What is New Age Spirituality?
New Age spirituality is a range of spiritual and religious practices and beliefs that rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s, characterized by its highly eclectic and unsystematic structure. Though many scholars consider it a religious movement, its adherents typically see it as spiritual or as a unification of mind, body, and spirit, and rarely use the term New Age themselves. Theologically, the New Age typically accepts a holistic form of divinity that pervades the universe, including human beings themselves, leading to a strong emphasis on the spiritual authority of the self. A common New Age belief posits a forgotten age of great technological advancement and spiritual wisdom that will be remedied by the emergence of an Age of Aquarius, from which the milieu gets its name.
Origins & lineage
The New Age drew heavily upon esoteric traditions such as the occultism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the work of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, as well as Spiritualism, New Thought, and Theosophy, and more immediately arose from mid-20th-century influences such as the UFO religions of the 1950s, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the Human Potential Movement. Helena Blavatsky was a cofounder of the Theosophical Society in 1875 and announced a coming New Age. Alice Bailey wrote about 25 books on Theosophy and was one of the first writers to use the term New Age. Scholar Gordon Melton wrote that Theosophy, particularly as mediated through the works of Alice Bailey, was the most important source of the transformative metaphor and the term “New Age” for the movement.
The movement’s exact origins remain contested, but it became a major movement in the 1970s, centered largely in the United Kingdom, expanding widely in the 1980s and 1990s. Key developments included David Spangler’s ideas at the Findhorn Foundation in 1970, which emphasized personal transformation to usher in the New Age. The term was popularized in books like David Spangler’s 1977 work Revelation: The Birth of a New Age, Mark Satin’s 1979 book New Age Politics, and Marilyn Ferguson’s 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy, which has been regarded as a landmark work promoting the idea that a new era was emerging. Many former members of the 1960s counterculture and hippie subculture subsequently became early adherents of the New Age movement.
How it’s practiced
The movement encompasses traditional occult practices such as tarot reading, astrology, yoga, and meditation techniques, integrating concepts from Eastern religions like those found in Hinduism and Buddhism, and incorporating alternative healing practices, spiritual healing, and techniques like channeling and the use of crystals. There is a common belief in a variety of semi-divine non-human entities such as angels, with whom humans can communicate, particularly by channeling through a human intermediary. Examples of New Age channeling include Jane Roberts’ belief that she was contacted by an entity called Seth, and Helen Schucman’s belief that she had channeled Jesus Christ.
New Agers are perennialists in the sense that they accept the existence of an ageless wisdom at the heart of the world’s great religious traditions, believing that all religions are a common treasury of spiritual practices that can be used as needed by contemporary seekers, and they soundly reject exclusivist claims to truth by traditional religions. Most New Age teachings encourage seekers to test any belief or practice against the standard of their own intuition, assuming that within each person is a sacred reality that can know clearly the truth or falsity of any religious claim.
New Age Spirituality today
By the start of the 21st century, the term New Age was increasingly rejected within this milieu, with some scholars arguing that the New Age phenomenon had ended. Despite this scholarly assessment, New Age concepts and practices have diffused widely into mainstream culture. New Age spirituality has held considerable social sway over Western culture over the past three decades, with an estimated one in three Americans accepting various elements of New Age ideology. Seekers today encounter New Age spirituality through wellness retreats, yoga studios, meditation apps, alternative healing centers, crystal shops, astrology websites, and online communities. Contemporary prominent figures include actress Shirley MacLaine, who promoted ideas of reincarnation in her 1984 book Out on a Limb, Deepak Chopra, who published Quantum Healing in 1989, and Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now and A New Earth.
Common misconceptions
Though many scholars consider it a religious movement, its adherents typically see it as spiritual or as a unification of mind, body, and spirit, and rarely use the term New Age themselves. New Age spirituality is not an organized religion with a central authority, doctrine, or membership rolls. There is no such thing as a New Age doctrine or creed or statement of faith, and most New Agers would not even identify themselves as such, because this ideology is spread through books, seminars, teaching tapes, and DVDs.
The Age of Aquarius is not a literal event that occurred in the 1960s or 1970s. Astrologers maintain that an astrological age lasts for 2,160 years on average, caused by Earth’s slow precessional rotation. Astrologers do not agree on when the Aquarian age will start or even if it has already started. The expression “age of Aquarius” in popular culture usually refers to the heyday of the hippie and New Age movements in the 1960s and 1970s, brought to attention worldwide by the 1967 musical Hair with its opening song “Aquarius.”
New Age spirituality is not inherently benign or uniformly positive. New Age theorist David Spangler criticizes New Agers’ tendency toward narcissism and a shallow, pastiche-like spirituality. Former Dominican theologian Matthew Fox takes issue with the movement’s tendency to deny the shadow side of human nature and its upper-class elitism, which sometimes fails to take practical action to address the suffering of oppressed people.
How to begin
Because New Age spirituality is inherently eclectic and individualistic, there is no single entry point. The New Age Movement is best characterized as a ‘spiritual supermarket’ where individuals are free to pick and mix those spiritual beliefs and practices which they feel best help them achieve peace of mind or realise their full human potential. Those curious about New Age concepts might begin by reading Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980) for historical context, exploring meditation or yoga classes at local studios, consulting introductory astrology resources, or investigating holistic health practices. The emphasis throughout is on personal experimentation and following one’s own intuition rather than accepting external authority.