The New Age can be viewed as a revivalist movement within a pre-existing metaphysical-occult community. As such, the New Age can be compared with Christian revivals, particularly with such phenomena as the early Pentecostal movement (i.e., a movement that simultaneously revived and altered a segment of Protestant Christianity). Comparable to the to the influence of Pentecostalism* on Christianity*, the New Age had an impact on some but not all segments of the occult community. Also like Pentecostalism, the New Age revival left a host of new organizations/denominations in its wake without substantially affecting the teachings of pre-existing organizations/denominations.
From another angle the New Age can be viewed as a successor movement to the counter culture of the 1960s. As observers of the New Age vision ave pointed out, a significant portion of New Agers are baby-boomers, people who two decades earlier were probably participating, at some level, in the phenomenon known as the counter culture. As the counter-culture faded away in the early seventies, many former "hippies" found themselves embarking on a spiritual quest--one that, in many cases departed from the Judeo-Christian mainstream. Thus one of the possible ways to date the beginnings of the New Age movement is from the period of the rather sudden appearance of large numbers of unconventional spiritual seekers in the decade following the sixties.
Narrowly considered, as a social movement held together by specific ideas, the New Age can be traced to England in the late 1950s. At that time, the leaders of certain independent occult groups heavily influenced by the reading of many theosophists, especially Alice Bailey*, began to meet to discuss the possible changes coming during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Those meetings continued through the 1960s and, as they grew, came to include their most well-known participants--the founders of the Findhorn Community* in Scotland. By the 1970s a vision of the New Age had been clarified, and the movement was ready to reach out to like-minded people around the globe. The process of spreading was greatly assisted by the work of Anthony Brooke and the Universal Foundation. Brooke toured the world contacting occult and metaphysical groups, and created the first international networks of New Age believers. David Spangler*, a student of the Alice Bailey writings, traveled to England in 1970 and stayed at Findhorn for three years. Upon his return to the United States, he began to author a series of books which laid out the hopes and aspirations of the New Age. One can pinpoint four essential ideas which came to distinguish the movement. None are particularly new ideas, their distinctiveness being in their being brought together in a new gestalt:
(1) The possibility of personal transformation. The New Age movement offers the possibility of a personal transformation in the immediate future. While personal transformation is a common offering of some occult and New Thought groups, it is usually presented as the end result of a long-term process of alteration through extensive training and indoctrination into the occult life (in conscious contrast to the immediate transformation offered by revivalist Christianity). Thus the New Age, without radically changing traditional occultism, offered a new immediacy which had been lacking in metaphysical teachings.
The transformative process is most clearly seen in the healing process, and transformation often is first encountered as a healing of the individual, either of a chronic physical problem or of a significant psychological problem. Healing has become a metaphor of transformation and the adopting of a healthy lifestyle a prominent way of being a New Ager.
(2) The coming of broad cultural transformation. The New Age movement offered the hope that the world, which many people, especially those on the edges of the dominant culture, experience in negative terms, would in the next generation be swept aside and replaced with a golden era. As articulated by Spangler, the hoped for changes are placed in a sophisticated framework of gradual change relying upon human acceptance of the new resources and their creating a new culture. According to Spangler, a watershed in human history has been reached with the advent of modern technology and its possibilities for good and evil. At the same time, because of unique changes in the spiritual world, symbolized and heralded (but not caused) by the astrological change into the Aquarian Age*, this generation has a unique bonus of spiritual power available to it. It is this additional spiritual energy operating on the world and its peoples that make possible the personal and cultural transformation that will bring in a New Age.
It is, of course, the millennial hope of the coming of a golden age of peace and light that gave the New Age movement its name. The millennialism* also provided a basis for a social consciousness which has been notably lacking in most occult metaphysics. Once articulated, the new Age vision could be and was grounded in various endeavors designed to assist the transition to the New Age. The New Age movement wedded itself to environmentalism, lay peace movements, animal rights, women's rights, and cooperative forms of social organization.
(3) The transformation of occult arts and processes. Within the New Age movement one of the familiar occult practices from astrology* to tarot, from mediumship* to psychic healing. Yet in the New Age movement the significance of these practices have been significantly altered. Astrology and tarot are no longer fortune telling devices, but have become tools utilized for self transformation. Mediumship has become channelling, in which the primary role of the medium is to expound metaphysical truth, rather than to prove the continuance of life after death. Spiritual healing launches and undergirds a healing relationship to life.
The number of practitioners of astrology, tarot, mediumship, and psychic healing had been growing steadily throughout the twentieth century, thus the New Age movement did not have to create its own professionals de novo, rather it had merely to transform and bring into visibility the large army of practitioners of the occult arts already in existence.
Possibly the most widely practiced New Age transformative tool is meditation* (in its many varied forms) and related tools of inner development. In its utilization of meditation, the New Age movement borrowed insights from the findings of the human potentials movement* and transpersonal psychology, both of which, in isolating various practices for study, demonstrated that techniques of meditation and inner development could be detached from the metaphysical teaching in which they were traditionally embedded. Thus one could practice Zen* meditation without being a Buddhist* and yoga* without being a Hindu*. That insight made all of the Eastern, occult, and metaphysical techniques immediately available to everyone without the necessity of their changing self-identifying labels prior to their use.
(4) The self as Divine. Within the New Age one theological affirmation has found popular support, the identification of the individual as a one in essence with the divine. Underlying this notion, which finds a wide variety of forms is a monistic world in which the only reality is "God," usually thought of in predominantly impersonal terms as Mind or Energy.
However, as it is expressed, the New Age offers a decisive alternative to traditional Christian theological approaches which draw a sharp separation between God as Creator and humans as God's creation. It is most clearly seen in New Thought* and Christian Science* which see the basic healing-transformative process occurring as one discovers the Truth of their oneness with the Divine.
Thus the New Age movement, narrowly defined, can best be seen as an occult-metaphysical revival movement generated among independent British theosophists in the post-World War II generation which spread through the well-established occult-metaphysical community in the 1970s. Through the 1980s it became a popular movement which enlivened the older occult-metaphysical community and which both drew many new adherents to it and greatly assisted the spread of occult practices (such as astrology and meditation) and ideas (such as reincarnation) into the general population far beyond the boundaries of the New Age movement proper.
The New Age movement is comparable to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement drew upon century long efforts to bring some equity to the culture's treatment of black people. That effort drew new strength and vitality from a new program and a new, somewhat millennial, hope of a society that could do away with racism. While building on older efforts, it articulated a new program (which some of the older groups could not accept) and both drew many new supporters to the cause of destroying racism and spread its goals through the population to many never directly involved in the movement. And like the Civil Rights movement, the New Age Movement is destined to have a short life span, the signs of its disintegration already before us as the millennial hope of cultural transformation has faded dramatically. That fading would have occurred in any case, but it has been hastened by negative media treatment. Unlike the Civil Rights movement, the New Age movement was rarely taken seriously, and frequently held up to ridicule by writers who combined a theological hostility to it with an inability to perceive its importance as a change agent in the culture. Like the Civil Rights Movement, however, as the New Age movement fades, its effects upon the culture (in drawing many new people to the occult-metaphysical community and its making some of the community's key ideas acceptable to the middle class) remain.
The effects of the New Age movement on the occult community were not uniform. Many of the older denominations, such as the National Spiritualist Association of Churches*, never really participated in the New Age, and those that did, such as Unity*, eventually rejected certain New Age innovations in favor of the "orthodoxy" of their tradition. In the wake of the movement (viewing the New Age as a revivalist movement that has already peaked), it is clear that most of the older occult-metaphysical bodies have grown and certain new organizations have been formed. The occult has become more "respectable," and has penetrated the mainstream to greater extent than even during the "occult explosion" of the late sixties.
Bibliography. E. Barker, New Religious Movements; M. Bednaroski, New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America; R.S. Ellwood, and H.B. Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America; D. Lattin, "`New Age' Mysticism Strong in Bay Area," in The San Francisco Chronicle; J.R. Lewis, "Approaches to the Study of the New Age," in J.R. Lewis and J.G. Melton, eds. Perspectives on the New Age; and J.G. Melton, J. Gordon, J. Clark, and A.A. Kelly. 1990. New Age Encyclopedia; H. Sebald, "New-Age Romanticism: The Quest for an Alternative Lifestyle as a Force of Social Change." Humboldt Journal of Social Relations.
J. Gordon Melton
Institute for hte Study of American Religions
This article is reprinted from The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions by James R. Lewis and appears here with the permission of Mr. Lewis. Copyright: James R. Lewis, 1998. Thanks also to Mr. Melton who preparedthe article for The Encyclopedia.
