New Age

• 1. Introduction

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  New Age is not a church, not a doctrine, and not a faith with a fixed set of beliefs. It is a vast and shifting spiritual landscape that swept through Western society with remarkable speed during the early 1970s. Scholars Steven J. Sutcliffe and Ingvild Saelid Gilhus have called it "among the most disputed of categories in the study of religion". What exactly was this movement, where did it come from, and why did it draw millions of people away from traditional religion toward something that had no central authority, no agreed-upon creed, and no clear name for itself?

  The answer reaches back centuries, through Swedish mystics and German hypnotists, through counterculture festivals and Scottish ecovillages, through bestselling books and planetary alignment ceremonies. It winds forward into corporate boardrooms, political manifestos, and eventually the phrase that many within the movement quietly stopped using altogether. The story of what scholars call the New Age milieu is, at its core, a story about what happens when millions of people decide to build their own relationship with the divine, brick by brick, from whatever materials happen to be at hand.

• 2. Roots in Occult History

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  Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century Swedish Christian mystic, claimed he could speak directly with angels, demons, and spirits. His attempt to fuse scientific inquiry with religious revelation, and his prediction of a coming new era, made him one of the earliest figures scholars identify as prefiguring the New Age. Not far behind him was Franz Mesmer, the German physician who wrote about a force he called "animal magnetism" running through the human body, whose ideas filtered into a long tradition of alternative healing.

  Those two threads, the visionary and the therapeutic, kept reappearing. In the 1840s, Spiritualism took hold in the United States, drawing on both Swedenborgianism and Mesmerism while representing itself as a scientific approach to religion. Then came Theosophy, co-founded by the Russian Helena Blavatsky in the late 19th century. Her books Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, and The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888, claimed to convey the essence of all world religions. The American esotericist Edgar Cayce and the Danish mystic Martinus each served as partial bridges between Theosophical ideas and what would eventually become the New Age.

  Another strand arrived from New England, where New Thought developed as a Christian-oriented healing movement in the late nineteenth century. Psychologist Carl Jung contributed his own current of influence. And Swami Vivekananda, the Indian adherent of Vedanta philosophy, brought Hinduism to Western audiences for the first time in the late 19th century. Scholar Nevill Drury described the New Age as having a "tangible history", though scholar Olav Hammer believed that "source amnesia" was actually a "building block of a New Age worldview", with many practitioners adopting ideas while remaining unaware of where those ideas originated.

  The most immediate precursors, according to scholar Wouter Hanegraaff, were the UFO religions of the 1950s, which he termed a "proto-New Age movement". Groups such as the Aetherius Society, founded in the UK in 1955, and the Heralds of the New Age, established in New Zealand in 1956, combined apocalyptic beliefs about a coming new age with the idea that extraterrestrials would help bring it about.

• 3. The 1960s Catalyst

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  In October 1965, Peter Caddy, co-founder of the Findhorn Foundation and a former member of the occult Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, attended a weekend meeting at Attingham Park advertised as "The Significance of the Group in the New Age". It brought together figures from across Britain's esoteric milieu. Findhorn itself had already established a community in the Scottish area of Findhorn, Moray in 1962, and by 1972 its population had grown sixfold to around 120 residents, as countercultural baby boomers streamed in.

  Across the Atlantic, the Esalen Institute opened in Big Sur, California in 1962, developing links to humanistic psychology and helping to birth the Human Potential Movement that would become central to the New Age. That same year, author Andrew Grant Jackson noted, George Harrison's adoption of Hindu philosophy and Indian instrumentation in his Beatles songs, combined with the band's publicised engagement with Transcendental Meditation in the mid-1960s, "truly kick-started" the Human Potential Movement.

  The terms New Age and Age of Aquarius were circulating within the counterculture by the late 1960s, appearing in advertisements for the Woodstock festival of 1969 and in the lyrics of "Aquarius", the opening song of the 1967 musical Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. The U.S. government's decision to rescind the Asian Exclusion Act in 1965 opened the door to a wave of Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi teachers, spawning new religious movements including the San Francisco Zen Center, Soka Gakkai, the Inner Peace Movement, the Church of All Worlds, and the Church of Satan.

  Scholars James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton described the New Age as "a synthesis of many different preexisting movements and strands of thought". But scholar Michael York argued that despite its debts, the New Age remained "distinct from its predecessors in its own self-consciousness as a new way of thinking".

• 4. Growth and Popularization

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  By the early 1970s, according to scholar Steven Sutcliffe, the term New Age had been passed from the "subcultural pioneers" in groups like Findhorn to a wider array of "countercultural baby boomers". As it spread, its meaning shifted: what had once referred specifically to a coming era now became an umbrella for a vast range of spiritual activities. Former members of the hippie subculture, watching the commune movement collapse, became early adherents of this expanding milieu.

  Stores selling books, magazines, jewelry, and crystals opened and became known as "New Age shops". In the USA, these bookstores doubled during the 1980s, a few New Age radio stations including WBMW and KTWV built audiences, and the Grammy Awards introduced a special New Age music prize. The movement became, in the words of scholars, very trendy, including among high-finance workers.

  Several key events drove public awareness. Linda Goodman's astrology books Sun Signs, published in 1968, and Love Signs, published in 1978, became bestsellers. Shirley MacLaine's 1983 book Out on a Limb was later adapted into a 1987 television mini-series. The event that attracted more people to the movement than any other single occasion was the "Harmonic Convergence" planetary alignment organized by Jose Arguelles on the 16th and the 17th of August 1987 in Sedona, Arizona.

  Books spread the ideas further. David Spangler's 1977 work Revelation: The Birth of a New Age, Mark Satin's 1979 book New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society, and Marilyn Ferguson's 1982 book The Aquarian Conspiracy each became landmark texts. Jane Roberts's Seth series, published from 1972 onward, sold over a million copies quickly. Helen Schucman's A Course in Miracles appeared in 1975. James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy arrived in 1993. The development of the internet then accelerated the spread of all of these ideas further, and New Age concepts influenced the development of rave culture in the late 1980s and 1990s.

  Marilyn Ferguson's concept of a vanguard she called the "Aquarian conspiracy" captured the mood of the moment: participants believed their own spiritual actions were actively helping to bring the new age into being.

• 5. Beliefs and Theology

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  Paul Heelas, a scholar of religion, characterised the New Age as "an eclectic hotch-potch of beliefs, practices, and ways of life" held together by a shared vocabulary about the human condition and how it could be transformed. At the theological core sits a holistic view of divinity: a force that pervades the universe and resides within each human being, described in New Age literature through terms like "Ocean of Oneness", "Infinite Spirit", and "Universal Principle".

  Because divinity was understood as dwelling within the individual, the self became the primary spiritual authority. Hammer identified "a belief in the existence of a core or true Self" as a "recurring theme" in New Age texts. Heelas observed that "for participants spirituality is life-itself". This radical individualism led to what he called "unmediated individualism": each person assembles a personal belief system from whatever spiritual traditions appeal to them. Anthropologist David J. Hess found that a common attitude among New Agers was that "any alternative spiritual path is good because it is spiritual and alternative", a stance that generated the familiar jibe about "supermarket spirituality".

  A belief in the Age of Aquarius gave the milieu much of its collective direction. Scholar John Gordon Melton characterised this coming age as "a New Age of love, joy, peace, abundance, and harmony... the Golden Age heretofore only dreamed about." Opinions differed on when it would begin: David Spangler wrote that it started in 1967, others tied it to the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, Jose Arguelles predicted 2012, and some placed its arrival several centuries into the third millennium. Many believed the age would last around two thousand years.

  New Age cosmogony typically described an original primal oneness from which the universe emanated, and human souls descending from a spiritual world into matter. History was framed as a narrative of decline from a forgotten era of spiritual wisdom, through an Age of Pisces marked by spiritual degeneracy, toward the coming Age of Aquarius. Hanegraaff noted that these perceptions of history were "extremely sketchy" and "highly ethnocentric in placing Western civilization at the centre of historical development".

  Reincarnation was widely accepted and typically treated as self-evident in New Age literature. The Higher Self, a concept drawn from Theosophical and Anthroposophical thinking, was understood as the part of a person that connects with the divine and survives death to be reborn. New Age writers like Shakti Gawain and Louise Hay argued from this that humans are responsible for the events that happen to them, a view many regarded as empowering.

• 6. Channeling and Spirit

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  Rose Edith Kelly, wife of the English occultist Aleister Crowley, allegedly channeled the voice of a non-physical entity named Aiwass during their honeymoon in Cairo, Egypt in 1904. That episode sits near the beginning of a long tradition within the New Age of what Hanegraaff called "articulated revelation": the belief that human beings can act as channels for information from sources beyond themselves.

  Channeling took various forms. Hanegraaff identified four: trance channeling, automatisms, clairaudient channeling, and open channeling. Jane Roberts believed she was contacted by an entity called Seth. Helen Schucman believed she had channeled Jesus Christ, producing A Course in Miracles. J. Z. Knight, born in 1946, channels a spirit she calls "Ramtha", described as a 30-thousand-year-old man from Lemuria. Esther Hicks, born in 1948, channels what she calls "Abraham", described as a collective consciousness. Gary Douglas of Access Consciousness purports to channel figures including Grigori Rasputin, aliens called Novian, a 14th-century monk named Brother George, and an ancient Chinese man called Tchia Tsin.

  Scholar Suzanne Riordan examined a variety of these channeled messages and noted that they typically "echoed each other in tone and content", offering an analysis of the human condition and instructions for how humanity could discover its true destiny. For many New Agers, these messages carried authority rivaling that of mainstream religious scripture. New Agers often framed historical religious revelations as their own form of channeling, which served to legitimate their contemporary practices.

  Scholars drew a clear distinction between this New Age channeling tradition and Spiritualism, which had focused on proving the existence of life after death, and psychical research, which had tried to test mediums for consistency. New Age channeling was less interested in proof and more interested in the content of the messages themselves.

• 7. Demographics and Reach

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  Heelas and Woodhead conducted research in the English town of Kendal, Cumbria between 2000 and 2002, finding 600 people actively attending New Age activities on a weekly basis, representing 1.6% of the town's population. From that figure, they extrapolated that around 900,000 Britons regularly took part in New Age activities. In 2006, Heelas stated that New Age practices had grown to such an extent that they were "increasingly rivaling the sway of Christianity in Western settings".

  Estimates of U.S. participation during the mid-1990s ranged from 20,000 to 6 million, though Heelas believed the higher figures were inflated by assumptions such as equating all Americans who believed in reincarnation with New Age practitioners. He nevertheless suggested that over 10 million Americans had had some contact with New Age practices or ideas.

  Sutcliffe noted that although most influential New Age figureheads were male, approximately two-thirds of participants were female. The Kendal Project found that 80% of those regularly attending New Age activities were female, and 78% of those running such activities were female. Heelas and Woodhead attributed this to "deeply entrenched cultural values and divisions of labour" in Western society. Men, they argued, were hampered by a "masculinist ideal of autonomy and self-sufficiency" which discouraged them from seeking inner assistance from others.

  The majority of participants came from the middle and upper-middle classes of Western society. In the Kendal study, 57% of active New Agers had a university or college degree. The study also found that 73% were aged over 45, and 55% were aged between 40 and 59. Heelas argued that the movement attracted the well-educated but disenchanted, those who believed "modernity is in crisis", and particularly former members of the 1960s counterculture who had concluded they could not change society but remained committed to changing themselves.

  A 2000 poll found that 39% of the UK population had tried alternative therapies, suggesting that New Age practices had filtered well beyond any identifiable movement into mainstream life. In 1995, Kyle observed that on the whole, New Agers in the United States preferred the values of the Democratic Party over those of the Republican Party, and that most "soundly rejected" the agenda of former Republican President Ronald Reagan.

• 8. Decline, Diffusion, and Legacy

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  In 1994, scholar Gordon J. Melton presented a conference paper arguing that, since he knew of nobody describing their practices as "New Age" anymore, the movement had died. In 2001, Hammer observed that the term had been rejected within the milieu as either pejorative or meaningless. By 2003, Sutcliffe documented its use as "optional, episodic and declining overall", and noted that even those few who still used it typically did so with qualification, placing it in quotation marks.

  Others pushed back. Daren Kemp stated in 2004 that "New Age is still very much alive". Hammer himself acknowledged that "the New Age movement may be on the wane, but the wider New Age religiosity... shows no sign of disappearing". Sara MacKian proposed that the "movement" had been replaced by a wider "New Age sentiment" pervading "the socio-cultural landscape" of Western countries.

  High-profile figures helped normalize once-fringe ideas. U.S. First Lady Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer. British Princess Diana visited spirit mediums. Norwegian Princess Martha Louise established a school devoted to communicating with angels. New Age shops continued to operate, though many were remarketed under the label "Mind, Body, Spirit". During the 1980s, companies including IBM, AT&T, and General Motors had embraced New Age seminars seeking productivity gains, although in several cases employees brought legal action against their employers on religious freedom and psychological health grounds.

  In 2015, scholar Hugh Urban argued that New Age spirituality was growing in the United States, noting that the "spiritual but not religious" category had become one of the fastest-growing trends in American religious affiliation. In a 2017 doctoral dissertation at Australian National University, scholar Paul J. Farrelly argued that while the term New Age was fading in the West, it was booming in Taiwan, where it was regarded as comparatively new and was being exported to mainland China, where authorities largely tolerated it.

  The tension that had always run through the milieu, between egalitarian ideals and commercial enterprise, between self-development and social transformation, did not resolve. It simply continued in new forms. As York put it, "a tension exists in New Age between socialistic egalitarianism and capitalistic private enterprise" -- and that tension, still unresolved, is part of what keeps the phenomenon alive wherever it surfaces next.