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.
52 steven sutcliffe
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 53
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).
54 steven sutcliffe
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
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 55
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
56 steven sutcliffe
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’.
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 57
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).
58 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).
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 59
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 arising
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.
60 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;
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 61
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
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).
62 steven sutcliffe
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
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 63
‘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
64 steven sutcliffe
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-
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 65
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
8
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).
66 steven sutcliffe
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
The Shrine of Wisdom, 1920 2.1, Autumn.
10
Advertisement in The Search Quarterly, 1931, Vol. 1.
11
“Linking Up”, Occult Review LVI/1, July 1932, 2ff.
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 67
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.
68 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
12
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.
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 69
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
Leaflet: Lucis Trust (London nd). For a note on Triangles, see Sutcliffe (2003:48).
16
In the words of the standard advertisement in the endpapers of Bailey’s texts.
17
The Arcane School: Entrance Papers (London nd:2).
18
Composed in the mid-1930s, it is the last of three Invocations (Bailey 1944:xvi).
70 steven sutcliffe
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
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 71
‘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.
72 steven sutcliffe
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,
the origins of ‘new age’ religion 73
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.
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