoV seminars and serve as centres for PoV products. These include Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and the UK. The main PoV centre, outside Hawaii, is Psychology of Vision UK Ltd., which has its offices in Spirthill, Wiltshire.

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PoV provides a useful example of how a web-community has locations in specific areas yet is diffused across local and national boundaries. Because PoV advertises in national and international publications participants of their courses come from many areas of the country, and from abroad. The community is dispersed. Equally the community is linked by a network of different kinds of relationship ranging from those who merely use the Internet web links, to those who participate in PoV courses, to those who run the courses and those who both run courses, develop material for distribution to the diffuse community and live at the large house in Spirthill which also functions as the office for PoV UK and Ireland. Though there are many strands linking PoV to the wider web of New Age or alternative spiritualities it is appropriate here to concentrate on one feature of the emergent community linked with PoV (for a more detailed examination of the wider web of PoV activities see Corrywright [2003:187–216], from which this example is developed). This feature is shaped by the informal connections made by individuals involved in the organisation of PoV UK and Ireland and participants of PoV courses. The development of a newsletter in September 2000 from an informal network of PoV workshop participants illustrates one manifestation of the increasing cohesiveness of some aspects of informal network groups, or web-communities. The first newsletter produced by this group, called friends helping friends, operated both as an information bulletin board and as a network hub from which PoV workshop participants could extend network links. There has always been an unofficial support network for Psychology of Vision UK but the aim of ‘friends helping friends’ is to expand and develop this network. Each contact is committed to providing a nucleus to focus the energy of the work. There is no formal structure and indeed what’s on offer may vary greatly—some may invite you to a barbecue or dinner, others for a cup of tea and a chat, or perhaps to join a study group. Whatever’s on offer, the underlying intention is the same—to provide support and encouragement on your healing journey. ( friends helping friends 2000:3)

Since this early emergent aspect of the PoV’s web-community the significance of this aspect of the diffuse community has grown. It has become more formalised, and centralised as it has become incorporated into the web-hub maintained by PoV. Thus, in 2006 the Internet home page for PoV UK and Ireland leads to a page that states, “This page


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provides you a link to friends and like minded individuals and groups.”3 This in itself is a network hub both for those only interested in PoV and those interested and involved with other groups such as The Happiness Project, Healing Stars and Alternatives.4 The emergence of such diverse structures within a specific network indicates the evolutionary expansion of network hubs within web-communities. This example from PoV gives a concrete basis for Manuel Castells’ description of the modalities of the “network society”: Networks are open structures, able to expand without limits, integrating new nodes as long as they are able to communicate within the network, namely as long as they share the same communication codes (for example, values or performance goals). A network-based social structure is a highly dynamic, open system, susceptible to innovating without threatening its balance. (1996:470)

It is necessary to consider how communities such as these cohere and are reticulated between different nodes of the web. The web-community of PoV is expanding. As a business organisation it is dependent on wider economies related to financial security and international economic buoyancy. As a web-community it is subject to the changing social and cultural interests of a client base interested in developing personal spirituality (cf. Colin Campbells’ notion of a cultic milieu). Both offer the scholarly researcher patterns of unpredictable expansion as they are the product of the unquantifiable interests, experiences and skills of the multiple individuals who come into contact with PoV through other webs. Given the existence of other networks or web-communities, such as the world wide web or closer web-community forms such as other psychotechnologies, it is possible to assert probabilities about the nature of the evolutionary growth of the informal PoV community. However, it remains impossible to construct a complete picture of such communities. Web-communities such as those of New Age and

http://www.psychology-of-vision.co.uk/friends.htm. The Happiness Project (www.happiness.co.uk) is a psychotechnology established by Robert Holden that emphasises happiness and well being in its seminars and products; Healing Stars is run by Pam Carruthers who self-defines as an “astrologer, counsellor and trainer [who] is a spiritual midwife who can help you give birth to your true potential” (www.healingstars.com); Alternatives is itself an influential web community that advertises itself thus: “We host Monday talks at St James’s Church, Piccadilly and weekend workshops in spirituality, creativity, wellbeing and self development. Since 1982, we have welcomed the most well-known names in the Mind-Body-Spirit world” (www.alternatives.org.uk). 3 4

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alternative spiritualities are transient and complex systems. They reflect the speed of change and the widely differentiated nature of human relationships in the post-technological world. Nevertheless, there are means of uncovering the web-community network. The most effective mode for gaining access to the informal networks is by qualitative and ethnographic research such as is increasingly evident in the study of New Age and alternative spiritualities (e.g. Sutcliffe 2003; Heelas, Woodhead et al. 2005). The organic nature of webs, that is the way they are constructed by the pathways of individuals, necessitates discovering insiders’ perspectives. Scholars may describe these pathways in a number of ways, but the essential narrative must be given by the voices of those making the journey. Failure to represent the views of the researched community, may fall foul of Clifford Geertz’s criticism of constructing “ingenuities” which bear little resemblance to the actual structure of the researched community (1973:11). The key to the informal structure of such web-communities is communication. Research into a number of New Age and Alternative groups has provided evidence to this conclusion. A high percentage of questionnaire respondents and interviewees have cited word-of-mouth communication as the key means for sharing information and ideas which is a major type of thread linking those within a web-community (Corrywright 2003:153–4). There is a high level of commitment to sharing information and experiences gained through workshops, seminars, psychotechnological programmes, presentations, fairs, discussion groups, retreats, personal spiritual experiences and so on, with other people. So a core modality of the definition, and expansion, of such web-communities is via informal, word-of-mouth communications. Furthermore, underlying this medium is the self-conscious adoption of communication as an active means of developing personal spiritualities (Corrywright 2003:157–8). However, when one follows the diverse pathways of individual biographies as a way of mapping community one discovers that the notion of a discrete self-contained community is a fiction. Communities such as these overlap and are interdependent. By following the pathways of individuals within the communities we can see many levels of engagement and many levels of activity in a variety of communities. There are many layers to the interconnections between communities. There are mundane, worldly communities that interact with each other using recognised formal mediations of paper and electronic systems. There are equally less formal diffuse communities that are supported


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primarily by word-of-mouth communications, webs that may more accurately be termed ‘informal’. These connections are less clearly evident and are difficult to track in any quantitative sense. It is possible merely to provide ‘extracts’ from the informal pathways which interlink nodes in these informal webs. For those within the New Age spiritualities, there are modes of community which are just as concrete, though they are less easy to define for the outsider scholar. These modes of community involve human persons and non-human persons often referred to as ‘guides’ or angels. The spiritual and material realms are interpenetrating for insiders who maintain this worldview. From their perspective the web-communities of New Age or alternative spiritualities are comprised by the relationships between individual psyches, social groupings and a universal spirituality. Conclusion The field of New Age and alternative spiritualities offers new expressions of community and relationship for scholars of religion to study. This chapter has two functions: firstly it offers theoretical models to describe these phenomena; and secondly it provides empirical examples of the ways communities are engaged with and function amongst New Agers. The problems that novel phenomena present are that they destabilise previously established taxonomies and typological formulae. From certain perspectives on religious communities, the New Age diffuse communities may be read as negations of structural integrity, they are seen to exhibit and exemplify the fractured discontinuities of postmodernity. Yet the fragmentary nature of these communities does not signify entropic collapse. Rather the new morphologies of the New Age illustrate a cultural manifestation of Ilya Prigogine’s “dissipative structures.” That is to say, in this area of human expression the disintegration of community structures leads to new formations and reintegrations. In summary then: this chapter provides a notion of community that accepts the dissolution of certain forms of community in the postmodern world; it goes on to assert that novel forms of diffuse web-communities are emerging. There are a range of theories emerging from academic studies of New Age and alternative spiritualities and from social movement theory that can accurately represent the nature of these communities. It is in the field of New Age or alternative spiritualities that we can find evidence of these new, evolving communities.

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Beyer, P., 1998. “The Religious System of Global Society: A Sociological Look at Contemporary Religion and Religions.” Numen 45 1–29. Bowman, M., 2000. “More of the Same? Christianity, Vernacular Religion and Alternative Spirituality in Glastonbury.” In Sutcliffe, S. & M. Bowman, eds. Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 83–104. Bruce, S., 1985. Religion in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castells, M., 1996. The Rise of the Network Society: Information Age, Vol. I. Cambridge Mass: Blackwell. Commission on Urban Priority Areas, 1985. Faith in the City. London: Church House Publishing. Corrywright, D., 2003. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations into New Age Spiritualities. Bern: Peter Lang. ——, 2004a. “The Web of New Age Spiritualities.” In Lewis, J., ed. Encyclopedic Sourcebook of New Age Religions. Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 391–408. ——, 2004b. “Network Spirituality: The Schumacher-Resurgence-Kumar Nexus.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 19.3 311–27. Davidson, D., 1984. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: OUP, 183–98. Della Porta, D. & M. Diani, 1999. Social Movements: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Ferguson, M., 1982. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time. New York: Tarcher/Putnam. friends helping friends, 2000, edition 1. Blackheath: London. Geertz, C., 1993/1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Fontana Press. Gerlach, L.P. & V.H. Hine, 1970. People, Power, Change Movements of Social Transformation. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc. Heelas, P. & L. Woodhead, with B. Seel, B. Szerszynski & K. Tusting, 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell. Kemp, D., 2004. New Age: A Guide—Alternative Spiritualities from Aquarian Conspiracy to Next Age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kuhn, T., 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago University Press. MacIntyre, A., 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Mayo, M., 2005. Global Citizens: Social Movements and the Challenge of Globalization. London: Zed Books. Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2006. Prigogine, I., 1971. “Unity of Physical Laws and Levels of Description.” In Greene, M., ed., Interpretations of Life and Mind: Essays Around the Problem of Reduction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1–13. Prigogine, I., in collaboration with E. Stengers, 1997. The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. London: The Free Press. Sutcliffe, S., 2000. “A Colony of Seekers: Findhorn in the 1990s.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 15.2 215–31. ——, 2003. Children of the New Age: A History of Alternative Spirituality. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L., 1969. On Certainty. Anscombe, G.E.M. & G.H. von Wright, eds., G.E.M. Anscombe & D. Paul, trans. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. York, M., 1995. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. Lanham, Maryland: Roman & Littlefield Publishers.

NEW AGE, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY

NEW AGE, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY One of the strands of influence that shaped—and was in turn shaped by—the New Age was the Human Potential Movement. Techniques developed within the Human Potential Movement also quickly found their way into business training seminars. In “New Age and Business,” Martin Ramstedt examines this development, arguing that the increasing adoption of the Human Potential Movement converged with the western business world’s attempts to emulate the success of Asian businesses and with the neo-liberal call for a value-driven ‘enterprise culture’. The New Age has a wide-ranging interest in science that extends from holistic health to the scientific investigation of phenomena like the Near-Death Experience. However, the most significant aspect of this interest is undoubtedly the New Age attraction to certain metaphysical interpretations of modern physics, and this is the focus of James R. Lewis’s “Science and the New Age.” The central theme of his analysis is that the primary attraction is not to physical science per se, but to the philosophy of nature that draws on the authority of science to legitimate certain key ideas in the New Age worldview. Focussing on the apparent epistemic pluralism of New Age thought, more than a few observers have characterised the movement as a thoroughly postmodern form of spirituality. Christopher Partridge disputes this characterisation in his chapter, “Truth, Authority and Epistemological Individualism in New Age Thought.” Instead of being postmodern, Partridge demonstrates at length that the New Age is, generally speaking, thoroughly rooted in modernist understandings of the self, truth, etc. Inhabitants of contemporary industrialised societies tend to see themselves as having broken free of the constraints of traditional myths. However, a variety of different observers have pointed out that older myths and symbols continue to saturate our culture, though in fragments and less explicit forms. In “Old Myths, New Mythicising,” Anna E. Kubiak discusses this phenomenon and its connection with contemporary spirituality, particularly with the New Age. Building on the Gaia hypothesis and on earlier speculation about the earth’s invisible power grid, the New Age interest in the planet’s ‘power spots’ reached a critical mass during the Harmonic Convergence

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of 1987. Adrian Ivakhiv’s “Power Trips: Making Sacred Space through New Age Pilgrimage” explores the contours of this notions, and what it means for participants to undertake pilgrimages to these locations. Although these journeys are part tourism, the stress on contact with realms beyond the physical dimension indicate that such pilgrimages cannot simply be understood as a way of reducing the landscape to a commodity.

NEW AGE AND BUSINESS Martin Ramstedt Popular wisdom has it that the hallmark of present-day achievers is an aptitude for combining spiritual quests for authenticity with an entrepreneurial spirit. Applying emotional intelligence and seeking to listen actively to both the demands of their environment and the stirring of their soul, contemporary top-level managers also profess to work and live from a holistic perspective. Today, to be counted among the leading players, it does not suffice to benefit shareholder value only. It is expected that one serves the common good too through independent agencies. Frequently, contemporary business managers seek guidance on their path in the pithy affirmations and psycho-techniques of post-modern management gurus who develop their expensive brands of spiritual blending in response to an ever-growing demand from the professional market. Their brands are usually amalgamations of miscellaneous techniques, partly adopted from various schools of psychotherapy and in part appropriated from existing religious traditions. These techniques range from discursive introspection with the aid of a trainer-therapist, role-playing frequently bordering on psychodrama, storytelling, shamanic trance, aromatherapy, meditation, visualisation, chanting of so-called affirmations, to Sufi dancing. While some of the gurus have evolved out of countercultural communities such as Findhorn—like Daniel Hofman for instance, the founder of the well-known Dutch spiritual management consultancy firm KernKonsult—most management wizards have themselves undergone training in the diversified spiritual marketplace that has emerged with the baby boomers (Roof 1993). As a consequence, most ‘client cults’ (Bainbridge 1997), like Scientology or Osho for instance, now consciously cater to the needs of ‘business’, thereby displaying an acute sense of business themselves (see e.g. Heelas 1999:56–9). In this ever more business-minded spiritual market, spiritual management theories have successfully claimed a particularly profitable niche which has converged with deluxe segments of the wider experience economy, such as ‘wellness’ for instance. Anita Roddick’s Body

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Shop is a perfect case in point.1 In her autobiography Body and Soul (1991), she revealed that in her travels she had admired the skin and hair of women in less developed countries, who used nothing more than natural plants and fruits instead of lotions and shampoo. This gave her the idea to sell cosmetics made from natural ingredients only. Roddick furthermore saw no need for elaborate packaging of her cosmetics. Instead, she instigated her customers to buy refills for their empty containers. Apart from her commitment to the ecological movement, Roddick has also widely supported the work of Amnesty International. The bookshops at Singapore’s Changi Airport, a hub in the worldwide web of business travel, are full with glossy books on ‘authentic leadership’ and related themes which often draw on meditation, yoga, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), the enneagram, Tarot, channelling or astrology. Depending on the length of his or her transit at Changi, the interested traveller might want to take such counselling in the Sushi Bar, after having perhaps spent an hour in the airport’s Jacuzzi Spa. Of course, one finds exactly the same kind of management literature in major bookshops all around the world. In the new ‘cultural department store’, Dussmann in Berlin’s luxuriously refurbished city centre, the spiritual management literature genre is positioned right between ‘psychology’ on the one hand, and ‘Esotericism’ on the other. The mushrooming publications of this genre as well as the burgeoning number of spiritual management consultants all over the world attest to a convergence of the New Age movement and (neo-)liberal capitalism which was almost certainly inconceivable to the ancestors of both the former and the latter. In their pursuit of a utopian life-style rooted in communal living, vegetarianism, nature worship, experimental art and dance, Buddhist philosophy, Theosophist piety, heterodox psychoanalysis, and anarchist thinking, the bohemian forefathers and -mothers of the New Age movement had seemingly forsaken any association with the bourgeois milieu of fin de siècle (ca. 1900) Europe in which liberalism was

1 In March 2006, after this chapter was written, the Body Shop was taken over by L’Oréal, a large French cosmetics group. Dame Anita came under criticism for betraying her values. L’Oréal currently sells products which were historically tested on animals, and is at the time of publication part-owned by Nestlé, a company that has long been criticised for its marketing of powdered baby milk in developing countries. DJK.

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thriving. Conversely, hard-working industrialists like the father of Henri Oedenkoven, co-founder of the Monte Verità life-reform community near Ascona (Switzerland), were hardly keen on being associated with the lofty characters that kept companionship with his son (see Rotzler 1980:99–105; Ramstedt 1999:101–4; Green 1986). Yet both the cultural formation of the precursors of the New Age movement and that of the bourgeois liberals emerged as parallel, albeit antithetical movements from a common root: Enlightenment and its concomitant ethics of authenticity. The present convergence of New Age and neo-liberalism therefore seems to bear out a dialectical development that is about to culminate in a ‘higher’ synthesis. Conceptualisations of the Convergence of New Age and Business Those who feel reassured by idealist or holistic readings of this seemingly dialectical ‘spiral dance’ may very well have lost interest in the melancholic Marxist mantra pointing to the anaesthetising potency of ‘religion’ and its alarming actualisation in contemporary capitalism. A more sophisticated take on the subject was recently proposed though by Jeremy Carrette and Richard King in their co-written treatise, $elling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, published in 2005. Deploring “the increasing encroachment of the ideology of ‘market forces’ and utilitarian efficiency into all aspects of human culture and thought” (2005:ix), they observed a “fundamental ground shift” that has taken place in American and British culture since Reagan’s and Thatcher’s deregulation of the market. It has entailed “. . . an erasure of the wider social and ethical concerns associated with religious traditions and communities and the subordination of ‘the religious’ and the ethical to the realm of economics, which is now rapidly replacing science ( just as science replaced theology in a previous era), as the dominant mode of authoritative discourse within society.” (Carrette & King 2005:4–5) In the process, “ ‘religion’ was re-branded as ‘spirituality’ in order to enhance work productivity, performance and efficiency” (Carrette & King 2005:17). Carrette and King counted three functions of spirituality in the contemporary business world: (1) fostering allegiance to a company as a corporate community; (2) providing a “feel-good” factor that boosts workers’ efficiency and loyalty; and (3) aligning the personal mission of employees with that of the corporation (Carrette & King 2005:134–5).

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Their analysis has actually taken further the discussion on the neoliberal values of the so-called enterprise culture, published by Paul Heelas and Paul Morris back in 1992. Regrettably, Carrette and King failed to mention this earlier work. Yet, here we find ample evidence for the convergence of the spiritual or private and the worldly or professional domain prompted by the conservative, neo-liberal revolution: “Our aim has always been more than just economic progress; it is to renew the spirit and solidarity of the nation” (Thatcher 1979 cited in Heelas & Morris 1992:1). The individual citizen was now called upon in every aspect—and his or her family too, as, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families” (Thatcher 1987 cited in Heelas & Morris 1992:2). The traditional, though crumbling, family set-up was again advertised as an ideal cradle in which to nurture the individual with spiritual values such as generosity, dedication, initiative, responsibility, discipline and hard work, thereby advancing active citizenship. The conservative government in the United Kingdom did its part in fostering enterprising and valuedriven citizens (Cohen 1992:179; Heelas & Morris 1992:2, 6): We can only build a responsible, independent community with responsible, independent people. That is why Conservative policies have given more of them the chance to buy homes, build up capital and acquire shares in their companies. (Thatcher 1988 cited in Heelas & Morris 1992:6)

Alongside the traditional liberal value of capital accumulation, ‘responsible’ consumerism had now attained a positive moral connotation as well. This instituted a major conceptual shift, because the ‘authorial self ’, that is, the enterprising individual making the ‘right’ consumerist choices (Cohen 1992:180), was now projected as the ‘authentic self ’, that is, a person who has full author- and ownership of his or her actions. Apart from the allusions to ‘authenticity’, traditional Christian rhetoric too was marshalled by Thatcher and her conservative cabinet (Morris 1992:276). It was during her reign that Weber’s thesis that Protestant ethics gave birth to the Capitalist spirit became a major topic of scientific reflection again. Some people have even spoken of the “protestantisation of religions” when actually referring, I think, to the workings of neo-liberal globalism.2 While the Christian Churches were

2 For instance, in October 2005, the Singapore-based Indonesian social scientist Said Farid Alatas gave a plenary lecture on “The Protestentization of Islam” on the occasion of the annual meeting of the German Society of Anthropology in Halle.


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in the process of losing their grip on contemporary life, unconventional Christians made use of the popular myth that associates Protestantism with the rise of capitalism and embarked on a new mission. In 1994, Laurie Beth, founder and President of The Jones Group, an advertising, marketing and business development firm with the mission “to recognize, promote, and inspire divine excellence,” presented Jesus as an exemplary executive leader (Beth 1994). Two years later, there appeared Norvene Vest’s Catholic ‘answer’ to the Protestant challenge, proposing the Benedictine Rule as a guideline for how to integrate work with all aspects of our life (Vest 1996). In Europe, the German Pater Anselm Grün and the Dutchman Will Derkse, an oblate of the Benedictine abbey of St-Willibrord at Doetinchem, have recommended the Benedictine Rule as a guideline for Human Resource Management in the Dutch corporate world (Derkse 2003:9). Steven Covey, a dedicated member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) has indubitably been the most successful Christian agent in business though. With his seven habits of highly successful people he sought to apply traditional Protestant character development precepts to modern management. His teachings now form an integral part of the management trainings in a large variety of multinationals (see e.g. Covey 1989; Salamon 2000:157). To view this entrepreneurial spirit as intrinsically Christian would be a mistake. Already back in the 1960s, some Hindu gurus had discovered the benefits of combining business with a spiritual message. Suffice it to only mention here a couple of examples: first of all Swami Chinmayananda, disciple of Swami Shivananda, the founder of the international Divine Life Society in Rishikesh. Swami Chinmayananda not only established the Sandeepany Sadhanalaya, a training institution for Hindu missionaries in Bombay. He also transmitted Hindu nationalist ideas to the affluent Indian Diaspora in the United States in person. In 1965, he was taken to America by an Indian businessman who wished to export yoga to the US. Chinmayananda’s influence, however, also stretched to the East, to the Indian Diaspora in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong (Ramstedt forthcoming a; see also McKean 1996). His contemporary Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) enterprise, was even more apt in combining spirituality with business. His disciples eventually established a University of Management in the Netherlands, offering MBAs to dedicated students (see also Heelas 1999:56). The Maharishi may have found his master though—at least in the domain of profit making—in Deepak Chopra

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whose affirmation that one has only to be wealth conscious in order to attract money has attracted a large readership (Chopra 1993). In increasingly Hindu-nationalist India itself, the convergence of Hindu spirituality and business is demonstrated, for instance, by the books of S.K. Chakraborty, professor at the Management Centre for Human Values of the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, drawing upon the eternal wisdom of the Hindu tradition in order to educate modern Indian managers (see e.g. Chakraborty 1998). Another case in point is the book by Ajanta E. Chakravarty, recommending “The Art of Successful Management” supposedly inherent in the sacred scripture of the Bhagavad Gita. Here, it is Arjuna who is turned into an apprentice of CEO Krishna, as it were (Chakravarty 1995). Zen Buddhism, which has become a marginal Buddhist sect in enterprising Japan, has made an inroad into the western corporate world instead. In the 1990s, the now Denmark-based Dutch Zen teacher Rients Ranzen Ritkes, for instance, founded the Zentrum in Utrecht. Specialising in Zen training for managers, the Zentrum counts a huge clientele of some hundred people regularly attending its Zen meditation classes. In 2000, one of Ritkes’ close students, Dick Verstegen, a Dutch journalist and chief-editor of major newspapers, received Ritkes’ authorisation to establish the Zazen Foundation. At the same time, Verstegen started his own consultancy firm, Core Consultancy. Apart from his obligations as editor of the magazine Zen and the Buddhist quarterly Kwartaalblad Boeddhisme (see also Verstegen 2005), he now also handles the public relations for ZIN, the Monastery for Spirituality in Work, a management consultancy venture of the Congregation of the Brothers of Our Lady, Mother of Mercy (Brothers CMM), conventionally called “the Fraters of Tilburg” (Ramstedt forthcoming b). Daniel Goleman’s promotion of emotional intelligence is another case of Buddhist teachings applied to worldly wellbeing. While Goleman’s insights have long been integrated into contemporary management know-how (extracts of his book were incidentally sold on an audio CD accompanying the October 2004 issue of the German jubilee edition of the Harvard Business Review), it is less well-known though that Goleman is himself a Buddhist practitioner (see also Ramstedt 1999:118); just as Steven Covey is not commonly associated with the Mormon Church. Hence, Carrette and King have a point when they speak of a “silent takeover of religion”, for “The corporate machine or the market does not seek to validate or re-inscribe the tradition but rather utilises its


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cultural cachet for its own purposes and profit” (Carrette & King 2005:16). Frequently, the religious or spiritual sources are not even cited. Thereby their dissenting potential is silenced too. The application of “emotional intelligence” and “the seven habits of highly successful people” in business are just two cases in point. While the market ravenously picks and chooses from religious traditions, there are also spiritual agencies that willingly let themselves be appropriated. The New Age movement has been especially blamed for providing “little in terms of a challenge to the status quo or to a lifestyle of self-interest and ubiquitous consumption”. Many have attributed this to the individualisation of “religious sensibilities” and the concomitant erosion of a sense of community and social responsibility that supposedly constitutes the very core of the New Age movement. They hold that this core already facilitated the development of postmodern consumerist spiritualities which can easily, so it is claimed, be transformed into capitalist spiritualities benefiting the global economy.3 Yet, the beginnings of the New Age movement were definitely countercultural, as I have pointed out above. And, as Paul Heelas rightly observed, the movement’s following still comprises a substantial number of counter-culturalists. Heelas nevertheless also stated that the affirmation of prosperity by a growing number of New Agers has rendered certain facets of the movement compatible with dominant trends within the capitalist mainstream. The reasons why an increasing number of New Ager affirmed prosperity and fulfillment in work, thereby attracting the mainstream to the movement, as it were, are however still not sufficiently analysed (see Heelas 1999:55). The Factor of the Increasing Psychologisation of Culture Further interpretation has in any case to take into account the increasing psychologisation of mainstream culture since the conception of psychoanalysis (cf. Rose 1990, 1998; Carrette & King 2005:54–86). On the following pages, I would like to offer some salient considerations with regard to this point. My point of departure is a line of thought which was propounded by Eli Zaretsky in his book Secrets of the Soul, 3 See Carrette & King (2005:5, 14, 18, 19–23, 28, 45, 47–49, 53, 99); Heelas (1999:54).

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published in 2004.4 There, he attributed to psychoanalysis the same socio-cultural function as Weber did to Calvinism. That is, while Calvinism shaped the character development of its followers in such a way that they developed a disposition conducive to the rise of the capitalism of the era of industrialisation, it was psychoanalysis that provided the motivational basis for the development of the consumerist age. Zaretsky correlated the beginning decline of the cultural influence of psychoanalysis in the 1960s with another economic transformation: the rise of the post-industrial service-oriented economy of the information age. In extension of his reasoning, I propose to correlate the beginnings of the prosperity-affirming strands of the New Age movement, which Heelas dates back to the 1960s (Heelas 1999:60), with this new economic era. And very much like pre-reformation Christianity was modified and transformed in Calvinism (Zaretsky 2004:14, 15, 20–2, 25–6), so was psychoanalysis modified and transformed in the human potential movement as that strand of the New Age movement, in which prosperity and fulfilment in work were presented as necessary components for the development of the ‘whole’ or ‘authentic’ self. Zaretsky rightly pointed out that psychoanalysis was the first grand theory of the “personal life”, highlighting the experience of a personal identity which was independent from class, family, gender and profession. Affirming the libido as an important component of the personality structure, it helped to emancipate both men and women, gay and straight, from the strictures of repressive convention. Yet, with the beginning of its decline, psychoanalysis was increasingly scolded—very much like the New Age later on—for having furthered consumerism and, as a management tool of Fordism, mass production. From 1914 onwards, Henry Ford had his managers observe the family life of his workers in order to arrive at new and more sophisticated disciplinary measures in his factories with which to keep production costs low. After World War I, Ford’s managers also tried to get at the private thoughts and desires of the employees in order to obtain a lead to the demands of the market. At the same time, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud, and other eloquent producers of ‘spin’ applied key insights of psychoanalysis to advertisements and public relations, ushering in

4 For the references in the following passages, I used the 2004 German translation of Zaretsky’s book which, in its title, emphasises the historical analysis of its content: Freuds Jahrhundert: Die Geschichte der Psychoanalyse. Wien: Paul Zsolnay.


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the age of mass consumption (see Zaretsky 2004:15, 16, 199–234; Tye 1998:8–9, 97, 107; Bernays 1965:62–3, 179–80). The normalisation of psychoanalysis and other schools of psychotherapy as applied science in business, and the concomitant popularisation of psychoanalytical jargon favoured the development of a proto-psychological discourse which became the vernacular for personal experience. The emergence of a proto-psychological vernacular in turn paved the way for the human potential movement, bridging ‘science’ and ‘New Age’. It was in fact initiated by two Freudian renegades: Wilhelm Reich and Fritz S. Perls. In his classic The Function of Orgasm, published in 1927, Reich had argued that the ability to achieve was an essential attribute of the healthy individual. The failure to dissipate pent-up sexual energy through orgasm could produce neurosis in adults. He also believed that repressed feelings became manifest as muscular tension and that this mental and physical armour could be overcome by both making the individual aware of the tension and physical manipulation, such as massage and other body techniques. Reich thereby prepared the way for the profound attention to the body in the human potential movement, alternative healing and the New Age in general. After his break with the Psychoanalytical Association in 1934, he concentrated on the development of “orgonomy”, a technique with which to measure so-called “orgones” or units of the cosmic life-energy he believed energised the nervous system. A lack of orgones would be tantamount to illness. It is here we find a direct link to the monistic, life and prosperity affirming strands of the New Age movement, believing in one all-pervading cosmic life energy. In Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy, on the other hand, we encounter a psychological precursor of the holistic life concepts prevalent in the prosperity affirming New Age currents and related spiritual management theories and trainings. According to Gestalt therapy, people have an innate inclination to organise their field of experience into well-defined patterns or configurations, so-called “Gestalts”. Patients can resolve their unfinished business in the present or the past, that is, they can realise their “incomplete Gestalts”, by becoming aware of significant sensations both within themselves and their environment. Perls was incidentally one of the resident therapists at the Esalen Institute, founded in 1962 at Big Sur, California, by two Stanford graduates in psychology, Michael Murphy and Richard Price. Murphy and Price wanted to provide patients or clients with an ideal growth environment,

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in which experimental psychotherapy was complemented with oriental contemplative techniques. Esalen eventually became the cradle of the incipient human potential and transpersonal psychology movement, associated most of all with the names of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. The latter was a psychologist with a strong background in Gestalt therapy who became another resident therapist at Esalen as well as co-founder of The Journal of Humanistic Psychology at the beginning of the 1960s. At that time, Maslow had already published his major work on Motivation and Personality (1954), in which he first propounded his theory on the pyramid of needs. The pyramid’s foundation, so he said, is defined by basic physiological drives such as hunger or thirst, followed by higher ones like love or esteem, and finally resulting in the highest need of self-actualisation. In his book Toward a Psychology of Being, published in 1962, he argued that, as each need is satisfied, the next higher level in the emotional hierarchy dominates conscious functioning. Thus, people whose basic needs remain unsatisfied, are insensitive to higher needs. Self-actualising people, on the other hand, are not only able to experience so-called peak-experiences of enjoyment. They can even reach a transpersonal plateau experience, that is, a prolonged sense of connection, confidence and happiness. Maslow described self-actualising people moreover as, “. . . our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also our best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence)” (cited in Bloom 2000:56). Maslow’s notion of selfactualisation has greatly influenced a wide array of New Age notions of spirituality, various guilds of advertisement agents as well as major brands of spiritual management training (see also Heelas 1996:29, 47, 51–54, 57; Zaretsky 2004:246–48, 263, 333). Equally influential, both in the New Age as in contemporary business, was Carl Rogers’ emphasis of a non-directive, client-oriented approach to psychotherapy and counselling. He suggested that the client can resolve psychological difficulties and gain the insight necessary to restructure his or her life, by establishing a relationship with an understanding, accepting therapist. He furthermore linked the insight that each individual perceives his or her world according to his or her own experience to his holistic claim that there is an innate drive in each person to satisfy the needs of the total self. There is in every person an “undreamed-of potential,” a vast unconscious intelligence that can “. . . control many bodily functions, can heal diseases, can create new


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realities. It can penetrate the future, see things at a distance, communicate thoughts directly” (cited in Bloom 2000:59). The actualisation of the total self, involving—very much as Maslow suggested too—selfmaintenance and self-enhancement in the sense of transcending the status quo, brings forth a person who “. . . lives in a new universe, where all the familiar concepts have disappeared—time, space, object, matter, cause, effect—nothing remains but vibrating energy” (cited in Bloom 2000:59). Rogers envisaged such persons to be “young in mind and spirit.” And he found them not only among contemporary youth but also among women as well as members of minority groups, such as AfroAmericans, Chicanos, and “creative school drop-outs,” and, last but not least among “corporation executives who have given up the grey-flannel rat race, the lure of high salaries and stock options, to live a simpler new life” (cited in Bloom 2000:61). Rogers lists openness, revulsion of hypocrisy, scepticism with regard to the established wisdom of science and technology, a holistic outlook, wish for intimacy, caring, self-reliance, responsibility, ecological awareness and “a yearning for the spiritual” among the qualities as being the core qualities of a self-actualised person (Bloom 2000:60–63). Not surprisingly, one finds an almost identical list of qualities in notions of ‘authentic leadership’ in contemporary corporations. Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, a large medical company, for instance, rediscovered the following virtues as constitutive for lasting value-creating leadership: authenticity in the sense of genuineness, trustworthiness, self-development, self-reflexivity, value-driven and consistent behaviour, leadership from the heart, establishing connected relationships, passion for purpose, compassion, leading a balanced life, and community service. Apart from recommending daily physical exercise as a way to stay in shape, he also professed to have meditated for twenty-five years (George 2003:1–55). However, the human potential movement has not only been influential in trainings for executive positions. It has also informed numerous personal development programs geared to enhance the capacities of professionals in general, including that of the common employee. While some of the trainings have been given by therapeutic cults with a strong ideological link to human potentialism, such as the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh movement or Scientology, most of the personal-growth programs have actually been introduced by organisational psychologists of the humanist school. While psychologists have counselled managers

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since Fordism, they came to represent a growing variety of schools. In the first two decades after World War II, behaviourism and humanist psychology emerged as serious competitors of psychoanalysis. With the eclipse of the latter in the 1980s (Zaretsky 2004:14), many organisational psychologists had gone spiritual. A major catalyst for the “mainstream going New Age” (Sutcliffe & Bowman, eds 2000:1–13) or the development of “New Age capitalism” (Lau 2000) from the 1980s onwards was the economic success of countries apparently run by Confucian work ethics and ancient Asian contemplative techniques: Japan and the ‘four little tigers’ Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, not to forget to mention the ‘bamboo network’ of the overseas Chinese. According to Eiko Ikegami (1995), bushido or ‘the way of the Samurai’, including the traditional contemplative martial arts, were consciously applied as a disciplinary force comparable to the Protestant work ethic in the post-war Japanese corporate world. When western business recognised the Asian success formula, consisting of network-oriented, harmony-oriented, integrative, holistic and process-oriented behaviour, western management theories began to advocate the introduction of the Japanese management concepts of ‘lean management’ and ‘lean production’, alongside Japanese martial arts, Zen meditation, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and kaizen, the principle of ‘continuous improvement’. This trend converged with the human potential movement and the neo-liberal call for a value-driven ‘enterprise culture’. The end result of this convergence was an increasing “romantic spiritualism in business management” (Salamon 2002) which has provided for a growing segment within the spiritual marketplace (Ramstedt 1999:105–17; Salamon 2000:156). Corporations as Cultic Milieus? Some spiritual management trainings, aiming at the self-actualisation—or rather self-realisation—in the corporate world, have advocated a rather authoritarian treatment of their trainees. A well-known example is Landmark Education International Inc., a managementoriented derivate of Werner Erhard’s famous seminars called est (an acronym for Erhard Seminars Training) developed in the 1970s (Heelas 1996:58–9; Heelas 1999:56). Participants of Erhard’s seminars were typically treated as follows:


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They [the trainees] were present, he [the trainer] roared in command voice, because their lives did not work. Their lives were shit. Hopeless. They did not know what they were doing, did not know how to experience life, were struggling, desperate, confused. They were assholes. (Brewer 1975:39 cited in Heelas 1996:18)

In an article of the German management magazine Wirtschaftswoche (1997:94–5), Landmark was indeed accused of “brainwashing”. The same article mentioned also another authoritarian management training institute: Block Trainings GmbH, located in Hohenbrunn, a suburb of Munich. At the beginning of the five-day Block seminars, participants had to hand over their personal belongings such as passport, car keys, and watch. Moreover, they were not allowed to communicate with other participants during the whole duration of the seminar. Elements of the Block Trainings programs, alongside Sufi dance and bio-energetic exercises designed by the human potentialist Alexander Loewen, were also taken over by the similarly authoritarian UPT Hans Schuster und Partner GmbH (Ramstedt 1999:121). The trainings of Landmark, Block Training and UPT Hans Schuster und Partner thus display strong similarities with the self-improvement seminars of Scientology, which are incidentally called “auditing sessions”, a term taken from the business world. In these auditing sessions, the auditor takes a position of absolute authority towards the “patient”: “It cannot be too emphatically stated that the analytical mind and the dynamics of the patient never, never, never resist the auditor. The auditor is not there to be resisted.” (Hubbard 1997/1950:248) Not surprisingly, there are a number of employees who have been exposed to such management training trajectories, and who have been repelled by the authoritarian style or the guru-like behaviour of the trainers. Some of them have openly protested against sectarian brainwashing at the workplace. They have found public support especially among staunch Protestants. In February 2006, for instance, I was interviewed by a journalist of the fundamentalist Calvinist daily Nederlands Dagblad who was questioning me on how Christians are exposed to spiritual threats at work. She had noticed my academic webpage and expressed such alarm with regard to what she learned from me in respect to the convergence of New Age and business that I myself became rather disconcerted, albeit for different reasons (as I am not of Christian persuasion and furthermore adhere to a strictly secular approach in religious studies). In her article, she eventually alerted her

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readers to the fact that spiritual management trainings can threaten Christian values, and that there are entrepreneurs out there who want to get at the soul of their employees.5 Apart from incidental management trainings, employees are exposed to ‘ideology’ on a much more long-term base, when an organisation adopts a highly developed ‘ethical’, ‘cultural’ or ‘spiritual’ framework for its business mission. In her research on the managerial discourse of holism, Karen Salamon came across the following statement by Lars Funder, CEO of the large chewing gum producer Dandy, which is not uncommon for organisational leaders to make: “If we want to get somewhere in the future with our enterprises, we need total commitment and a holistic perspective, which quite simply are the basic elements of a religion” (Salamon 2000:134). Since the 1970s, and especially since the awareness for the economic success of ‘Confucian Asia’, human resource management theoreticians and departments have been increasingly concerned with corporate identities, organisational culture and, more importantly, ‘culture change’ as a necessary category for good corporate performance. In the post-industrial service-oriented economy, in which the attitude of an individual employee is crucial in building customer loyalty, good performance is highly dependent on ‘management by values’. These do not have to be explicitly ‘spiritual’. Yet many corporate mission statements express a clear, quasi-spiritual or implicitly spiritual holistic outlook (Salamon 2001). Contemporary corporate management discourse is furthermore frequently characterised by a metaphorical use of spiritual concepts, thereby mobilising as yet subliminal motivational forces in both employees and customers. Organisational processes of change management are, for instance, occasionally described as ‘spiritual quests’, thereby ascribing a larger and simultaneously more personal meaning to them (Salamon 2002:89, 94–95). The term ‘mission statement’ itself is a metaphor with a source domain in religion. Other examples are the common use of the metaphor ‘vision’, playing with notions of supernatural or trance-like capacities of managers or leaders, or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” (Csikszentmihlayi 2003), especially in connection with buzz-words like ‘creativity’ and ‘energy’, evoking the notion of the workings of a cosmic life-force or

See Vermeer, Nelleke in Nederlands Dagblad (11 February 2006): zaterdagopzondag, p. 1. 5


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‘spirit’. A valid observation was made in this respect by Salamon who pointed out the significance of the word ‘enthusiasm’ being employed “in relation to hopes for new forms of leadership that match the rapidly changing business environment” (Salamon 2002:103): The word “enthusiasm” is derived from the Greek “en-theos”, which literally means “in—a god.” It signifies being “possessed by a god,” “inspired by a god” or “one in whom a god rests.” . . . The neo-spiritual and religious consultants take this meaning rather literally, concerned as they are with the evolution of spirituality and the influence from higher spiritual forces and entities on the human conscious. It is part of their work to make corporate employees and organisations inspired. It is relevant that the word “inspired” has the same meaning, this time derived from the Latin “in-spirare”: blowing (spirit) into a subject. (Salamon 2002:103–4)

The playfully or forcefully provoked internalisation of the implicitly or explicitly spiritual corporate values, aimed at purposeful “self-transcendence” (see also Carrette & King 2005:50), on the part of corporate employees is in many cases not in the first instance designed to create a well-defined corporate identity and hence a marketable brand. It is much more to invoke a sense of community at a time when every firm in the western world experiences a comparatively quick turnover of manpower, especially at the executive level. And it is the sense of community that breathes life into any marketable brand. Strangely perhaps, while many professionals do appreciate emotionally intelligent, understanding and perhaps even therapeutically gifted bosses as well as individual or collective coaching trajectories and personal development opportunities, it is this very sense of community that seems to work for a large number of people. It apparently does so in spite of the fact that instantly produced corporate communitas can be quickly, “cast away and replaced with the next move of career” (Salamon 2001:121; see also Salamon 2000:135, 138–51). A value driven enterprise built on intimacy and total loyalty hence becomes the employee’s extended family, even if it turns out to be only a short-term affair, in which he or she finds continuous nurturing of—or ‘therapy’ for—‘right behaviour’ in work and life. The firm has thus taken on the role of the family as envisaged by Thatcher, providing for the material as well as the spiritual needs of its members, thereby turning them into ‘adult’, that is, ‘active’ and ‘responsible’ citizens. While the image of the bourgeois family has indeed changed from a hierarchical community into an alliance of caring ‘friends’, so have many corporations, at least according to various interlocutors to

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whom I have spoken. Even cynics have to admit that, in the course of the postmodern socio-cultural transformations, children as well as employees have apparently become generally much more empowered than in former generations. This development, paralleling that of the reception of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, perhaps accounts for the fact that more and more people demand corporate responsibility, thereby instigating firms to brand their products as well as their organisation in spiritual terms. Generation X and The Experience Economy At least Tom Beaudoin seems to have endorsed this line of thought in his call for “integrating who we are with what we buy”, put forth in his book Consuming Faith (2003). In this book he intended to correct and complement some of the arguments in his earlier work on Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (2000). There, he had claimed that post-baby boomer adults, born in the 1960s and 1970s, find popular culture a “major meaning-making system”, suffused with religious references and simulations of “real” religiosity. Blending sexuality and spirituality, pop culture would express Xers’ notions of sensual spirituality, emphasising suffering, irreverence, and ambiguity of (gender) identity. Despite their engagement in virtual worlds, Xers would in fact hold lived experience as sacred, especially experience of suffering.6 David Chidester incidentally pursued a similar line of reasoning in his more recent book Authentic Fakes (2005), focusing however on the relationship between South African politics and American pop culture. Beaudoin’s claim is furthermore substantiated by the work of B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore on The Experience Economy (1999) and Bernd H. Schmitt’s book on Experiential Marketing (1999). Both works are, however, intended to raise the awareness of entrepreneurs rather than presenting the view of active consumers. Pine and Gilmore started out by advising companies that the service of staging experiences creates value, as experiences “represent an existing but previously unarticulated genre of economic output” (Pine & Gilmore 1999:ix). They conceptualised experiences as “a fourth economic offering”, different from services as services are different from goods. Interestingly, they 6 See Beaudoin (2000:xiv, 10, 13, 23, 41, 42, 68–9, 73–4, 79, 80, 97, 100, 109, 118–20, 131, 138, 177).


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used the metaphor “offering” in this context which has, of course, its source domain in religion. Stageable experiences, according to the authors, comprise such events as entertainment proper, technologyinduced experiences in movies and virtual reality, service on the part of salesmen and -women who have succeeded in turning it into a memorable experience for their customers, or the merging of dining with comedy, art, architecture, history or nature as happens in certain avant-garde restaurants. Apart from entertainment experiences, they thus also listed inter-personal exchange experiences, educational experiences, sensual or aesthetic experiences and escapist experiences. It almost goes without saying that having a commodity mind-set is detrimental to the experience economy, because it reminds customers of function and functionality, thereby disturbing their sense of authentic experience. Claiming that, “there’s no such thing as an artificial experience” (Pine & Gilmore 1999:37), Pine and Gilmore reasoned that the creation of authentic experiences for diversified customers requires special services that draw on marketable aesthetic know-how, of which theatre-work—dramaturgy—would be the prime model.7 Schmitt in principle agreed with Pine and Gilmore but offered a slightly different categorisation of marketable experiences. Discussing concrete products from the experiential marketplace, he distinguished between “sense” cases, “feel” cases, “think” cases, “act” cases, and “relate” cases. Finally, he provided a strategic framework and implementation tools for entrepreneurs specialising in the creation of one or more of the different types of experiences for customers. On the occasion of a public presentation of his book on Virtual Faith (2000), Beaudoin encountered an astute Lutheran pastor who expressed the following concern about the somewhat naïve glorification of popular culture as a locus of authentic or religious(-like) experience: . . . pop culture is part of a larger economic system. Movies and music and all types of media are all part of buying and selling. What about pop culture as advertisement? What about the economic effects of pop culture on young adults? (Beaudoin 2003:xi)

The pastor was actually voicing the point of critique put forth by Carrette and King. In his book Consuming Faith (2003), Beaudoin set out to respond by underscoring his contention that brand economy

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See Pine & Gilmore (1999:ix, x, 1, 3, 4, 32–3, 35–8, 101–38).

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“works” precisely because, “it brings a similar sort of meaningful order and coherence to people’s lives that classical spiritual disciplines one did in the past (and still do for some today).” Moreover, people would not be “idiotic dupes of advertisers”. They would turn to pop-culture because there they would find resonance and a sense of connection. He then proceeded to offer recommendations for the development of an economically minded spirituality that would allow Xers, and in fact all consumers, to more deeply integrate who they are with what they buy. Just buying into the emotionality of spiritually branded products without a critical awareness of their (un-)ethical dimension would be equivalent to “submitting ourselves too uncritically to the moral codes of religious institutions rather than asking anew what right economic relationships require today” (Beaudoin 2003:40; see also Beaudoin 2003: xiii, xiv, 7–8, 39–40, 97–107). There is, however, a major flaw in his reasoning. While his recommendations as to bringing an ethical consciousness to one’s consumer choices advertise an “economic spirituality” (Beaudoin 2003:20–1), the very fact that he has to make these recommendations highlights a certain lack of ethical awareness among Generation X consumer culturalists. He moreover did not reflect upon the fact that he himself is a Christian minister and theologian, and that he has tried to inject into pop culture—by way of his recommendations—something “alien”, that is, an idea based on doubts developed not within pop culture itself but within a religious tradition. Conclusion Beaudoin’s attempt—as incoherent as it doubtlessly is—at injecting into pop cultural consumers an economically minded spirituality perhaps supports Carrette’s and King’s contention that, “The emergence of new forms of engaged spirituality grounded in an awareness of our mutual interdependence, the need for social justice and economically sustainable lifestyles, may yet prove our best hope for resisting the capitalist excesses of neoliberalism and developing a sense of solidarity and global citizenship in an increasingly precarious world. Our futures may depend upon it” (Carrette & King 2005:182). As a supporter of a purely secular academic approach to religion and religiosity, I however, prefer to see Beaudoin’s ideas as a result of the convergence between various cultural currents comprising a whole


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array of institutionalised religions, economic developments, and the normalisation of psychology in society at large. By saying this, I decline to apply any dialectics, idealist, materialist or otherwise, and rather draw on Gerd Baumann’s (1994) concept of convergence, entailing a description of the following processual features: a tradition A and a tradition B—and possibly a number of other traditions—converge upon common elements which then constitute a tradition X. The tradition X subsequently takes on a life of its own, with the traditions A and B (etc.) also following their own independent courses. The process of convergence nevertheless affects also their further development to some extent, increasing their potential for future moments of convergence with each other as well as the tradition X. Accordingly, Beaudoin’s ideas in Consuming Faith reflect the reverberations of the convergence outlined in this chapter. So do many economy-minded responses from organised religion. And they tend to address—to a larger or smaller extent—real suffering, caused either at the workplace or resulting from the workings of certain economic forces. I just wonder whether we need spiritual, let alone spiritually branded, concepts in order to alleviate the causes of such suffering. Can we not just empathise with suffering, and act upon the rawness of our feeling? References Aupers, S., 2004. In de Ban van de Moderniteit: De Sacralisering van het Zelf en Computertechnologie. Amsterdam: Aksant. Bainbridge, W.S., 1997. The Sociology of Religious Movements. New York: Routledge. Baumann, G., 1994. “ ‘The Lamps are Many but the Light is One?’ ” In Aijmer, G., ed. Syncretism and the Commerce of Symbols. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Beaudoin, T., 2000. Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ——, 2003. Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are with What We Buy. Lanham etc.: Sheed & Ward. Bernays, E.L. & F. Doris, 1965. Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bloom, W., 2000. Holistic Revolution: The Essential New Age Reader. London et al.: The Penguin Press. Brewer, M., 1975. “We’re Gonna Tear You Down and Put You Back Together.” Psychology Today, August. Carrette, J. & R. King, 2005. Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. London & New York: Routledge. Chakraborty, S.K., 1998. Values and Ethics for Organizations: Theory and Practice. New Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks. Chakravarty, A.E., 1995. The Geeta and The Art of Successful Management. New Delhi: Indus.

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Chidester, D., 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press. Chopra, D., 1993. Creating Affluence: Wealth Consciousness in the Field of All Possibilities. San Rafael: New World Library. Cohen, A.P., 1992. “The Personal Right to Identity: A Polemic on the Self in the Enterprise Culture.” In Heelas, P. & P. Morris, eds. The Values of the Enterprise Culture: The Moral Debate. London & New York: Routledge. Covey, S., 1989. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. London: Simon & Schuster. Csikszentmihalyi, M., 2003. Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning. New York et al.: Viking. Derkse, W., 2003. Een Levensregel voor Beginners: Benedictijnse Spiritualiteit voor het Dage Lijkse Leven. Tielt: Lannoo. George, B., 2003. Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Green, M., 1986. Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins—Ascona, 1900–1920. Hanover & London: University Press of New England. Grün, A., 2004. Menschen Führen—Leben Wecken. Münsterschwarzach Abtei: Vier-TürmeVerlag. Heelas, P. & P. Morris, 1992. “Enterprise Culture: Its Values and Value.” In Heelas, P. & P. Morris, eds. The Values of the Enterprise Culture: The Moral Debate. London & New York: Routledge. Heelas, P., 1991. “Cults for Capitalism. Self Religion, Magic, and the Empowerment of Business.” In Gee, P. & J. Fulton, eds. Religion and Power, Decline and Growth: Sociological Analysis of Religion in Britain, Poland and America. London: British Sociological Association. ——, 1992. “The Sacralization of the Self and New Age Capitalism.” In Abercrombie, N. & A. Warde, eds. Social Change in Contemporary Britain. Cambridge: Polity Press. ——, 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. ——, 1999. “Prosperity and the New Age Movement: The Efficacy of Spiritual Economics.” In Wilson, B. & J. Cresswell, eds. New Religious Movements: Challenge and Response. London: Routledge. Hubbard, L.R., 1997/1950. Dianetics: The Power of the Mind over the Body. East Grinstead: New Era Publications. Ikegami, E., 1995. The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Jones, L.B., 1994. Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership. New York: Hyperion. Kleiner, A., 1996. The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Lau, K.J., 2000. New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McKean, L., 1996. Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, P., 1992. “Is God enterprising? Reflections on Enterprise Culture and Religion.” In Heelas, P. & P. Morris, eds. The Values of the Enterprise Culture: the Moral Debate. London & New York: Routledge. Perkin, H., 1992. “The Enterprise Culture in Historical Perspective: Birth, Life, Death—and Resurrection?” In Heelas, P. & P. Morris, eds. The Values of the Enterprise Culture: the Moral Debate. London & New York: Routledge. Pine II, B. Joseph & J.H. Gilmore, 1999. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.


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Ramstedt, M., 1999. “ ‘Weiche’ Faktoren im ‘Harten’ Diskurs. Intuition und Emotion im Modernen Management.” In Kreft, U., H. Uske & S. Jäger, eds. Kassensturz. Politische Hypotheken der Berliner Republik. Duisburg: Duisburger Institut für Sprachund Sozialforschung. ——, forthcoming a. “Hindu Bonds at Work: Spiritual and Commercial Ties between India and Bali.” Journal for Asian Studies. ——, forthcoming b. “Shifting Notions of Mercy at Work: The Transforming Mission of a Dutch Monastery in Secularizing Dutch Society.” In Margry, P.J. & H. Roodenburg, eds. Reframing Dutch Culture. Hants and Burlington: Ashgate. Roddick, A., 1991. Body and Soul: Profits with Principles: The Amazing Success Story of Anita Roddick. London: Crown Publications. Roof, W.C., 1999. Spiritual Marketplace Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rose, N., 1990. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. ——, 1998. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rotzler, W., 1980. “Der Baron auf dem Monte Verità.” In Dado, A., ed. Monte Verità, Berg der Wahrheit: Lokale Anthropologie als Beitrag zur Wiederentdeckung einer Neuzeitlichen Topographie. Milano. Salamon, K.L.G., 2000. “No Borders in Business: the Managerial Discourse of Organisational Holism.” In Bewes, T. & J. Gilbert, eds. Cultural Capitalism—Politics after New Labour. Lawrence & Wishart, London. ——, 2000. “Faith Brought to Work: A Spiritual Movement in Business Management.” Anthropology in Action, Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice 7.3 24–29. ——, 2001. “ ‘Going Global from the Inside Out’: Spiritual Globalism in the Workplace.” In Rothstein, M., ed. New Age Religion and Globalization. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 150–72. ——, 2002. “Prophets of a Cultural Capitalism: An Ethnography of Romantic Spiritualism in Business Management.” Folk—Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society 44 89–115. Schmitt, B.H., 1999. Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands. New York: The Free Press. Sutcliffe, S. & M. Bowman, eds., 2000. Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tye, L., 1998. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Verstegen, D., 2005. Zenboeddhisme. Kampen: Kok. Vest, N., 1996. Friend of the Soul: A Benedictine Spirituality of Work. Cambridge and Boston: Cowley Publications. Wirtschaftswoche. 19, 1 April 1997. Zaretsky, E., 2004. Secrets of the Soul. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

SCIENCE AND THE NEW AGE James R. Lewis Where the New Age movement [differs] from other more clearly religious movements is the degree to which it draws on areas of . . . culture that would be considered not only secular but scientific as well. In characteristically eclectic fashion people involved in the New Age movement have made full use of recent scientific developments in the fields of psychology and biology. Paradoxically, then, although much New Age thinking is characterized by a lack of faith in science, it would not be an exaggeration to say that in the New Age science has become a sacred symbol . . . (Danforth 1989:254)

The popularity of books such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975) and the more recent enthusiasm for productions like the film What the Bleep Do We Know? (2004) indicate that New Age interest in alternative science and alternative interpretations of mainstream science is a major cultural phenomenon. There are, however, several significant ambiguities that make a discussion of science and the New Age problematic. On the one hand, unlike traditional religions, the New Age is a decentralised subculture lacking institutional structures, a shared set of agreed-upon doctrines, or even clear boundaries. Nevertheless, for simplicity’s sake, the New Age will be referred to in the present chapter as if it is a unitary phenomenon. (In order to avoid the stylistic awkwardness of overusing one term, New Age will be used interchangeably with certain alternate designations, such as the metaphysical1 subculture and the alternative spiritual subculture.) On the other hand, the New Age interest in science has many facets, including interests in everything from aspects of mainstream science such as modern physics, to quasi-mainstream practices like holistic health, to marginal fields of study like UFOlogy, and to occult ‘sciences’

1 For a discussion of the history of the term ‘metaphysical’ and how it has come to be used in the alternative spiritual subculture, refer to the relevant entry in Lewis (2002:488–489).

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like numerology. All of these areas fall within the scope of science and the New Age, broadly conceived. For the sake of clarity, these different facets should be distinguished from one another: 1. Alternate interpretations of mainstream science—this ranges from straightforward discussions of certain apparent parallels between areas like quantum physics and the metaphysics of Eastern mysticism (Talbot 1981) to discussions that attempt to extend the spiritual implications of theoretical formulations like the Gaia hypothesis (Spangler 2004/1990). 2. The application of accepted scientific methods to topics considered beyond the pale of mainstream science—this includes everything from the scientific investigation of near-death experiences (Lewis 1994:257–60), to empirical studies of traditional occult sciences like astrology (York 2003:170–9), to ‘hard’ (meaning empiricallyoriented as opposed to spiritually-oriented) UFOlogy (Denzler 2001), to some phases of the Holistic Health movement (English-Lueck 1990). 3. Referring to a systematic and/or broadly empirical approach to anything as science—for example, scientific meditation, scientific therapy, the science of mind, the science of yoga, and so forth—as a way of “appropriating the glamour and respectability of science” (Ivakhiv 2001:39). 4. Describing certain approaches as scientific on the basis of analogies and metaphors drawn from scientific methods, scientific theories and technology—this can range from referring to certain healing methods that have nothing to do with quantum physics as “quantum healing” (Chopra 1989) to the deployment of holograms as metaphors for how the universe works ( Wilber 1982). In other words, using “scientific language” to refer to beliefs and practices that are “far from scientific” (Rothstein 2004:102). Although it is analytically useful to separate them, these facets of the metaphysical subculture’s interest in science are not hermetically-sealed categories. And it is not, in fact, unusual to find two or more of these approaches deployed alongside one another. From the standpoint of mainstream science, the patchwork of concerns that constitutes New Age science comes across as a ‘cargo cult’ appropriation of science: “the external trappings of science are used and invoked, often in an isolated attempt to adapt scientific vocabulary or build pseudo-technical

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cult objects or perform quasi-rational calculations to buttress specific articles of Esoteric belief ” (Hammer 2001:209). With respect to the systematic approaches to certain subject matters found in the New Age (indicated by the third item noted above), it might be useful to think in terms of the more inclusive German term Wissenschaft. In the English speaking world, we tend to reserve science for the natural sciences. Wissenschaft, however, is ‘science’ in the English sense of the natural sciences, but it also applies to systematic enquiry into any subject matter. Much New Age science that would not qualify as science in the English sense of the word would qualify as Wissenschaft. A related issue is that one frequently finds devices and practices that would more accurately be referred to as technology labelled as science. Given the situation that in the larger society science is often perceived in terms of its technological offspring, this confusion is understandable. Also, ‘science’ has a much more authoritative, prestigious ring than ‘technology’ (e.g. contrast the more authoritative connotations of the ‘science of meditation’ with the ‘technology of meditation’), making the former the preferred term. Secularisation, Science and the New Age For earlier generations of scholars, the secularisation process seemed to be an integral part of the progress of science, a progressive development accompanied by the triumph of a scientific world view which provided humankind with “an understanding of reality that must replace traditional religions” (Brooke & Cantor 1998:76). This older notion of secularisation is clearly flawed. The rise of science may have caused problems for traditional religions, but it has clearly not vanquished traditional religions. Also, as William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark have argued, perhaps the major result of “the decline of old religious traditions” is that it “clears the spiritual marketplace for the rise of new ones” (Bainbridge 1993:277). In his classic article, “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization”, Colin Campbell observes that in the modern world “scientific orthodoxy has replaced religious orthodoxy as the dominant cultural tradition in society” (Campbell 2002/1972:21). One consequence of this change is that the repressive power of the religious establishment has been severely diminished, so that “non-Christian varieties of religious

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belief are free, for the first time in many centuries, to spread throughout society” (ibid.:21). Though we might anticipate that alternative forms of spirituality would suffer as much from the rise of science and the secularisation process as traditional religions, this has not been the case. Campbell argues that this is because the world view of the “cultic milieu” (Campbell’s expression for the New Age) is less likely to conflict with scientific world views: The potential for conflict would, in fact, appear to be greater for religions which emphasize a personal, and transcendent conception of God than those which hold to an impersonal, non-intervening and immanent notion of the divine. . . . If we accept that science’s potential conflict with religion varies according to the nature of the religion concerned then it could well be the case that science is less likely to come into conflict with some of the religious systems prevailing in the cultic milieu than with the prevailing religious orthodoxy. The non-historical character of mystical religion, for example, means that a conflict similar to that which existed between Christianity and science over evolution is unlikely to occur. (ibid.:22)

Beyond a relatively small number of core notions such as monism, reincarnation, and the power of the mind to influence external reality, New Age ideas are quite flexible. This enables New Age thinkers to appropriate certain aspects of science as religious symbols, thus providing alternative spirituality with a veneer of scientific respectability. For a variety of reasons discussed by Campbell, the scientific establishment is unable to enforce its norms on “those outside the scientific community” (ibid.:22). On this point, the contrast between traditional religious orthodoxy and contemporary scientific orthodoxy is quite sharp. The only arena outside of the scientific establishment where ‘heresy’ is attacked is in applied science, especially medical practice—though even here one finds a high level of tolerance for ‘alternative’ medicines. Also, and again in contrast to traditional religions, the flexibility of its ideology means the New Age is able to adapt to changes rather than being tied to any specific conceptualisation of science. Thus critics who point out that science has already developed beyond the specific formulations on which the New Age draws to support its vision of reality (Melton 1988:51) miss the point that, “As scientific metaphor develops, so too is the non-doctrinaire and flexible New Age outlook likely and able to transform” (York 1995:46). Another interesting characteristic of the New Age appropriation of science Campbell notes earlier in his article is that alternative science tends to develop alternative institutions which model themselves on


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mainstream institutions. “Thus, if it is heterodox science, then like para-psychology, there will tend to be ‘colleges’ and ‘institutes’ like the College of Psychic Science and the Institute for Occult Sciences offering quasi-educational courses, lectures, demonstrations and facilities for research” (ibid.:17). In his important book, Claiming Knowledge (2001), Olav Hammer makes a related observation about parapsychology, though his observation can be extended to other alternative sciences: “The first generation of parapsychologists emulated the practices of mainstream science, created journals for the peer-reviewed dissemination of their ideas and affirmed their ties to mainstream values of their times” (Hammer 2001:217). In more recent decades, UFOlogists (people engaged in the scientific study of UFOs), astrologers, transpersonal psychologists, and past-life therapists, among others, have also created referred journals and professional societies in imitation of the conventions of mainstream science. Education in the New Age We should, however, be careful to note that not every idea or practice drawn from the sphere of formal research and learning is motivated by the desire to ape the methods and forms of orthodox science. Long before it became fashionable to appeal to the legitimacy of quantum physics to support alternative world views, the spiritual subculture had reinterpreted the cycle of reincarnation and its driving principle of karma as a learning process designed to educate the soul. As a consequence of this core vision of the cosmos-as-school, the world view of the contemporary New Age movement is saturated with educational discourse and praxis. This vision is reflected in, for instance, the fact that the dominant New Age ‘ceremonies’ are workshops, lectures and classes rather than worship ceremonies. Large New Age gatherings such as the Whole Life Expo resemble academic conferences more than they resemble camp meetings. To cite some examples of educational discourse, Katar, a New Age medium, channels such messages as, “Here on Earth, you are your teacher, your books, your lessons and the classroom as well as the student” (Clark 1988:7). This message is amplified by J.L. Simmons, a sociologist, who, in his The Emerging New Age, describes life on the physical plane as the “Earth School” (1990:91), and asserts that, “[W]e are here to learn . . . and will continue to return until we ‘do the course’

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and ‘graduate’ ” (ibid.:73). Reflecting the world view inherited from the New Age’s Theosophical roots, human beings are even pictured as attending lectures in ‘Halls of Learning’ on the astral plane during sleep (Lewis 1998:136). Similar educational images are reflected in an essay on “The Role of the Esoteric in Planetary Culture,” where David Spangler argues that spiritual wisdom is esoteric, “only because so few people expend the time, the energy, the effort, the openness and the love to gain it, just as only a few are willing to invest what is required to become a nuclear physicist or a neurosurgeon” (Spangler 1977:193–4). It would not be going too far to assert that, in the New Age vision, the image of the whole of human life—particularly when that life is directed toward a spiritual goal—can be summed up as a learning experience: Each of us has an Inner Teacher, a part of ourselves which knows exactly what we need to learn, and constantly creates the opportunity for us to learn just that. We have the choice either to cooperate with this part of ourselves or to ignore it. If we decide to cooperate, we can see lessons constantly in front of us; every challenge is a chance to grow and develop. If, on the other hand, we try to ignore this Inner Teacher, we can find ourselves hitting the same problem again and again, because we are not perceiving and responding to the lesson we have created for ourselves. [It] is, however, the daily awareness of and cooperation with spirit [that] pulls humanity upwards on the evolutionary spiral, and the constant invocation and evocation of spirit enables a rapid unfolding of human potential. When the Inner Teacher and the evolutionary force of the Universe are able to work together with our full cooperation, wonders unfold. (Findhorn Foundation 1986)

In these passages, we see not only the decisive role of the educational metaphor, but also how this metaphor has itself been reshaped by the New Age movement’s emphasis on holism and growth. In other words, the kind of education this subculture values is the education of ‘the whole person’, sometimes termed ‘holistic education’, and this form of education is an expression of the ‘evolutionary force of the Universe’ (a parallel to what, in more traditional language, might be called the redemptive activity of the Holy Spirit). Thus, despite the marked tendency to deploy images drawn from the sphere of formal education—a tendency reflected in a discourse replete with metaphors of ‘classrooms’, ‘graduations’, and the like—the metaphysical subculture’s sense of the educational process has tended to be more informal (more or less equivalent to learning in the general sense), as well as more continuous—a process from which there may be periodic graduations,


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but from which there is never a final graduation after which the learning process ceases. Even death and the afterlife are viewed as learning experiences (Bednarowski 1989:889–97). Though some aspects of this view of the spiritual life as a learning experience are based on tradition (e.g. the Pythagorean ‘school’), the widespread appeal of this image of spirituality is the result of the manner in which modern society’s emphasis on education informs our consciousness. The various social, economic, and historical forces that have led to the increased stress on education in the contemporary world are too complex to develop here. Obvious factors are such things as the increasing complexity of technology and of the socio-economic system. Less obvious factors are such considerations as the need to delay the entry of new workers into the economy. But whatever the forces at work in the larger society, by the time the baby boom generation began attending college in the 1960s, formal educational institutions had come to assume their present role as major socialising forces in western societies. Being a college graduate and achieving higher, particularly professional degrees became associated with increased prestige and the potential for increased levels of income. In other words, to a greater extent than previously, education and educational accomplishments had become symbols of wealth and status. Because the generation from which the majority of participants in the alternative spiritual subculture have been recruited is the baby boom generation, the majority of participants in that subculture have been socialised to place a high value on education. Baby boomers, however, also tend to have been participants in the counterculture of the 1960s, which means that they come from a generation that was highly critical of traditional, formal education. While some members of that generation revolted against the educational establishment by denying the value of education altogether, other college students of the time reacted against what they saw as an irrelevant education by setting up alternative educational structures such as the so-called ‘free schools’. These educational enterprises, which could offer students nothing in terms of degrees or certifications, were viable, at least for a time, because they offered courses on subjects people found intrinsically interesting—including such metaphysical topics as yoga, meditation, and so forth. The free school movement, in combination with the adult education programs that emerged in the 1970s, provided the paradigms for independent, metaphysical educational programs that would eventually emerge.

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The New Age eventually created institutes and colleges that granted alternative degrees of various kinds. Though many of these were ephemeral, unaccredited schools, others went on to accommodate themselves to the educational mainstream and gained formal accreditation—such as, among others, John F. Kennedy University, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. This institutionalisation is one aspect of the quest for legitimacy that will be discussed in a later section. Naturphilosophie The appeal to mainstream science—especially to physics—for legitimacy is often regarded as the primary theme in the New Age appropriation of science. This has some justification (e.g. the appeal to quantum physics is, for example, the dominant theme in the film, What the Bleep Do We know? [2004]). Alternative interpretations of the natural sciences are the exclusive focus of the chapter on ‘New Age Science’ in Wouter Hanegraaff ’s benchmark study, New Age Religion and Western Culture (1998). Despite this limited focus, Hanegraaff makes a number of important observations: 1. What the New Age seeks in science is evidence for a unified, ‘holistic’ world view—one that supplies, in effect, a scientific foundation for New Age religion. One consequence of this approach is that New Agers are highly selective about what they draw from science, focussing on elements that suit their purposes but completely ignoring others (Lucas 1996:55). 2. As a closely-related corollary, the New Age also seeks in holistic interpretations of science a critique of mainstream science; in Hanegraaff ’s words, “New Age believers claim that established science reflects an outdated reductionistic paradigm bound to be replaced by a new paradigm based on the holistic perspective.” Thus, “The evolutionary thrust of science now leads it to reject the very materialism it once helped to create” (Hanegraaff 1998:62). 3. Finally, Hanegraaff makes a fairly obvious though “largely unnoticed” point that “New Age science” is actually a misnomer, because the real domain of New Age interest in modern science is the philosophy of nature—sometimes referred to by the German term Naturphilosophie (1998:65). He then cites the prominent historian of


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Western Esotericism, Antoine Faivre, who contrasts natural science, which is the pursuit of “objective knowledge of phenomena,” (Faivre 1987:328) with Naturphilosophie, which is an “intuitive and rigorous approach focussing on the reality underlying phenomenal reality” (ibid.:336) Although speculative and metaphysical, Naturphilosophie nevertheless strives to take into account the data derived from empirical observation.2 Hanegraaff points out that modern secularism is also a Naturphilosophie rather than science in the strict sense. Both defenders of holistic interpretations of science and secularist critics of such interpretations make the mistake of identifying their particular Naturphilosophie with natural science per se, while characterising the other camp as representing an illegitimate interpretation of science. Thus sceptical outsiders tend to refer to New Age Naturphilosophie as ‘fringe science’, whereas insiders tend to think of their appropriation of science as ‘leading edge science’ (Hanegraaff 1998:62–3). In another important study, Science in the New Age (1993), David Hess explores this mutual opposition between secularist sceptics—as represented by the ultra-secularist Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (usually abbreviated CSICOP and pronounced ‘psi cop’)—and New Age adherents. He points out that, in sharp contrast to the common stereotype of New Age thinking as a flight from reason into reassuring fantasy, “New Agers are skeptical of orthodoxy, be it religious, scientific, technical or economic. From this perspective, the New Age movement may represent not an irrational reaction to rationalisation, but an attempt to build an alternative rationality in a world perceived to consist of irrational and unjust orthodoxies” (Hess 1993:14). Hess further sees secular sceptics and New Agers as adopting comparable positions toward each other: “At one extreme, then, members of CSICOP portray New Agers as fools bound to dogmatic superstitions who would lead the country toward an

2 As an aspect of this, we should probably also add the imagined implications of scientific theory for everyday life. In her seminal The Aquarian Conspiracy (1982), Marilyn Ferguson refers to Fritjof Capra’s remark, “that most physicists go home from the laboratory and live their lives as if Newton, not Einstein, were right—as if the world were fragmented and mechanical. ‘They don’t seem to realize the philosophical, cultural, and spiritual implications of their theories’ ” (Ferguson 1982:161; the source of the Capra quote was not provided).

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apocalypse of unreason. At the other extreme, New Agers see sceptics as bound to their own superstition of dogmatic materialism that could result in environmental Armageddon” (ibid.:14–15). New Age and New Science vs Old Age and Old Science One way of approaching the New Age is to see how it contrasts itself with what might be termed the ‘Old Age’. To get a sense of how the New Age/Old Age distinction is portrayed, we can begin by examining the contrasts outlined in Lynn White’s influential 1967 essay, “The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” This short piece set in motion a line of thinking about religion and ecology that has shaped the discussion of this issue down to the present. One of the most controversial aspects of his essay is White’s view that Christianity has given birth not only to science and technology, but also to the exploitative attitude toward nature responsible for our contemporary ecological crisis: Since both science and technology are blessed words in our contemporary vocabulary, some may be happy at the notions, first, that viewed historically, modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology and, second, that modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful master over, nature. But, as we now recognize, somewhat over a century ago science and technology—hitherto quite separate activities—joined to give mankind powers which, to judge by many of the ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.

The problem, according to White, is that—in sharp contrast to earlier Pagan religions—the Judeo-Christian tradition views the natural world as being no more than inert matter. The combination of this attitude with certain other elements in the western religious tradition produce a recipe for ecological disaster. Elsewhere, White calls attention to such aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the biblical mandate to subdue and have dominion over the Earth: “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’ ” (Genesis 1:28). Not one to pull punches, White further asserts that even people who do not think of themselves as Christians are still being influenced by this pernicious attitude:


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The fact that most people do not think of these attitudes as Christian is irrelevant. No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity. Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

White’s essay was so influential that, in the twenty years following its publication, it was utilised as the starting point for more than two hundred articles and books. Theological responses tended to emphasise that the Judaeo-Christian tradition’s attitude toward nature could more accurately be characterised as mandating a stewardship or caretaking role for humanity. And there were other kinds of responses and criticisms from a variety of different perspectives (many of which are surveyed in Whitney 1993). Though White advocated the nature-friendly spirituality of Saint Francis of Assisi as a potential antidote for our destructive attitude toward the natural world, he also favourably contrasted “ancient paganism and Asia’s religions” with Christianity. In one passage, he explicitly mentions “beatniks”—the antecedent subculture to the counter-culture, which, sociologically speaking (in terms of the continuity of people who participated in both movements), was the immediate predecessor to the New Age movement—and Zen Buddhism: More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one. The beatniks, who are the basic revolutionaries of our time, show a sound instinct in their affinity for Zen Buddhism, which conceives of the man-nature relationship as very nearly the [inverted] mirror image of the Christian view.

White was certainly not a ‘New Ager’ in any sense. Furthermore, he identified himself as a Christian and advocated reforming Christianity’s attitude toward nature rather than turning to Paganism or to eastern religions. Nevertheless, there is much in “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” with which participants in the alternative spiritual subculture would agree. Specifically, White identified the western worldview that had been decisively shaped by Christianity and its wayward child science as the source of the problem. A major theme of New Age thinking is that our current problems—social, cultural and political as well as ecological—ultimately result from the fragmented (and, by implication, pathological) world view we have inherited from traditional religion and traditional science. As a corrective, thinkers associated with the New Age

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advocate the adoption of a new holistic worldview, one that sees the human being as an integral part of a deeply interconnected universe. Most would further view a variety of different traditions—from ancient Paganism to Western Esotericism to eastern religions—as sharing this holistic view. Reflecting its roots in the counter-culture, up until the mid-1970s the attitude within the New Age tended to be scorn for mainstream science. Science and technology were seen as opposed to the mystical world view that was so appreciated by members of the metaphysical subculture. As Fritjof Capra noted in the introductory chapter of his The Tao of Physics (1975), “They tend to see science, and physics in particular, as an unimaginative, narrow-minded discipline which is responsible for all the evils of modern technology” (1975:25). This all began to change after the publication of Capra’s influential book in 1975. It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of The Tao of Physics. As Hanegraaff observes in New Age Religion and Western Culture, “The Tao of Physics is no doubt the epitome of New Age science in the eyes of the general public” (Hanegraaff 1998:74). The runaway success of Capra’s book stimulated “a string of popular authors and intellectuals [to draw] on the findings of quantum physics, nonlinear thermodynamics, complex and self-organizing systems theories, Gaia theory, holographic models of mind, and other twentieth-century scientific developments, to articular a new and ‘constructive postmodern’ cosmology” (Ivakhiv 2001:39). The overarching theme of Capra’s influential book is captured in its subtitle, An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. What Capra’s analysis accomplished was to modify the pre-1975 antagonism between alternative spirituality and mainstream western culture so that modern physics—particularly quantum physics—was seen as supporting the unified world view favoured by the New Age. In other words, instead of: New Age spirituality vs Judaeo-Christian mainstream and Science

The Tao of Physics—in combination with later works such as Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) that brought sciences other than physics under the banner of holism—modified the formula to: New Age spirituality and New Science vs Judaeo-Christian mainstream and Old Science


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In chapter three of their Reconstructing Nature (1999), John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor similarly call attention to the importance of The Tao of Physics, characterising it as “one of the canonical books of the New Age movement” (Brooke & Cantor 1998:80). Brooke and Cantor place Capra’s “master narrative” in the context of comparable narratives that have drawn on the history of science to support some specific—and, typically, highly evaluative—notion of ‘progress’. Often these progressivist narratives portray how, “Science liberated humanity from its native, degenerate state” (ibid.:76). The Tao of Physics is a comparable ‘historical romance’, one that weaves its dramatic narrative by sharply contrasting ‘villains’ like Descartes and Newton with the heroes of post-Newtonian physics. Capra’s discussion toward the end of his introduction highlights this oppositional structure: The organic, ‘ecological’ world view of the Eastern philosophies is no doubt one of the main reasons for the immense popularity they have recently gained in the West, especially among young people. In our Western culture, which is still dominated by the mechanistic, fragmented view of the world, an increasing number of people have seen this as the underlying reason for the widespread dissatisfaction in our society, and many have turned to Eastern ways of liberation. (Capra 1975:25)

He further notes that his aim is to improve the image of science “by showing that there is an essential harmony between the spirit of Eastern wisdom and Western science” because “the modern physicist, like the Eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting and ever-moving components with man being an integral part of this system” (ibid.:25). In other words, mystics and physics agree on the holistic/unified world view that New Agers see as the solution to the world’s problems. Though in actuality most physicists would be quite reluctant to accept the proposition that modern physics aligns well with eastern mysticism, Capra’s efforts to bring them into alignment was tremendously influential. The enthusiasm for his basic proposition was, in fact, so great that it led to emergence of a new field of interest within the New Age subculture that came to be referred to as ‘New Science’. What was and continues to be the source of this enthusiasm? The answer to this question is fairly obvious: if cutting-edge science can be interpreted so as to support the world view treasured by members of this subculture, then, in effect, it legitimates that world view. Furthermore,

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as a corollary, this interpretation of science implicitly or explicitly de-legitimates the dominant cultural tradition which is seen as opposed to New Age thinking. Science and Legitimacy Numerous observers have pointed out that what the alternative spiritual subculture primarily seeks in science is legitimacy. This is a key point in, for instance, Hammer’s discussion of the New Age appropriation of science in Claiming Knowledge (2001:203). Ernest Lucas, a traditional Christian, makes essentially the same point in his Science and the New Age Challenge (1996) where he notes that, “What may seem surprising is that New Age writers appeal to modern science to vindicate their view of the nature of truth and reality” (Lucas 1996:30). Though focussed on specific alternative religions rather than on the New Age movement, the present writer makes the same argument in chapter four of Legitimating New Religions (Lewis 2003). The New Age interest in science as a source of legitimation for a religious world view is by no means unprecedented, as can be seen by taking a few random examples. The colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards revamped Puritan theology in terms of Newton’s physics and Locke’s empiricism—among other reasons—to make traditional Christianity more relevant to his contemporaries (Lee 2005). Theologians also drew on the legitimacy of science when they compared their occupation with that of the scientists, as in the introduction to Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology (1872–3): The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his storehouse of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches is the same as that which the natural philosophy adopts to ascertain what nature teaches. . . . The duty of the Christian Theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to him. There facts are all in the Bible. (cited in Olson 2004:163)

The same pattern is observable in Asian religions. At the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, Swami Vivekananda, for instance, emphasised Hinduism’s compatibility with science, as when he stated that, “the Brahmin boy repeats every day: ‘The sun and the moon, the Lord seated like the suns and moons of previous cycles’. And this agrees with modern science” (Vivekananda 1972/1893:7). Soyen Shaku, a Zen Buddhist representative at the same gathering as Vivekananda, spoke more


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boldly when he asserted that, on many points, the “Buddha’s teachings are in exact agreement with the doctrines of modern science” (Shaku 1999/1893:139). Shaku’s remarks represent a mild form of a polemical point put forward by many nineteenth century Buddhists, namely “that it was Buddhism, not Christianity, that could heal the breach between science and religion” (Fields 1981:126). The issue of legitimation was at the very core of the classic sociologist Max Weber’s thinking about the nature of authority. Weber proposed a tripartite schema of traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic legitimations of authority. The dynamics (in the sense of upsetting rather than reinforcing established authority structures) of this schema were largely confined to the factor of charisma, a form of legitimation Weber viewed as particularly—though not exclusively—characteristic of New Religious Movements. The discussion of the strategies power elites deploy to maintain their position has consumed a small lake of scholarly ink, not to mention a small forest of trees that sacrificed their lives to the paper industry. In sharp contrast, the analysis of the legitimation strategies deployed by emergent movements has not moved forward substantially since Weber. While other, more recent researchers have touched on the subject in passing, no one has published a single article (much less a book) focussed on this issue—despite the fact that legitimacy is a core issue for new movements. Weber’s work on the legitimation of authority provides a useful starting point for understanding the legitimation strategies deployed by new spiritual movements, but it should also be noted that his analysis is inadequate. For example, in contrast to what one might anticipate from the discussion of charismatic authority in Weber’s Economy and Society (1968), one often finds such movements appealing to tradition—though the explicit nature of such appeals means that they constitute a variation from what Weber had in mind by the traditional legitimation of authority (which he viewed as largely implicit). Also, when nascent movements attempt to justify a new idea, practice or social arrangement by attributing it to the authority of tradition, it is usually through a reinterpretation of the past that they are able to portray themselves as the true embodiment of tradition.3 Such modifications of his schema indicate that Weber did not have the last word on this issue. In fact, 3 This is also a common legitimation strategy utilised by the New Age; in this regard, refer to the discussion in Section IV, “The Appeal to Tradition”, in Hammer (2001).

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upon closer examination one finds that contemporary movements rely upon a wide range of different legitimation strategies. For instance, in addition to appealing to the authority of tradition, many movements also appeal to an ancient wisdom or to a primordial religiosity that antedates current religions. Yet another strategy is to appeal to the authority of reason and science (in Weber’s schema, this would be a form of legal-rational authority). This last strategy is particularly important, because science has become “the main mode of legitimation in the modern world” (Tumminia 2005:188).4 Prior to the blossoming of cold war nuclear concerns and the emergence of the ecology movement’s critique of runaway technology, the general populace accorded science and science’s child, technology, a level of respect and prestige enjoyed by few other social institutions. Science was viewed quasi-religiously, as an objective arbiter of ‘Truth’. Thus any religion that claimed its approach was in some way scientific drew on the prestige and perceived legitimacy of natural science. Religions such as Christian Science, Science of Mind, Scientology and others claimed just that. There are, however, a number of differences between popular notions of science and science proper. Average citizens’ views of science are significantly influenced by their experience of technology. Hence, in most people’s minds, an important goal of science appears to be the solution of practical problems. This aspect of our cultural view of science shaped the various religious sects that incorporated ‘science’ into their names. In sharp contrast to traditional religions that emphasise salvation in the afterlife, the emphasis in these religions is on the improvement of this life. Groups in the Metaphysical (Christian Science-New Thought) tradition, for example, usually claim to have discovered spiritual ‘laws’ which, if properly understood and applied, would transform and improve the lives of ordinary individuals, much as technology has transformed society. The notion of spiritual laws is taken directly from the ‘laws’ of classical physics. The eighteenth and nineteenth century mind was enamoured of Newton’s formulation of the mathematical order in the natural world. A significant aspect of his system of physics was expressed in the laws of gravity. Following Newton’s lead, later scientists similarly expressed their discoveries in terms of the same legislative metaphor—for example, the ‘law’ of evolution.

4

Tumminia’s statement refers to the discussion in Habermas (1970).


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One of the first and, at the time, most influential of the nineteenth century new movements to adopt a rhetoric of establishing religion on a scientific basis was spiritualism. Spiritualism was and is a religious movement emphasising survival after death, a belief Spiritualists claim is based upon scientific proof through communication with the surviving personalities of deceased human beings by means of mediumship. The belief in the possibility of communication with the spirit world has been held in most of the societies about which we have records. Spiritualism thus has many parallels and predecessors among traditional, tribal peoples, in the miracles of world religions, and in certain phenomena associated with shamanism and possession. In Christianity, these manifestations were not always associated with the spirits of deceased people, but, rather, were traditionally associated with angelic or diabolic possession, most frequently with the latter. By reinterpreting such phenomena as communications from the dead, one could view mediumship as an avenue for conducting an empirical enterprise. In fact, “Spiritualists tended to understand their own project as a scientific investigation of the afterlife” (Hammer 2001:217). Like the later New Thought movement, Spiritualists also expressed their discoveries in the spiritual realm in terms of a series of laws. These have rarely been formulated systematically, and tend to vary from writer to writer. Thus, for example, a relevant reading on the official website5 of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches lists twenty laws, which are said to be “just a few” of the many universal laws. In addition to such familiar items as the law of gravity and the law of evolution, some of the less familiar laws listed are the laws of “harmony”, “desire”, “mind”, “vibration”, and so on. This legislative rhetoric was carried over into Metaphysical religions, particularly New Thought. Rather than presenting themselves as empirically investigating the spiritual realm via communications from the dead, groups in the Metaphysical tradition view themselves as investigating the mind or spirit in a practical, experimental way. The self-perception of the early New Thought movement as ‘science’ is expressed in Lesson One of Ernest Holmes’ 1926 classic, Science of Mind, in the following way: Science is knowledge of facts built around some proven principle. All that we know about any science is that certain things happen under certain 5

http://www.nsac.org.

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james r. lewis conditions. Take electricity as an example; we know that there is such a thing as electricity; we have never seen it, but we know that it exists because we can use it; we know that it operates in a certain way and we have discovered the way it works. From this knowledge we go ahead and deduce certain facts about electricity; and, applying them to the general principle, we receive definite results . . . The discovery of a law is generally made more or less by accident, or by some one who, after careful thought and observation, has come to the conclusion that such a principle must exist. As soon as a law is discovered experiments are made with it, certain facts are proved to be true, and in this way a science is gradually formulated; for any science consists of the number of known facts about any given principle . . . This is true of the Science of Mind. No one has ever seen Mind or Spirit, but who could possibly doubt their existence? Nothing is more self-evident . . . (Holmes 1926:38)

In much the same way as the 1950s viewed technology as ushering in a new, utopian world, many New Age approaches to the mind view their psycho-spiritual technologies as supplying the missing ingredient in existing technologies—namely the therapeutic engineering of the human psyche. However, as indicated earlier, New Age therapists and others more often characterise their approach as ‘scientific’ rather than as ‘technological’. Thus the well-known New Age motivational speaker Tony Robbins, to take a prominent example, describes Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) as a “‘scientific’ approach to personal growth and achievement” (Danforth 1989:264). Facets of the New Age Interest in Science There are numerous facets of the New Age appropriation of science, any one of which could be the subject of a book-length study. As has already been indicated, the New Age has inherited the efforts of nineteenth century Spiritualism to prove scientifically the immortality of the soul. For Spiritualists, communication with the dead was a scientific enterprise in which one collected empirical (in the broadest sense of that term) data from the Other Side. Contemporary research on the near-death experience, as exemplified especially by the work of Raymond Moody, is very much a direct descendant of the Spiritualist quest. A different but related approach is the empirical (again, in a very broad sense) research on prior incarnations carried out by PastLife Therapists. Another facet of this interest is the quest for a ‘science of mind’. This topic also has its source in the nineteenth century, particularly in


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the mental science of Christian Science and the New Thought tradition. Both Spiritualism and New Thought provided impetus for the development of parapsychology. New Thought was also the immediate predecessor for so-called Creative Visualisation as well as for the ubiquitous dictum ‘change your mind; change your reality’ that is the basis for so many New Age practices. Additionally, biofeedback, especially as biofeedback methods were applied to the study of various altered states of consciousness such as meditative states, is in this tradition. Finally, one of the more sophisticated approaches to enterprise of bringing spirituality under the umbrella of science is represented by Transpersonal Psychology. The New Age appropriation of physics and mathematics—particularly modern physics as represented by quantum physics—is, as indicated earlier, the focus of much New Age interest in science. Popular writers in this area include Fritjof Capra, Gary Zukav, and David Bohm. The New Age approach to modern science builds on prior philosophical speculation on the implications of theoretical formulations such as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Goedel’s Theorem. Much has also been made of the technological phenomenon of holograms as a model for how certain aspects of the universe works. Emergent topics in this general area include chaos theory, fractal geometry and string theory. Yet another area of interest is the field of biology, including what has been referred to as ‘bio-fields’. The Gaia Hypothesis articulated by James Lovelock is a comprehensive theory about our planet that is attractive because it presents an ultimate model of planetary holism, namely the notion that the Earth as a whole is a single living being. Research on bio-fields has also drawn a great deal of interest because of the bio-field’s association with a wide variety of phenomena, such as acupuncture, electro-acupuncture, related healing modalities, auric healing, Kirlian photography and the martial arts. The theory of Morphic Resonance put forward by Rupert Sheldrake presents a somewhat different notion of the bio-field. Morphic Resonance has been used to explain such phenomena as the so-called ‘Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon’. Holistic health is easily the most significant (in a number of different ways) aspect of the New Age movement. This complex area includes yoga, meditation, homeopathy, herbalism, chiropractic, aromatherapy, flower remedies, macrobiotics, esoteric healing, etc. Because physical and mental health are often conflated, any consideration of the field

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of alternative medicine must include an examination of alternative psychotherapies. Because this is such an involved topic, the New Age would consider holistic healing methods ‘scientific’ in a number of different meanings of that word. ‘Borderline’ sciences have also captured the interest of the New Age movement. On the one hand, traditional divinatory methods—especially astrology—are considered empirical or quasi-empirical sciences within the alternative spiritual subculture. Another important area of interest is UFOs, though UFOlogy has different aspects—some of which are explicitly religious while others are research oriented. Finally, there is also considerable New Age interest in alternative archaeology and ancient civilisations, including hypothetical civilisations such as Atlantis and Lemuria. Conclusion Though the topic of science and the New Age is complex and manyfaceted, the fascination with mainstream natural science—and, more specifically, the fascination with the philosophical implications of modern physics—has been a central focus of interest in the metaphysical subculture. Despite the fact that this approach ignores the other aspects of science and the New Age, it nevertheless serves to bring into focus a key point, namely that a primary reason for this interest in science is the belief that contemporary science provides strong legitimation for the New Age world view. Before we rush to deprecate this deployment of modern science as just one more example of New Age foggy-headedness, we would do well to take into account that members of traditional religions feel precisely the same attraction. Thus, for example, in the introduction to his critical overview of New Age science, Ernest Lucas asserts that, “an orthodox Christian world-view provides the most satisfactory framework for doing science and for integrating ‘physics’ with metaphysics” (Lucas 1996:12). Similarly, if one puts the words ‘science’ and ‘Buddhism’ into the Amazon.com search engine, one discovers numerous books—some published by high-level presses like Oxford University Press and Columbia University Press—that focus on the Capra-like links between traditional Buddhism and modern science (e.g. Ricard & Thuan 2001; Wallace 2003; Zajonc & Houshmand 2004).


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Though I have not conducted extensive research on this topic, I am reasonably confident one could find comparable bodies of literature for all of the world’s major faith traditions. Thus, while the pattern we have been examining may manifest in particularly striking ways within the metaphysical subculture, we should not be blind to the fact that members of every tradition desire to see their ‘truths’ supported by the authority of science—especially in the midst of the present historical period, when all of the comforting old certainties seem problematic and threatened. References Bainbridge, W.S., 1993. “New Religions, Science and Secularization.” In Bromley, D.G. & J.K. Hadden, eds. Religion and the Social Order. Vol. 3A. Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press. Bednaroski, M.F., 1989. New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brooke, J. & G. Cantor, 1998. Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Campbell, C., 2002/1972. “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization” In Kaplan, J. & H. Loow, eds. The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization. Walnut Creek, California: Altamira. Capra, F., 1975. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Boulder: Shambhala. ——, 1982. The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster. Chopra, D., 1989. Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. New York: Bantam. Clark (channelled by Katar), 1988. “Back to School–Earth Revisited.” Open Channel: A Journal with Spirit 2, November–December. Danforth, L.M., 1989. Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Denzler, B., 2001. The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs and the Pursuit of UFOs. Berkeley: University of California Press. English-Lueck, J.A., 1990. Health in the New Age: A Study in California Holistic Practices. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Faivre, A., 1987. “Nature: Religious and Philosophical Speculations.” In Mircea Eliade, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan. Ferguson, M., 1982. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher. Fields, R., 1981. How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America. Boulder: Shambhala. Findhorn Foundation, 1986–87. Catalog. Autumn-Winter. Habermas, J., 1970. Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press. Hammer, O., 2004. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Leiden: Brill.

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Hanegraaff, W.J., 1998. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Albany, New York: SUNY. Hess, D.J., 1993. Science and the New Age: The Paranormal, its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Holmes, E., 1944/1926. The Science of Mind. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. Ivakhiv, A.J., 2001. Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona. Bloomington: Indian University Press. Kemp, D., 2004. New Age: A Guide—Alternative Spiritualities from Aquarian Conspiracy to Next Age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lee, S.H., 2005. The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lewis, J.R. & J.G. Melton, eds., 1992. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany: SUNY Press. Lewis, J.R., 1994. The Encyclopedia of Afterlife Beliefs and Phenomena. Detroit: Gale Research. ——, 1998. Seeking the Light. Los Angeles: Mandeville Press. ——, 2002/1998. The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ——, 2003. Legitimating New Religions. Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. ——, 2004. The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of New Age Religions. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. Lovelock, J., 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lucas, E., 1996. Science and the New Age Challenge. Leicester: Apollo. Main, R., 2002. “Religion, Science, and the New Age.” In Pearson, J., ed. Beyond Belief Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. Aldershot: Ashgate. Melton, J.G., 1988. “A History of the New Age Movement.” In Basil, R., ed. Not Necessarily the New Age. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ——, 1990. New Age Encyclopedia. Detroit: Gale Research. ——, 2002. “The New Age Movement.” In Lewis, J.R., ed. The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects and New Religions. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2nd edition. Milton, R., 1994. Alternative Science: Challenging the Myths of the Scientific Establishment. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. Olson, R.G., 2004. Science and Religion, 1450–1900: From Copernicus to Darwin. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood. Ricard, M. & T.X. Thuan, 2001. The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet. New York: Crown. Rothstein, M., 2004. “Science and Religion in the New Religions.” In Lewis, J.R., ed. The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. New York: Oxford University Press. Sentes, B. & Palmer, S., 2000. “Presumed Immanent: The Raelians, UFO Religions and the Postmodern Condition.” Nova Religio 4 86–105. Shaku, S., 1999/1896. “Reply to a Christian Critic.” In T.A. Tweed & S. Prothero, eds. Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press. Sheldrake, R., 1981. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher. Simmons, J.L., 1990. The Emerging New Age. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bear and Co. Spangler, D., 1977. “The Role of the Esoteric in Planetary Culture.” In Katz, M., W.P. Marsh & G.G. Thompson, eds. Earth’s Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences. New York: Harper & Row. ——, 2004/1990. “The Meaning of Gaia.” In Lewis, J.R., ed. The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of New Age Religions. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. Sutcliffe, S.J., 2004. “The Dynamics of Alternative Spirituality: Seekers, Networks and ‘New Age.’ ” In Lewis, J.R., ed. The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. New York: Oxford University Press.


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Sutcliffe, S.J. & M. Bowman, 2000. Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Talbot, M., 1981. Mysticism and the New Physics. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Tumminia, D., 2005. When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying Saucer Group. New York: Oxford University Press. Vivekananda, S., 1972/1896. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Calcutta: Advaita Ashram. Wallace, B.A., ed., 2003. Buddhism and Science. New York: Columbia University Press. Wallis, R., ed., 1979. On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge. Keele: University of Keele. Weber, M., 1968. Economy and Society. New York: Bedminster Press. White, L., 1967. “The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science 155 37–67. Whitney, E., 1993. “Lynn White, Ecotheology and History.” Environmental Ethics 15. Wilber, K., ed., 1982. The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science. Boulder: Shambhala. York, M., 1995. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ——, 2003. “Contemporary Academic Study of Astrology.” In Lewis, J.R., ed. The Astrology Book: The Encyclopedia of Heavenly Influences. Detroit: Visible Ink Press. Zajonc, A. & Z. Houshmand, 2004. The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama. New York: Oxford University Press. Zukav, G., 1979. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. New York: Morrow.

TRUTH, AUTHORITY AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM IN NEW AGE THOUGHT* Christopher Partridge Several problems are involved in studying the New Age, ranging from mapping its enormous diversity of beliefs and practices to locating it with reference to the conditions of modernity and postmodernity. With the latter issue in mind, this chapter is an analysis of understandings of truth and authority in the New Age. Against the assumption of some theorists, one of the central aims of the discussion is to demonstrate that, epistemologically speaking, the New Age is essentially a manifestation of modernity rather than postmodernity. Having established that, it is also shown that there are certain postmodern elements within the New Age network, as well as a superficial embracing of postmodernity and an emerging postmodern critique, all of which produce increasingly apparent tensions and confusion. The final section provides a critique of some of the principal problem areas. At first sight, the idea of uncovering an understanding of truth and authority in the New Age network1—at least in a single chapter—may seem rather naive. Indeed, in academic treatments of the New Age per se, as opposed to discussions of particular groups or individuals, it has become something of a convention to begin by noting that: (a) it is eclectic; (b) it has no founder, no central prophet, no binding creed, and no headquarters; and (c) it is far broader and more amorphous than what we normally understand to be ‘a religion’.2 In the words of the

* Reproduced with the permission of Taylor & Francis (www.tandf.co.uk/journals) from Journal of Contemporary Religion 14.1 1999 77–95, with minor editorial changes. 1 At the beginning of her influential book The Aquarian Conspiracy, Marilyn Ferguson refers to the New Age as “A leaderless but powerful network . . . working to bring about radical change . . . ” (Ferguson 1982:23). ‘Network’ is, I think, preferable to the more popular term ‘movement’, in that it indicates more adequately the diversity and plurality of the New Age, as well as the way New Agers relate to each other. To this end, I think that Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine’s description of the New Age as a “segmented-polycentric-integrated-network” (SPIN) is as accurate a term as one is likely to get (quoted in York 1995:76). 2 For a good overview of some of the problems involved in studying the New Age, see Greer (1995:151–2).

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New Age spokesperson David Spangler, while “Christianity is like a great cathedral rising around a central spiritual and architectural theme,” the New Age is “more like a flea market or country fair, a collection of differently coloured and designed booths spread around a meadow, with the edges of the fair dissolving into the forested wilderness beyond. Where the cathedral may be a place of worship, the fair is a place of play and discovery” (Spangler 1993:80). Strictly speaking therefore, because the New Age is not a single religion or worldview, one would need to produce a study of the epistemologies and concepts of truth of each of the stalls at the fair. Its eclectic pluralism simply undermines any attempt to discern a single concept of truth or authority without being procrustean in certain respects and therefore unrepresentative of many New Agers.3 Despite this lack of homogeneity, a broad indication can be given because, generally speaking, New Age worldviews do connect at certain points. Indeed, there are some common themes running through New Age thinking, which do tend to give its otherwise amorphous character some shape.4 While the New Age is undeniably nebulous and while the risk of procrustean exposition must be recognised, it is nevertheless possible to provide an outline of New Age epistemologies and concepts of truth and authority which most New Agers would want to affirm. This chapter provides an overview and examination of contemporary New Age epistemologies and addresses the question of whether the New Age is essentially a manifestation of modernity or postmodernity,5 not least because this issue raises questions of an epistemic nature. Although it will be shown that there clearly are postmodern elements (and, indeed, an emerging postmodern critique) within the New Age network, the thesis of this chapter is that its epistemology is essentially modernist.

3 A comprehensive treatment (impossible in a short chapter such as this) would also need to examine each of what William Bloom has identified as the four major fields of New Age endeavour: new paradigm/new science; ecology; new psychology; and spiritual dynamics (see Bloom 1991:xvi). 4 See, for example, Bloom: “The New Age movement represents several very different dynamics, but they thread together to communicate the same message: there is an invisible and inner dimension to all life—cellular, human and cosmic. The most exciting work in the world is to explore this inner realily” (Bloom 1991:xvi). 5 A discussion of the relations of these conditions to the New Age can be found in Heelas (1993); Johansson (1994); and Lyon (1993).

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After a discussion of the relation of New Age thought to modernity and postmodernity, the chapter turns to look at some specific loci of truth. Beginning with an examination of the epistemic significance of ‘the self ’6 (which includes a short comparative discussion of New Age thought and Romanticism), there are brief discussions of the epistemological importance of personal experience and the reverence for the premodern and the primal. Finally, the various lines of thought are drawn together in a concluding critique of some of the principal points raised. Postmodern or Modern? It is hard to avoid the fact that there are, within the New Age, manifestations of postmodern culture. This has led some scholars to argue that it is, essentially, a postmodern spirituality.7 Michael York, for example, declares that it is “the very product if not the condition of postmodernism” (York 1994:15).8 As to postmodernism per se, although there is some debate as to whether it is “an idea, a cultural experience, a social condition or perhaps a combination of all three” (Lyon 1994:4), generally speaking, it is a ‘family resemblance’ term used by a variety of thinkers working within a variety of contexts (e.g. painting, music, poetry, fiction, architecture, sociology) for things which are apparently related by a pluralism of styles and which eschew the pretensions of modernity (see Docherty 1993). From a more philosophical angle, it can be understood as a movement which, critical of Enlightenment values and truth claims, forsakes foundationalism and seeks to break down hierarchies of knowledge. From an epistemological viewpoint, one of the most conspicuous theses of postmodernism is its rejection of what it understands to be the naïve realism of modernity, which seeks a direct correspondence between external reality and epistemological judgements. The Enlightenment project was predicated on the assumption that the autonomous

6 New Agers often distinguish between the ‘self ’ (the individual cgo or personality) and the ‘Self ’ or ‘Higher Self ’ which is understood in a more mystical/spiritual/ ‘transpersonal’ sense. In order to avoid confusion, this distinction should be borne in mind. 7 See, for example, Beckford (1992); Lyon (1993); Netland (1994:93); and Veith (1994:ch 11). 8 See also Bowman (1995:147).

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individual was able to arrive at truth by establishing a correspondence between objective reality and the propositions of the knower. Against this, many postmodern theorists insist that, not only are our epistemic judgements affected by our worldviews, but our worldviews are, as far as epistemology is concerned, all that there is. That is to say, we have no way of getting beyond our perspectives to see whether there is actually a correspondence to any objective ‘reality’. We simply have no access to reality, apart from the conceptually constructed reality of our worldviews and discourse. Although, from a postmodern perspective, the social construction of reality is also important, the point is that, because we are essentially left to construct our own realities, there being no norms or criteria of truth, we should visit and explore a variety of ‘realities’. Moreover, this means that no perspective is wrong or untrue, only different. We cannot judge something as untrue, because we have no criteria for making such a judgement. Furthermore, it is not so much the content that is important in postmodernity, as the choice itself. As a consumer culture, the act of unrestrained choosing and the utopian goal of unlimited choice are central to postmodernity. Hence, in the final analysis, the postmodern self is essentially a cognitive and cultural nomad endlessly wandering in and out of experiences and worldviews. It is not difficult to see why it is assumed that the New Age fits neatly into this complex world of choice and plurality which seeks to turn its back on the Enlightenment and tear down the hierarchies of past generations. “One of the most palpable similarities between postmodernity and the New Age is that both are responses to—or even expressions of—a crisis of modernity. Enlightenment Reason, that glorifies objectivity and abhors ambivalence is doubted and attacked in both” (Lyon 1993:120). For example, although I will argue that her sometimes contradictory comments need to be understood in a larger context, Shirley MacLaine tells us that she has “come to realise that ‘reality’ is basically that which each of us perceives it to be. That is to say, what is real to me may not be real to a friend, much less a stranger. We each live in a separate world of reality” (MacLaine 1990:45). Clearly, this sounds very much like the postmodern rejection of modernist epistemology. Truth is what we perceive it to be. Following on from this, the New Age and postmodernity are one in their rejection of the modern, machine age, with its industrialism and militarism—it is governed by faceless bureaucracy and based on ‘left-brain’ rationality and technology. Both look forward to the inevi-


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table and increasingly apparent demise of the modern period and the emergence of a new era.9 Moreover, in postmodern culture, religion has, as David Lyon says, “become a neatly packaged consumer item—taking its place among other commodities that can be found or bypassed according to one’s consumption whims” (Lyon 1994:62). Hence, the view that New Age spirituality can be understood as essentially postmodern religion seems to be supported by Spangler’s comment, cited above, that it is “like a flea market or country fair . . . a place of play and discovery.” In accordance with a late capitalist, consumer culture conspicuously marked by an emphasis on personal choice and the satisfaction and fulfillment of the self, the New Age offers the spiritual nomad a variety of products, beliefs, practices, and experiences. As I was told in a talk by William Bloom, the New Age is essentially a pick-and-mix spirituality in which seekers are encouraged to explore the plurality of spiritual paths on offer. It is a spirituality for a consumer culture.10 The point is that, as Lyon puts it, the New Age “clearly has little to do with the conventional transcendent monotheism of Christianity and much to do with the market place . . . of religious and quasi-religious elements focused on self and choice” (Lyon 1993:117). This centring on the self and the emphasis on choice and consumerism have led to beliefs, practices and experiences being reinterpreted in terms of the self. Hence, for example, symbols and beliefs of primal religions and contemporary world faiths are often detraditionalised, detached from their original contexts and interpreted in a way appropriate to the individual. Self-centric spiritual bricolage seems to be the order of the day. However, although it is true that the New Age has a number of affinities with, and incorporates elements of the postmodern worldview, it would be wrong to conclude that it is simply a manifestation of postmodernity. For, if a fundamental feature of postmodernism is the rejection of objective truth, metanarratives and the concept of the self arising out of Enlightenment thought, then much New Age thinking 9 E.g. concerning the New Age: “At 2000 locations around the world at 11 p.m. (GMT) on the 11 January 1992 . . . New Agers joined forces to ‘open the door to global harmony’. From Vancouver BC to Glastonbury UK and from Giza, Egypt, to the South Islands in New Zealand and Ayers Rock in Australia celebrations were held to mark the passing of one age and the start of the new” (Lyon 1993:121). 10 From memory and notes of Bloom’s lecture at a conference on “The New Age: Old Lamps for New?”, held at Middlesex University in May 1997.

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is not essentially postmodern. While it is characterised by diversity, an emphasis on choice and a radical critique of secular rationalism, a scraping of the surface will reveal that it is firmly rooted in the soil of modernity. One should not generalise, but on the whole, it is true to say that the New Age (a) does not work with a philosophy of the de-centred self, (b) has modernist concepts of truth and authority, and (c) constructs metanarratives. For example, we will see that many New Agers do feel that knowledge of the world rests on a foundation of concepts from which further propositions can be inferred, thereby building up a superstructure of known truths. “The truth is out there”—one simply needs to discover it. As Alice Bailey comments, we will eventually “isolate that inner significant structure of truth which is the same in all climes and in all races . . .” (Bailey 1991:20–21). Many truths of the New Age are not private or localised truths, true only for the individual or for the community to which the individual belongs, they are understood to have universal validity—they are ‘big truths’. For example, although we have noted the New Age critique of Enlightenment rationality and the increasing variety of beliefs and practices on offer, this needs to be understood within the context of a New Age metanarrative which arises directly out of the modern belief in evolutionary progress, the particular interpretation of which, in many cases, can be traced back to late-nineteenth century Theosophy. The increasing number of alternative philosophies and therapies which give the New Age its postmodern, commodifying appearance, are, it is believed, manifestations of an emerging worldview, an evolving consciousness. Although it is variously understood, it is a fundamental presupposition of the New Age that people are starting to think differently as a consequence of an all-embracing spiritual, material and intellectual evolution of the cosmos into the Aquarian age. There is, it is argued, a fundamental shift in thinking taking place, as we begin to use the more intuitive right hemisphere of the brain, rather than primarily relying on the rationalistic left hemisphere, as has been the case up until now.11 The point is that, in this belief (and there are others), we are dealing with a metanarrative, a philosophy of progress, that finds its proper place in modernity. In the words of Eileen Campell, “we are evolving to be better, more advanced beings and that our age is the one in which humanity will take the next major leap forward in conceptual evolution and transform ourselves and our world” (quoted in Palmer 1993:85). 11


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The Sacralised Self This brings us to the most significant metanarrative in New Age thought, namely ‘the self ’. The self is, as Paul Heelas has noted, “a powerful metanarrative, of a kind which stands in sharp contrast to the ‘de-centred’ self theorised by advocates of the postmodern tradition” (Heelas 1993:110). There is, of course, nothing new in this. Self-religiosity is “as ancient as the Upanishads, for instance; or, to take an example from the West, can be found in the millenarian movements of the Middle Ages” (ibid.). More significantly, a conspicuous western emphasis on the self can be found in the modern period in Romantic thought.12 Those familiar with the thought of, for example, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge or William Wordsworth, will be struck by the similarity of some of their emphases and concerns with those of contemporary New Agers. Opposed to the idea that reality can be known simply by the application of human reason, Romanticism argued that there needed to be a complementary emphasis on human intuition and imagination, which is capable of discerning the profound sense of mystery at the heart of universe. There are things in the universe that reason cannot grasp. Reason may be a useful tool, but it is limited in its abilities. Hence, for example, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s appeal to the imagination as a faculty capable of transcending the limitations of human reason. Humans can, in other words, intuitively or by the use of imagination, have access to the infinite through the finite, discover the metaphysical within the physical, see the spiritual flowing through the material. As in the New Age, the universe was understood to be, not simply a dry, inert, mathematical collection of rationally quantifiable matter, but rather a living, creative entity permeated with a spiritual ‘presence’ that cannot be discerned by the simple application of logic and reason. The point is that there was a great confidence in the individual’s ability to know the truth about the nature of reality without recourse to revelation. Whereas Enlightenment rationalism emphasised the abilities of unaided human reason in this respect, Romanticism, still focusing on the authority of the individual, stressed feeling, intuition, and imagination. Similarly in the New Age, while reason per se is not wholly rejected, it is distrusted and there is a

12 For an excellent treatment of Romanticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Reardon (1985).

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stress on intuition, feeling, and imagination. However, as with Romanticism, the New Ager’s decisive Socratic turn to the self does not take it beyond modernity. As to why there is this turn within in the New Age, the answer is, of course, to be found in its particularly high view of the self. Whereas, for example, Schleiermacher still thought of God as being distinct from the self, as being ‘the Other’ on which the self absolutely depends, the New Age, influenced particularly by Indian thought, thinks more in terms which indicate a socialisation or divinisation of the self. The ‘pious self-consciousness’ of Schleiermacher is, in the New Age, not a consciousness of the self as determined by God, an apprehension which leaves a person with an absolute sense of contingency, it is Selfconsciousness—consciousness of one’s Higher Self. Hence, for New Age epistemology, the self becomes supremely significant: not only is the self able to discover truth, but the truth it seeks is within the self. In a very real sense, the self is understood to be ‘the way, the truth and the life’. In her discussion of “Superconsciousness and the Higher Self ”, Shirley MacLaine declares that: . . . self-realisation is God-realisation. Knowing more of your Higher Self really means knowing more of God. That inner knowledge is radiant with life, light and love . . . When I go within I look for communication and guidance . . . I like to ask questions, check my perceptions as to my opinions, my progress . . . When we go within and come into alignment with our spiritual power, we come into connection with that spark of Divinity . . . which I call the Higher Self. Some call it the Divine Oversoul, the Divine Centre, the God within, the personal interface with God . . . whatever one calls it, it is the personalisation of the God Source within us. When I first made contact with my Higher Self I was aware that I could, from then on, better touch my purpose on Earth and have it fit in with everyone else’s. (MacLaine 1990:82–3)

However, this emphasis on the Self does not necessarily mean that New Age epistemology stops at the boundaries of the individual self, believing that there is nothing greater than the individual’s own truth and authority. Although we will see that some do understand the Higher Self to be none other than a deeper level of the individual self, it is clear that there is, in much New Age thought, a sense of something greater than the individual self. Hence, operating, although not always very clearly, with a vague form of pantheism, MacLaine speaks of the “Divine spark” as a part of God, a part of a truth and authority greater than the self, a part of “the universal energy . . . which . . . has


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always existed” (MacLaine 1990:82). It is in this pantheistic sense that we need to understand MacLaine’s oft-quoted claim that “I am God. I am God. I am God.” As she says, “the basic principle of the New Age” can be summed up in the following words: “Begin with the self; recognise the God within, and the result will be the recognition, with tolerance and love, that everyone else possesses God within as well. In other words, we are each part of God experiencing the adventure of life” (MacLaine 1990:108). According to Marilyn Ferguson (who betrays an indebtedness to the Upanishadic doctrine of brahman-atman identification), “All souls are one. Each is a spark from the original soul, and this soul is inherent in all souls . . . You are joined to a great Self . . . And because that Self is inclusive, you are joined to all others” (Ferguson 1982:418). Similarly, George Trevelyan writes, “Look into the eyes of another human being . . . Just gaze into the human eye, thinking that God in me is looking at the God spark in you. But it is the same God, looking at Himself . . . If I look at you in this way I experience that we are both parts of the same vast being that is the totality of humanity” (Trevelyan 1991:8). Having said that, although many New Agers do work with a vague form of pantheism, there are others whose philosophies seem to have collapsed into total, sometimes narcissistic, subjectivism. These are, generally speaking, New Agers belonging to what might be loosely termed the ‘human potential’ camp in which the emphasis is on selfdevelopment. For example, the psychiatrist Scott Peck teaches that, “If you desire wisdom greater than your own, you can find it inside you . . . To put it plainly, our unconscious is God . . . [ T ]he goal of spiritual growth [is] . . . the attainment of godhead by the conscious self. It is for the individual to become totally wholly God” (quoted in Chandler 1988:297). Also tending in this direction is Werner Erhard, the founder of est. Concerning his own experience of enlightenment, he recalls: . . . after I realised that I knew nothing-I realised that I knew everything . . . I realised that I was not my emotions or thoughts. I was not my ideas, my intellect, my perceptions, my beliefs. I was not what I did or accomplished or achieved . . . I was simply the space, the creator, the source of all that stuff. I experienced Self as Self in a direct and unmediated way. I didn’t just experience Self; I became Self . . . It was an unmistakable recognition that I was, am, and always will be the source of my experience . . . I was whole and complete as I was and now I could accept the whole truth about myself. For, I was its source. I found enlightenment, truth, true self all at once. I had reached the end. (quoted in Heelas 1992:145 and Heelas 1997:58)

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The point is that in writings such as MacLaine’s, one gets the clear impression that although the Absolute is not other than the self as in Schleiermacher’s thought, there is that which is greater than the self and of which the self is a small part. While one can logically refer to the self ’s divinity, this is generally understood within a larger pantheistic context. Indeed, there is, in many cases, a sense of the transcendent. Whether one calls it ‘the Spirit’, ‘God’, ‘the Life Force’, ‘the Source’ or ‘the Higher Self ’, it is an absolute with which all humanity should seek to live in harmony. That this is so, is particularly clear in some forms of channelling. In the words of Geoff Boltwood, a channeller based in Glastonbury, “ ‘Channelling’ involves achieving an expanded state of consciousness that allows for the transmission of information from higher, some say ‘divine’, intelligence” (Boltwood 1997:41). Boltwood, for example, is “a focus of energy for the Source known as ‘Tareth’ . . . the centre of infinite creation and potential” (Boltwood 1997:40). And in a channelled message, ‘Tareth’ communicates the following: “I am Tareth of the source of creation, of the present and of the future . . . The Tareth has been here a long time and has returned in this era with the name Tareth . . . The Source of Creation is calling all those now who are ready to take upon themselves the role of becoming doorways to new dimensions, to heal and to teach others: no one is exempt. Anyone can become part of this” (Boltwood 1997:40–3). Boltwood makes a subtle distinction between the individual self and the Source/Tareth who addresses and appeals to that self. Interestingly, here, as with much channelling, we are dealing with a doctrine of revelation. Indeed, the theosophist Annie Besant explicitly affirms the revelatory value of channelling as “communication from a Being superior to humanity of facts known to Himself but unknown to those to whom he makes the revelation-facts which they cannot reach by the exercise of the powers they have so far evolved” (Besant 1909:4). Boltwood’s and certainly Besant’s notion of the divine, the Source of truth and authority, is distinct from that of Erhard and Peck, for whom there seems to be no understanding of a greater authority than one’s Self, one’s own mind/soul. Certainly, they could not meaningfully work with a doctrine of revelation as understood by Besant. Having said that, there are channellers who do work with an understanding of the Self similar to Peck’s. For example, whereas Eileen P. Caddy of the Findhorn community initially understood her channelled revelations to come from God, later she came to believe that it was simply guidance from her Higher Self: “There is no separation between ourselves and


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God, there is only ‘I am’. I am the guidance. It took me so many years to realise this” (quoted in Bruce 1996:203). Perhaps the distinction between these different understandings of the self ’s relation to ‘the Divine’ can be best understood as a distinction between pantheism, polytheism, and panentheism: for some New Agers, humans are, in the words of Trevelyan, “parts of the same vast being”; for others, humans are, in the final analysis, individual gods—as Peck says, “our unconscious is God” (quoted in Chandler, 1988:297); others, like Boltwood, Besant and many of those working from within the Christian tradition, such as Matthew Fox and Peter Spink, have developed, or simply adopted, a thesis which can best be described as panentheistic (see Spink 1991:chs. 11–12 and Fox 1983:ch. 6). In the words of Fox, [P]anenheism is not pantheism. Pantheism, which is a declared heresy because it robs God of transcendence, states that “everything is God, and God is everything”. Panentheism, on the other hand, is altogether orthodox and very fit for orthopraxis as well, for it slips in the little Greek word en and thus means, “God is in everything and everything is in God.” This experience of the presence of God in our depth . . . is a mystical understanding of God . . . Panentheism is a mature doctrine about the presence of God, about the deep with-ness of God. (Fox 1983:90)

Turning again to the modernism-postmodernism question, while the polytheistic theses of those, such as Erhard and Peck, are suggestive of postmodernity, they would not—unlike many postmodern theorists—understand the self as a construct of social systems. The decentred self of postmodernity is a self which not only recognises that versions of reality and truth are socially constructed, but also recognises that the self itself is a social construct. As Middleton and Walsh comment: “Just as reality is a social construct . . . so also is Homo autonomous [sic]* . . . socially constructed. Just as ‘we only know the world through a network of socially established meaning systems’ or ‘the discourses of our culture’, so also such meaning systems and discourses ‘structure how we see ourselves and how we construct our notions of self, in the past and in the present’ ” (Middleton & Walsh 1995:50). Furthermore, not only are many postmodern theorists arguing that the self is a product of social systems, they also argue that discourse plays a significant role in the construction of the self. “Rather than perpetuating the myth of * Though its meaning is clear, this new species presents grammatical difficulties. DJK.

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the autonomous, self-constituting subject, Michel Foucault says that the modernist subject must be ‘stripped of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse’ ” (ibid.). In this sense, it is language, strictly speaking, that is autonomous, rather than the self. Hence, although some New Agers have an absolute understanding of homo autonomos, they are nevertheless still standing on the soil of modernity, for the simple reason that homo autonomos—the self which is a law unto itself—is the construct of a modernist anthropology. For New Agers, it is a universally self-evident truth about humanity which, as the Aquarian Age unfolds, will be recognised by increasing numbers of people from every culture. New Agers are thus clearly working with the modernist subject—the autonomous self constructed in the postRenaissance western world, as understood and attacked by thinkers, such as Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In the pick-and-mix world of the New Age, we are not so much deconstructing the individual self as discovering timeless truths about the Self/Higher Self. Nonetheless, it should be noted that there is a tension emerging within the New Age as a result of more postmodern theses. For example, at the beginning of the 1980s, Starhawk, berating ‘power-over’ traditions, questioned worldviews (New Age or otherwise) which assume the existence of some external source of authority and truth, especially when this is invested in a particular individual. Such worldviews support “the illusion that truth is found outside, not within, and denies the authority of experience, the truth of the senses and the body, the truth that belongs to everyone and is different for everyone” (Starhawk 1997:22). Although there are modernist themes in Starhawk’s thought, we see the emergence of a postmodern epistemology providing a critique of the dominant, hierarchical modernity evident in the New Age. Likewise, although more stridently, Monica Sjöö, in her significantly entitled New Age and Armageddon: The Goddess or the Gurus (Sjöö 1992),13 has attacked much New Age thinking. Although, Paul Greer has, for example, quite rightly drawn our attention to the antithetical ‘patriarchal’ and ‘ecological’ dynamics operating in the New Age (Greer 1995), Starhawk (and other polytheists), while arguably not thoroughly postmodern, indicate the emergence of other antithetical dynamics. As New Agers (if they can still be termed ‘New Agers’) begin to embrace postmodernity and seek to make use of its tools, such as deconstruction, so the contemporary New Age will be increasingly scrutinised and the subject of critique, 13

See also Sjöö (1994).


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together with the rest of modernity and patriarchal culture. We will return to this issue in the final section of the chapter. Finally, before leaving the discussion of the Self and turning to the importance of personal experience, a brief mention of ‘transpersonal’ psychology/spirituality is required. Transpersonal psychology, to quote Capra, “regards consciousness as the primary reality and ground of all being.” This consciousness, he continues, “is often described as ‘pure consciousness’, ‘ultimate reality’, ‘suchness’ and the like . . . It is said to be the essence of the universe and to manifest itself in all things; all forms of matter and all living beings are seen as patterns of divine consciousness” (Capra 1983:323). The epistemic significance of this is obvious. In experiencing the transpersonal, the individual “makes contact with collective and even cosmic mental patterns” (ibid.). Thus, Roberto Assagioli’s ‘psychosynthesis’ (see Assagioli 1991:124–30), which is generally understood to be the most influential and developed form of transpersonal psychology, seeks to bridge the psychological and the spiritual/transpersonal realms and thereby opens up avenues to the Higher Self from which one can then receive wisdom, truth and guidance.14 Beyond the unpredictable flux and mutability of the sphere of the personal, foundational truth is to be found in the sphere of the transpersonal. Existential Truth The New Age emphasis on the self and the Higher Self is not simply a result of a sacralising anthropology. Self-authority is also linked to a particular epistemology of experience. Only personal experience, it is argued, can provide immediate and uncontaminated access to truth, particularly truth in the sphere of the spiritual/transpersonal. Mediated truth, communicated by sacred texts, by the Church, by society cannot be trusted. Indeed, pushing towards the boundaries of postmodernity, New Agers make much of the fact that objective thinking is an ignis fatuus and that observation and communication are always informed by one’s interests and presuppositions. Truths cannot be communicated without being in some way interpreted and therefore ‘contaminated’. The immediacy of personal experience is thus understood as 14 Transpersonal psychology can, of course, be used regardless of whether the practitioner’s understanding of the Higher Self is pantheistic, polytheistic or panentheistic.

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epistemologically crucial. External truths should only be accepted if, in the words of George Trevelyan, they “ring true to your own Inner Self ” (quoted in Perry 1992:147). As Heelas comments, “voices of authority emanating from experts, charismatic leaders and established traditions [are] mediated by way of inner experience. Even New Age teachers (typically) do not expect their adepts to simply listen to what they have to say” (Heelas 1997:21). Corinne McLaughlin says that “The highest source of guidance for anyone is always within each person—the voice of the soul, the inner Divinity” (McLaughlin 1991:52). Taking this experiential emphasis a step further, because it is often recognised that we have worldviews which are permeated by left-brain rationalism and intellectualism, many New Agers have been led to a radical questioning of the presuppositions and understandings of truth with which they have been educated. Particularly in some of the more structured New Age groupings, it is taught that only by purging the mind can one embark on the path to truth. For example, to quote the words of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, “Only if you are ready to drop the ego, your judgements, and your rationality, your intellect—only if you are ready to allow me to cut off your head—will you be able to understand what is going on here” (quoted in Thompson & Heelas 1986:33). Indeed, Rajneesh does not, as such, want his followers to understand at all. What he aims at is not an understanding of truth as such, but rather an experience of truth: “Authentic religious life . . . must be approached by discarding the intellect. Bhagwan’s utterances are those of the mystic, unable to do more than hint at the truth. His aim is to conjure up that which cannot be intellectually understood. His utterances are not to be taken literally, for they are aimed at evoking that totality of experience which goes beyond words” (Thompson & Heelas 1986:33–4). To quote Rajneesh again, “Once you become dependent on borrowed light, you are lost. Knowing is good, but knowledge is not good. Knowing is yours, knowledge is others” (quoted in Thompson & Heelas 1986:34). Hence, in the light of the emphasis on inner experience, it is not surprising that Christian New Ager Peter Spink argues that the Church’s insistence on the propagation of intellectual truth “makes understanding impossible.” The Church should move away from insisting on the authority of ‘borrowed light’, of mediated truth, and rather help seekers to experience truth for themselves. He says: “Because of a quickening of perception at this deeper level, many who are travelling a spiritual path find unacceptable the idea of submission to either a biblical or an ecclesiastical authority without reference to an


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inner resonance. Submission to the truth in this sense is felt to be a denial of integrity and something divorced from spiritual awakening” (Spink 1991:63). Earlier in the book, he states that “the new consciousness . . . is to know that belief patterns and words, concepts and ideas, theological definitions, dogmas and doctrine are all articulations of the truth. They do not in themselves constitute the truth. Truth is the experience of reality in the present moment” (Spink 1991:38). This is why “religion, as normally understood in the west, has been replaced by teachers whose primary job is to set up ‘contexts’ to enable participants to experience their spirituality and authority” (Heelas 1997:23). Although an individual may turn to channelling, to a guru, to a sacred text, to astrology, these, it is argued, are not to be understood as external authorities—rather, detraditionalised, they should be understood as aids to assist us on our journey within in order to experience truth. The Epistemic Significance of Premodern and Primal Cultures Finally, to turn from the modern to the premodern is not, according to New Age thought, to turn from the conceptually advanced to the conceptually primitive. Many New Agers are convinced that contemporary thought has much to learn from premodern and primal cultures and that, in some ways, the modern period has seen a regression, rather than a progression, of the human understanding of the nature of reality. Whether drawing on eastern spirituality or first-century Gnosticism, both New Agers and their critics have been keen to show that, far from being a recent phenomenon, the New Age is, in part, the resurgence of ancient traditions.15 Whether one worships the Goddess of Wicca spirituality, studies the rites of the Druids, consults a shaman, charts the stars or channels at Glastonbury,16 there is a strong sense of continuity with the past (see Bowman 1995:139–149). Often animated by a vision of what might be called ‘a Gaian golden age’, many New Agers have a strong sentimental attachment to the past because of a romanticised 15 See, for example, Groothuis (1990:chs. 4–5); Kelsey (1993:35–58); MacLaine (1990:ch. 2); Palmer (1993:ch. 2); and Seddon (1992:6–8). 16 It should be noted out that many practising ‘pagans’ are keen to point out that they are not ‘New . . . Agers’. Some argue, for example, that they cannot be accused of a ‘pick-and-mix’ approach to spirituality, being followers of a particular ancient spiritual tradition. See, for example, Harvey (1997) and Harrington in this volume.

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understanding of ancient cultures and spiritualities. Our ancestors, it is believed, used to live in a harmonious, symbiotic relationship with Gaia, rather than in what Starhawk calls the contemporary person’s state of ‘estrangement’ (see Starhawk 1997:5ff.): the ancients were in touch with nature, themselves and each other. More importantly, the ancient wisdom of these cultures is understood to be the uncorrupted wisdom of a humanity unrepressed by the external dogma, rationalism and authority of later institutionalised religion and culture. While naïve in some respects, these ancient cultures of the Gaian golden age (and, of course, the contemporary primal cultures—to some extent they have been by-passed by modernity and, therefore, still retaining the ancient wisdom and living in a symbiotic relationship with the environment, they belong to this conceptual, timeless age) are often seen as spiritually superior to our own, and thus as spiritual and cultural paradigms. As Ray Castle and Mark Turner insist, “Aboriginal people have a primordial oneness with the earth at ground level and have a direct relationship with the rocks, minerals, insects, animals and plants. The western world can learn much from these sacred people” (Insectoid 1997:50). For many, as already indicated, the quest for truth and knowledge needs to take account of the wisdom imparted by the ‘sacred people’ of ancient and primal cultures.17 Indeed, these cultures often carry the same sort of authority and inspire the same degree of blind faith that western science has inspired during the modern era. That is to say, a matter can be settled in the New Age by a simple appeal to some

17 It should be noted that some New Agers invest particular significance in premodern cultures, not simply because of their wisdom and union with Gaia and possibly other cosmic powers, etc., but because of their relationship with extra-terrestrial intelligence. For example, in a discussion of the “remarkable similarities in the beliefs of isolated primitive peoples”, John Keel writes: “. . . from Africa to Australia there are early myths that the gods came from Pleiades, a cluster of six stars visible to the naked eye . . . How did this particular myth get started? And why are the Pleiades universally known as ‘the Seven Sisters’ when only six stars are visible? Is it possible that early peoples everywhere were actually being visited by seemingly supernatural beings who claimed to be from another planet?” (Keel 1978:29). More recently, reflecting on the pyramids, Ann Walker provides answers to questions, such as, How did an ancient civilisation give the knowledge and technology to design and construct them? Guided by White Arrow, a native American spirit, she tells us that, not only are the pyramids built in the shape of a spacecraft, but buried between the pyramids and the Sphinx there has, “for millions of years”, been a spaceship known as “the Hall of Records” from which humanity started life. The argument is that this is one of a number of spaceships containing aliens who had escaped from a dying planet (see Walker 1995).


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premodern belief or practice. Hence the almost ubiquitous reference to a continuity with the premodern in New Age literature. New Agers promoting their practices and philosophies recognise the power of the premodern. What may appear as simply a bit of interesting information added to a leaflet, is actually a guarantee of its truth and authority.18 Indeed, the feeling of authenticity and truth seems to be enhanced, if the material is adorned with symbols and illustrations which, if not ancient, have the look of antiquity. Critique The criticism of the New Age that truth is seen to be unimportant,19 which is certainly the initial impression that one gets, is found to be unwarranted when one digs a little deeper. Truth is important to many New Agers. Regarding, for example, Marion Bowman’s claim that, in New Age and Neo-Pagan thought, “people need not be constrained by . . . the metanarrative” and that “truth is subjective” (Bowman 1995:147)—assuming that this is not meant in the Kierkegaardian sense of ‘subjective truth’,—one has to question the accuracy of such statements. In my experience, if one questions the truth of a particular worldview or metanarrative, very few New Agers will retort ‘Does it matter?’; more will respond ‘I know that it’s true for me’, and after further discussion often reveal an underlying belief in its truth for others also (even if others do not understand it in exactly the same way); most will affirm it to be a truth which the rest of humanity would do well to acknowledge and adjust their lives to. As I have sought to demonstrate, generally speaking, the New Age works within the epistemic framework of modernity. It is not so much ‘truth’ (in the modernist sense of the term) that is a problem for New Agers, but rather some external claims

18 For example, the following is taken from three leaflets randomly picked from my pile of New Age literature: in his leaflet “Mysterious Tremendum”, Gongmaster Don Conreaux begins by telling us that he stands in “the lineage of ancient tradition”; Paulinne Delcour-Min, in her leaflet “Realise Your Potential Through Past Life Therapy”, declares that her brand of “Soul therapy” is “derived from Native American healing practices”; and the Isle of Avalon Foundation informs us that Glastonbury has “powerful and ancient energies” and that it is “a place which has long been recognised as a sacred site . . . [and from] the earliest days this energy has drawn people to it to find healing.” See also Rothstein in this volume. 19 E.g. Chandler (1988:291); Osborn (1992:107–8); Seddon (1992:18); Veith (1994: ch. 11).

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to truth. However, while being suspicious of some traditional authorities and critical of the modern period in some respects, for the most part, New Agers fail to move significantly beyond modernity. Just as the modern mind sought emancipation from what it perceived to be external authorities, so the New Ager appeals to the freedom and responsibility of the self to discover truth and judge between rival claims to truth. Kant’s words ‘Dare to know’ are just as much the slogan of the New Age as they are of modernity. On the other hand, we have noted an emerging tension within the network, as thinkers embracing postmodernity have found the New Age epistemologically wanting. Although Starhawk’s comments are set within a critique of patriarchal culture, they have a clear postmodern ring to them. She speaks of “the lie that there is only one truth and of ‘many feminisms, many truths’ ” (Starhawk 1997:22). I would not want to argue that she is a postmodern New Ager, but her comments do demonstrate that (a) there are those within the network, or on its periphery, who identify a modernist epistemological dynamic, and (b) there is an emerging tension as a result of an opposing, more postmodern dynamic. Furthermore, there is also a tension evident in New Age epistemologies born out of a desire to move beyond modernity, while, at the same time, being firmly rooted in modernity. It would seem to be a case of viewing the land of postmodernity on the horizon and fantasising about being (even believing that one is living) in that land, without making the necessary journey towards it. Because of this, many postmodern elements within the New Age are fairly cosmetic. For example, the presupposition that the self is its own authority is more of an ideal than a fact, in that much trust is invested in external New Age authorities, be they teachers, Ascended Masters, sacred texts, or the beliefs and practices of premodern cultures. Although it is often argued that, for example, teachers and texts are not to be understood as external authorities, but rather as aids to help people experience the truth within, it is hard to ignore the impression that there are some teachers and writings understood to be more than simple aids. Their declarations are often invested with more authority than a papal bull. Rajneesh teaches, for instance, that all humans are gods, but his very title—which can be translated as ‘the Blessed One’—separates him out from his sannyasins. Not only did his Rolls Royces get washed, his housework done and all his appetites catered for, but he has also clearly been seen as the channel of truth and authority. Hence at the beginning of the day, sannyasins repeated the following (in Sanskrit):


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“I go to the feet of the Awakened One. I go to the feet of the Commune of the Awakened One. I go to the feet of the Ultimate Truth of the Awakened One” (quoted in Thompson & Heelas 1986:26). Also, despite Puttick’s conclusion that there is little evidence of sexual exploitation in the Rajneesh movement and that many female disciples gave a positive assessment of any distressing experiences, she does bring out the sense of hierarchy and the great authority invested in spiritual teachers, such as Rajneesh (see Puttick 1995). Even in arguably more moderate cases, there are still hierarchies and a great sense of authority and power attached to masters, teachers, leaders, and channels. Another example is Elizabeth Claire Prophet of the Church Universal and Triumphant (also, significantly, known as Mother Elizabeth or Guru Ma): although she disclaims uniqueness, she is nevertheless God’s instrument chosen to communicate with the Ascended master.20 As the ‘Vicar of Christ’ she is the principle source of truth for humanity (see York 1995). Likewise, the Aetherius Society—which primarily exists to make known information communicated by Aetherius (an Ascended Master)21—claims that “the only channel of communication He uses between Himself and this Earth” is “His Eminence Sir George King” (King 1983:1), to whom are ascribed not only a knighthood, but also a variety of doctorates—which are sometimes changed between publication.22 King’s messages are revered as “the gospel Truth, unlike the ‘pure myths’ circulated by other teachers” (King 1983:2).23 These New Age authorities are understood (sometimes in an exclusivist sense) to be channels of truth. When this happens, regardless of any teachings claiming the opposite, “epistemological individualism”24

20 Superior spiritual individuals who are released from the cycle of rebirth and ascend become the guides and teachers of humanity. Although the list of Ascended Masters in the New Age network is extremely long, it usually includes Jesus and Gautama Buddha. An account of the role of Ascended Masters in the life of Helena Petrova Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society (who, according to some, has herself now ascended) can be found in Annie Besant’s short biography (see Besant 1907). 21 Aetherius is “a Master now alive in a physical body upon the planet Venus” (King 1957:5). 22 In The Practices of Aetherius (1957), King’s doctorates are listed as DSc and ThD; several years later, according to Become a Builder of the New Age! (1983), he no longer has these qualifications, but rather PhD, DLitt and DD. 23 Similarly, Peter W. Leach-Lewis, founder and president of The Foundation for Higher Spiritual Learning and “the oracle for the Masters of Wisdom”, attacks a variety of New Age organisations and teachers (see Leach-Lewis 1997). 24 The term is Roy Wallis’s and is used by Heelas (1997:21). Heelas’s own term, “unmediated individualism” is also helpful.

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is severely eroded and a relationship of dependency develops.25 This is not postmodern spirituality. Although it a might be argued that these extremes are not typical of the New Age, it is susceptible to guruism; New Agers do tend to invest a great amount of epistemic trust in teachers, channels, and masters. That this is so, is evident from the fact that, in recent years, some eco-feminists, who since the 1970s have been associated with New Age thinking, have become increasingly uneasy about this association. For example, with concerns similar to Starhawk’s, Monica Sjöö, who works with a neo-Pagan Goddess spirituality, distances herself from the New Age, it being what she understands to be the latest expression of patriarchal consciousness: “[it] has a very reactionary, hierarchical, racist and misogynist agenda” (Sjöö 1994:22). This, of course, is a good example of the hostility between ecological and hierarchical theologies in the New Age as discussed by Greer (see Greer 1995). Bloom can happily declare that, “There are a thousand different ways of exploring inner reality. Go where your intelligence and intuition lead you. Trust yourself ” (Bloom 1991:xvi). However, it is clear that there are those in the New Age network who believe that the individual’s intelligence and intuition cannot be trusted. Indeed, when Bloom further insists that “New Age attitudes are the antithesis of fundamentalism” (ibid.), one has to question to what extent this is true. What some New Agers present us with is not so different from some forms of exclusivism, which insist that an understanding is false to the degree that it differs from one’s own understanding (which is often determined by an external authority). It would seem that the New Age self is not quite as free as it claims to be. Furthermore, closely linked to the above, there is the issue of truth and the diversity of religious truth claims. Although much time has been spent discussing this and related issues over many years, particularly within Christian theology, it is not an issue which has been adequately addressed in New Age circles. New Agers, generally speaking, seem to simply assume a naïve ‘pluralist’ hypothesis which seeks to affirm most, if not all spiritual experience.26 Again, this is often not

For a general discussion of these issues, see Barker (1992). This became evident when I recently, with great hopes, attended a conference concerning the New Age and interfaith dialogue. As the conference progressed, it became apparent that the issue was not going to be addressed and that, as far as I could tell, New Agers had not really thought about the issues in any depth. 25 26


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a postmodern or post-liberal pluralism, but rather something akin to the pluralist and essentialist theses of modernity. From an essentialist perspective, although conceived in various ways, there is usually some understanding of a transpersonal essence underlying all the particular historical manifestations of spirituality (an understanding which more often than not betrays an indebtedness to Carl Jung’s discussion of a common ground of religion). For example, concerning religion and mystical experience, Bloom makes the dubious claim that “people in all cultures at all times agree on its essence” (Bloom 1998:4). From the pluralist perspective, the history of religions is understood to be a history of equally authentic relationships with ‘the Absolute’. According to the far more developed pluralism of the Christian philosopher of religion, John Hick, not only do “the great world traditions constitute different conceptions and perceptions of, and responses to, the Real from within the different cultural ways of being human” (Hick 1989:376), but each of the divine personae are “authentic manifestations of the Real” (Hick 1989:242). The much debated problem with this thesis is that, when one considers the variety of understandings of ‘the Real’, from ethical theism to polytheism to atheism, it is hard to understand ‘the Real’ in terms which do not relegate some understandings to the status of inauthentic apprehension. Hick, however, like many New Agers, would deny that “our own form of religious experience . . . is veridical whilst others are not” (Hick 1989:235) and seek refuge in a doctrine of the ineffability of ‘the Real’. Unfortunately for pluralism, this does not remove the problem. For although it might be argued that the Absolute is, in the final analysis, ineffable, the problem is that, as Keith Ward has argued, “each tradition has its own ‘correct’ description of the Real, or of the nature of reality, to offer; and the thesis of ineffability serves not to undermine such descriptions, but to affirm that the Real is more than, but decidedly neither less nor wholly other than, what is describable by their conceptual frameworks” (Ward 1994:313). Without developing this line of thought further, the point is that many New Agers, not only uncritically accept a form of modernist pluralism, but fail to address the problems it presents. Because of this failure, there is often an evident tension in their writings. While adopting some version of pluralist essentialism, they often show a marked exclusivist tendency. On the one hand, they can speak of, for example, “the universal dynamics of self-organisation” (Capra 1983:332), or insist that there is “only one religion in the world, [and]

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that all faiths [are] only perversions of it”, or that, “the universal church is simply the universal self . . . We are really all one Person” (Beasant, quoted in Dale 1982:150). On the other hand, those who disagree are generally understood to be in need of greater enlightenment. After the ‘chosen oracle’ for The Great White Brotherhood made the pluralist statement that “No one particular route can be given as being the ‘Way’ or a so-called infallible ‘System’ . . . ”, he proceeds, in a more exclusivist vein, to expose some “false ‘Prophets” (e.g. J.Z. Knight and Elizabeth Prophet), before revealing that there is, in fact, “only one” path and that “If you are not a member of The Foundation for Higher Learning you have yet to set your feet upon [it]” (Leach-Lewis 1997:1, 2, 4).27 This is the truth, he is the authority, and the world would be the better for recognising it. Although other questions might be raised regarding truth and authority in the New Age network, such as how far New Agers have understood their primal and premodern sources28 or the question of scientific truth and the New Age interpretation of quantum logic,29 enough has been said to indicate that, due to several factors, there are some fundamental areas of epistemic confusion in New Age thought. Moreover, as indicated above, this confusion (no doubt, along with some animosity) is likely to increase, as postmodern theory is embraced by those within this essentially modern network. References Assagioli, K., 1991. “Psychosynthesis.” In Bloom, W., ed. The New Age: An Anthology of Essential Writings. London: Rider, 124–30. Bailey, A., 1991. “The Way of the Disciple.” In Bloom, W., ed. The New Age: An Anthology of Essential Writings. London: Rider, 20–7.

27 Later in the booklet, “a cosmic announcement by the Ascended Master El Morya” confirms that there is only “ONE recognised Oracle at this present time” (Leach-Lewis 1997:9). Likewise, after criticising several erroneous teachings, George King urges people to get on “the right track by joining the Aetherius Society” (King 1983:1). 28 Marion Bowman, for example, notes that, during the 1993 Parliament of World religions, Native American participants drafted a ‘Declaration of War’ “which specifically targeted New Age and Neo-Paganist [sic] profiteers”. In the words of Andy Smith (quoted by Bowman), “New Agers see Indians as romanticised gurus . . . [They] do not understand Indian people . . . [and] have no genuine understanding of Indian spiritual practices” (Bowman 1995:147). 29 There have been several cogent critiques of the New Age interpretation of the new physics, e.g. Clifton (1989); Ebenshade (1982); Lucas (1991); Lucas (1992); Osborn (1992:ch. 5).


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Barker, E., 1992. “Authority and Dependence in New Religious Movements.” In Wilson, B.R., ed. Religion: Contemporary Issues. London: Bellew, 237–55. Beckford, J., 1992. “Religion, Modernity and Post-modernity.” In Wilson, B.R., ed. Religion: Contemporary Issues. London: Bellew, 11–23. Besant, A., 1907. H.P. Blavatsky and the Masters of Wisdom. London: Theosophical Publishing House. ——, 1909. Revelation, Inspiration, Observation: An Approach to Them for Theosophical Students. Madras: Theosophical Publishing House. Bloom, W., ed., 1991. The New Age: An Anthology of Essential Writings. London: Rider. ——, 1998. “We Are All Saints Now.” Alternatives, Winter & Spring. London: St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, 4. Boltwood, G., 1997. “Channelling.” In Deckker, C., ed. Sacred Sites. London: Return to the Source, 40–3. Bowman, M., 1995. “The Noble Savage and the Global Village: Cultural Evolution in New Age and Neo-Pagan Thought.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 10.2 139–49. Bruce, S., 1996. Religion in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Capra, F., 1983. The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture. London: Flamingo. Chandler, R., 1988. Understanding the New Age. Dallas: Word. Clifton, K.K. & R.G. Regehr, 1989. “Capra on Eastern Mysticism and Modern Physics: A Critique.” Science and Christian Belief 4 53–74. Dale, A.S., 1982. The Outline of Sanity: A Life of G.K. Chesterton. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Docherty, T., ed., 1993. Postmodernism: A Reader. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ebenshade, D.H., 1982. “Relating Mystical Concepts to Those of Physics: Some Concerns.” American Journal of Physics 50 224–28. Ferguson, M., 1982. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Times. London: Paladin. Fox, M., 1983. Original Blessing. Santa Fe: Bear & Co. Greer, P., 1995. “The Aquarian Confusion: Conflicting Theologies of the New Age.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 10.2 151–66. Groothuis, D., 1990. Revealing the New Age Jesus. Downers Grove: IVP. Harvey, G., 1997. Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism. London: Hurst. Heelas, P., 1992. “The Sacralization of the Self and New Age Capitalism.” In Abercrombie, N. & A. Warde, eds. Social Change in Contemporary Britain. London: Polity, 139–66. ——, “The New Age in Cultural Context: The Premodern, the Modern and the Postmodern.” Religion 23 103–16. ——, 1997. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. Hick, J., 1989. An Interpretation of Religion. London: Macmillan. Insectoid, 1997. “Aboriginal Sites, Australia.” In Deckker, C., ed. Sacred Sites. London: Return to the Source, 50. Johansson, L., 1994. “New Age: A Synthesis of the Premodern, the Modern and the Postmodern.” In Sampson, P., V. Samuel & C. Sugden, eds. Faith and Modernity. Oxford: Regnum, 208–51. Keel, J., 1978. The Cosmic Question. Frogmore: Granada. Kelsey, M., 1993. “The Former Age and the New Age: The Perennial Quest for the Spiritual Life.” In Ferguson, D.S., ed. New Age Spirituality: An Assessment. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 35–58. King, G., 1957. The Practices of Aetherius. London: The Aetherius Society. ——, 1983. Become a Builder of the New Age! London: The Aetherius Society. Leach-Lewis, P.W., 1997. A Brief Introduction to the Foundation for Higher Spiritual Learning and the Legitimate Emissary and Oracle for the Great White Brotherhood. Washington: The Foundation for Higher Spiritual Learning.

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Lucas, E.C., 1991. “God, GUTS and Gurus: The New Physics and New Age Ideology.” Themelios 16 4–7. ——, 1992. “Scientific Truth and New Age Thinking.” Science and Christian Belief 4, 13–25. Lyon, D., 1993. “A Bit of a Circus: Notes on Postmodernity and New Age.” Religion 23 117–26. ——, 1994. Postmodernity. Buckingham: Open University Press. MacLaine, S., 1990. Going Within. London: Bantam Books. McLaughlin, C., 1991. “How to Evaluate Channelling.” In Bloom, W., ed. The New Age: An Anthology of Essential Writings. London: Rider, 51–5. Middleton, J.R. & B.J. Walsh, 1995. Truth is Stranger Than it Used to Be. London: SPCK. Netland, H., 1994. “Truth, Authority and Modernity: Shopping for Truth in a Supermarket of Worldviews.” In Sampson, P., V. Samuel & C. Sugden, eds. Faith and Modernity. Oxford: Regnum, 89–105. Osborn, I., 1992. Angels of Light? The Challenge of the New Age. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Palmer, M., 1993. Coming of Age: An Exploration of Christianity and the New Age. London: Aquarian Press. Perry, M., 1992. Gods Within. London: SPCK. Puttick, E., 1995. “Sexuality, Gender and the Abuse of Power in the Master-Disciple Relationship: The Case of the Rajneesh Movement.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 10.1 29–40. Reardon, B.M.G., 1985. Religion in the Age of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seddon, P., 1992. The New Age: An Assessment. Bramcote: Grove Books. Sjöö, M., 1992. New Age and Armageddon: The Goddess or the Gurus. London: The Women’s Press. ——, 1994. “The New Age and Patriarchy.” Religion Today 9.3 22–8. Spangler, D., 1993. “The New Age: The Movement Toward the Divine.” In Ferguson, D.S., ed. New Age Spirituality: An Assessment. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 79–105. Spink, P., 1991. A Christian in the New Age. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Starhawk, 1997. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press. Thompson, J. & P. Heelas, 1986. The Way of the Heart: The Rajneesh Movement. Wellingborough: Aquarian. Trevelyan, G., 1991. Exploration Into God: A Personal Quest for Spiritual Unity. Bath: Gateway. Veith, G.E., 1994. Guide to Contemporary Culture. Leicester: Crossway. Walker, A., 1995. The Stone of the Plough: The Search for the Secret of Giza. Shaftesbury: Element. Ward, K., 1994. Religion and Revelation: A Theology of Revelation in the World’s Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. York, M., 1994. “New Age in Britain: An Overview.” Religion Today 9.3 14–21. ——, 1995. “The Church Universal and Triumphant.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 10.1 71–82.

OLD MYTHS, NEW MYTHICISING Anna E. Kubiak Joseph Campbell begins The Power of Myth (1994) by recounting that, “When our youngest son saw the movie Star Wars for the twelfth time, I asked him: ‘Why do you see it so often?’ He answered: “For the same reason you read the Old Testament again and again” (Campbell 1994:43). I would like to propose that the problems of defining the New Age reflect a more general predicament of late modern culture. One can assert that there is nothing which can be designated New Age because it is not possible to delineate its borders or to clearly characterise participants in Aquarian spirituality. The very symbol of the New Age, namely a new era of history, is vague: some participants do not believe or do not care about the coming of a New Age. New Age is not however, a subculture nor an alternative culture. It is, rather, a complementary culture that is always generating hybrids. The collapse of distinctions is well expressed by Christoph Bochinger: “New Age as currently used is a phantom—but the phantom has left traces in reality!” (Bochinger 1994:35). So, the identity of the subject is not the essence. There is no structure or border which can be drawn between New Age and such phenomena as the ecological movement, feminism, fantasy and science fiction. It is in constant transgression—a diffused religion similar to that which Catholicism is becoming. The dissolution of divisions is visible even in New Religious Movements. For instance, after I finished a book on the Hare Krishna movement in which I analysed the model of closed religiosity (Kubiak 1997), I learned that many Hare Krishna participants had started to become involved in Reiki, bioenergy therapy or Feng Shui. The main priest in the Hare Krishna temple near Warsaw told me to give him a call so he could send me Reiki energy for my broken leg. The first Hare Krishna bar in Poland, Vega, is a place where one encounters New Age courses and advertisements. James Clifford’s discussion of identity seems particularly appropriate to the New Age when he asks, “Yet what if identity is conceived not as

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a boundary to be maintained but as a nexus of relations and transactions actively engaging a subject?” (Clifford 1988:344). If we focus on participants instead of trying to describe the identity of the New Age phenomenon in any kind of a traditional sense, I would rather talk in terms of probability: a New Ager probably has some New Age artefacts at home (e.g. crystals, stained-glass windows, wind chimes), probably listens to meditative or other relaxing music, probably attends courses in Reiki or some other therapy, probably talks in terms of working on themselves and probably has the smell of incense or essential oils around the house. One can make a distinction between New Age in a broad and New Age in a narrow sense. In the broader sense, one encounters a constant flux of New Age-y fragments: symbols, sentences, images and tunes. Some of them are only allusions. For example, in a Polish television commercial for the Millennium Bank, there are children and dolphins, and the image of a pendulum made of a hand holding a string at the end of which is a small coin. Not everyone appreciates the origin of the allusions and very few will think, for instance, about children as the symbol of a special condition of a human being or about the wisdom and mystery of dolphins. In the narrow sense, one can talk about New Age ‘climates’—to borrow a term from Polish youth culture jargon—meaning places where there is a density of elements which are New Age cultural artefacts. Young people in Poland talk about climates or feelings when they try to describe where they have been, what they experienced. The notion expresses the lack of borders, the fuzziness of it; the plural indicates the many facets of the phenomena. So, on the one hand, there are ‘mainstream’ centres like the Institute of Professional Improvement in Warsaw, where besides ‘conventional’ courses like accounting, administration, computer skills, there are also courses in Chinese massage and divination. On the other hand, there are centres giving courses only in New Age topics. The shops containing souvenirs and rehabilitation equipment have Feng Shui or acupressure instruments, but there are also shops known in Warsaw as ‘witches’ shops’ (sklepy czarownic) which specialise in New Age literature and gadgets. To provide one detailed example from my fieldwork, at one point I began visiting places for massage. A New Age friend recommended a holistic massage, so I made an appointment. At first sight, it was a regular establishment for the medical treatment for the rehabilitation

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of children with brain paralysis. But the particular room where I went had a special atmosphere. I noticed a pleasant smell (aromatherapy), wicker furniture, meditative music, esoteric paintings and one humorous painting showing a masseur tearing apart a patient’s body (which I saw when I was leaving the room). Initially we talked for 15 minutes. I was asked what my problem was. Then the practitioner explained that my broken leg as well as the state of my feelings indicated that I was on the threshold of a big change and that I should work on myself carefully, watch my feelings and not identify with them. I recognised a sort of Buddhist attitude or Buddhist awareness in this advice. I was also asked about my astrological sign. Then I undressed, the main light was turned off and I had a massage, which was called a holistic massage. It was a combination of classic massage (oils were used) and bioenergy therapy and working with the energy of the chakras (the body’s energy centres described in traditional Indian yoga). I was informed which chakras were blocked and which open. At the end of the session, I was told that I should work toward change and come back for a deeper massage, which would correct my backbone. Soon after this, I went for a different kind of massage—a classic massage, such as one might have in medical institutions or beauty saloons. It was a massage without music or aromatherapy, with only a common massage lotion, and without work on the chakras. Only one thing was borrowed from New Age massage, which was that, as at the beginning of the massage, the masseur put his hands on my back to give me energy, making me more relaxed and ready for massage. I must say—despite my sympathy for New Age climates—that my muscles were better massaged and I paid less then half as much as for the holistic massage. The centre where I received my New Age massage is but one example of an expanding phenomenon in Poland. Since the end of the 1980s, there have been a growing number of centres, non-conventional medical consulting rooms, shops and flats where one can easily recognise New Age climates. The difficulty of grasping the New Age phenomenon is rooted in the predicament of late modern culture. Instead of isolated units, we have networks. As researchers, we have to participate in the networks in order to trace network links. The principle of network and probability is the rule. It means that two New Age people may have nothing in common (one is practising Reiki and the other bioenergy therapy), but

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they know a third person, with whom they attend macrobiotics cooking courses. Eileen Barker writes about Wittgenstein’s family resemblance principle: “. . . two members of the family (of New Age) may bear almost no resemblance to each other, although they both resemble a third member” (Barker 1992:189). Now I would like to shift the focus of my discussion to New Age myths and mythicising. I will refer to Paul Heelas, whose cultural theory of New Age (Heelas 1996) is the best analysis of the phenomenon. In his book and articles he describes the continuity of culture. I am more interested in discontinuities. There is, of course, a continuity in contents, in traditions, in ideas like the idea of New Age which, as Marion Bowman notes (Bowman 1995), is the very old idea of a Golden Age. And there is a continuity in myths which are the menu of the New Age table. But there is a discontinuity in mythicising, in the way we consume myths. This is where we find the discontinuity in the status of myths and symbols (the relation between myth and symbol I understand after Paul Ricouer). I will first describe theoretically the discontinuities theoretically and then provide some examples. The Status of Symbols and Myths Symbols become stereotypes—they seem not to have the density of the tradition which was forgotten, or which was not studied very deeply. By the notion of stereotype, I mean an anthropological understanding of a stereotype as a simplification of a symbol, but still in touch with the original symbol and myth. Even in the ‘gaze’ of a tourist or a consumer, there is a moment of seduction, of the loss of self-control. And, I have to add, in cases of trauma, when one is desperately looking for help, simplification can even help, simplification can be helpful for familiarising one with a new notion or belief. There is a constant and global flux of signs—so they are important only for a moment—and a competition between signs. What is more, the relation between the signifier and signified is looser and detached. Very often the representations find new things (die Sachen) to represent. There is also another tendency, which seems to pull in the opposite direction. Symbols are very empirical and can be treated as fetishes. We may speak of the naturalisation of significance. So in this sense, religion becomes very visible, in some cases fetishist. To take the example of folk religion, the use of the senses in spiritual practices may be seen as reifying spiritual experience.


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Myths are distributive (not collective), which means that they do not belong to any special group, but they are in flux. Symbols and myths are generic rather than genetic—although they are connected with different traditions, traditional roots are forgotten. Myths only allude to tradition. The intricate net in which traditional symbols were embedded is lost. Meanings become more general. They are sort of Buddhist, sort of Christian, sort of Sufi and so on. Myths and symbols are individual and contextual; their meaning is referred to the individual experience and the context of her/his life. Myths and symbols are confluent. Their fragments from different traditions compose new units. Just as coherent narration was the essence of traditional myths, the opposite characterises temporary mythicising, which consists of mixing different languages and putting together fragments of different myths (religious, scientific, magic, from popular culture). No story can be “captured or encapsulated. A miniseries, even a good one, can’t sum it up or confine it. Attempts to define or set the narrative are a reduction of an ever changing variety of voices in conversation at the end Millennium” (Dean 1998:134). One can call it the poetisation of culture: to employ a semiotic parallel, instead of syntax there are paradigmatic structures. The new spirituality is in some ways the outcome of common sense thinking. In this regard I refer to Tanya Luhrmann’s (1989) analysis of the magic milieu and the theoretical work of Teresa Hołówka (Hołówka 1986). Briefly, in common sense thinking there is an eclecticism of different plots and sources, and a realistic relation between the word and thing. At the same time, common sense is ambiguous, occasional, impossible to codify a body of knowledge, non-discursive, grasps the unknown sphere of reality with unverified idioms, and stresses the importance of personal experience. Like everything else, the new spirituality is also saturated with popular culture. Here Featherstone’s analysis (Featherstone 1991) of the flux of signs and images is useful, as is Barthes’ (Barthes 1992) observation of the constant transformation of significance and Scott Lash’s analysis (Lash 1988) of the domination of figure to discourse—which, as a consequence, destroys chronological, logical and narrative order. To better grasp this phenomenon, I would like to propose the concept of enfolded myths, which one might understand as akin to David Bohm’s conception of a hidden dimension (Bohm 1988). Bohm refers to a hologram, which enfolds the whole picture of an object into each

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photographic element that makes it up. This corresponds roughly with my idea of an implicit, latent religion. Myths are enfolded into simple symbols. Symbols are the tips of the iceberg, which is our global cultural resources, or, to use Polanyi’s expression, tacit knowledge. Roland Barthes writes about the fragmentisation of narrations (1992). He argues that myth has disappeared and mythicality is left. He proposes the notion of écriture (writing): there are key words; stereotypes instead of narrative structures. I think that the researcher can not conclude that there is no transcendence in the New Age simply because New Age symbols appear to be little more than stereotypes; because no sign seems stable; because seemingly incompatible myths and traditions are juxtaposed; because there is no coherent narration; because there is too much play and a consumer/tourist attitude towards religious things; because participants do not kneel down but only sit in zazen, although afterwards they joke about sitting; and so forth. But the idea of enfolded myths is not simply born of a sympathy with new spirituality. Rather, I think it captures an essential aspect of the changing face of religion. Tradition and Memory There is a different conception of tradition and memory as something, which also grasps not-remembering. Gadamer puts it in this way: “Even where life changes violently, as in ages of revolution, far more of the old is preserved in the supposed transformation of everything than anyone knows, and it combines with the new to create a new value” (Gadamer 1992:281). It is, rather, a process, which is in flux, unpredictable. It also takes into account a different condition (however we label it) where there are no authorities, where everyone has to work with their own doubts and questions and helps themselves along with a sense of humour. So, also, religiosity is adapted to this ambivalent, unstable and processual condition. Lisbeth Mikaelsson states this quite strikingly: “[R]eligion may also be something that is ‘laid on thin’, something that can be easily changed, that can be amusing and entertaining . . . We should systematically look for religion in unusual places: shops and restaurants, the pop industry and popular fiction, in order to find out more about the entertainment side of religious topics and paraphernalia” (Mikaelsson 1995:28). Late modern myths are more often to be found in movies,


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in fiction, in fantasy and science fiction, on the Internet, in popular journals, and so on. A good example of the kind of mythicising I am discussing can be found in the television programme, popular in the 1990s, The X-Files, which “capitalizes on and contributes to pop-cultural preoccupation with aliens” (Dean 1998:25). It gives way to late modern reversions and “plays” with expectations. Or, to take another interpretative tack, it shows the emancipation of gender roles as the two principal characters represent reverse cultural qualities. Special FBI Agent Fox Mulder represents subjectivity, emotions, beliefs, and naivety toward popular myths. He is the soft part of culture, looking for the answer in stories of alien abductions, vampires, demons, angels, psychotronic activity, paranormal phenomena, legends of monsters and whatever remains unexplained. This becomes the stuff for mythicising. His partner, FBI Agent Dana Scully, represents objectivity—personally and metaphorically she has a laboratory scalpel. We see her very often performing autopsies, taking intestines out and weighing them. She believes only in science, in empirical proof until she herself experiences alien abduction. The programme “exhibits the ‘kaleidoscopic jumbling together of partial and fragmented visions of reality’ that is characteristic of cyberspace” (Dean 1998:135). It is also surrealistic in its plot construction. Every investigation begins with fragments and presumptions. But agents Mulder and Scully are charged with accomplishing tasks, which are very much about complicity, mystery and disinformation. Moreover, every intrigue ends with no hard evidence, confirming the message of the catchphrase at the beginning of each episode: “The truth is out there.” As Jodie Dean writes, “Truth is now a problem for all of us, not just for those trying to find evidence that flying sources are real. The confusion and hesitations of the UFO discourse are thus a concentrated version of the facts and pseudofacts of life at the millennium. The alien icon marks the disequilibrium we face at the dissipation of distinctions between fantasy and reality, original and copy” (Dean 1998:22). The poster in Fox Mulder’s office saying, ‘I want to believe,’ is a handy catchphrase, which reflects the ambivalence of our condition. We enjoy the seduction. We desperately need a myth. But we cannot tell the story without winking.

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Barker, E., 1992. New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction. London: HMSO. Barthes, R., 1992. “O Zmianie Przedmiotu Badań.” [“The Changing Subject of Research.”] Konteksty 3–4 5–6. Bochinger, C., 1994. “New Age” und Moderne Religion: Religionwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen. Gutersloh: Chr. Kaiser. Bohm, D., 1988. Ukryty Porządek. [Hidden Dimension.] Pusty Obłok: Warszawa. Bowman, M., 1995. “The Noble Savage and the Global Village: Cultural Evolution in New Age and Neo-Pagan Thought”. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 10.2 139–49. Campbell, J., 1994. Potęga Mitu. [The Power of Myth.] Kraków: Signum. Clifford, J., 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Dean, J., 1998. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Featherstone, M., 1991. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage. Gadamer, H.-G., 1992. Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hołówka, T., 1986. Myślenie Potoczne. [Common Sense Thinking.] Warszawa: PIW. Kubiak, A.E., 1997. Delicje i Lewa Ręka Kryszny. [Delicasy and Krishna’s Left Hand.] Warsaw: IFiS PAN. Lash, S., 1988. “Discourse or Figure? Postmodernism as a Regime of Signification.” Theory, Culture & Society 5.1. Luhrmann, T., 1989. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft. London: Picador. Mikaelsson, L., 1995. “Exploring Contemporary Religion: Aims and Methods.” In Warburg M., ed. Studying New Religions. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 23–30.

POWER TRIPS: MAKING SACRED SPACE THROUGH NEW AGE PILGRIMAGE Adrian Ivakhiv Travel to sacred sites constitutes an integral part of New Age spiritual culture. As a largely middle-class phenomenon, New Age travel shares much with the culture of twenty-first century tourism, but it differs in key respects. Some scholars have argued that New Age spirituality is a form of ‘self-spirituality’, an expression of the trend within advanced capitalism to commodify everything and convert it into a marketplace of choices for individual consumers (e.g. Bruce 1996; Heelas 1992, 1996; Johnson 1995; Lasch 1980; Urban 2000; and van Hove 1999). This chapter will examine the phenomenon of New Age pilgrimage at a prominent centre of New Age activities, the town of Sedona in north-central Arizona. By comparing it with tourist activities more generally in the Sedona area, however, we will see that despite some overlap, New Age approaches to space, place, landscape and nature depart markedly from the tourist commodification of landscape that analysts have identified as part and parcel of consumer capitalism. Such a comparison sheds helpful light on the ways in which New Age spirituality both reflects and contests popular understandings of the relationship between self and the natural world. It should be mentioned that not all spiritual travellers to Sedona and other New Age sites identify themselves as New Age. Such recognised New Age hubs as Sedona, Glastonbury in southwest England, and others, are notable by the overlapping and mutable nature of religious and spiritual categories (see Bowman 2000; Ivakhiv 2001, 2003; and Riches & Prince 2001). They have become hubs of spiritual creativity, where New Age adherents mix and mingle with Neo-Pagans, extraterrestrial ‘contactees’, Theosophists, occultists, liberal Christians, and others, resulting in a hybridisation and cross-breeding of alternative spiritualities. Due to the prominent role of New Age discourse in the pilgrimage activities at these places, however, what emerges from this mix could justifiably be considered a form of ‘New Age culture.’ Let us begin by examining the geographical contours of New Age culture.

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As a phenomenon that began within western metropolitan centres, the 1960s counterculture was conspicuous in its tendency to move away from those centres, whether in a relocation ‘back to the land’ or as a more ephemeral drift to places of exotic allure or vague spiritual import. Of the first group, many rural communards eventually returned to the cities, but a significant minority stayed on and dug their heels into the land. For some, the rural communes and intentional communities which emerged and grew in the 1970s were seen as places in which the practical implications of the ‘new consciousness’ could be worked out; and over the years surviving communities organised themselves into networks, such as the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, the Fellowship of Intentional Communities, the Alternative Communities Network in Britain, and the International Communes Network. By the mid-1970s, the more explicitly spiritual or New Age communities, such as Scotland’s Findhorn Community and India’s Auroville, had begun expressing the vision of a neo-monastic communitarianism, consisting of ‘centres of light’ linked in a network that would provide the infrastructure for a ‘new planetary culture’ (Spangler 1977; Thompson 1974). Countercultural historian Theodore Roszak (1978) compared the present period with the waning decades of the Roman Empire, and saw this new communitarian “monasticism” as a tested historical model for the “creative disintegration of industrial society”, a model which “illuminates the way in which the top-heavy and toxic institutions of an exhausted empire were sifted down into civilised, durable communities where a vital, new sense of human identity and destiny could take root” (1978:289). To this day, Findhorn, Auroville, Tennessee’s The Farm, and numerous other intentional communities interact with the broader culture in a dialectic which helps to sustain New Age and alternative spirituality (e.g. Popenoe & Popenoe 1984; McLaughlin & Davidson 1986; and Fellowship for Intentional Community 1995). At the same time, the countercultural movement to rural and nonmetropolitan areas closer to home (for instance, to places in the US southwest, northern California and the Pacific northwest states or, in Britain, to southwest England and Wales) began turning into a broader pattern of ‘counter stream migration’ consisting mainly of middle-class urban expatriates looking for quieter, safer, and more ‘natural’ havens for relocation. Fuelled by environmentalist discourse and imagery, effective real estate marketing strategies, and the geographic imperatives of

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the global tourist economy, the culturally produced nostalgia for rural or natural places has dovetailed with the New Age search for natural ‘power,’ resulting in the growth of such New Age hubs as Santa Fe and Taos in New Mexico, Sedona in Arizona, Asheville in North Carolina and Glastonbury in England. Among its results are the environmental and social stresses accompanying such growth. The second line of geographic mobility within the New Age and countercultural milieu, since the late 1960s, has been that cantered around places identified as generically more spiritual or sacred than the urban industrial West. Romanticisation of the non-West, particularly India, Bali, and central and South America, grew with the rising popularity in the 1960s of books by such authors as Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts and Carlos Castaneda. Travel to sacred places around the world became a staple of the western hippie seeker’s itinerary in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Already in the late 1960s one can find the idea that a network of ‘power places’ is spread out across the planet. British mystic John Michell’s book The View Over Atlantis (1969) served as an influential clarion call expounding such a vision and eliciting a movement of ‘Earth mysteries’ research and travel (Ivakhiv 2005). By the mid-1970s, a variety of guidebooks had appeared for the growing number of New Age pilgrims and travellers (e.g. Spiritual Community Guides 1972–1979; Pilgrim’s Guide to Planet Earth: Power Places 1974). The power place idea fermented for two decades within the hippie and New Age counterculture, but it was finally launched into popular consciousness with the Harmonic Convergence of August 1987. Projected to be the largest simultaneously coordinated act of prayer, meditation and ceremony ever to take place at sacred sites throughout the world, the Harmonic Convergence was an overt manifestation of the New Age movement’s incipient millenarianism. According to its primary instigator, art historian José Argüelles, the dates 16–17 August 1987 were supposed to mark the synchronous occurrence of several significant events, including the beginning of the final 26-year period of the Mayan calendar’s 5200-year “Great Cycle”, the “dancing awake” of 144,000 Sun Dance enlightened teachers, a “grand trine” in the astrological fire signs and the first time since the early 1940s that the seven planets have been so closely aligned, and a galactic “calibration point” allowing for the anchoring of divine energy into the power points of the planet for their subsequent transmission through the “planetary grid system” (cited in Buenfil 1991:177–8; Dame-Glerum 1987a:A3). Argüelles called for 144,000 people to meditate, pray, chant

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and visualise at sacred sites and power spots throughout the world in order to launch the 25-year transition into a New Age of peace and harmony. Convergers, including celebrities like Shirley MacLaine, John Denver and Timothy Leary, gathered at places as varied as Sedona, California’s Mount Shasta, Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, the Black Hills of South Dakota, New York’s Central Park, Glastonbury and Stonehenge, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and Mount Olympus in Greece, to celebrate the event and to “create a complete field of trust by surrendering themselves to the planet and to the higher galactic intelligences which guide and monitor the planet” (cited in Buenfil 1991:177–8). As the list of Convergence sites suggests, New Age spirituality envisions what could be considered an ‘Eliadian’ geography of nonhomogeneous space, marked by special places (hierophanies, kratophanies; see Eliade 1959:20ff.) which stand out as especially important, meaningful or powerful. These places can be distinguished between natural and cultural sites, and I will examine each of these categories in turn. The first category includes mountains, unusual rock formations, spectacular lakes and canyons, falls and hot springs, and other natural landscapes which are characterised by some outstanding quality, as seen, for instance, in the examples of mounts Shasta, Fuji and Kailash, the Sedona area of Arizona, the Haleakala Crater in Hawaii and Lake Titicaca in Peru. These are places where the power, vitality, or sheer otherness of nonhuman nature seems obviously present, places where the Earth seems to speak, relatively unobscured by the din of modern civilisation. Such places are believed by many to harbour ‘Earth energies’ of some sort—energies which are thought to be beneficial and health-promoting in their effects and catalytic to spiritual growth. If such places are obviously valued for their natural features, others, such as Stonehenge, Machu Picchu and the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, are clearly valued for their cultural monuments, built structures and age-old human uses. The connection between the two kinds of sacred sites, for many New Age devotees, is that the latter are believed to have been constructed in coordination with the natural energies represented by the former. In other words, ancient cultures, such as the megalithic monument builders of the British Isles, the temple builders of Mesoamerica and the Near East, prehistoric ‘Goddess cultures,’ or the legendary civilisations of Atlantis and Lemuria, are thought to have constructed their own monuments on powerful ‘energy points.’ According to different accounts, ancient peoples either intuitively per-

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ceived these Earth energies or they practised a proto- or quasi-scientific geomancy based on Earth energy alignments which follow geometrical patterns or form planetary ‘energy grids.’ In the growing body of popular literature on such power spots, these landscapes are seen as places of personal transformation, and pilgrimages to them are considered a tool of such transformation. The majority of such ‘power places’ are located away from major urban centres. The cultural sites are generally associated with cultural traditions that are thought to be sufficiently older than and different from western modernity such that they come to represent an alternative to the disenchanted West. As such, cultural power places fall readily into the tradition of what Donald Lopez (1995:261) has called romantic orientalism, by which places like India, Bali and parts of South America are imagined to be more authentic, representative of timeless tradition, sacredness and spiritual wisdom. Such places are seen to offer restoration and salvation to the progressive, rational, but despirited West and their cultural representatives are generally expected to conform to the images we westerners have created for them, whether that be as noble savages, bearers of traditional wisdom, or mysterious sensualists (see Mehta 1991; Bartholomeusz 1998; and King 1999). Photography and the New Age Gaze There is a fine line between pilgrimage and tourism, and as this line is a mutable and socially constructed one, it may be preferable to write the two together, that is, to speak of pilgrim-tourists. After all, the same people can at times, even by their own criteria, be tourists travelling to see and experience something that they can take back with them, in the form of photographs, stories, or experiences, to their home place; and at other times be pilgrims, genuine seekers open to spiritual encounters which may transform them in the process. The movement of pilgrimtourists over time, however, has given rise to an international New Age infrastructure, a network of healing and retreat centres, retreats, spiritual communities, and places of New Age commerce. Just as travel books and tours produce what John Urry (1990) has called a tourist gaze, so New Age pilgrimage guidebooks and sacred site tours have produced a certain New Age encounter with the landscape, which includes a New Age gaze, but, as will be shown below, which is always more than a mere gaze.

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But let us examine what a New Age visuality might be. Photographer Courtney Milne’s lavishly produced and beautifully photographed book The Sacred Earth (1991a), with a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, exemplifies what could be called the Earth cathedrals genre of visual representation. Milne’s five-year odyssey to sacred sites on seven continents was instigated, according to the author, by a “mysterious-looking document” called Revelations from the Melchisadek Priesthood. This book by New Age author Robert Coon describes “The Twelve Sacred Places of the Earth”: Glastonbury, Ayers Rock (Uluru) in central Australia, Haleakala Crater in Hawaii, Bolivia’s Islands of the Sun and Moon, Palenque in Mexico, the Great Pyramid of Gizeh and Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, and the mountains Tongariro (New Zealand), Shasta (California), Kailas (Tibet), Fuji ( Japan), Table Mountain (South Africa) and the Four Sacred Mountains of Bali. This list echoes and overlaps with others which are readily available in numerous books and on countless web sites devoted to sacred places, power spots, Goddess sites, and the like.1 For New Age Earth pilgrims, who consider the Earth itself a potent and divine being, such places are Gaia’s theophanies and pilgrimage offers access to the power and spiritual secrets they hold. Milne describes his thinking during his odyssey: “Was I at this sacred spot as a pilgrim to meditate or as a photographer to get the job done? As the project progressed, however, I realised that I had been training myself for years to meditate, not by sitting in the lotus position with my legs crossed but by looking through the viewfinder at the exquisite shapes and forms and letting the 20th century evaporate from my consciousness” (1991b:42). Curiously, this passage suggests that his dependence on twentieth century photographic equipment has also evaporated from his consciousness, allowing him access to an authentic nature undefiled by modernity, a timeless nature that exists outside of history and safely beyond the reach of the social world with its industrial as well as its touristic encompassment of ecosystems and natural places. And it allows him to equate the twentieth-century technological activity of picture-taking with the ‘timeless’ activity (or non-activity) of meditation.

1 E.g. Rufus & Lawson (1991); Bryant (1991); Devereux (1992); Joseph (1992); Swan (1990, 1992); McLuhan (1996); Leviton (2002); and http://www.sacredsites. com/manu/Intro.html.

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Yet, photography has been one of the primary ways in which such places of power have become established as magnets for the very modern activity of tourism—a complex of activities that some claim have now become the world’s largest single industry. In a rapidly expanding global economy, tourism constitutes one of the main engines of economic growth for numerous countries, regions, and cities, and it is becoming more so for the kinds of non-urban centres that dominate Milne’s and others’ lists of sacred landscapes. Within the amorphous networks of New Age spirituality, power places become known in part through word of mouth, with seekers and travellers exchanging travel tales among themselves, but in part also through tourist marketing and the reproduction of images. The role of photography and visual imagery in the development of a New Age sacred geography can hardly be denied; in fact, it is doubtful whether ‘New Age nature religion’, with its emphasis on Gaia and her power places, could have emerged were it not for the by-now ubiquitous image of the whole Earth as seen from space. To the extent that New Age sacrality both relies on and contributes to the commodification of a landscape, it would seem to be complicit with the economic processes of consumer capitalism. To gauge the extent of this complicity, let us first examine the role of visual representation, and specifically the representation of natural landscapes, in the commodification and appropriation of the natural world for the projects of capitalist enterprise. Several cultural historians and philosophers have argued that visual perception has been hegemonic among the senses in western modernity. As Martin Heidegger (1977) argued, our ocular-centric age had turned the world into a ‘picture’ and thereby made possible the conquest and transformation of nature into a ‘standing reserve’ to be surveyed, unlocked and transformed into usable energy and profit. The dominant modes of western modernist visuality, according to cultural historians, have been rooted in Cartesian perspectivalism, the tradition according to which a coherent, distinct subject gazes out at an empirical, discrete object, with no inherent connection between the two and neither changing in the process of seeing or being seen (e.g. Rorty 1979; Bordo 1987; and Jay 1994). In the Cartesian relation, the seeing subject is active, viewing the objects of the world on his or her own mental representational screen, whilst the object seen is passive, simply there to be viewed. In the words of historian Martin Jay, the ascendancy of classical linear perspective in the Renaissance meant that the “participatory involvement of more absorptive visual modes

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was diminished, if not entirely suppressed,” and the gaze fell on objects of desire “largely in the service of a reifying male look that turned its targets into stone” ( Jay 1992:181). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European and EuroAmerican artists and critics elaborated several distinct visual modalities atop this generally Cartesian substrate of perspectival landscape art. In representing the landscapes of the American West, in particular, American artists made extensive use of the magisterial gaze, a mastering and panoramic view from on high, which constructs nature as scenic vista and spectacle, to be gazed at and admired for its sweeping visual beauty and to thereby be possessed by its viewer (Boime 1991). The late nineteenth century opening up of the West by the railroad companies was facilitated by the landscape art, photography, and literature that served to romanticise the western landscape: while, on the one hand, the photography of Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson and others, served to sanctify the landscape, on the other, it was both a necessary prelude and a strategy by which the railroad companies and real estate and mining entrepreneurs colonised the land and opened it up for the extraction of its resources (e.g. Dorst 1999; Rothman 1998; and Snyder 1994). In today’s global economy, non-urban areas have frequently already been divested of their resources, or, alternatively (as in the western United States and Britain), resource values have plummeted as new resource frontiers have been opened up in parts of the world where labour is cheaper and laws more flexible. Tourism has consequently become a popular solution for such places as Sedona, Santa Fe, Aspen and other hubs of the American ‘New West’ (Riebsame & Robb 1997; Rothman 1998; and Campbell 2000), while an analogous ‘manufacture of heritage’ has been occurring in Britain and parts of Europe. Sedona as Tourist Site Located part-way between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, the small town of Sedona and its surrounding area attract some four to six million tourists a year. Sedona has also for decades been a hub of New Age activities, including the home base of a number of spiritual groups (such as the Aquarian Concepts Community, Eckankar and the Aquarian Educational Foundation) and a large community of psychic channellers centred around the magazine Sedona: Journal of Emergence (Ivakhiv 2001). Its famous red rock landscape is highly photogenic, its ‘imageability’

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being evident to visitors at least since 1895, when archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes described its rock formations as “weathered into fantastic shapes suggestive of cathedrals, Greek Temples, and sharp steeples of churches extending like giant needles into the sky,” adding that, “This place, I have no doubt, will sooner or later become popular with the sightseer” (cited in Rigby 1979). By the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood had begun to make use of that landscape in its mythic portrayals of the American West; to date, over sixty feature films (including Broken Arrow, Johnny Guitar and Billy the Kid) have been shot here. The town is nestled in the ‘red rock country’ formed by erosion of the Mogollon Rim, the 1000ft (300m) high escarpment that makes up the southern rim of the Colorado Plateau. Reddish brown and vermillion, copper, orange and magenta sandstones and shales have been sculpted by wind and water here into spectacular mesas, buttes, spires, columns, domes, and arches. With such dramatic visual possibilities, the engine of the town has become the demand to produce, stage-manage and market visual pleasure, and the town has been successfully sold as an upmarket destination resort, a picture-postcard haven for exurban second-homers, retirees, and tourists. One of the most effective marketing tools for the selling of Sedona has been the slick and glossy full-colour publication Sedona Magazine. Filled with full-page picture-postcard photographs of red rock scenery, resorts and subdevelopments, golf courses and advertisements for art galleries (with their characteristic Native American and southwest kitsch), the magazine, sold at newsstands across much of the United States, attempts to elicit a kind of open-jawed excitement in its target audience. The back cover of a typical issue can be taken as an example of its visual strategy. It features the caption “AH . . . isn’t this why you came to Sedona?” above three rectangular-framed, wide-angle images of high-contrast reddish rock formations majestically looming above a forest-green landscape and set against the blue and grey of the sky. Each of them presumes a viewing subject positioned magisterially well above ground level at a panoramic distance from the monuments portrayed—three windows onto a scenic landscape viewed from an invisible panoptic location hovering in mid-air somewhere above Sedona. The advertisement is for Casa Contenta, “Sedona’s premier residential community,” yet there is no residence in sight nor any sign of human habitation at all. Clearly, this is one reason why people come to Sedona: to see views that can only be captured by camera—in fact, the redness of the landscape is often accentuated through the use of

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colour filters—because they carefully omit the signs of human activity that have made them possible. The advertisement, like numerous others, offers a promise that effaces its own materiality, a God’s eye view from everywhere and nowhere, and the prospect of living in a place uncontaminated by living itself. In this sense, Sedona falls squarely into the tradition of the magisterial and panoramic gaze—nature as a sublime object of desire to be gazed at, possessed and savoured. Among visitors this gaze becomes effected through the taking of photographs, while among those who stay it mediates the buying and selling of real estate. Indeed, this imageability has become part of the defence of the red rock landscape against further development. A proposal to build a bridge over Oak Creek at a place called Red Rock Crossing—considered necessary by many to deal with the traffic of some 16–20,000 cars per day passing through the centre of town—has been vigorously contested by environmentalists who argue that such a bridge would destroy the beauty of the ‘most photographed spot in Arizona.’ Red Rock Crossing runs directly below a rock formation known as Cathedral Rock, a highly distinct signature monument that graces photographs, postcards, and tourist brochures for Sedona more frequently than any other. This photogenicity argument cuts to the heart of the paradox of the American West: it is a kind of reversal of the landscape’s role in the creation of that mythic West, with its image now become part of its own defence against further development. Sedona as Sacred Site: Vision, Compulsion and the Invisible Sedona’s New Age or metaphysical community, one of the most concentrated of such communities in North America, has been growing steadily since the late 1950s, but this growth accelerated dramatically after psychics Dick Sutphen and Page Bryant publicly identified the area’s power spots or ‘vortices’ in the late 1970s, and especially following the Harmonic Convergence of 1987. The community includes a variety of psychics and spiritual counsellors, therapists and alternative health practitioners, and others who have left behind better-paying jobs and lives elsewhere and taken on whatever work they can find in the retail or service industries. Local New Age authors and tour guides tout the “vortexes”, describe the extraordinary experiences they and others have had at them, draw up maps of the “interdimensional landscape,” and encourage visitors to partake of them as well.

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The role of visual imagery in New Age pilgrimage has rarely been studied. Perhaps the best known example of a case where an image of a natural landscape formation has been instrumental in attracting spiritual seekers to that landscape is, oddly enough, to be found in a Hollywood movie, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film portrays a number of seemingly ordinary citizens dreaming or otherwise receiving visions of a monument which, on an inner compulsion, they then seek out. The monument turns out to be Devils Tower (Bear Butte) in Wyoming, to which the seekers congregate in time for the descent of the benevolent and godlike extraterrestrial mothership. Mirroring the film, the visual spectacle of Sedona’s landscape has had a similar effect on many of the New Agers whom I have interviewed there. Many reported arriving in the area because they felt a strange connection to the landscape: like the characters in Spielberg’s movie, they followed some inner compulsion, a feeling of being irresistibly drawn to Sedona, or obsessing over it after they first heard about it or saw photographs of the area (see Dongo 1988; Ivakhiv 2001:187ff.; and Bowman 1993 regarding the same trope in Glastonbury). This trope of inner compulsion is one that is found throughout New Age discourse. The New Age travel magazine Power Trips opens up a panorama of possibilities to its readers. In an article entitled “How to decide which place you should visit,” editor Robert Scheer writes: Suppose you go to a travel presentation where you see several hundred slides, taken at twenty different sites in a dozen different countries. It’s likely that one or two pictures will really ‘jump out’ at you. They may seem especially interesting, or beautiful, or dramatic. Perhaps you’ll feel ‘shivers’ when you see them. If this happens, you’re getting a signal about where you need to go. It happened for one man when he was simply walking down the street one day, not thinking about going anywhere. He was walking by the window of a travel agency when a poster in the window caught his eye. It was of the giant stone statues on Easter Island. He suddenly felt an unexplained urge to go to Easter Island. Even more amazing, a short time later, he happened to receive a free airline ticket to South America! Taking advantage of this remarkable serendipity, he went to Easter Island, where he received a message telling him what direction his life should take.2

2

http://www.newagetravel.com/decide.shtml.

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Power places serve here in a fashion analogous to that of a deck of Tarot cards or some other divination method. A certain few may be selected for you; you may get an inner impulse or intuition from glancing at one—and, voilà, you know where you must travel. The ‘free airline ticket’ may seem a little unbelievable, but it does allow the question of cost to go unasked. Once drawn to a particular place, what do New Age tourist-pilgrims do there? Manuals for New Age pilgrimage provide a plethora of suggestions and advice for pilgrims, detailing not only the places to be visited, but the activities to be performed and attitudes to be cultivated in the process. The more conscientious guidebooks advise extensive preparation and a certain etiquette, generally involving some form of purification or ‘clearing,’ assessment of one’s motivation, and a general sense of humility and respect. Many recommend asking permission of the spirit of the site or engaging in dialogue with its invisible guardians. Some writers advocate specific methods of altering one’s consciousness, including fasting, meditation, ritual drumming and movement, dreamwork, trance induction, or the use of psychoactive plants, in order to facilitate attunement or interfacing with the Earth or the spiritual beings associated with the place. And following whatever ritual or attunement the practitioner undergoes, most authors suggest some expression or token of gratitude before departing, whether it be leaving an offering of tobacco or sage, a few drops of blessed or pure water, a seed or flower from your garden, a crystal or attractive stone, or simply a prayer or ritual gesture.3 The notion of attunement is central to New Age pilgrimage, as is the belief in the efficacy of ceremonial ritual. The act of travelling to and performing rituals at sacred sites is often believed to have tangible effects on the sites and on the world at large. As many of these writings make clear, however, much of the desire motivating such pilgrimage is a personal one—the desire for experience, personal transformation or self-actualisation—which would seem to support the claim that New Age religion restricts itself to a self-centred spiritual individualism. Visiting sacred sites, however, is for many pilgrims only a beginning or a punctuation mark in a more extended life-pilgrimage. There are

3 Other such guidebooks include Corbett (1988); Joseph (1992); Swan (1990, 1992); Kryder (1994); LaChappelle (1988); Johansen & Barclay (1987); Dannelley (1991); Pettis (1999); Leviton (2002); and http://www.sacredsites.com/manu/Intro.html.

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those for whom such places become so important that they leave behind their former places of residence and resettle closer to their “elective Centre” (Cohen 1992). In the case of Sedona, pilgrim-tourists (and spiritual immigrants, since many who begin as pilgrims or tourists have ended up relocating there permanently) engage in a variety of individual and collective activities that serve to reinforce their claims about the landscape’s sacrality. These activities include hiking or walking the land and repeatedly visiting specific locations with spiritual intent; cultivating a state of psychic receptivity while there through meditation, visualisation, chanting, chakra activation, invocation or channelling of guides or spirits; and the arrangement of stones or rocks in circular medicine wheels (modelled after Plains Indian practices) and the conducting of ceremonies within them.4 Rather than being taken apart after use, as some claim would be a more traditional practice, medicine wheels in Sedona are often left in place after their use, and sometimes tobacco, coins, pine cones, or other personal offerings are left behind as well. Such medicine wheels seem to be built for three main purposes: to mark out the place as sacred (which could be seen as a territorial claim or type of religious graffiti); to facilitate the prayer, meditation, or ritual performed within them; and to effectively harmonise with or channel the natural energies believed to flow through the landscape. As an example of this third goal, a large medicine wheel on public land outside Sedona was built repeatedly, even after being dismantled by US Forest Service rangers, in order to “heal a broken ley line,” in the words of one of the leaders of this action. Aside from these more focal practices, pilgrims’ sacred site encounters involve an array of background activities and perceptual interactions with the landscape, associated with the movements and physical exertion needed to manoeuvre their way through the topography on the way to a sacred location; the changing visual, auditory, olfactory and kinaesthetic stimuli at different stages of a pilgrimage route or climb; the colours, shapes, textures, and other physical qualities of the landscape; the temporal or durational factor, as pilgrims undergo the process of journeying, expectation and desire, encountering a site, performing a Space does not allow me to delve into the vexed issue of the non-Native ‘cultural appropriation’ of Native spirituality, though such appropriation is widespread in Sedona. See Rothstein in this volume; Ivakhiv (2001:178–9, 193–7, 278–9); and Taylor (1997), for discussions of these issues. 4

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ritual or attunement, and returning home; and all of these factors and qualities and their experiential and interpretive results as they develop over daily, seasonal and annual cycles. Over time, the experiential and interpretive data acquired through such activities is collected and sedimented within the interpretive communities for whom the place is held to be sacred. As such a community becomes more firmly anchored within the landscape, its interpretations take on an increasing matter-offactness for its members, which they then pass on to New Age culture at large, with the incentive of boosting Sedona’s destination value among potential New Age tourists and visitors. As we see, New Age pilgrimage places a high premium on openness to signs or signals, perceptions, and intuitions, and it is this quality of encounter that makes New Age pilgrimage a different form of place practice than the Cartesian relationship embodied in photography, sightseeing and other forms of commodification. In the debate over Red Rock Crossing, New Agers raised a very different kind of argument to the conservationists’ argument that the place should be saved because it is, among other things, the most photographed place in Arizona (or in the southwest). For New Agers, Cathedral Rock and Red Rock Crossing are among the most potent of Sedona’s energy vortices. New Age author Richard Dannelley has written that, “[W]e must do everything we can to make sure that this bridge is never built. . . . Cathedral Rock is sacred and a highway through this area can not be allowed. Cathedral Rock is an ascension point” (Dannelley 1993:62, italics in original). Dannelley continues, “Placing a metal bridge over Oak Creek at this place would also interfere with the spiritual energy that flows along the creek,” (idem) and, “many people, myself included, have encountered Angelic entities in this area” (ibid.:54). Another prominent psychic, Page Bryant, informed her readers that, “two magnificent Archangels stand guard over the ‘entrance to the inner sanctum’ ” at Red Rock Crossing, and that this spot is the only ‘magnetic vortex’ in the area and thus vital to the energetic balance of the landscape (Bryant et al. 1991:13). For another local spiritual group, the Aquarian Concepts Community, Red Rock Crossing is nothing less than the axial power point on the Earth’s surface. The New Age community, in fact, shows a profound distrust for visual representation. Instead, it valorises the invisible and interdimensional landscape. New Age activities are directed less at gazing onto an objectified landscape and more at listening, receiving, channelling

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or tuning in to voices or signs that lurk hidden behind the observable façade of the landscape. Many of Sedona’s more prominent channellers are regularly featured in the locally based Sedona: Journal of Emergence, which has become one of the leading media for channelled spiritual writings in North America. The magazine features a streaming heteroglossic stew of millennial prophecies, astrological predictions and spiritual and personal advice penned in quasi-scientific jargon by channels with names gleaned from science-fiction (Kryon, Vywamus, Zoosh, the Galactic Council), romantic fantasies about Native Americans (Red Cloud and the Council of Eight), angelic personages and even ‘Mother Earth (Gaia)’ herself. Journal of Emergence bills itself as presenting “the latest channelled information on what to do as humans and the earth move from the third to the fourth dimension—how these energies affect you and the earth.” The ambiguous notion of energies plays a crucial function within New Age discourse, serving as a kind of conceptual glue that binds alternative and non-western physico-medical theories, ideas inherited from late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spiritualism and metaphysical religion, the post-1960s vocabulary of humanistic and consciousness psychology, and an imagined future in which advanced technology is reconciled with earthly and cosmic ecology. The connection between energy and rocks is one that has been especially pursued within New Age thought, particularly during the crystal craze of the 1980s, and the two together constitute a type of ‘New Age sublime’ that is readily found in Sedona’s looming ancient rock formations. That red rock landscape often serves as a background—but in some cases the foreground as well (e.g. Bryant et al. 1991)—for the communicative productivity of Sedona’s psychics, yet these voices show little interest in the monumental visuality splayed across the pages of the business community’s (rival) Sedona Magazine. The few photographs to be found in Journal of Emergence tend to be grainy, black-and-white images of inscrutable lights in the sky, mysterious ‘flying disks’ captured on film surreptitiously in the night sky, and other signs of meaningful life beyond the visible spectrum. The channellers portray the landscape as redolent with invisible and mysterious, but psychically perceivable activity, filled with energy portals and interdimensional doorways, dissemination points, stargates, spiritual presences and alien beings. In contrast, then, to the dominant representations of Sedona, this landscape harbours far more than the eye can see, making up a neo-magical universe in which

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particular locations (canyons, rock outcroppings, and so on) correspond to specific stellar constellations, cosmic forces, chakras and body parts, elemental qualities, and spiritual states. Textual Production of New Age Sacred Space To better grasp this neo-magical cosmos, let us examine Richard Leviton’s book The Galaxy on Earth: A Traveler’s Guide to the Planet’s Visionary Geography (2002). The book is by a prolific writer on Earth mysteries, and is an encyclopaedic compendium of information on fifty-six sacred sites culled from a tremendous variety of sources liberally mixed with the insights and imaginings from the author’s own visionary experiences at the sites or in meditation over the meanings of the sites. The book presents a most impressively wide-ranging synthesis of New Age views on sacred space. Leviton’s theoretical tool-kit is a voraciously eclectic mixture of mythology and mysticism from several of the world’s religious and mythological traditions; ideas taken from occult, esoteric, theosophical, metaphysical, astrological and medical-spiritual traditions; the work of writers, scholars, and scientists, including Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin, Gerschom Scholem, Ananda Coomaraswamy, James Lovelock, Doris Lessing and numerous others; writings and speculations on sacred geometry, sacred mathematics and related fields; and New Age cosmological theories about galactic connections between the Earth and Sirius, the Pleiades, and other constellations, star systems and galaxies. What Sedona’s channellers are groping towards in their visionary encounters with the red rock landscape of Sedona, Leviton attempts to do, with rather greater erudition, for the entire planet. Leviton’s basic model of sacred space is one which follows the Hermetic dictum “As above, so below,” to which he adds “and in the middle too.” He sees the Earth’s sacred sites as patterned in a “planetary grid” which constitutes “an edited, condensed version of the galaxy” (Leviton 2002:18), with 85,000 different stars represented across the planet’s surface. Correspondingly, “all the galaxy on Earth is but a magnificent planetary mirror of the spiritual organization of the human” (ibid.:20). Leviton admits to the solipsism of his approach, which is consistent both with the Hermetic and Gnostic traditions and with the New Age focus on the self. As he puts it, “everywhere you go, it’s you”: “Remembering the Self is what the Earth’s visionary geography facilitates for us. That’s why it’s here: to help us wake from this long slumber of forget-

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ting,” and to allow us to “restore our full memory of our cosmic and spiritual origins” (ibid.:20–1). The only references to a broader social community here are of galactic proportions: each of us is undergoing an evolutionary process, but we have guides ‘out there’ and ‘within’ to help us with our efforts and to help the Earth undergo its own evolutionary unfoldment. On the latter point, Leviton provides meditations which suggest that there are benefits to the Earth from what he calls “responsible sacred sites tourism.” One of these benefits is planetary detoxification, something that will supposedly occur automatically when we travel to sacred sites with right intent. But he also provides meditations which suggest to pilgrims that they “ask Gaia where it hurts” in order to find out what needs to be done, or at least what images we should be holding in our minds as we meditate and travel. In the end, however, The Galaxy on Earth, like Power Trips magazine, serves mainly as a travel manual. And even if some of the travel is to be done in inner space, the book presumes a reader who is equipped to travel—that is, a westerner with the wealth and spending money allowing for travel not to one place, but to many. It also presumes the infrastructure that accommodates travel to these places, and it takes for granted the notion that the world is one’s oyster—a naturalisation of the sort of mobility that mirrors the mobility of capital in an age of liberalised and globalised, post-Fordist, flexible-accumulation capitalism. Courtney Milne’s and Richard Leviton’s photographic approaches to sacred space can be taken as emblematic of the two main tendencies within New Age sacred space discourse: the first, a visually-directed form of representation, shaped by late modern discourses of the beautiful and the sublime, but which acknowledges and even seeks for openings to sacred meanings; the second a form of representation that has abandoned late modern visuality altogether and has instead opted for a dense, neo-magical web of polyvocal narrative, multi-sensory exploration and extrasensory gnosis. We had earlier suggested that Courtney Milne’s desire to allow the twentieth century to “evaporate from [his] consciousness” resulted in a lapse of consciousness by which he failed to acknowledge his dependence on twentieth century technology, and instead was able to reify the sacred as transcendent and transhistorical, existing in some space beyond historical time and outside of society, an essentialised nature full of power and energy, but disingenuous, unreal, a kind of fantasy. Apart from the goals he sets for himself, however, a closer look at his

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photography reveals a greater complexity. In fact, his photographs rarely fall into the tradition of the magisterial gaze. Flipping through The Sacred Earth, one gets the impression not so much of a planet for the taking, a storehouse of resources to be used by humans for our own ends, as of a planet that is very much alive and teeming with its own energies, possibilities, and mysteries. A large number of the photographs draw attention to Milne’s techniques, his process of selecting a view, or the time and place of the produced image. And while the implied viewer of some of the images is located at the ‘magisterial’ location above and far from the focal object, in the case of many others, the viewer may be located astride the object (without much of a sense of separation from it), below it, or even caught within it, surrounded by an object that cannot be possessed but only entered. In fact, much New Age practice reflects this desire to enter inside the energy centres of the Earth, a desire that sits uneasily alongside the project of sacred geometry and the numerous global grids that have been proposed to map out Gaia’s energy fields (e.g. Becker & Hagens 1991; Walsh 1993). A closer examination of these discourses of Gaia, Earth energies, and sacred geometry, will provide us with a better sense of these tensions and ambiguities in New Age ideas of nature. ‘Gaia’ has become a provocative shorthand for a holistic theory of the biosphere, and, for the spiritually inclined, it is an image representing the divinity of the Earth. Many women have found Gaia to be an empowering image, while environmentalists have found it useful as a personification of a revalorised relationship between humans and Mother Nature. And yet, on some level, sex-typing the planet as woman and as mother could be said to reinforce the same basic stereotypes that have accompanied the modernist (and masculinist) domination of nature (e.g. Merchant 1990). The feminine is idealised yet remains passive, and humanity is still perceived as a masculine agent, a central nervous system (Lovelock & Epton 1975:306) or global brain (Russell 1984) to the unconscious, feminine body of the Earth. If the idea of Gaia suggests to some a need to care for our nurturing mother, androcentric attitudes have historically tended to promote a schizoid love/hate response on the part of the collective male-identified ego toward its mother. It is that mother, after all, whose overbearing presence constrains the growing adolescent and is rejected in the process of becoming a man. As monolithic as the proverbial mother-in-law, Gaia may not be an advance for a postmodern reconceptualisation of human-Earth relations.

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If Gaia is meant to describe the Earth as a whole, the most common New Age trope which articulates the recognition of a local numinosity is that of Earth energies. Energy metaphors have their own history, having worked their way into New Age discourse in part from the spiritualist and metaphysical movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like other quasi-scientific jargon, they are intended to grant New Age discourse some semblance of authority, while their ambiguity makes for a polysemic applicability to nearly anything. The fact that the Gaia and energy discourses frequently accompany each other is a reflection of the ubiquity of alternative medical traditions within New Age thought. Chinese acupuncture, martial arts like Tai Ch’i and Aikido, unorthodox western systems such as polarity therapy and Reichian bodywork, and more recently popularised systems such as Reiki, all conceive of the body in energetic terms: a healthy body is one in which the flow of life-energy is unimpeded. If the Earth is identified as Gaia, then it is reasonable to suppose that life-energy flows through its body, and that there will be places, chakras or energy centres, where this flow is more intense and the energy more concentrated than elsewhere—Gaia’s erogenous zones, so to speak. In its plurality, its suggestiveness and ultimate elusiveness, the notion of Earth energies has played an important function within New Age discourse. But it remains limited in its evocative capacity, suggesting as it does a physical universe uninhabited by beings or personal others. As such, it is vulnerable to the Heideggerian critique referred to earlier, insofar as it suggests that nature can be unlocked, transformed, and in the process subjected to management by some technocracy of, say, geomancer-engineers. This trend is especially evident in the notion of sacred geometry, which frequently accompanies the energy discourse (as we see in Leviton’s book). The idea is that Earth’s energies are structured according to specific geometrical and mathematical patterns and formulas, and that the proper human relationship to them is to channel, manipulate, or work those energies in order to follow those patterns. Energy also suggests a kind of convertibility, whereby one form of energy can be transformed into another. In an unwitting example of such a conversion of energies, pilgrimage leaders Suzanne McMillanMcTavish and Glen McTavish, founders of Sacred Sight Journeys International, recount their several-year mission to complete a circuit of Transceiving Stations intended “to unite the Americas on the ley lines (Earth’s energy grid) and assist the Earth in her ascension through

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harmony, balance and stability” (McMillan-McTavish & McTavish 1994). By 1994, 44 of these stations had already been created, and 40 more were planned by the year 2000. After they were “given the word to move to Sedona,” Glen spent three weeks in Phoenix, “taking an accelerated course to get an Arizona real estate license in order to sell vacation interval ownerships. Spirit had let us know that Glen’s mission had shifted after he had arrived in Sedona” (idem). The tour leaders continue, without a hint of irony, “Glen’s mission now is to move large amounts of financial energy and real estate (Earth energy) around to create the physical spaces for Suzanne to anchor the Light for Spirit to move into” (idem). Earth energy thus becomes real estate which becomes financial energy, all in an invisible circuit of flows and transformations (and see Mikaelsson 2001). We see, then, that the desire to ‘get inside’ the Earth and explore its spiritual-erogenous potentials rests uneasily alongside the desire to survey the planet, map out its sacred locations and organise them into a comprehensive planetary energy grid, and channel those energies for one’s benefit. On the one hand, there is a willingness to submit to the planet or to engage in a planetary eroticism, humanity and the Earth partnered in some mysterious way. On the other hand, there is the desire to master the Earth intellectually, mathematically, philosophically, to map out the correspondences between its chakras, domes, and stargates, and the angelic, Pleiadian and intergalactic overlords that run the cosmic biocomputer so much better, it seems, than our own scientists ever could. This entire project reflects a desire that was only rendered possible in the 1960s through the development of visual technologies that delivered us photographs of the Earth from space—visual technologies that were by-products of the space race, itself a product of the military race between cold-warring superpowers. With that space race over but other global divisions and threats looming large on the horizon, New Age pilgrimage can be seen as a kind of vote for globality, a desire for a global society at peace with itself, unthreatened by hostile social forces, environmental risks or other fault lines of early twenty-first century civilisation. Such a globality is a promising vision, but without a recognition of its complicity in generating those very fault lines, an acknowledgement of its own dependence on global structures of inequality and uneven development, the vision remains a selective and incomplete one.

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Conclusion New Age pilgrimage thus represents a multitude of desires: to heal the sores and imbalances of a society perceived to be broken, to feel strange energies and open mysterious portals into the unknown, to map out the alternative universes exposed by New Age theories and gnostic insights. The sacred or visionary geography of New Age spirituality is in many ways novel in its embrace of a global, post-Apollo and postSputnik perspective. But its globality appears to seek a sacred geometry at the expense of the more mundane but ever-present geometry of power (Massey 1994), a geometry which keeps some locked into tightly bounded, highly localised relations of service, wage and domestic labour, to others. To the extent that tourism is now the world’s largest industry, human society can be seen to be made up primarily of two classes, the tourists and their servants, with some overlap between the two in wealthier countries but with a clear dividing line in the developing world. There is, then, a political dimension that keeps disappearing in New Age discourse: who, after all, has the power to be tripping around Gaia’s energy body, and who does not? In this sense, the title of the New Age travel magazine referred to above (and of a book on New Age pilgrimage [Corbett 1988]) may be apt in more ways than one: New Age ‘power trips’ consist of trips toward power—travels to places that represent a New Age form of sacred power—and trips intended to gain power for the traveller, a form of New Age power which provides a sense of personal clarity and directedness with the ability to ‘manifest’ what one needs for one’s spiritual life. But from a sociological perspective they are also trips that presume, require, and help set in motion a certain set of power relations—relations according to which certain people can travel where they desire, because they have the economic means to do that, because an appropriate infrastructure is in place for them when they arrive, and because their destinations (both the places themselves and the meanings they embody) have been incorporated into a system of economic exchange in which such ‘power’ can be identified, amplified, bought, sold and transferred. Hugh Urban (2000) has argued that New Age is “the spiritual logic of late capitalism.” The example of New Age pilgrimage suggests that consumer or postmodern global capitalism may not have any spiritual logic. If it did, why single out New Age over the suburban mega-church phenomenon or any of a dozen other religious trends? Its logic is an

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economic one, rather. New Age spirituality, it seems, is caught within that logic, but at the same time it seeks to escape or counteract that logic, as when Sedona’s New Agers attempt to prevent the construction of the bridge at Red Rock Crossing. New Age spirituality expresses a desire for a spiritualised globalism, a globalism that is vying with other, largely western-led globalisms to define the current or coming period of history. But as long as the more mundane geometry of power—the set of unequal power relations on which New Age economic and pilgrimage practices themselves depend—remains unacknowledged and unaddressed, it will likely remain a globalism for some but not for others, and thus a globalism that, contrary to its adherents’ hopes, may not be able to sustain itself in the long term. References Bartholomeusz, T., 1998. “Spiritual Wealth and Neo-Colonialism.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 35.1 19–32. Becker, W.S. & B. Hagens, 1991. “The Rings of Gaia.” In Swan, J.A., ed., The Power of Place. Wheaton, IL: Quest/Theosophical Publishing House, 257–79. Boime, A., 1991. The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830–1865. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Bordo, S.R., 1987. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: SUNY. Bowman, M., 1993. “Drawn to Glastonbury.” In Reader, I. & T. Walter, eds. Pilgrimage in Popular Culture. London: Macmillan. ——, 2000. “More of the Same? Christianity, Vernacular Religion and Alternative Spirituality in Glastonbury.” In Sutcliffe, S. & M. Bowman, eds. Beyond New Age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bruce, S., 1996. Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults. New York: Oxford University Press. Bryant, P., et al., 1991. Sedona Vortex Guide Book. Sedona, AZ: Light Technology Publishing. ——, 1991. Terravision: A Travelers’ Guide to the Living Planet Earth. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn. Buci-Glucksmann, C., 1984. La Raison Baroque: De Baudelaire à Benjamin. Paris: Editions Galilée. Buenfil, A.R., 1991. Rainbow Nation Without Borders: Toward an Ecotopian Millennium. Santa Fe: Bear & Company. Campbell, N., 2000. The Cultures of the American New West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cohen, E., 1992. “Pilgrimage and Tourism: Convergence and Divergence.” In Morinis, E.A., ed. Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. London: Greenwood Press. Conron, J., 2000. American Picturesque. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Dame-Glerum, K., 1987. “Did Harmonic Convergence Come Off as Advertised?” Sedona Times 26 August A3–5. Dannelley, R., 1993. Sedona UFO Connection and Planetary Ascension Guide. Sedona, AZ: Richard Dannelley/Vortex Society.

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Devereux, P. with J. Steele & David Kubrin, 1989. Earthmind: A Modern Adventure in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Harper & Row. Devereux, P., 1992. Secrets of Ancient and Sacred Places: The World’s Mysterious Heritage. London: Blandford. Dongo, T., 1988. The Mysteries of Sedona: The New Age Frontier. Sedona: Hummingbird. Dorst, J., 1999. Looking West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Eliade, M., 1959. The Sacred and the Profane, trans. J.R. Trask. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Fellowship for Intentional Community, 1995. Communities Directory: A Guide to Cooperative Living. Langley, WA: Fellowship for Intentional Community. Hanegraaff, W.J., 1998. “Reflections on New Age and the Secularisation of Nature.” In Pearson, J., R.H. Roberts & G. Samuel, eds. Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Heelas, P., 1992. “The Sacralization of the Self and New Age Capitalism.” In Abercrombie, N. & A. Warde, eds. Social Change in Contemporary Britain. Cambridge: Polity. ——, 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, M., 1977. “Age of the World Picture.” In Lovitt, W. trans. and ed. The Question Concerning Technology. New York: Harper and Row. Huntsinger, L. & M. Fernandez-Gimenez, 2000. “Spiritual pilgrims at Mount Shasta, California.” Geographical Review 90.4 536–58. Ivakhiv, A., 2001. Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ——, 2003. “Orchestrating Sacred Space: Beyond the ‘Social Construction’ of Nature.” Ecotheology: The Journal of Religion, Nature and the Environment 8.1 11–29. ——, 2005. “Earth mysteries.” The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Taylor, B., ed.in-chief. London & New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 525–9. Jay, M., 1992. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Lash, S. & J. Friedman, eds. Modernity and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. ——, 1994. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johansen, G. & N.S. Barclay, 1987. The Sedona Vortex Experience. Sedona: Sunlight Productions. Johnson, P., 1995. “Shamanism from Ecuador to Chicago: A Case Study in New Age Ritual appropriation.” Religion 25 163–78. Joseph, F., ed., 1992. Sacred Sites: A Guidebook to Sacred Centers and Mysterious Places in the United States. St. Paul: Llewellyn. King, R., 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East. New York: Routledge. Kryder, R.P., 1994. Sacred Ground to Sacred Space: Visionary Ecology, Perennial Wisdom, Environmental Ritual and Art. Santa Fe: Bear & Company. LaChappelle, D., 1988. Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology —and Celebrating Life. Silverton, CO: Finn Hill Arts. Lasch, C., 1980. The Culture of Narcissism. London: Abacus. Leviton, R., 2002. The Galaxy on Earth: A Traveler’s Guide to the Planet’s Visionary Geography. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads. Lopez, D.S., Jr., 1995. “Foreigners at the Lama’s Feet.” In Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lovelock, J.E. & S. Epton, 1975. “The Quest for Gaia.” New Scientist 65, 6 February 304–6. Massey, D., 1994. “A Global Sense of Place.” In Space, Place and Gender. London: Polity Press. McLaughlin, C. & G. Davidson, 1986. Builders of the Dawn: Community Lifestyles in a Changing World. Shutesbury, MA: Sirius.

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McLuhan, T.C., 1996. Cathedrals of the Spirit: The Message of Sacred Places. Toronto: HarperCollins. McMillan-McTavish, S. & G. McTavish, 1994. “Holiday Greetings from Suzanne & Glen.” Sedona: December flyer. Mehta, G., 1991. Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystical East. New York: Ballantine. Merchant, C., 1990. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Michell, J., 1969. The View Over Atlantis. New York: Ballantine. Mikaelsson, L., 2001. “Homo Accumulans and the Spiritualization of Money.” In Rothstein, M., ed. New Age and Globalization. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Milne, C., 1991a. The Sacred Earth. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books. ——, 1991b. “Sacred Earth. Pilgrim’s Portfolio: Five Years Among the World’s Holy Places.” Equinox 58 July/August 38–47. Pettis, C., 1999. Secrets of Sacred Space: Discover and Create Places of Power. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn. Pilgrim’s Guide to Planet Earth, 1974. San Rafael, CA: Spiritual Community Publications. Popenoe, C. & O. Popenoe, 1984. Seeds of Tomorrow: New Age Communities That Work. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Riches, D. & R. Prince, 2001. The New Age in Glastonbury: The Construction of Religious Movement. Oxford: Berghahn. Riebsame, W.E. & J.J. Robb, eds, 1997. Atlas of the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region. New York: Norton & Co. Rigby, E., 1979. “Forest Service Working to Stabilize Local Indian Ruin.” Red Rock News 28 March, 8. Rorty, R., 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press. Roszak, T., 1978. Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society. Garden City, NJ: Anchor/Doubleday. Rothman, H., 1998. Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West. University Press of Kansas. Rufus, A.S. & K. Lawson, 1991. Goddess Sites: Europe. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Russell, P., 1984. The Awakening Earth: The Global Brain. London: Ark Paperbacks. Snyder, J., 1994. “Territorial Photography.” In Mitchell, W.J.T., ed. Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spangler, D., 1977. Towards a Planetary Vision. Forres, Scotland: Findhorn Publications. Spiritual Community Guides, 1972–1979 (4 volumes). San Rafael, CA: Spiritual Community Publications. Sutcliffe, S., 2003. Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices. London: Routledge. Swan, J.A., 1990. Sacred Places: How the Living Earth Seeks Our Friendship. Santa Fe: Bear & Company. ——, 1992. Nature as Teacher and Healer: How to Reawaken Your Connection to Nature. New York: Villard Books. Taylor, B., 1997. “Earthen Spirituality or Cultural Genocide?: Radical Environmentalism’s Appropriation of Native American Spirituality.” Religion 27.2 183–215. Thompson, W.I., 1974. Passages About Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture. New York: Harper & Row. Urban, H., 2000. “The Cult of Ecstasy: Tantrism, the New Age, and the Spiritual Logic of Late Capitalism.” History of Religions 39.3 268–304. Urry, J., 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Society. London: Sage. Van Hove, H., 1999. “L’Émergence d’un ‘Marché Spirituel’.” Social Compass 46.2 161–72. Walsh, T., 1993. Global Sacred Alignments. Glastonbury: University of Avalon Press.

GLOBAL ASPECTS OF NEW AGE

GLOBAL ASPECTS OF NEW AGE Like Sedona, Arizona, in the United States, Glastonbury in England is regarded as a ‘power spot’ and thus a Mecca for New Age pilgrims. However, unlike Sedona, Glastonbury is also a sacred place for Goddess spirituality, Christians, and certain Buddhists. In “Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth: The Local and the Global in Glastonbury,” Marion I. Bowman explores this surfeit of meaning and the complex interaction of local and global spirituality in Glastonbury. A major facet of New Age interest has been fascination with the religions of traditional peoples such as American Indians. In “Hawaii in New Age Imaginations: A Case of Religious Inventions,” Mikael Rothstein examines this aspect of the new Age through an extended case study of Hawaiian religion. Rothstein finds that although the appropriated version bears almost no relationship with the original, and although it appears to attract only European and Euro-American participants, New Age practitioners nevertheless draw upon their purported relationships with native peoples and the islands for their legitimacy. As a transnational phenomenon, the New Age is usually understood as presenting a mostly uniform appearance in different countries where internationally-popular books are translated into regional languages and internationally-popular healing modalities are practised in the same way in every country. In “A Latin American New Age?”, Maria Julia Carozzi presents data indicating that the New Age is actually appropriated somewhat differently in different countries. Through examples drawn from Argentina, Brazil and, to a lesser extent, Mexico, she discusses the tension between certain New Age values and traditional Latin American values, and the different ways in which the New Age interacts—or does not interact—with local religious traditions. Under the rubric ‘spiritual world’, the New Age has been popular in Japan since the 1970s. Inken Prohl surveys the Japanese New Age and the stages of its unfoldment in “The Spiritual World: Aspects of New Age in Japan.” Though there are many unique aspects of the ‘spiritual world’ such as a noticeable nationalism, the emphasis on health, success and personal happiness unites the Japanese scene with the global New Age movement.

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Chapters located in other sections of this volume also draw on research from around the world. Although the vast majority of studies of New Age are written in English and focus on Britain and the USA, and to a lesser extent Australia, New Zealand and Canada, there is a growing body of research drawing on research in non-English-speaking countries. In this volume, Martin Ramstedt illustrates his study of business and New Age with examples from the Netherlands and Germany, Anna Kubiak utilises examples from Poland, Liselotte Frisk has undertaken a number of studies in Sweden, and Olav Hammer compares New Age and sceptics, also in Sweden.

ANCIENT AVALON, NEW JERUSALEM, HEART CHAKRA OF PLANET EARTH: THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL IN GLASTONBURY*,1 Marion I. Bowman Glastonbury, a small town in the South West of England is the focus for a variety of spiritual seekers and religious practitioners. This chapter explores the extent to which Glastonbury has claimed a ‘serial centrality’ over the centuries in relation to different religious trends, first within Christianity and, in the course of the twentieth century, within a growing number of worldviews. Highlighting similarities and tensions between the competing visions and discourses to be found there, the chapter examines issues surrounding the negotiation of the local and the global for a variety of groups and individuals. Despite the element of change (indeed exoticism) in some of the manifestations of contemporary spirituality in Glastonbury, there is, nevertheless, a considerable degree of continuity in relation to the vernacular tradition there. The idea that the world is ‘a single place’ is actively articulated within many aspects of contemporary religion in Glastonbury. It therefore provides a fruitful location in which to examine the local in the context of the global, and the global in the context of the local. I will look at various ways in which the local and global are perceived to interact there, some of the issues raised and exemplified by this interaction, and the extent to which there is both continuity and change in how Glastonbury has been and continues to be centrally and significantly located in relation to a variety of worldviews. Adopting an ethnological approach, which Kockel (2003) claims is “particularly suited to studying local-level interpretations and negotiations of global processes,” I have conducted fieldwork in Glastonbury on a variety of phenomena since 1991 (e.g. Bowman 1993a, 1993b, 2000). Accordingly, much of the information for this chapter has been gathered

* This chapter was first published as Bowman (2005), and is reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders, with minor editorial amendments. 1 The chapter is based on the Keynote Lecture of the same name given at the EASR conference on The Local and the Global, University of Bergen, 2003.

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through formal interviews, participant observation and informal conversation.2 Many of the claims reported here about Glastonbury’s past and its present significance have the status of ‘common knowledge’ or ‘received wisdom’, by which I mean that they are now so embedded in the oral tradition of various groups and individuals in Glastonbury that they tend to be stated as uncontested fact. In addition, there are books (such as Glastonbury: Maker of Myths (1997) by long term Glastonbury resident Francis Howard-Gordon), magazine articles and websites which assume, repeat or support this ‘common knowledge’. Occasionally people will reference assertions back to characters influential in Glastonbury in the twentieth century, such as Frederick Bligh Bond, Dion Fortune, Wellesley Tudor Pole and Katharine Maltwood (see Benham 1993), or modern writers including Geoffrey Ashe, John Michell and Kathy Jones. For the most part, though, the varied statements made about Glastonbury’s past and present, its connections with a variety of myths, and its local and global significance tend to be presented as unassailable or self-evident fact, for which more conventionally recognised proof is not deemed necessary.3 As will become clear, the making of extravagant but largely unauthenticated claims for Glastonbury’s status is not a new phenomenon. Locating Glastonbury In conventional terms, Glastonbury is a small town (population ca. 8500) in rural Somerset, in the South West of England. However, some consider Glastonbury to be the point where the veil between this world and the ‘other world’ is at its thinnest. It exerts an attraction for a variety of spiritual seekers and scholars on account of the many myths that surround it and the myriad claims made for it (Bowman 1993a, 2000; Ivakhiv 2001). In effect, Glastonbury is not one place but many; it is a place of parallel pasts and presents. Normally we might think of the history of a place in terms of ‘stacking’, a vertical structure whereby

2 When no specific reference is given for a quotation, it comes from fieldwork tapes or notes. I am grateful to all who have given me the benefit of their time, knowledge, experiences, insights and company. 3 On one occasion I asked about evidence relating to the Druidic university which many claim existed in Glastonbury. The person to whom I was speaking replied, “You mean, observable phenomena?” in a tone which made it clear that I had asked a rather stupid question.

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one layer rests on and to some extent obliterates the previous layer. In Glastonbury, while there is a popularly perceived chronology of events (patriarchy replacing matriarchy, Christianity replacing Paganism), there is also a horizontal structure of simultaneity whereby different pasts are being revived to take their place in the present, at the same time in the same location. Sometimes complementing, frequently interacting, and on occasion competing with each other (see Ivakhiv 2001; Bowman 2004), these parallel universes provide case-studies of how the local and the global are (re)interpreted and (re)negotiated in this context. In popularly accepted chronological order, some believe that Glastonbury was a significant prehistoric centre of Goddess worship, confirmed for present-day devotees by figures of the Goddess they discern in the landscape and the existence in the Christian era of strong devotion to St. Bridget,4 widely regarded in some circles as a Christianised form of the Goddess. (Glastonbury resident and author Kathy Jones asserts, “Where we find St. Bridget we know that the goddess Bridie was once honoured” [2000:16].) For others, Glastonbury’s significance lies in the claim that it was the site of a great Druidic university, a centre of learning to which people flocked from all over Europe and beyond. There are those who claim that in Glastonbury the Druids had anticipated the coming of Christianity, and that here the transition from the old religion to the new was smooth; indeed, there is even speculation that Jesus himself attended the Druidic university. Beyond the prehistoric period, Glastonbury’s Christian history is contested (see Carley 1996) and has relied heavily on folk religion, which is defined by folklorist Don Yoder as, “the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside the strictly theological and liturgical forms of the official religion” (1974:14). For many Christians, past and present, Glastonbury’s status has rested on it being the ‘cradle of English Christianity’, the point at which Christianity took root in England, allegedly brought there by Joseph of Arimathea (the person who provided a tomb for Christ after the crucifixion) who established the first Christian church in the British Isles in Glastonbury. It is claimed that Joseph arrived in Glastonbury after the crucifixion with a staff which he thrust into the ground on

4 St Brighid was a sixth century lrish saint, foundress of a celebrated convent at Cili Dara (Kildare), Ireland. The saint’s name in modem Irish is Brid, and in anglicised form appears as Bride, Brigit or Bridget.

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arrival at Wearyall Hill; this took root and became the Glastonbury thorn, which flowers twice a year, in spring and around Christmas. (Each year this legend is celebrated in the Holy Thorn Ceremony held at the Anglican St John’s Church, attended by local schoolchildren, and a sprig of the Christmas flowering thorn is sent to the Queen.) Joseph is also reputed to have brought the chalice used at the Last Supper, the Grail, although in some versions of the legend he brought containers holding the blood (and possibly the sweat) of Christ. Even more significantly, many believe that Jesus himself came to Glastonbury with St Joseph, and furthermore that he may have spent some time living there before he commenced his ministry (see Bowman 2003–2004). The words of the eighteenth century poet and visionary William Blake, “And did those feet in ancient times Walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the Holy Lamb of God On England’s pleasant pastures seen?” are widely thought to express this belief. More recently (though rather less well known), Van Morrison’s Summertime in England contains the line “Did you ever hear about Jesus walkin’, Jesus walkin’ down by Avalon?”, demonstrating the continuing currency of this idea. Traditionally—though questionably—connected with Celtic saints such as Patrick, Bridget, Columba, and David (see Carley 1996:99–112), there are those who regard Glastonbury as a bastion of Celtic Christianity, suggesting that here was a more nature-oriented, egalitarian, spiritually intuitive form of Christianity than the Roman version later ‘imposed’. Some claim this was because of the insights and esoteric knowledge incorporated from Druids who became Christians. Glastonbury has also been identified with the Isle of Avalon, the place where in Arthurian legend King Arthur was taken for healing after his last battle, and where some believe he lies sleeping, waiting to return at some time of great national emergency. The connection between Joseph and Arimathea and the Grail, and the centrality of the quest for the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend are seen as significant, while the fortuitous twelfth century ‘discovery’ of the body of Arthur in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey seemed to confirm the popular association between Arthur, Glastonbury, and Avalon. Many feel that this connection has been reinforced with the 1920s ‘rediscovery’ by artist and sculptor Katharine Maltwood of the Glastonbury Zodiac, a huge planisphere ten miles in diameter in the landscape around Glastonbury, hailed as the original Round Table of Arthurian myth (see Maltwood 1964).


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By the Middle Ages Glastonbury Abbey was a major pilgrimage centre, boasting a huge collection of relics and a fine library; the Abbey’s Lady Chapel was allegedly built on the site of Joseph’s original church. The Abbey was brutally suppressed at the time of the Reformation, and fell into ruins. However, there is a tradition that Austin Ringwode, last of the Glastonbury monks, made the deathbed prophecy that, “The Abbey will one day be repaired and rebuilt for the like worship which has ceased; and then peace and plenty will for a long time abound” (Ashe 1957:362). Some feel that if the Abbey could be rebuilt, it would restore not only the spiritual wellbeing of the nation but ‘Britain’s greatness.’ From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influences from the Celtic revival, Theosophy and Esotericism were felt in Glastonbury (Benham 1993), and from the 1970s it gained a media reputation as a centre for ‘hippies’, ‘New Age Travellers’, and people seeking alternative lifestyles and spiritual experiences. Regarded as the epicentre of New Age in England, some see Glastonbury’s significance in terms of leylines, as a node where leylines converge, a centre of earth energies. In global terms, Glastonbury is regarded as the ‘heart chakra’ of planet earth, or as one informant put it, ‘the beginning of where the spiritual energy comes into the physical plane’. In the wake of numerous reports of UFO sightings and crop circles in the area, some feel that it is also an important communication point for extraterrestrial contact. Serial Centrality From this brief sketch of perceptions of Glastonbury among different spiritual seekers, one thing becomes very clear: whatever the prevailing myth or worldview, Glastonbury somehow claims a central place in it. Glastonbury was a major centre of devotion to the Goddess in the British Isles, it is claimed. There is not just the assertion that there were Druids in Glastonbury; Glastonbury was the great British (even European) Druidic centre of learning. The Christian church at Glastonbury was the original, the first church in England; the founder of Christianity, Christ himself, came to Glastonbury. Some of the most significant figures of the Celtic Church (such as Patrick, Bridget, David and Columba) are said to have had Glastonbury connections. In the context of Arthurian legend, Glastonbury is Avalon and Arthur

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himself is here. In terms of English nationalism, the nation’s greatness can be restored by rebuilding the Abbey in Glastonbury, and as some believe not only that Christ came here during his lifetime, but that he will return to Glastonbury, Glastonbury’s central position seems assured for the future. It comes as no surprise, then, that in the context of highly globalised contemporary spirituality, Glastonbury is not just on one leyline, but at the significant convergence of a number of them; it is ‘heart chakra’ of planet earth. The claims simply get bigger as the world and worldviews expand. Glastonbury has consistently localised the global and globalised the local, locating itself in a prominent position, pulling in and projecting out significance. Of course that has happened elsewhere, but this ‘hyperlocalisation’ seems particularly marked in Glastonbury at present. For while at one level the world may be a single place, currently Glastonbury is the centre of a number of worlds, because of the way Glastonbury functions as a multiple choice or multivalent location. Just as in Britain there are Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) which are prized and protected for either the rarity or the diversity of the flora and fauna found there, there may well be an argument for declaring Glastonbury an alternative SSSI (Site of Special Spiritual Interest) on similar grounds. Locating Vernacular Religion and Contemporary Spirituality Leonard Primiano defines vernacular religion as “religion as it is lived: as humans encounter, understand, interpret and practice it” (1995:44). To study it requires “an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the religious lives of individuals with special attention to the process of religious belief, the verbal, behavioural, and material expressions of religious belief, and the ultimate object of religious belief ” (idem). That is, the focus is on what people actually believe, how they actually behave, and how this is expressed in everyday life rather than on some idealised notion of what they should be believing or doing. This is a context in which cultural tradition, informal transmission and personal experience of efficacy are likely to be as important as authoritative texts or religious professionals. This is undoubtedly the case in Glastonbury, and any downplaying of this aspect would lead to an incomplete understanding of ideas and events there.


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More generally, if we are thinking about the negotiation of the global and the local within religion, both past and present, it is imperative to take into account vernacular religion, for vernacular religion is very much about locating religion in everyday life, about rooting religion not just in different cultural contexts but in myriad physical locations. This is something that religions have traditionally done in a variety of ways. When the Romans reached Bath in South West England, for example, the hot springs became dedicated to the hybrid deity Sulis Minerva, a combination of the Roman Goddess of wisdom and healing Minerva, and the Celtic deity Sul—a good example of localising the global, and globalising the local. Meanwhile, for Christmas 2002 there was a selfconsciously Venetian nativity scene in St Mark’s Square, with the Holy Family in a gondola, being visited not by shepherds and wisemen, but by gondoliers and doges. But localisation has been inherent in the spread of global religions, far beyond the simple addition of cultural trimmings. Catholic churches around the world contain the Stations of the Cross which, especially on Good Friday, are not just reproducing, but relocating the Via Dolorosa, so that people can join Jesus on that last journey in Jerusalem. Likewise, in the wake of the apparition of Our Lady to Bernadette in a grotto outside the old town of Lourdes in 1858, Lourdes Grottoes began to be replicated in churches in Europe, America and elsewhere. These were frequently built by priests or parishioners who had had the experience of visiting Lourdes and who wanted to enable parishioners who would not be able to make the journey to have that experience at home. This phenomenon might be considered an example of the global becoming local, the local becoming global and then re-localised or relocated. It is certainly worth remembering that virtual pilgrimage and time-space compression are not new ideas, and that the relationship between the local and the global can take a variety of forms: Local

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marion i. bowman Spiritual Shopping and Consumer Choice

As I have pointed out elsewhere (Bowman 2000), few (if any) places in the UK enjoy such high status among believers and spiritual seekers of so many different persuasions as Glastonbury. Thousands visit Glastonbury for the Anglican and Catholic pilgrimages; for courses at the Isle of Avalon Foundation (which sees itself as the successor to the Druidic university); for the array of healing on offer; for the annual Goddess Conference or the Glastonbury Symposium on Cereology (Crop Circles); for ritual activity at various times on the eightfold calendar widely observed by ‘free range’ pagans, Druids and Wiccans; to visit Britain’s first officially registered Goddess Temple; and as individual pilgrims, spiritual seekers and tourists. In addition to groups already mentioned, Glastonbury has attracted devotees of Sai Baba, members of ISKCON, Baha’is, Sufis of various sorts, and at least three people claiming either to be, to channel or to represent Buddha Maitreya in recent years. People come not just from Britain but from all over Europe, North America, the Antipodes and elsewhere. In addition, many more know of Glastonbury through countless myths and memorates, novels set in Glastonbury (such as the highly influential Mists of Avalon by Marion Bradley), books, articles, songs, television features and increasing numbers of Glastonbury-related websites. Spiritual seekers can also be keen consumers. Medieval Glastonbury grew up around the Abbey, with businesses developing to cater to the varied needs of the people who came to visit, feeding them, housing them and selling them mementos and relics. Just as a medal or statue from a pilgrimage site is popularly regarded as more powerful or sacred, now there is an assumption that the crystal bought in Glastonbury and bathed in Chalice Well water might be especially precious or empowering. For those seeking accommodation, some Bed and Breakfast establishments offer particular types of healing or meditation to discerning clients to enhance their stay in Avalon.5 I mentioned in relationship to vernacular religion the importance of personal experience of efficacy, a theme very much in evidence in contemporary spirituality. The contemporary spiritual seeker has a ‘toolkit’ approach to spirituality, seeking whatever spiritual tools ‘work’ for her

5 Hannah Drown’s MA Thesis (Drown 2001) offers fascinating insights into the ‘alternative’ Bed and Breakfast scene in Glastonbury.


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or him at any given time. In pursuit of the individual spiritual quest, globalisation undoubtedly provides a global toolbox (some might say a Pandora’s box) of vocabulary, artefacts, and praxis. Glastonbury bears witness to the global nature and commodification of contemporary spirituality, with the availability of “tools for personal and planetary healing” at Maitreya Monastery (formerly known as Archangel Michael’s Soul Therapy Centre); didgeridoos; Tibetan singing bowls; “Feng Shui products”; and images of assorted Bodhisattvas, Hindu deities and ancient goddesses. Shops such as The Goddess and the Green Man, Starchild Apothecary, Stone Age (“To promote the practical use of crystals and gemstones for healing and transformation”), Man Myth and Magick (“A shop to build your dreams on”), Yin Yang (“Ancient Principles— Beautiful Solutions”), Natural Earthling (“for dance, yoga and meditation products”), and The Psychic Piglet cater to a wide range of needs and tastes, and the spiritual shopping opportunities presented by such outlets are part of Glastonbury’s attraction for its varied visitors. It will already be obvious that globalised consumer choice is not confined to material goods, as the number of different religious groups and spiritual interests to be found there indicates. There are numerous types of healing available (including crystal therapy, “Zen Shiatsu”, past life regression, Reiki, Hopi ear candle therapy and shamanic healing); assorted forms of yoga and meditation (including “shamanic moving meditation” and “Osho kundalini meditation”); and the more active can enjoy ecstatic dance, belly dancing, and Dances of Universal Peace. People can experience Sufi Zikr, Darshan with His Holiness Gyalwa Jampa, or “Shamanic journeying”, and they can attend such events as a “Kabbalah Weekend” or a Wolfclan Teaching Lodge. In such a context it is inevitable that the local and the global interact, as in the case of the Glastonbury dream catcher. The dream catcher is an item ‘borrowed’ from Native American tradition, increasingly common as both ethnic chic and spiritual tool. Looking something like a stylised circular spider’s web, it is said to catch or filter out bad dreams. However, typical of the creative ‘spiritual cottage industries’ that flourish there, I was given a ‘Glastonbury dream catcher,’ the web incorporating beads of blue, green and purple, with two pale turquoise feathers attached (all considered very ‘Aquarian’ colours) and it came with a label from the maker claiming that it was “specially charged with Glastonbury energy.” The toolkit approach to the spiritual quest and the global gleanings available to the contemporary spiritual searcher can occasion stress as

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well as opportunity. With so much to choose from, and with the individual responsible for personal spiritual success, in some ways there is no excuse for a spiritual seeker not to get it right. There are those who say that Glastonbury acts as spiritual magnifying glass, so that things are bigger, bolder, more extreme in Glastonbury—and that includes good and bad, positive and negative. While many people feel they have found their spiritual destiny in Glastonbury, many come to Glastonbury with questions, conditions and problems that cannot be resolved easily. Drug addiction and mental health issues undoubtedly are part of the Glastonbury scene. The widespread perception of Glastonbury as a place outside conventional normality is wryly summed up in the badge for sale in one Glastonbury shop which reads “Glastonbury is an Open Air Lunatic Asylum.” Bryan Turner’s question (summarising Roland Robertson), “How is a stable self possible when permanent reflectiveness is a necessary consequence of global relativisation?” (1994:112) seems to have some relevance here. Glastonbury is able to function as a global spiritual and experiential bazaar in part because the prevailing ethos of contemporary religiosity encourages spiritually shopping around and creative consumerism to create and develop the personally-crafted package that is the individual quest. However, such trends are amplified in Glastonbury by its claims to be significant in or connected with a variety of world religious traditions. Brahmin, Sheikh and Buddha in Glastonbury If we are thinking about continuity and change in relation to the local and the global in Glastonbury, what is most striking at present is scale; the conceptual world with which Glastonbury engages is a very much bigger and more varied place than simply Christian Glastonbury or Arthur’s Avalon. The extent to which ‘eastern’ products, praxis and philosophies enjoy popularity in Glastonbury can to some degree be seen as indicative of the ‘Easternisation’ (Campbell 1999) of much contemporary spiritual discourse. However, for some, the perception of Glastonbury as a great Druidic centre also plays a part in establishing its Indo-European credentials and to some extent explains why it might be ‘natural’ to adopt such ideas and practices. Since the eighteenth century, some writers and


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practitioners have drawn connections between Hinduism and Druidry by identifying Druids and Brahmins with one another (see Robinson 2000). That this trend continues is indicated by the following extract from the Druid Directory: Like the Brahmins, the Druids of old were teachers, priests, doctors, historians, poets, prophets, guardians of lore and givers of law. Brahmin and Druid were both noted for their devotion to the concept of transcendent Truth . . . As far as we know, the religion practised among the tribal peoples of pre-Roman Europe had no name, just as adherents of what we call Hinduism refer to their faith simply as “the eternal religion.” Again like Hinduism, this religion seems to have consisted not so much of a uniform system of practice and belief as of innumerable local cults based around local or tribal deities. The rites of these cults were overseen by members of the Druid caste, much as those of Hinduism are overseen by Brahmins. (Shallcrass & Restall Orr 2001:8–9)

However, Glastonbury’s global significance is more specifically affirmed by its incorporation into the beliefs, praxis and worldview of two groups drawing on very different religious traditions. While a variety of Sufi groups have had a presence in Glastonbury over the years, currently the most publicly active Sufis there is the Naqshbandi-Haqqaniyya of Shaikh Nazim al-Haqqani al-Qubrusi (see Draper 2002:199–209). In 1999 Sheikh Nazim visited Glastonbury and declared that it was “the spiritual heart of Britain.” He felt it necessary for the group to have a presence in Glastonbury, and this was achieved through opening the Healing Hearts Charity shop run by “Zero”, a Swedish convert who is the local group leader. Sheikh Nazim and his Naqshbandi Tariqa are convinced that Christ came to Glastonbury, as we read on their website: Perhaps the most important thing is that the Prophet Isa (peace be upon him), Jesus Christ, for whatever reason, came here a lot. This has been verified by Sheikh Nazim who said that by the power of the phrase “Bismillahi Rahmani Rahim” Isa was able to transport his whole being here. He left his mark by building, along with Yusuf/Joseph of Arimethea, the famous “wattle and daub” or “old” church. (accessed 1 September 2003)

They feel that the Abbey is the holiest ground in Glastonbury, and believe that when Christ returns to earth he will re-appear in Glastonbury. Thus the Christian vernacular tradition of Jesus in Glastonbury is used to connect Glastonbury with Sufism and Sufism with Glastonbury.

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Similarly, the myth of Jesus in Glastonbury is intricately woven into the worldview of the American believed by his followers to be an incarnation of both Jesus and Buddha, formerly known as His Holiness Tulku Buddha Maitreya Rinpoche, now His Holiness Gyalwa Jampa (Sanat Maitreya Kurnara), Director of the Church of Shambhala Vajradhara Maitreya Sangha (see http://www.tibetanfoundation. org/introduction.htm). In an interview in September 2003, His Holiness confirmed that Jesus did indeed spend time in Glastonbury as a young man, after which he went to India and then Tibet. He claims that it is part of “traditional knowledge” in Tibetan Buddhism that Jesus not only visited Tibet then but reincarnated there on a number of occasions. This explains why in some respects such as hierarchical structure, monasticism and the use of prayer beads, Tibetan Buddhism is “almost identical to the Catholic church, or Christianity.” Self-consciously repeating the previous pattern of events, His Holiness felt that in this incarnation it was important for him to come to Glastonbury before starting his work in Tibet, where he claims responsibility for supporting and restoring a number of Buddhist monasteries. In addition to regularly holding Darshan in Glastonbury, it is now his ambition to bring increasing numbers of Tibetan monks with knowledge of the teachings of Jesus in various incarnations to Maitreya Monastery (previously called Archangel Michael’s Soul Therapy Centre), located in a former church in Glastonbury. This will be the first step towards transforming all of Glastonbury into a monastic settlement, one aspect of His Holiness’s ambition to restore the status and practice of monasticism worldwide so that people may realise their true spiritual potential. Here we see the vernacular tradition of Jesus in Glastonbury being utilised to assert connections between East and West, Jesus and Tibetan Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism and Glastonbury. Negotiating the Local and the Global We have established that many people in Glastonbury see themselves as part of global culture, and are at ease with the idea that the local and the global interact fruitfully to enhance individuals’ spiritual lives. However, spiritual consumers face ethical issues such as where the fine line lies between appreciation and appropriation, when individual desires need to be modified by environmental concern, and the extent


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to which it is necessary or acceptable to commodify spirituality. Some of these issues and tensions have appeared in relation to the annual Glastonbury Goddess Conference. Goddess spirituality in Glastonbury is very buoyant and visible at present, from The Goddess and the Green Man shop on the High Street, to the Glastonbury Goddess Temple which opened in 2002 and became England’s first officially registered Goddess Temple in 2003. The first Glastonbury Goddess Conference was held in 1996, co-organised by Kathy Jones, who has written extensively on the Goddess in Glastonbury, and Tyna Redpath, owner of the Goddess and the Green Man. Now a Glastonbury ‘institution’, the conference regularly attracts not only people based in the Glastonbury area and other parts of Britain but an eclectic mix of attendees from mainland Europe, the USA and the Antipodes. An exuberant, international gathering, the organisers feel it gives the wider Goddess community the opportunity to come together from all over the world, sharing ideas, insights and enthusiasm; they also hope that what people find in Glastonbury will inspire them to go home and start their own temples and other Goddess related activities. As the 2004 conference programme stated: Together we are riding the crest of the wave of the Goddess’s return into the world, creating new forms for Her expression. The Glastonbury Goddess Conference is one of the premier Goddess events in the world where we can gather together to express our love for Her and encourage others to do likewise in their own lands and cultures. (p. 1)

Already the conference has evolved a number of ‘traditions’, the most public being the “Goddess in the Cart” procession during which a variety of effigies of the Goddess has been paraded through the streets of Glastonbury (Bowman 2004). In recent years the procession has featured large colourful banners depicting a range of female deities, reflecting the tendency within the contemporary Goddess movement to regard as aspects of the universal sacred female all Celtic, Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, Roman, Indian, African and other indigenous goddesses, Bodhisattvas in female form and the Virgin Mary. Created by American artist Lydia Ruyle, these banners have been ‘taken all over the world’, to every continent, a powerful physical and symbolic expression of the global nature of the Goddess. However, tensions between the local and the global in the context of the Goddess movement, and issues of economics and environment,

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were thrown up by what has become known in these circles as the “Bad Fairies” incident at the first Goddess Conference.6 The so-called “Bad Fairies” were a group of women, including radical activists who had been involved in such protests as the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (an American military base in the UK). They marched into the Saturday night conference banquet behind a banner proclaiming “The Goddess Can Not be Bought, She is Not For Sale.” Colourfully dressed, some with painted faces, playing drums and other instruments, the Bad Fairies began chanting, shouting, running around and generally disrupting proceedings. This behaviour shook, shocked and outraged many of those present, but consequently there was sympathy for some of the points the protesters were making. One of the main issues was that of “spiritual materialism”, what was perceived as selling the Goddess to those who could afford to buy her. The Bad Fairies felt that women who could not afford the conference fee were being excluded, although Glastonbury was their spiritual home too. Other issues related to race, class and elitism, due to the mainly white, middle class attendance of the conference, reflecting the charge that the Goddess spirituality movement is a predominantly white, middleclass, middle-aged, European/North American phenomenon, neither representative of nor involved with the less privileged women of the world. Some adjustments were made in the aftermath of the protest. Although by 2004 a fully inclusive ticket covering the whole week of conference, fringe events, and the Goddess Masque and Buffet cost £272 (ca. €400/$500), for example, reduced rate tickets were available for the economically disadvantaged and it was possible to work at the conference in exchange for a ticket. Tension between the local and the global was and still is raised by the issue of people travelling to Glastonbury to celebrate the Goddess. The organisers of the Goddess Conference include in the programme “Goddess Ground”, outlining the principles on which the conference is run and the basis on which decisions are made. These include, “To invite women and men from all over the world who love the Goddess to come to Glastonbury to join us in celebrating her living presence upon the Isle of Avalon at Her festival of Lammas and to create an open,

6 A number of people have mentioned this incident to me, but I am also indebted to Sarah Watkins for some details from her account of this incident and its aftermath (see Watkins 2000:32–149).


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loving space in which we can all experience Her” (2004 Glastonbury Goddess Conference Programme, p. 2). Nevertheless, some eco-feminists find the international connection particularly difficult, for it means that for many getting to the conference involves air travel. As one woman pointed out, “Long distance tourism is now the second most destructive thing on the planet after the Arms trade. It [the Conference] therefore seems contradictory and antithetical to Mother Earth and love for and protection of her” (Watkins 2000:141). In many ways the Bad Fairies incident was akin to an anti-globalisation protest in a spiritual setting. It gave pause for thought and highlighted some of the issues in the complicated negotiation between the local and the global both in Glastonbury and in the broader context of contemporary spirituality, not least the whole phenomenon of international ‘spiritual tourism.’ The Local, the Global and Sacred Space It is a constant paradox for a variety of believers that while all the world is deemed sacred, some places are regarded as more sacred or special than others. As we have already established, Glastonbury exerts an attraction for a wide variety of pilgrims and spiritual tourists (Bowman 1993a) and as such is a multivalent, contested location. Disparate ‘travellers with a purpose’ may be attracted to different locations, or, in this case, view the same sites through different spiritual lenses. In Glastonbury there is sacredness by association, which for a variety of Christians would relate to traditions locating Joseph and Jesus there. As we have seen, this view is also shared by Sufis of Sheikh Nazim’s Naqshbandiyya Tariqa. For some, Arthur would play a similar role. As one self-styled “New-Ager” told me, “the whole idea that he lies here sleeping and will rise again. Some people interpret that as meaning he’ll rise again to lead us into a New Age, a new cycle, a new beginning: a new phase in world evolution.” In the realm of popular culture, a website giving a glossary entry for the Van Morrison song “Jesus Walking Down By Avalon” concludes: “Although Jesus may or may not have actually walked down by Avalon, it is far more likely that Van Morrison walked down by Glastonbury. . . . Anyone planning a tour of important Van places should put Glastonbury high on their list” (accessed 15 March 2004). Thus we find yet another

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reason why people might be drawn to Glastonbury. Undoubtedly one obvious but important reason people come to Glastonbury is that valued others have come there before. Alternatively, or additionally, sacredness or specialness might be associated with some aspect of the landscape that attracts attention and awe, which is also undoubtedly the case in Glastonbury. Successful pilgrimage or sacred sites often tend to have a hill, a spring, or a tree, for example. Perhaps predictably, Glastonbury boasts at least two springs, two lots of trees, and two hills; in physical terms, it is extremely well-endowed. However, given the context, the associational or inherent sacredness of various landscape features in Glastonbury is subject to a variety of interpretations, involving different degrees of localisation, globalisation and glocalisation. Certain aspects of the landscape have fairly clear associations: the Glastonbury Thorn is special primarily for Christians because of the Joseph of Arimathea connection (even though some associate it with Celtic tree worship), while two ancient oak trees, known as Gog and Magog, are said to be the last remnants of a Druid Grove. But at the foot of the Tor, the chalybeate Chalice Well is sacred to some for its association with the Grail (its red waters representing the blood of Christ shed for humanity) while for others it is clearly the menstrual flow of the Goddess. Opposite Chalice Well is the calcite staining White Spring, which for a period in the 1990s became ‘revived’ as an ancient Pagan rag well. Some see the proximity of the red and white waters as indicative of the balance of male and female energies (red representing blood, white semen) associated with the Michael and Mary leylines which are said to intertwine at the Tor; for others, as red and white are the colours of the Fairy King Gwynn Ap Nudd, the waters indicate the site of the entrance to his kingdom beneath the Tor. Wearyall Hill is of interest to many Christians as the site of Joseph’s arrival in Glastonbury, the spot where the original staff took root, while for others it is significant as one of the two fish making the sign of Pisces on the Glastonbury Zodiac. Glastonbury Tor (the curiously contoured and conical hill which is the town’s most striking landscape feature) is the most speculated upon aspect of Glastonbury topography, with both local and global associations. The Tor is significant to Catholics as the site of the hanging of Abbot Whiting and two monks at the brutal dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey, while His Holiness Gyalwa Jampa claims that Glastonbury Tor is one of the points where God’s will enters the earth (two other such


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points being the Great Pyramid and the Washington Monument). The Tor is variously regarded as the spiral castle of Celtic legend; a Goddess figure; the Grail Castle; a crystal filled communication beacon for extra-terrestrials; and part of the phoenix figure representing Aquarius on the Glastonbury Zodiac. Some see the Tor as a prehistoric, threedimensional ceremonial maze, and in typical Glastonbury fashion great claims are made for it. According to the 2004 Glastonbury Goddess Conference Fringe Events publicity material, for example, “To the Hopi, the labrynth [sic] is a symbol of the Earth Goddess, and it has been found etched into rocks from Arizona to Australia. Here in Glastonbury, the Tor is the largest three-dimensional labrynth [sic] yet known.” Two extreme views of sacred sites might help to explain Glastonbury’s attractiveness, and these might be summarised as ‘empty vessel’ versus ‘cornucopia.’ Eade and Sallnow claim: The power of a shrine . . . derives in large part from its character almost as a religious void, a ritual space capable of accommodating diverse meanings and practices . . . This, in the final analysis, is what confers upon a major shrine its essential universalistic character: its capacity to absorb and reflect a multiplicity of religious discourses, to be able to offer a variety of clients what each of them desires. . . . The sacred centre then, in this perspective, appears as a vessel into which pilgrims devoutly pour their hopes, prayers and aspirations. (2000:15)

At the other end of the spectrum is not empty vessel but cornucopia. Within contemporary spirituality, particularly some branches of paganism, we find the resurgence of animism, which means that there is no such thing as an inanimate object. Similarly, for many people now there can be no such thing as an empty space. As the late Anthony Roberts (alternative publisher and earth mysteries writer) put it, The holy ground of Glastonbury holds many strange secrets. They are heavily festooned with in the rich (often gaudy) accoutrements of myth and magic, but they all resolve themselves around a uniformly synergic nexus. This is that the Glastonbury terrain, with its physical and meta-physical alchemies, is a vast orrery and teaching environment for revealing (and enhancing) all that is spiritual in the nature of mankind. This blending of the physically symbolic with the symbolically physical this writer has termed the art of geomythics. (1992:18)

In Glastonbury, the sacred is felt to communicate itself through the Tor and Chalice Well, through landscape figures of the Goddess, through leylines, through the ‘buzz’ of energy felt by many there—although there is clearly room for personal interpretation as to the nature of what is

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communicated. The landscape may speak to people in Glastonbury, but it tells a number of different stories. With the idea of the land almost as active participant in the interpretation of it, we find one of the most significant features of contemporary spirituality in the negotiation between the local and the global, interconnectedness. Interconnectedness Interconnectedness is a powerful leitmotif in contemporary globalised spirituality. As I have commented elsewhere (Bowman 2001), this interconnectedness takes a variety of forms and operates in a variety of ways. There is the interconnectedness of past and present, whereby people seek to connect with ancient wisdom (such as Druidic knowledge) and what is regarded as the ‘timeless wisdom’ of indigenous peoples, all of which are considered important in recapturing a previous era of global harmony, when humanity enjoyed a holistic and symbiotic relationship with nature and the planet. Past life remembrance and ideas of reincarnation are seen to operate in connecting past and present. Some regard the former leader of the Glastonbury Order of Druids as a reincarnation of Merlin, for example, and believe that a “karmic cluster” of “King” Arthur Pendragon (originally John Timothy Rothwell) and his knights have been brought together at this time of national spiritual emergency. Connections between the seen and the unseen realms are perceived and pursued in assorted ways in Glastonbury. When Frederick Bligh Bond was excavating Glastonbury Abbey early in the twentieth century, he claimed to be receiving guidance, via a medium, from a medieval monk. There are now courses on working with angels and workshops to put people in touch with their spirit-guide; at one point it was even possible to have spirit guide portraits painted. In 2003 “World Wide Web” (a sculpture of seven willow webs) was erected in Chalice Well Gardens, of which artist Freddie Foosiya wrote: “The seven webs represent the seven cycles of creation and the seven major chakras (energy centres) within the body. Chalice Well is part of a worldwide web of places dedicated to peace and the awakening of humanity to the realization of our oneness with nature.” Many in Glastonbury are familiar with the environmentalist adage “Act locally, think globally.” It has become almost a cliché in alternative circles to point out that what the space exploration of the twentieth


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century gave us was a picture of the whole world, of the world as one entity. After that, the logic runs, it was impossible not to view the world as a single place. James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis” (1982), regarding the earth and all life forms upon it as a living, interactive, self-regulating organism, is widely quoted to support this holistic worldview. As one Glastonbury resident told me, “There are more and more people now that are just accepting this, that Glastonbury is the heart centre. If Gaia is the living planet and is literally the body of some kind of intelligence, then that intelligence must have energy centres, and often these coincide with holy places, whether they’re Mecca, or Ayers Rock, or Glastonbury.” Thus many believe that what happens in one part of the world—especially in ‘special’ places like Glastonbury—can have an impact on and significance for the whole, both physically and spiritually. In terms of physical interconnectedness and the relationship between the local and the global, there are two particularly significant phenomena: sacred geometry (often referred to as gematria) and earth energies. Both sacred geometry and earth energies are perceived to have connective roles between different eras, localities, cultures and, worldviews, and are used to support the idea that literally ‘beneath the surface’ seemingly disparate structures and spiritual outlooks have some common elements or are in some way related if we can see past the superficial differences. (It might be argued that this is simply relativism on a global scale.) It is claimed that the sacred geometry of Stonehenge and Glastonbury Abbey are linked, for example, and furthermore that the ground plan of Glastonbury Abbey conforms in terms of gematria to that of the New Jerusalem outlined in the Book of Revelation, chapter 21 (see Michell 1992). Draper notes that among followers of Sheikh Nazim at one point there was speculation that “the Lady Chapel in the Abbey had similar dimensions to the Ka’ba in Makka” (2002:209). A figure of particular importance in Glastonbury gematria is the vesica piscis, two interlocking circles, representing “the interpenetration of the material and immaterial worlds or the yin and the yang where the conscious and unconscious meet” (Howard-Gordon 1997:68). The shape of the intersection has been associated both with the fish of early Christian symbolism and with the yoni of Hinduism. In terms of connecting the local and the global, one of the most striking quasi-physical expressions of interconnectedness is the concept of leylines, perceived as lines or identifiable channels of earth energy and power. Leylines are envisaged as connecting places: they tie together

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apparently historically, geographically, culturally and religiously disparate places like Glastonbury, Stonehenge, Ayers Rock (Uluru), Mecca and the Great Pyramid into a global package of earth energy, power and sacredness. The sacred places of the world are literally bound together. Predictably, Glastonbury does not merely lie on one leyline; it is said to be at the node of a number of leylines. Indeed, many argue that this convergence of leylines is what gives Glastonbury its special energy, its healing powers, its ‘buzz.’ Ideas of interconnectedness are also embedded in concepts of earth healing, and the ability—indeed duty—some perceive of acting locally at significant places like Glastonbury in order to have a global, spiritual impact. His Holiness Gyalwa Jampa, for example, claims that, “if holy people go back to holy sites, the site re-awakens and the whole earth can be healed” (interview 2 September 2003), and that is one reason he feels he has to be active in Glastonbury. On 16 August 1987, there was the great global project of the Harmonic Convergence, when hundreds gathered on Glastonbury Tor as people attempted to ‘activate’ sacred sites around the world.7 Many of the ideas of interconnectedness discussed were incorporated in July 2004 during the Glastonbury Goddess Conference in an extended ceremonial pilgrimage to four sites within Glastonbury specifically “to generate healing energy and to radiate it to all parts of Brigit’s Isles and beyond” (2004 Goddess Conference Programme, p. 7). The plan for the Earth Ceremony on Chalice Hill (“the Great Mother’s rounded and ever pregnant belly”) was typical of the day’s events: As we face outwards to all the directions we will sing our Earth Chant and send clearing and healing energy outwards from Avalon through the meridians and energy lines of the Earth, which is Her sacred body, to the whole of the land which is Brigit’s Isles, and connecting to the land of Europe and to all the continents. We will send healing energy to all the creatures who live in and on the earth, to the badgers, boars and foxes, to the earthworms, moles and snakes, to the earth elementals, gnomes and faeries. (2004 Goddess Conference Programme, p. 9). 7 While accepting the idea of earth energies, feminist Goddess artist and anti-New Age author Monica Sjöö saw a far more sinister agenda behind the Harmonic Convergence: “New Agers travel the world to sacred places where they attempt to manipulate Earth’s sacred energies, planting crystals at standing stones and in similar places. Their plan is to facilitate the entry into this realm of extraterrestrials by changing the energy patterns of the Earth, and this, not Earth healing, was also the purpose of the so-called ‘Harmonic Convergence’ in August 1987” (Sjöö 1998:5).


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At Chalice Hill, the priestess said the healing energy was being sent out though the leylines, to the stone circles, to the crop circles and out to all the world. The next morning, conference delegates were told that they had truly sent their and Brigit’s healing out across the land, and that, “Something has changed in the landscape because of the work we did yesterday.” Continuity or Change? One effect of globalisation, it is commonly said, is to make the world a single place—and we have seen how certain trends in contemporary spirituality foster that. However Glastonbury simultaneously maintains within it a variety of worlds and worldviews. These different worlds can interact with each other in various ways, for example in the mixing and merging of myths: Jesus was in Glastonbury to attend the Druidic University, or to walk the leylines from which he gained his powers as a healer; King Arthur will rise in Glastonbury to lead us into the New Age. As Hervieu-Léger puts it, “In the fluid, mobile domain of modern belief liberated from the hold of all embracing institutions of believing, all symbols are interchangeable and capable of being combined and transposed. All syncretisms are possible, all retreads imaginable” (2000:75). In Glastonbury there is undoubtedly a tendency towards ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. No one version of Glastonbury has a complete monopoly, and although the current simultaneity of belief and practice might seem very much a product of contemporary spirituality, I would suggest that it finds antecedents in vernacular religion. For example, there is a story that I have been told on a number of occasions, both in relation to fairy belief and to the Tor, concerning either St Collen (a seventh century Welsh saint) or more vaguely an Abbot of Glastonbury. Baldly told, this Christian was on the Tor when he encountered two small persons who requested that he returned at midnight, as their lord was keen to meet him. When he met them at the summit of the Tor at the appointed hour, he was suddenly transported into a fabulous palace, magnificently decorated, with fine food piled on golden platters, and full of small people dressed in red and white (fairies). There he met King Gwynn Ap Nudd, who invited him to partake of the feast. Knowing that to eat fairy food would imprison him in fairyland, the

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Christian declined the offer, drew out a bottle of holy water, scattered it all around him, and suddenly found himself back on top of the Tor. While this traditional tale appears to demonstrate the superiority of Christian power, it underlines a rather important point—that although Christianity was in the ascendant, the fairies were still there, literally below the surface. When introducing Glastonbury, I made the point that what has consistently happened is that Glastonbury has been positioned at the centre of whatever the prevailing myth or worldview might be. The claims simply get bigger as the worldview expands. Thus the shift from Glastonbury as ‘cradle of English Christianity’ to Glastonbury as Heart Chakra of Planet Earth could be seen as one of scale rather than substance. Perhaps we could say that Glastonbury seems always to have had a gift for localisation, or as Prince and Riches put it, “domestication”: Our premise is that ideas exist in the form they do, and in the place they are, because of local exigencies. Particular ideas are voiced in local situations, and would not be so voiced if local situations did not invite this to be. People in local communities, especially in literate cultures, know about similar ideas existing in other places or times; they may well consider that such similar ideas are directly influencing them in what they say and do. But local exigencies determine in the first place whether or not these ideas are taken on board, and in the second place how they are taken on board—to harmonise with local understandings and meanings such ideas come to be altered or “domesticated.” (2000:294)

In the undoubtedly globalised context of contemporary spirituality in Glastonbury, new phenomena are constantly emerging, but I suspect that the extent of their novelty has been exaggerated. If we take into account its long and colourful vernacular religious history, I think there is, on balance, more continuity than change in the relationship between the local and the global in Glastonbury. References Ashe, G., 1957. King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury. London: Collins. Benham, O., 1993. The Avalonians. Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications. Bowman, M., 1993a. “Drawn to Glastonbury.” In Reader, I. & T. Walter, eds. Pilgrimage in Popular Culture. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 29–62. ——, 1993b. “Reinventing the Celts.” Religion 23 147–56.


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——, 2000. “More of the Same? Christianity, Vernacular Religion and Alternative Spirituality in Glastonbury.” In Sutcliffe, S. & M. Bowman, eds. Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 83–104. ——, 2003–2004. “Taking Stories Seriously: Vernacular Religion, Contemporary Spirituality and the Myth of Jesus in Glastonbury.” Temenos 39–40 125–42. ——, 2004. “Procession and Possession in Glastonbury: Continuity, Change and the Manipulation of Tradition.” Folklore 115.3 273–85. Bradley, M., 1986. Mists of Avalon. London: Sphere Books. Campbell, C., 1999. “The Easternisation of the West.” In Wilson, B. & J. Cresswell, eds. New Religious Movements: Challenge and Response. London & New York: Routledge, 35–48. Carley, J., 1996. Glastonbury Abbey: The Holy House at the Head of the Moors Adventurous. Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications. Draper, I. (Mustafa), 2002. Towards a Postmodern Sufism: Eclecticism, Appropriation and Adaptation in a Naqshbandiyya and a Qadiriyya Tariqa in the UK. University of Birmingham: Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. Drown, H., 2001. Sacred Spaces: Alternative Religion and Healing in Glastonbury, England. Memorial University of Newfoundland: Unpublished MA Thesis. Eade, J. & M. Sallnow, 2000. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hervieu-Léger, D., 2000. Religion as a Chain of Memory. Oxford: Polity Press. Howard-Gordon, F., 1997. Glastonbury: Maker of Myths. Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications. Ivakhiv, A.I., 2001. Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Jones, K., 2000. In the Nature of Avalon: Goddess Pilgrimages in Glastonbury’s Sacred Landscape. Glastonbury: Ariadne Publications. Kockel, U., 2003. “Turning the World Upside Down: Towards a European Ethnology in (and of) England.” Unpublished paper presented at the 7th ESRC Seminar in European Ethnology, University of the West of England, 11 September. Lovelock, J.E., 1982. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maltwood, K.E., 1964/1929. A Guide to Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars: Their Giant Effigies Described from Air Views, Maps, and from ‘The High History of the Holy Grail’. 16th ed. London: James Clarke & Co. Michell, J., 1992. “Glastonbury—Jerusalem, Paradise on Earth: A Revelation Examined.” In Roberts, A., ed. Glastonbury: Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem. London: Rider, 169–77. Primiano, L., 1995. “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife.” Western Folklore 54 37–56. Prince, R. & D. Riches, 2000. The New Age in Glastonbury: The Construction of Religious Movements. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Roberts, A., 1992. “Glimpses of Eternity: A Visionary Voyage into the Glastonbury Zodiac.” In Roberts, A., ed. Glastonbury: Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem. London: Rider, 8–25. Robinson, C., 2000. “Druids and Brahmins: A Case of Mistaken Identity?” In Bowman, M. & G. Harvey, eds. Pagan Identities. DISKUS 6 (electronic journal http://www. unimarburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/discus/6). Shallcrass, P. & E. Restall Orr, 2001. A Druid Directory: A Guide to Druidry and Druid Orders. St. Leonards-on-Sea: The British Druid Order. Sjöö, M., 1998. New Age Channellings: Who or What is being Channelled? Bristol: Monica Sjöö.

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Turner, B.S., 1994. Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism. London & New York: Routledge. Watkins, S., 2000. “The One and The Many: The Glastonbury Goddess Conference as a Microcosm of Goddess Spirituality in the United Kingdom.” Bath Spa University College: Unpublished MA Thesis. Yoder, D., 1974. “Toward a Definition of Folk Religion.” Western Folklore 33 2–15.

HAWAII IN NEW AGE IMAGINATIONS: A CASE OF RELIGIOUS INVENTIONS* Mikael Rothstein The religious use of indigenous peoples’ religions is becoming increasingly more popular on the New Age scene. Particularly perhaps the religions of the North American Indians, but other cultures provide inspiration as well, among those the pre-European Hawaiians. Rather than integrating actual Hawaiian religion, however, New Agers seem to carry out a radical reinterpretation of this tradition, or simply invent traditions that were never Hawaiian. Based on data obtained in the field, as well as through literature and the Internet, this chapter presents the phenomena and suggests several ways of approaching and interpreting it. It seeks to describe and analyse the use of native Hawaiian religion in the viable fabric of New Age beliefs. As it will appear, this issue is by no means simple—partly because New Age religion, as well as the traditional religion of Hawaii, are difficult to overlook, partly because the ongoing development of any belief system is a delicate and complex cultural process. Furthermore, what appears to be ‘Hawaiian’ in this connection, very often turns out not to be Hawaiian at all. In fact, what is presented in the following, is not simply a discussion of recent articulations among participants on the so-called New Age scene. It is just as much one example of how human beings think and act during the formation of new religious thoughts and ways in general. All religions are negotiated cultural phenomena which only have come into existence because human beings have created them in a variety of cognitive and social transactions. Very often this process means relating to the religious systems of other people, and to the general New Age ideologist and practitioner this certainly is a driving force in the ongoing production of religion (even if the religions of the ‘others’ are very often, as in this case, transformed into something radically new or straightforwardly invented).

* This chapter is a revised version of Rothstein (2005b). I would like to thank the editors of FINYAR’s journal for allowing this reprint.

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Indeed, what is commonly designated syncretism—the blend or mix of various religious systems—is so normal that it hardly needs to be specified as a phenomenon. As a rule, every religious system (beliefs as well as practices) constitutes a conglomerate of traditions that are balanced into a new system, and the concept of syncretism therefore is rather empty. It simply points to obvious things. The real theoretical issue at stake is of course the question of ‘tradition’. What has been, what exists, and what will prevail? And how is the dynamics of this relationship best understood? What is its texture, so to say. The issue has been discussed at some length by historian of religions Armin W. Geertz with reference to a host of significant contributions, and I agree when he refers to sociologist Wilbert E. Moore and says that, “any enduring system must have some degree of flexibility which in turn at least provides, if not encourages, innovation” (Geertz 1992: 164). Perhaps it is too early to call New Age cosmologies “enduring systems.” They may, after all, be too young for that designation, but it is very true that the structure of these systems provide possibilities for and encourages innovation. Above all, New Age ideologies entertain the notion of constant evolution: things have to move on, knowledge and perception are supposed to expand, new standards and perspectives are meant to be reached perpetually. The ‘tradition’ of the New Age community (historically rooted in Theosophy), consequently, defines itself as very viable and dynamic. It follows that New Age beliefs and practices are extremely adaptive, a fact that may explain why this kind of modern folk religion seems to survive—sometimes, as in this case, by ‘sponging’ heavily on other peoples’ cultural systems. Not every perspective pertaining to the relation between New Age religion and the religion of ‘old Hawaii’ can be covered in a few pages. The intention, therefore, is to present the basics of the theme before us, a kind of framework that will allow further academic expansion on the matter. The present discussion may also be seen as a brief interrogation into the construction and development of certain mythological structures (rather than myths in the narrow sense of the word) including: firstly, the sacredness of the ethnic Hawaiians; secondly, the sacredness of the Hawaii islands; and thirdly, the ‘spiritual evolution’ of the human race. Furthermore, as indicated already, the discussion touches upon the problem of cultural and political dominance facilitated by ideologies shaped within mythological frameworks.

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Historiography? The December 2002 issue of National Geographic carried a feature on how modern day Hawaiians are “reclaiming their culture.” Some months later, in the April issue of 2003, a number of readers responded to the lengthy article in very different ways. One comment reads: The founding premise of [the] article seems to be that Hawaii was a peaceful paradise before the Europeans showed up. Although it is unquestionable that native culture was suppressed, a very important part of the story was left out: Hawaiian culture prior to Captain James Cook was not peaceful but filled with warfare and near-constant power struggles of a most violent nature. Hawaiian society was also extremely stratified—it had what we would call today a caste system. Human sacrifice was practised. I grew up in Hawaii and love the place, but the whole story should be told, not just the pretty parts.

Another wrote: I want to say mahalo nui loa (thank you very much) for your piece about Hawaiians reclaiming their own culture. I attended Kamehameha Schools and have the utmost pride to be Hawaiian. The experience allowed me and my fellow classmates to learn our language, culture, and history. It was an invaluable opportunity because our culture has been raped by the American government, and Christian missionaries, which left my mother not knowing very much about her culture because the teaching of hula and the speaking of the language were frowned upon . . .

History, of course, is no objective thing and no historiography exists independently from explicit or implicit political agendas. Accordingly, the two reactions expressed in these quotations are typical, each in their own way: the first aiming at a balanced description of historical facts disregarding whatever implications the ‘truth’ may hold, the second emphasising native social and political interests. From a traditional, distanced, scholarly point of view the first comment seems of greatest relevance. It is certainly true that Hawaii’s past had its very bloody dimensions and that any realistic appreciation of ancient Hawaii has to take that into consideration. However, to an individual who is struggling to find his or her cultural identity, the latter is probably more important. Why, indeed, should any modern Hawaiian feel responsible for warfare and violence in their ancestors’ society? In fact this kind of historiographic path is what we should expect among the many so called indigenous or native peoples, who are fighting to uphold, reclaim or reconstruct their cultures that in most

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cases have been taken over, one way or another, by other peoples, in the case of Hawaii predominately by Christian Europeans and, later, Americans. In a modern anthropological research strategy the two perspectives, however, will often mix, and no real understanding of the issue will emerge solely from an isolated outsider’s position. In order to understand what is happening right now it is necessary to take history as well as contemporary people’s feelings and points of view into account—including mythological renderings of history on the part of indigenous representatives. However, the present analytical attempt does not incorporate the native Hawaiian perspective directly even if it seeks to include it in different ways. The focus is laid on yet another wave of intruders, non-Hawaiian people who are currently reshaping Hawaii’s traditional religion into something new—New Age proponents. ‘Culture’ and ‘religion’, though, are not unambiguous concepts and it is by no means clear what, for instance, native Hawaiian religion really is, where it starts and where it ends. Religion, being a dimension of culture, is always on the move and should be perceived as a process rather than a static phenomenon. We therefore also need to ask whether, for instance, traditional Hawaiian religion is totally abandoned or suppressed or to what extent it still exists in transformed ways. Some would claim that nothing is left and that the native revivalist movements are in fact building an entirely new cultural and religious system much as European Wiccans (Wallis 2003; Magliocco 2004) or contemporary devotees of the old Norse gods. Others, though, insist that neither Christianity, nor Mormonism, nor the many Asian religions present in Hawaii today have managed to suppress the old culture in all aspects, and that remnants of the traditional Hawaiian religion are still at work among ordinary people (Rothstein 2005a). Scott Cunningham, a writer on Hawaiian religious traditions and New Age proponent, for instance, claims to identify what he terms a “contemporary survival of traditional Hawaiian spirituality.” In general, what he describes is a kind of local folk religion that exists interwoven with Protestantism, Catholicism, and Mormonism, in the sense that people keep the Hawaiian traditions to themselves while publicly acting in accordance with the major religious traditions: “Most outward expressions of traditional Hawaiian spirituality are performed in secret within the home, on lonely beaches, in forests, and at isolated temples,” he says (Cunningham 2001:196). During a scouting trip to Oahu and Kauai in December 2002 and January 2003, and a more in depth research trip to Hawaii (The Big Island) in January 2004 and June 2005, I have noticed a number of


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the phenomena to which Cunningham refers. Sometimes, people have related their private religious practices to me, at other times I have simply observed how discourse or behaviour points to certain kinds of religious orientations or ways that are best described as preEuropean. However, the overall impression is that Hawaii’s traditional religion has ceased to exist as a coherent system in its own right, even if attempts to revive it currently are being reinforced. As it appears, a growing number of people are quite optimistic on behalf of their ancestral tradition. According to people I have talked to, there are in fact good reasons for believing that the current developments will lead to a further strengthening of the old religion of Hawaii even if only very few have expressed a real desire to gain total control, and make the Christians inferior. To most of the people I have met, it is sufficient to get the old religion back on track in ways that will allow them to use it in their private lives, but certainly also in ways that will make it a future cultural force which will enable Hawaiians to act collectively as native Hawaiians on a larger scale. Right now, one woman told me, Hawaiians are navigating in a kind of vacuum: the old culture is in most ways gone, but the foundations for reconstructing or revivifying it are quite promising. “To some people it will be like starting all over again,” she said. Her point is a good one. Hawaiian religion has experienced a break, and in many ways things have to be rebuilt from scratch. In certain ways, the old religion has to be reinvented as a part of the counter-colonial process. The emergence of New Age-inspired interpretations of traditional Hawaiian religion is a parallel phenomenon, a new invention nourished by the relics of a past tradition: the fact that the connection to the old ways has been weakened or even cut, has given way to an entirely new construction, a New Religious Movement in terms of the New Agebased reworking of Hawaii’s religious legacy. In effect, two different developments are seen: firstly, a local, politically coloured ambition to revivify (or reinvent) the old religion as it was (or as people believe it was) with no apparent link to New Age beliefs; and secondly, a rather aggressive reconstruction of Hawaii’s religious legacy based on an entirely new mythological and ideological scheme provided by nonHawaiian proponents of New Age religion in its multitude of forms. This New Age-inspired appropriation of native Hawaiian religion represents yet another kind of historiography, or rather a transcended historiography that leaves more to mythology than to history in the usual sense of the word, and it has only been possible to develop it

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because the link back to the traditional religion of Hawaii has been either weakened or simply broken. To put it rather bluntly, New Age interpretations of Hawaiian religion have in many ways emerged detached from the very phenomenon (i.e. Hawaiian religion) they claim to continue. Rather than taking traditional Hawaiian belief systems and practices out into the world, New Age representations redefine Hawaiian concepts in order to align them to basic New Age trends. In that sense, what we are facing, is a mindset and ritual system that superficially appears to be a contemporary representation of an ancient religion but, when examined more closely, reveals itself as something new and quite different.1 In order to understand how this colourful and largely misconceived understanding of Hawaii’s traditional religion works as a new dynamic religious system within the New Age-community, a brief historical perspective is needed. Early Developments Apart from the vast majority of tales told about the Polynesians in general and the people of Hawaii in particular, a number of fantastic accounts clearly relate to what is presently known as New Age mythology. It is quite easy to identify the earliest source behind this development. Every lead connects the researcher directly with Max Freedom Long (1890–1971), an American who took a deeply felt interest in Hawaiian religion during his first visit to the islands, where he came to work as a school teacher, in 1918, when he was 28 years old. Long was a student of psychology, and he soon came to believe that the wisdom of the native Hawaiians, which occupied his imagination to a great extent, was kept secret from outsiders by the means of a special language code. In order to explore this phenomenon he set up Huna Research Inc. in 1945, an organisation which still exists. In the course of his investigations, he developed the notion that Hawaii’s traditional religion—which he termed Huna—had in fact been influencing, if not straightforwardly determining, the world’s great religious traditions. I have no reason to doubt that Long himself was honest in his persua1 For a parallel analysis (on an entirely different matter), see Rothstein (1996), where TM’s claim of being “scientific” is interpreted as a religious appropriation of science.


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sion, but there is virtually nothing in his concept of huna that seems to reflect elements of pre-Christian Hawaiian religion. What he did was to conceive a new religious system. In 1953, Long claimed to have “discovered the presence of coded Huna information in the Bible” (Long 1998:ix) and in a book from 1965, The Huna Code in Religions, he explains how secret huna information is found in “the religions of the ancient Egyptians, Israelites, Buddhists and practitioners of Yoga” (Long 1998:ix). “Huna,” Long asserts, simply means “secret” (which is correct, even if the word also entails a lot of different connotations), and by unlocking the secrets, Long believed himself to be going behind the esoteric veil of the keepers of the hidden wisdom, the Hawaiian priests, the kahunas. According to Long, the huna wisdom did not originate in Polynesia. From where the aboriginal kahunas came is beyond his understanding, even if he provides his readers with a rather meticulous outline of how the wisdom of the initiates has travelled the world. As it appears, the most important thing is the fact that mankind, during the course of evolution, has been guided and inspired by the ever present but intangible kahunas. The “coded Huna messages” in the world’s great religions, including the most ancient, are taken as proof of just that. In terms of Christianity, for instance, Long writes: . . . some kahuna initiates of about the beginning of the Christian era translated the pre-Polynesian tongue into the current Greek and used that language to insert coded Huna passages into the Bible, especially into the four Gospels. (Long 1998/1965:12)

According to Long, the kahunas developed a “double talk” in the sense that any given word could mean a surprisingly number of different things. In fact, the Hawaiian language was, says Long, developed in order to carry the coded messages. Hence, the initiated will identify a deeper layer of meaning in words and sentences that appear quite different to the uninitiated. “No more perfect code system has ever been evolved,” he states (Long 1998/1965:45). In fact, the Hawaiian language from a structural point of view, does have a capacity that resembles what Long imagined in the sense that various words and sounds may hold more than one meaning, and it is possible (if not likely) that Long’s speculation was nourished by this fact. Max Freedom Long was a visionary and an explorer. He saw himself as a meticulous scientist, and those working along the same paths today (most notably Henry Krotoschin of the Huna Forschungs-Gesellschaft in

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Switzerland and Long’s successor E. Otha Wingo at the Huna Research Inc.) have the same self-perception. Neither huna itself, nor the ambition of decoding it, is considered anything but scientific even if Long and his followers are perfectly capable of seeing the lore of the kahunas as ‘religious’ and ‘scientific’ at the same time. According to historian of religions Olav Hammer, religious traditions from Theosophy to New Age make use of a distinct strategy of epistemology as they strive to promote their ideas. Two elements of this strategy are clearly present in Max Freedom Long’s understanding of Hawaii’s traditional religion. Hammer talks of “the appeal to tradition” as one important way of self-promotion (Hammer 2001:85f ): in order to justify and consolidate a given esoteric system, religious discourse will root it in an imaginative history and thus place it in a comprehensive frame work. In Long’s case, he simply removes the kahunas from their actual cultural and ideological habitat and incorporates them into another of his own choice and construction to serve a specific purpose. Similarly, but not as explicitly, Long moves along another path identified by Hammer. He uses scientism as a language of faith (Hammer 2001:201f ), i.e. he promotes his basically mythological understanding by the means of scientific language and pseudoscientific arguments. The strategic advantage is obvious: the presence of huna in the world’s religions is documented from the earliest times (a move backward in time), and by means of the most recent methods, science (a move forward in time). Long, in other words, argues along the same discursive paths as most performers on the European esoteric scene since the early days of Theosophy, and quite as might be expected, Long refers to Theosophy approvingly (Long 1998/1965:39f ). Strangely, in this connection, Long, to my knowledge, makes no mention of the Hawaiian king David Kalakaua, who apparently was very interested in European Esotericism. According to New Age author Kenneth Johnson, Kalakaua was a Freemason of international reputation, and he is said to have reorganised an ancient Hawaiian lineage society, the Hale Naua. Among other things, Kalakaua, says Johnson (2002), devoted his attention to the legend of Lemuria, which he related to traditional Pacific Island tradition. Johnson’s article ends, “Lemuria is not a chimera or a New Age invention, but a vital part of the spiritual tradition of the Pacific Islands, both past and present.” It is certainly no coincidence that subsequent New Age-inspired promoters of the universality and uniqueness of the huna religion


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(or whatever term one may choose to designate traditional Hawaiian religion), move within the same epistemological framework, even if Max Freedom Long, as an individual, appears to be unknown to most contemporary proponents of New Age huna. Furthermore, contemporary New Agers will stress that the effect of this or that Hawaiian discipline can be directly experienced by the practitioner. According to Olav Hammer, this is a third typical discursive strategy among New Agers (Hammer 2001:331f ): It works, and anyone can judge for him or herself by simply applying the philosophy or techniques of the kahunas in his or her life. New Age professional Roberleigh H. Claigh, as one example, writes, “Whatever you think, feel, say and do, like an echo, resonates and returns to you. By empowering huna teachings and striving to give your best, you will enjoy the best and your highest good in return” (Claigh 1998:3). Two Current Examples It is not difficult to locate or identify typical representatives of the broader New Age worldview. One way of doing it is to depart from widely read books that promote this or that idea. Using the Internet as the empirical basis is another option. At any rate books on Hawaii’s traditional religion are becoming increasingly more popular in the New Age market, and the number of Internet references on the subject, and thus consumers of this particular product, are constantly growing. In rare cases, authors clearly place themselves within a global Neo-pagan ideology, while others—but only very few—identify slightly with the Hawaiian political sovereignty movements. Sometimes within, sometimes outside these categories we find the many interpreters of Hawaii’s traditional religion that fit into what we may conveniently call practitioners and professionals within the New Age movement. In many cases people offering their services have moved to the Hawaiian islands and draw attention their geographical location. In other cases such people or groups are not physically located in Hawaii but claim to have taken the marvels of huna (or whatever term they use) to the world outside the Hawaiian islands. Aloha Kulani in Denmark One such example is the Danish Aloha Kulanui, the School for Hawaiian Massage, Dance and Philosophy (in Danish, Skolen for hawaiiansk massage,

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dans og filosofi ) which offers courses and lectures in the cities of Copenhagen and Elsinor in Denmark. The main activity is called Lomi Lomi, which is defined as “a 5,000-year old form of healing body therapy, originally a temple-dance-massage from ancient Hawaii.” To learn Lomi Lomi is described as “a loving journey in time and space.” Lomi Lomi is taught over four weekends and more extensive courses may be composed according to the client’s wish. Furthermore, a number of specially designed courses are available: massage for pregnant women, massages for mother and child, massage combined with aromatherapy, therapeutic massage that includes “deep conversation about trauma and problems,” everything taking place in a pseudo-Polynesian setting by European people in pseudo-Polynesian garments. Should one wish to become a Lomi Lomi instructor, a two-year course must be completed. Every course includes “dance and massage training, philosophy, guided meditations, Hawaiian legends, Hawaiian based healing, and energy work.” The organisation’s eight-page introductory folder (which is quite similar to the organisation’s web-page at www.aloha.dk) holds no detailed information about how things are actually done, but there are lots of assurances regarding the marvels and efficacy of the techniques that are mentioned. The Aloha Kulanui is run by Rose-Marie Sundell as an integrated part of a broader New Age health and healing enterprise known as The Growth House (Væksthuset). Mrs Sundell has been involved in Lomi Lomi for the past 13 years and makes a point of saying that she is still discovering new layers of meaning and experience from the techniques. Several other practitioners and professionals on the Scandinavian New Age-scene are offering Hawaii-related programs of different kinds, but The Growth House seems to be the most successful. Serge Kahili King and the Aloha Project Other examples may be derived from religious literature based on the same interest, even if successful authors in this business almost always are founders or owners of centres and retreats that offer all kinds of Hawaii related courses and treatments. Roberleigh H. Claigh, who runs the retreat Living Wellness at Koloa, on the island of Kauai, has already been mentioned but it is probably the works by Serge Kahili King, a psychologist by training, that are the most widely read and appreciated in the New Age market. Indeed, the current proliferation of huna has its most important fountain here, and the historical link to the


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actual pre-Christian religion of Hawaii is equally weak. King’s writings include the well known title Urban Shaman (1990), but also volumes such as Imagineering Health (2006) (“how to heal with your mind”), Mastering your Hidden Self (1985) (“how to work with your subconscious”), Earth Energies (“ideas and experiments with natural energies”), Kahuna Healing (1983) (“philosophy and practice of Huna Masters”) and Dangerous Journeys (2002) (“a novel of Hawaiian shamanism in action”).2 King, however, also works as a very energetic practitioner and has done so for many years. Apparently, he was the first to take a practically oriented New Age rendering of Hawaii’s pre-Christian religion to a larger audience when he, in 1973, set up The Aloha Project in order to “make the world a better place.” This project was, “conceived . . . as a way to join the people of the world together in a spirit of Aloha to bring about physical, emotional, mental, environmental, social, and spiritual harmony based on the wisdom found in Hawaiian philosophy and culture.”3 The word aloha in this connection—as usually in New Age renderings—means “love, friendship, compassion, and charity, as well as, in its roots, the joyful sharing of loving energy in the present moment” (the standard dictionaries translate aloha with ‘hello’, ‘welcome’ and ‘love’). The Aloha Project is carried on by The Aloha Fellowship, “a membership association made up by people of all ages and from all walks of life who believe that it is possible for individuals working together to transform the Earth into a paradise of love, peace, and happiness”, as it is expressed in one project presentation. A free lifetime membership of the organisation—with no obligations at all—is granted those who send the following pledge to The Aloha Fellowship: “I pledge to do my best to make the world a better place.” Those who wish to act more directly for the benefit of all may join a number of sub-projects: for example, The Booklet Plan is concerned with the distribution of free booklets and web-based healing techniques; The Aloha Action Plan focuses on social and environmental projects; while The Blessing Plan is concerned with the practice of “blessing [. . .] as a way of healing the world.”

2 The explanations in brackets are taken from the home page www.huna.net (September 2004) where King’s work is promoted. 3 www.alohainternational.org (September 2004).

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The overall tendency is that people align with Serge Kahili King’s work at a distance, but this does not make it a client cult in the usual sociological sense of the word (Bainbridge 1997). It appears to be even looser knit. What apparently unites or combines the participants in this ‘fellowship’ are the books written by King. Indeed, this literature is promoted directly by the same organisation (and Internet homepage), and all references take those interested in The Aloha Project to the books. The fact that religion and business go hand in had should be of no surprise and it certainly does not pose a problem in itself. What seems to be of importance, however, is the fact that the fascination with preChristian Hawaiian religion in the New Age market, as illustrated in this example, primarily remains a private affair where the relationship between those interested and those possessing knowledge, is mediated by literature and Internet pages. People may occasionally attend courses and workshops, but the religious awareness and interest is primarily raised and maintained through literature and the Internet. In this way King’s project makes a remote, locally bound tradition available in a global market in versions determined by the merchant himself. It only takes a superficial knowledge of the American or European New Age movement’s matrix to identify most of these elements as typical contributions to the scene. On the one hand, the New Agegenerated huna presents itself as something very special and particular, but at the same time the universality of beliefs and techniques that it entails, are stressed. Perhaps the Hawaii-related New Age interest could be seen as a niche that allows its professionals and practitioners to act as specialists within a religious realm where the multiplicity of beliefs and methods otherwise pose a threat to the uniqueness and possibilities of the individual expert. By promoting a certain ethnicity (Hawaiian) and a certain place (Hawaii) as especially significant, and by identifying with it, they may confer intellectual, social, physical, and indeed, economic space. Many similar examples could be mentioned from many different parts of the world. Most New Age professionals that offer Hawaiirelated courses are located on the US West coast (and thus in relatively close range from Hawaii), but the interest in New Age-appropriated Hawaiian religion extends much further. As with everything else in the social realm of New Age beliefs, we are faced with an almost globally distributed religious phenomenon.


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Understanding the Phenomena There are a number of different ways to analyse what has been described thus far, and a few ideas have already been suggested. For one thing, the specific appropriation of Hawaii’s traditional religion by New Age proponents cannot be seen detached from an overall tendency within the New Age community to embrace native peoples’ religions as something positive and even “spiritually” superior. To Max Freedom Long, Hawaiian religion is at the very foundation of any great religion;4 to Mrs Sundell and her customers it represents a path away from the dehumanising and alienating industrialism and rationalism of the Western world; and to Serge Kahili King it is simply the key to world peace and everything good. This remarkable reversal of traditional evolutionism—which has haunted the western mind for centuries—implicitly places the industrial societies, and thus Christianity, at a lower cultural level, while the less materially complex cultures and their religious systems, are seen as ‘pure’ and unspoiled. The path that goes forward in terms of personal development and expanded ‘spiritual consciousness’ within the individual, is the path that goes back in time and turns its back to materialism. The position against industrialism and colonialism on the part of the New Agers that take an interest in these matters, is obvious. Ironically, however, this particular interest in native religious traditions is yet another kind of appropriation. It is itself an expression of ‘cultural imperialism’ or at least some kind of cultural dominance; the rise of the transformed Noble Savage. Ethnicity and Land In fact, one may question in what ways native Hawaiians themselves are necessary at all for the New Agers’ usage of their religious tradition? As 4 Historian of religions Florian Jeserich has, in a private communication, made the following remark: “I have the impression that Long tries to upvalue Huna by claiming that it is encoded in other established religions [. . .]. I think that Long still thought that Westerners were superior, and that he operated in the evolutionary framework of the 19th century.” Jeserich is right in nuancing Long’s approach to the subject matter, and it is probably correct that Long is less clear cut than other authors mentioned here. As I see it, however, parts of Long’s argumentation perfectly matches Hammer’s model. I am grateful for this and other valuable comments that Jeserich has provided me with.

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we shall see, their significance is in general of a symbolic rather than a concrete nature. It is, for one thing, quite significant that those offering expertise in Hawaiian religion in the New Age market—be it dance, chanting, healing, prayer or something else—are almost exclusively nonHawaiians, and that authors of New Age books dealing with Hawaiian religion are primarily mainland Americans and Europeans. The vast majority of—if not all—New Age practitioners I have encountered or otherwise located in Hawaii also seem to be non-natives. On the island of Kauai, for instance, the entire New Age spectrum is covered by the journal Zento, which carries advertisements from all kinds of New Age professionals. In the winter 2003 issue, almost 50 advertisements were published, but not a single one by a native Hawaiian although the courses and techniques offered typically claimed to be based on Hawaiian religion in one way or another. A similar pattern is revealed in Ke Kukui—A Healing Island Resource Guide (2003 edition) and in many inspirational books. New Agers adapting Hawaiian religion will often claim that each and everyone can join in, and indeed courses and healing are offered with no reservation to anyone. In New Age writer, healer, numerologist and astrologer Roberleigh H. Claigh’s book The Kahuna Way to Create the Future in 5 Steps (1998), for instance, there are no direct references to native Hawaiian sources, but the author’s overall American/European network in terms of colleagues and customers is easily detected. On the other hand, however, it is continuously implied that the wisdom of the ancient Hawaiians is closely linked with the wisdom-keepers’ Polynesian ethnicity, and that mysterious connections are formed between the land and its residents. Scott Cunningham, writing from a Neo-pagan tradition, notes: Anyone who’s the least bit sensitive to place, on arriving in Hawaii, senses the unusual atmosphere that emanates from the islands. It can’t be seen and is difficult to describe, but this peaceful, humming energy is part of what convinces many visitors to return. This energy seems to stem first from the land itself, then from the surrounding ocean and fresh water, and finally from the air, the residents—particularly cultural Hawaiians—also emanate this energy. (Cunningham 2001:5–6)

In the process of transmitting Hawaii’s religious heritage to non-Hawaiians, the ethnic delimitations are by and large overcome, but ethnic Hawaiians are nevertheless considered to be something special, and without their inspiration and guidance, no European or American could enjoy the marvels of hula, huna or Lomi Lomi. The above-mentioned


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Rose-Marie Sundell, for instance, expresses a “deeply felt gratitude” to two inspiring Masters from Hawaii who “helped her find her own path” (one of them being Serge Kahili King).5 However, it was not until she “finally met Kahu” that she realised the real splendour of the Hawaiian tradition. Kahu is described as “one of the few genuine Hawaiian kahunas left.” “Most importantly,” she writes, he is “the original source from whom the templedancemassage stem.” The Danish woman feels privileged and proud to be allowed to have been his pupil and to “teach in his name.” The discursive strategy is again quite apparent: the Lomi Lomi practice is rhetorically rooted in the ancient past, but more significantly we see how the New Age practitioner is basing her own authority on the Polynesian ethnicity—the originality—of her Hawaiian teacher. In effect she becomes a carrier and translator of the ‘spiritual essence’ of the native Hawaiians herself, even if she is not Polynesian. The identification with an ethnicity different from her own is quite apparent (a pattern similarly indicated by the way people dress during Lomi Lomi performance). The case of Serge Kahili King shares the same features, but in an even more intimate way. According to King—and thus the hagiographic narrative presented by his organisation—he was initiated into “Hawaiian shamanism” by his father at the age of 14. His father had come to the Islands with the British Diplomatic Corps in 1912, and was soon adopted and educated by a native family “with an ancient esoteric tradition” (apparently called Kali Ka Kulva of Ka Hula). When Serge was 17, his father died, but the Hawaiian family included him into their midst where he continued his education into his rare “shamanistic” skills. Furthermore, after many years of work in West Africa, King adopted the ways of “African shamanism” as well.6 King’s expertise in Hawaiian religion, consequently, is legitimated in his personal experience and close relationship with native Hawaiians, a relationship so close that the barriers between himself as a foreigner and them as locals almost evaporates.

Quotations taken from Aloha Kulanui introductory folder. Data obtained from transcripts of a lengthy interview with Serge Kahili King on School of Metaphysics’ home page: www.som.org/3library/interviews/king.htm (September 2004). Fragments of the same text are used on The Aloha Project’s home page. 5 6

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It is fascinating to observe that even when his authority is doubted, ethnicity becomes of primary importance. In a discussion group on the Internet, for instance, one participant wrote about King: “His material is OK, but I have my doubts about it’s origin . . . Learn about Hawaiian spirituality from HAWAIIAN sources, not from haole7 interpretations of Hawaiian material. I’ve finally started doing that, and it DOES make a BIG difference.”8 A similar pattern, even if it is not as profoundly presented (and with no hesitation regarding the haoles!), applies to another Lomi Lomi teacher, Hawaiian resident Elandra Meredith. Her credentials are quoted like this in her PR-folder: Elandra was trained and initiated into sacred Lomi Lomi in a New Zealand Maori Marae (temple) by a master Tohunga (kahuna). She studied with senior staff of the school of Auntie Margaret, Hawaii’s honoured premier Lomi Lomi teacher. Elandra has also studied Hawaiian spirituality, culture and dance with some of the state’s top kumu hulas.9

The interesting detail in all this obviously is that the ethnic Hawaiians are used as legitimisation for the non-Hawaiian teachers’ authority. The New Age professional becomes a kind of cultural translator or facilitator, a crossover category that makes it possible for ordinary people to enjoy the benefits of the Hawaiian treasures. The ideological reversal of traditional evolutionism—as mentioned above—places the Westerner on an inferior spiritual level, and allows the native Hawaiians to rise as guiding examples. The mediator, the person who is able to facilitate the necessary communication between the two ethnic and religious spheres, is a white person who has, him-/herself, built the bridge already by transgressing the ethnic delimitations through some kind of esoteric training from a real Hawaiian in the right place, namely the (more or less explicitly sacred) islands of Hawaii. The contrast between competing conceptual domains in the last quotation (Elandra Meredith’s PR-folder) is clear: talking of Hawaii as “a state” (i.e. in the USA) places the discourse within the political structures of today’s world, but the mentioning of Auntie Margaret and the “top kumu healers” puts an emphasis on Hawaii as a land with an ethnically shaped culture and religion in its own right. In fact, 7 Haole means ‘a white person’, but formerly it designated any foreiger. It also carries the meaning of ‘introduced’ or ‘non-native’. In the discourse of many Hawaiians the word is definitely derogatory. 8 www.masterworksinternational.com/BBarchive/messages/27.htm. 9 No printing data. Material obtained in January 2004.


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as expressed in an earlier quotation, and perhaps even more so in this example, New Agers insist that the very land of Hawaii has a special significance. The islands as physical locations are believed to hold very special properties, a kind of tangible ‘spiritual energy’ which is often set in focus. Authors Laura and Betsy Crites have, for instance, composed a volume based on the assumption that Hawaii has a key role to play in the future development of human kind: “Hawaii has great power to contribute to the transformational shift needed in our world” (Crites & Crites 2003:xi). Many other writers join in. A location known as Queen’s Bath on the island of Kauai, for instance, is known to be “one of the premier power vortexes” with a “palpable spiritual power” (Zento, Fall 2002:9). In similar ways people participating in religious Hawaii-related courses and workshops in Europe have explained that performing hula or Lomi Lomi connects them to the remote islands on the other side of the globe.10 Usually, Hawaii as such is considered, but sometimes the religious interest is more focused and specialised. One particularly striking example of this pertains to the volcano sites on the island of Hawaii that relate to the goddess Pele (Nimmo 1990). In pre-Christian times the cult of Pele was a well-founded element in Hawaiian religion, and today, reinforcing but also reshaping the old tradition, the goddess attracts visitors from all around the world. At this point the myths of Pele are often told in the shape of urban legends and similar narratives, while the physical focal point remains the same volcanic locations as always in the history of the Pele cult (Carroll 2003). The number of pilgrims to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (at the island of Hawaii) has never been calculated, but guided tours from the US mainland as well as Europe are offered by a number of New Age professionals, and many people go there on their own. Visiting the place is supposed to ignite further ‘spiritual awakening’ and align the seeker with divine forces bound to the location. One woman, sitting amidst the volcanic fumes on the Kilauea mountain, explained that the physical contact with the ground made it possible for her to “become one with Mother Nature.” She had a distinct feeling of being “touched” and “seen” by the divine, and there was no doubt in her mind that by sitting there she would establish an eternal link to Pele and the island of Hawaii disregarding the fact that

10 Interviews with people attending New Age-groups in Denmark and Sweden, November 2004.

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she lived in Austria. Very similar expressions emerges through talks with local Caucasian residents including the numerous artists that have made Pele and everything pertaining to the goddess their favourite image. Pele is seen, heard, tasted and felt. She is describes as physically present on her sacred land, and treated as a tangible person. Some visitors, quite expectedly, wish to import the power of the divinity and her sacred land to their home outside Hawaii. So, they bring little lava rocks as a relic or, as is often termed “a spiritual souvenir” (I certainly possess a few myself ). However, Pele gets rather angry when her property is removed. Consequently, so the rumour goes, people are struck by bad luck and misfortune until the sacred geological pieces are returned. Many people do this by sending the lava rocks back by mail addressed to the local authorities, but special ‘spiritual agencies’ provide similar services.11 (I kept mine—no misfortune so far!) The example reveals how intensely the notion of sacred land may be entertained in the New Age-community interested in Hawaii. A non-physical relationship may be established, but the sacred land itself cannot be changed. Topography is a strikingly important feature in pre-Christian Hawaiian religion. Places would be of immense importance and all sorts of myths and legends would include references to specific sites and locations. Even today, any given piece of land or topographical formation in the islands has its own Hawaiian name. While this old understanding obviously has survived in the transformed New Age rendering it is not the only source of inspiration. Probably the New Age conception of the land of Hawaii is just as much a religious interpretation of the overall western idea of Hawaii as an earthly Paradise. The tourist industry is massive, and the driving force for all enterprises in the business is always the same: Hawaii is the most exotic, most beautiful and most relaxing place on the face of the Earth. Hawaii is simply where you go to obtain everything that is good. Obviously this is not at all true, but it remains a very popular myth which lives on in the western mind. Departing from this cultural stereotype maintained by eager entrepreneurs in the tourist industry, New Agers are developing their own version of the secular paradise myth by remodelling it into

11

See for instance www.volcanogallery.com/lavarock.htm.


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a religious narrative that lays the foundation for yet another industry; religious services of various kinds. As it appears, no non-native usage of Hawaiian religion can take place without some kind of connection to the Hawaiian soil and its original population. At the foundation of the lucid New Age conceptions lies a need for solid ground in the shape of physical land and exotic people of flesh and blood. This connection to the Hawaiians and their land, though, need not be actual or real as in the case of the Pele worshippers mentioned above. It may well take the form of narrative or ideological discourse. The outspoken interest in ‘real’ Hawaiians on the part of wannabe kahunas and New Agers more generally does not necessarily lead to any real contact or communication with Hawaiians. In essence what we can identify is an import or appropriation of ethnicity in the sense that non-Hawaiians take on a pseudo-Hawaiian identity. Similarly the very idea—the myth—of Hawaii as a very special physical place does not necessitate actual presence in the islands. It may work perfectly well on the imaginative, mythological level while the person entertaining this idea remains in Paris, Budapest or Los Angeles. In this mode, New Age religion reveals itself as a cult of the idealised and romanticised exotic, and the question remains: To what extent are the Hawaiian elements found in New Age contexts in fact in tune with the religion of ‘old Hawaii’? Anthropologist Robert J. Wallis points to this general condition and concludes that the neo-colonial actions of New Agers (he talks of “neo-Shamans”) “in a bizarre twist, have facilitated the survival of Hawaiian religion [‘shamanism’] in modern form” (Wallis 2003:221). It is not clear what he means by “bizarre twist”, but the question is whether the neo-colonial interpretation of ancient Hawaiian religion implicates the survival of something or rather the transformation of something. If the examples mentioned above are considered, it seems clear that change and transformation are the predominant features of the phenomenon. Certain terms and concepts derived from old Hawaii are certainly used, but the context is so different that their meaning deviates significantly from the original. Wallis also points to the fact that native people’s religions, in principle, are as accessible as any religion to the interested outsider. Why distinguish between a native Londoner or Parisian who takes a personal interest in Islam or Buddhism, and people with the same background that

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engage themselves in the religions of native Americans or Hawaiians?12 Clearly such individuals will often appear as ‘wannabe natives’, but their religious ambition in itself is not very different from what transpires in any process of conversion (be it minimalist or maximalist in orientation). The religions of ‘native’ people, however, are never considered as intellectual, philosophical or semantic systems in their own right to the extent accorded to Buddhism or Christianity, for example. In effect, it is always considered in close conjunction with an certain ethnic group based in a certain place. While the major religious traditions of the world may, to simplify, be seen as ‘theologies’ or thought-systems, native people’s religions are consequently anthropologised, i.e. identified with particular ethnic locations. The religious imaginations of Hopis, Wai-Wais, or Hawaiians are never described out of ethnic and geographic context, while religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism certainly are. This explains why it is actually impossible to compare the old Hawaiian religion with Buddhism, Islam or Christianity. Approaching old Hawaiian religion implies overcoming ethnic (and in this case also physical) boundaries. This is not the case with the so-called major religious traditions. The consequence is simple: while it is commonplace to develop local variations of the larger religious traditions, the process of adaptation works the other way around when native people’s religions are considered. Protestantism appears globally in uncountable variations in all sorts of ethnic and linguistic contexts. It is ideologically established that everyone can join the Protestant project. The religion places itself at everybody’s disposal thereby disclosing an inherent ambition of global dominance and supremacy at the foundation of Christian thought. Taking on Hawaii’s traditional religion requires the opposite: an ongoing identification or at least contact with Hawaiian ethnicity and soil. Perhaps the structure of this particular kind of belief system could be summarised as ‘believing by becoming.’ The argument is that Hawaii’s religious legacy is relevant for everybody, but rather than simply taking it out into the world the missionary project requires a gathering around Hawaii as a place and Hawaiian ethnicity. According to leading figures on the native-political scene in Hawaii, this kind of New Age representation amounts to straightforward

12 Wallis is himself a “neo-Shamanic” practitioner and some of his scholarly arguments, therefore, also cover personal domains (see Wallis 2003:195f ).


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exploitation. People often feel that non-Hawaiians are violating native intellectual property rights and that the out-of-context use of Hawaii’s religious legacy cripples the values that are imbedded in concepts such as kahuna, hula, Lomi Lomi, etc. The very idea that anyone could join a workshop and develop kahuna skills within a few weeks, for instance, is considered ridiculous as the traditional kahuna’s knowledge depends on a way of life rather than learning.13 In the ‘instant salvation’ economy of the New Age community this distinction does not apply at all. Even if haste and productivity is rhetorically abandoned it remains a fact that New Age offers are structured much in the same way as the capitalist ideology it claims to escape. Equally annoying to native Hawaiians is the interpretation of themselves as religiously supreme people. Admittedly, the written sources are few, but in interviews people will express great irritation. One young man said to me, “How could some old guy be spiritually smarter than others simply because he is from Hawaii? Bullshit! If he is spiritual it is because of his training.”14 To cite another example, an older man referring to people attending a New Age-course: “I have talked to people who saw me as some kind of innocent child or perhaps as something in a museum. They would smile and nod their heads no matter what I say. What do they know about me?”15 Tradition: Reproduction or Innovation? As mentioned earlier, the New Age representation of Hawaiian religion omits a lot of things that are known to have been central to the religion of ancient Hawaii. In short, the political, military and legal aspects of Hawaii’s traditional religions seem to be almost totally ignored. This, however, is in full accordance with the usual New Age perspective that will always create a distance from institutionalised religion. Religious beliefs and rituals administered by priests employed by political leaders, or religious dogma intended for unquestioned belief are programmatically rejected. The religious resources that may be derived from more non-institutionalised realms, on the contrary, are positively endorsed. In

This concrete example was given to me by Pohai Ryan, director of the Kamehameha Schools and a central figure on the native cultural scene. 14 Interview, Honolulu, December 2002. 15 Interview, Kilauea region, January 2004. 13

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New Age discourse this is often reflected in the negative connotations attached to the word ‘religion’ while the term ‘spirituality’ refers to everything good. Put in other terms, New Agers will typically adhere to religious authorities outside the control of any formalised system. They will always prefer systems that are (presumably) esoteric and therefore restricted to the fortunate initiate or people with the right mentality and understanding. In terms of Hawaii this means that the elaborate religion of the royalty (the ali’i ), the state’s religion with its distinct temple institution, its highly institutionalised cult for the major gods, its political and military preoccupation and close relations to the legal system is by and large of no interest. The people’s religion as represented by the kahunas and carried out by the average Hawaiian, on the contrary, lends itself to a multitude of interpretations. And very often “interpretation” is suffused with “fantasy”. The non-institutionalised is singled out while the more formal or official religion is forgotten, not least because the non-institutionalised makes less resistance when twisted and changed into something entirely new. In effect, New Age proponents seek out the private or ‘folk’ dimensions of pre-Christian Hawaiian religion that primarily deal with the individual’s well-being while, by and large, ignoring the public cult of the major gods, the sacredness of the chiefs, the human sacrifices, the holy wars, and so on. How could it be different considering the basic ideological and mythological make up of the New Age movement, and the mechanism at work in the ongoing process of religious creativity? In this connection, it is interesting to observe that the major political Hawaiian revitalisation movements are predominantly focused on nation formation in one way or another, and that the religious dimension in that respect is precisely the opposite of what New Agers’ are interested in. The royal traditions, including heiaus and other sacred places, are generally in focus, but seeking ‘inner transformations’ or ‘spiritual development’ is apparently no real treat. The natives, with whom the New Age practitioners wish to identify, simply have no real interest in the New Age project. They prefer aspects of their religious legacy that are rejected by the New Agers. In this way, the politically inclined natives adopt a much more trustworthy historiography than the romanticising entrepreneurs of the New Age community. Obviously, I am not implying that transformed belief systems or new religious ways, such as New Age concepts and rituals, are unauthentic. They are not. They are as authentic as any older tradition. However, they are authentic in their own way (each and every tradition is) and


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should, in terms of academic analysis, of course be distinguished from the systems they derive some of their concepts from or identify with. Neither do I suggest that traditional Hawaiian religion is a definite category that has been corrupted by intrusion from the outside. Religious systems, as all cultural systems, are flexible and will always change. One should, however, distinguish between the changes taking place within a relatively stable social matrix and the changes that happen when this matrix is broken by intellectual or political invaders. In this case, there is no real correspondence between the dominating native revitalisation movement’s interests and the ambition of the New Agers. Hawaiians are simply not prepared to be shaped according to western New Age conceptions. Indeed, as pointed out by historian of religions Florian Jeserich,16 the wave of huna-imagination that was inaugurated by Max Freedom Long, actually may transform Hawaii’s religious history as the Longian interpretation gradually finds its way into new areas. At some point, one may hypothesise, it will be impossible for ordinary people to distinguish between the historiography and theology of the New Agers and that of the traditional Hawaiians. Indeed, many of the Hawaiians themselves are not at all sure what is what. I have interviewed a woman who was confused, but at the same time aware of her own disorientation. Talking of people who were offering public lectures about “the spirituality of dolphins as taught by the ancient Hawaiians” in Hilo, the island of Hawaii (in June 2005), she said: “I am no scholar. I have not read all this stuff. I would like to trust them, but what do they know?” Another (female) informant, a spectator to a ‘cultural practitioner’ hula-dance (which is one of the more significant expressions of native cultural identity), also in Hilo, said to me, “How come that so many white people know everything about hula? How come they always want to teach this? Where did they pick it up? The meaning of what we do is not what they say. It is annoying.” In stating this I am not arguing that religious traditions are better off if they remain unchanged. No religious system will survive unaffected. I am simply pointing to the fact that New Agers, in ways similar to Christian missionaries, are deconstructing a foreign religious system in favour of their own. Contrary to the Christians, though, the New Agers tend to believe that they are in full accordance with the ‘exotic other’. They are not.

16

Private communication, publication being considered.

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mikael rothstein Conclusion

One possible explanation for the kind of identity formation that takes place among non-Hawaiians during the New Age appropriation of Hawaii religion, may be found by applying sociologist of religion Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s theory about religion as a chain of memory. According to Hervieu-Léger “religion is the ideological, symbolic and social device by which individual and collective awareness of belonging to a lineage of believers is created and controlled” (Hervieu-Léger 2000:back cover). However, modern societies are no longer “societies of memory” (Hervieu-Léger 2000:123f ). Rather, groups and individuals will often choose to inscribe themselves into new contexts where a new historiography can develop. In terms of actual new religions that mechanism is readily visible: the devoted members of the Church of Scientology, for instance, will to a large extent identify their own history with that of the organisation, thus providing a common ground for the group’s members who otherwise would lack a common descent and history, and thus an important condition for social solidarity. By importing Hawaiian ethnicity and revivifying what is perceived to be Hawaii’s religious legacy, New Agers from Europe and the United States are doing somewhat the same. And in order to do it they really do not need the Hawaiians themselves. They need a myth about them, and so they create it for the same purpose. The book cited above by Laura and Betsy Crites (2003) is very explicit in this respect. They consider Hawaii a universal focal point that has the potential of uniting all human kind in a soteriological quest. It is true that no social formation in terms of an actual new religion takes place, but within the framework of a more versatile organisational pattern, the participants in New Age-related hula, huna or Lomi Lomi are connected in a network that relates them to the sacred land of Hawaii, and to the appraised people of the islands in ways that are quite different from the general self-perception and national understanding of the actual Hawaiians. The islands provide a kind of physical framework to a set of religious speculations and dreams that very often have no place to ‘be’ apart from the minds of the individuals entertaining them. More specifically, as already mentioned, certain places on the islands are singled out as especially sacred. To go there is partly a personal pilgrimage, partly a contribution to an overall project for the benefit of everything that lives. So, while some New Age concepts are challenging the epistemology of the modern Christian or secular West, the preoccupation with native


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people’s religions, at this point, seems to be more connected with sacred space and the transgression of ethnicity. History is no real issue here, presumably because the alleged wisdom of the noble Hawaiians is considered as timeless and free from history as the pure and aboriginal Hawaiians themselves. We know, of course, that this is certainly not the case, but the romantic vision of the old evolutionists still survive as a guiding principle during the formation of many modern religious or symbolic systems. What still needs to be discussed is to what extent the New Age perspective triggers some kind of feedback mechanism that allows it to be incorporated into contemporary Hawaiian’s understanding of themselves. As already implied, such an impact is surely going on, but its precise nature and future odds has not been the subject for this presentation. My guess is that initiatives such as Ka Lahui Hawaii (The Sovereign Nation of Hawaii), very soon, will have to face the challenges posed by the non-Hawaiian New Agers, and that different conceptualisations of Hawaii’s traditional religion will be competing in an open market. Again, I would suspect that matters of ethnicity will define the borderlines and delimitations. After all, native Hawaiians are not among the most frequent customers in New Age retreats and centres. In fact, I have not encountered one single native Hawaiian receiving personal training from any New Age houle. References Bainbridge, W.S., 1997. The Sociology of Religious Movements. New York: Routledge. Carroll, R., 2003. Madam Pele: True Encounters With Hawaii’s Fire Goddess. Honolulu: Bess Press. Claigh, R.H., 1998. The Kahuna Way to Create the Future in 5 Steps. Hawaii: Living Wellness. Crites, L. & B. Crites, 2003. The Call to Hawaii. A Wellness Vacation Guidebook, Aloha Wellness Publishers, Honolulu. Cunningham, S., 2001. Hawaiian Magic and Spirituality. Minnesota: Lewellyn Publications. Geertz, A.W., 1992. The Invention of Prophecy: Continuity and Meaning in Hopi Indian Religion. Knebe: Brunebakke Publications. Hammer, O., 2001. Claiming Knowledge. Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Leiden: Brill. Hervieu-Léger, D., 2000. Religion as a Chain of Memory. London: Polity Press. Johnson, K., 2002. “Chanting the Lost Lands: Polynesian Traditions of Lemuria.” Zento Fall 34–36. King, K., 1983. Kahuna Healing. Quest Books. ——, 1985. Mastering Your Hidden Self: Guide to the Huna Way. Quest Books. ——, 1990. Urban Shaman. Fireside. ——, 1992. Earth Energies: A Quest for the Hidden Power of the Planet. Quest Books.

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——, 2002. Dangerous Journeys: A Teaching Story. Hunaworks. ——, 2006. Imageneering Health. Hunaworks. Long, M.F., 1998/1965. The Huna Code in Religions. The Influence of the Huna Tradition on Modern Faith. California: DeVorss Publications. Magliocco, S., 2004. Witching Culture. Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nimmo, A.H., 1990. “The Cult of Pele in Traditional Hawaii.” Bishop Museum Occasional Papers 30, Honolulu. Rothstein, M., 1996. Belief Transformations: The Relation Between Science and Religion in Transcendental Meditation (TM) and The International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. ——, 2005a. “Motorvejen og Forfædrenes Ånder Religion og Magt på Hawaii.” [“The Highway and the Spirits of the Forfathers: Religion and Power in Hawaii.”] Chaos 43. ——, 2005b. “The Spiritualization of Land and People: The Adaptation of Native Hawai’ians in New Age Belief Systems.” FINYAR 2 94–113. Wallis, Robert J., 2003. Shamans/Neo-Shamans. Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans, Routledge, London.

A LATIN AMERICAN NEW AGE?* María Julia Carozzi The simple question posed by the title of this chapter, “A Latin American New Age?”, comprises two related issues I will address. The first deals with the uniqueness of the Latin American branch of the New Age movement and wonders about its specific characteristics. The second refers to its uniformity and inquires about the internal diversity within Latin America. I will seek to answer these questions by analysing three aspects of the New Age. Firstly, I will explore the collective arrangements or organisational infrastructure (Zald & McCarthy 1990) that contributed to the spread of New Age practices and ideas in Latin American cities. Secondly, I will explore the directions of change proposed and performed within the above-mentioned social arrangements. Finally, I will refer to the diverse frame alignment processes (Snow et al. 1986), or instances of translation of the New Age movement aims and ideas in local terms to make them amenable to potential adherents. Data presented in this chapter are derived from my own field experience studying the New Age movement in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and by reading works by colleagues in other countries of Latin America. Understanding fades as geographical distance increases. This, together with the fact that Brazilian academic institutions are particularly productive in the social scientific study of religion, makes for a heavy bias in favour of this country and mine, Argentina, as sources of data. Social scientists in Latin America have analysed different aspects of the New Age from a variety of perspectives, allowing them to frame it as a religious culture (Amaral 1999, 2000), an alternative therapeutic complex (Martins 1999; Tavares 1999), a neo-esoteric circuit (Magnani 1999a, 1999b), a set of practices creating symbolic merchandise (de la Torre & Gutiérrez Zúñiga 2005), and a distinctive version of nativism (González Torres 2000). As I have done elsewhere (Carozzi 1997, 1999,

* Research leading to this chapter was financed by the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (National Council of Scientific and Technological Research). I would like to thank Alejandro Frigerio for his careful reading and fruitful comments on previous versions of this chapter.

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2000, 2004, in press) I will here analyse New Age with a conceptual framework derived from the study of new social movements. This does not mean I will take sides in the discussion about whether the New Age ‘really’ constitutes a movement (Melton 1992; York 1995) or not (Shimazono 1999; Van Hove 1999; Sutcliffe 2003). I chose this conceptual framework since it allows me to relate: a set of organisations and collective arrangements; a number of directions of change proclaimed by discourse and performed in action within those organisations; the effects that those changes bring on different fields of action; and finally the translation of those transformative trends in local terms. Organisational Infrastructure At least in São Paulo (Magnani 1999a) and Buenos Aires (Carozzi 1999), the organisation most actively allowing for the spread of the New Age movement during the last two decades of the past century has been a circuit integrating diverse locales within each city through which people traverse in search of health, spiritual development and consciousness amplification. This circuit was labelled “neo-esoteric” in São Paulo (Magnani 1999a, 1999b) and “alternative” in Buenos Aires (Carozzi 2000), terms that reflect more the difficulties in classifying the practices that they encompass rather than any substantial differences between both locations. The core of this circuit consists of people participating interchangeably as healers and patients, speakers and audience members, co-ordinators—or facilitators, as they prefer to be called—and participants, teachers and disciples, writers and readers of a vast array of combined spiritual, esoteric, mystical, ritual, nutritional, (psycho-)therapeutic and body movement techniques and practices. There are, however, at least in Buenos Aires, limits to the above-mentioned exchangeability. When circuit travellers start to offer their own workshops and therapeutic services they generally stop participating in other activities based on disciplines already present in the circuit and subsequently only attend those of newly introduced practices. This accounts for the fact that many recently introduced disciplines very early reach a peak of attendance, losing popularity rapidly thereafter. Local chapters of the circuit were initially comprised of segments of psychologists, medical doctors, nutritionists, specialists in the supernatural, and dance and gym instructors who, adhering to the movement through reading and participating in activities coordinated by its

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agents in Europe or the United States transformed their activities in the directions proposed and performed by them. In the Buenos Aires branch of the movement, the establishment of international connections preceded the formation of local ones. The latter phenomenon only started to take place in the early 1980s through the effort of a few journalists and publishers (Carozzi 1999, 2000). As in the United States (Melton 1992), the movement clearly divided some pre-existent esoteric, religious, and psychological fields that subsequently saw the rise of their New Age varieties in addition to their traditional ones. Most notably this process affected homeopathy, astrology, yoga, Zen Buddhism, macrobiotics, naturism and Gestalt psychology, disciplines already present in the largest cities of Latin America. Once the New Age editorial industry was well-established, disciplines completely new to Latin America—such as Reiki or Feng Shui—were integrated into these local and trans-national networks. Throughout the last decade, the Buenos Aires chapter of the network witnessed a diminishing of its internal connections as practices become more strictly codified. Their combination was increasingly looked upon with suspicion, and professional, often internationally based, certificates were offered and desired. This tendency towards specialisation and disciplinary orthodoxy appears as the local reflection of a trans-national trend observed both in Brazil (Russo 1993; Tavares 1999) and England (Bowman 1999). After these transformations, the New Age looks like a movement that has already finished its cycle, leaving behind both some new institutions and new practices, and values within pre-existing ones. Magnani (1999a) classified the diverse organisations comprising the São Paulo neo-esoteric circuit in the 1990s, and produced a list that would not differ much had it been elaborated in Buenos Aires. Organisations include, first, holistic centres that organise diverse activities—such as oracular consultation, therapies, alternative body movement workshops, conferences, courses, artefact- and book-selling—in a variety of New Age disciplines. Secondly, the list includes centres that specialise in only one of the afore-mentioned disciplines but nevertheless reunite a large number of teachers, coordinators and therapists. The circuit also includes more individualised locations where one or two persons offer services, teach or coordinate workshops applying the knowledge they have developed by participating in the circuit. Finally, there are a variety of shops that have a purely commercial relationship with circuit participants offering products for consumption—they include

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bookshops, pharmacies, tourist agencies, organic groceries, and so on. Magnani found that the neo-esoteric circuit in the city of São Paulo also included initiatory societies with a doctrinal system, a body of rituals and a clear hierarchical organisation. Although the alternative therapists I interviewed in Buenos Aires had sometimes participated in similar centres in the past, I hesitate to include them in the New Age circuit for they lack—unless they offer services open to the community—the encouragement of inter-disciplinary circulation, the value placed on personal creativity and the immediate payment modality that characterises organisations that comprise this circuit. Both in Buenos Aires (Carozzi 2000) and in São Paulo (Magnani 1999a), most circuit organisations are located in high and upper-middle class neighbourhoods. In addition, in the Buenos Aires circuit while women acted as coordinators, facilitators and therapists more often than men, the latter were more often directors of centres, schools, academies and organisations. In addition to the circulation of individuals and the practice of mutual referral (Amaral 1999; Carozzi 2000), in both Argentina and Brazil, centres are also linked by a variety of New Age and alternative magazines as well as by the organisation of New Age festivals and fairs. Brazilian literature on the topic strongly suggests that festivals and fairs play a more important connecting role for the circuit in Brazil than they do in Argentina. In Buenos Aires, according to local organisers, it was only in the beginning of the movement, during the 1980s, that large numbers of people attended festivals. In the first years of the following decade, mutual recommendation, gossip, magazines and books were the main fuel of contacts and circulation from one discipline to another. Around 1994, the disciplines enjoying some degree of popularity1 that were offered, taught, combined, shared and experienced at organisations connected by the circuit included therapies with natural elements (e.g. gem, crystal, flower-essence, colour, scent, water and mud therapy); natural alimentation and cooking systems (e.g. vegetarianism, anna yoga and macrobiotics); non-psychoanalytic psychotherapies (e.g. Gestalt, bioenergetics, Reichian, Jungian and transpersonal therapy, psychodrama, play therapy, mask therapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming

1 There were an almost infinite variety of disciplines that were brought together in ‘personal syntheses’ that were only taught, practised or shared in workshops by one person as, for example, mystic theatre, angelic writing and holistic swimming.


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(NLP), language ontology, body-mind centring, re-birthing, past-life therapy); esoteric disciplines (e.g. astrology, Tarot reading, numerology, graphology, angelology); oriental and alternative ritual and body movement techniques (e.g. Tai Ch’i Chuan, Feldenkrais, yoga, the Alexander Technique, bio-dance, energy-centre dance, eutonics); oriental and alternative medicines (e.g. homeopathy, acupuncture, Shiatsu, Do In, postural correction, global postural alignment, Rolfing); and meditation techniques inspired by Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Native American shamanism. Later, Feng Shui, emotional intelligence training and dance therapy became successively popular. Having conducted interviews amongst participants in a workshop in Recife, an important city in north-eastern Brazil, Paulo Henrique Martins (1999) presented a list of the most popular disciplines in the local chapter of the circuit. These included yoga, meditation, homeopathy, flower essence therapies, bioenergetic dance and Reiki. Other alternative therapies mentioned frequently by his interviewees included acupuncture, art therapy, crystal therapy, colour therapy, Chinese massage, reflexology, rebirthing, past-life therapy and Tai Ch’i Chuan. He also found that alternative circuit travellers in Recife often consulted Tarot readers, astrologers and numerologists. As in the United States (Melton 1992), in Argentina and Brazil training in selected alternative disciplines became fashionable in consecutive waves. For a number of disciplines—such as shamanism, Reiki, Feng Shui and emotional intelligence—this occurred in both countries at roughly the same time and following the same order. This success was preceded by the translation and publication of North American bestsellers on those practices by big local publishing companies. These companies embraced the policy of securing good earnings buying editorial rights for books on disciplines recently introduced in the international alternative circuit and enjoying great success. Directions of Change In a movement that proclaims the value of experience over preaching or lecturing, the changes it endorses and causes are to be found in the organisation and transformation of the activities and situations it inspires, more than (or at least not only in) the discourses of its leading practitioners. Following Gamson (1992), I will employ the concepts of cultural themes and counter-themes in order to analyse such directions

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of change in the Latin American manifestations of the movement.2 Cultural themes are safe, conventional and normative assertions that one could invoke in almost any situation with the assumption of public support and absence of overt opposition. Conversely, counter-themes “typically share many of the same taken-for-granted assumptions but challenge some specific aspect of the mainstream culture; they are adversarial, contentious, oppositional” (Gamson 1992:135). Examining the way that situations were organised in the Buenos Aires New Age circuit and comparing them with therapeutic, esoteric and religious activities laying outside this circuit but previously attended by the same socio-economic segment of the population, I found that the counter-themes repeatedly emphasised by these transformations included: • Endorsement of the permanent circulation of individuals, establishment of ever-changing relationships and formation of ephemeral groups, as opposed to the traditional safeguarding of permanent links and preservation of stable associations, groups and institutions. • Encouragement of individual autonomy as opposed to attempts to exert power or influence on the actions, beliefs and decisions of disciples, patients and audiences. In close relation to this, the amplification of conscience of and connection with a perfect inner self was repeatedly presented as the principal instrument of individual, collective and planetary change as opposed to any kind of concerted collective action. Suppression of all power and knowledge hierarchies as opposed to the attribution of a special role to any person, group or institution in any kind of positive individual, collective or ‘planetary’ transformation. Likewise, individual synthesis and personal creativity were highly valued at the expense of following established procedures and adopting traditional doctrines. • Respect and love of nature as opposed to celebration of technological dominion over it. As Bowman (1995) has pointed out from observations in several English speaking countries, this preference for nature over civilisation subsumed in the Buenos Aires circuit a vast array of other preferences that are culturally interchangeable (e.g. magic, ritual With Gamson—and contrary to New Agers themselves who would assert that their practices override dualities—I assume that in the modern western world, themes and counter-themes of political culture are organised in pairs so that when one is invoked the other is present in latent form. 2


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and myth over science; femininity over masculinity; childhood over adulthood; the East over the West; indigenous peoples, cultures and religions over imperial ones; body over mind; moving and touching over talking; intuition over rationality; pleasure over effort; feeling over thinking; rhythm over melody; experiencing over reading, etc.) (Carozzi 1999, 2000, 2004) These themes and counter-themes are similar to those found by other researchers not only in Latin America (Amaral 1999, 2000; Magnani 1999a, 1999b; Martins 1999) but also elsewhere (Albanese 1990; York 1995; Heelas 1996). Nevertheless, while the directions of change of the New Age movement appear globally shared, one cannot assert the same of the cultural consequences they entail, these depending on the cultural milieus where such values are sustained and emphasised. Thus, if in North American culture the first two assertions in the list are clearly cultural themes that anyone could hold with the assumption of no overt opposition, in Latin America this is far from true—in fact they are counter-themes. As I have argued elsewhere (Carozzi 2004), even in urban settings ephemeral relations and personal autonomy are only reluctantly accepted by the majority of the middle-class population in Latin America. Although neo-liberal policies have obliged most people to accept them in the workplace, this fact is generally seen with regret. Many high and upper middle-class Latin Americans would prefer to stay in the city where they were born or at least conserve permanent face-to-face relations with their original family and friends. Moving location entails severing these ties and is typically attributed to unwanted economic circumstances more often than to genuine and uncontested desire or free will. Thus, personal autonomy and ephemeral relations, while present in many aspects of social life, are far from been endowed with the sacred legitimate condition they enjoy in the United States (Slater 1970). Instead, mutuality—being supportive, true to friends and sensitive to the needs of others—is universally legitimate in the Latin American cultural milieu, whereas it would constitute a counter-theme in America (Gamson 1992, 140–1). Practices and discourses of the alternative circuit discourage and de-emphasise permanent personal relationships by framing them as the source of unhealthy and unbalancing personal and collective circumstances. Concurrently, ephemeral social relationships, intra-personal relationships and relations with the cosmos and nature are shown to be associated with health, well-being and spiritual development.

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Considering the broader cultural milieu, it becomes clear that participating actively and constantly in the New Age circuit implies some sort of conversion for Latin Americans. This conversion entails the bestowal of a new sacred quality to some dispositions—such as the inclination to move along, to sever mutual dependency and to be autonomous—that were considered ambivalently before participation. Concurrently, differently from what occurs in other areas of the world, particularly the United States, where the value placed on such dispositions are almost universally positive, the New Age circuit entails a more radical cultural transformation in Latin America. This radical transformation entails de-sacralising lasting and significant personal relationships and, conversely, bestowing a brand-new sacred character to autonomy, continuous circulation and participation in ever-changing ephemeral groups (Amaral 2000; Carozzi 1997, 2004). As Miguez (2000) has shown, while the New Age has effected this transformation for many members of the middle and upper-middle classes, the spread of Pentecostalism has caused a similar transformation in the lower-class segments of the population. Beside these general cultural transformations, movement consequences multiply when each of the various fields the New Age has modified in Latin American cities is considered. From the point of view of consumption, the movement has created a new, clearly differentiated urban life-style cutting across the cities of the continent, creating a sustained demand for products once rarely sought for in the area. It has created a new type of consumer whose preferences Magnani (1999b) has vividly described for São Paulo with words perfectly suited to depict also those of a frequent participant in the Buenos Aires alternative circuit: She can go from yoga to liangong (but never to aerobic gym), sometimes consults the runes and sometimes the Tarot cards, attends the play “Eternal Bonds” and the film “Little Buddha” . . . Her code includes Vivaldi (in the Spring Ritual), Jungian archetypes, the yin/yang dichotomy and is suited to distinguish between mantras, mudras and mandalas. She appreciates (or practices) light cooking preferring it to the radically macrobiotic and vegetarian varieties. She can read Paulo Coelho, but also Joseph Campbell, confronts mild organic disturbances with fitotherapy, and emotional ones with Bach flower essences, seeking instead homeopathy for more serious problems. (Magnani 1999b:40)

In the therapeutic sphere, the New Age has consolidated an integrated alternative therapeutic field and has awarded a good number of oriental and western non-allopathic medical, psychological, body-movement and spiritual procedures with a new and unprecedented visibility (Tavares


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1999). The movement has also contributed to blurring the once uncontested limits between these kinds of practices even for people who only attend regularly one or a few selected activities. In the religious field, New Age has institutionalised multiple participation and eclectic circulation between religious denominations. As Richardson (1980) has pointed out for the United States, frequent religious shift has also characterised the conversion careers of many people for at least the last two decades in Latin America. But while outside the New Age circuit this shift takes place in spite of the opposition of religious leaders and spiritual masters, within the network even leaders encourage circulation. The boom of spiritual-religious workshops and seminars that the movement originated also spread amongst the middle-class urban inhabitants a practice previously mostly found among popular spiritual healers and Afro-Brazilian religious practitioners: to charge immediately for spiritual services. Since in the religious field the delay of the counter-gift and its translation into long-lasting services typically assures mutual dependency, this practice further fostered religious autonomy by suppressing relations based on the gift/counter-gift dynamics. Frame Alignment Processes If cultural commonalities amongst the urban middle-classes in Latin America appear to affect the success of the New Age movement across the cities of the region, there are, however, some local cultural peculiarities in each urban branch. In effect, both New Age spokespersons and circuit travellers have aligned the movement frame (Snow et al. 1986) making it amenable to local cultural dispositions. As cultures, these adaptations vary from one city to another and even within the same city according to changing political climates. It is only possible for me to make reference to some of these local adaptations, since studies of the New Age movement are not as abundant nor do they circulate widely enough in Latin America as to make an exhaustive enumeration possible. A Revolution of the Hearts The first of these adaptations took place in Buenos Aires during the early years of the 1980s, when Argentina was still under the military dictatorship that became internationally known for its cruel methods

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of repression and disappearance. A very small number of practitioners of alternative disciplines, especially humanistic and Gestalt psychologists but also some body movement specialists, had returned from exile. They were connected to centres of the trans-national alternative circuit, but isolated from one another. A very popular singer who had had contact with the New Age movement during his exile in Spain, had made attempts to transmit some of the movement tenets, mainly positive thinking, harmony with nature, and the value of forgiveness, to the general public in Argentina, but he had been loudly rejected by his former loving audiences. The cruelty of the repression was not an adequate political climate for the kind of message promoted by A Course in Miracles, for example. The majority of the middle-class inhabitants of Buenos Aires who had dreamed in the sixties and seventies of either social revolution or radical reform had not abandoned but rather carefully hidden their social justice ideals in order to preserve physical integrity. In this climate, a journalist who was connected to the international New Age network through participation in international meetings and subscription to American magazines, succeeded in reuniting large audiences first for his speeches and then his magazine, Mutantia. His success may be attributed to the radical rhetoric he adopted—in a way reminiscent of the leaders of oriental religions in America’s late Vietnam war era described by Kent (1993). He stressed the social changes that the movement would bring, announcing it as a ‘revolution’ of the hearts, and framing the nationstates as its main opponent. Such an emphasis, which was shared by many of the first activists of the local branch of the movement, made the New Age look as much akin to a socialist revolution as possible and granted its message a success that would have been otherwise unattainable. This characteristic of New Age in its early stages in Buenos Aires, together with the frequent adoption of its practices and ideas by former sympathisers of radical social reform,3 allowed me to interpret it elsewhere (Carozzi in press) as a continuation of the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s: one that maintained its desired goals but spiritualised and individualised the means to achieve them.

3 Conversions from political movements seeking radical social transformations to the New Age were also common both in the United States (Gitlin 1993:425) and in São Paulo (Magnani 2000).


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This occurred in a climate of violent repression where the cost of social protest was very high. During the second half of the 1980s, the stress on the social consequences of consciousness expansion was progressively replaced in Buenos Aires by an emphasis on the enhancement of health as the main bridge established between the movement and the culture of its potential adherents. As in other countries and following the lead of the publishing industry, even the term New Age was dropped in the next decade. Nevertheless, the notion that their activities would contribute in the long run to a world free of inequalities, poverty and hunger continued to be present in the private discourse of many alternative therapists participating in the Buenos Aires circuit. Even so, social issues would only re-appear in local magazines informing the network in 1998 when a new wave of political protest arose in Argentina. Extreme Syncretism In 1994, I had been circulating through the alternative therapy circuit in Buenos Aires for two and a half years when I suffered, during a modern dance class not included in the circuit, a muscle contraction that impeded movement of my arms and head. I contacted Manuel, a massage specialist who had introduced Do In to the Buenos Aires circuit and who had many famous dancers as clients. During the ensuing Do In session, a persistent smell of burning charcoal impregnated my nostrils. It was not a scent I was used to, as those of massage ointments or aromatherapy oils. It was a definite smell of burning charcoal. When the session finished I asked Manuel what it was, and he answered “These are charcoal pieces used at the sweat lodges.” He pronounced “sweat lodges” in English with a heavy Argentinean accent. I had to ask once more before the word started to evoke a meaning. I remembered the sweat lodges announced in the pages of Uno Mismo—one of the local New Age magazines—as an alternative therapy practice, and those that María Teresa, my Bach Flower therapist and informant had told me she had attended. But almost at the same time I recalled the North American Indian cultures frequently mentioned at the UCLA anthropology courses I had attended a decade before. I couldn’t avoid wondering why while frequenting the alternative therapy circuit informed by the New Age movement, taking courses, participating in self-healing and self-knowing workshops, private consultations and

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body movement sessions following the recommendations of co-ordinators, masters and therapists, I had found no Argentine Indian healing ritual practised, no Afro-Brazilian spirit mentioned or any of the vast repertoire of folk saints invoked by poor suburban curanderos called for. It was not the case that there were no people in Buenos Aires who after entering in contact with the circuit presented themselves as Argentine Indian shamans—there was, for example, one anthropologist who converted to the New Age and re-framed his previous anthropological knowledge of Argentinean Indians in the terms of the movement—but their vocabulary did not enter the common language (Albanese 1992) of the Buenos Aires circuit as those of the American Indian sweat lodges, yoga chakras or Tai Ch’i Chuan tan tien did. Very few activists of the movement and therapists in the alternative circuit in Buenos Aires perceived continuities between their recent spiritual journey and their previous religious experience or that of their Argentine neighbours. Most of them had rejected their Catholic, Jewish or Protestant religious upbringing in their early youth, either becoming agnostics, believing in an indefinite idea of God with no associated religious practice or initiating a search for alternative spiritual paths that took them to practising yoga, learning parapsychology or reading esoteric books. Others, with agnostic parents, had never had any kind of religious instruction until they came into contact with New Age spirituality. While the concept of religious syncretism—understood here as a blend of Catholic beliefs and rituals and those of various indigenous and African religious traditions—could depict the religiosity of popular classes in Buenos Aires and that of the general population in rural areas of Argentina, the term is far from describing the religiosity of the secularised urban middle-classes of the big cities. Religious syncretism would not make a good bridge between the New Age and the culture of potential adherents and alternative therapy users and practitioners, because it would not evoke any cultural resonances (Frigerio 2005). The opposite seems to be true both in Brazil and Mexico. Brazilian New Age activists were able to build bridges between a syncretism already present in the culture of their audiences and the movement interpretive frame. In the fifth edition of the Encontro para a Nova Consciência (Encounter for a New Consciousness) that took place in Paraíba, Brazil, in 1997, Leila Amaral (2000) witnessed one of these attempts to align the New Age movement frame with local syncretism by a local Presbyterian pastor. Like the Buenos Aires journalist I mentioned above, he believed that a new consciousness was emerging in


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the whole world but he described it for his audience with the following words: It is a holistic syncretism, but it is not a fusion of creeds, nor proselytising, nor conversion, nor going back to the origins. Each movement preserves its idiosyncrasies and a number of identity marks . . . In my chapel, the Eucharistic table is the principal door. Everybody is invited to it, without asking them to be baptized or belonging to any given church. (Amaral 2000:190–1, author’s translation)

Emphasis in the combination of religious traditions within the New Age movement allowed Amaral to define the latter as a renewed version of Brazilian syncretism. According to Amaral, the first alteration that Brazilian syncretism had undergone under the New Age resided in the fact that it was now always on the move, always adding new experiences, beliefs and spiritualities to put the previously encountered ones into question, and then never leading to a synthesis. An additional transformation consisted in the severing of the ties once uniting syncretism with place. Religious hybridising had ceased to have a fixed location and as a result any religious combination could be found in any place in the world and even within any religious institution. But even with these transformations, a fundamental continuity seems to be found between the past religious and present spiritual practices in Brazil (Amaral 1999, 2000). New Age and Nativism A similar blending of pre-existent syncretism into New Age practices was found by Renée de la Torre and Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga (2005) in Guadalajara, Mexico. There they found that Reiki and Bach Flower Essence therapists invoked, together with the multiplicity of spiritual beings that they met in the neo-esoteric circuit, other spirits already present in traditional Mexican folk religion. In the performance of their therapeutic rituals, they also combined Reiki and Bach Flower Remedy practices with other procedures inspired by the Catholic mass. Continuities between the New Age and Catholicism are probably possible because Guadalajarans take pride in being mestizos, of ‘mixed blood’, instead of having purely indigenous origins as other Mexicans. In the capital city of Mexico, the New Age respect for ancient wisdom and shamanistic aboriginal practices inspired, instead, a retrospective search for an Indian identity further fuelled by Castaneda’s imaginative

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ethnographies of the teachings of a Mexican Yaqui Indian. There, some of the readers of New Age literature dress in white and reunite around Mexican pre-Hispanic monuments to perform re-invented aboriginal rituals during the equinoxes together with other defenders of the Indian cause. They also hold rituals in front of Mexica—Mexicas being the original inhabitants of the territory of Mexico city—divine images at the National Museum of Anthropology to awaken the collective unconscious of the Mexicans, change their former Christian names to Nahuatl names and demand learning the Nahuatl language and imposing it as the national language (González Torres 2000). As with New Age shamans in São Paulo (Magnani 1999c), most of these neo-Mexicas are middle class inhabitants with no links to indigenous communities, whose native language is Spanish and whose immediate ancestors do not claim to be Indians. They share their ideas of what it means to be truly Mexican with other middle-class urban inhabitants, but, in contact with the New Age circuit they resort to rituals and pre-Hispanic gods to achieve their goals re-inventing a religious tradition. Unlike the New Agers in Guadalajara that De la Torre and Zuñiga describe, these capital city inhabitants reject Catholicism and are more prone to find connections with Tibetan Lamas than with Catholic priests. This diversity within Mexico shows that the particular selection of traditions made by the middle classes conditions the ways in which the New Age message is re-framed and re-interpreted in each Latin American city. The fundamental unity of all religion traditions—including Catholicism—seems to be emphasised in some places, while in others it is the superiority of ancient, pre-imperialist traditions—imagined to prompt a harmony with nature absent in Christianity—that gains prevalence. Final Remarks There is no simple answer to the unity nor to the uniqueness of the Latin American branch of the New Age movement. Indeed, the publishing industry, some common features of upper-middle class habitus in times of globalisation and intense trans-national circulation of lecturers, masters and facilitators, have imprinted common markers on urban Latin American New Age circuits. These common markers include the insistence on some themes and counter-themes of late modern global culture, a common language, similarly organised rituals, a number of


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oriental and alternative disciplines and some recent trends towards institutionalisation. These commonalities do not differ much when comparing the chapters of the movement in Latin American cities like Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio, Recife or Guadalajara with those depicted in literature relating to other urban chapters around the world. Some distinctive Latin American traits emerge when we consider the consequences of the movement in terms of the magnitude of the cultural transformations it imported. The relative newness of the sacralisation of ephemeral social relations in the region make for a distinctive radical character of transformations brought about by the New Age. Nevertheless, the uniqueness of this radical quality remains to be probed by research in other areas of the world. The bridges that New Age circuit travellers establish with local cultures impress diversity to the movement in different Latin American cities. We mentioned here some of these adaptations. An emphasis on the social consequences that self-knowledge and amplifications of consciousness brought about by the New Age would import, distinguishes Buenos Aires activists and therapists from those of other cities of Latin America. Continuities with religious syncretic folk religions seem to characterise both the Brazilian chapter of the movement and that of Guadalajara in Mexico. In this same country, as a result of contact with the movement, at least some inhabitants of Mexico City seem to reject syncretism in favour of a ‘pure’ indigenous culture and religion. The latter are conceived as more proximate to other non-European native cultures than to Catholicism. Finally, we should point out that the panorama presented in this chapter depends on case studies that have mostly privileged large cities heavily affected by globalisation. A different picture could emerge had the focus been on small Latin American villages that have been affected by modernisation in a smaller degree and which have lately become points of attraction for international New Age nomads. References Albanese, C., 1990. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. ——, 1992. “The Magical Staff: Quantum Healing in the New Age”. In Lewis, J.R. & J.G. Melton, eds. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany: SUNY, 68–84. Amaral, L., 1999. “Sincretismo em Movimento. O Estilo Nova Era de Lidar com o Sagrado.” [“Syncretism in Movement. The New Age Style of Dealing with the Sacred.”] In Carozzi, M.J., ed. A Nova Era no Mercosul. [The New Age in the Mercosur Region.] Petrópolis: Vozes.

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——, 2000. Carnaval da Alma: Comunidade, Essência e Sincretismo na Nova Era. [Carnival of the Soul: Community, Essence and Syncretism in the New Age.] Petrópolis: Vozes. Bowman, M., 1995. “The Noble Savage and the Global Village: Cultural Evolution in New Age and Neo-Pagan Thought”. Journal of Contemporary Religion 10.2 139–50. ——, 1999. “Healing in the Spiritual Marketplace: Consumers, Courses and Credentialism”. Social Compass 46.2 181–89. ——, 2005. “Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth: The Local and the Global in Glastonbury.” Numen 52 157–90, reprinted in this volume. Carozzi, M., 1997. “Autónomos y Adaptados en la Nueva Era Porteña: Rescatando la Situación para Explicar Paradojas de la Identidad Personal” [“Autonomy and Adaptation in the Buenos Aires New Age: Recovering the Situation as an Explanation for Personal Identity Paradoxes.”] Paper presented at the VII Jornadas sobre Alternativas Religiosas en América Latina, November 27–29, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. ——, 1999. “La autonomía como religión: La Nueva Era.” [“Autonomy as Religion: the New Age”] Alteridades 9.18 19–38. ——, 2000. Nueva Era y Terapias Alternativas: Construyendo Significados en el Discurso y la Interacción. [New Age and Alternative Therapies: Constructing Meaning through Discourse and Interaction.] Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Universidad Católica Argentina. ——, 2004. “Ready to Move Along: The Sacralization of Disembedding in the New Age Movement and the Alternative Circuit in Buenos Aires”. Civilisations 51.1–2 139–54. ——, In press. “Otras Religiones, otras Políticas. Algunas Relaciones entre Movimentos Sociales y Religiones sin Organización Central.” [“Other Religions, other Politics: Linking Social Movements and Decentralized Religions.”] Ciencias Sociales y Religión/ Ciências Sociais e Religião 8. De la Torre, R. & C. Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2005. “La Lógica del Mercado y la Lógica de la Creencia en la Creación de Mercancías Simbólicas.” [“Market Logic and the Logic of Belief in the Creation of Symbolic Commodities.”] Desacatos 18 53–70. Frigerio, A., 2005. “Identidades Porosas, Estructuras Sincréticas y Narrativas Dominantes: Miradas Cruzadas entre Pierre Sanchis y la Argentina”. [“Permeable Identities, Syncretic Structures and Dominant Narratives: Re-reading Pierre Sanchis from an Argentine Perspective.”] Ciencias Sociales y Religión/Ciências Sociais e Religião 7 223–37. Kent, S., 1993. “Radical Rhetoric and Mystical Religion in America’s Late Vietnam War Era.” Religion 23 45–60. Gamson, W., 1992. Talking Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gitlin, T., 1993. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books. González Torres, Y., 2000. “El Movimiento de la Mexicanidad”. [“The Mexicanidad movement.”] Religiones y Sociedad, Nuevo Milenio y Nuevas Identidades 8, 9–35. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Magnani, J.G., 1999a. Mystica Urbe: Um Estudo Antropológico do Circuito Neo-Esotérico na Cidade. [Urban Mysticism: An Anthropological Study of the Neo-Esoteric Circuit in the City.] São Paulo: Studio Nobel Editora. ——, 1999b. “O Circuito Neo-Esotérico na Cidade de São Paulo”. [“The Neo-Esoteric Circuit in the City of São Paulo.”] In Carozzi, M.J., ed. A Nova Era no Mercosul. Petrópolis: Vozes. ——, 1999c. “O Xamanismo Urbano e a Religiosidade Contemporánea”. [“Urban Shamanism and Contemporary Religion.”] Religião e Sociedade 20.2 113–40. Martins, P.H., 1999. “As Terapias Alternativas e a Libertação dos Corpos”. [“Alternative Therapies and Body Liberation.”] In Carozzi, M.J., ed. A Nova Era no Mercosul. Petrópolis: Vozes. Melton, J.G., 1992. “New Thought and the New Age”. In Lewis, J.R. & J.G. Melton, eds. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany: SUNY.


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Miguez, D., 2000. “Modernidad, Posmodernidad y la Transformación de la Religiosidad de los Sectores Medios y Bajos en América Latina.” [“Modernity, Postmodernity and Religious Change amongst Middle and Lower Classes in Latin America.”] Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Arturo Pratt 10 57–72. Richardson, J., 1980. “Conversion careers.” Society 17.3 47–50. Russo, J., 1993. O Corpo Contra a Palavra: As Terapias Corporais no Campo Psicológico dos Anos 80. [The Body Against the Word: Body Therapies in the Psychological Field During the 80s.] Río de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ. Shimazono, S., 1999. “ ‘New Age movement’ or ‘New Spirituality Movements and Culture.’ ” Social Compass 46.2 121–33. Slater, P., 1970. The Pursuit of Loneliness. Boston: Beacon Press. Snow, D., E. Burke Rochford, S. Worden & R. Benford, 1986. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review 51 464–81. Sutcliffe, S., 2003. Children of the New Age. London: Routledge. Tavares, F., 1999. “Holismo Terapéutico no Ambito do Movimiento Nova Era no Rio de Janeiro.” [“Therapeutic Holism in the New Age Movement in Rio de Janeiro.”] In Carozzi, M.J., ed. A Nova Era no Mercosul. Petrópolis: Vozes. Van Hove, H. 1999. “L’Emergence d’un ‘Marché Spiritual.’ ” [“The Development of a ‘Spiritual Marketplace.’ ”] Social Compass 46.2 161–72. York, M., 1995. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Zald, M. & J. McCarthy, 1990. “Religious Groups as Crucibles of Social Movements”. In Zald, M. & J. McCarthy, eds. Social Movements in an Organization Society. New York: Transaction.

THE SPIRITUAL WORLD: ASPECTS OF NEW AGE IN JAPAN Inken Prohl The Japanese New Age scene is booming: strolling through a big bookstore in Japan, one will come across the translated works of Shirley MacLaine, Fritjof Capra, Ram Dass, Rudolf Steiner and various other authors popular in New Age in the West, but also books by native Japanese authors on questions of spiritual energy, spiritual awakening or life after death. Since the emergence of New Age in Japan, the various Japanese terms for ‘spiritual’ and ‘spirituality’ have become more and more popular, although it is difficult to discern what they actually mean—whether in English or Japanese. Throughout the course of this chapter I will therefore expand on the problematic aspects of these two terms. Since the second half of the 1980s more and more Japanese companies have offered seminars and workshops about the spiritual self and the proper way to attain it. A growing number of shops sell omajinaigoods (items or objects with a so-called ‘spiritual touch’) such as crystals, stones and pyramids that supposedly contain spiritual energy from which their purchasers or owners benefit in various ways. During the 1990s the subject of destiny (unmei ) and the different methods for improving it became extremely popular. Since then, Japan has been witnessing a boom in all kinds of healing (iyashi ), with New Age notions becoming more and more integrated into mainstream life-styles. The first part of this chapter introduces the development, the audience and some popular themes of the seishin sekai, the ‘spiritual world’, the Japanese counterpart of New Age in the West.1 In sharp contrast to the latter scene, Japan’s New Age is distinctive in its discourse on the nature of spirituality typical for Japanese religions, in which many intellectuals, authors and artists participate. In the second part of the chapter, the emergence of the spiritual world and this ‘spiritual discourse’ will be

1 The Japanese term seishin can be translated as ‘spirit’ or ‘spiritual’ into English, while sekai is rendered by the English word ‘world’. Japanese writers refer to the Japanese word seishin sekai as ‘spiritual world’ when writing in English; see Shimazono (1996a).

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discussed in the contexts of both Japanese religions and contemporary Japanese society. The chapter then describes some tendencies of New Age in Japan in the early twenty-first century. The conclusion again takes up the problematic aspects of the term spirituality. The Emergence of the Spiritual World As is the case with the so-called New Age in other countries, it is notoriously difficult to grasp this phenomenon in terms of its form of social organisation, its basic notions and practices and its adherents. Therefore, this chapter will just give some very general descriptions. Since the 1980s many New Age ideas and practices have been introduced to Japan. The term seishin sekai (‘spiritual world’)2 was first used in 1978 when a large bookstore in Tokyo held a book exhibition called Indo Nepal seishin sekai no hon (“Books on the spiritual world in India and Nepal”). Because the contents of these books could not be fitted into the framework of established religions (kisei shûkyô)3 and also because of their often critical view of established religions, they required a separate category. Thus the term seishin sekai came to serve as an umbrella term for these ideas and practices. During the 1990s, instead of the catchword ‘New Age’, the term supiritualiti 4 came to refer to the Japanese counterpart of New Age in the West, having been taken up both by its adherents as well as by many of the academic observers of the religious scene in Japan. By the early 1980s, many bookstores in major cities all over Japan had established sections on the spiritual world. Today, almost all of the large bookstores have a department with shelves of translations of works by Edgar Cayce, Osho, Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, George I. Gurdjieff, Shirley MacLaine or Carlos Castanedas, among others, along with books on channelling, transpersonal psychology, Qi Gong, Feng Shui, holistic healing, aromatherapy and other major themes of New Age in the West. Best-selling authors include, e.g. James Redfield and Darryl Anka. While the majority of these offerings are translations of authors popular in western New Age, we also find a growing number

For an overview over the emergence of Japanese New Age see Shimazono (1996b), Prohl (2000) and Fukasawa (2001). 3 The religious traditions of Buddhism, Shintô and Christianity. 4 The term supiritualiti corresponds to the English word ‘spirituality’; see below. 2

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of books by Japanese authors on religious questions and spirituality. Japanese religious traditions such as Zen Buddhism, esoteric Buddhism or Shintô have been ‘rediscovered’, as it were. Indeed, the blossoming of Japanese New Age stimulated an increased interest in religion and in religions in general. As a result, Japan’s own religious traditions became the focus of renewed attention. The 1990s witnessed a boom in the literature on Buddhism. Particularly the works of Dôgen Kigen, one of the founders of Sôtô Zen Buddhism, were and still remain very much in demand. As we still lack empirical research on the seishin sekai, I hesitate to assume automatically that it is just a literary phenomenon. To be sure, familiarity with such literature on religion, spirituality and alternative healing methods as well as with self-help texts is an important feature of Japanese New Age. Yet, as several priests of the Sôtô school have pointed out to me, the books authored, e.g. by Dôgen, are not necessarily read, at least not by the members of their temple-parishes. My observations have also revealed that many of the books may indeed be bought by people who intend to read them, but often never actually get around to doing so. Rather, even their mere slumbering existence on a person’s bookshelf may have a talismanic function or they may act as expressions of well-wishing in ritual gift-exchanges. Many newspapers and magazines offer special issues on spiritual world topics like mystical phenomena, the inner space of the self or the search for a higher state of consciousness located in the depths of the individual heart. Of course, the ideas and worldviews expressed in a publication, on the one hand, and during the actual practices or events in the spiritual world scene, on the other, may differ markedly, but I think it is safe to argue that the keywords for western New Age, as Paul Heelas has pointed out, namely the transformation of the self and the planet as well as a quest for ‘self-spirituality’ (Heelas 1996), also characterise the Japanese spiritual world. The personal self is held to be the source of spirituality. As such it can become sacralised and is thought to have some kind of connection not only to a cosmic order, but also to the spirituality that is supposedly inherent in all beings or to the gods and goddesses of various religious systems. In order to find or ‘reconnect’ with the authentic spiritual self, the adherents of the seishin sekai engage in all kinds of practices and programmes suggesting such a goal. In the second half of the 1980s, New Age therapies, lectures and seminars were introduced into Japanese society. Some of these lectures and seminars were undertaken by organised corporate entities coming from the United States, such as Forum (est) or Life Dynamics, and,

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particularly during the 1990s, were extremely popular. These companies conduct self-development seminars ( jiko keihatsu seminâ; see Haga (1995), promising a better understanding of one’s personality and an enhancement of one’s capabilities. At the same time, small Japanese groups and companies such as the Spiritual World Organization or Voice hold seminars and workshops. The Spiritual World Organization, for example, offers seminars on Feng Shui, healing, the history and religion of the Maya or aura reading. A hotline called Spiritual Phone offers spiritual counselling 24 hours a day. The Voice company offers a wide range of services in the Japanese New Age scene, including seminars on subjects like the inner voice, spiritual shamanism or neo-Reiki. The teachers of these classes are not only from Japan; many of them along with other leaders, masters or gurus active in the scene come from the United States, India and Australia. Voice also has a panoply of New Age merchandise to offer. An advertisement for Pleiades Goods praises them as “presents from the Pleiades for healing man and humankind.” Many objects such as stones, crystals or jewellery are thought to act as mediums between the universe and human beings. Supernatural powers play an important role in the seishin sekai. Such powers are allegedly acquired through yoga or meditation practices but also mediated through New Age goods. Very popular in the 1990s was the Uri bear, which was the centre of attention when I visited the Voice’s shop in Tôkyô.5 After Uri Geller’s televised demonstrations of his spoon-bending techniques in the 1970s, supernatural powers became a widespread conversation piece. Uri Geller himself remained a star of the occult in Japan up into the 1990s. Voice also offers spiritual tours to India, Tibet, Mexico or China. One of its flyers announces a tour to German castles, particularly the Schloß Neuschwanstein, where, as the brochure tells us, one will encounter angels. Journeys to Rome are also offered, promising the participants that they will be getting in touch there with the vibrations of Christian saints. The 1990s witnessed the appearance of a number of new magazines with articles on New Age subjects and announcements for workshops, seminars, new books and goods. One of these is Evah, since 1996 a monthly magazine with a circulation of 200,000. The Ki Magazine is a monthly on holistic healing focusing on various kinds of therapies. The most successful magazines in the 1990s were Fili and Tama. Fili

5

3 May 1997, Roppongi, Tokyo.

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often features articles on psychotherapy and transpersonal psychology, whereas Tama acts as a trend-setter, introducing and propagating the latest practices of the spiritual world. At the end of the decade, Tama changed the second part of its title from Spiritual Network Magazine to Spiritual Surfing Magazine. Its major subjects appear on the cover in English: UFOs, the supernatural, channelling, life after death, synchronicity, ESP, meditation, the transpersonal and astrology. On offer is a mix of New Science, western New Age thought and practice and the occult together with more traditionally Japanese subject matter like bushidô. As far as I can see, hardly any empirical surveys have been undertaken on the audience of the publications, activities and goods of the seishin sekai. In bookstores one sees young people as well as businessmen and housewives browsing the sections devoted to the spiritual world. New Age shops in Tokyo and other major cities tend to have a youngish, female clientele. Shops like Cosmo Space or those belonging to the Triangle chain characterise themselves as retailers in magic goods and divination. The buyers are mainly schoolgirls and women in their twenties, among whom divination in all its varieties is enormously popular (see Yumiyama 1995). As the Uri bear fad illustrates, but also the popularity of manga and animation films featuring religious and occult topics, the trade in occult materials as well as religious and esoteric games and amusements is a burgeoning industry. Very often, people purchase, say a healing dolphin or a book on Inca religion, to be entertained. However, the interest for the spiritual world does not stop at entertainment. Young people engage in divination or buy the so-called omajinai goods, because they are eager to win a new friend or succeed in university entrance exams (Shimazono 1996a). The very playfulness and the entertainment character of many of the spiritual world’s offerings attract many customers, thus contributing to the acceptance of the religious outlook on the world that is typical of the seishin sekai. New Age music (very popular in Japan), omajinai goods, Tarot or Feng Shui serve to make young people more malleable and susceptible to the notions of the spiritual world. Young people pin their hopes on supernatural agencies or powers and often remain active in the spiritual world scene as they get older. Men and women alike visit workshops and seminars conducted by companies like Voice. New Age thought has gained broad acceptance in Japanese society in recent decades, embracing people well into their 50s within its orbit. Culture centres run by department stores and fitness clubs have also adapted New Age themes with offerings for different social groups.

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Closely related to the seishin sekai is the great interest in individual destiny and the various methods offered to improve it. Astrological services of all sorts are advertised in mass circulation newspapers and magazines as well as on television. Many astrological offers serve as a form of life-choice counselling, discussing those issues so crucial to Japanese young people, particularly university entrance exams and the search for a suitable marriage partner. The reference to the influence of forces beyond human reality relieves the advice-seekers of the burden of shouldering the responsibility for their fate themselves and at the same time stimulates optimism and hope (see Suzuki 1995). Since the mid-1990s, topics such as the ‘search and creation of a new or true self ’ and ‘healing’ have become focal points of Japanese New Age. A typical spiritual world publication describes 500 “books for the search of a new self.” As is evident, the quest for a spiritual self goes hand in hand with the wish for self-improvement, the betterment of performance and abilities. This has spawned a growing number of self-improvement books purporting to offer spiritual help of some kind or other. In addition, more and more health clubs, fitness studios, travel agencies, institutions of further education and so forth offer programmes, for example, on yoga or meditation. Many learn to employ techniques with a spiritual touch in order to empower themselves to make more money, reduce stress, fulfil the demands of family and work or simply to be happy. Many are motivated by the quest for simple well-being or, to be more accurate—well-feeling. Of course, closely connected to these trends are the various forms of alternative healing practices found in the seishin sekai. Many of their advertisements promise relaxation, a positive perception of the body and the self, more energy and a generally positive outlook on the world in times of terrorism and chaos. Increasingly we also find offers promising a fulfilling experience or simply a good time with like-minded people. The prospect of getting a taste of mysticism or spirituality seems to attract people in search of extraordinary experiences. Here, we see the influence of the popular orientation toward having good experiences and feelings in present-day Japan. Yet another aspect of Japanese New Age is the rise of what could be called spiritual capitalism. The 1990s saw new consulting companies offering methods of occult or spiritual management. The most prominent figure in this context is Funai Yukio, director of the Funai Sôgô Kenkyûjo, one of the biggest consulting firms in Japan with more than 4,800 client companies. In his books and seminars Funai expounds the Funai Management System as well as the necessity for managers to

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acquire knowledge about the order of the universe and the existence of an absolute being that rules the cosmos (e.g. Funai 1997). He expounds on subjects that have their origin in the spiritual world such as ki energy, the influence of wave-motions and the need for a fundamental individual as well as social transformation, that he calls the evah-way. The Funai Sôgô Kenkyûjô organises events with popular authors of books belonging in a wider sense to the spiritual world, e.g. Graham Hancock, author of Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), a work that was extremely successful in Japan, particularly in its comic version. The company also organises events with lectures on typical themes of the spiritual world such as “Prayers to the holy garden,” “The search for the inner self,” or “Healing Japan and the world.” During the mid-1990s not only the heads of large corporations, like the managing directors of Sôgô or Marui (big department stores), but also businessmen, housewives and students became Funai fans. The Funai phenomenon exemplifies the broad acceptance of the ideas and practices emanating from the spiritual world throughout contemporary Japanese society. The Context of Japanese New Age The popularity of the spiritual world in Japan can be seen as part of a general rebirth or even boom of religion, as the media and scholars of religion dub the development of recent decades in Japan. The results of public-opinion surveys reveal that especially young people are showing more interest in religion than before. Here, I use the term religion as an umbrella term for all kinds of practices that rely on notions of phenomena, categories and worlds beyond human experience like, e.g. gods, ghosts, supernatural powers or the power of the stars, destiny, crystals and so on. Browsing through the literature on Japanese religions, one again and again comes across the notion that the Japanese are not very religious or that the level of their ‘religiosity’ is decreasing (e.g. Ama 1996, 2004). Very often, this observation relies on the originally western theoretical construct of religion that has become the focus of critical analysis in recent decades, namely by deconstructing it as a product of pure fantasy (King 1999). The situation in Japan is complicated by the fact that this fantasy had already been transformed into an influential social reality before it could be deconstructed. As a result, the Japanese usually rely on the western academic notion of religion when determining their own religiosity. Of course, just taking

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a western-derived construct as a point of reference creates lots of confusion. One important consequence of this chaos is that surveys and studies generally conclude that the Japanese are not religious or have a decreasing level of religiosity. Yet, this observation is misleading, as is shown by the importance of rites de passage in Japan, particularly outside the urban centres, the popularity of religious sites, the growing number of books on religious topics, the rising popularity of pilgrimages and retreats with a therapeutic aim and, last but not least, the emergence and rapid transformation of the spiritual world. Japan has a lively and dynamic religious landscape if one does not restrict religion to mean institutions, dogmas or beliefs.6 One indication for the religious revival is the conspicuous growth of the so-called ‘New New Religions’, modern religious organisations teaching distinct aspects of common Japanese religious traditions, which since the 1970s have expanded rapidly (Clarke 1999; Prohl 2003). Among these organisations are the Aum Shinrikyô and others such as Agonshû, a religion that may be known outside of Japan because of its advertisements in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Other examples are Kôfuku no Kagaku (Institute for Research on Human Happiness) and World Mate. A revival of religion is also evidenced in a development dubbed the ‘little gods’. This refers to people who work as religious specialists, but whose powers of healing or exorcism attract only a few followers. The number of religious specialists themselves increased during the 1990s, among them some who promote mizuko kuyô, the rituals for aborted foetuses, which has attracted much attention among western scholars of Japanese religions. To explain the new religious phenomena of the spiritual world, the Japanese scholar of religion Susumu Shimazono points out that Japanese religious history has been characterised by individualist religion since the 1970s. During the 25-year period immediately after the end of World War II, the worldview of rationalistic enlightenment, including faith in the development of modern science and a secular state, was widely disseminated in Japan. Today its society is experiencing social conditions similar to those of western industrial societies and is marked 6 One of the best discussions on the problems of western-derived categories when talking about Japanese religions is offered by Davis (1992); a recent analysis of the manufactured characteristics of the Japanese terms for religion is provided by Isomae and Fukasawa (2002).

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by the predominant prestige of science, technology and bureaucratic organisation. Since the 1970s, however, ever more Japanese people seem to have become frustrated by the emphasis on materialism and rationalism in every sphere of daily life as well as the market of possibilities in contemporary Japanese society. The overwhelming number of consumer products to choose from nowadays leads many of them to wish for and seek guidance and orientation. The rebirth of religion in Japan, as Shimazono states, has come about primarily from the loss of faith in the nation-state and in modern secularised civilisation. Because of its many similarities with New Age in western cultures, Shimazono sees the Japanese spiritual world as part of a global development that he labels “new spirituality movements” (shinreisei undô) (Shimazono 1999). As is often pointed out, major New Age themes, such as the advocacy of a holistic worldview, oneness with the universe or the denial of God, contradict the teachings of mainstream Judeo-Christian traditions. Indeed, many Japanese authors of the spiritual world as well as scholars of religion emphasise the contradictions between traditional religion and New Age in the West, pointing, in contrast, to the remarkable continuity with Japan’s traditional religious culture that the seishin sekai appears to exhibit (Itô 2002; Kashio 2002). According to Susumu Shimazono, there are many similarities in the philosophy and practice of long-cherished folk religions, Shintô and Buddhism on the one hand and the spiritual world on the other (Shimazono 1996b). He even considers the New Age practice of channelling to be not very different from the shamanistic practices of Japanese folk religion. Masayuki Itô, a Japanese sociologist of religion, points out that New Age’s ultimate goals, namely the advocacy of a holistic worldview and achieving oneness with the universe, sound quite familiar to those versed in Japanese religious tradition. According to Itô, the symbolic universe of Japanese religion may be described as tending towards ‘fusion’ with the universe, a Buddhist fusion with the universe or a Shintoist fusion of deities, humans and nature. Interestingly Itô relies on Mark Mullins to prove his point (Itô 2002:103). In describing the New New Religions and Japanese New Age Mullins notes that: “. . . these movements are most accurately understood as new expressions of folk religion and a revival of animism” (Mullins 1992:142). Shimazono, Itô and Mullins, among others, describe traditional Japanese religion as “holistic,” “shamanist” or “animist”. However, it would be too much of a coincidence if these terms, which are derived

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from the long tradition of religious studies in the West, were being accurately used to analyse traditional Japanese religion. Wouter Hanegraaff criticises Mullins’ interpretation as follows: But actually I am afraid that his interpretation is a mistake, resulting from the impact of western ethnocentric theories about religion combined with an essentially non-historical approach. Concepts such as ‘animism’ or ‘magic’, and closely related concepts such as ‘the occult’, ‘the primitive’ or ‘superstition’ have been construed by western scholarship as universal and essentially static phenomena of human culture; and as such they have been opposed to the specific, unique and dynamic historical phenomena of their own culture: Judeo-Christian religion, and progress by means of rationality and science. (Hanegraaff 2001:25)

Terms like ‘animism’, ‘shamanism’ or the ‘mystic East’ constitute central elements of the ‘orientalistic’ (Said 1979) and colonial outlook on nonwestern religions created by western scholars. From its very beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals and scholars reacted to it by formulating a kind of “self-orientalism” (Prohl 2000) or “reverse-orientalism” as the Buddhist scholar Bernard Faure puts it (Faure 1995). The best-known representative of this “self-orientalism” might be D.T. Suzuki, whose highly influential notion of Zen Buddhism is nothing more than the invention of a new religion with the help of orientalistic categories, namely the ideas of spirituality and “religious experience” (see Sharf 1995). Since the end of the nineteenth century, many Japanese scholars of religion, journalists and intellectuals have effectively re-read the entire Japanese religious tradition in creating such a self-orientalistic image of their country’s culture. The resulting selforientalistic discourse in Japan has gained momentum since the 1970s and in the intervening period many intellectuals have come to affirm the uniqueness of Japanese religion. Their writings explain the superiority of Japanese culture, particularly Japan’s supposedly unique spirituality, through its religions. The main features of this ‘spiritual discourse’ are discussions of an allegedly Japanese ‘animism’ and ‘shamanism’ and their potential for the worship of nature, an innovative vision of koshintô (‘ancient Shintô’) and a critique of western logic contrasting with eastern spirituality (tôyô reisei ). Indeed, very prominent Japanese scholars of philosophy and religion like Takeshi Umehara, Tôji Kamata and Shin’ichi Nakazawa, but also scholars like Shoichi Saeki, Yasuo Yuasa and Tetsuo Yamaori, engage in this kind of discourse, attributing their country’s superiority to its religions (Prohl 2000; Gebhardt 2001). The ‘spiritual discourse’ can be analysed as an orientalistic one

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with reversed roles, whereby the self-proclaimed orientals are doing the orientalising to affirm the uniqueness of Japanese religion, harking back to its alleged ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystic’ aspects. While engaging in this discourse, many of the authors embellish their writings with popular notions and ideas borrowed from western New Age, e.g. deep ecology or, of course, spirituality, terms that seem to resonate with meaning. As is typical of New Age thought, they discuss the future and the proper means to shape it. These spiritual intellectuals, as I call them, stress the significance of eastern religion in their efforts to put forth a new paradigm of science, a notion that became popular in Japan through the translations of books by New Age authors like Fritjof Capra. They expound on the general importance of experience, often even mystic experience, for understanding Japanese religion, an idea that is fundamental to New Age thinking. Whereas New Age thought examines so-called ancient wisdom in search of solutions for the problems facing modern society, such as the destruction of nature, the spiritual intellectuals present a vision of Japanese religion in which the worship of nature and the harmonious coexistence with it play a fundamental role. Thus, it seems safe to argue that New Age thought has become so popular in Japan not so much because of some fundamental similarities with traditional Japanese religions, but because it serves conveniently to fuel the highly influential self-orientalistic discourse on Japanese religions. Western authors like Capra or Ram Dass, with exotic and idealised pictures of the East, are highly welcomed by their Japanese readers because they propagate exactly the image of Japan, that of a mystic Buddhism or a new paradigm of science originating in the East, which appeals to their readership. This observation sheds light on the reasons why Japanese New Age incorporates nationalist tendencies. Many influential intellectuals and authors maintain that Shintô, in particular, is a religion superior to the world’s other religions and as such will save humankind because of its unique ‘animistic’ and ‘holistic’ outlook on the world. At the same time, in promoting all sorts of spirituality, the media and the spiritual intellectuals provide the ideological underpinnings for New Age thought and practice in everyday life. One could even argue that notions of spirituality, ‘holiness’ or ‘transformation’ of the self form the theological basis for engaging in all kinds of practices, therapies, alternative health-care, esoteric wellness or spiritual capitalism. However, as is always the case with theologies, the details of their

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semantics are hardly known by the average actors, who read and hear about the importance of spirituality expressed in the media by eminent intellectuals and specialists on religion. Their affirmative attitude towards spirituality might aid in legitimising the practices of the seishin sekai in Japan. When we look at the practices on offer, it becomes clear that from the viewpoint of these average adherents the most important topics of the seishin sekai are love, health, success and harmony with family and friends. Be it a class in aromatherapy, a course in neo-Reiki or a workshop on reincarnation, according to the brochures the participants will emerge refreshed, rejuvenated, energised and better able to cope with stress, work and family. Lectures and workshops in spiritual management promise success and profit. Tendencies of the Spiritual World —Spirituality as Ideology The quests for healing, beauty and well-being have constituted the major trends of the seishin sekai since 2000.7 The Holy Shop is a typical shop of the seishin sekai scene in contemporary Japan. Located in Kunitachi, Tokyo, near a big university campus, the shop sells all kinds of New Age goods. When I visited the shop recently, material on angels, reincarnation-therapy and Edgar Cayce were particularly in demand,8 along with all kinds of vitamins and minerals, oils, cosmetics and accessories. According to the shop-owner, the most important feature of the seishin seikai has become the quest for healing—and the keyword for healing is energy. With his merchandise he tries to cater to this demand, as he wants to make his customers feel happier. As is evident, religious and secular concepts are blurred together in the seishin sekai. Much more importance is attached to the effectiveness than to the coherence of the concepts. The shop-owner explained to me that nowadays there are two trends in the quest for healing: some people opt for therapies in order to reconnect to some underlying spirituality whereas others use spiritual practices simply to have a better life. The magazine Star People introduces to its readers concepts based upon a supposedly intrinsic spirituality. It features, for example, articles on the importance of the sun, the Dalai Lama, collective forms of living and various healers from

7 See typical websites of the seishin sekai in contemporary Japan at http://teddyangel. com or http://www.geocities.jp/kanprinako/. 8 13 March 2004, Kunitachi.

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all over the world, who, I would like to add, offer courses in Japan. The articles stress ideas like the interconnectedness of all people, the importance of nature and the need to create a better world by referring to the intellectual exploration of the self and expressing a very vague altruistic concern for the well-being of the planet. The magazine TRINITY for flexible and vigorous women’s magazine represents the second trend.9 Its message is that women should be adaptable, energetic and beautiful. This magazine lists and describes all kinds of spiritual methods and strategies for attaining these goals, like cosmetics, psychological advice, various products and practices. One of its special reports describes various spiritual practices offered in Tokyo that promise beauty; another one cites the ‘Japanese Spirit’ and its relevance for women who want to be beautiful and happy. The spiritual practices featured in this magazine illustrate the most significant healing trend in Japan today—healing through aesthetics (esute de iyasu). Goods that are themselves considered beautiful and capable of enhancing feminine beauty are supposed to lead to a better life. The question remains: whether these practices are called spiritual simply because spirituality sells, or whether spirituality and spiritual are used as catch-all terms to mean everything that serves to better one’s life. An analysis of the writings of the ‘superstar’ of the spiritual world in contemporary Japan, Hiroyuki Ehara, offers insights into the meaning generally attached to spirituality.10 Ehara is a self-styled spiritual counsellor with more than 20 books to his credit, almost all of them with spirituality in their titles. Not only in his writings, but also in other popular publications of the seishin sekai at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Japanese words seishin and reisei, which had been widely used for the English word spiritual, have been replaced by the alreadymentioned supiritualiti. This term is a transliteration of the English word into the characters used in Japan. When compared with the characters that were used previously, the meaning of the word supirituarity is even more vague. Again, it would be too much of a coincidence if the essence of Japanese religion could be expressed by the unclear notion denoted by the English term spirituality, as Ehara and others declare (e.g. Kashio 2002).

9 For the idiosyncratic English see TRINITY’s homepage at http://www.el-aura. com/currentissue-e.html. 10 See his website at http://www.donna-town.com/spiritual/index.html.

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One of Ehara’s books is entitled Spiritual Sanctuary.11 It is rather like a popular magazine supplement with glossy pictures showing Ehara at various shrines and temples all over Japan. Here he takes his female readership to famous religious sites, describing their beauty and the relaxing effects of visiting these places. Then, in the second part, Ehara explains the worldly benefits of the talismans available at these places, that is to say, their spiritual effectiveness in helping someone to achieve success in his or her love life or satisfaction at work. A crucial reason for his success appears to be his successful blending of nostalgia, the spiritual, the striving for this-worldly benefits typical of Japanese religions and the emphasis on aesthetics. One can see that the word spiritual is first and foremost a powerfully suggestive label, an attractive come-on to entice prospective buyers. Another one of his publications bears the title Supirichuaru kôun hyakka—“The encyclopaedia for spiritual happiness”. Here, Ehara describes spirituality as a mysterious power that leads people to happiness. He refers specifically to spiritual everyday life, spiritual food, or for that matter to a spiritual diet, spiritual cosmetics and spiritual communication. In his usage of the word spiritual it means simply effective—the mystery he implies is not something otherworldly but rather expresses the talent to select the right know-how for a given task. To judge from Ehara Hiroyuki’s success, one general meaning of spiritual in contemporary Japan is certainly the quest for a happy life with the rightly chosen methods. The outstanding parallels to the situation of New Age in western and other countries become obvious: spirituality is very often presented as a means toward a better, healthier and happier life with a strong emphasis on beauty and well-being. Conclusion In conclusion, it is important to stress that New Age thought was able to gain popularity in Japan not because of some fundamental similarities with traditional Japanese religions, as so many authors suggest. Rather, the seishin sekai has been successful because it caters to popular wishes for this-worldly benefits. Only in this sense would I agree that Japanese New Age has many similarities with traditional Japanese 11 Spiritual Sanctuary was published as a special issue of the magazine Hanako, 2003.

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religion. Genze riyaku, the quest for this-worldly benefits lies at the core of Japanese religions, it constitutes the common Japan religion (see Reader and Tanabe 1998). The notions and concepts of the spiritual world—imported from all over the world, mainly via the USA—simply supply new wrappings for the quest for this-worldly benefits, the fundamental pattern not only of Japanese religion, but also of most religious systems on a practical level. As has become clear, it is important to distinguish different meanings in the use of the term spirituality: on the one hand, notions of spirituality, ‘holiness’ or ‘transformation’ form the theological basis for engaging in all kinds of practices, therapies, alternative health care and esoteric-wellness programs promoting self-optimising and selfbeautifying practices. This function can be described as the marketing dimension of the rhetoric of spirituality. It is exactly the vagueness of the term that makes possible its usefulness in selling many different sorts of goods. In Japan and elsewhere, it can be observed that this notion of spirituality has merged into mainstream trends—a catchword encompassing all sorts of techniques and goods that are supposed to lead to a better life and hence serving to justify the modern-day pursuit of individual happiness. Because these exertions involve, as the Japanese example shows, a variety of professionally marketed goods, devices and practices, this notion of spirituality also functions to legitimise the current ideological argument expounding the importance and inevitability of neo-liberalism. Indeed, the Japanese case confirms in an impressive way the thesis of Richard Kind and Jeremy Carette (2005) about the sell-out of religion. Yet, on the other hand, another important function of the term spirituality is unique to Japan: for the self-assertive or even nationalistic dimension in the Japanese rhetoric of spirituality we find no parallel in western societies. References Ama, T., 1996. Nihonjin wa Naze Mushîkyô Nanoka. [Why are the Japanese Non-Religious? ]. Tôkyô: Chikuma Shobô. ——, 2004. Why Are the Japanese Non-Religious? Japanese Spirituality: Being Non-Religious in a Religious Culture. Maryland: University Press of America. Carrette, J. & R. King, 2005. Selling Spirituality. The Silent Takeover of Religion. London, New York: Routledge. Clarke, P.B., 1999. Bibliography of Japanese New Religions, with Annotations and an Introduction to Japanese New Religions at Home and Abroad. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library. Davis, W., 1992. Japanese Religion and Society. Paradigms of Structure and Change. Albany, New York: SUNY.

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Ehara, H., 2003. Supirichuaru Kôun Hyakka. [The Encyclopaedia for Spiritual Happiness.] Tokyo: Shufu to Seikatsusha. Faure, B., 1995. “The Kyoto School and Reverse Orientalism.” In Fu, C.W. & S. Heine, eds. Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspective. Albany, New York: SUNY. Funai, Y., 1997. Evah e no Shiten. [A Perspective for Evah]. Tôkyô: Bijinesusha. Fukasawa, H., 2001. “Die “Spirituelle Welt” (seishin sekai ) Japans—Einführung und Auseinandersetzung.” [“The ‘Spiritual World’ (seishin sekai ) in Japan: Introduction and Exposition.”] In Gössmann, H. & A. Mrugalla, eds. Deutschsprachiger Japanologentag in Trier 1999. [German Language Japanese Studies Day in Trier 1999.] Münster: Lit-Verlag. Gebhardt, L., 2001. Japans Neue Spiritualität. [ Japan’s New Spirituality.] Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Haga, M., 1995. “Self-Development Seminars in Present-Day Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 22.3–4 283–99. Hancock, G., 1995. Fingerprints of the Gods: A Quest for the Beginning and the End. London: William Heinemann. Hanegraaff, W.J., 2001. “Prospects for the Globalization of New Age: Spiritual Imperialism Versus Cultural Diversity”. In Rothstein, M., ed. New Age Religion and Globalization. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. Isomae, J. & H. Fukasawa, eds, 2002. Kindai Nihon ni Okeru Chishikijin to Shûkyô—Anesaki Masaharu no Kiseki. [Religion and Intellectuals in Modern Japan: The Case of Anesaki Masaharu.] Tôkyô: Tôkyôdô. Itô, M., 2002. “New Spirituality in Contemporary Societies: A Comparative View on the Japanese ‘Spiritual World.’ ” In Prohl, I. & H. Zinser, eds. Zen, Reiki, Karate: Japanische Religiosität in Europa. [Zen, Reiki, Karate: Japanese Religiosity in Europe.] Hamburg: Lit-Verlag. Kashio, N., ed, 2002. Supirichuariti o Ikiru. Atarashii Kizuna o Motomete. [Living Spirituality: In Search of a New Connection.] Tôkyô: Serika Shobô. King, R., 1999. Orientalism and Religion. Post-colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East. London: Routledge. Mullins, R.M., 1992. “Japan’s New Age and Neo-New Religions: Sociological Interpretations”. In Lewis, J.R. & J.G. Melton, eds. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany, New York: SUNY. Prohl, I., 2000. Die “Spirituellen Intellektuellen” und das New Age in Japan. [The “Spiritual Intellectuals” and the New Age in Japan.] Hamburg: Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens eV. ——, 2003. Religionen als Orte Kognitiven und Sinnlichen Erkennens: Die Japanische Moderne Religiöse Organisation World Mate. Berlin: Habilitationsschrift, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaft der FU Berlin. Reader, I. & G.J. Tanabe, 1998. Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Said, E.W., 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books Sharf, R.H., 1995. “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience.” Numen 42 227–83. Shimazono, S., 1996a. “Aspects of the Rebirth of Religion.” In Noriyoshi, T. & D. Reid, Religion in Japanese Culture. Tôkyô: Kôdansha. ——, 1996b. Seishin Sekai no Yukue: Gendai Shakai to Shinreisei Undô. [On the Way to a Spiritual Society: Contemporary Society and New Spiritual Movements.] Tôkyô: Tôkyôdô. ——, 1999. “ ‘New Age Movement’ or ‘New Spirituality Movements and Culture?’ ” Social Compass 46.2 121–33. Suzuki, K., 1995. “Divination in Contemporary Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 22.3–4 249–66. Yumiyama, T., 1995. “Varieties of Healing in Present-Day Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 22.3–4 267–82.

NEW AGE AND WORLDVIEWS

NEW AGE AND WORLDVIEWS New Age is often described as a ‘worldview’, in a way which tries to encapsulate its all-encompassing effect on the outlook of practitioners, but distinguishes New Age from established worldviews such as religions or religious traditions. New Age has interacted not only with established worldviews such as Christianity, but also with similar, more recent worldviews, such as modern scepticism, modern astrology, the holistic health movement and Paganism. Some of the first commentators on what subsequently became known as New Age were the sceptical community, in their publications against ‘pseudo-science’ that later broadened in scope to cover what they perceived as religious quackery. Olav Hammer, in “New Age Religion and the Sceptics,” examines this clash of worldviews drawing mainly on fieldwork in Sweden. Extending a process already initiated within the Theosophical movement, New Age took over and reoriented many of the older occult arts. Astrology in particular was transformed from a predictive system into a psychological technique for aiding spiritual unfoldment. In “The New Age Movement as an Astrological Minority Religion with Mainstream Appeal,” Michael York discusses this transformation and the significance of astrology’s penetration into the cultural mainstream. Another worldview that was in some ways appropriated by New Age is the holistic health movement. Maria Tighe and Jenny Butler discuss “Holistic Health and New Age in Britain and the Republic of Ireland,” showing the ways in which the holistic health movement is going mainstream in Britain, and illustrating its overlap with New Age in Ireland. “Paganism and the New Age,” by Melissa Harrington, shows the conflicts that can result when one tradition (New Age) is perceived by some practitioners and scholars to appropriate another worldview (Paganism). Pagans typically resist such appropriation, and Harrington explores some of the reasons underlying such resistance. Finally, in “Christians and New Age,” Daren Kemp revisits his study of New Age and Christianity, The Christaquarians (2003), and suggests that in addition to the hostile and sympathetic approaches of Christians to New Age, there is now an additional way in which the two worldviews

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interact: Christian evangelism to New Age. If it can be argued that evangelical Christians by their hostile critiques first made New Age a newsworthy subject, in some ways this evangelising trend brings the history of New Age studies back to its origins. Reference Kemp, D., 2003. The Christaquarians? A Sociology of Christians in the New Age. London: Kempress.

NEW AGE RELIGION AND THE SCEPTICS* Olav Hammer New Age Religion New Agers tend to avoid using the term ‘religion’ to designate their beliefs and practices, and prefer labels such as ‘spirituality’. The concept ‘religion’ is a human construct, and there are numerous and partly incompatible definitions of the word (see e.g. Spiro 1966; Platvoet & Molendijk 1999). However, it is clear that the New Age does comprise many of the same elements that are found in other traditions to which common parlance attaches the rubric religion. The sources comprise texts that New Agers themselves consider to be revealed from supra-human sources. New Agers engage in rituals of divination, such as astrology, the Tarot and dowsing. They postulate the existence of trans-empirical, invisible forces permeating the cosmos, enabling such feats as clairvoyance and telepathy, and affecting the wellbeing of the individual through systems of healing such as Reiki. They suggest that there is a life after death—in fact many afterlives, in the form of successive incarnations. Some New Agers treat certain objects (e.g. crystals), animals (e.g. dolphins) and places (e.g. crop circles) as sacred. If the New Age has such obviously religious traits, why is there a widespread resistance against accepting that label? One reason has to do with the connotations that the term has acquired for New Agers: that of a hierarchical and ossified organisation, in which opinions are imposed in top-down fashion. Another reason has to do with the way that our culture predisposes us to interpret the term. Talal Asad argues (1993) that our definitions of religion are historically contingent. That is, they have been formulated against the tacit background assumption that the religion most familiar to those who do the defining is prototypical of the entire category. When Friedrich Schleiermacher in his book Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Addresses to Its Cultured Despisers), published in 1799, famously suggested that * This chapter has benefited greatly from discussions with Asbjørn Dyrendal, historian of religions and member of the Norwegian sceptics’ organisation Skepsis.

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the essential characteristic of religion is neither to provide factual statements about the world nor to provide ethical guidelines, but to inculcate the feeling of dependence on god, he accomplished three things. He defined an inner state (belief ) as prototypical, he stipulated that religion deals with the trans-empirical, and he defined the theological elite version of religion as the correct one. In brief, normative Protestantism was elevated to the status of a general concept of what ‘true’ religion is. Clearly, New Age beliefs do not match the prototypical example very well. For the purposes of the present discussion, two ‘non-prototypical’ characteristics are particularly important. Firstly, popular New Age books as well as discussions between New Agers on the Internet show that there is relatively little interest in the trans-empirical realm for its own sake.1 Theological discussions regarding the existence and nature of the divine are not very prominent. The main focus tends to be on the effects of the trans-empirical on the immanent, empirical world. There is thus little interest in formulating theories about the precise identities of the supra-human agents who have revealed themselves through channelled messages, and much more attention is given the import of those messages for us. There is a general lack of precision when it comes to understanding the nature of the trans-empirical ‘energies’ operating in Reiki healing, and much more interest in narratives that support the contention that Reiki works. Secondly, although some New Age beliefs are very widespread, they are not supported by any significant social elite. According to the National Science Foundation’s biennial report on scientific literacy (April 2002), 60 per cent of Americans believe in ESP and 88 per cent accept alternative medicine (cited in Shermer 2002:35). Nonetheless, ESP and alternative medicine are not taught in schools, nor are they generally applied in publicly funded health care, enlisted in the process of corporate decision-making or invoked in judiciary procedures. Such beliefs and practices belong to the undergrowth of ‘rejected knowledge’ that sociologist Colin Campbell gave the name cultic milieu (Campbell 1972). Several terms are used in everyday language to designate folk beliefs and practices that largely focus on empirical matters, and none of these is ‘religion’. For adherents, it is something better than religion, namely ‘spirituality’. For the more incredulous, it is something far lower, perhaps 1 See e.g. the discussions on the Danish Internet site selvet.dk, as presented in Hammer forthcoming.

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‘superstition’ or ‘irrationality’. While there is a wide-spread cultural norm that religion should be treated with a minimum of respect, for some people ‘superstition’ is fair game. Emeritus professor of philosophy Paul Kurtz can go on record stating that religion performs “an important function that cannot be simply dismissed”, namely one that is “evocative, expressive, emotive” (Kurtz 2002), and yet be one of the founding figures of an organisation (CSICOP) that actively debunks New Age claims. Like Schleiermacher before him, Kurtz defines religion as something else than a set of empirical statements. New Age turns out to be the ‘wrong’ kind of religion. On the Roots of Scepticism Consider an empirical proposition p and a question, ‘Do you think that there is a way to find out whether p is true?’ There are three possible answers to that question: (1) Yes, I think there is; (2) No, I don’t think there is; (3) I refuse to commit myself to any opinion. The first is the realist, common-sense option. Presented with a proposition such as “Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769”, most people would agree that there are ways to find out whether it is true or not. Throughout the history of philosophy, this epistemic position has been the dominant one. The second option is held by some postmodernists and relativists, on a variety of different grounds. One might, for example, argue that there always remains a source of uncertainty. Just conceivably, all historians might quote the same primary sources, which all happen to be forged or to have miscalculated the year of birth. In the history of philosophy, scepticism of this kind has been attributed (whether rightly or wrongly) to Arcesilaus, Carneades and other representatives of the Platonic Academy in the period from the third to first centuries BCE. Versions of the third option appear to have been defended at least by one philosophical school in ancient Greece, Pyrrhonism, and one school of Buddhist philosophy, the prasangika madhyamaka. Thus, the second century Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna advocated “the relinquishing of all views” (see e.g. Garfield 1995:212–15).

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Confusingly, the term sceptic has been used of people representing a variety of views that can be placed within all three groups. In the modern, non-philosophical usage which concerns us here, scepticism refers only to those who are thoroughly un-sceptical of the foundations of the modern, scientific worldview, and accept a plethora of methods of empirical investigation as valid. Sceptics, in this sense, are sceptical of particular sets of propositions because they are problematic when viewed from the perspective of these normative methods. Judging from their publications, sceptics in the modern sense are particularly distrustful of propositions that are prevalent in popular culture. They devote much more of their energy to counteracting the effects of such folk beliefs in academia, the media and in the general culture, than to correcting the garden varieties of factual error. If a historian were to publish a paper in which he repeatedly stated that Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1779, sceptics would most likely not bother to intervene. They would leave it to other historians to react, correct the error, and presumably to inquire why this paper passed the peer review process. On the other hand, if the same historian were to back up his claim by referring to paranormal means of investigation, he would provoke the ire of the sceptical community.2 Considering the folk religious characteristics of the New Age, it can hardly come as a surprise that a large proportion of the sceptical literature is devoted to debunking claims from that milieu. Sceptics in the classical philosophical sense would, if consistent in their scepticism, be equally suspicious of all empirical propositions. This broad, philosophical scepticism is rejected outright by the modern sceptics.3 Despite the shared name, modern sceptics thus have little to do with the sceptics of the ancient Academy, or of the Pyrrhonist School. The intellectual forebears of the modern sceptical movement are rather to be found among the many writers throughout history who have argued against beliefs they did not share. Such arguments can be roughly divided into two ideal types: rationalist and empirical. For a case analogous to this thought experiment, see Carrier (2002). See e.g. the lengthy discussion of this issue in Kurtz (1992:21–74). It is possible to be sceptical in both senses, most readily in different contexts. David Hume would be a case in point. His arguments against causality (in Treatise of Human Nature, first published 1739–40) are related to the Greek version of scepticism. His discussion of miracles in e.g. the tenth chapter of his An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (first published 1748 as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding) is closer to the modern, debunking kind of scepticism. 2 3


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Characteristic of rationalist precursors is their deployment of a priori or logical arguments. The miracle stories associated with the NeoPythogorean Apollonius of Tyana were debunked, not because the facts of the case had been checked, but because they seemed unreasonable.4 The problem for this kind of rationalism, in an era when Christianity supplied the unquestioned background assumptions, was not least that Christian churches provided their own supernatural interventions. Although individual Christian miracle stories might be doubted, the genre as such was not subjected to the same all-out rejection as the pagan narratives. Christian miracles simply formed an integral part of ordinary life (Ward 1982:2). Whereas rationalist criticism of religious claims has ancient roots, empirical investigation is a more recent phenomenon. Augustine scoffed at the astrologers for allegedly predicting that twins would meet the same fate, but produced no evidence for his counterclaims, e.g. by recording and analysing the biographies of a statistically significant sample of twins.5 Modern sceptics have gone to great lengths to devise and carry out empirical tests of astrology. Although there are isolated early examples of empirically based critiques against the belief in witches,6 the turning point when predominantly rationalist arguments against controversial beliefs began to be supported by empirical investigation is the end of the Enlightenment. The corpus of empirical methodologies that had been developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could be deployed not only in pursuit of new scientific theories, but also in the service of debunking. The locus classicus of early empirical debunking is the report written in 1786 against the practices of Anton Mesmer (1735–1815) (Pattie 1994:142–58). Mesmer claimed to have discovered a subtle but allpervasive force, which he called animal magnetism. A regular flow of animal magnetism through the human body was crucial to good health, and conversely all kinds of illness were attributed to disturbances in

Eusebius, Treatise Against the Life of Apollonius by Philostratus, in Philostratus (1912). City of God 5:1–7. Augustine provides a variety of rationalist and ad hominem reasons for not accepting astrology. The closest he comes to providing any empirical evidence for his rejection of divination is his claim in 5:2, that he personally “knows twins who not only pursue different activities and have been on different voyages, but also suffer from different diseases.” Modern, empirically based sceptics would reject such testimony as anecdotal. 6 See e.g. the case of the late sixteenth century ‘demoniac’, Marthe Brossier, discussed in Walker (1981:33–37). 4 5

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this flow. Mesmer and his disciples carried out sessions in which the clients were allegedly magnetised. In some, the magnetiser passed his hands over the body of the client. Other modes of treatment involved an elaborate apparatus, the baquet. Loosely modelled on the Leyden flask, a precursor of the modern capacitor, the baquet consisted of a tub filled with sand, water and other ‘magnetised’ substances, with iron rods protruding from its midst. Such treatments typically provoked crises, which could manifest themselves as fainting spells and convulsions.7 The report had been commissioned in 1784 by the King of France, and was prepared by four members of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, five members of the Royal Academy of Sciences and five from the Royal Society of Medicine. The list of those who participated in the enquiry was thus an impressive one: on it were Benjamin Franklin, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly and the founder of modern chemistry Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. The commissioners decided to study the baquet with an array of measuring devices, let themselves be magnetised, and tested the effects of the magnetic treatment on a variety of subjects. They suggested that there were considerable problems with accepting the existence of the alleged force. Children who were too young to understand what was being done to them did not show any effects. Disbelievers in magnetism were also unaffected, as were subjects who were blindfolded and therefore unable to see that the mesmerist was treating them. On the other hand, similarly blindfolded patients who were told that they were being magnetised fell into convulsions, even when in reality nothing was done to them. The commission concluded that the observable effects were due to the touch of the magnetiser, aroused imagination and the imitation of the behaviour of other patients. The nineteenth century was the formative age of modern scepticism. Many nineteenth century sceptics continued the battle against mesmerism and its successors. Far from being shaken by the report of the royal commission, mesmerism had by the first half of the nineteenth century acquired a large following. Among the reported effects of being magnetised were truly spectacular phenomena such as clairvoyance and out-of-body experiences. When the Spiritualist movement gained momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century, further exotic phenomena were added to the repertoire.

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A variety of Mesmerist treatments are described, e.g. in Pattie (1994).


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Among the nineteenth century writers sceptical of mesmerism one can mention James Braid (1795–1860), who in 1843 presented a naturalistic theory of mesmerism and in connection therewith coined the term hypnotism.8 Quite a few rationalists throughout the second half of the nineteenth century—H.H. Furness, J.N. Maskelyne, William Hammond, Joseph Jastrow and others—attacked the claims of the Spiritualist movement and attempted to explain why belief in table rapping, spirit apparitions and ectoplasm was so wide-spread even among intelligent observers.9 Furness’ remark in the report of a commission set up by the University of Pennsylvania to investigate spiritualist claims, illustrates the chasm that separated the believers from a thoroughly unconvinced sceptic: Again and again, men have led round the circles the Materialized Spirits of their wives, and introduced them to each visitor in turn; fathers have taken round their daughters, and I have seen widows sob in the arms of their dead husbands. Testimony, such as this, staggers me. Have I been smitten with colour-blindness? Before me, as far as I can detect, stands the very Medium herself, in shape, size, form and feature true to a line, and yet, one after another, honest men and women at my side, within ten minutes of each other, assert that she is the absolute counterpart of their nearest and dearest friends, nay, that she is that friend.10

Although Spiritualism was the main goal of debunking, nineteenth century sceptical discourse was not confined to this topic. Among the best-known such sceptics one finds Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), who formulated a naturalistic explanation of dowsing and the pendulum, based on experiments carried out in 1812 but only published in 1833 (Chevreul 2001/1833), and Charles Mackay (1814–1889) whose book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1843, covers a number of controversial phenomena, including such historical ones as alchemy and the belief in witches. Texts such as these prefigure some of the characteristics of twentieth century scepticism. Many sceptics, then as now, are prominent in the natural sciences. Some of their written output ranges from fairly 8 In his book Neurypnology: Or, the Rationale of Nervous Sleep; see the discussion of Braid in Gauld (1992:279–88). 9 On Furness, see Brandon (1983:99–102); on Maskelyne, see Brandon (1983: 256–7); on Hammond and Jastrow, see Hess (1993:26–9). 10 Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to Investigate Modern Spiritualism in Accordance with the Request of the Late Henry Seybert (1887), quoted in Brandon (1983:100).

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neutral attempts to explain controversial phenomena in naturalistic terms to highly polemical, even offensively phrased texts based on a moralistic stance. The tradition of sceptical writing continued throughout the twentieth century, first as a small trickle, and by the 1970s increasing to a veritable torrent of words. Among the early to mid-twentieth century examples of the genre are books by Joseph Jastrow (Fact and Fable in Psychology [1900]; The Story of Human Error [1936]), Daniel Hering (Facts and Foibles of Science [1924]), David Jordan (The Higher Foolishness [1927]) and Martin Gardner (Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science [1952]). Of these books, Gardner’s has achieved the status of a modern classic and remains in print to this day. Some early twentieth century figures, notably Harry Houdini (stage name of Ehrich Weiss [1874–1926]), have become icons of scepticism more for their debunking activities than for their written output. Other debunkers who were active and well-known in their own day, such as Hugo Gernsback (b. 1884), have lapsed into obscurity (Miller 2002). The uniting trait of these endeavours is that they were carried out by individuals acting on their own, or by ad hoc groups such as the antimesmerist royal commission. The late nineteenth century also saw the creation of organised bodies devoted to studying and, to some extent at least, debunking controversial claims. There have been a number of sceptical organisations in recent history. Early organisations were established in countries such as Hungary (Magyar Termeszettudomanyi Tarsulat), the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gemeenschap tegen Kwakzalverij ) and Germany (Kepler-Bund ) (Dyrendal n.d.). By far the most influential was the British11 Society for Psychical Research or SPR, founded in 1882 in order to “examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable in terms of any generally recognized hypotheses.” The Society focused its investigative efforts at areas such as “thought transference” (i.e. telepathy, in modern terminology), clairvoyance, evidence of an afterlife and mediumistic séances. The SPR expressed no corporate views on any of these matters, giving its individual members

The SPR was founded in Cambridge, England, in 1882. Contacts with individuals such as William James inspired the incorporation of an American society in 1885, which merged with the British SPR in 1890. The American SPR became as influential as a precursor of organised scepticism as its British counterpart. 11


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free hands to interpret the articles of the society in a more believing or more debunking direction. Although many of the members of the SPR, perhaps even most of them, hoped to find evidence for the existence of the controversial phenomena, there were committed debunkers among them. The debunking activity which projected the SPR into the public limelight was its investigation of the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky was in a report prepared by SPR member Richard Hodgson in 1885 denounced as a fraud who had forged the letters she claimed to have received by occult means from superhuman spiritual masters.12 The Rise of Contemporary Scepticism Although the last decades of the nineteenth century were a hotbed of sceptical activity, most contemporary sceptical societies trace their histories back to the formative influence of a much later, defining moment: the establishment of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, or CSICOP. CSICOP was founded in 1976, a time when alternative beliefs were emerging at a massive scale. A year earlier, Paul Kurtz, professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, astronomer Bart Bok and science writer Lawrence Jerome had jointly formulated a statement against astrology in the journal The Humanist.13 The document was signed by 186 individuals, most of whom were working in the natural sciences. The battle against astrology appears to have been part of a more general distaste for the sudden popularity of a range of unorthodox beliefs. In a retrospective article on the first 25 years of the organisation, Kurtz recalls the atmosphere in which the sceptics’ movement was born: A wide range of claims were everywhere present. Books such as Erich von Däniken’s Chariot of the Gods?, Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, and Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle were widely popular; and self-proclaimed gurus and soothsayers were stalking the media-from Uri Geller to Jeane Dixon. I was distressed that my students confused 12 The charge was seriously put in doubt in 1986, after a new investigation of the letters by handwriting expert Vernon Harrison. Of course, the choice between Blavatsky or the suprahuman spiritual masters as authors by no means exhausts the possibilities. 13 The Humanist, September/October 1975.

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In 1976, Kurtz convened a conference with the title “The New Irrationalisms: Antiscience and Pseudoscience,” and took the occasion to invite a number of scholars to the inaugural session of the proposed organisation. Kurtz co-chaired CSICOP with sociologist Marcello Truzzi, who had also founded the journal The Zetetic, which became CSICOP’s first publication. However, disagreement soon arose over the direction in which both the organisation and the journal should head. Truzzi was intent on fostering dialogue between proponents and individuals sceptical of controversial opinions, whereas Kurtz wanted to focus on the sceptical arguments. Truzzi left CSICOP, and the confrontational line became predominant. As a symptom of its new agenda, the organisation in 1978 began to issue a new publication, Skeptical Inquirer, with Kendrick Frazier as its editor. CSICOP served as the inspiration for the many sceptics’ organisations that began to spring up around the world. There are at present numerous such organisations in America, Europe, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and elsewhere.15 These are run independently of CSICOP, but have comparable aims. Sceptical Movements as Social Formations If the term ‘sceptics’ is defined broadly as those who sympathise sufficiently with the sceptical cause to subscribe to the journals and to become members, in the case of organisations that have such an option, it becomes clear that the movement is two-tiered. A perusal of books as well as journals such as Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic, shows that there is a fairly small number of people who write regularly, carry out investigative work and generally function as the movement’s public

Skeptical Inquirer, July 2001:42. Just a few examples of the many such sceptical societies across the world would be Skeptica (Denmark), Skepsis (Finland), Vetenskap och Folkbildning (Sweden), Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (Germany), Stichting Skepsis (Netherlands), Cercle Zétetique (France), Australian Skeptics, New Zealand Skeptics, the Indian Rationalist Association, Japan Anti-Pseudoscience Activities Network and a host of others. 14 15


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intellectuals, its ‘activists’. Most sceptics by far are passive members or readers of sceptical literature. What kind of people are the major activists? An admittedly unsystematic list of some American sceptics, i.e. some of the most prolific contributors to Skeptical Inquirer, other sceptical publications and Internet sites, shows that individuals with four professional backgrounds constitute the core of the movement. There are academics with a background in the ‘hard’ sciences either as researchers or as science writers (Martin Gardner, Phillip Klass, Kendrick Frazier, Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer), psychologists (Susan Blackmore, Ray Hyman, James Alcock, Barry Beyerstein), philosophers (Paul Kurtz, Lee Nisbet, Tod Carroll) and professional or amateur stage magicians ( James Randi, Massimo Polidoro, Joe Nickell and, again, Martin Gardner). The humanities and social sciences have a much less prominent place. The list of activists of sceptical organisations from other countries is roughly similar, although there are local variations.16 Another striking characteristic of the activist group is its gender imbalance. Of the fifteen names mentioned above, only one is a woman. Within the discourse of anti-New Age, anti-paranormal, sceptical writers, there are personal differences. The most visible is that between the oddly-named ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ sceptics. A sceptical web site explains the difference: DRY: There is no reason to treat these people seriously. Anyone with half an ounce of sense can see that their ideas are completely bogus. Time spent trying to “understand their ideas” and “examine their evidence” beyond that necessary for debunking is wasted time, and life is short. Furthermore, such behaviour lends them respectability. If we take them seriously, so will other people. We must ridicule their ideas so that others will see how silly they are. “One belly laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms” (H.L. Mencken, quoted by Martin Gardner). WET: If we lay into these people without giving them a fair hearing then we run two risks: 1: We might miss someone who is actually right. History contains many examples. 2: We give them a weapon against us. Ad-hominem attacks and sloppy logic bring us down to their level. If we

16 Two examples of such local variation concern the Scandinavian situation. The Norwegian sceptics’ society Skepsis has a number of journalists as well as historians of religion as members (Asbjørn Dyrendal, personal communication). Neighboring Sweden has a sceptics’ society (Vetenskap och Folkbildning) whose activists constitute a mix of philosophers and scientists, without the stage magicians that have been a characteristic of the American sceptical scene at least since Houdini.

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olav hammer are truly the rational, scientific people we claim to be then we should ask for their evidence, and then pronounce our considered opinion of it.17

Although, as we have seen, CSICOP soon after its establishment proved to be too hard-line or ‘dry’ for people such as Marcello Truzzi, the spectrum of attitudes is clearly discernible among present-day sceptics. Other, less immediately obvious differences concern the metaphysical presuppositions of the sceptics themselves. Many profess an atheistic or agnostic point of view, and some, such as Paul Kurtz, may suggest that critically examining religious claims should be part of the sceptical agenda.18 Others, such as Martin Gardner, consider themselves theists.19 Sceptical movements have over the years developed a largely shared discourse which can unite individual activists, whatever their divergent views on particular details. This shared discourse concerns the topics fit for discussion, the manner of presenting and arguing against controversial beliefs, and the explanations adduced to explain why so many people stubbornly persist in adhering to practices that sceptics find irrational and bizarre. Sceptical Argumentation In a programmatic statement posted on its website, CSICOP proclaims that its purpose is to “encourage the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and disseminate factual information about the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public.”20 A survey of the literature indicates what topics sceptics understand by the terms paranormal and fringe science. Far from all of these topics are part of the New Age, even by the most generous definition. Beside what might be classified as New Age practices (divination, complementary and alternative medicine in its many guises, UFOs, channelling), the following list of topics is regularly debunked in the sceptical literature:

17 Quoted from Sci.Skeptic FAQ , at www.faqs.org/faqs/skeptic-faq. All Internet addresses quoted in this chapter were checked and active at the time of writing, i.e. February 2006. 18 Considerable space is devoted to this issue in Paul Kurtz (1992:193–233). 19 See e.g. the interview with Martin Gardner at www.csicop.org/si/9803/gardner. html. 20 www.csicop.org.


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• Elements of the Christian tradition that involve controversial empirical claims. The two main targets are Christian creationism and miracle stories. • New Religious Movements. These are much more rarely addressed, although Scientology and Transcendental Meditation have been attacked. • Controversial science. Perhaps because so many sceptics are involved in the natural sciences, a considerable amount of boundary work is done to define controversial theories as pseudoscience. Intelligent design, parapsychology, Freudianism and more exotic pursuits such as cryptozoology are regularly criticised in the sceptical literature. • A host of less readily classifiable themes such as conspiracy theories, urban folklore, consumer hoaxes and historical revisionism (including holocaust denial) are part of at least some sceptics’ list of irrationalities.21 One of the striking characteristics of the sceptical discourse is that many of the above topics have been debunked again and again. Sceptics have for decades attacked phenomena such as astrology or healing. They have produced dozens of empirical experiments, in which e.g. astrological predictions of personality traits fail to match personality profiles obtained by other means with any success rate better than chance. Nevertheless, believers continue to produce large volumes of astrological literature and to participate in such practices. Sceptics are thus constantly confronted with the fact that a belief system, that they themselves feel has been decisively refuted, continues to be of interest to large segments of the population. Why, to paraphrase sceptic Michael Shermer (1997), do people persist in believing in weird things? Sceptics produce characteristic narratives to explain why astrologers and believers in astrology are apparently not swayed by what they consider to be rational arguments. Some sceptical sources suggest that the resistance of ‘irrational’ beliefs to debunking depends on a variety of rather crude causes such as general human credulity, the deceit 21 There are variations between different sceptics’ organisations. Some are probably the result of individual preferences and chance. Thus, CSICOP literature tends to limit itself to ‘pseudo-science’ in a narrower sense, whereas e.g. the Skeptics Society, the Norwegian Skepsis organisation and others will cover topics such as conspiracies. Other differences are due to the salience of particular controversial claims in particular countries. Anthroposophy is a marginal topic in CSICOP literature, but is much more prominent in German, Dutch and Swedish sceptical publications, no doubt due to the visible presence of Anthroposophy in those countries.

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and charisma of those who propose controversial claims and the lack of critical judgment of the media.22 Even otherwise intelligent people can apparently be made to believe nonsense, because “there are chinks in those brilliant minds—blind spots that defy explanation” (Pollak 2001). However, sceptical literature also abounds in considerably more subtle suggestions. The chinks in the mind, the blind spots, can be explained by referring to a variety of psychological mechanisms. Sceptics can refer to the innumeracy and lack of understanding of statistical results that characterise large segments of the public, and which make it difficult to assess controversial claims (see e.g. Stokes 2001). They can refer to the same studies that cognitive and social psychologists might do. One frequently cited mechanism is the clustering illusion: we see patterns, meaningful clusters of events, whether or not we according to normative standards of rationality should find any. Versions of the argument have been invoked to explain the belief in Nostradamus’ prophecies (Pickover 2001). It has been cited as a reason why divinatory rituals common in the New Age milieu, such as astrology, work: according to this line of explanation, it is because clients are willing to recognise correlations between what the diviner (astrologer) tells them, and biographical details that they remember or personality traits as they perceive them.23 It has been suggested as a mechanism underlying the popularity of alternative health practices.24 Clients who feel that their health has become improved will infer (whether rightly or wrongly) that it is the alternative treatment that has helped them. Such findings from cognitive psychology can of course be interpreted in ways that support the cruder sceptical arguments, i.e. as signs that people are able to fool others and delude themselves. However, psychological research has no obvious normative or moral implications. It is just the case that we have certain cognitive constraints; beliefs and practices that do not follow normative standards of rationality are merely data. No group is singled out as particularly prone to being 22 Note e.g. the title of a piece such as Joe Nickell’s (2001) “John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved,” and its description of mediums as “shrewd” and “cheating”, and their clients as “credulous”. Martin Gardner (1952:6–7) and Paul Kurtz (1992:11) are other well-known sceptics who can attribute controversial beliefs to human gullibility. 23 The classical empirical study of the ability of diviners’ clients to match the narrative with which they are presented and their own self-perception is Forer (1949). 24 See Stevens (2001), especially the discussion of Frazer’s principles on (ibid.: 34, 36); and Gilovich (1991:125–45).


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bounded by such cognitive constraints. To the extent that experimental psychologists draw any ‘moral’ conclusion at all, it is that the processes involved are probably universal and apply to individuals regardless of their intelligence as measured by IQ , their gender, level of education and so forth. Fundamental cognitive processes that support normatively invalid beliefs are hardwired in us all, so that it basically requires very strong social mechanisms to suppress ‘irrationality’. This summarises very briefly some of the explanatory models that are found in printed sceptical accounts by activists. Conversations and on-line discussion groups provide many sceptics with an informal setting where other explanatory mechanisms also come to the fore.25 Some rank-and-file members have a basic grasp of the psychological research, and can identify cognitive and social processes. However, these explanations are used together with two other explanations that are closely related to each other, but are not easy to harmonise with the psychological model. The first we might call the argument from pathology. According to this mode of reasoning, there is something fundamentally wrong with people who believe in New Age claims. They must be unusually naïve, deluded or irrational. The second is the argument from immorality. This mode of reasoning affirms that healers, psychics, astrologers and other spokespersons of the New Age scene are out to make a quick buck at the expense of gullible clients. Together, they depict controversial practices as a social menace. Because people are irrational enough to believe in the ‘nonsense’ they are fed with, irrationalism suspends the critical judgment that is indispensable for a democratic society to function. Because they believe in healing, they will not go to medical doctors and will therefore suffer health problems. Many sceptics have a double aim of understanding a contested phenomenon in naturalistic terms, and of depicting it as a social problem. In his classic study Outsiders (1963), Howard Becker argues that social problems are identified as such by moral entrepreneurs, i.e. individuals or groups who set up normative standards of behaviour and depict the activities of others who do not conform as a deviation. Deviance can never be absolute, but will only be deviance from a certain norm (Becker A minor caveat is called for: references to personal communication with sceptics primarily refer to the situation in the Swedish milieu, with which I am most familiar. Little if any empirical research exists on sceptics as a social phenomenon in other countries. 25

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1963:143–63).26 CSICOP and similar organisations fulfil this function by setting up rules for rational behaviour, and by identifying culprits who break those rules.27 Becker subdivides the moral entrepreneur into several ideal types, and these cover the spectrum between ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ sceptics. The ‘dry’ sceptic in particular resembles Becker’s crusader, who “operates with an absolute ethic,” is “fervent and righteous,” but is often so because he is driven by a concern for others (Becker 1963: 147–8). The crusade which is a concern for a larger group of moral entrepreneurs can become a full-time occupation for some (in this case, a small core of sceptical activists). As sceptics organise, they take on the characteristics of Becker’s category of rule enforcers. As an institution, they can more successfully attempt to influence others to follow the norms. Part of the success in doing so lies in their ability to explain to others why it is imperative that those rules be followed. The sense of moral urgency, and the perceived need to convince others of that urgency, goes a long way toward explaining one of the features of at least some sceptical discourse that is striking to an outsider: the almost Manichaean division of the world into the deluded and the clear-sighted, expressed in a harsh and occasionally abusive language. Especially in less hard-core scientific publications, the polemical tone can be remarkably strong. A programmatic statement by Skeptical Inquirer editor Kendrick Frazier (2002) manages to compress into merely two pages a whole array of rhetorical phrases. The paranormal and its believers are described with words such as shameless, bogus, nonsense, clap-trap and muddle-headed; forces of unreason threatening the modern democratic world; counter-science manifestations that attempt to confuse, taint, misdirect, delude and distract us. The sceptical camp is characterised by using words such as rationality, reason, clear thinking, science, freedom, openness, intellectual dignity, honesty, integrity and intelligence. The feeling of urgency is brought home by the many metaphors alluding to war and acute danger. To pick just a few: people are 26 The suggestion that behaviour can only be labelled deviant should not be misunderstood as an acceptance of moral relativism, or a suggestion that labelling causes deviant behaviour, see Becker (1963:177–208). Extreme intra-group violent behaviour will no doubt have deleterious effects on any society, but it will not be understood as a social problem e.g. in societies that reward displays of male aggressiveness and accept vendetta-style revenge. 27 The similarities between sceptics and Becker’s moral entrepreneurs are striking. Previous discussions include Dyrendal (1997) and Hammer (2001).


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“besieged” with dubious claims,28 the sceptics’ “first target was . . .,”29 the relation between biomedical and complementary systems is characterised as medicine “wars”;30 we are “drowning” in a vast sea of medical disinformation,31 herbal medicines and dietary supplements are a “risky health gamble” and are in some ways “like illicit street drugs” such as “crack cocaine and heroin,” and controversial claims regarding such supplements result in consumer “confusion and anxiety.”32 A book title such as Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Sagan & Druyan 1997) similarly brings home the message of the clear-thinking sceptic struggling to uphold reason in a world that risks being plunged into ignorance. The bulk of sceptical texts thus operate on an implicit model where the individual for various reasons, such as succumbing to cognitive illusions or being hampered by scientific illiteracy, fails to grasp the plain facts. By contrast, interest in the cultural aspect of New Age belief is more muted. What role does belief in paranormal or other ‘alternative’ pursuits fill in the milieu where it is prevalent? How are people socialised into these beliefs? Although discussions of such topics can be found in the sceptical literature, they are by no means common.33 The way in which contemporary astrology is discussed in the literature is a striking example of this lacuna. The post-Enlightenment culture in which sceptics live has fostered the opinion that astrology must be either a failed empirical method or a valid one. The anthropological perspective, that astrology has little to do with empirical science but is a form of ritual divination, makes more sense of the activities in which astrologers and their clients are involved, but seems to be utterly foreign to its critics. Sceptics seem to be satisfied, once they have ascertained that astrologers consistently fail tests in which they attempt to match personality profiles with chart interpretations. To my knowledge, nobody has seriously suggested to similarly subject the shells, bones and sticks of the African diviner to scientific scrutiny. What in a different society can be perceived as an exotic but interesting cultural practice, is in our own culture seen as nothing more than ‘superstition.’ Skeptical Inquirer, July 2001:24. Ibid.:25. 30 Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 2001:28. 31 Skeptical Inquirer, July 2001:24. 32 Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 2001:36. 33 Examples of sceptical books that do combine debunking with a discussion of historical and social issues are Spanos (1996) and Buckman & Sabbagh (1993). 28 29

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Does the sceptical movement make any difference? In discussions and interviews, one readily comes across the opinion that ‘pseudoscientific’ beliefs will be just as common within the next decade or so as they are today.34 This might seem a rather puzzling stance. If sceptics believed New Age practices were gaining in popularity, one would understand their sense of moral urgency, since they would see themselves as combating an increasing threat. If ‘pseudo-scientific beliefs’ were assumed to become less popular, one could interpret this as a prognosis of the effectiveness of their own discourse. One possible explanation for this particular answer is that many sceptics may see their efforts as a longterm battle against irrational beliefs, and that a perspective of a decade is far too short. The puzzle is, however, compounded by the many sceptics who do not feel that such practices constitute any major social problem. The activists in the movement tend to describe their opponent in terms of a moral crisis. Some grassroots sceptics do agree with this analysis. Some argue that democracy depends on rational argumentation, and that pseudo-scientific beliefs would become a social problem if and when people in the political elite were to be influenced by it. Others feel that it is immoral that some people make money on an activity that—to the sceptics—is utter nonsense. Nonetheless, many sceptics seem unconcerned. The impression conveyed by at least a segment of the grass roots level sceptical movement, that New Age beliefs constitute a largely ineradicable non-problem, might seem like an admission that their own attempts to argue against such practices are both pointless and useless. Some sceptics, when asked what motivated them, explain that it is simply better not to believe in things that are not believable. As one sceptic summarised this line of reasoning:35 Actually, [it] has no [social consequences] at all. I just think that it’s like other kinds of belief in the supernatural, it’s a goal in itself not to believe things that aren’t true. [Astrology] isn’t any more plausible than Santa Claus, it’s just a matter of belief and attitudes. I think adults who believe in [astrology] are as depressing as adults who believe in Santa Claus. 34 35

held.

Much of this section is, again, based on discussions with Swedish sceptics. E-mail to the author from a Swedish sceptic, whose identity has here been with-


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The sense of not achieving very much, at least in the foreseeable future, may be quite realistic. One general reason why sceptics may have such limited success has to do with the very nature of New Age religion. Wouter Hanegraaff summarises the New Age in the following way: All New Age religion is characterized by a criticism of dualistic and reductionistic tendencies in (modern) Western culture, as exemplified by (what is emically perceived as) dogmatic Christianity, on the one hand, and rationalistic/scientific ideologies on the other. It believes that there is a “third option” which rejects neither religion and spirituality nor science and rationality, but combines them in a higher synthesis. (Hanegraaff 1996:517)

Thus, it is part of the very core of New Age practices and New Age discourse to be opposed to the way of reasoning of the scientific-minded sceptics. New Agers do not adhere to complementary medicine and astrology despite the information presented by sceptics, but in part because of it. Because scientists and other sceptics are representatives of the reviled rationalistic/scientific ideology, they can be summarily dismissed as narrow-minded. As David Hess remarks, it is the New Agers who perceive of themselves as sceptically-minded, while CSICOP and its likes are supposedly driven by an irrational dogmatism (Hess 1993:15). This general distrust of the sceptical position fits the social composition of the New Age. The New Age milieu is largely comprised of women (Frisk 2003).36 A study by Mary Belenky and her colleagues on the social epistemology of American women shows that many are led for both personal and intellectual reasons to embrace subjectivism (Belenky et al. 1986). Subjectivists, like New Agers, claim that they rely on their intuition and are suspicious of logic, analysis and abstraction as valid avenues to knowledge. However, the sense of being in touch with a strong gut feeling often boils down to “turning for answers to people closer to their own experience—female peers, mothers, sisters, grandmothers . . . Truth for these women is particular and grounded in the firsthand experience of others most like themselves” (ibid.: 60). That is, knowledge and truth come from trusting the experience of others, especially other women. From this perspective, sceptics represent an ultimate negative Other: an almost

36 Although Frisk’s data are from Sweden, experience with New Age milieus in other western countries hardly suggests any greater gender balance there.

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all-male group of institutional experts, pitted against the insights of close female kin and friends. The martial and social-problems oriented language of some sceptics, which implicitly (and on occasion explicitly) tells New Agers that they are irrational fools, serves to widen the gap between the two groups. Such differences in social background, language and trust in experts, go hand in hand with very real differences in underlying epistemic assumptions. Sceptics will, for instance, typically be guided in their judgments by two implicit principles: a strongly held distinction between normatively correct and incorrect ways to assess empirical evidence, and a Bayesian approach to probabilities.37 Conflicting attitudes to unconventional or complementary medicine among sceptics and among a large sympathetic general population will illustrate the issues involved. When assessing a non-biomedical system such as homeopathy, sceptics will ask what evidence there is in favour of homeopathic remedies. Are there any randomised, double-blind studies? A sceptical website notes that there are such tests, but concludes: Of the hundreds of studies that have been done on homeopathic remedies the vast majority have found no value . . . Homeopaths have had over 200 years to demonstrate their wares and have failed to do so. Sure, there are single studies that have found statistically significant differences between groups treated with an HR [homeopathic remedy] and control groups, but none of these have been replicated or they have been marred by methodological faults.38

The Bayesian question is how the basic presuppositions of homeopathy mesh with other background assumptions. When Samuel Hahnemann formulated the basic tenets of homeopathy, he based his method on

37 Bayesian probability is here used loosely to describe a mode of reasoning that is ultimately grounded in the insight of Thomas Bayes (1701–61). This line of argumentation is grounded in the realisation that an empirical proposition p cannot be proven to be absolutely correct, but only as more probable or less so. What effect should a new piece of evidence have on our belief in p? The force of new evidence should normatively depend on how well-supported p is by other background presuppositions. If p is very well supported, a single piece of contrary evidence should make us very cautious of abandoning our belief in p. Our experience has confirmed time and again that gravity prevents us from leaving the surface of the earth without the use of considerable muscular power. A single verbal report of somebody who has levitated should, on this (loosely) Bayesian norm, be weighed against the overpowering evidence for the inexorable effects of gravity, and in no significant measure increase our belief in levitation. 38 www.skepdic.com/homeo.html.


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two principles. The law of similars suggests that illnesses that produce certain symptoms can be cured by employing remedies that create similar symptoms. The law of infinitesimals states that one should use minute doses of those remedies, since dilution and shaking increases their potency. The Bayesian will ask whether it makes sense in terms of other background presuppositions to accept these homeopathic claims. Why should a malady and a cure resemble each other? Is a head-ache cured by a painful blow to the skull? Why would lower amounts of an active substance produce greater effects (does the coffee get more potent when one reduces the amount of ground coffee in the percolator?) There is good reason to assume that many users of homeopathic remedies differ radically on both issues. Firstly, they seek evidence, but do not share sceptical assumptions as to what constitutes valid evidence. Secondly, they are not Bayesians.39 Patients of homeopathic doctors may accept the efficacy of this particular system of complementary medicine because they feel that they have evidence: they have personally had positive experiences or they know of people who feel that they have been helped. The Internet abounds with such testimonials. New Agers seek confirmation of their beliefs, but do so in a way that contrasts sharply with the sceptics. A final clue to why sceptical discourse does not have a greater effect on the general public comes from two classic psychological experiments (Nisbett & Ross 1980:176–9). Since the details are a bit intricate, I beg the reader’s indulgence as I present the experiment in some detail. The subjects were in the first experiment given a number of letters to read. Some were said to be the genuine last letters of people who had committed suicide. Others had been faked. In the first phase of the experiment, subjects were asked to separate the genuine suicide notes from the fake ones. Afterwards, all subjects received an assessment of their success at carrying out this task. Some were told that they were 39 One might argue that New Agers are Bayesians, because their background assumptions (the existence of normally invisible, non-physical forces) mesh with their acceptance of alternative methods such as homeopathy. I would, however, suggest that New Agers are not Bayesian, because many will accept one set of propositions about reality in many everyday circumstances and another, conflicting set of propositions when the need arises to justify specific beliefs. Homeopaths will accept that the active substance in their remedies become more potent by dilution, whereas other trace elements such as impurities do not become more potent. Sceptics will argue, in Bayesian fashion, that precisely because there is a background assumption that impurities do not become more potent, it is unwarranted to assume that the active substance will be somehow be singled out and rendered more effective through dilution.

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very good at intuitively picking the genuine letters, while others were informed that they had managed poorly. In reality, experimenters graded the subject’s performance randomly; there was no correlation whatsoever between the test results that the subjects were given and their performance at the task. The experiment now entered a second phase. All subjects were now told the truth. The experimenters admitted that none of the test results was valid. Their scores said nothing about their levels of intuition or empathy. In fact, the experimenters were careful to show the subjects the test protocols, which clearly indicated that all scores were given at random. How did the subjects assess their own psychological skills after this thorough debriefing? Many of those who were told that they had unusual psychological insight and intuition retained this flattering self-image. Conversely, those who were told in the first phase of the experiment that they had a particularly low level of intuition were similarly convinced after their debriefing of their lack of talent in this area. The troubling conclusion is that it is very difficult to free oneself from an erroneous belief. A second experiment shows that there are ways of counteracting such illusions. The subjects underwent the same phases as in the first experiment: false scores, debriefing and assessment of subsequent selfperception. However, for this second experiment two more elements were added. The subjects were given a lecture on the cognitive errors that had led them to over- or underestimate themselves. Those who sat in on the lecture demonstrated a dramatically heightened awareness of the way in which they had misinterpreted the data at hand. A second group of people were allowed to watch and hear the subjects through a one-way mirror. For those who merely watched, the insight did not register. After all, the faulty reasoning lay with the others, those who were being lectured to. The moral of this tale is easy to extrapolate to the real-life encounter between sceptics and New Agers. People base their views of complementary medicine or divination on highly uncertain evidence. Once a hypothesis has been formed, it is rarely abandoned because of new empirical evidence. We form our opinions in ways that bear only the faintest resemblance to normative standards of reasoning, and yet we are all convinced of our own rationality and believe that we have excellent reasons for holding on to our own beliefs. The arguments of the sceptics face two nearly insurmountable challenges. For those who


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do not share the same epistemological presuppositions as the sceptics, their arguments seem pointless and misguided. For those who do, the sceptical message risks being read as a little more than a vaguely amusing tale of the folly of other people, and as a source of a selfcongratulatory confirmation of one’s own intellectual superiority. Both groups will retain the confident feeling that they are not as easily duped as their opponents. Scepticism and Self-Reflexivity In the sceptical literature, there is a preponderance of detailed debunking of specific claims, and much less self-reflexive engagement with the implications of the sceptical enterprise itself. Part of the very definition of being a moral entrepreneur is the insistence that the negative Other whom one is fighting is a social evil. At the same time, the sceptical selfimage is that of a person who carefully weighs the evidence. Many sceptical writers tend to operate on both principles, without explicitly reflecting on how these two issues match: what hard, empirical evidence is there to suggest that controversial beliefs are a danger to the social fabric? Numerous sceptical texts will for instance attempt to present complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as a threat to people’s health, because clients who consult healers and others who provide alternative services may have threatening conditions that go undetected because they are not examined by a medical doctor. This moral argument is invoked in a textual corpus which generally does not support these contentions with the necessary empirical evidence. How many clients of CAM do actually have such threatening illnesses? How often does it actually happen that these clients develop major medical problems because of faulty diagnoses? For example, do patients who consult homeopathic doctors display such a distrust of the biomedical system that they will refrain from seeking medical help when gravely ill, or is that hazard exaggerated? There are underlying assumptions behind the ethical stance of the moral entrepreneur that would deserve a more sustained discussion. It is well known that some patients who make use of biomedical health care become gravely ill because of medical malpractice; others are infected with contagious diseases passed on by other patients that they would otherwise not have come into contact with; yet others develop

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adverse reactions because of the side-effects of the drugs that they are prescribed. If we assume that an unknown number of people are worse off because they have been treated by people in the complementary and alternative milieu, how does that number compare with that of patients afflicted with such iatrogenic conditions? What ethical presuppositions should we embrace: should we be pragmatists and support treatments that yield fewer victims, even when these are based purely on placebo effects? Or should biomedicine prevail and ‘quackery’ be fought, even in cases where placebo treatments seem innocuous and the drawbacks of biomedicine should turn out to be considerable? People pursue different goals in life. We live in a culture in which science and rationality have an unparalleled ethos. New Agers are part of that culture. They will refer to what they perceive as evidence, and will struggle hard to define their position as the rational one. Beyond such self-descriptions, one can wonder whether the quest for empirically valid truth really is a shared value. Perhaps many New Agers are playing different games, with entirely different rules than those accepted by the sceptics: the pursuit of happiness, meaning, bonding with other people, giving voice to one’s distaste for mainstream values, and so forth. How should those of us who value empirical scholarship relate to those who do not? Is there a moral imperative to support the quest for empirical evidence at all costs? Or should we be multiculturalists, and accept that what may be an absolute value for one group—for sceptics, Hume’s ideal of proportioning one’s belief to the evidence—may not be so for another? These issues are not easy to resolve, and there is little sceptical literature that seriously grapples with them. References Asad, T., 1993. “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category.” In Asad, T. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Becker, H., 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York & London: Free Press. Belenky, M.F., et al., 1986. Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind. New York: Basic Books. Brandon, R., 1983. The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Buckman, R. & K. Sabbagh, 1993. Magic or Medicine? An Investigation into Healing. London: Macmillan. Campbell, C., 1972. “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization.” A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5.


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Carrier, R.C., 2002. “Pseudohistory in Jerry Vardaman’s Magic Coins: The Nonsense of Micrographic Letters.” Skeptical Inquirer March/April 39–41. Chevreul, M.E., 2001/1833. “Letter to Mr. Ampère on a Particular Class of Muscular Movements.” Trans. Marcuard, Y. Skeptical Inquirer July, 37–9. Dyrendal, A., 1997. “Ekte mannfolk tror på døden! Skeptikere og mirakler.” In Gilhus, I.S., ed. Miraklenes tid. Oslo: Norges forskningsråd, 154–70. ——, nd. “Communities of Disbelief ? The Sceptics’ Movement as a Discourse Community.” Unpublished paper. Forer, B., 1949. “The Fallacy of Personal Validation.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 44 118–23. Frazier, K., 2002. “Clear Thinking and the Forces of Unreason.” Skeptical Inquirer March/April 62–4. Frisk, L., 2003. “New Age Participants in Sweden: Background, Beliefs, Engagement and Conversion.” In Rothstein, M. & Kranenborg, R., eds. New Religions in a Postmodern World. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Gardner, M., 1952. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. New York: Dover Publications. Garfield, K., 1995. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gauld, A., 1992. A History of Hypnotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilovich, T., 1991. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press. Hammer, O., forthcoming. “Conflict and Concord on the Internet: selvet.dk.” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, vol. 19. ——, 2001. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Leiden: Brill. Hanegraaff, W.J., 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: Brill. Hess, D., 1993. Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Kurtz, P., 1992. The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge. Buffalo NY: Prometheus. ——, 2002. “Are Science and Religion Compatible?” Skeptical Inquirer March/April 42–5. Miller, R., 2002. “Hugo Gernsback, Skeptical Crusader.” Skeptical Inquirer November/ December 35–9. Nickell, J., 2001. “John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved.” Skeptical Inquirer November/ December 2001, 19–22. Nisbett, R. & L. Ross, 1980. Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Pattie, F.A., 1994. Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: A Chapter in the History of Medicine. Hamilton NY: Edmonston Publishing. Philostratus, 1912. Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Trans. Conybeare, F.C. Loeb Classical Library 17. London: Heinemann. Pickover, C.A., 2001. “The Antinoüs Prophecies: A Nostradamoid Project.” Skeptical Inquirer May/June 32–6. Platvoet, J. & A. Molendijk, eds., 1999. The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts and Contests. Leiden: Brill. Pollak, M., 2001. “Gobbledygook and Charm: Still the Right Formula for Snake Oil.” Skeptical Inquirer May/June 14. Sagan, C. & A. Druyan, 1996. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House. Shermer, M., 1997. Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time. New York: W.H. Freeman.

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Shermer, M., 2002. “Smart People Believe Weird Things.” Scientific American 287 3, September. Spanos, N., 1996. Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective. Washington DC: American Psychological Association. Spiro, M.E., 1966. “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation.” In M.P. Banton, ed. Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. New York, 85–125. Stevens, P., Jr, 2001. “Magical Thinking in Complementary and Alternative Medicine.” Skeptical Inquirer November/December 2001 32–37. Stokes, D.M., 2001. “The Shrinking Filedrawer: On the Validity of Statistical Metaanalyses in Parapsychology.” Skeptical Inquirer May/June 22–25. Walker, P., 1981. Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries. London: Scholar Press. Ward, B., 1982. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event 1000–1215. London: Scholar Press.

THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT AS AN ASTROLOGICAL MINORITY RELIGION WITH MAINSTREAM APPEAL Michael York The contemporary New Age movement is largely—though not completely—a modern manifestation of theosophy and astrology. While the study of the stars has a persistent, albeit esoteric, presence throughout the history of western metaphysical thought, Theosophy itself comes closest to being a renaissance of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism.1 Both subjects have of course been condemned by canonical Christianity and, more recently, by a prevailing scientistic/reductionistic form of modern science. Through its gnostic heritage, New Age2 should by rights be a minority religion in a traditionally Christian host society. However, eschewing for the most part sectarian sociological forms, New Age and popular interest in horoscopes and astrological forecasts have entered into the contemporary spiritual supermarket. Its audience and clients are simply and mostly mainstream consumers, and this raises the question concerning how and why does astrologically-based gnosticism create mainstream/market appeal? Moreover, does secularisation play a role here, and what does the emergence of New Age popularity tell us about shifts and changes within current western society?

1 I have employed the terms ‘theosophy’ and ‘gnosticism’ in lower case as generics and not specific religions. For the former, see the entry by that name in The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2001–05 (http://www.bartleby.com/cgi-bin/texis/webinator/ 65search?search_type=full&query=theosophy&submit=Go). By contrast, the term ‘Theosophy’ with capitalisation refers to the movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky as well as the schisms that developed from it. I use the designation ‘Gnosticism’ for the historical pre-Christian pagan, Jewish and early Christian sects that stressed the value of revealed divine knowledge ( gnosis) as the vehicle for attainment of spiritual redemption and that flourished for the most part from the fourth century BCE to thirteenth century CE. When the term ‘gnosticism’ in lower case is employed, it refers not to specific sects but to the generic of transcendental religions that view life as a “fall” and matter as ultimately either illusory or valueless. See York (2004). 2 I follow the developing convention among scholars of the New Age movement on both sides of the Atlantic to refer to the broad, amorphous spirituality that has developed around the notion of the New Age (i.e., the Age of Aquarius) simply as New Age. In other words, ‘New Age’ refers to New Age spirituality; the New Age to either this spirituality conceived as a movement or the expected ‘new age’ period of time.

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Apart from its continuation of New Thought heritage that stresses the power of the mind (A Course in Miracles, est, Neuro-Linguistic Programming [NLP], Unity, etc.), the New Age movement is equally a development of Spiritualism’s offspring, Theosophy. From Spiritualism, New Age inherits its belief that we can communicate with the dead, but like Theosophy, there is less interest in mediating or communicating with the spirits of deceased family members and loved ones and more in receiving guidance from evolved spiritual masters or mahatmas, extraterrestrial beings or space-brethren, and extra-dimensional discarnates. With its devaluation of the material world of nature for a transcendental realm of gnosis or spiritual wisdom, Theosophy considers nature as a foil that must be penetrated and by-passed if the aspirant is to achieve an understanding of true reality. By and large, New Age follows in this same understanding of nature as an illusion, as something unreal, and as something that simply masks the true reality of the spirit. The chief metaphor of New Age is the astrological concept of the Age of Aquarius based on the astronomical fact of the ‘precession of the equinoxes’3 from which many astrologers argue that we have left or are leaving or shortly will leave the Age of Pisces that has flourished from around the time of Christ. As British astrologer Nicholas Campion (2000:10–16) has discovered, there are countless different understandings of when the Age of Aquarius begins—understandings that range over several centuries if not more. To be fair, however, the Aquarian Age for New Age is less a literal expectation and more a metaphor for what is to be a collective shift in consciousness. The form of this shift 3 The precession of the equinoxes refers to the earlier occurrences of the equinoxes in each successive sidereal year. Since the earth functions as a tilting gyroscope, the planet’s polar axis gradually shifts relative to the fixed stars. As with any gyroscope, there is a resultant retrograde motion of the equinoctial points along the ecliptic that change the direction in which the axis points. The precession of the axis causes the zodiacal constellations to appear to rotate around the earth relative to any specific point (e.g. the spring equinoctial point). The zodiac shifts 50 seconds annually, approximately one degree every 72 years, one complete sign every 2,160 years, and a complete zodiacal revolution (one Platonic or great year) roughly every 26,000 years. Claudius Ptolemy defined the first 30 degrees of the sky as the sign Aries, and his tropical system of astronomy/astrology codified in the second century CE began at the spring equinoctial point or 0 degrees Aries. However, due to the retrograde motion caused by equinoctial precession, the sun is now in the sign of Pisces at the time of the vernal equinox around March 21. As long as it continues to be so, we are said to be in the Age of Pisces. However, when the zodiac precesses enough to cause the vernal equinoctial point to slip back into the sign that precedes Pisces, it is asserted by astrologers that we will then have entered into the Age of Aquarius which, in turn, is identified by many as the New Age. See York (2004).

an astrological minority religion with mainstream appeal 407 is another matter, and whether it is the product of the world wide web of electronic communication systems and the global exchange of information, or whether it is a product of humanitarian and ecological activism; whether the cumulative effect of many individuals attaining enlightenment, or whether the result of spiritual grace in the form of supernatural intervention—the important notion behind the concept itself is that it symbolises a ‘golden age’ of individual, social and global integrity. From the scientistic community alone, New Age is ridiculed on much the same basis as religion itself is rejected as immature fantasy—manifesting an unwillingness of adherents to ‘grow up.’ Taking a reductionistic attitude toward religion in general, New Age is understood as either one more opiate to appease the masses now seen primarily as consumers rather than workers (the neo-Marxist attitude) or an entrenched and obstinate human desire to recreate the early symbiotic world of childand-mother (the neo-Freudian perspective). Consequently, New Age must navigate between two equally negative antagonists—the rationalists, on the one hand, and the religious conservatives, on the other. That it has continued to do so and establish itself as a viable presence in increasingly enlarged sections of western bookshops apparently flies against the outlook it faces between its two formidable opponents. The question becomes one of asking how is this possible? Is the mainstream appeal of this ‘minority’ spirituality a product of the movement itself—namely, its cleverness, its marketing skills, its organisation—or is it a product instead of inherent weaknesses in its mainstream adversaries? While New Age derives from specific cultural or sub-cultural trends (theosophy, spiritualism, humanistic and later transpersonal psychologies), it is nevertheless a disparate conglomerate of different movements and/or religions. Sociologically, it remains difficult to grasp. It is neither a traditional church, identifiable sect, mainstream denomination or a single unorthodox cult. There is no institutional mechanism for determining membership or countenancing expulsion, no one who can speak for the movement as a whole, no list of creeds, and no registrar of membership. It is instead a loose series of networks, often cellular and replicate, with a constantly shifting rostrum of spokespeople, therapists and teachers. In short, its fluid organisation or even non-organisation makes it more of a consumer phenomenon than anything that could be understood as traditionally religious. There is no unified or coordinated overall strategy that is or can be articulated for the movement as a whole as a means for consciously insuring mainstream success—including the sale of its many, many different products.

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In fact, the absence of any hierarchical or integrating structure throughout the movement as a whole would appear to indicate that the mainstream appeal has more to do with mainstream changes themselves than with any coordinated acumen on the part of New Age as a selfconscious movement itself. A clue to part of the answer is perhaps to be found in New Agers’ frequent proclamation that they are spiritual rather than religious. This would seem to indicate that New Age springs from atavistic human impulses for religiously sanctioned values, meanings and answers to fundamental questions—answers that established religious institutions are increasingly failing to supply for the satisfaction of public demand. In other words, the human desire for spiritual seeking is more or less a cultural constant, but institutional religion no longer is the framework within which this quest is undertaken in our rapidly changing social and economic world. The non-institutional nature and marketing choice of New Age appears to be its underlying appeal. The New Age represents a if not the spiritual consumer supermarket that is steadily superseding the appeal of traditional religion in the West. In the context of social transformations, New Age has become emblematic of the affirmation and celebration of spiritual choice. This in turn leads to severe accusations of cultural appropriation—especially from identity-endangered peoples—but New Age insists that the multi-cultural register is now public domain and accessible to everyone. One example of a ‘New Age product’ among many, many others is astrology. Astrology, however, is particularly important in that it provides the underlying framework and rationale for the New Age itself. The Age of Aquarius is an astrological concept. That being said, astrology is far from a new or recent interest. If alchemy is the parent of chemistry, astrology is the parent of astronomy—a study that goes back to at least the beginnings of history. It has been an inevitable part of humanity’s desire to know its place in the universe and understand macrocosmic/ microcosmic connections. Over time, and despite their being superseded by more sophisticated and predictable systems of explanation, the symbols and terms of astrology have entered into and become part of the cultural register. In the surfeit of choice that has come to characterise the contemporary West, the familiar and methodological are becoming supplemented and sometimes replaced by the exotic and superstitious. Many are turning to forgotten and discarded spiritual vernaculars in an attempt that might be interpreted as stemming from a desire for more colourful and mystically laden symbols and notions. Astrology

an astrological minority religion with mainstream appeal 409 is at the forefront of this popular interest—combining as it does the familiar with the obscure. Newspaper horoscope columns began to appear in the late 1930s. Since that time, they have become a regular feature in the daily tabloids and the weeklies. For instance, in Britain, Russell Grant describes ‘Your Stars’ for the Evening Post, while Peter Watson maintains a slightly more detailed star-sign listing for the Daily Mail. Both papers list a dial-in service for each of the twelve signs. These and more form part of a well-established astrological vernacular culture. The diffusion of this interest finds a presence among more select audiences as well. An example of this last would be the London produced journal boyz that describes itself as “For gay adults only.” The weekly maintains a “Starman” page presenting brief star-sign analyses along with a “top tip” and a “passion rating” that are all tailored to the established nuance of its readership. In its 16 June 2001 issue, for example, for Aquarius the magazine stated, “You’re worried that this good feeling is an artificial high. It’s only artificial if you think it is, it exists now, and it’s up to you if you want it to stay. Look at yourself in the mirror, and say, ‘I’m a complete and utter shag’.” For Leos, the “top tip” was, “Take fruit to eat instead of paying a million pounds for popcorn,” and, out of a possibility of five stars for “passion rating,” only Taurus received one star; Aries, Gemini, Leo, and Capricorn, two; with Cancer, Sagittarius and Aquarius being assessed with all five. Strictly for comparison, Grant states for Aquarius, “Your own particular personal pursuits or choices may seem peculiar to serious-minded onlookers, but they’re the very essence of your being.” For the same sign, Watson says, “People are right when they tell you you’re wasting a lot of energy and talent. It may be time to admit you would love to be more original in how you deal with important areas of your life, but you haven’t up to now, been given the encouragement you’d like. That is probably more an excuse than a reason not to take a chance and show that when push comes to shove, you can be every bit as ingenious as the next person. The planets are urging you to have a go. Now.” Whether we judge such columns to be serious or not, whether they are intended to be humorous, whether they simply offer guiding principles and advice that some readers can incorporate into their lives, and whether any of these ‘Star’ pages are based on actual astrological considerations, the fact remains that the daily horoscope has become an accepted part of vernacular culture. Everyone reads one of these columns at some point, and some people actually rely on them and use

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them. While most people may not take them seriously, they are nevertheless an accepted part of popular discourse. But inasmuch as this is true, the daily and weekly horoscope page is the tip of the iceberg of astrological esotericism. Of course, at the much deeper levels we encounter ‘serious astrology’ in the sense of the pursuit of a codified system of horoscope casting and interpretation—a process that is subject to standard empirical testing, confirmation or disconfirmation. But in the context of understanding marginal religions with mainstream appeal, it is not the validity of astrology that is here the issue but rather the role that astrology plays in demotic and cultural discourse. This in turn has led to the increasing popularisation of Human Potential and New Age practices if not of the New Age movement as a whole. The New Age speaks in its own language, it has an identifiable vocabulary, and a large part of its dialogue and New Age-speak are grounded in the terminology and concepts of astrology. As John Wadsworth puts it, “An astrology conceived of causative influence applied to human affairs has never fared well under the empirical microscope and its results continue to disappoint in the modern era.”4 He continues that any logical insistence on determinative fate becomes philosophically unappealing by undermining the popular western notion of free will. Nevertheless, the notion and practice of divinisation have always survived in western astrology despite the heritage of Greek rationalism and Ptolemaic classicism. Patrick Curry (1992:162) observes that Thomas Aquinas incorporated astrology into medieval Christianity, Alan Leo into modern theosophy and Dane Rudhyar into depth psychology. Alan Leo (William Frederick Allan, 1860–1917), deeply influenced by Theosophical Society beliefs,5 sought to ‘modernise’ astrology through his amalgamation of western occultism with eastern mystical thought but, all the same, stressed the rational basis of the astrological enterprise as a dispassionate endeavour. Nevertheless, as Durkheim conveyed, a divinatory system reflects an underlying cosmology. Both Leo and many contemporary astrologers continue to work with the cosmological, geocentric structure of traditional astrology. With Henry Steele Olcott, Helena Petrovna Blatvaksy (1831–91) founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Blavatsky’s 4 John Wadsworth, “The ‘Disenchantment’ of Astrology: An Appeal to Reason,” Journal of Religion, Nature and Culture (Special edition on Astrology—forthcoming). 5 In 1915, Leo founded the Astrological Lodge of the Theosophical Society.

an astrological minority religion with mainstream appeal 411 objective was to explore the unexplained laws of nature and the spiritual powers believed to be latent within the human individual. Through the work of Leo, this emphasis on the spiritual development of the person has remained an important emphasis within western astrology in general—a focus that astrology shares significantly with New Age practice. Another member of the Theosophical Society was Alice Bailey (1880–1949) who eventually broke with Blavatsky to found her own Arcane School. Through her writings, Bailey has been highly influential on the development of New Age thought in the twentieth century and has fused the concept of spiritual energies with astronomical events, particularly the full moon. In contrast to the esoteric astrology of Leo et al.,6 further astrological developments have occurred within the political and psychological fields. Mundane astrology seeks to apply astrological understandings to world affairs. It traces its original developments to Babylonian astrology but finds its fundamentals in Claudius Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos from around 120 CE. A leading figure in the historical study of the rise and fall of political states in line with celestial events is Nicholas Campion, former president of the Astrological Association of Great Britain and the Astrological Lodge of London and director of the Sophia Centre for Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at Bath Spa University. More significant for New Age spirituality, however, has been the development of psychological astrology—originally inspired by Carl Jung and, later and more completely, by Dane Rudhyar (1895–1985). While still focused on spiritual journeying and ascending development, Rudhyar established astrology’s preoccupation with personality, person-centredness and personal transformation. The real impetus in the psychological direction occurred in the 1960s with the advent of humanistic astrology and its concomitant use of the natal chart as an indicator for growth and transformation. In 1983, the Centre for Psychological Astrology was established by Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas with perhaps an even more solid grounding on psychological principles than Rudhyar’s transpersonal astrology. To the present, Greene has spearheaded the drive within astrology to move away from its traditional deterministic associations and more toward the perspective of modern, depth psychology—the same move that has come to characterise much of the New Age movement and its shift away from the esoteric and occult and

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See, for example, Leo (1925).

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toward more mainstream psychological analyses and understandings of human nature in both its emotional and spiritual senses. The astrological bias of New Age is, of course, only a constituent part of its growing mainstream appeal. If the movement as a whole conforms largely to the Stark and Bainbridge construct of the ‘cult movement,’ its more prolific and ephemeral manifestations occur as their ‘audience and client cults.’ The audience and clients who attend a New Age lecture or consult an astrologer for advice are largely mainstream consumers. Doubtlessly, in this mainstream and market appeal of what we can understand essentially as an astrologically-based form of gnosticism, secularisation plays a role—especially in Larry Shiner’s senses of secularisation as (1) the decline of influence of institutional religion; (2) the shift from ‘other-worldly’ to ‘this-worldly’ orientations; (3) the privatisation of religion; (4) Robertson’s ‘surrogate religiosity’; and (5) the more openly rational society resulting from industrialisation and urbanisation (Hill 1973:228–50) that can “accept alternative sets of beliefs without anxiety” (ibid.:248). If the second seems ironic—as that gnosticism is fundamentally an ‘otherworldly’ spirituality—New Age has not clearly articulated its position, and the otherworldly and this-worldly emphases remain ambiguous. But to the degree that astrology caters to both positions, it becomes an ideal vehicle for an ambivalent spirituality such as New Age and the conflicting other-worldly/this-worldly desires inherent in the contemporary mainstream consumer. It is perhaps only in the sense of secularisation as representing the process by which the world is “gradually deprived of its sacral character”, that astrology and New Age do not fit the expected scenario of western humanity’s rejection of magical images (ibid.:245). But as Hill (ibid.:247) points out, “Interest in astrology seems to be an area of considerable importance even in the most technologically advanced areas of Western society.” The final suggestion is that astrology and New Age are attempts to ‘keep the world sacred,’ and this may be the bottom-line explanation for the current mainstream appeal of traditionally minority religion.7

7 Note in particular Curry and Willis (2004). Senior Lecturer with the Sophia Centre, Curry follows strongly in the Weberian tradition that calls for a ‘re-enchantment of the world’ in the wake of the ravages of secularism and secularisation upon western culture. To this end, Curry recognises the role of astrology as a leading conduit toward what New Age thinking might consider a necessary magical re-visioning of the planet and humanity’s custodial responsibilities.

an astrological minority religion with mainstream appeal 413 References Anonymous, 2001. “Starman.” boyz 515, 16 June, 36. Campion, N., 2000. “The Beginning of the Age of Aquarius.” Correlation 19.1 7–16. Curry, P., 1992. A Confusion of Prophets. London: Collins & Brown. Curry, P. & R. Willis, 2004. Astrology, Science and Culture. Oxford: Berg. Grant, R., 2001. “Your Stars.” Evening Post 13 June, 29. Hill, M., 1987/1973. A Sociology of Religion. London: Heinemann; repr. Aldershot: Avebury/Gower House. Leo, A., 1925. Esoteric Astrology: A Study in Human Nature. London: N. Fowler. Stark, R. & W.S. Bainbridge, 1985. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Watson, P., 2001. “Star-sign.” Daily Mail 13 June, 64. York, M., 1995. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ——, 2004. Historical Dictionary of New Age Movements. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.

HOLISTIC HEALTH AND NEW AGE IN BRITAIN AND THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND* Maria Tighe and Jenny Butler This chapter explores the mainstreaming of the holistic health movement in Britain and illustrates its inter-relation with New Age in an ethnographic description of ‘Angel therapy’ in the Republic of Ireland. Holistic health can loosely be defined as an approach to healing that takes into account the ‘whole person’—the physical, spiritual and psychological condition of a client—helping the individual to regain a harmonious ‘balance’ within his or her environment. The holistic and ecological model is generally contrasted with allopathic medicine, which tends to treat patients with drugs and surgery in order to cure an individual of a specific ailment. Allopathic medicine typically isolates the part of the body exhibiting symptoms, and focuses narrowly on curing that part, whereas holistic approaches typically include attention to a person’s emotional and spiritual life as integral to the healing process (Reilly 2006). Some of the diverse array of holistic treatments available include: Reiki, crystal healing, reflexology, acupuncture, kinesiology, craniosacral therapy, massage, visualisation, meditation, yoga, homeopathy, nutritional and dietary therapies, iridology, colour therapy, dance and music therapy, hydrotherapy, osteopathy, chiropractic, polarity therapy, shiatsu, past-life regression or reincarnation therapy, healing by touch or laying on of hands, aromatherapy, the Alexander Technique, Ayurveda, and herbal medicine. The list is almost endless as new derivatives and reformulations are created. As a way of illustrating this point, we might note that in 1993, the British Medical Association (BMA) identified almost four hundred alternative therapies in Britain (BMA 1993). Many of these therapies claim long lineages, and many practitioners proudly refer to the traditions from which they draw. However, a * Research on which parts of this paper are based was funded by a PhD research development and capacity award (2003–2006) from the UK Government Department of Health National Co-Ordinating Centre for Research and Development (NCCRD); and by a Government of Ireland Scholarship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

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cultural phenomenon, the holistic health movement may usefully be dated to the counter-culture of the 1960s. By the 1970s, it had become a significant social movement. In his study of the New Age, Wouter Hanegraaff distinguishes between the Human Potential movement, with its emphasis on psychological healing, and the somewhat earlier holistic health movement, with its emphasis on physical healing—though he notes that both movements share many of the same concerns (Hanegraaff 1998:48). The New Age movement, emerging from the late 1970s and at the height of its visibility during the 1980s, employs many holistic healing techniques. Michael York points out that much of New Age is concerned less with global ecological concerns than it is with personal health (York 1995:37). In some holistic and medical circles, as well as among neo-Pagans, the term New Age is used to designate a certain social distinction. In these contexts, New Age is frequently used to distinguish a kind of spirituality that is considered fanciful or ‘airy-fairy’.1 Those labelled New Agers often reject the term. Terminology in the study of holistic health can be confusing. For example, a widely-accepted synonym for holistic health, especially following the House of Lords’ Select Committee on Science and Technology’s Sixth Report (2000), is “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” (CAM). Unfortunately, this term blurs the distinction between a medical system that is alternative to mainstream allopathic medicine, and a medical system that is complementary or parallel to it. Neither is it helpful to refer to ‘conventional’ medicine when allopathic medicine is meant, with the implication that holistic health will always be ‘alternative’ or non-mainstream. Similar terminological prejudices are regularly encountered in studying New Age. Allopathic Medicine, Holistic Health and New Age Illich’s (1976) classic analysis of allopathic medicine supported Foucault’s (1989) discourse on the politicisation of health, and both highlighted

1 A pejorative description was often encountered when interviewees were attempting to differentiate themselves from the New Age movement, in research on the neo-Pagan movement in Ireland between 2001–2006. In a critique of ‘New Age commercialism’, James (2006c) has also suggested ‘leading edge’ scientific and medical thought has been hijacked by the holistic health movement and thus under-valued.

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the notion of resistance. Indeed, the holistic health movement, as a movement of resistance, engaged a lay as well as a professional response to such politicisation. Illich’s concerns with the “expropriation of health” focus on the misuse of biomedical technology and pharmacological panaceas. Doyal (1979) and Stacey (1988) remind us that this critique was ante-dated by the golden age of medical achievement and the first flush of life-saving vaccination and antibiotic therapy, as well as the control and eradication of infectious disease in nineteenth century public health policies. Medical activists in the social sciences (e.g. Tudor [1971], Black et al. [1982], Engel [1977], Doyal [1979] and Stacey [1988]) also influenced a later revolution in medical practice in which social improvements and rising living standards—such as better nutrition, sanitation and education—contributed to better health. The holistic health care movement is a subsequent medical revolution characterised by resistance to biomedical and pharmacological hegemonies—a socio-political phenomenon rooted in the counter-culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. Competition between alternative forms of healing has led to rapid professionalisation that effectively challenges these hegemonies. The distinguishing feature of the holistic approach to health is a commitment to the re-integration of mind and body, a post-modern challenge to modern ‘scientific’ thinking and Cartesian dualism. The health of the individual is viewed as an integral part of a wider sociocultural whole, rather than as deriving from a mechanistic breaking down of organic body parts. Cartesian dualism is at the root of industrialised western medical phenomena and the concept of holistic health is a western notion, understood by lay and professional healers across biomedical and alternative divides (Pietroni 1986, 1990; Peters 2001). Freeman (2005) charts the various means through which the term has developed in ecological science as well as in CAM and medical care. Citing Lawrence et al. (1998), Freeman reminds us that “Medical holism can address itself to individuals, the environment, or populations, either separately or in various combinations” (Freeman 2005:155). This public health awareness contributed to a medical vision of holism characterised by social equality, a view which further shifts the focus towards a model of self-empowerment, as understood by Reilly (2006), Pietroni (1986), Inglis (1964, 1979) and other person-centred practitioners. This emphasis on self-healing and the role of the mind in physical healing is characteristic of the holistic health movement. As Hanegraaff explains: “[T]he individual is challenged to find the deeper meaning of

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his/her illness and thus to use it as an instrument for learning and inner growth instead of taking the passive role of the victim. The concept of ‘taking responsibility’ for one’s illness is central to the holistic health movement, and accordingly there is a heavy emphasis on the individual character of therapy. This individualization of health care, in which not an abstract ‘disease’ but the unique individual in his/her undivided wholeness is at the centre of attention, is arguably the most central characteristic of the movement” (Hanegraaff 1998:54). Paul Heelas (1996:2) coined the term ‘self-spirituality’ to describe a brand of spirituality that looks to the internal world of the person rather than the external hegemonic societal discourse for answers. Steven Sutcliffe also mentions this emphasis on the self rather than the external world for spiritual authority and the autonomy to heal oneself: “[ T ]he concept of self-healing helps to substantiate the interrelationship between holistic health and ‘New Age’ spirituality . . . In short, self-healing and self-realisation go hand-in-hand in post-seventies ‘New Age’ discourse. Both require modification of the actor’s conventional vector of engagement with the world in favour of self-referentiality and reflexivity” (Sutcliffe 2003a:178). The self, in the New Age view, is a microcosmic part of the macrocosmic transcendent reality or ‘whole’—thus the healing method is intended to affect this ‘whole,’ which consequently improves the state of the microcosm. An emphasis on spiritual health and healing of the soul permeates many of the healing practices found on the New Age scene. New Age healers talk about an inner transformation that attunes one to the wider cosmos, the integration of the individual into the collective whole of the universe and of ‘world energy’ that flows through the universe and interlinks all of life. Certain types of holistic healing, especially energy healing, are based on the notion of the interconnectedness and cohesiveness of all that exists: “[I]f the New Age is a religious discourse community with a characteristic language that identifies it, a large part of its vocabulary concerns the ‘universe’ (read God?) and its healing ‘energies’, ‘polarities’ and their balancing, ‘chakras’ and their activation, ‘vibrations’ and the need for their harmonization” (Albanese 1992:75). Concepts such as the Indian chakra system are employed in the discourses of both holistic health and New Age to refer to connections between the physical body and the spiritual and emotional centres of the self. Within such worldviews, physical ailments are cured by changing the psychological and spiritual conditions of the person. Conversely,


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the emotional and mental problems of an individual may be treated by relieving stress and curing the physical body. The aim of holistic healers in easing any health complaint is to put the individual ‘back in balance’ with the emotional, spiritual and physical parts of themselves. Holistic practice champions the validity of and market for ‘traditional’, ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ self-help approaches to health care and maintenance. Social equality and the self-help vision run parallel with demand for more effective health care and consumer-led choice in access to government and private health service. However, in the UK National Health Services (NHS), such a consumerist philosophy has posed certain challenges, since the “inverse care law” described by Tudor (1971) had previously mobilised the medical community to address the “disproportionate care” required by populations with the greatest need. The social concept of health was influenced by Engel’s (1977) “bio-psycho-social” model, which depicted a continuum from nation to society, culture, community, family, two persons, one person, nervous system, organ, tissue, cells, molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. But this model still failed to address the ethical questions posed by Illich: the relationship between elite capitalist bureaucracies on one side and politicised medical and allied health professions on other sides; the problem of inter-dependency; and the role of the state. In some ways, the educative model of medical holism developed by Reilly (2006), Pietroni (1980, 1989), Inglis (1964, 1979) and others may have suggested a solution ( James 2006b). Current World Health Organisation (WHO) initiatives also reflect this interest. Holism is described by the WHO as “viewing humans in totality within a wide ecological spectrum, and emphasizing the view that ill health or disease is brought about by imbalance or disequilibrium of humans in the total ecological system and not only by the causative agent and pathogenic mechanism” (WHO 2002). This is very similar to the definition of holism first offered by Jan Smuts, who coined the term, in 1926: “Holism is an ecological concept that the totality of biological phenomena in a living organism cannot be reduced, observed, or measured at a level below that of the whole organism or system” (Smuts 1926). The twin principles of health economics and sustainability now direct WHO public health policy. English-Lueck’s ethnography of holistic healers, Health in the New Age (1990) traced the history of the movement and looks at the holistic health networks of southern California. She conducted a study of the beliefs behind holistic practices, how individuals became healers and

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the techniques employed by them. She posited that a social movement such as holistic health need not become institutionalised to succeed, but rather that it can survive as long as there is an “atmosphere of medical plurality” (English-Lueck 1990:158). English-Lueck hypothesised that the holistic health movement has the potential to thrive in an environment where there are several separate medical traditions co-existing within the same society and where multiplicity of traditions is encouraged (English-Lueck 1990). She contended that the 1980s were a time of “the growth of professionalism” (English-Lueck 1990:2) in the USA when holistic health began to represent “a clear example of a social movement, linked, allied, or opposed to the rest of the community in a complex fashion” (idem). In the following section, we examine the holistic health movement in Britain. Holistic Health in Britain British national health policies reflect global as well as local socioeconomic trends, and within this context, the holistic self-help movement is gaining ground. Health management programmes promoting exercise-based therapies such as yoga and Tai Ch’i are increasingly popular. The market for ‘stress management’ services is flourishing, and ‘natural’ exercise and relaxation pose little threat to the hegemonic position of western biomedicine. Commenting on hegemonies, Coward (1989) deconstructs what she describes as politicised holistic myth making—she suggests that notions of self-responsibility for care and self-empowerment are largely moulded by political and economic forces. Networked educational and academic initiatives have played a significant role in the advancement of the holistic health movement in Britain. The Scientific and Medical Network (SMN) was founded in 1973 originally as an invitation-only club, but now has a worldwide lay and professional membership. The SMN may be viewed as an important link in the relationship between holistic health care and the ‘scientisation’ of spirituality and healing. The UK National Federation of Spiritual Healers (NFSH), founded in 1955, trains and maintains a register of spiritual healers who are increasingly receiving referrals from NHS medical practitioners. The Wrekin Trust was originally


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founded in 1971 by Sir George Trevelyan (1906–66), who, among other things, co-ordinated international conferences and network activities on spirituality in healthcare. The Alternative and Complementary Health Research Network (ACHRN) was founded in 1996 by UK academic social scientists to embrace an inclusive research culture, supporting the participation and development of complementary therapists and healers. Many other such networks have contributed to the development of holistic health in Britain. An important figure in the contemporary British holistic health care movement is Patrick Pietroni, a General Practitioner (GP) and holistic physician who founded the British Holistic Medical Association (BHMA) in 1983. Pietroni has written on the humanising and “greening” of medicine (Pietroni 1990), and his vision of holistic health is based on a social and community model. The BHMA is currently chaired by GP and osteopath, Professor David Peters, editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary BHMA journal, The Journal of Holistic Healthcare. He is also Clinical Director of the School of Integrated Health at the University of Westminster in London. Peters, Morrison, Harris and an allied health profession team collaborated on the ‘Marylebone Experiment’ conceived by Pietroni, one of the first European examples of holistic primary health care (Peters 2002). The practice offers a wide range of complementary and alternative medical therapies alongside conventional NHS and allied health and social services provision. The holistic Marylebone model differs from earlier community initiatives. According to James (2006c), initiatives such as the Natural Health Networks (NHN)—promoted by medical doctors Alec Forbes and Ian Pierce intended to support grassroots interests and activities in natural approaches to health—were uncontaminated by professional or commercial initiatives. However, such interests prevailed and the NHN no longer operates. With the exception of the Marylebone projects, this period of creative medical revolution in British healthcare remains under-researched and largely unrecorded. James is an acupuncturist, doctor, psychotherapist, and principal lecturer in complementary and alternative medicine at the University of Westminster in London. He is researching interprofessional development and professionalisation on issues and was involved in the Limes Grove Practice, one of the earliest examples of integrated family health care, and is also the co-author of Medicine

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for Beginners (Clark2 & Pinchuck 1984), a cartoon documentary of the history of modern medicine and the rise of holistic healthcare within the socio-political context. James (2006b) is keen to note that “the holistic approach to health care (and life in general) as a ‘grass roots anarchic movement’ supported by educational and sustainable principles remains at odds with the top-down approach to professionalisation that is currently being embraced by the various CAM disciplines.” CAM is a problematic concept as it is based on essentialist biomedical assumptions about the local or static nature of populations and health care interventions in the treatment of specific disease. For example, the WHO (2002) distinguishes on purely economic grounds between ‘traditional’ medicine in third world and developing countries, and ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ in the West (although more recent WHO reviews do acknowledge this distinction as context-bound). Such a distinction, however, fails to address the socio-political context in which certain therapies and professions arise. The re-negotiated status in Britain of traditional Asian medicines as complementary and alternative medicines, as well as ethnic or indigenous medicines highlights the complexity of the issues for professional policy purposes. Mike Saks (1994) has explored this in some detail, concluding that CAMs represent a significant threat to existing biomedical hegemonies in the West. He advocates a holistic healthcare revolution that will undermine the current situation of pharmacological dominance. Critics have suggested that the holistic healthcare vision is flawed, in that the political mobilisation of the CAM community serves professional interests at the expense of public health care need (Coward 1989; Dieppe 2003). The mass media influences public perceptions of the potential benefits as well as the dangers of CAM. A national BBC Two television programme on CAM produced by scientist Professor Kathy Sykes in 2006 raised public expectations and awareness of fringe and CAM therapies as novel yet effective, but arguably without due regard to the socio-political and cultural context of CAM practice and research, and the volume of disputed evidence. Newspapers have also been utilised by critics of CAM, who have adopted an ‘anti-quackery’ stance and have asserted the duty of biomedical science to evaluate provision of plural health care services. A remarkable ‘open letter’ plea to NHS Trusts and the Department of Health was signed by twelve UK

2 Clark is Dr James’ pre-marital family surname—he describes the decision to change his name as a feminist gesture influenced by spiritual leanings.


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professors of medical and pharmacological sciences (Baum, Ernst et al. 2006) and published in The Times newspaper (23 May 2006), requesting an urgent halt to government funding of CAM research and practice. Historically, Pietroni’s position as physician to HRH the Prince of Wales is likely significant. Royal patronage and active interest in the development of the holistic healthcare movement led to the charitable founding of the Prince of Wales Foundation for Integrated Medicine. This has since become the Prince of Wales Foundation for Integrated Health (FIH), an independent charity which plays a leading consultancy role in the development of complementary and alternative medicine research and practice policies. It is a public advisory resource and has advised UK government Department of Health. It was pivotal in the UK government House of Lords’ Select Committee on Science and Technology’s Sixth Report (2000) on Complementary and Alternative Medicine and in the moves towards regulation of the CAM professions. As will now be discussed, this seminal report categorised CAM therapies into three main groups. The report suggests a framework for the statutory recognition of CAM therapies in the UK, the first step towards government regulation of CAM practice and professions. The Sixth Report proposed three main groupings of CAM, based mainly upon its judgement about the available evidence for each therapy. Group One included professionally organised disciplines, with their own diagnostic approach, with some scientific evidence of effectiveness and recognised systems of training for practitioners. The “Big Five,” as they are now commonly termed, are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Acupuncture Herbal medicine Osteopathy Chiropractic Homeopathy.3

Supporting the middle ground, Group Two therapies are recognised as those which are primarily touch-based, movement and counselling therapies. These therapies include reflexology, massage, yoga, Tai Ch’i and spiritual healing and are described as complementary therapies

3 For a full description of each therapy including “mechanisms of action” and commonly treated conditions, see FIH (2005); cf. Micozzi (2001) and Fulder (1996).

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which lack a firm scientific basis and that are not regulated to protect the public, but which give help and comfort to many people. Overall, the Report was welcomed by the CAM community, but the grouping of therapies raised heated debates within certain sectors. In particular, the formal distinction between acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a deeply contested issue. TCM was relegated to Group Three therapies as a long-established and traditional discipline with a specific philosophy. Therapies in this third group are further described as alternative disciplines which offer diagnosis as well as treatment, but for which the Committee did ‘not find convincing evidence of efficacy.’ The Report suggests that acupuncture and medical herbalism are not just distinct from TCM, but superior in demonstrating therapeutic “safety and effectiveness” in the “evidence based” ethos of western medicine. Since the publication of the Report and government response (Department of Health 2005), TCM is now included as a “whole system” third category within the proposals for the statutory regulation of acupuncture and herbal medicine. Practitioners of acupuncture and herbal medicine are working towards statutory professional regulation (DoH 2005). Chiropractic, which focuses on mechanical disorders of the musculo-skeletal system, is regulated under the Chiropractors Act 1994, and osteopathy, a related therapy is regulated under the Osteopaths Act 1993, which came into force in May 2000 and established the General Osteopathic Council. Although statutory regulation involves the establishment of a unitary professional body, practitioners of homeopathy remain divided by a distinction between medical and lay homeopathy. Medical homeopaths are regulated by the General Medical Council (GMC), while the Society of Homeopaths represents lay homeopathic practitioners who favour voluntary self regulation. Reflexologists and a number of other Group Two CAM disciplines,4 are also opting for voluntary rather than statutory regulation. Under the quality assurance umbrella, clinical governance for CAM is fast developing parallels with medical and allied health professions in the NHS (Wilkinson et al. 2004). In this way, much of what was once termed fringe and alternative medicine is now well on the way Twelve “other” therapies are recognised and included in the Foundation for Integrated Health’s Guide for Patients (FIH 2005): homeopathy, aromatherapy, craniosacral therapy, healing, reflexology, Reiki, hypnotherapy, massage therapy, naturopathy, nutritional therapy, Shiatsu and yoga therapy. 4


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to mainstream. The Prince of Wales Foundation of Integrated Health (2005) has included “healing” as a stand-alone yet generic form of complementary and alternative medicine in their professional guide for patients, which details what to expect in a typical treatment session for each therapy, including cost and affiliated organisations. Healing is described as, “an ancient practice that has been used for thousands of years and is sometimes referred to as the laying on of hands. It aims to promote better health through channelling energy through the healer to the patient. Healers may put their hands near patients or sometimes on them. Some healers also work at a distance or through prayer, although there is no need for patients to have religious beliefs to receive healing. Some healers call themselves spiritual healers, whilst others call themselves “hands on healers, or just healers” (FIH 2005:14). Ecological notions of balance and equilibrium are common concepts in CAM and many other healing systems, yet a number of related concepts also warrant critical attention. For example, Bivins (2000) also suggests that “medical Orientalisms” feature in the phenomenal rise and popularity of complementary and alternative medicine in the UK. She describes Orientalism as a social process through which Asian medicine is marketed in the West. As discussed by Scheid (1993, 2006) and Taylor (2004), the rise of the provision and use of Asian medical systems (acupuncture in particular) is related to the cultural and industrial exchange between Chinese and British medical practitioners at the turn of the 1960s. Medical Orientalisms in complementary healthcare appear evident across a range of apparently disparate forms. For example, reflexology and Reiki are common CAM therapies which make claim to Asian origins and esoteric roots as a means of validating therapeutic status (FIH 2005:44–5). Reflexology utilises an eclectic mix of ‘holistic’ concepts to explain the origin and function of reflexology, including popular reference to Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese meridian theories and the concept of chi (Pitman & MacKenzie 2003). In Britain and worldwide, the path to Reiki ‘mastership’ is variable. It is becoming a highly popular form of spiritual healing largely due to the increasing accessibility of the training (now generally a weekend for each level, one and two). Most forms of Reiki claim channelled Asian lineage, commonly involving the transmission of secret symbols to new initiates. Such transmission, and the mapping of the foot in reflexology as a ‘reflection of the whole’ suggest that the body is perceived as a representation of a wider universal whole. Hsu (1999) has documented a similar process in her anthropological analysis of the transmission of

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‘secret’ healing techniques in Chinese medicine. Porkert’s principle of “inductive correspondence of the macrocosm and all microcosms” in Chinese medicine (Porkert 1974:55) may also apply, but in the western context it may be argued that the social body appears imbued with New Age religious intention to be ‘cultural[ly] creative’ (Ray & Anderson 2001). The cultural re-creation of ‘traditional’ peoples, in particular the popular image of Native American, Egyptian, and Asian cultures persists in ethnographic accounts of spiritual healing in the British Isles (McClean 2003). Also, in what are termed as ‘body-centred’ CAM therapies such as yoga and Tai Ch’i (Fulder 2000), teachers and performers delineate between traditional Asian and westernised forms of practice (Ryan 2002). Adams (2002) illustrates this ‘glocalised’ social process in his ethnographic analysis of the practice of Shiatsu in Britain and Japan. He describes the commercial aesthetic of holism as a transitional feature of capitalist society. In similar vein, Scheid (2006) has usefully deconstructed the term ‘traditional’ in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). He illuminates the commercial use of the term as a successful and sometimes misguided marketing strategy (Scheid 2006). The use of the term ‘holism’ is similar, yet also suggests a competitive and complex social relationship between CAM and biomedicine. Saks (1994a, 1994b) has discussed the relationship between biomedicine and alternative healing practices, suggesting that CAM poses a threat to western biomedical and scientific hegemonies. Saks is a social scientist, committed to the transformation of medical and public health service provision and use. As mentioned, he supports the model of ‘integrated’ holistic medicine and, akin to Reilly, Peters, Pietroni, Inglis and others, Saks also addresses the socio-economic challenges this vision entails. He challenges the current model of reductionism in modern medicine, which is based on empirical observation and the positivist and objective view of the world, and readily constructs and assimilates the authority of pharmacological science. Conventional medicine remains rooted in allegiance to this model, despite recent industrial public health reforms. However, situated ethnographic research of the integration of complementary medicine into mainstream NHS in the UK has raised pertinent real world considerations, which suggest a cautionary response.


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Case Studies In his guest editorial to Volume 4 of the journal Culture and Religion, Steven Sutcliffe pointed out that there is a tendency in the field of New Age studies to look at the New Age as a “more or less singular and homogeneous entity and what was less available is a cultural studies approach or detailed local ethnographies” (Sutcliffe 2003b:3). Contextualised studies provide more detailed data on the worldview and practices of individuals within the burgeoning New Age networks. Scholarship will benefit from learning the sui generis forms of religiosity that compose the wider New Age movement. Barry’s (2006) ethnographic research in UK homeopathy clinics describes the enculturation of homeopathy users into a cosmological and holistic worldview, making reference to her experiences of ‘going native.’ Barry considers the effects of plural ideologies and organisation on patients’ experience of health and illness. She compares differences in regulated state, licensed private and lay healing (homeopathic) practices and presents her fieldwork as a case of medical pluralism. This includes an analysis of the concept of ‘integration’ as a ‘new medical pluralism’ in the UK. Barry establishes the relationship between the UK statesupported biomedicine and homeopathy, suggesting biomedical hegemonies as the paradoxical agent of medical change. She describes ‘integration’ in practical but problematic terms, in that the philosophical and holistic divisions between biomedicine and homeopathy appear blurred. She raises the point that biomedical patients who are not seeking alternatives appear confused by the offer of medical homeopathy, while those patients who are seeking alternatives are sometimes dissatisfied with the offer of homeopathy in professional general practice. This can be compared with the work of McClean (2003), who discusses the shifting borderlands between biomedical and alternative healing practices, suggesting that rituals in spiritual healing are mimicked. For example, purification rituals are described as parodied performances of biomedical power. McClean demonstrates that the relationship between alternative and conventional medicine is far from discrete. Instead, co-existence suggests that although members of both groups make claims to holism as a means of distinction from ‘mechanistic’ healthcare, there are also atomistic elements in ‘alternative’ spiritual healing practice. The remainder of this section of the chapter reports on two case studies in the Republic of Ireland, where New Age incorporates many

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of the same ideas and practices as the movement does in Britain and globally. However, it must be noted that the context of healing and medicine is radically different in the Republic of Ireland as compared with Britain, due to the dominance of Catholicism and the inter-relationship between Church and state. There are many practitioners of holistic healing methods in Ireland who integrate New Age ideology in their belief-system. Romantic conceptions of Irish spirituality in the historical context have led to the development of the notion of ‘Celtic spirituality’ as a mystical, numinous form of self-expression for those who feel a connection to Celtic culture. Phyllis Jestice has noted that such for romanticist writers, “[ T ]he view of Irish spirituality that they created, from a blend of fact, fiction, and wishful thinking, has become an important influence in the New Age movement” ( Jestice 2000:64). Books and other materials marketed as ‘Celtic’ can be found in many shops, usually in tourist areas. Images associated with the popular interpretation of ‘Celtic’ spirituality are fairies, elves, angels, nature and symbols from Celtic art. Oftentimes New Age healers claim to be able to contact fairies and angels. Profiles of two healers, Gloria5 and Caroline, who describe themselves as ‘Angel therapists’ illustrate the crossover between holistic health and New Age in Ireland. Gloria started working with angels in the early 1990s and now works with Integrated Energy Therapy (IET).6 She trained in various schools of massage and kinesiology, bio-energy and vortex healing before devising her own workshops, which she calls Deep Relaxation and Healing, involving personal development, reflexology, massage and meditation. According to Gloria, Angel therapy can be undertaken by anyone and includes readings of ‘angel cards,’ which are widely available commercially. IET is considered a more complex and powerful form of angel therapy, focussing on integration points over the body that, when triggered, will release pent-up emotion. The belief is that different parts of the body hold feelings and sensations, often negative ones. “It’s releasing suppressed emotions from the cellular memory from nine

5 Pseudonyms are used in this chapter in the presentation of fieldwork to protect the identity of informants. 6 The use of ‘energy’ is later discussed as a feature of holistic healthcare (Micozzi 2001). The concept of integration is a ‘new medical pluralism’ (Barry 2006) in complementary and alternative medicine. The use of these holistic medical terms in fringe and alternative healing is a commercial as well as social phenomenon.


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different parts of the body. So, I can tell people what I can feel I’m releasing, ‘I’m releasing anger now.’ ” The angels are seen as forming part of a pervasive energy and by the laying on of hands, the healer is energizing the sick person. This kind of reference to divine or cosmic causal agents is prevalent in New Age discourse. It is the ‘attunement’ to the angelic forces, practitioners claim, which makes IET a deep cellular healing: “The attunement is so powerful that when I put my hands on people, the angels are going right into their cellular memory. And remember the group soul that I spoke about, in spirit? The angels know exactly where we need to heal and where it started and where it came from.” The idea of the individual as a microcosm of the cosmic order and healing themselves by attuning to forces in the universe is also a characteristic New Age notion: “The kind of worldview associated with ‘New Age’ provides an ideal backdrop to specific healing practices and models of well-being since the alternative cosmology it provides can supply a higher-level, metaphysical legitimation for the esoteric aetiologies and anatomies of holistic healthcare” (Sutcliffe 2003a:178). In Gloria’s understanding, people heal themselves and she simply assists this process: “The people who come to me for healing—they are actually the healers. As soon as they decide to come, their healing has started. So, I really just facilitate it . . . I’m just a clear channel really.” As pointed out by English-Lueck (1990:146), “learning to become a practitioner is an extension of the role of the client.” A second interviewee, Caroline, explains her practice of angel therapy as a way of appealing to what is considered to be a higher form of wisdom by looking to the astral plane and channelling angel energy, working with angel cards, reading energy fields and developing psychic skills. IET, she explains, is healing with angels. She was brought up in a home atmosphere of believing in angels and was taught in school about guardian angels. In Christian tradition, angels symbolise the communication between God and humankind (Fontana 2003:217). In a country such as Ireland with a dominant Christian faith, this kind of notion might seem attractive to those seeking to find a new outlet for their spiritual expression without straying from the Christian ethos to which they have hitherto adhered. When Caroline was a child she had psychic experiences, including clairsentience and clairaudience in her teens. One night she woke up to see an angel standing beside her bed and she has had various other extrasensory experiences. Elizabeth Puttick, discussing features common

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to NRMs, New Age groups and healers, suggests that there “is continuity between earlier psychic and spiritual experiences and later spiritual choices” (Puttick 1997:26). Caroline believes that angels cannot interfere in your life if you do not ask for help but they can still guide you and leave messages: “Simple ways of getting messages would be maybe the feather, which people are most commonly used to talking about now ‘Oh I’m really looking for a feather,’ and you’ll get a little white feather.” The finding of a feather mentioned in Caroline’s narrative above, are interpreted by practitioners as a sign of angelic communication. Roderick Main discusses how, “New Agers for whom external religious forms have lost their authority, and who therefore look to their inner self for guidance, sometimes also appeal to chance outer events as signs or omens,” (2002:211) and that these believed synchronistic events are understood as occurring by chance but are nevertheless meaningful in a New Age worldview (Main 2002:211). Caroline describes what she does as channelling angel energy to clear the old cellular memory of the individual she is treating and replace it with positive energy, so that people can move on in a more positive way, attracting more affirmative things to themselves. She gives an example of one man who came to her with a lump on his throat: He had been investigated, tested, everything you could mention and nobody could figure out what was going on with him. So, out of desperation really he came to me . . . sometimes people come to us as a last resort. When I worked with him I actually cleared the area. And I had picked up on different areas of his body, you know you can pick up different areas as well—it’s not just the throat area that I picked up on. I said to him ‘You know, you have been swallowing your self-expression an awful lot. You couldn’t say what you’ve really wanted to say in the last while, could you?’ and he said, ‘Yeah that’s true’ and he said, ‘by the way the lump is going!’ What actually was happening was he was swallowing back what he really wanted to say so much that he’d created a lump that physically manifested as a pain in his throat and people couldn’t understand what it was. So we actually cleared that.

This example reveals the paradigmatic model of self-healing at work within holistic healing, the idea being that when the individual identifies the root problem of his/her affliction; they are then empowered to deal with it. In communicating with these two healers, a continuation of the same themes and a common base or complex of ideas is apparent in their discourse. They make idiomatic reference to similar imagery, tropes and metaphors, which would indicate the presence of a shared


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community. The angel therapists interviewed knew of each other and had encountered each other on the healing scene, sometimes passing clients on to other IET practitioners whom they felt would be in a position to help with a specific problem. As Jon P. Bloch found as in his survey of beliefs in a network of alternative spiritualists in America, people who share meanings and group ideology can view themselves as a community: “[H]owever loosely structured these clusters of individuals are, and however diverse the beliefs from one individual to the next, they consider themselves to be a ‘community’ ” (Bloch 1998:2). However, in the Republic of Ireland, it seems likely that holistic practices and communities will continue to become integrated into the social mainstream rather than being ‘alternative’ or counter-cultural to the hegemonies of biomedical order. Recent attempts to integrate CAM within mainstream medical practice in Northern Ireland,7 for example via the University of Ulster, mirror the British movement. But to date, despite rapid economic and social change, there has been little alternative challenge to the position of biomedicine in the Republic of Ireland (Besley, Gouvia & Dreze 1994; O’Hearn 2001). Concluding Remarks Having been partially eclipsed in the late 1980s by the visibility of the New Age movement, holistic health has more recently regained its relative ascendancy in popular culture and is increasingly entering the mainstream. This may be partly a semantic phenomenon in that, as frequently noted, New Age is often used pejoratively, whereas holistic health has retained a positive image. Indeed, in two recent works by William Bloom (2004) and Heelas et al. (2005), the term holism is arguably used simply as a synonym to refer to what was previously known as New Age. William Bloom champions the term ‘holism’ in his Soulution: The Holistic Manifesto (2004), and explores some of the ways in which it can avoid fundamentalism by encouraging self-reflection. He examines how holism constructs a novel ethical system, drawing principles from traditional religion, psychology, ecology and modern cultural myths, and suggests that holism will become the major form of world spirituality, providing meaning and integrity to the crises of modern society (Bloom 2004:22). 7 Northern Ireland remains part of the UK, and is not part of the Republic of Ireland.

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Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead and their team, in The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (2005), also make predictions for the growth of the ‘holistic milieu.’ One prediction is “the last gasp of the sixties” (Heelas & Woodhead 2005:132–3) where spiritual practitioners who came of age during the 1960s may not be replaced by younger practitioners. Another scenario is, “the declining sacred capital scenario,” which hypothesises that young people of the future will be growing up in a society with much lower church attendance and less transmission of Christian values through church and school and thus fewer people will find themselves disillusioned or rebelling against the faith in which they were raised. This means that, potentially, fewer people will seek out alternatives to Christianity in their search for spirituality and may not become involved in the holistic milieu. In the “cultural transmission scenario” (Heelas & Woodhead 2005:133–4), it is posited that younger people are now growing up in a world where holistic spirituality has become mainstream. They don’t need to have experienced directly the 1960s counter-culture to be exposed to ideas circulating in the holistic milieu. They will be exposed to mind-body-spirit systems of thought through a variety of cultural forms including education, media and consumerism and may themselves become ‘primed’ by this exposure to ideas and perhaps become actively involved in holistic health themselves. To conclude, the holistic health movement is becoming increasingly mainstream through the rapid development and professionalisation of complementary and alternative medicine in Britain. This movement is reflected to varying and lesser degrees in other parts of Europe, including the Republic of Ireland. Popular dialectics in the presentation and use of the healing arts as part religion and part science are evident and resemble the term ‘artience’ coined by Reilly (2006) as a feature of holism. However, such meaning is best analysed in local ethnographic context. This social and ethnographic analysis draws out its relationship with New Age, as shown in the example of ‘Angel therapy’ in Ireland. References Adams, G., 2002. “Shiatsu in Britain and Japan; Personhood, Holism and Embodied Aesthetics.” Anthropology and Medicine 242–262. Albanese, C.L., 1992. “The Magical Staff: Quantum Healing in the New Age.” In Lewis, J.R. & J.G. Melton, eds. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany: State University of New York Press, 68–84. Barry, C., 2006. “Pluralisms of Provision, Use and Ideology: Homeopathy in South London.” In Johanessen, H., & I. Lazar, eds. Multiple Medical Realities; Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine. New York. Oxford Berghahn Books.


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Baum, M., E. Ernst et al., 2006. “Re Use of ‘Alternative Medicine’ in the NHS.” Letter to The Times of London, 23 May. Besley, T., M. Gouveia & J. Dreze, 1994. “Alternative Systems of Health Care Provision.” Economic Policy 9.19 199–258. Bivins, R., 2000. Acupuncture, Expertise and Cross-Cultural Medicine. New York: Palgrave. Black, D., P. Townsend & N. Davidson, 1982. Inequalities in Health: The Black Report. London: Penguin. Bloch, J.P., 1998. New Spirituality, Self and Belonging: How New Agers and Neo-Pagans Talk about Themselves. Westport, CT & London: Praeger. Bloom, W., 2004. Soulution: The Holistic Manifesto. London: Hay House. British Medical Association (BMA), 1993. Complementary Therapies: New Approaches to Good Practice. London: British Medical Association. Clark, R. & T. Pinchuck, 1984. Medicine for Beginners. London: Writers and Readers Co-Operative. Coward, R., 1989. The Whole Truth; The Myth of Alternative Health. London: Faber. Department of Health (DoH), 2005. Statutory Regulation of Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture: Report on the Consultation. London: HMSO. Dieppe, P., 2003. “Developing Research Strategies in Complementary and Alternative Medicine.” Keynote speech, University of Southampton. Doyal, L., 1979. The Political Economy of Health. London: Pluto Press. Engel, G., 1977. “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine.” Science 196.4286 129–36. English-Lueck, J.A., 1990. Health in the New Age: A Study in California Holistic Practices. Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press. Freeman, J., 2005. “Towards a Definition of Holism.” The British Journal of General Practice 55.511 154–5. Foucault, M., 1989. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London: Routledge. Foundation of Integrated Health, 2005. Complementary Therapies: A Guide for Patients. www.fih.org.uk. Fulder, S., 1996. Handbook of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hanegraaff, W.J., 1998. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. New York: State University of New York Press. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Heelas, P. & L. Woodhead with B. Seel, B. Szerszynski & K. Tusting, 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hsu, E., 1999. The Transmission of Chinese Medicine. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. House of Lords, Select Committee on Science and Technology, 2000. Sixth Report: Complementary and Alternative Medicine. London: HMSO, also available at http://www. publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldselect/ldsctech/123/12301.htm. Illich, I., 1976. Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. London: Penguin. Inglis, B., 1964. Fringe Medicine. London: Faber & Faber. ——, 1979. Natural Medicine. Glasgow: William Collins Sons. James, R., 2003. “Vitalism.” Lecture in Mind-Body Medicine Module, MSc Complementary Therapy Studies, University of Westminster, February. ——, 2006a. “The Challenges of Developing Inter-Professional Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in Integrated Health.” Presentation at the Third International Alternative and Complementary Health Research Network (ACHRN) Conference, University of Nottingham, 5 July. ——, 2006b. In personal communication on holism at the 3rd International Alternative and Complementary Health Research Network (ACHRN) Conference, University of Nottingham, 5th July.

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Jestice, P.G., 2000. Encyclopedia of Irish Spirituality. California, Colorado & Oxford: ABC-CLIO. Lawrence, C. & G. Weisz, 1998. Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine 1920–1950. New York: Oxford University Press. Main, R., 2002. “Religion, Science and the New Age.” In Pearson, J., ed. Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. Hants and Milton Keynes: Ashgate in association with The Open University, 173–222. McClean, S., 2003. “Doctoring the Spirit; Exploring the Use and Meaning of Mimicry and Parody at a Healing Centre in the North of England.” Health: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 7.4 483–497. O’Hearn, D., 2001. The Atlantic Economy: Britain, the US and Ireland. Manchester, Manchester University Press. Peters, D., 2001, ed. Understanding the Placebo Effect in Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Theory, Practice and Research. London: Churchill Livingstone. ——, 2002. Integrating Complementary Therapies in Primary Care: A Practical Guide for Health Professionals. London: Elsevier. Pietroni, P., 1986. Holistic Living: A Guide to Self Care by a Leading Practitioner. London: The Guernsey Press Co Ltd. ——, 1990. The Greening of Medicine. London: Victor Gollancz. Pitman, V., & K. MacKenzie, 2001. Reflexology: A Practical Approach. London: Churchill Livingstone. Porkert, M., 1974. The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine: Systems of Correspondence. New York: MIT Press. Puttick, E., 1997. Women in New Religions. London: Macmillan Press. Ray, P. & S. Anderson, 2000. The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World. New York: Harmony Press. Ryan, A., 2002. ‘Our Only Uniform is the Spirit’: Embodiment, Tradition and Spirituality in British Taijiquan. Lancaster University: PhD thesis. Saks, M., 1994a. Professions and the Public Interest. Medical Power, Altruism and Alternative Medicine. London: Routledge. ——, 1994b. The Alternatives to Medicine. London: Routledge. Scheid, V., 1993. “Orientalism Re-Visited. Reflections on Scholarship, Research and Professionalisations.” The European Journal of Oriental Medicine 1.2 1–13. ——, 2006. “Diversity and Debate in Alternative and Complementary Medicine.” Paper presented at the 3rd International Alternative and Complementary Health Research Network (ACHRN) Conference, University of Nottingham, 5 July. Smuts, J.C., 1926. Holism and evolution. New York, Macmillan. Stacey, M., 1988. The Sociology of Health and Healing. London: Routledge. Sutcliffe, S.J., 2003a. Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices. London & New York: Routledge. . ——, 2003b. “Studying ‘New Age’: Reconfiguring the Field.” Culture and Religion 4.1 3–4 Taylor, K., 2004. Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945–63: A Medicine of Revolution. London: Routledge. Tudor, H.J., 1971. “The Inverse Care Law.” The Lancet 1.7696 405–12. Wilkinson, J., D. Peters & J. Donaldson, 2004. Clinical Governance for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Primary Care: Final Report to the Department of Health and the Kings Fund. London: University of Westminster. World Health Organisation, 2002. WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2002–2005. Geneva: WHO. York, M., 1995. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

PAGANISM AND THE NEW AGE Melissa Harrington This chapter focuses upon discourse on Paganism and the New Age, reviewing important studies, and discussing critical views on the relationship between these two spiritualities. The main problem in such discourse is that authors writing about the New Age are discussing a huge spiritual and life-style domain, and foundational studies have tended towards a wide inclusivity that has lead to certain generalisations regarding Pagan religiosity, which do not work when subjected to a closer scrutiny. Key problem areas that have generated the most critical discussion of this relationship are highlighted. These include: conflating different Pagan traditions and belief systems; attributing New Age belief systems to Paganism; attributing New Age privileging of mind/spirit over body to Paganism; attributing New Age views of ego, self and psychology to Paganism; overwriting positive Pagan attitudes to tradition, authority and commitment; and decontextualising aspects of Pagan practice to include them in New Age eclecticism. It is suggested that discussions of New Age and Pagan relationships that have been most fruitful are those that have looked at the differences as well as the similarities between these spiritualities, and that this would be a good direction for further study. The birth of modern Paganism can be located in the mid-twentieth century, when Druidry and Wicca came into the public eye. Hutton (2003) traces the emergence of the Ancient Druid Order from eighteenth century secret societies, and its influence on the development of later Druid orders, which he describes as blossoming after 1975 (Hutton 2003:242). Wicca is well documented as having evolved from the covens of Gerald Gardner (Hutton 1999), who claimed to have discovered a surviving remnant of ‘the Old Religion’ in the New Forest, and published his first non-fiction book making this claim in 1954 (Gardner 1954, 1959). Wicca swiftly evolved into the most popular form of modern Pagan religion, with increasing numbers of differing denominations (e.g. Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Dianic, Feminist, Hedgewitch, Faery), and offered a template for the non-denominational, or eclectic Paganism that has

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become apparent within the last decade. Eclectic Pagans do not follow any particular Paganism, but follow a Pagan religious path, that includes the overall Pagan ethos of reverence for the ancient Gods, including the divine Feminine, participation in a magical world view, stewardship and caring for the Earth, and ‘nature religion.’ They also tend to celebrate the same eight festivals including the solar solstices and equinoxes. Thus Paganism has come to be an umbrella term for a diverse spiritual network, which also includes modern Shamanism and Heathenry. Heathens have reconstructed ancient Norse rituals and religious practices, and revere the pantheons of the Vanir and Aesir; thus some Heathens also sometimes specifically call themselves Vanatru and Asatru. Academic Study of Paganism The academic study of Paganism is in its infancy. The first notable work was published by Tanya Luhrmann in 1989, an anthropological study of a magical community in London, in which she asked how ‘normal’, middle class people could come to believe in magic, and its efficacy. Her work has been heavily criticised by subsequent scholars of Paganism (Orion 1995; Pike 1996; Harvey 1999; Pearson 2000; Greenwood 2000; Pearson 2002; Hutton 2003), both in terms of methodology and of discourse. It has come to be something of benchmark for discussion of covert and overt observational techniques, the efficacy and moral implications of undertaking initiations into closed groups for research purposes, and the validity of emic or etic researcher positions. Luhrmann’s work was followed by a rather better received anthropological study of a similar London community by Susan Greenwood (Greenwood 2000). Greenwood managed to maintain her academic objectivity whilst undertaking participant observation with a number of Pagan groups, and proposed a theory of magic as communion with the ‘otherworld’. Other anthropological work includes that by Loretta Orion in America (Orion 1995); Sarah Pike’s (2001) study of the Pagan festival scene as a community of choice; Jone Salomonsen’s brilliant monograph on San Francisco’s Reclaiming community of feminist Witches (Salomonsen 2002); and Sabina Magliocco’s Witching Culture (2004) which explores American Paganism as a spiritual counter-culture to that of dominant American culture (Magliocco 2004). Helen Berger has undertaken a detailed sociological study of American Paganism

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(Berger 1999), and Ronald Hutton has provided two definitive histories of the Pagan revival (Hutton 2000, 2003). The diversity within Paganism is mirrored by the diversity in the way that scholars describe it. In Britain, academics tend to refer to ‘Paganism’, and more recently to ‘Paganisms’; to reflect the fact that there are a variety of spiritual paths (Blain, Ezzy & Harvey 2004). In America, scholars tend to refer to ‘Neo-Paganism,’ to reflect the fact that it is a revival, and indeed can be termed a New Religious Movement (Berger 1999). Some authors prefer to capitalise (Neo-)Paganism; others do not. In common with most other British authors, I prefer to use a capitalised Paganism, to denote its status as a religion, but without the prefix ‘Neo-’. However, in this chapter, I have not changed capitalisations or prefixes within quotes, so as to stay faithful to the original words I am quoting, and to preserve the richness of the text, and within that, the somewhat oblique scholarly code, which reveals each author’s personal view as to Paganism’s place in the contemporary religious landscape. Paganism, Esotericism and the New Age One of the earliest academic discussions of Witchcraft and Esotericism is Tiryakian’s anthology of papers On the Margin of the Visible (1974). This discussed ‘esoteric culture’ and its distance from mainstream culture. It is split into three sections that examine the classics of Esotericism, including work by Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner; Witchcraft’s social settings in different times; and the theory and practice of the modern occult revival. Tiryakian argues that Esotericism has been most visible at times of major cultural paradigm shifts, and that it should be studied in a broader context than sociology of religion since it is of relevance to societal change and secularisation. Hanegraaff has produced a number of papers on esoteric spirituality, and the book New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (1996). He suggests that the New Age is the cultic milieu having become conscious of itself, fuelled by a reaction to rationalist and dogmatic philosophy, and a sense that is rooted in traditional Western Esotericism. He structures New Age religion within several basic tendencies: the anticipation of the coming New Age; the sacralisation of psychology and the psychologisation of religion; holism, teleological, pedagogical and creative evolutionism; and a weak attitude to the experiential realism of this world. He makes important points

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about the western rather than eastern influences that can be traced by occultism and romanticism, and places Paganism as a trend within New Age religion along with channelling, healing, personal growth, New Age science and the millennial idea of a New Age. The book is one of the best available on the history of ideas of the New Age. Regarding Paganism, Hanegraaff says, “The neopagan movement should be treated as a part of the New Age movement, but it should nonetheless be seen as a special, relatively clearly circumscribed subculture within that movement” (Hanegraaff 1996:79). Antoine Faivre edited with Jacob Needleman a volume on Modern Esoteric Spirituality (1992) and also was the sole author of Access to Western Esotericism (1994). Faivre (1994) defines six components of Esotericism; four are essential and two are ‘relative’ elements. The essential elements are correspondences; living nature; imagination and meditation; and the experience of transmission. The relative elements are the praxes of concordance and transmission. Tiryakian’s assertion that a latent esoteric subculture emerges at times of paradigm change in dominant culture is one that is echoed in many studies of the New Age, which often highlight just how much ‘old’ material is incorporated into ‘new’ spiritual paradigms. He tends to talk about the occult revival in general terms, as part of the wider esoteric culture. Hanegraaff and Faivre’s later studies specifically classify Paganism within their typologies for the New Age, but then unfortunately are not able not spend enough time on the intricacies of this ‘clearly circumscribed subculture.’ One of the problems in overviews of the New Age is the depth, which gets sacrificed in place of breadth of vision. In the midst of groundbreaking work on esoteric religion, Hanegraaff and Faivre conflate Paganism and Witchcraft into a misleading homogenous whole. When discussing Christianity, one would never conflate Methodism with an order of monks, or an African house church with the Vatican. As a scholar of Wicca1 I am wary of discussing Heathenism, Druidry, Shamanism or Traditional Witchcraft. There are enough disparate beliefs, practices and ethical systems between these branches of contemporary Paganism that they each merit study in their own right.

My doctoral thesis (King’s College, London, 2006) focused on ‘conversion’ to Wicca, with specific reference to the experience of Wiccan men. 1


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The popularity of Wicca, Modern Pagan Witchcraft, and eclectic Paganism is reflected in the fact that they have been the focus of all studies of Paganism so far. It is wrong to generalise about Paganism as a whole when so little work has yet been accomplished about its lesser known paths, and so much of the current discourse focuses purely on diverse paths within Modern Pagan Witchcraft. There are a few problem areas emerging in this body of literature, most succinctly addressed by Michael York (1995), Jo Pearson (2000), and latterly by Doug Ezzy (2006). The rest of this chapter will focus on areas where caution should be taken if including Paganism in studies of the New Age, and discussion of some of the criticism thereof. Problem 1: Conflating Pagan Traditions and Belief Systems A major problem in many studies of Paganism is that the many and various separate traditions, some of which have been mentioned above, tend to become conflated into an imagined homogenous unity. This problem is confounded by a tendency to base such an imputed unitary entity on references and research limited to the more popular traditions, such as Wicca. Jo Pearson attempted to address the problem of misleading homogeneity in her doctoral thesis Religion and the Return of Magic: Wicca as Esoteric Spirituality (2000). This is a useful addition to the literature, primarily for its successful bid to firmly locate Wicca as a modern esoteric religion that has direct links to a historical esoteric past, and secondly because it provides a wide-ranging overview of Wicca as a religion. Although some of her material had already been covered in existing academic literature, Pearson wrote a thesis that is accessible for readers unfamiliar with the field. Thus she discusses the history, etymology and image of witchcraft, Esotericism, magic and religion, and historical streams of continuity with the occult revival of the nineteenth century, before beginning to discuss the magical community and Wicca. She investigates entry to Wicca, the core community, communitas in Wicca, and Wiccan ritual and training techniques. Pearson uses data derived from participant observation, interviews, and survey techniques obtained during her four-year association with a group of Wiccan covens in the North-West of England. She describes the Wiccan networks she joined, their beliefs, practices and relationships, and discusses Wiccan history, and what she perceives as the human

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need for a myth of continuity in relation to Wicca’s past, which she sets alongside a summary of Ronald Hutton’s history of Wicca. Pearson locates Wicca’s birth as being in the nineteenth century occult revival, and explores Wicca’s roots as well as “streams of affinity” between the Esotericism of the Renaissance and contemporary Wicca. ‘Wicca’ is a religion which links itself to the mystery traditions of the ancient world, making use of material gleaned from mythology and known history of the mystery traditions in Egypt, Greece, Rome, and whose initiates identify themselves as priest and priestesses of a modern Western Mystery Tradition as well as regarding themselves as witches. (Pearson 2000:51)

Pearson’s thesis locates Wicca within the religious worldview, and she strongly argues against linking Wicca to the New Age, also arguing that magic is a valuable part of religion, particularly in modern times. She points out that the Wiccan understanding of magic is not of an individual using a contra-religious, instrumental means of control, but rather a participative group practice that is an integral element of the religion. She says: Magic in Wicca is understood in the same way as it was portrayed in the Renaissance. Magic is not set in opposition to religion, but rather is an important element of spiritual growth towards the mystical attainment of gnosis, with any short term pragmatic goals being secondary to this end result, the experience of transmutation which produces insight into the hidden mysteries of the cosmos, self and God. (Pearson 2000:310–11)

Pearson suggests that Wicca is an esoteric spirituality that reclaims the harmonic synthesis of magic and religion that was lost in the Protestant reformation and last seen in the Renaissance. She builds on the connections noted by Hanegraaff and Faivre of Wicca to the Western Esoteric Tradition, yet seeks to distinguish Wicca as a mystery religion that is esoteric, as distinct from exoteric Witchcraft and Paganism. She argues that Hanegraaff and Faivre do not see Wicca as esoteric per se because they conflate it with exoteric Witchcraft and Paganism, then makes a strong argument for Wicca’s status as an esoteric spirituality, concluding that much more work needs to be undertaken investigating its Renaissance roots.


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Problem 2: Attributing New Age Beliefs to Pagans A second major problem with many academic studies of Paganism is that beliefs more typical of New Age are attributed unthinkingly to Pagans. Paul Heelas’ The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacrilization of Modernity (1996) makes a comparison of Paganism and New Age that is similar to that of Hanegraaff. In his wide-ranging attempt to define and discuss the growth and salience of the New Age Movement, Heelas explores the philosophy, history and diversity of its milieu. He defines the term New Age as one that has “come to be used to designate those who maintain that inner spirituality—embedded within the self and the natural order as a whole—serves as the key to moving from all that is wrong with life to all that is right” (Heelas 1996:160). Heelas characterises the New Age Movement with three principles he calls the lingua franca of the movement, and which he sees as the basis of a sacralisation of the self, epitomised in the three statements “your lives are not working,” “you are gods and goddess in exile” and “let it go/drop it” (Heelas 1996:20). Jo Pearson wrote a paper on “Assumed Affinities: Wicca and the New Age” (1998a) in a direct response to, and refutation of, Heelas’ book. In the paper, she critically examines Heelas’ three principles, concluding they do not apply to Wicca. Pearson bases her argument on her doctoral research on Wiccan self-identification, and examines evidence of the rejection by British Wiccans of identification with the New Age (Pearson 2000). In a survey undertaken for Pearson (2000), 86% of Wiccans did not regard Wicca as part of the New Age movement. Reactions ranged from horror at the prospect of such an association, to an acceptance that, although there may be some similarities, there was no evidence to support an overall categorisation of Wicca as New Age. Pearson stresses that traditions, dogmas, doctrines and moralities do exist (and are actively sought) in Wicca, and that none of her 100 subjects joined Wicca because their lives were not working. She argues there is no evidence that Wicca regards humankind as malfunctioning, and that it operates within a framework of pragmatic realism that includes dark and light rather than seeing the New Age as the light after the darkness. She notes a response from one High Priestess who refused to initiate someone who thought Wicca could solve his life problems. Heelas’ book also provides another example of the problem of sacrificing specialisation for inclusivity. He refers to Paganism and Wicca

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throughout the book, but with only a page-and-a-half devoted to Pagan practices, he unrealistically seeks to merge all forms of Pagan religion together. He then defines Paganism as New Age and squeezes them into the metaphysical boxes he has formed with his principles. Thus he brackets Paganism with est (Erhard Seminars Training) seminars where candidates are reviled by leaders for having ‘shit’ lives, and with New Agers whom he describes as averse to traditions, dogmas, doctrines and moralities. Heelas sees Wiccan rituals as part of a wide range of practices available to New Agers, whom he describes as feeling unobliged to remain true to any particular path, but able to participate freely in a range of movements. Pagans are also presented as a somewhat homogeneous group of eco-warriors and activists, which is at odds with all empirical studies. Michael York (1995) distinguished New Age from its metaphysical antecedents by its own self-consciousness as a movement and its referral to the Age of Aquarius. In contrast to the general tendency to impute New Age beliefs to Pagans, York perceived Paganism as having different ideologies of meaning and morality, illusion and materialism, and showing further difference of orientation to the New Age in that it espoused a tradition-bound re-awakening of the spiritual as opposed to an eclectic awakening that harkened to a New Age. Problem 3: Attributing New Age Privileging of Mind/ Spirit Over Body to Paganism Attributing New Age transcendental aspirations about mind and spirit to Paganism is misleading. Pearson (1998a) points out that Heelas depicts a Manichean dualism of matter and body versus mind and spirit as typifying the New Age Movement, with spirit seen as superior and more desirable than matter. Pearson contrasts this with the results of her study in which Wiccans claim not to be seeking metaphysical perfection, but rather earthy wholeness and completeness. York made a similar observation, noting that Pagans seek an immanent locus of deity as opposed to a transcendent metaphysical reality. Ezzy (2003) discusses Hanegraaff ’s suggestion that evolutionary teleology is one of the central characteristics of New Age spirituality. He then contrasts this to Witchcraft’s eco-centric ontology that focuses on the wheel of the year and the endless cycles of death and rebirth in which Pagans accept their part, rather than wishing to transcend it,


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and rather than waiting for the dawn of a New Age. Ezzy sees these differences as fundamental. Problem 4: Attributing New Age Views of Ego, Self and Psychology to Paganism It is not uncommon for academic work in this field to draw upon psychological and self-healing aspects of the New Age to propose the sacralisation of the self as the core spirituality of New Age religion, then overlay this self-sacralisation onto Pagan religion. Hanegraaff writes, “[ T ]he gods that earlier generations believed in, as supernatural beings existing apart from humanity, turn out to be mere projections of the human-mind. It is humanity that creates gods instead of the opposite” (Hanegraaff 1996:113). Heelas uses a similar viewpoint to classify Paganism as part of New Age. This may reflect New Age beliefs, but Pagan views of the Gods are complex, and while they may include aspects of this self-sacralisation, also include for example ancestor worship, panentheism and pantheism. Whilst some feminist Witches may seem self-sacralising, their Goddess is perceived to be without as well as within them, and for many Witches the Gods exist as entirely discrete beings. Jenny Blain’s work on Heathenism and Seidr magic describes communication with the spirit world and otherworldy beings, but not the Goddess of the Witches (Blain 2002). Whilst self-sacralisation may well be a part of New Age spirituality, it is too reductionist to state that it is a key component of Paganism, particularly in areas of Paganism that are further from feminist Witchcraft with its emphasis of finding the Goddess within. Pearson (1998a) claims that Wicca can be linked to the sacralisation of the self to a limited extent, but that many Wiccans view ego, self and psychology in a different and more holistic way to that posited by Heelas in particular. Certainly it seems that Heelas has used one of the few Wiccan texts that appears to promote a model of self-sacralisation (Crowley 1989)2 to make a case for all Paganism being self-sacralising, at the expense of most other Wiccan or Pagan texts. It also is somewhat reductionist to relegate the Jungian model of the Wiccan initiation

2 Crowley and the publishers of her best-selling book Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Age chose to rename it in subsequent imprints, instead entitling it Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium.

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process proposed by Vivianne Crowley to a process of self-sacralisation in view of Crowley’s claim that: The concept that we are at our core divine is a difficult one for the ego to handle. Usually when we first access the divine self within us, we see it as an external god, but it is the divine within us which we have met and not the divinity without; that divine spark which has as its origin a greater divine whole from which we all sprang forth . . . These images are not random but are true expressions of the nature of the divine translated into human terms and we therefore treat them with respect and honour. The full nature of that reality is as yet beyond our human understanding and we therefore clothe this multi-faceted reality in archetypal images, which are an expression of the truth, but not the full truth, much as we translate complicated scientific laws into simple terms for school children. (Crowley 1989:152–154)

Problem 5: Overwriting Positive Pagan Attitudes to Authority and Commitment Pearson (1998a) argues that attitudes to authority and commitment in Paganism and the New Age are to be contrasted. Paganism tends to demand long-term, process-centred commitment and intimate involvement rather than a results-centred temporary allegiance as suggested by Heelas to be typical of New Age. This is a little too dichotomous and neat an argument as there is an eclectic element within Paganism, and there are very dedicated New Age followers who remain on the same path for decades. However, Pearson’s objection to the description of Wicca, and other initiatory branches of Paganism, as temporary allegiances is certainly pertinent. Pearson makes the point that Wiccans do not avoid, or have a negative attitude towards authority and commitment. This argument is clearly substantiated in other studies of initiatory forms of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Even Luhrmann is warmly positive about her chief informants and initiators. Salomonsen describes how she undertook an initiation after some years as a practitioner, out of a growing sense respect for the traditions of initiation. Pearson (2000) discusses positive leadership models in Wicca. I also discuss coven function, leadership and role modelling in Wicca in my own doctoral thesis (Harrington 2006). Most covens provide a threetiered teaching structure through which initiates are expected to graduate. People who seek a Wiccan initiation are aware of the three-fold system of initiations, of the structure of the coven, and the roles of High Priest and High Priestess. Wiccan initiation offers a rite of passage


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for a seeker, simultaneously bestowing the initiate with a cohesive social group—friendships made in coven are often enduring and deeply felt. Initiates also gain spiritual mentors in the High Priestess and High Priest and other coven elders. As mentors, they guide the learning process, including when and how the initiate learns new roles in the coven and in ritual, thus guiding their spiritual development. On a practical level, the close bonds and mutual support also lead to increased happiness and feelings of self-worth. The initiate is not a client or consumer, but a valued member, with further initiations in sight, which will culminate in having equal status to the initiators. Commitment to Wicca usually progresses beyond this point, whereby the initiate ‘hives off ’ to be an elder within the community or start their own group. Problem 6: Decontextualising Aspects of Pagan Practice and including them in New Age Eclecticism Pagans themselves are less likely to be offended by the contested theoretical areas listed above than some of the unwitting consequences of scholars including Paganism in their work without understanding the normal level of commitment involved. Heelas describes people using “wiccan rituals” (Heelas 1996:89) within a wide range of practices, as if Wicca can be part of a pick and mix bag in the spiritual supermarket. Wiccans might prefer the text to state ‘Wiccan-style’ or ‘Wiccan-derived’ rituals since they see their path as a committed one to a religion and community of choice, and in British terms, to be an initiatory mystery religion. Most writers on the New Age and Paganism do not even make any differentiation between the British definition of Wicca (initiatory Gardnerian and Alexandrian lines) from the American definition of Wicca (anyone, initiated or not, who is committed to the ideology and practice of Modern Pagan Witchcraft). Nor do they seem to differentiate between the two different meanings of the word ‘traditional’ used when referring to Modern Pagan Witchcraft. The British tend to use that term to refer to Witchcraft believed to derive from pre-Gardnerian groups, whilst the American definition tends to refer to Gardnerian and Alexandrian initiatory lines. Michael York made similar criticisms to those above in a review of Heelas’ work in Religion Today (1997). He has similar concerns to Pearson and says “[ T ]he question of differentiating New Age and Neo-Paganism, however, lies at the heart of the modern/post modern debate

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and the post modern agenda of ‘hearing the voice of the other’ rather than deprivileging a new or marginal grouping’s quest for a recognised identity.” (York 1997:401–2). Paganism and the New Age—A Rapprochement Until Pagan practice and belief are put into the correct context within studies of the New Age, the overwhelming conflation of tradition and practice will continue to cause confusion and misleading generalisation. The problem areas listed in the above paragraphs are the weak links in the excellent work that has formed the foundation of scholarly study into alternative religion, the occult revival and esoteric counterculture. With the fruit of the last fifteen years of scholarly inquiry into Paganism, there is now a body of literature that could constitute the foundation of ‘Pagan Studies,’ and the means to an end of these problem areas. In my opinion, Michael York’s work on Paganism and the New Age remains the most well-researched and cogently argued book on this topic, even though it was published as long ago as 1995 and based on a doctoral thesis awarded in 1991. This is because it is the only work of its kind, specifically addresses the similarities and differences between Paganism and the New Age, and is based on considerable fieldwork. York proposed that traditional scholarly typologies of church and sect are problematic when studying New Religious Movements and New Age spirituality, discussing the difficulty of labelling ‘cults,’ and giving the example of Robbins’ 1987 argument that Unification Church could really be a Christian sect. His thesis aimed at “some understanding of what the New Age Movement is: how it is formed; who is involved, who its leading spokespersons are; and in particular how it differs from, is similar to, and overlaps with what is simultaneously emerging as the Neo Pagan Movement” (York 1996:1). York’s approach to presenting the New Age and Pagan milieu was refreshing. He strove to allow the New Age and Pagan subjects their own voice, while maintaining his own academic objectivity and insight. He discussed the problems associated with trying to apply theoretical frameworks and models to the Pagan and New Age movements and observed and interviewed only self-identified New Agers and Pagans. He included material from spokespersons with his own primary data, and set this in a theoretically well-grounded discourse. In doing so he succeeded in describing and discussing Paganism and its relationship with the New Age movement in academic terms.


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York contributed to the field by suggesting a useful model for the structure of Paganism and the New Age movement. He suggests that Hill (1987) is wrong to suggest that a religious movement that seems to lack organisation should be referred to as a cultic milieu, preferring Robbins (1988b) and Gerlach and Hine’s theory (1973) that a movement might appear leaderless but is in fact ‘polycephalous,’ with leadership being situation-specific, a leader’s position only endorsed by continuous demonstration of worth, and depending on a personal following. York agrees with Gerlach and Hine that a movement is strengthened by being polycephalic in its increased adaptability and innovation. Apart from Gerlach and Hine’s discussion of active recruitment, York accepts their description of a movement as one that covers the phenomena well: “They define a movement by, and committed to a purpose which implements some form of personal or social change; . . . whose influence spreads in opposition to the established social order within which it originated, the non-centralised, many celled organisation is not subject to control, manipulation, or even prediction—hence, the frequent antagonism against it that can be generated on both governmental and orthodox social levels” (York 1996:325). York sees Hine’s (1977) Segmented Polycentric Integrated Network (SPIN), as the sociological construct that is most accurate for Pagan and New Age groups, even though this was originally applied to groups keen on social and personal change such as the new left, or Black Power rather than a religious community. However, at the time of his research York noted Zachary Cox’s3 unease at the growth of green militancy in Paganism, which he felt indicated a closer similarity in structure and radical reform than might be supposed, and which could well call for further research in the future. York focuses on non-bureaucratic segmentation and unbounded reticulation as essential aspects of a SPIN. One of the most interesting aspects of York’s work is his vision of a spirituality that shows cohesion through diversity. He adapts Gerlach and Hine’s (1968) model of inter-cell linkages via friendships, study interests, leaders talking at other groups or networks conferences, travelling, and large gatherings for modern Paganism, and shows how this is relevant to the circular structures of immanence within this milieu that are written about by the popular Pagan writer, Starhawk.

3 Cox is the former editor of The Aquarian Arrow, the magazine for the ‘Neo-Pantheists’. He is also a respected Wiccan elder, and key member of a number of esoteric orders.

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York is happy to further Marilyn Ferguson’s (1987) definition of New Age as a SPIN of SPINS that is a contemporary ‘holistic’ movement which includes ecology and the Goddess movement, liberal politics and similar movements, and concludes that if this is combined with the hierarchical church sect typologies, recognising this reticulated polycephalous structure, then sociology would have available tools for studying these areas. More recently, Steven Sutcliffe identified a ‘second wave’ of New Age scholarship when editing a special issue of the Journal Culture and Religion, entitled “Studying the ‘New Age’: Reconfiguring the Field” (2003). He said: This call to ‘reconfigure the field’ was made in the context of a dominant discourse that has tended to favour representations of a sui generis ‘New Age’ movement or milieu—a more-or-less singular and homogenous entity— based largely on the study of (entextualised) ideas and beliefs. What has been less forthcoming in studies of the ‘New Age’ over the past 20 years or so is an ethnographical/cultural studies approach, consisting in (for example) detailed local ethnographies, fine-grained historical and geological analyses, examinations of practitioners’ uses of the popular texts that are so widely cited, and—last but not least—the application of contemporary theory to ‘New Age’, particularly relating to the social variables of gender, sexuality, social calls and ethnicity, but also to such comparative fields as audience reception and popular culture. (Sutcliffe 2003:3)

The resulting volume provides an opening for a “second wave” of New Age study, and papers in this collection continue to address the foundations studies described above with good scholarship. However, only one deals with Paganism per se, or rather a tangential result of the growing popularity of Paganism, that of commercially marketed spell-books. This chapter, by Doug Ezzy, builds on his earlier differentiation between initiatory Neo-Pagan Witchcraft and “commodified Witchcraft” (Ezzy 2001). In it he proposes that “popularised Witchcraft” is influenced by the New Age, and typified by commercial spell-books that provide a “technology of the self for young women,” including characteristics of New Age commercialism that promote the self-ethic, this-worldly orientation, and holism. Ezzy also cites their use as tools for a re-enchantment of everyday life. Ezzy’s chapter identifies an area that has previously been classified as Pagan but could now be classified as New Age, if one agrees with Ezzy’s classification of New Age values and practice. He emphasises the absence in New Age Witchcraft of the basics of Pagan ethics and


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spirituality, particularly the acceptance of darkness and loss in one’s life. He also points to a lack of spell-makers’ connection to any existing Pagan network in favour of strongly individualist bias, and ephemeral participation in a milieu driven by market forces. Ezzy later continues to define New Age “white witchcraft” as black magic, in terms of its individualist, hedonistic, and morally unambiguous search to serve the self. These issues are perhaps not as black and white as Ezzy portrays them, and have received some criticism on the academic email forum Natrel, but his focus on commodification and materialism in the Pagan/New Age fringe does offer a new avenue of classification and debate in this area. Paganism and the New Age Movement —a Final Frontier In the most simplistic terms it must be noted that most Pagans do not see themselves as New Age, and do not aspire to the coming of the Age of Aquarius, or any other future golden age. They see the New Age movement as something different and discrete from Paganism. It has been the work that has been more sensitive to the differences between Paganism and New Age that has shed most light on the relationship between the two, notably in the writings of Michael York and Jo Pearson. While it is clear that the New Age movement and Paganism share certain characteristics, it is in their differences that we will find the fertile ground for future study. As long ago as 1995, Paul Greer discussed conflicting theologies of the New Age, calling them “the Aquarian Confusion.” He identified two antithetical dynamics within the New Age Movement that he termed “patriarchal theology” and “ecological theology.” This “Aquarian confusion” is an ongoing one, since one overwhelming difference between the Pagans and New Agers is that the vast majority of Pagans are not Christian. As a religion that has become evident and self-conscious since the middle of the last century, Paganism is only now beginning to show a small number of second and third generation practitioners. Overall it is a religion of first generation converts who have turned away from the nominal Christianity of their birth, to seek spiritual satisfaction in ‘coming home’ to ‘the Old Religion’. As Daren Kemp has demonstrated (Kemp 2003) it is perfectly possible to be a New Age Christian, or ‘Christaquarian’ as he christened

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Christians who are involved in New Age spirituality. These followers of New Age spirituality over-lay their Christianity with Hanegraaff ’s sacralised psychology, psychologised religion, holism and teleological, pedagogical and creative evolutionism. They are quite different creatures to Pagans, who have stripped away the religion of their country, their family and their birthright to follow an esoteric occult path that is still misunderstood within the society in which they live (Harrington 2006). I predict that as the study of Paganism develops, further distinctions between Paganism and the New Age Movement will be discussed, particularly as more Pagan scholars join the field. This will coincide with Pagans continuing to lobby the authorities for the recognition of their religion as a valid and recognised faith within contemporary multi-cultural society. They will continue to seek to distance themselves from the seeming randomness and all-inclusivity of New Age philosophy in favour of a self-defined religious identity that can be identified as a recognised religion. The final barrier between the New Age movement and Paganism will be one of expediency; whilst scholars may like to include Paganism as a discrete subsystem within the New Age movement, Pagans will not be wish to be included—they have too much at stake that affects their jobs, their inclusion in society, and their right to practise their religion without discrimination or disturbance. Conclusion This chapter has discussed Paganism and the New Age, particularly focusing on critical comments regarding foundational studies proposing similarities between the two spiritualities. The main problem has been identified as being the challenge of coherently discussing and analysing a huge spiritual and life-style domain, wherein inclusivity has lead to certain problematic generalisations. Key problem areas are: conflating different Pagan traditions and belief systems; attributing New Age belief systems to Paganism; attributing New Age privileging of mind/spirit over body to Paganism; attributing New Age views of ego, self and psychology to Paganism; overwriting positive Pagan attitudes to tradition, authority and commitment; and decontextualising aspects of Pagan practice to included them in New Age eclecticism.


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Michael York’s work in this area was commended as providing the first sociological framework to explain Paganism’s polycephalous structure, and to highlight differences as well as similarities between Paganism and the New Age. The suggestion was made that this fascinating area of religious studies might be well served by future authors further investigating the differences between these two contemporary spiritualities, particularly between Christaquarians and Pagan religious practitioners. Having demarcated the field it is perhaps now time to return to Hanegraaff ’s original analysis and to research more deeply into what makes Paganism a “relatively clearly circumscribed subculture” (Hanegraaff 1996:79) in relation to the New Age movement. References Berger, H., 1999. A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Blain, J., 2002. Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in North European Paganism. London: Routledge. Blain, J., D. Ezzy & G. Harvey, eds, 2004. Researching Paganisms. New York: Alta Mira. Crowley, V., 1989. Wicca, The Old Religion in the New Age. London: Aquarian. Revised edition, 1996. Wicca, The Old Religion in the New Millennium. London: Thorsons. Ezzy, D., 2001. “The Commodification of Witchcraft.” Australian Religious Studies Review 14.1 31–4. ——, 2003. “New Age Witchcraft: Popular Spell Books and the Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life.” Culture and Religion 4.1 47–65. ——, 2006. “White Witches and Black Magic: Ethics and Consumerism in Contemporary Witchcraft.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 21.1 15–31. Faivre, A. & J. Needleman, 1992, eds. Modern Esoteric Spirituality. New York: Crossroad. Faivre, A., 1994. Access to Western Esotericism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ferguson, M., 1982. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Greenwood, S., 2000. Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology. Oxford, New York: Berg. Greer, P., 1995. “The Aquarian Confusion: Conflicting Theologies of the New Age.” Journal of Contemporary Religion. 10.2 151–168. Gerlach, L. & V. Hine, 1970. People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill. ——, 1973. Lifeway Leap: The Dynamics of Change in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hanegraaff, W.J., 1995. “Empirical Method in the Study of Esotericism.” Methods and Theory in the Study of Religion 7.2 99–129. ——, 1996. “New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought.” Studies in the History of Religions 72. Harrington, M.J., 2002. “The Long Journey Home; A Study of the Conversion Profiles of 35 Wiccan Men.” REVER http://www.pucsp.br/rever/rv2_2002/a-harring.html.

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——, 2004. “Psychology of Religion and the Study of Paganism.” In Blain J., G. Harvey & D. Ezzy, eds. Researching Paganisms. New York: Alta Mira Press. ——, 2006. A Study of Conversion Processes in Wicca, with Specific Reference to Male Converts. King’s College London: PhD thesis. Harvey, G., 1999. “Coming Home and Coming out Pagan (but not Converting).” In Lamb, C. & M.D. Bryant, eds. Religious Conversion, Contemporary Practices and Controversies. London: Cassell. Hill, M., 1973. A Sociology of Religion. New York: Basic Books. Heelas, P., 1996. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacrilization of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hutton, R., 1999a. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——, 1999b. “Modern Pagan Witchcraft.” In The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic In Europe: Volume 6 —The Twentieth Century. The Athlone Press: London. ——, 2003. Witches, Druids and King Arthur. London & New York: Hambledon & London. Kemp, D., 2003. The Christaquarians? A Sociology of Christians in the New Age. London: Kempress. Luhrmann, T., 1989. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft. London: Picador. Magliocco, S., 2004. Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Orion L., 1995. Never Again the Burning Times; Paganism Revisited. Illinois: Waveland Press. Pearson, J.E., 1998a. “Assumed Affinities Wicca and the New Age.” In Pearson, J.E., R. Roberts & G. Samuel, eds, 1998. Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 45–56. ——, 1998b. “Numbers of Witches.” Natrel Internet Forum. Http://www.uscolo.edu/ clifton/natrel.html. ——, 2000. Religion and the Return of Magic: Wicca as Esoteric Spirituality. Lancaster University: PhD thesis. ——, 2002. “Going Native in Reverse: The Insider as Researcher in British Wicca.” In Arweck, E. and M.D. Stringer, eds. Theorizing Faith: The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Ritual. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press. Pike, S.M., 1996. “Rationalizing the Margins: A Review of Legitimation and Ethnographic Practice in the Scholarly Research on Neo-Paganism.” In Lewis, J.R., ed. Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft. Albany, New York: SUNY, 353–72. ——, 2001. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robbins, T., 1988. Cults, Converts and Charisma. London: Sage. Salomonsen, J., 2002. Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. London: Routledge. ——, 2004. “Methods of Compassion or Pretension? The Challenges of Conducting Fieldwork in Modern Magical Communities.” In Blain, J., D. Ezzy and G. Harvey, eds. Researching Paganisms. New York: Alta Mira. Sutcliffe, S., ed., 2003. Culture and Religion. Special Issue: Studying New Age—Reconfiguring the Field. Vol. 4.1. Tiryakian, E.A., 1972. “Toward a Sociology of Esoteric Cults.” American Journal of Sociology 78 491–512. York, M., 1995. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo Pagan Movements. Lanham, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefield. ——, 1997. “New Age and Late 20th Century.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 12.3 401–21.

CHRISTIANS AND NEW AGE* Daren Kemp One might be forgiven for thinking that some of the most pressing spiritual enigmas in today’s world include whether Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and had children whose descendants are still alive (Brown 2004), the significance of the date 6 June 2006 (6.6.6) as representing the Antichrist (and also the release date of a remake of the classic film The Omen) in a reinterpretation of the Book of Revelation (Alberge 2006), and the life and times of a schoolboy wizard (Rowling 1997, etc.). Works based on these quasi-religious concerns and others like them have with increasing frequency made newspaper headlines and provided the lead story for television news bulletins, have been the subject of highly successful films with accompanying marketing frenzies, and have not just topped but filled best-seller booklists for many months. The originality of the historical research conducted by authors of the first claim has even been deliberated in the English Court of Appeal and the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.1 Such alternative cultural fare may respond to a contemporary need for sensationalism combined with mystery and the suggestion of some deeper significance. We are now living in a society which is heavily influenced by themes that were until recently obscure, arcane and esoteric, even occult. It is perhaps not much of an exaggeration to say that this facet of popular culture has a generalised New Age Christian ambience.

* The original fieldwork from which some of this chapter is derived was supervised by Peter Clarke at King’s College, London, and part-funded by grants from King’s College London Theological Trust and St. Olave’s & St. Saviour’s Grammar School Foundation. 1 Baigent Anor v The Random House Group Limited ( The Da Vinci Code) [2007] EWCA Civ 247 (28 March 2007). [The “code-obsessed” Christaquarian mentioned in The Daily Telegraph newspaper report on 28 April 2006 of the secret code hidden by the judge within the lower court judgment is, of course, the author.] For the American case, see the Summary Order in Dan Brown and Random House, Inc. and Ors v Lewis Perdue 05–4840–cv, on appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Similar proceedings were also threatened in Russia (The Times of London 13 and 21 April 2006).

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Renewed public interest in matters spiritual has also been noticed by traditional Christians. Popular spirituality is now seen as a major mission field for evangelising Christians, increasingly under the name ‘postChristendom’ (Murray 2004). So-called ‘emerging churches’ take nonbelievers as they find them, with postmodern, relativist attitudes to truth and hierarchical institutions, and present their gospel from within such a culture. Emerging churches meet, often informally, for example, in coffee shops, shopping malls and mother-and-toddler groups. The mindset is summed up in the recognition that, whereas to make itself attractive to modern secular seekers, churches had once replaced stained glass windows with video screens, now emerging churches sensitive to so-called post-seekers in a postmodern culture, are bringing stained glass windows back into church on those same video screens (Kimball 2003:185). Prior to this phase of Christian interaction with contemporary spirituality, many Christians were typically hostile to what was then known as the New Age Movement, understood as a relatively small but dynamic movement or grouping within society at large. The New Age Movement was the Satanic Other in contrast to which some Christians defined themselves. The most vocal exponents of this approach were conservative Christians, and a huge apologetic literature continues to testify to its popularity. The official policies of the major Christian denominations towards the New Age Movement were formulated against the backdrop of such hostility, and sometimes relied heavily on evangelical publications for their understanding of New Age. In a third, earlier historical phase, what Hanegraaff has called protoNew Age (Hanegraaff, this volume) developed on the fringes of both Christianity and a tradition of occultism, Theosophy and Spiritualism, and was arguably not yet distinct from them. Little academic research has been conducted specifically on Christian interaction with protoNew Age. Traces of this shared history may still be evident in the continuing similarity in styles of evangelical and New Age spiritualities (Kemp 2003:154–60). Christian influence on proto-New Age continued to run parallel alongside the two later phases of Christian interaction with New Ageproper. A small number of professing Christians have continued consciously to explore New Age spiritualities to enrich their own tradition. Such ‘New Age Christians’ or ‘Christian New Agers’ may, for example, utilise in their Christian life Celtic artefacts, Buddhist meditation or creative visualisation. These Christaquarians have not yet networked into a self-conscious movement with a reflexive identity.

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This chapter briefly describes these three historical phases of Christian interaction with New Age, as well as the Christaquarians, before presenting a cursory review of the relevant academic literature, a brief discussion of difficulties in undertaking fieldwork and conceptualising its findings, and suggestions for future research in the area. Emerging Christian Mission to Post-Christendom Since the turn of the century, there have been numerous studies illustrating how late capitalist society (or New Age Capitalism [ Lau 2000]) is now a ‘spiritual marketplace’ (Van Hove 1999), Selling Spirituality (Carrette & King 2005). In the 1980s it had been necessary to argue the case that practices from the New Age Movement were entering mainstream society, but it is now a starting assumption that they have done so and the question is whether this amounts to a full-scale ‘spiritual revolution’ (Heelas & Woodhead 2005; Tacey 2004). The New Age Movement was perceived from the late 1990s by many to have become less of a distinct grouping, and more of a general trend in postmodernity. To reflect this transition, some scholars declared the movement dead (e.g. Melton 1998) or discovered “Next Age” (e.g. Introvigne 2000), while others dropped the definite article and the descriptive tag of “the New Age Movement”, writing instead of an indeterminate ‘New Age’ (e.g. Kemp 2004). Christians also perceived that trends, previously understood to be merely a part of the feared New Age Movement, were becoming ubiquitous in mainstream society and had to be accepted as part of the landscape. Rather than conducting full-on spiritual warfare with the enemy, as had been the Christian battle plan against the New Age Movement, some Christian evangelists now sought to engage with their contemporary spiritual wayfarers in their own terms. Early exponents of this approach were Ross Clifford and Philip Johnson, in their Jesus and the Gods of the New Age: Communicating Christ in Today’s Spiritual Supermarket (2001) and, with John Drane,2 Beyond Prediction: The Tarot and Your Spirituality (2001). These texts have a conservative missionary purpose, but casual readers who are not aware of such an agenda will not have it thrown in their face. Beyond Prediction, for example, is on first blush

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See also later on Drane.

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simply another New Age Tarot workbook, progressing through the deck with additional illustrations of spiritual messages taken from popular psychology such as the Enneagram and Joseph Campbell, just as much as from Biblical quotations. Of course, such acculturation was far from new to Christian mission— the transformation of established non-Christian traditions, such as Yuletide to Christmas and spring fertility myths to Easter—is wellknown among amateur sociologists. Perhaps surprisingly, though, prior to the new millennium, few Christians3 had sought to evangelise New Agers by adopting their personae. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the new inculturating approach developed from alternative worship or alt.worship (as it is frequently known) circles. Best known as emerging church, by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the technique had become a highly visible tool for growing church numbers, leading to a plethora of seminars and publications (e.g. Kimball 2003; Moynagh 2004). Emerging church is a grassroots missionary strategy that meets people where they are. In contemporary society, this may mean that the ‘potential convert’ will have little or no knowledge of the JudaeoChristian tradition. Emerging church adopts the standpoint of its missionary target almost4 whole-heartedly, whether this means through Starbucks coffee discussions, professional dinner parties, or even, it seems, a sewing circle in sheltered accommodation where a minister is asked to say a few prayers (Moynagh 2004:101). The mindset is simply that non-Christians are met by Christians where they feel comfortable. The traditional (caricature of the) conversion script of browbeating and bible-bashing is dropped for a ‘genuine’5 human encounter from which the non-Christian may, when ready, ask about becoming a Christian. Emerging church is currently encountered mainly in conservative Christianity (Moynagh 2004:27), perhaps because of its underlying evangelistic agenda. It seems possible that the emerging church technique of acculturation with post-Christendom may become more widely popular among Christians, just as the evangelical Alpha course spread into mainstream and even some liberal and progressive churches. Such

3 With the possible exceptions of alternative worship and post-evangelicalism, although the missionary element in both these exceptions is arguably absent. 4 Attention is however drawn to the instrumental nature and motives of such acculturation. 5 See previous footnote.


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certainly would be the hope of a report for the Church of England, Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context (2004), by a working party chaired by Graham Cray, Bishop of Maidstone. The report explores a number of ways in which ‘church’ is being expressed: Alternative worship communities Base Ecclesial Communities Café church Cell church Churches arising out of community initiatives . . . Multiple and midweek congregations Network-focused churches . . . School-based and school-linked congregations and churches Seeker church Traditional church plants Traditional forms of church inspiring new interest (including new monastic communities) Youth congregations. (2004:44)

Graham Cray also wrote the foreword to Evangelism in a Spiritual Age (Richmond et al. 2005), which builds on Revd Yvonne Richmond’s research in the Diocese of Coventry into the spirituality of people outside the Church (Spencer 2005), and discusses evangelistic strategies for the large and growing number of people who have little experience of Christianity. ‘Church In A Spiritual Age’ (www.ciasa.org.uk) is a related project of the Churches Together in England Group for Evangelisation. Churches Together in Britain and Ireland6 also sponsored the Living Spirituality Network, which supports those “who are pursuing their spiritual path on the margins of the traditional, mainstream churches.” It should be emphasised that emerging church is not primarily a response to New Age—the Mission-Shaped Church report does not even mention New Age once. Rather, such Christian approaches to mission are responses to the nature of contemporary society and culture, to post-Christendom. Emerging church and New Age are related only in so far as New Age and emerging church can both be seen as products of postmodern conditions (Lyon 1993; Kemp 2003:69–74). Only in this limited sense can emerging church be described as a New Age Movement within Christianity. The successor body to the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, previously known as the British Council of Churches. 6

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The beginnings of the acculturating emerging church approach had begun to be seen from the mid-1990s, for example in the Techno-Cosmic Mass7 of Rev Dr Matthew Fox and similar experimental approaches to alternative worship; and in post-evangelical Christian groups such as Holy Jo’s, which meets in a public house (Tomlinson 1995). Early exponents of acculturation were perhaps more ‘into’ the new culture than the old. Later exponents of acculturation may initially seem equally adventurous and accommodating, but remain at heart traditionalists in sheeps’ clothing. For example, Revd Dr Rob Frost describes himself as “becoming a New Age Christian” (Frost 2001:119), experimenting with psychotherapy, astrology and ley lines. He has also written Essence (2002), a six-part evangelistic course with an accompanying CD of meditative music and words, akin to Alpha but designed to appeal to New Agers. But at heart he remains a traditional evangelist with a regular slot on Premier, a British evangelical Christian radio and pay-TV station. Brian McLaren is another traditional Christian who has sought to dress his evangelical message in contemporary style. The Secret Message of Jesus (McLaren 2006) explicitly sets out to present the gospel à la Da Vinci Code, as a coded enigma that must be deciphered by the curious. Although McLaren has been criticised by more conservative Christians for his apparently ‘liberal’ approach, in fact like Frost, McLaren remains at heart squarely within the evangelical tradition. The Da Vinci Code (Brown 2004) has inspired a large number of Christian commentaries along with the plethora of other spin-offs. But even a general interest news magazine such as The Economist noted (20 May 2006:52) that Christians are taking a new approach to the heretical claims in Brown’s book and film. Outrage and marches had greeted Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which depicted similar claims about Jesus’ sexuality. The Economist notes that many evangelicals have realised that The Da Vinci Code “provides a golden opportunity to get people talking about Christian subjects. Some churches are giving away tickets along with Starbucks vouchers to encourage post-film discussion. The Campus Crusade for Christ has 7 Later renamed simply, the Cosmic Mass, when the limitations of being tied to an ephemeral Techno-Rave culture became evident—see www.TheCosmicMass.org. Such alternative worship had a false start in England in the mid-1990s, in an innovative programme known as the Nine O’Clock Service led by Revd Chris Brian, with whom Fox initially sought to collaborate. The programme disintegrated amid allegations of impropriety that received wide media coverage (see e.g. Howard 1996).


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printed 1m copies of its guide to the code. . . . The calculation is that the film will boost the number of seekers—and that the churches will then knock Mr Brown’s nonsense out of their heads.” (The Economist, 20 May 2006:52). Christian responses to J.K. Rowling’s series of books about Harry Potter character and his education at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry have also tended to soften in the new millennium, as noted by Russ Breimeir in Christianity Today (15 November 2005): “The initial Christian outcry against the boy wizard seems to be dying down. Maybe that’s because more and more of us are discovering multiple redemptive themes in the series.” Breimeir’s detailed article notes a number of ways in which ideas in the Harry Potter books, previously opposed by conservative Christians, may also be interpreted to promote traditional Christian values. For instance, the source of the power in magic is not fully explained by Rowling, who has always denied believing the magic in her books represents anything in the real world, and who focuses more on how her characters choose to use their magical powers. Other proponents of such an accommodating approach to Harry Potter include Connie Neal’s What’s a Christian to Do with Harry Potter? (2002) and John Granger’s Looking for God in Harry Potter (2004). For example, Breimeir cites Granger’s re-evaluation of the symbolism of the unicorn, on whose blood the evil Lord Voldemort feeds: “In medieval literature, the unicorn was considered a symbol of Christ, and the Potterian explanation of the life-giving properties of unicorn blood and its consequences for those who drink of it selfishly bears strong resemblance to Paul’s explanation of Holy Communion in 1 Corinthians 11:23–29.” Christian Hostility to the New Age Movement To find rather more hostile Christian reactions to Rowling, one only has to type “Harry Potter” and “Christian” into an Internet search engine or into an online bookstore, to find scores of publications (see Kemp 2002 for a summary). There is even a Christian film, Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged (2001) produced by Caryl Matrisciana, author of the early hostile critique Gods of the New Age (1985) (also made into a film); and at the far extreme there are reports of public book burnings (Robinson 2002/2000). Such Christians object to, for instance, the approval of Hogwarts’ white magic over the Dark Arts of Lord Voldemort, and the depiction of magic not in a fantasyland, but in the real world.

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Hostile Christian reactions to Harry Potter, although they rarely mention the New Age Movement by name and instead focus on witchcraft and the occult in general, in fact continue a tradition of hostile Christian approaches beginning with Constance Cumbey’s The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow (1983). Cumbey portrayed the New Age Movement as a sinister Nazi network organised by followers of Alice Bailey that was planning a new world government and the elimination of unbelievers. When this tract became a best-seller, New Age became a cause for concern among the wider Christian community. Hostile Christian critiques of New Age in similar vein and varying degrees of sensationalism include those by Vishal Mangalwadi (1992), Elliot Miller (1989) and Walter Martin (1989). The more sensationalist, such as Roy Livesey (1983, etc.) and Texe Marrs (1987, etc.) tapped into long-standing conspiracy theories of a New World Order orchestrated variously by the Vatican, international bankers, Jews, the Rothschild family, Cecil Rhodes and other staple conspirators. Frank Peretti even authored best-selling novels (1986, 1989) depicting spiritual warfare between conservative Christians and New Agers (and they are a good read). New Age first became visible publicly from the mid-1970s, and was boosted by the success of Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy (1982).8,9 By the early 1980s, New Age was frequently covered in regional 8 Even though, as has been noted by several scholars, Ferguson refers to the Aquarian Age rather than the New Age, and her lengthy, relatively difficult text popularising alternative scientific theories, was not typical of later best-selling texts in the genre—nor indeed was it typical of New Age practice as it later developed. 9 Conspiracy theorists might cite Alice Bailey’s date of 1975 for which the Plan was to go public: The Dissemination of Information of a Preparatory Nature Those who do the work of reaching humanity with the needed information fall into two main groups: 1. Disciples and convinced aspirants who are today working in the field of occultism. 2. Those disciples and initiates who will emerge from the three Ashrams and whose work is largely to act as the vanguard of the Hierarchy and precede it into outer manifestation. This will begin in the year 1975, if the disciples now active will do their work adequately. (Bailey 1957:587) Bailey’s explanation of this date is that the interrelation of the constellations of Leo, Capricorn and Pisces had potent effect on the planet “in 1875 [the year in which the Theosophical Society was founded], achieved momentum in 1925, will reach its highest expression (for good or evil) in 1945 and will then decline slowly until 1975. These three constellations are . . . curiously and most mysteriously related to the fourth kingdom in nature and therefore to the evolution and the destiny of the human family. Add to these the emerging energy of Aquarius, and you have four energies which are playing upon the vehicles of men and producing peculiar effects—both destructive and constructive” (Bailey 1951:537; cf. Bailey 1942:737; 1957:48, 694; 1960:255, 716; etc.).


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and national newspaper reports.10 Many journalists writing on New Age could not avoid a smirk, associating New Age with mercenary exploitation of traditions of questioned authority, and unconventional and bizarre therapies. New Age was often in this period described with terms such as ‘fad’ or a ‘craze,’ and typically reified into a movement, referred to as the New Age Movement, sometimes abbreviated to NAM. The exact meaning of the descriptive tag ‘Movement’ was rarely explored critically, even by the first sociologists of the phenomena,11 and it is not known who was the first to describe New Age in this way. When rationalised, Christian hostility to the New Age Movement was essentially doctrinal (e.g. Groothuis 1986, etc.): New Age appeared to manifest many of the traditional marks of heresy, including pantheism, polytheism, monism, humanism, salvation by works rather than grace (the ancient doctrine of Pelagianism), and above all a liberal, relativist conception of truth. Ritual aspects of New Age were also unorthodox, with non-Christian and innovative elements incorporated into alternative liturgies not only in covens and magical circles, but also within a number of churches (two of the better-known examples being St James’s church, Piccadilly, London and St John the Divine, New York). The meditative approach of New Age was suspected as ‘demonic possession’ in some Christian circles, especially when facilitated by invoking a Guardian Angel or other deva. The soft spiritualist artefacts of candles, essential oil burners, New Age music, decorative suns and moons, and all things green and natural, were alien to many Christians who had often acculturated their worship to a seemingly non-spiritual, even secularised style that befitted an earlier generation. Such Christian hostility to the New Age Movement was very vocal, and gained the attention of church authorities in major denominations, many of which set up working groups to address the ‘problem.’ The sources cited in the resultant official reports12 were sometimes limited to such hostile Christian publications, with inevitable effects:

Source: LexisNexis. The academic term ‘New Age Religion’ (Hanegraaff 1996) was used more reflectively, but was not widely adopted no doubt primarily because it did not accommodate New Age antipathy to organised religion and its preference for non-hierarchical ‘spiritualities.’ 12 In addition to those mentioned in the main text here, see also the Methodist Church’s Faith and Order Committee Report to Conference in 1994, The New Age Movement and the Church of Scotland’s report, Young People and the Media (1993), which included a section on New Age. All official church reports on New Age mentioned in this chapter are available via www.Christaquarian.net. 10

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daren kemp All the NAM authors teach that the Spirit Hierarchy have a master plan for planet Earth, which they operate in every age through their disciples, who influence the course of history . . . . What is afoot is the reconstruction of a new World Order, carried out by a group of high Initiates who are experts in every field. The New Age social structures will come from these people. This will lead inexorably towards a One World Government, where high Initiates will be in charge. Part of this plan is also a One World Church, which these writers refer to as the New World Religion. (Irish Theological Commission 1994)

It is difficult to read such second-hand paranoia without being shocked by the credulity of its authors, but they were not alone. More balanced and better-researched official church reports include a chapter in the Church of England’s Mission Theological Advisory Group report of 1996, The Search for Faith and the Witness of the Church, and the provisional report, Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the “New Age”, by the (Roman Catholic) Pontifical Council for Culture and the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, published in February 2003. The Church of England report suggested various responses to New Age: liturgies that address peoples’ experiences, commissioning of artwork, use of the metaphor of pilgrimage for Christian faith; praise of God as creator, recognition of the community of Christian believers; seeing the wholeness of the Earth, and rediscovery of ‘spiritual’ language, such as that of ‘angels’. The Catholic report is especially well-researched and referenced, and calls for Christian discernment of heterodox practices that are reminiscent of ancient Gnosticism, while acknowledging that for many people, New Age meets spiritual challenges that the church has often failed to meet. With such a large number of hostile Christian critiques of New Age, many Christians have only second-hand knowledge of the phenomena. Geoffrey Walker (forthcoming), in a study of attitudes of Christian clergy to ‘folk religion’ in Somerset, southern England, describes the way in which some clergy believe themselves to be encountering New Age, pagan and neo-pagan influences, but in fact have little or no such actual personal experience. A similar pattern of derivative knowledge was found in my own study of attitudes to New Age in an evangelical Anglican congregation (Kemp 2003:144–61).


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Christians in proto-New Age Wouter Hanegraaff has identified what he calls a proto-New Age, in which what would later become New Age-proper emerged from nineteenth century occult, Theosophical and Spiritualist groups, and in which the literal advent of a new era of history was central. Steven Sutcliffe has also examined what he calls the Children of the New Age (2003) in the early twentieth century, in which early protagonists of New Age, especially those centred around the Findhorn Foundation (f.1962) of Eileen and Peter Caddy and Dorothy MacLean, and the Wrekin Trust of Sir George Trevelyan (1906–96), became distinguishable from occult trends already present in the Edwardian period and earlier, as exemplified in Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) and periodical journals such as The Occult Review and The New Age. Despite the work of these two scholars, little is yet known about early Christian interaction with proto-New Age. It seems probable that the vast majority of Christians in this period, like most of the rest of the population, were unaware of the ‘children of the New Age.’ What is interesting, however, is that a number of proto-New Agers were influenced by Christianity. Many key protagonists had a Christian background. Alice Bailey (1880–1949), founder of the Lucis Trust in 1922, and responsible for popularising the contemporary understanding of the phrase ‘New Age,’ worked as a Christian missionary in India (Bailey 1973) and employed Christian imagery and ideas throughout her works. David Spangler (b. 1945), who is often credited with transforming the proto-New Age he found on his arrival in 1970 at the Findhorn Foundation to the more popular New Age-proper, also continued to use Bailey’s Christian motifs (e.g. Spangler 1993). Eileen and Peter Caddy, co-founders of the Findhorn Foundation, first met through a recruitment drive by Moral Re-Armament (MRA), an international movement with Christian roots13 (Sutcliffe 2003:59).

13 MRA was known until 1938 as the Oxford Group movement. Promoting obedience to divine guidance and public confession, MRA also influenced Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, which has similarities to New Age. It may be significant that Roy Livesey, who campaigns against New Age from a fundamentalist perspective (see further in text), was also a member of MRA. Since 2001, MRA has been known as Initiatives of Change.

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Anna Kingsford (1846–88) and Edward Maitland (1824–97) taught a system of esoteric Christianity, later influenced by Theosophy, lecturing on the “new gospel” in The Perfect Way; Or, the Finding of Christ (1882). Annie Besant (1847–1933) had been tutored by an evangelical Christian, first married Revd Frank Besant, an evangelical Anglican clergyman, and championed the ideas of Kingsford and Maitland in her Esoteric Christianity (1901) before becoming President of the Theosophical Society in 1907. Revd Charles W. Leadbeater (1854–1934), an associate of Besant and instrumental in the promotion of Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) as World Teacher, was first an Anglican clergyman and later a Bishop in the Liberal Catholic Church, and channelled a hymnbook and liturgy under dictation from St Germain. Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) broke away from the Theosophical Society in 1909 largely because of the Krishnamurti affair, and formed the Anthroposophical Society, which has a strong Christology and an allied church, The Christian Community, founded as the Movement for Religious Renewal in 1922. Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), founder of Christian Science, was brought up a Calvinist Congregationalist and always understood her new church to be part of mainstream Christianity (Kemp 2003:134–6). G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?–1949), whose influence on New Age is widely acknowledged, said that the aim of his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was to help pupils become Christian, and also referred to his teaching as “esoteric Christianity” (Wellbeloved 2003:176). Edgar Cayce (1877–1945), also highly influential in the later New Age, may fairly be described both as a fundamentalist Christian, and as a trance channeller. Revd Anthony Duncan prepared occultist Gareth Knight (pen name of Basil Wilby, b. 1930) for confirmation and wrote under his influence, for example, The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic (1969). This mixed Christian/New Age approach is epitomised in David Vaughan’s A Faith for the New Age (1967), which couched imminent expectations of a nuclear catastrophe in both Christian and New Age settings. The observation of Christian influences within proto-New Age should nevertheless be tempered by the equally valid observations, firstly that Christianity was much more prevalent in this period and thus the significance of Christian backgrounds should be weighted accordingly; secondly that many proto-New Agers were not influenced by Christianity in this way; and thirdly that many Christians at the time were hostile to occultism, esotericism and alternative movements such as Theosophy and Spiritualism.


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Christaquarians Early positive Christian interaction with proto-New Age continued among a minority when proto-New Age became understood as the New Age Movement, and continues today in post-Christendom New Age culture. I have described people with this approach as Christaquarians—otherwise known as New Age Christians, or Christian New Agers (Kemp 2003). These are people who profess Christianity and are also open to New Age; or alternatively, New Agers who utilise aspects of the Christian tradition; or further, people who would describe themselves neither as New Age nor as Christian, but whom scholars might describe as such. In fact, respondents and fieldwork subjects rarely describe themselves in this way,14 are not networked into a collective movement, and are numerically of little significance compared even to small Christian denominations. Nevertheless, examples of Christaquarians abound. There is a large number of small, local study groups reading the tome A Course in Miracles (Anonymous 1985), which is thought to have been channelled from Jesus (Kemp 2004:13–28), uses traditional Christian terminology in new ways, and shows the influence of Christian Science, visualisation and Freudianism. Paulo Coelho (b. 1947), a best-selling author of accessible spiritual novels such as The Alchemist (1999) and The Zahir (2004), professes Catholicism and writes on New Age themes such as spiritual quests and self-discovery. Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have popularised ancient Christian Gnostic ideas in best-selling books The Jesus Mysteries (1999), Jesus and the Goddess (2001) and The Laughing Jesus (2005), and give a large number of lecture tours. Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God series (1995, etc.) and Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (2001) both draw on the Christian tradition and vocabulary to appeal to a wide contemporary spiritual audience. What may be more significant than these well-publicised books adopting a New Age approach to Christianity (or a Christian approach to New Age), is that many grassroots members of traditional congregations increasingly put such ideas into practise in their everyday lives, without giving much thought to it. In many circles, it is not at all

14 Although see e.g. Groff 1988; Detweiler 1998; and see later on this and an allied research difficulty.

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incongruent that a regular and committed church-goer will also attend a weekly yoga class, use homeopathic medicine bought in the high street pharmacy, occasionally consult a Tarot card reader, prefer the idea of reincarnation to resurrection, or believe that all spiritual paths lead to the same God. Such crossovers may simply reflect the increasing influence of formerly alternative spiritualities on mainstream culture. In this way, after a relatively brief period of polarisation between traditional Christianity and the seemingly concrete New Age Movement, Christian interaction with New Age in such circles simply reverts to the original historical tendency for cross-fertilisation of ideas between Christianity and proto-New Age. Studies of Christians and New Age The academic literature on Christian interaction with New Age is small and not well known. It is surveyed in depth in Kemp (2003) and Saliba (1999), and only a brief listing can be given here. Unsurprisingly, almost all academic writers on the subject are partisan to either traditional Christianity or New Age Christianity, and there are few disinterested accounts. Early academic studies by conservative Christians are of strictly limited influence: Ron Rhodes’ An Examination and Evaluation of the New Age Christology of David Spangler (1986), Alan Roxburgh’s On Being the Church in a New Age (1991), and Barton Dean English’s, The Challenge of the New Age to Christian Theology and Life (1994). Academic studies by Christians open to New Age15 also remain obscure, for example, Revd Don MacGregor’s The New Age Critique of the Church: What Can we Learn from it? (1993) and Gillian Paschkes-Bell’s Christian Belief and the ‘New Awareness’: A Qualitative Sociological Study and a Theological Critique (1998). Academic studies by Christians who strive for an impartial approach include What is the New Age Saying to the Church? (Drane 1991), Christian Responses to the New Age Movement: A Critical Assessment (Saliba 1999), and my own The Christaquarians? A Sociology of Christians in the New Age (Kemp 2003)—and these last are summarised below. Revd Dr John Drane (1991) defines the New Age with reference to Shirley MacLaine, an actress who popularised New Age; J.Z. Knight who channelled Ramtha, an ancient warrior; the use of crystals in spirituality;

15

Available with other relevant materials at www.Christaquarian.net.


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and management training. Drane believes that 80% of New Agers are lapsed Christians, disillusioned by a mechanistic and reductionist style of Christianity (Drane 1991:214, 238). Nevertheless, Drane sees common themes in New Age and Christianity: personal freedom and maturity, the environment, peace, justice, self-discovery and a holistic view of life (Drane 1991:214). The main difference between Christianity and the New Age is said to be that the New Age identifies the basic problem as alienated or undeveloped consciousness, while Christians affirm that the problem is moral, not metaphysical (Drane 1991:214). Drane recommends that the church should become less intellectual, and give people the kind of spirituality they want, with an emphasis on the supernatural. John Saliba (1999) analyses Christian responses to the New Age Movement in three categories—evangelical/fundamentalist, Protestant and Orthodox, and Catholic—each of which are illustrated with a number of examples. Evangelical/fundamentalist responses are described as confrontational, apologetical and pastoral (Saliba 1999:63), and are thought unlikely to be effective (ibid.:78). Protestant and Orthodox responses to the New Age Movement are further divided into three sub-categories, described as: firstly, maintaining that only Christianity is the true religion; secondly, allowing for some truth and goodness in other religions; and thirdly, arguing that all religions are equally valid paths to revelation and salvation (Saliba 1999:124). Catholic responses are subdivided into four: firstly, traditional and dogmatic; secondly, traditional, but open to the positive side of New Age; thirdly, the official Catholic reaction which incorporates materials from the first two methods; and fourthly, an innovative attempt to harmonise New Age and Catholic world views. In The Christaquarians? A Sociology of Christians in the New Age (Kemp 2003),16 I examined whether Christians who were open to New Age had formed a cohesive movement, and concluded that there was no such self-consciousness of a collective identity. Three case studies were researched—St. James’s church in Piccadilly, the network Christians Awakening to a New Awareness (CANA), and the Omega Order retreat house—and compared with an evangelical Anglican congregation. The case studies were also used to illustrate New Age as a postmodern spirituality; ‘cognitive dissonance’ (Festinger et al. 1956; Festinger 1957)

16

See Kemp (2004b) for a summary.

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where people hold seemingly contradictory beliefs; the processes through which people become New Agers; and a possible ‘legitimating tradition’ of esoteric Christianity on which Christaquarians could be seen to draw. Research Difficulties Studies of Christians and New Age have not always overcome two fundamental difficulties of research in the area. The first difficulty is encountered by all studies of New Age: very few people describe themselves as New Agers. Some scholars object to the classification of subjects under a label the subjects would not use themselves, but this is arguably an academic privilege. The difficulty then becomes how to delimit the New Age population. An operational definition must be adopted but, of course, there is no generally accepted definition of New Age. This difficulty is now also compounded by suggestions examined above that the New Age Movement is passé, having been overtaken by Next Age or generalised postmodern alternative spiritualities. Similar difficulties must be considered with profession of Christianity. Many people describe themselves as Christian, but mean vastly different things by this. Others do not profess Christianity but nevertheless hold many core beliefs and values held by others who do profess Christianity. This is related to the problem in interpreting census surveys where people may tick the ‘Christian’ box for their religion, meaning only that they do not belong to any other faith tradition. Again, while most people think they know what is meant by Christianity, there is no authoritative definition and so decisions must be made by researchers as to an operational definition to delimit the Christian population. This problem is also compounded by the growing acknowledgement that we are now in a post-Christendom era. Avoidance of the New Age label is of particular salience in studies of New Age among Christians given the noted hostility of many Christians—there is the real fear of being branded ‘heretical.’ This impacts not just on self-description as New Age, but also on willingness to report beliefs and practices that are perceived by the respondent as being thought of by others as New Age. For example, many Christians concerned about being branded New Age by hostile evangelists, may at the very least under-report their use of non-traditional spiritual traditions in their daily life and worship, and are quite likely not to mention them at all.


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The second major difficulty with research on Christians and New Age is also related to the problem of definition, but in a more theoretical way. Sometimes, the substitute phrase ‘alternative spiritualities’ is used for New Age (e.g. Possamaï 2005), highlighting the fact that New Age is often understood as alternative to the mainstream, which in the West is of course still essentially Christian or post-Christian. Thus, the concept of New Age is often unconsciously constructed, prior to any research or fieldwork, as in opposition to mainstream Christian society. This problem was recognised as early as Hanegraaff (1995), and is discussed comprehensively in Hanegraaff (2005). Such constructional deficiencies are infrequently acknowledged by scholars of New Age. They may have been exacerbated by the at times unquestioning acceptance of the concept of a concrete New Age Movement, as originally popularised by hostile Christians. Unfortunately, a consequence of such an oppositional construction of New Age is that it becomes difficult to theorise alternative spiritualities becoming mainstream, and New Age within the church is understood by definition as an anomaly. Nevertheless, although these constructional problems can be elaborated, it is difficult to overcome them with a substantive rather than an oppositional definition of New Age. There is no generally accepted definition of New Age. The appropriateness of substantive examples of New Age given in some studies (e.g. aromatherapy, crystals, meditation) may be contested both by other academics and by subjects themselves. One possible resolution of this definitional problem that has been explored by many academics is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ theory of definition, which suggests that we can define a concept in the same way as we can recognise members of the same human family, through their shared characteristics, without being able to produce a definitive list of identifying traits (Kemp 1996). Conclusion Christian interaction with New Age may thus tentatively be divided into three historical phases: first, a shared history and background in ‘proto-New Age’; later, vocal hostility to the New Age Movement when it first became public in the 1980s; and more recently, the mission of the emerging churches to post-Christendom now that it is acknowledged New Age has gone mainstream. Continuing parallel to

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these three phases, a tiny minority, whom I have called Christaquarians, have been open to both mainstream Christianity and New Age. Operational and definitional difficulties must be considered prior to effective research in the area. Despite the inordinate amount of research on mainstream Christianity, and the growing literature on New Age, there has been little academic study of the interaction between the two. Much of this has concentrated on the middle phase of hostile Christian responses to the New Age Movement, and so fruitful topics for new studies include historical Christian influences on proto-New Age, and the interaction between emerging church and generalised New Age in post-Christendom. References Abanes, R., 2001. Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magic. Camp Hill PA: Horizon Books. Alberge, D., 2006. “Damien’s Second Coming is a Bad Omen for the Church.” The Times, 13 May. Anonymous, 1985. A Course in Miracles. Harmondsworth: Arkana. The Archbishops’ Council, 2004. Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context. London: Church House Publishing. Bailey, A., 1942. A Treatise on the Seven Rays: Volume 2—Esoteric Psychology II. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1951. A Treatise on the Seven Rays: Volume 3—Esoteric Astrology. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1957. The Externalization of the Hierarchy. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1960. A Treatise on the Seven Rays: Volume 5—The Rays and the Initiations. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. ——, 1973. The Unfinished Autobiography. New York: Lucis Publishing Company. Breimeier, R., 2005. “Redeeming Harry Potter.” Christianity Today, 15 November. Brown, D., 2004. The Da Vinci Code. London: Corgi. Carrette, J. & R. King, 2005. $elling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. London: Routledge. Coelho, P., 1999. The Alchemist. London: HarperCollins. ——, 2005. The Zahir. London: HarperCollins. Clifford, R. & P. Johnson, 2001. Jesus and the Gods of the New Age: Communicating Christ in Today’s Spiritual Supermarket. Oxford: Lion. Clifford, R., P. Johnson & J. Drane, 2001. Beyond Prediction: The Tarot and Your Spirituality. Oxford: Lion. Cumbey, C., 1983. The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow. Lafayette: Huntington House. Detweiler, N.B., 1998. A New Age Christian: My Spiritual Journey. Richmond, Virginia: Bridging the Gap Ministries. Drane, J., 1991. What is the New Age Saying to the Church? London: HarperCollins. Duncan, A., 1969. The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic. London: George & Allen Unwin. English, B.D., 1994. The Challenge of the New Age to Christian Theology and Life. Edinburgh: PhD thesis.


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Ferguson, M., 1982. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. London: Paladin. Festinger, L., 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. London: Tavistock Publications. Festinger, L., H.W. Riecken & S. Schachter. 1956, When Prophecy Fails. New York: Harper & Row. Freke, T. & P. Gandy, 1999. The Jesus Mysteries: Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? London: Thorsons. ——, 2001. Jesus and the Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians. London: Thorsons. ——, 2005. The Laughing Jesus: Religious Lies and Gnostic Wisdom. New York: Harmony Books. Frost, R., 2001. A Closer Look at New Age Spirituality. Eastbourne: Kingsway. ——, 2002. Essence. Eastbourne: Kingsway. Granger, J., 2004. Looking for God in Harry Potter. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House. Groff, J.W., 1988. Sebastian. NP: 1stBooks. Groothuis, D.R., 1986. Unmasking the New Age, Leicester: InterVarsity Press. Hanegraaff, W.J., 1995. “Empirical Method in the Study of Esotericism.” Methods and Theory in the Study of Religion 7.2 99–129. ——, 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture. Leiden: Brill. ——, 2005. “Forbidden Knowledge: Anti-Estoeric Polemics and Academic Research.” Aries 5.2 225–54. Heelas, P. & L. Woodhead, 2005. The Spiritual Revolution. Oxford: Blackwells. Hexham, I., 1992. “The Evangelical Response to the New Age.” In Lewis, J.R. & J.G. Melton, eds. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany: SUNY. Howard, R., 1996. The Rise and Fall of the Nine O’Clock Service: A Cult Within the Church? London: Mowbray. Introvigne, M., 2000. New Age & Next Age. Casale Monferrato: Piemme. Kemp, D., 1996. “Family Resemblance Categorisation Theory.” Paper presented at the King’s College London Postgraduate Sociology of Religion seminar, December, available at www.Christaquarian.net. ——, 2002. “Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings: Contemporary Civil Religion and some Christian Responses—Chasing Phantoms that Have Left Traces in Reality?” Paper presented at the 10th Annual Conference on Contemporary and New Age Religions, Open University, Milton Keynes, 25 May, available at www. Christaquarian.net. ——, 2003. The Christaquarians? A Sociology of Christians in the New Age. London: Kempress. ——, 2004a. New Age: A Guide—Alternative Spiritualities from Aquarian Conspiracy to Next Age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ——, 2004b. “The Christaquarians? A Sociology of Christians in the New Age.” In Lewis, J.R., ed., The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of New Age Religions. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Kimball, D., 2003. The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Lau, K.J., 2000. New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Livesey, R., 1983, More Understanding Alternative Medicine. Chichester: New Wine Press. Lyon, D., 1993. “A Bit of a Circus: Notes on Postmodernity and New Age.” Religion 23 117–126. MacGregor, D., 1993. The New Age Critique of the Church—What can we Learn from It? St John’s College, Nottingham: MA dissertation. Mangalwadi, V., 1992. In Search of Self Beyond the New Age. London: Spire. Marrs, T., 1987. Dark Secrets of the New Age. Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books. Martin, W., 1989. The New Age Cult. Minneapolis: Bethany House.

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Matrisciana, C., 1985. Gods of the New Age. London: Marshall Pickering. Melton, J.G., 1998. “The Future of the New Age Movement.” In E. Barker & M. Warburg, eds. New Religions and New Religiosity. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 133–49. Miller, E., 1989. A Crash Course on the New Age Movement. Eastboume: Monarch Publications. Moynagh, M., 2004. emergingchurch.intro. Oxford: Monarch. Murray, S., 2004. Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World. London: Authentic Media. Neal, C., 2002. The Gospel According to Harry Potter: Spirituality in the Stories of the World’s Most Famous Seeker. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Paschkes-Bell, G., 1998. Christian Belief and the ‘New Awareness’ a Qualitative Sociological Study and a Theological Critique. Oxford University: MTh dissertation. Peretti, F., 1986. This Present Darkness. Eastbourne: Kingsway. ——, 1989. Piercing the Darkness. Eastbourne: Kingsway. Possamai, Adam, 2005. In Search of New Age Spiritualities. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rhodes, R., 1986. An Examination and Evaluation of the New Age Christology of David Spangler. Dallas Theological Seminary: ThD thesis. Richomnd, Y., 2005. Evangelism in a Spiritual Age: Communicating Faith in a Changing Culture. London: Church House Publishing. Robinson, B.A., 2002/2000. “Negative Reviews by Conservative Christians to the Harry Potter Books.” Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, available at http://www. religioustolerance.org/potter2.htm. Rowling, J.K., 1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. Roxburgh, A.J., 1991. On Being the Church in a New Age. Northern Seminary Toronto: DMin thesis. Spangler, D., 1993. “The New Age: The Movement Toward the Divine.” In Ferguson, D., ed. New Age Spirituality: An Assessment. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press. Saliba, J.A., 1999. Christian Responses to the New Age Movement: A Critical Assessment. London: Geoffrey Chapman. Spencer, N., 2005. Beyond the Fringe, Researching a Spiritual Age: The Report of Revd Yvonne Richmond’s Exploration in the Diocese of Coventry into the Spirituality of People Outside the Church. Calver: Cliff College. Sutcliffe, S., 2003. Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices. London: Routledge. Tacey, D., 2004. The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality. London: Brunner-Routledge. Tolle, E., 2001. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Tomlinson, D., 1995. The Post-Evangelical. London: Triangle. Van Hove, H., 1999. “L’émergence d’un ‘marché spirituel’.” Social Compass 46.2 161–72. Vaughan, D., 1967. A Faith for the New Age. London: Regency Press. Walker, G., forthcoming. “ ‘The Glastonbury Effect’: Christianity and the Significance of Glastonbury as ‘Place’ and ‘Experience’.” Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies. Washington, P., 1993. Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. London: Secker & Warburg.

CONTRIBUTORS Marion I. Bowman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Jenny Butler is a doctoral candidate researching pagan culture in Ireland, and a part-time lecturer, in the Folklore and Ethnology Department of University College Cork, Ireland. María Julia Carozzi is tenured researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technology Research (CONICET) and the University of San Martin, Argentina. George D. Chryssides is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Dominic Corrywright is Principal Lecturer, Field Chair Religious Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Miguel Farias is a Research Associate at the Ian Ramsey Centre, Theology Faculty, Oxford University, UK and at the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind. Liselotte Frisk is Professor in the Department of Religion, Dalarna University, Sweden. Pehr Granqvist is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden. Olav Hammer is a Professor of History of Religions at the University of Southern Denmark. Wouter J. Hanegraaff is Professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Melissa Harrington completed her doctoral studies in the sociology of religion at King’s College, London, UK, in 2006. Adrian Ivakhiv is Associate Professor, and coordinator of the graduate programme in Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont, USA.

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Daren Kemp is co-editor of the Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies, www.asanas.org.uk. Anna E. Kubiak is cultural anthropologist in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. James R. Lewis is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, USA. J. Gordon Melton is founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and a research specialist with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. Christopher Partridge is Professor of Contemporary Religion at the University of Chester, UK, and Co-director of the Research Centre for Religion and Popular Culture. Inken Prohl is Professor of Religious Studies, Ruprecht-Karls University, Heidelberg, Germany. Martin Ramstedt is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Germany. Mikael Rothstein is Associate Professor in the Section of History of Religions of the Department for Cross-cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Steven Sutcliffe lectures in Religious Studies at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, UK. Maria Tighe is a doctoral candidate/researcher in complementary and alternative medicine for the UK government Department of Health (2003–7) hosted in the Sociology Department, University of Bristol, and a visiting lecturer in the School of Integrated Health, University of Westminster, UK.

INDEX Access to Western Esotericism (Faivre), 438 acupuncture, 424 Aetherius Society, 249 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 170 Age of Aquarius. See Aquarian Age Agonshû, 366 Ahlin, Lars, 110 The Alchemist (Coelho), 465 alchemy, 46–47 Aliens Among Us (Montgomery), 87 allopathic medicine, 416–420 Aloha Kulanui (Denmark), 323–324 Aloha Project, 324–326 Alternative and Complementary Health Research Network (ACHRN), 421 alternative medicine, 380 Alternatives, 177n4 Amaral, Leila, 352–353 American Metaphysical Movements, 29 Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, 83 Angel therapy, 428–431 animal magnetism, 383–384 animism, 367–368 Anthroposophical Society, 7, 61, 391n21, 464 apocalyptic beliefs, 27 Aquarian Age, 9, 85, 406–407 The Aquarian Conspiracy (Ferguson), 28, 38, 215n2, 231n1 The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (Dowling), 20 Aquarius Now (Ferguson), 13 Arcane School, 53, 69, 83 Argüelles, José, 265 Art of War (Sun Tzu), 196 Arthur, King, 294–295, 305 Ascended Masters, 6–7, 83, 94, 249 Ascension, 92–95 Asian philosophies, 196 Assagioli, Roberto, 243 astrology, 84, 88–89, 364, 405, 408–410 audience cults, 158–159 Augustine, 383 Aum Shinrikyô, 366 Auroville, 264 autonomy, individual, 346

Avalon, 294–295 Avalon of the Heart (Fortune), 7 “baby boom” generation, 112, 213 “Bad Fairies,” 304–305 Bailey, Alice A., 6–7, 43, 52–54, 62, 66, 68–71, 82, 83, 460, 463 Ballard, Guy W., 82, 83 Baumann, Gerd, 203 Bayes, Thomas, 398n37 Beaudoin, Tom, 200, 201–202 Becker, Howard, 393–394 Benedictine Rule, 189 Besant, Annie, 85, 464 Beth, Laurie, 189 Beyond Prediction: The Tarot and Your Spirituality (Drane), 455–456 biology, 225 Blake, William, 53 Blavatsky, Helena P., 6, 60–61, 387, 410–411 Block Trainings GmbH, 197 Bloom, William, 235, 250, 251, 431 Body and Soul (Roddick), 185–186 Body Shop, 185–186 Bohm, David, 36, 259–260 Böhme, Jacob, 81 Bok, Bart, 387–388 Boltwood, Geoff, 240 The Book of Fortune-Telling (Daily Express), 62 book publishing, 110 Bowman, Marion, 247, 291–314 Braid, James, 385 Britain, 59, 61, 188, 420–426, 445 British Holistic Medicine Association (BHMA), 421 Brooke, John, 219 Brown, Mick, 11 Bruce, Steve, 171 Brunton, Paul, 64, 67 Bryant, Page, 276 Buchman, Frank, 65 Buddhism, 61, 220–221, 361 Buddhism in England ( journal), 61 Buddhist Lodge, 61 Buenos Aires. See Latin America, New Age in

476

index

Bund, 155–156 business, and New Age, 185–187 convergence of, 187–191 corporations as cultic milieu, 196–200 Generation X, 200–202 psychologisation of culture, 191–196 Butler, Jenny, 415–434 Caddy, Peter and Eileen, 8, 240, 463 CAM. See Complementary and Alternative Medicine Campbell, Bruce, 160–161 Campbell, Colin, 16, 157, 209–210 Campbell, Joseph, 255 Cantor, Geoffrey, 219 capitalism, 151–152, 455 Capra, Fritjof, 35, 37, 207, 218–219, 369 Carozzi, María Julia, 341–357 Carrette, Jeremy, 11, 12, 14, 187 Castells, Manuel, 168–169 Cathedral Rock (Sedona), 272 Catholics/Catholicism, 125 Cayce, Edgar, 464 Celestine Prophecy (Redfield), 38, 95 Celtic Christianity, 294 Celtic spirituality, 428 Centre for Psychological Astrology, 411 chakra system, 418 Chakraborty, S.K., 190 Chakravarty, Ajanta E., 190 Chalice Well, 308 Changi Airport, 186 channelling, 32–33, 83–84, 94 Chevreul, Michel Eugène, 385 Children of the New Age (Sutcliffe), 463 Chinmayananda, Swami, 189 chiropractic, 424 Chopra, Deepak, 189–190 Christaquarians. See Christian New Age Christ, 70 The Christaquarians? A Sociology of Christians in the New Age (Kemp), 467–468 The Christian Community, 464 Christian millenialism, 69–70 Christian New Age, 453–455 academic studies, 108, 111, 466–468 Christaquarians, 449–450, 465–466 development of, 455–459 influences, 463–464 research difficulties, 468–469 Christian occultism, 7 Christian Science, 82, 225, 464 Christianity alternative gospels, 20

business and New Age, 189 Christaquarians. See Christian New Age hostility to New Age, 20–21, 197–198, 459–462 responses to New Age, 216–218, 244, 456–459 Chryssides, George, 5–24 Church of Shambhala Vajradhara Sangha, 302 Church of the New Jerusalem, 82 churches, 153–154 Claigh, Roberleigh H., 323, 324, 328 Claiming Knowledge (Hammer), 211, 220 client cults, 159 Clifford, Ross, 455 climates, 256 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 273 Coelho, Paulo, 465 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), 215, 381, 387–388 commodification, of religion, 47–48, 235, 299, 304 common sense thinking, 259 communards, 264–265 community. See also network paradigm abstract connectedness, 127, 308–311 changing nature of, 169–175 diffuse, of New Age, 175–179 geography and, 167–168 types of, 168–169 Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), 416, 422–423 Conreaux, Gongmaster Don, 247n18 consciousness, altered states of, 88 Consuming Faith (Beaudoin), 200, 203 convergence, 203 Coon, Robert, 268 Corrywright, Dominic, 17, 106, 167–180 A Course in Miracles, 465 Covey, Steven, 189 Cray, Graham, 457 Creation Spirituality (Fox), 22 Crème, Benjamin, 85 Crowley, Aleister, 52, 53, 80 Crowley, Vivianne, 443–444 crystals, 90 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 198 cult movements, 159, 412 cultic milieu, 157–158, 162, 380, 447 corporations as, 196–200 cults. See also New Religious Movements (NRMs) definitions, 19, 30, 78, 154–157 typology, 158–163

index cultural imperialism, 327 Cumbey, Constance, 21, 460 Cunningham, Scott, 318, 328 The Da Vinci Code (Brown), 20, 458 The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Zukav), 218 Delcour-Min, Paulinne, 247n18 Derrida, Jacques, 242 Discipleship in the New Age (Bailey), 7, 70, 71 dissipative structures, 173–174 divination, 84, 88, 105, 363, 410 Divine Life Society, 189 Dôgen Kigen, 361 Donahue, Michael, 111, 114 Dowling, Levi H., 20 Drane, John, 455, 466, 467 dream catchers, 299 Druidry, 293, 300–301, 435 dualism, 39, 442–443 ecology, 216–218 Eddy, Mary Baker, 464 education, and New Age, 211–216 Education in the New Age (Bailey), 70 education levels, 105 Ehara Hiroyuki, 371–372 Elim Pentecostal Church, 65–66 emerging churches, 454, 456–458 The Emerging New Age (Simmons), 211–212 Encontro para a Nova Consciência, 352–353 energies, 277–282 English-Lueck, J.A., 419–420 Enlightenment rationality, 42, 234, 235, 237–238 entertainment cult, 161 Erhard, Werner, 196–197, 239 Esalen Institute, 193–194 Esoteric Astrology (Bailey), 62 Esoteric Christianity (Besant), 464 Esoteric Psychology (Bailey), 70 Esotericism, Western, 25–50, 40–48, 80–84, 437–439 ESP, 380 Essence (Frost), 458 Essene Society, 8–9 est, 196 European RAMP study, 113, 117 European Values Study, 113, 116, 117 Evah (magazine), 362 Evangelism in a Spiritual Age (Cray), 457 evolutionary theory, 36 evolutionism, 45–46 The Experience Economy (Pine & Gilmore), 200–201

477

experiential truth, 243–245 Experimental Marketing (Schmitt), 200 Exploring New Religions (Chryssides), 22 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Mackay), 385 extra-terrestrial intelligence, 246n17 Ezzy, Doug, 448–449 Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Gardner), 386 faith, 40–41 The Faith called Pacifism (Plowman), 58–59 Faivre, Antoine, 438 Farias, Miguel, 123–150 Ferguson, Marilyn, 9–10, 13, 16–17, 28, 38, 215n2, 231n1, 239, 460 festivals, 344 FIH. See Prince of Wales Foundation for Integrated Health Fili (magazine), 362–363 FIM. See Foundation for Integrated Medicine Findhorn community, 8–9, 17–18, 27, 167, 264, 463 Fingerprints of the Gods (Hancock), 365 Ford, Henry, 192 Fortune, Dion, 6, 7 Foundation for Integrated Medicine, 423 Foucault, Michel, 241 The Foundation for Higher Learning, 249, 252 Foundation for Shamanic Studies, 35 Fox, Matthew, 22, 37, 241, 458 Frazier, Kendrick, 388, 394 Freke, Timothy, 465 Frisk, Liselotte, 103–121 Frost, Rob, 458 Funai Sôgô Kenkyûjo, 364–365 Funai Yukio, 364–365 The Function of Orgasm (Reich), 193 Funder, Lars, 198 Furness, H.H., 385 Gaia hypothesis, 36, 208, 225, 280–281, 309 Gaian golden age, 245–246 The Galaxy on Earth: A Traveler’s Guide to the Planet’s Visionary Landscape (Leviton), 278–279 Gandhi, Mohandas, 63, 64 Gandy, Peter, 465 Gardner, Gerald, 36–37, 435 Gardner, Martin, 386, 390 Geertz, Armin W., 316

478

index

Geissler, Norman L., 21 Geller, Uri, 362 gender, 105, 372, 397–398 Generation X, 200–202 genze riyaku, 373 geography, and community, 167–168 George, Bill, 195 Gerlach, Luther P., 17 Gestalt therapy, 193–194 Gilmore, James H., 200–201 Glastonbury, 167, 291–314 Glastonbury Abbey, 294–295 Glastonbury Goddess Conference, 303–305, 310 Glastonbury Thorn, 306 Glastonbury Tor, 7, 306–307 gnosis, 40–41 Gnosticism, 41, 46–47, 80–81, 245 gnosticism, 405 God is My Adventure (Landau), 65, 66, 67 Goddess movement, 36–37, 293, 303–305 Goleman, Daniel, 190 gospels, Christian, 20 Granqvist, Pehr, 107, 114, 115, 116, 123–150 Great War of 1914–1918, 55, 62 Greene, Liz, 411 Greenwood, Susan, 436 The Growth House, 324 Gurdjieff, G.I., 56 Gyalwa Jampa, His Holiness, 302 Hagekull, Berit, 107, 114, 115, 116 Hair (musical), 12 Hammer, Olav, 211, 220, 322, 379–404 Hancock, Graham, 365 Hanegraaff, Wouter, 6, 10, 25–50, 214–215, 368, 437–438, 463 Happiness Project, 177n4 Hare Krishna movement, 255 Harmonic Convergence of 1987, 86–87, 265–266 Harner, Michael J., 35 Harrington, Melissa, 435–452 Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged (film), 459 Harry Potter books, 459 Hawaiian indigenous religions, 317–320 ethnicity, 327–330 Huna, 320–323 land, 330–335 New Age appropriation of, 323–326, 335–337 healing, 425

healing and spiritual growth, 33–35, 105, 370 Healing Stars, 177n4 health, holistic. See holistic health movement Health in the New Age (English-Lueck), 419–420 Heathenry, 436, 443 Heelas, Paul, 6, 10, 19, 106–107, 109, 115, 249, 258, 418, 431–432, 441–442 Heidegger, Martin, 269 herbal medicine, 424 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, 338 Hess, David, 215 Hick, John, 251 The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow (Cumbey), 460 Hinduism, 190, 301 Hine, Virginia H., 17 hippie movement, 7–8, 12–13, 265 “The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (White), 216 Hodge, Charles, 220 Hofman, Daniel, 185 holistic health movement, 208, 225–226 in Britain, 420–426 defined, 415 treatment examples, 415 holistic individualism, 126 holistic massage, 256–257 holistic science, 35–36 Holmes, Ernest, 223–224 holographic paradigm, 36 Holy Grail, 294, 306 Holy Shop, 370 homeopathy, 398–399 horoscopes, 62, 409–410 Houghton, Michael, 67 Houtman, Dick, 110–111, 114 The Humanist ( journal), 387 Humphreys, T. Christmas, 61 The Huna Code in Religions (Long), 321 Huna Research Inc., 320 The Hundredth Monkey (Keyes), 86–87 “I AM” Religious Activity, 83, 93–94 identity, 255–256 IET. See Integrated Energy Therapy illumination cult, 160 Indian missionary movements, 45 indigenous religions, appropriation of, 315–340, 353–354 individualism/collectivism, 125, 346, 347

index individuals, New Age cognitive looseness and thin boundaries, 129–130 magical thinking and schizotypy, 128–129 motivation and social cognition, 125–128 Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, 464 Institute of Professional Improvement, 256 instrumental cult, 161 Integrated Energy Therapy (IET), 428–431 interconnectedness, 308–311 Internet communities, 176–177 Irani, Merwan Shehiar. See Meher Baba Ireland, 294, 428–431 Isle of Avalon Foundation, 247n18, 298 Itô Masayuki, 367 Ivakhiv, Adrian, 263–286 James, R., 421–422 Japan, New Age in about, 359–360 context of, 365–370 emergence of, 360–365 spirituality as ideology, 370–372 Jeffreys, George, 65 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 90 Jerome, Lawrence, 387–388 Jeserich, Florian, 327n4 Jesus and the Goddess (Freke and Gandy), 465 Jesus and the Gods of the New Age: Communicating Christ in Today’s Spiritual Supermarket (Clifford and Johnson), 455 Jesus Christ, 7, 20, 294, 301–302 Jesus Lived in India (Kersten), 20 The Jesus Mysteries (Freke and Gandy), 465 Joad, C.E.M., 55 Johnson, Kenneth, 322 Johnson, Philip, 455 Jones, Kathy, 303 The Jones Group, 189 Joseph of Arimathea, 294 The Journal of Holistic Healthcare ( journal), 421 The Journal of Humanistic Psychology ( journal), 194 Jung, Carl, 46, 62, 411 Ka Lahui Hawaii, 339 Kahu, 329

479

The Kahuna Way to Create the Future in 5 Steps (Claigh), 328 Kalakaua, David, 322 Katar, 211 Kemp, Daren, 22, 108, 115, 453–472 Kendal, 167–168 KernKonsult, 185 Kersten, Holger, 20 Keyes, Ken, 86–87 Ki Magazine, 362 Kindred Spirit (magazine), 104, 168 King, George, 249 King, Richard, 11, 12, 14, 187 King, Serge Kahili, 324–326, 329–330 Kingsford, Anna, 464 Kôfuku no Kagaku, 366 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 6, 7, 53, 63–64, 85 Kubiak, Anna E., 255–262 Kuhn, Thomas, 29 Kurtz, Paul, 381, 387–388, 390 land, and sacredness, 330–335. See also power places Landau, Rom, 65, 66, 67 Landmark Education International Inc., 196–197 Landmark Forum, 10 The Last Temptation of Christ (film), 458 Latin America, New Age in about, 341–342, 354–356 directions of change, 345–349 organisational infrastructure, 342–345 syncretism, 351–354 The Laughing Jesus (Freke & Gandy), 465 “laws,” spiritual vs. physical, 222–223 Leach-Lewis, Peter W., 249, 252 Leadbeater, Charles W., 464 leadership issues, 444–445, 447 League of Nations, 56–57 Legitimating New Religions (Lewis), 220 Leo, Alan, 410, 411 Leviton, Richard, 278–279 Lewis, James R., 207–229 Liberal Catholic Church, 61 literary categories, New Age, 32–39 Living Wellness retreat, 324 localization of religion, 296–297, 310, 349 Lomi Lomi, 329 Long, Max Freedom, 320–323 Lovelock, James, 36, 225 Lucas, Ernest, 220 Lucis Trust, 61, 69–70 Luhrmann, Tanya, 259, 436

480

index

MacGregor, Don, 22 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 170 Mackay, Charles, 385 MacLaine, Shirley, 28n3, 29, 38, 89, 234, 238–240 magical thinking, 128–129 Magnetist movement, 82 Mahesh Yogi, Maharishi, 189 mainstream religions, 15 Maitland, Edward, 464 Maitreya, 85 Maitreya Monastery, 302 management training. See business, and New Age manga, 363 market economy, and spirituality, 47–48, 235, 304 Martins, Paulo Henrique, 345 Marylebone Experiment, 421 Mascini, Peter, 110–111, 114 Maslow, Abraham, 194 Masters, the, 68–69 McLaren, Brian, 458 McLaughlin, Corinne, 244 Mead, G.R.S., 66 media presence, 86 medical Orientalisms, 425 medicine, allopathic, 210, 225–226, 380, 416–420, 417. See also holistic health movement; science, and New Age meditation, 105 mediumship. See channelling Meher Baba, 63, 64–65 Melton, J. Gordon, 77–97 Meredith, Elandra, 330 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 81, 383–385 The Messenger (magazine), 68 Metaphysical Movements, 44 metaphysical perfection, 442–443 Michell, John, 265 millenialism, progressive, 86–87 Millerite movement, 90 Milne, Courtney, 268 ‘Milton’ (Blake), 53 Modern Esoteric Spirituality (Faivre & Needleman), 438 modernism, 233–236, 247–248 Montgomery, Ruth, 87 Moody, Raymond, 224 Moore, Wilbert E., 316 moral entrepreneurs, 393–394 Morrison, Van, 305 Motivation and Personality (Maslow), 194 motivational goals of New Age, 125–128

Mullins, Mark, 367 multiple seekers, 154 Murphy, Michael, 193–194 Mutantia (magazine), 350 Mysticism (Underhill), 60 mythicisation, 258–261 Nag Hammadi codices, 41 Naqshbandi-Haqqaniyya, 301 National Federation of Spiritual Healers (NFSH), 420 native revivalism. See indigenous religions nature vs. civilisation, 346–347 Naturphilosophie, 214–216 Naylor, R.H., 62 Nazim al-Haqqani al-Qubrusi, Sheikh, 301, 309 near-death experiences, 208 Needleman, Jacob, 438 Neopaganism, New Age, 36–37, 108–109. See also Paganism network paradigm, 152–157. See also community; Segmented Polycentric Integrated Network (SPIN) New Age defence of term, 13–16 definitions, 19–23, 27–29, 37, 38, 78–79, 469 emic/etic objections, 12, 15–16 historical perspective, 80–84 history of term, 5–10, 153 mainstream appeal, 405–413 objections to term, 10–13 origins, 51–54, 71–73, 463–464 as religion vs. spirituality, 379–381 stages of development, 26–31 New Age and Armageddon: The Goddess or the Gurus (Sjöö), 242 The New Age Conspiracy (Ferguson), 9, 460 The New Age ( journal), 56 The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacrilisation of Modernity (Heelas), 441 New Age Religion and Western Culture (Hanegraaff ), 214–215, 437–438 New Age travellers, 8, 12 New Religious Movements (NRMs), 19, 30, 47, 78, 154–158. See also cults New Thought movement, 44, 223–224, 225 NFSH. See National Federation of Spiritual Healers NRMs. See New Religious Movements numerology, 84

index The Occult Review (journal), 61, 66–67 occult sciences, 43 occultists/occultism, 27, 42–44, 59–63 Oedenkoven, Henri, 187 Olcott, Henry Steel, 81 On the Margins of the Visible (Tiryakian), 437 The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for World Revolution (Wells), 57–58 Orage, A.R., 56 Order of the Hidden Masters, 67 Order of the Star in the East (OSE), 52–53 Oriental Renaissance, 44–45 orientation study, 107–108 OSE. See Order of the Star in the East osteopathy, 424 Out on a Limb (MacLaine), 89 Outsiders (Becker), 393–394 Oxford Groups movement, 65 Pacifist movement, 58 Paganism, 20, 435–436 academic studies of, 436–437 conflated with New Age beliefs, 441–446 and Esotericism, 437–439 Neopaganism, 36–37, 108–109 rapprochement with New Age beliefs, 446–450 and Wicca, 439–440 palmistry, 84 pantheism, 239, 241 Paracelsus, 81 participation studies, 109–110 Partridge, Christopher, 231–254 Peace Pledge Union, 58 Pearson, Jo, 439–440, 441, 444 Peck, Scott, 239 Pele cult, 331–332 perennism, 153 The Perfect Way; or, the Finding of Christ (Kingsford & Maitland), 464 Perls, Fritz S., 193–194 personal experience, as truth, 243–245 Peters, David, 421 photography, 268–270 physics, 225 Pietroni, Patrick, 421, 423 pilgrimage natural and cultural sites, 266–267 power places, 263–266 Sedona as example, 270–278 and visual aesthetic, 267–270

481

Pine, B. Joseph, II, 200–201 Pleiades, 246n17 Plowman, Max, 58–59 pluralism, 231–233 Possamai, Adam, 151–165 postmodernism, 233–236, 247–248 The Power of Myth (Campbell), 255 The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (Tolle), 465 PoV. See Psychology of Vision power places, 265, 273–274, 278, 331–335 Power Trips (magazine), 273 precession of the equinoxes, 406n3 premodern cultures, 245–247 Price, Richard, 193–194 Prigogine, Ilya, 36, 173–174 Prince of Wales Foundation for Integrated Medicine, 423 Principe, Walter, 11 Prohl, Inken, 359–374 Prophet, Elizabeth Claire, 249 Protestantism, and New Age, 111–112 protestentisation of religions, 188 Proteus ( journal), 66 proto-New Age movement, 26–27, 463–464 psychic fairs, 159 psychoactive practices, 88 psychoanalysis, 192–193 psychological astrology, 411–412 psychologisation, of culture, 191–196 psychologisation, of religion, 46–47 Psychology of Vision (PoV), 175–178 psychosynthesis, 243 psychotechnology, 175 pyramids, 246n17 quantitative studies of New Age definition of New Age, 119–120 longitudinal data, 118 other than individual questionnaires, 109–110 problems with, 113–116 question formulation, 116–118 surveys of individuals, 104–109 surveys of whole populations, 110–113 quest culture, 51–52, 63–67 The Quest ( journal), 61, 66 Quispel, Gilles, 40–41 Rajneesh, Shree, Bhagwan, 244, 248–249 Ramakrishna mission, 45

482

index

Ramstedt, Martin, 185–205 reality, social construct of, 233–234 The Reappearance of the Christ (Bailey), 7, 70 reason, 40–41 Reconstructing Science (Brooke & Cantor), 219 Red Rock Crossing (Sedona), 276 Redfield, James, 38, 95 Redpath, Tyna, 303 reductionism, 39–40 reflexology, 425 Reich, Wilhelm, 193 Reiki, 425–426 reincarnation, 33, 34, 45–46, 88, 116 religion as chain of memory, 338 commodification of, 47–48, 235, 299, 304 in Japan, 365–370 localization of, 296–297, 310 syncretism and, 316, 351–354 vs. spirituality, 379 Religion and the Return to Magic: Wicca as Esoteric Spirituality (Pearson), 439 religious truth claims, 250–251 Resurgence (journal), 18 Revelation: The Birth of a New Age (Spangler), 12 Revelations from the Melchisadek Priesthood (Coon), 268 Rider Publishing, 66, 67 Ritkes, Rients Ranzen, 190 ritual, 14, 105 Robbins, Tony, 224 Roddick, Anita, 185–186 Rogers, Carl, 194–195 “The Role of the Esoteric in Planetary Culture” (Spangler), 212 Romanticism, 43–44, 44–45, 237–238 Roof, Wade Clark, 112 Rose, Stuart, 104, 116 Rosicrucianism, 81, 83 Rothstein, Mikael, 315–340 Rowe, Dorothy, 11 Rudhyar, Dane, 411 The Sacred Earth (Milne), 268 Sacred Sight Journeys International, 281–282 sacred spaces, 265, 273–274, 278 Salamon, Karen, 198 Saliba, John, 467 Sandeepany Sadhanalaya, 189

Sâo Paulo. See Latin America, New Age in Sasportas, Howard, 411 scepticism argumentation, 390–395 effectiveness, 395–401 foundation of, 381–387 movements, 388–390 and self-reflexivity, 401–402 schizotypy, 128–129 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 11, 238, 379–380 Schmitt, Bernd H., 200 Schumacher College, 18, 168 science, and New Age. See also holistic science about, 207–209 educational discourse of, 211–216 facets of interest in, 224–226 and legitimacy, 220–224 Naturphilosophie, 214–216 and secularisation, 209–211 vs. old traditions, 216–220 Science and the New Age Challenge (Lucas), 220 Science in the New Age (Hess), 215 Science of the Mind (Holmes), 223–224 Scientific and Medical Network (SMN), 420 scientism, 322 Scientology, 197 A Search in Secret Egypt (Brunton), 64 A Search in Secret India (Brunton), 64, 67 The Search ( journal), 66 The Secret Doctrine (Blavatsky), 83 The Secret Message of Jesus (McLaren), 458 The Secret Path (Brunton), 64 Secrets of the Soul (Zaretsky), 191–192 sects, 153–154 secularisation, and science, 209–211, 215, 412 Sedona, Ariz., 270–278 Sedona: Journal of Emergence ( journal), 94, 270, 277 Sedona Magazine, 271 Segmented Polycentric Integrated Network (SPIN), 9–10, 16–19, 168, 447–448. See also community; network paradigm seishin sekai, 359. See also Japan, New Age in Self Religion, 48 self-consciousness, 237–243 self-definitions, 125–126

index self-orientalism, 368 self-reflexivity, 401–402 self-sacrilisation, 443–444 self-spirituality, 418 self-understanding, 91 $elling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (Carrette and King), 11, 187, 455 serial seekers, 154 Seventh-day Adventists, 90 Shaku, Soyen, 220–221 shamanism, 367–368 The Shape of Things to Come (Wells), 57, 72 Sharpham House, 18 Sheldrake, Rupert, 36 Sheppard, Dick, 58 Shimazono Susumu, 366 Shintô, 361, 368, 369 Shivananda, Swami, 189 The Shrine of Wisdom (journal), 66 Simmons, J.L., 211–212 Sjöö, Monica, 242, 252 Skepsis, 389n16 Skeptical Inquirer ( journal), 388 Smith, Adrian B., 22 Smuts, Jan, 419 social cognition, and New Age, 125–128 Society for Psychical Research (SPR), 386–387 Soil Association, 8 Solara, 91–92 Sôtô Zen Buddhism, 361 Soulution: The Holistic Manifesto (Bloom), 431 Spangler, David, 9, 12, 27n2, 37, 85, 90, 212, 463 Spezzano, Chuck and Lency, 175–178 Spink, Peter, 241, 244 SPINs. See Segmented Polycentric Integrated Network (SPIN) spiritual capitalism, 364–365 spiritual materialism, 304 The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (Heelas and Woodhead), 431–432 Spiritual Sanctuary (Ehara), 372 The Spiritual Tourist (Brown), 11 Spiritual World Organization, 362 Spiritualism, 60–63, 82, 83, 223, 224, 385 spirituality, 11, 14–15, 158–161, 187–188, 379 The Star-Borne: A Remembrance for the Awakened Ones (Solara), 92

483

Star-Borne Unlimited, 92–95 Starhawk, 242, 246, 248, 447–448 Steiner, Rudolf, 6, 7, 43 subjectivism, 397 Sufiism, 301 Sundell, Rose-Marie, 324, 329 superstition, 381 supiritualiti, 360n4 surveys of New Age individuals, 104–109 Sutcliffe, Steven, 12, 13, 18, 51–75, 448, 463 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 81, 82 symbols, 258–260 syncretism, 316, 351–354 Systematic Theology (Hodge), 220 Tama (magazine), 362–363 The Tao of Physics (Capra), 35, 207, 218–219 Tareth, 240 Tarot card-reading, 84, 455–456 TCM. See Traditional Chinese Medicine Techno-Cosmic Mass, 458 Teilhard de Chardin Society, 8 The Tenth Insight (Redfield), 95 Theosophical Society, 6–7, 60–61, 68, 387, 410–411 Theosophical traditions, 43 Theosophy, 52–53, 60–62, 82, 83, 322, 406 theosophy, 405 Tighe, Maria, 415–434 Tiryakian, E.A., 437, 438 TM. See Transcendental Meditation Tolle, Eckhart, 465 Toward a Psychology of Being (Maslow), 194 tradition, 260–261, 316, 335–337 traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), 424–426 Transcendental Meditation (TM), 189 Transcendentalism, 43–44 transpersonal psychology, 34–35, 225, 243, 411 travel and tourism. See pilgrimage A Treatise on the Seven Rays (Bailey), 66 A Treatise on White Magic (Bailey), 71 Trevelyan, Sir George, 8–9, 37, 239, 420–421, 463 Triangles, 69 TRINITY for flexible and vigorous women’s magazine, 371 Trinity knot, 21 truth, 243–245, 247–252 Truzzi, Marcello, 390 The Turning Point (Capra), 37

484

index

Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Schleiermacher), 379–380 UFO phenomenon, 27, 208, 211, 226 Underhill, Evelyn, 60 unity vs. diversity in, 38–40 UPT Hans Shuster und Partner GmbH, 197 Urban, Hugh, 283–284 Verstegen, Dick, 190 Vest, Norvene, 189 Vetenskap och Folkbildning, 389n16 The View Over Atlantis (Michell), 265 Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (Beaudoin), 200, 201–202 A Vision of the Aquarian Age (Trevelyan), 9 Vivekananda, 45, 220 Voice, 362 Walker, Ann, 246n17 Wallis, Robert J., 333–334 Watkins, John, Sr., 67 Watts, Alan, 61 Wearyall Hill, 306 Weber, Max, 221–222 Wells, H.G., 57–58 Western Esotericism. See Esotericism, Western

What the Bleep Do We Know? (film), 207, 214 White, Lynn, 216 Wicca, 36–37, 435–451 Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium (Crowley), 443 Wissenschaft, 209 Wittgenstein, L., 171 Woodhead, Linda, 109, 115, 431–432 World Goodwill, 69 World Health Organisation (WHO), 419 World Mate, 366 World Values Study, 113 Wrekin Trust, 8, 420–421, 463 The X-Files (TV show), 261 York, Michael, 108–109, 405–413, 442, 445–447, 451 The Zahir (Coelho), 465 Zaren Foundation, 190 Zaretsky, Eli, 191–192 Zen Buddhism, 190, 361 Zento (journal), 328 Zentrum, 190 The Zetetic ( journal), 388 Zukav, Gary, 218

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