New Age Movements

12 Key excerpts on "New Age Movements"

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  Street Smarts and Critical Theory

  Listening to the Vernacular

  • Thomas McLaughlin(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • University of Wisconsin Press

    (Publisher)

  The New Age movement raises issues about narrative that more academic theories ignore, and its statements on the topic demand and deserve close critical questioning. "New Age" is of course a term of convenience, a media hype label that serves a marketing function more than an analytical one. Nev- ertheless, it is the term we are stuck with. My rough and tentative 78 Stories of the New Age 79 defInition would be that New Age writings share a conviction that we are at a crossroads in history, a time when personal, social, spir- itual, planetary, and cosmic transformation is at hand. Christian, Native American, Asian and other ancient prophecies are said to point to the present as the end of the regime of reason, science, pa- triarchy, linear concepts of time, insidious forms of power, etc., and the beginning of a world that honors the spiritual dimension, intu- ition, the feminine, ecstatic connection between the personal and the cosmic, human spiritual unity, an openness to higher powers, and a fundamental connection to the earth. This sense of living at a moment of planetary transformation fosters a belief in the possibil- ity of radical personal transformation as well. In fact, most New Age writings claim that the transformation must occur fIrst on a personal level. It is only through fInding a new consciousness, they assert, that individuals can contribute to a new identity for the planet, for the universe. Thus programs of personal change and therapy must be understood within larger visions of human spiritual trans- formation. The New Age movement has produced a huge literature on such varied topics as planetary change, spiritual ecology, human evolu- tion, contact with higher intelligences, channeling, near death ex- periences, UFOs, crystals, auras, shamanism, creativity, prophecy, wellness, and healing. As this list suggests, it is not a coherent and organized movement, though it exists in and through complex per- sonal, pedagogical, and economic networks.

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  Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America

  • J. Gordon Melton(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  III. New Age Movement DOI: 10.4324/9781315048154-18 Passage contains an image

  THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315048154-19

  [Note: The New Age Movement differs considerably from the other groups treated in this volume. These other groups are cohesive religious communities with fairly recognizable boundaries and a unified organization. The New Age Movement is a religious-social movement with somewhat vague boundaries. It consists of groups and individuals who, more or less, share its basic vision. Several of the new religions considered elsewhere in this volume, such as the Sikh Dharma and the Church Universal and Triumphant, have been active participants, while others such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Christian Foundation have just as actively opposed it. The movement entered the mass consciousness during the 1980s and has become an important force in presenting alternative religious ideas to Westerners by providing a forum for a wide variety of metaphysical, occult, and Eastern mystical spirituality.]

  Origins

  During the 1970s, religious observers became aware of a diverse new social and religious movement whose most visible proponents were teachers of Eastern and mystical-occult philosophies. Ira Friedlander, an early sympathetic observer, described it thusly,

  A great spiritual energy has been moved to this country and holy men of the East are following it, and, of course, they bring the Light within them to become our mirrors. They establish centers or ashrams and reconfirm the spiritual centers within ourselves. They plant the seeds of inner peace with their divine grace, which remains and nourishes like a good rain that falls on fertile soil; long after the rain has gone, the seed in the soil continues to grow.

  The New Age Movement, as it came to be called, grew on what many had perceived to be a great spiritual hunger in the West. David

  Vaughn, whose A Faith for the New Age

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  Possession, Power and the New Age

  Ambiguities of Authority in Neoliberal Societies

  • Matthew Wood(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In developing this perspective from individuals’ ‘social transactions’, Prince and Riches (ibid., pp. 8–9) eschew explanations of the existence and form of the New Age derived from belief systems or ‘social forces’ such as class. The New Age movement neither exists nor takes the form it does because of people’s social backgrounds, needs or beliefs, or because of social processes such as relating to class or postmodernism (ibid., pp. 15–16, 208, 293). Rather, it exists because of the choices, made by people who are liminal to mainstream society, to leave that society and join non-mainstream communities, based upon space–time preferences (ibid., pp. 214, 278). The radical individualism, flexibility and egalitarianism of the Alternative Community’s social organization, then, represents a choice by those already disposed to those features, presumably on the basis of upbringing and personal experience, and this is why there is an over-representation of the middle-classes, of women, and of the middle-aged (in other words those from the baby-boom generation) in the New Age (ibid., p. 290).

  Common themes

  This review of selected key thinkers demonstrates a number of crucial similarities across the field of New Age studies, despite variations in methodology and theory. Most obviously, there is virtual consensus that a set of diverse social phenomena of beliefs, practices and groups can be categorized as New Age, whether or not these represent a movement. Scholars discern this unity in the shared language, vision or worldview through which insiders use the term ‘New Age’. Sutcliffe accepts the centrality of the New Age taxon amongst disparate phenomena, even if he eschews the idea that they constitute a movement. Similar conclusions have been reached by historians of religion such as Hanegraaff (1996) and Melton (1988; 1992; Melton et al. 1990), and by interview-based researchers such as Steyn (1995) and Bloch (1998).

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  The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

  • James A Beckford, Jay Demerath, James A Beckford, Jay Demerath(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  This chapter scans the periphery of conven-tional religion, employing unifying themes to consider the New Age Movement, parapsy-chology, Atheism, and the challenge to religion posed by what E. O. Wilson (1998) calls the consilience of science, and what Roco and Bainbridge (2003) call the convergence of tech-nology. One theme is the tension between religious authority embodied in traditional denominations and religious traditions, versus the freedom or anarchy represented by a variety of loosely organized parareligious movements, and by people like Atheists and Transhumanists who turn their backs on the supernatural alto-gether. Another is the function that religion performs for individuals, through both pri-mary and secondary compensation for unavail-able but highly desired rewards. A third theme is the progressive consolidation of a secular cul-ture, based partly in science and technology, that is simultaneously libertarian and global, personal and cosmopolitan. THE NEW AGE John A. Saliba (2003: 27) has noted that the New Age ‘has no central organization and no commonly accepted creed.’ However, J. Gordon Melton (2000) has argued that its historical heart was a millenarian movement that coalesced in the 1960s, when popular culture proclaimed the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. As a distinct movement anticipating the spiritual transformation of the world, Melton says, the New Age reached a peak in the 1980s, then faded afterward. The net result was increased public awareness of alternative spiri-tual beliefs and practices. The meaning of the term New Age is currently ambiguous, and many people do not distinguish it from occult or paranormal phenomena. The nearest thing to a definition is that the New Age is whatever is sold in ‘New Age’ shops or in the ‘New Age’ sections of bookstores. The online bookseller, Amazon.com, includes both New Age and Occult categories within a larger category called Religion and Spirituality.

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  Shamanism

  Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mastery of Spirits and Healing

  • Merete Demant Jakobsen(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  To these three elements I would add four others: Native American religion, goddess religion and primitive matriarchy, therapies that integrate body and mind (and ‘spirit’ when it is a separate category from mind) and all things understood to be ‘natural’ (e.g. organic food, natural healing, and ecology). Together these elements locate New Age discourse and practice in an arena of debate and dialogue that takes place with reference to science, religion, feminism, biomedicine, psychotherapy, environmentalism, and non-Western philosophies. (1993: 4) It is almost impossible to imagine a broader definition of a movement. But precisely this broadness is also its strength. It is very difficult to pin-point the New Ager. They might be characterised as ‘greying baby-boomers’, and there is no doubt that a large part of the New Age users are middle-aged and come from the middle classes. It is a middle of the road movement both in terms of age and politics. As New Age cannot be described as a cult, i.e. a religious belief with the worship of a person or idea, it appeals to those who do not want to be trapped inside an institution but at the same time want to feel a certain sense of belonging to a spiritual movement. The sense of a spiritual urge is predominant. 152 Shamanism Transformation is a key word in the New Age terminology. Streiker describes the awakening in the following way: ‘At the heart of the New Age are ecstatic experiences, encounters with mystery, brooding intuitions and strange imaginings. First come the powerful feeling states, penetrating one’s soul like an unexpected, but impenetrable, fog. These states have no name and no content, but soon they attach themselves to symbol-pictures, images of the world as meaningfully related to the individual’ (1990: 143). This experience sets the search in motion for the individual concerned. It becomes important to incorporate this transcendental experience into a concept of life.

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  The Challenge of the Cults and New Religions

  The Essential Guide to Their History, Their Doctrine, and Our Response

  • Ron Rhodes(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Zondervan

    (Publisher)

  6The New Age Movement

  T he New Age movement has been called the fastest-growing alternative belief system in the country. Sociologists at the University of California–Santa Barbara estimate that as many as 12 million Americans could be considered active participants in the movement, and another 30 million are avidly interested. New Ager Marilyn Ferguson asserts that “if all these people were brought together in a church-like organization, it would be the third-largest religious denomination in America.”1

  Certainly a large percentage of Americans are involved in some form of New Age occultism or another. Some 42 percent of American adults presently believe they have personally been in contact with someone who has died. Fourteen percent of Americans endorse the work of spirit mediums or channelers. About 67 percent of American adults claim to have had a psychic experience such as extrasensory perception. Approximately 30 million Americans believe in reincarnation. Some 67 percent of American adults read astrology columns. One out of three Americans believe that fortunetellers can actually foretell the future. There are presently 2,500 occult bookstores in the United States and over 3,000 publishers of occult and New Age books, journals, and magazines. The New Age tome ACourse in Miracles has now sold a million copies and has spawned more than 1,000 study groups in the United States alone.2 Such statistics point to the broad penetration of New Age ideas in Western culture.

  One difficulty in discussing the New Age movement is defining it, for it is not a single monolithic organization. It is best understood as a loosely structured network of individuals and organizations who share a common vision of a new age of enlightenment and harmony (the “Age of Aquarius”), and who subscribe to a common set of religious and philosophical beliefs (“worldview”). This common set of beliefs is based on monism (all is one), pantheism (all is God), and mysticism (the experience of oneness with the divine).3

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  Exploring New Religions

  • George D. Chryssides(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  NEW AGE, WITCHCRAFT AND PAGANISM emphasizing intuition, creativity, imagination, compassion, healing and so forth. This change of emphasis in part derives from a perceived need to develop the whole of the mind, intuitive as well as logical; in part too it derives from a dissatisfaction with traditional scientific ways of looking at the world. For example, despite advances in modern medicine, new drugs have generated harmful side-effects, and new diseases such as AIDS have arisen, defying cure. The New Age does not profess to cure what allopathic medicine cannot, but its emphasis on holistic healing is intended to ensure optimal well-being in times of ill health, and its revival of herbalism and homeopathy are alleged at least to be natural and harmless. A number of antecedent strands contributed to the rise of the New Age. The beatnik and hippie counter-culture had largely blown itself out, and seekers had to look for some alternative spirituality. Abraham Maslow's notion of a hierarchy of needs culminating in the spiritual is often identified as an important influence, as is Teilhard de Chardin's notion of an evolutionary spirituality. Kuhn's notion of the 'paradigm shift' signalling a transition from one way of understanding the world to another radically different set of assumptiops and hypotheses suggested a quest for alternative modes of understanding. The rise of ecological awareness, heralded by the Club of Rome's gloomy report Limits to Growth in 1972, focused attention on the plight of the planet and the need to cherish the earth. Marshall McLuhan's notion of the 'global village' in which all the earth's inhabitants were brought closer and became interdepen-dent was another contributory theme. Added to these, the 1970s saw an increased interest in the paranormal: Lyall Watson's Supernature and Uri Geller's spoon-bending on television aroused much public curiosity.

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  Cults in Context

  Readings in the Study of New Religious Movements

  • Lorne Dawson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Though it has important historical roots in the alternative religious movements of the nineteenth century, the contemporary New Age movement is largely a phenomenon of the late twentieth century, The movement’s socio-political views and values, including its emphasis on individual freedom and self-empowerment, its willingness to innovate and experiment, and its acceptance of planetary, as opposed to an ethnocentric or national, perspective, all resonate with identifiable thematic currents in modern society. New Agers’ stands on social issues generally fall at the opposite end of the spectrum from those of Pentecostals and charismatics. Despite the elements of Judeo-Christian tradition in America that can be found within it, the New Age movement is essentially universalist and eclectic (as opposed to exclusivist) in its appropriation of religious traditions and practices.

  Summary and Conclusion

  It is now possible to posit answers to some of the questions that initiated this inquiry. There do indeed exist significant convergences and parallels between the Pentecostal/charismatic and New Age Movements. First, both movements represent attempts to bring an experience of sacred power into the daily lives of ordinary people.

  The actual means of accomplishing this and the theological models for comprehending these experiences may differ, but the underlying theme remains the same. As McLoughlin has observed, in an awakening the divine’s manifestations are no longer limited to the institutional churches and their functionaries. Instead, these manifestations occur in intense, personal encounters with all levels of humanity, even the lowliest. The spiritual and physical worlds intermingle and the boundaries between the two become permeable.66 The emphasis in both movements on personal experiences with sacred power, whether through channeling, speaking in tongues, prophesying, meditation, laying on of hands, or exorcism, can be understood as aspects of this characteristic manifestation of a great awakening. This democratization of numinous experience can be seen as part of the necessary wresting way from conventional authorities of their hegemony over societal norms, so that the currents of revitalization being pioneered by alternative religious movements can gain some legitimacy in the larger culture.

  Second, both movements place a high value on the reintegration of the individual into an intimate, stable, and meaningful sacred community. In each movement this community ultimately extends beyond conventional ethnic, class, national, regional, and denominational boundaries to embrace the human race as a whole. Third, both of these movements place a strong emphasis on the healing and inner transformation of the wounded, fragmented modern individual through various nonmedical means. Finally, each movement sees itself as part of a planetary spiritual transformation that it is helping to bring about, a transformation wherein the locus of authority will be the individual rather than an institution.

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  The Routledge Handbook of Religious and Spiritual Tourism

  • Daniel H. Olsen, Dallen J. Timothy, Daniel H. Olsen, Dallen J. Timothy(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  New religious movements (NRMs) are described as religions that have emerged from the nineteenth century up to the present (Ashcraft 2018). There are scholarly disagreements about whether the defining characteristic of such groups is their ‘newness’ (Barker 2014), or whether, given no new religion is completely original, historical links with ‘parent’ traditions offer a more accurate way to classify NRMs (Melton 2004, 76). Early scholars of the New Age movement argued that these movements were more fluid and eclectic than many NRMs, which tend to have strong organizational boundaries. However, presently New Age Movements are often considered a subset of NRMs because they are a part of what is considered the ‘cultic milieu’ (Campbell 1972)—both having alternative and non-mainstream beliefs and practices that are rejected by both Enlightenment science and Western Christianity. The secularization of Western culture, which led to the retreat of Christian churches from public life and with it the loss of both membership and public and personal relevance for a sizeable portion of western populations, became the enabling context within which NMRs have flourished. Increasingly secularized public spaces and dialogues encouraged those who were dissatisfied with both traditional Christianity and modern science—‘seekers’ as Colin Campbell termed them (Campbell 1972)—to experiment with the ‘spiritual marketplace’ as facilitated by late capitalism which focuses on individualism and the decline of communal relations (Roof 1999; Gauthier, Martikainen & Woodhead 2013).

  This ‘spiritual marketplace’ is a powerful lens through which to view contemporary spiritual seekers, many of whom reject the ‘New Age’ label while still engaging in similar practices. The spiritual marketplace also drives many of these activities, including ‘secular pilgrimage’ (Digance 2006) and ‘spiritual tourism’ (Norman 2011, 2012), which types of tourism overlap with ‘religious pilgrimage’ and secular forms of tourism. While these forms or niche markets of travel have the capacity to be life-transforming (Cohen 1979), the desire for spiritual experiences—encounters with the ‘other’ and journeys of the ‘self’ (Smith & Kelly 2006)—rather than for recreational experiences is what motivates them to travel. In the same way that NRMs often build upon broader parent traditions, a wide variety of experiences offered in the ever-increasing spiritual marketplace have also evolved from older beliefs and groups. Hanegraaff (1996) situated the popularity of New Age Movements with in a secular, open marketplace that has made previously esoteric, occult, and cultural more mainstream through commodification (Olsen 2019).

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  From Atoms to Galaxies

  A Conceptual Physics Approach to Scientific Awareness

  • Sadri Hassani(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 35 New Age “Physics” The decade of the 60s was a mixture of the good, the bad, and the nonsense. The unpop-ularity of the American war in Viet Nam spread rapidly across campuses, into the streets, and beyond borders. The misconceived association of science with the war initiated an antiscience wave that propagated with unprecedented speed into all strata of human pop-ulation, including the academia. The antidote of science very naturally emerged as the folklore and tradition of the very peoples at which the atrocities of the war were aimed. The oriental way of life became a panacea of the New Age. The new generation of “revolutionaries” protested against everything rooted in western civilization, and strove to replace them with their eastern counterparts: scientific medicine gave way to Qi-gong, acupuncture, and a host of other alternative medicine practices; western religion and phi-losophy were replaced by Hare Krishna and Eastern mysticism; the mind-body exercises became increasingly popular. The New Age Movement has a history that goes back to the nineteenth century spiri-tuality, but it picked up momentum in the 1960s in the midst of a “cultural revolution” in which all established institutions and ideas, including religion, came under scrutiny by the new generation of students. The “establishment” became a hated word, and it eventually encompassed anything that was “old.” The more authoritative western religions were re-placed by the decentralized Eastern theosophy. In the absence of any authority, ideas from atheism, monotheism, polytheism, Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism, as well as astrological, 1 ecological, and archaeoastronomical ideas could coexist in the New Age spirituality. Among the adherents of the New Age Movement were some physicists, who, in the crowded marketplace of such diverse ideas, found a kiosk to place physics.

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  The Catholic Church and the World Religions

  A Theological and Phenomenological Account

  • Gavin D'Costa(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 Catholicism and the New Age Movement Stratford Caldecott Introduction The New Age movement is spoken of less today than, say, 20 years ago, but that is only because the ideas and practices of the movement have seeped into the mainstream and have become commonplace. Surveys of the population in 1990 showed that around one in three people in Britain believed in reincarnation (up from 18 per cent in 1968). The proportion was even higher among Catholics! 1 The European Values Survey results for 2010 will show whether that proportion has risen or fallen in the sub-sequent decade. But the enormous success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol , which are based partly on New Age ideas, the recent popularity of books predicting the end of the world in 2012 based on New Age interpretations of the Mayan calendar, not to mention increasing numbers of television dramas and lms about the occult, show that the movement is far from over, and that its inuence on popular culture continues to grow. 2 In fact the irtation of Catholics with the New Age is one aspect of a wider cultural phenomenon. The Church is still trying to understand and respond to the cultural crisis that engulfed her after the 1960s. One import-ant element in that crisis was the widespread rejection of the Church’s authority in matters of sexual morality after the publication of Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI in 1968. Another aspect concerned the liturgy. An attempt to simplify and make more accessible the formal liturgy of the Church and an increased emphasis on community-building led to the virtual elimination in many parishes of a sense of mystery and wonder from the Mass.

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  The New Age in the Modern West

  Counterculture, Utopia and Prophecy from the Late Eighteenth Century to the Present Day

  • Nicholas Campion(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  New Age and Transcendence in the Twentieth Century 77 materialist, perspective is that consciousness is shaped by both biology and socio-economic circumstances, and that consciousness raising is possible but directed solely towards understanding one’s political and historical circumstances, prior to becoming a true revolutionary. 39 Two years after Holbrook and Jackson launched The New Age , The Theosophical Society announced that the new era was finally about to arrive. In 1909 one of the Society’s leading figures, Charles Webster Leadbeater, discovered a young Brahmin, Jiddu Krishnamurti, at Adyar, the Theosophical Society’s headquarters in India. Leadbeater proclaimed Krishnamurti the herald of the New Age, the prophet of the coming of the World Teacher, the Baptist to the coming Christ. Krishnamurti rapidly became the focus of a global cult. A brief-lived organization, the Order of the Rising Sun, was set up to promote him, in 1910 and replaced a year later by the much more successful Order of the Star in the East. The announcement of the Order’s founding studiously avoided the use of the term ‘New Age’, or any of the familiar timing measures for its beginning, whether the Ages of Aquarius or Michael or the end of the Kali Yuga. Instead there was a fixation on the messianic figure of the Teacher, accompanied by the constant repetition of the word ‘new’. Everything had to be new. And the success of newness centred on spiritual renewal driven by one imperative – love: The dawning age is one of Brotherhood. The great Teacher Himself comes to inaugurate that age. Even therefore, upon the question of His coming, there should be gentleness as tolerance shown, and not their opposites. The first propagandist in the world is love … And so, in this age as in all others, the very alphabet of the spiritual life has to be learnt anew – how hatred disappears not by hatred, but by love alone. 40 The mood was very much one of apocalyptic revivalism.

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