It is . . . not the religion of the professionals, religion in its
doctrinal purity,that I have sought to recover,but rather concrete
religious phenomena with all the impurities of a specific social
context.
(Obelkevich 1976: vii).
Different kinds of practice and discourse are intrinsic to the field
in which religious representations (like any representation)
acquire their identity and their truthfulness.From this it does not
follow that the meanings of religious practices and utterances are
to be sought in social phenomena, but only that their possibility
and their authoritative status are to be explained as products of
historically distinctive disciplines and forces.The anthropological
student of particular religions should therefore begin from this
point,in a sense unpacking the comprehensive concept which he
or she translates as ‘religion’ into heterogenous elements according
to its historical character.
(Asad 1993: 53–4)
This book proposes a thorough deconstruction and reconfiguration of ‘New
Age’ in which both the label itself and the phenomena associated with it
are subjected to critical scrutiny or a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ in the sense
identified (if not endorsed by) Ricoeur (1970: 32–3). My general argument
runs as follows. First, I unpack the concepts ‘New Age Movement’ and ‘The
New Age’.That is, I take issue with the hegemonic view that ‘New Age’ is a
‘movement’ of some kind or even a homogeneous entity at all. Such
formulations essentialise a set of mixed, meandering, even divergent social
processes more akin in presentation to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988: 3ff.)
proliferating ‘rhizome’ than to a unified organic entity. I also question the
covert metaphysics informing the reifying expression ‘The New Age’, which
effectively periodises manifestations by assigning them to a homogeneous
cultural epoch or astrological era. Both terms are unsatisfactory:‘New Age’ as
a ‘movement’ is, as I will show, a false etic category and a formulation such
9
1
THE LIFE AND
TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
as ‘The New Age’ simply reproduces an emic agenda.1 In fact, ‘New Age’
represents at its narrowest a specific millennialistic emblem, and at its most
diffuse – at its most symbolically overdetermined – a loose idiom of humanistic
potential and psychotherapeutic change that could be, and has been, called
anything from ‘human potential’ to ‘mind body spirit’, from ‘holistic’ to
‘spiritual growth’. Asad’s call to recover the ‘heterogenous elements’ of
particular religious formations is apt here, for little else in the history of
modern religion turns out on close inspection to be as variegated and diffuse in
character as ‘New Age’.
To deconstruct ‘New Age’ in this way is also to engage with the longstanding
debate in Religious Studies on the analytical purchase of broad
categories such as ‘world religion’, ‘religion’ and ‘religions’, even particular
constructs such as ‘Hinduism’ (Baird 1971, Fitzgerald 2000). Such debates
have called the universalism of this vocabulary of religions into question,underscoring
the specific historical circumstances of its genesis and development.
‘New Age’ is no exception here; indeed, it exemplifies an enduring mystification
in category formation in Religious Studies.
Approaching the subject through a hermeneutic of suspicion also raises the
question of whose interests are served in classifying as ‘New Age’ the Fortean
diversity of phenomena typically associated with the term.2
Through taxonomic
sleight-of-hand the phenomena have been accorded a homogeneity and
concrete presence that the historical record simply does not permit. But this
does allow ‘New Age’ to be set up like a stooge to be knocked down by a
variety of vested interests. For example, it has been demonised by conservative
evangelical Christians, particularly in the US, as is evident in the very titles of
Constance Cumbey’s The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow:The NewAge Movement
and Our Coming Age of Barbarism (1983) andTexe Marrs’ Dark Secrets of the New
Age (1987).3
In other constituencies,‘New Age’is sniggered at as‘touchy–feely’
spiritual consumerism. Parties with axes to grind here include rationalist
sceptics (Basil 1988) and paternalist social scientists (Bruce 1998), for whom
‘New Age’ is a codeword for a shallow, self-indulgent, even – one senses –
plebeian and vulgar spirituality that should not be given scholarly oxygen.This
unlikely confluence of critics shows that ‘New Age’ has triggered curiously
exaggerated and intemperate reactions in very different social power bases.This
only reinforces an important but largely occluded function of ‘New Age’
studies:to connect data about alternative spirituality and religious innovation to
comparative studies in the sociology of knowledge and anthropology of culture,
rather than remaining a pocket of colourful anecdotalism tagged on to the end
of Religious Studies.
Deconstructing ‘New Age’ has a second major revisionist function: it
contributes to the wider process of recovering and reassessing ‘lost’ expressions
of religion, for ‘New Age’ flourished as a major current within a much broader
field of popular religious practice.When William Bloom, an influential activist
in 1980s and 1990s Britain, describes ‘New Age’ as
EMBLEM
10
the visible tip of the iceberg of a mass movement in which humanity
is reasserting its right to explore spirituality in total freedom.
(Bloom [ed.] 1991: xvi)
we can identify some typical concerns of religion in a popular mode:grassroots
activism, strategies for everyday living, ideals of spiritual autonomy and
egalitarianism, and – not least – an ideology of direct, unmediated access to
‘experiences’. Nevertheless, I shall be arguing throughout this book that the
cultural arena within which such voices are raised has no overarching purpose,
no compelling agenda, beyond that of expressing whatever ‘spiritual’ values are
deemed appropriate for the moment and – through a radical tolerance –
upholding the rights of others to do the same.That is, what debate there has
been among practitioners on the meaning of ‘New Age’ has most often
amounted simply to a nexus of conversations, occasionally arguments, within a
decentred and theoretically unbounded matrix of viewpoints and pressure
groups, here locally-focused, there widely-dispersed, but almost always
mutually tolerant and hence diffusive rather than regulative. Rather than
constituting a social movement or a new religious movement, then,‘New Age’
was originally an apocalyptic emblem whose encoded semantics were
sufficiently rich and multiform for a later generation to take it over as a
codeword for currents in post-1960s popular religion.
And this is the third point in my argument: ‘New Age’ is not a distinctive
empirical formation but a (now rather stale) codeword for the heterogeneity of
alternative spirituality, best classified as a sub-type of ‘popular religion’. Here
are two simple definitions of ‘popular religion’. The first is from Thomas
(1995: 387):
If ‘official’ religion [is] defined as religion founded on authoritative
documents and propagated by religious specialists, priests or hierarchy,
then the term‘popular’can apply to any layperson,whether peasant or
ruling-class, who adopts beliefs and practices which may be at odds
with the religious specialists’ views.
A clear illustration of this can be found in the rhetoric of David Icke, a former
footballer, broadcaster and Green Party spokesman, now a prominent
contemporary advocate of ‘New Age’. In his early memoir-cum-manifesto The
TruthVibrations he writes:
The new spirituality involves a one-to-one relationship with the
Godhead and the higher intelligences. We will no longer believe
that all our sins can be forgiven by a priest appointed by the church
hierarchy. Why do we need a human to arbitrate between ourselves
and God when we have our own link?
(Icke 1991: 127)
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
11
Icke’s is an unusually combative declaration of anti-clericalism and antiinstitutionalism.
But of course the problem with this definition of popular
religion is that it reproduces a crude dichotomy between‘official’and‘popular’,
which – although clearly attractive to Icke, for example – may not always, or
even typically, obtain in the field. This is particularly the case in ‘New Age’,
where to the extent thatThomas’s‘specialists,priests,or hierarchy’can be found
at all, they exist in secondary institutions with relatively high-turnover user
groups. Although a strong strain of neo-Christian piety and mysticism has
flavoured the arena, the stance is less one of being ‘at odds’ with Christianity
than with the hegemony of ‘institutional religion’. At the same time such
disdain for ‘tradition’ does not prevent practitioners from co-opting historical
formations deemed fit and useful for everyday spirituality, including popularising
mystics of the Christian churches as spiritual rebels. Hence a second
working definition of popular religion teases out some important social
psychological dimensions underpinning ‘New Age’s disdain for institutional
religion:
Popular religion is the quest for (a) more simple, (b) more direct, and
(c) more profitable relationships with the divine.
(Maldonado 1986: 6; emphasis in original)
The field is replete with evidence of appeals to less complex, less mediated and
more rewarding ideas and practices.The aforementioned William Bloom urges
readers to‘do something,anything,to deepen your relationship with the sacred’
(Bloom 1993b: 18, 19). Gill Edwards, one of a plethora of independent
workshop leaders in 1990s Britain, writes in Stepping IntoThe Magic:‘It is time
for everyone to become a shaman, a metaphysician, a dream-weaver, a walkerbetween-worlds
– each in our unique way’ (Edwards 1993: 192).
This brings me to my fourth and final point, one that is in fact applicable to
all academic study of religion. Obelkevich’s conceptualisation of his subject
as ‘concrete religious phenomena with all the impurities of a specific social
context’ precisely describes my own view of religion as a cultural institution
among others.The special interest of ‘New Age’ manifestations is that, by dint
of their fluidity, ephemerality and heteroglossia, they compel us to reassess the
implicit boundary maintained by most scholars between‘culture’and‘religion’.
I would argue that this differentiation functions to safeguard the agential purity
of the latter from the contaminating contingency of the former. ‘New Age’,
however, is contaminated – that is, hybrid and syncretic – culture par excellence,
and proper comprehension and extension of this insight dissolves the scholastic
illusion of ‘world religions’ and their sub-types. In the dizzying field of cultural
hybridity that opens out before us once the ‘New Age’ umbrella is collapsed,
we can glimpse the truth of Deleuze and Gauttari’s (1988: 7) application of the
rhizome to linguistics‘there is no language in itself ...only a throng of dialects,
patois, slangs, and specialised languages’. In Religious Studies this amounts to
EMBLEM
12
Martin’s (2000: 282) reconceptualisation of religion as ‘the ubiquity of locally
contingent and syncretistic formations’,which is to say that‘local variation is all
there is!’
Fieldwork, history, text:
methodology in the study of ‘New Age’
Any theory of religion must be able to deal adequately not only with
structure but with change and must include within its stipulations
historical as well as contemporary data.
(Martin 1990: 112)
The qualitative researcher is not unlike the detective in the classic
murder mystery. Starting with a few clues, the detective questions
persons connected with the case, develops hunches, questions further
on the basis of those hunches, begins to see a picture of ‘what
happened’ start to emerge, looks for evidence pro and con, elaborating
or modifying that picture – until finally the unknown is known.The
murderer is caught; what was once a mystery is now understandable.
(Wiseman 1979: 113)
Since I am concerned in part with the methodological shortcomings of the
field, a brief review of my own methods follows in the interests of transparency
and reflexivity.To begin with I employed ethnographic fieldwork and textual
analysis, with Denzin’s (1970: 307–10) well-known principle of ‘methodological
triangulation’ in mind – meaning the generation of multiple measures
or profiles of one and the same phenomenon. This is particularly germane
to the study of religion, which – pace the efforts of anthropologists and
ethnographers – still tends to be dominated by analyses based largely on texts.
That this is still largely the case in ‘New Age’ studies is suggested by Heelas’s
admission (1996: 7) that ‘academics . . . simply do not know much, if anything,
of the thousands of different things that are going on’. One aim of the present
study is to map historically and ethnographically the sheer variety of people’s
popular practices and interpretations, which scholars can find when they start
to look for religion in its proper habitat.
I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork in Scotland. Given my rationale for
a multidisciplinary approach to the subject it seemed realistic to tackle an
accessible arena.In the end,most of the fieldwork was done within a few hours
of where I live in central Scotland, some of it in ‘old haunts’ mentioned in the
introduction. Doing ethnography ‘at home’ in a compact European country
(population c. 5 million) that is also a keenly theorised cultural–political
community (Paterson 1998, Sutcliffe 2002) certainly encouraged serendipitous
connections between people and places that kept warm my autobiographical
stake in the field. For example, while browsing for primary sources in an
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
13
Edinburgh second-hand bookshop I discovered that the proprietor was a
nephew of Peter Caddy,co-founder of the Findhorn community and one-time
husband of Sheena Govan, the charismatic teacher of the proto-Findhorn
group in 1950s London. Later I found that, at the time of her death, Govan
herself had been lodging in the same village in south-west Scotland where I
myself, a generation later, had lived during my shoemaking career. Not only
this, but a certain Alice Bailey had in 1895 first encountered her spiritual
‘Master’ at an aunt’s country estate in the same locality (Bailey 1973: 35). I
interpreted these developments as pleasing coincidences, although they were
later reinterpreted by one or two informants as Jungian ‘synchronicities’ which
demonstrated that,esoterically,I was‘meant’to write this book.That aside,some
details were clearly chance incursions into the area: Sheena Govan had no
previous connections with the south-west of Scotland, and Alice Bailey came
from a very wealthy Manchester family and could presumably just as easily have
met her ‘Master’ at another country seat. Similarly, the colony that became the
Findhorn Foundation community might have sprung up in theTrossachs if the
staff group of Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean had been laid off
there, instead of in the north-east of Scotland. Indeed, but for Sheena Govan’s
family connections in Scotland, the proto-Findhorn group would have had no
reason to move to Scotland at all.And yet,as I will show,Sheena Govan is a key
figure in the genealogy of‘New Age’,Bailey its chief theorist and the Findhorn
colony an international site of ‘New Age’ practice.The contingent turns out to
be essential.
There is an additional reason for restricting the ethnographies to Scotland.
The distinctiveness of Scotland within the UK, demonstrated on educational,
legal and ecclesiastical grounds since 1707, presents an opportunity to remark
in passing upon the differing acculturative potential of ‘New Age’ in a society
that still retains a Presbyterian cultural resistance to Anglo–American popular
culture (Highet 1972, Brown 1997). The demographic profile of Scotland’s
prime ‘New Age’ site, the Findhorn colony, demonstrates this by default:
founded by English and Canadian nationals, Findhorn has been dominated by
American, German and English people, with Scots scarcely represented at all.
But notwithstanding the residual cultural resistance of Presbyterianism, the
contemporary profile of ‘New Age’ in Scotland appears to be coming into line
with other countries in the grip of globalising and postmodernising forces: the
rest of mainland Britain, Western Europe, North America and Australasia.
Hence at the same moment that Highet (1972) was arguing for the distinctiveness
of Presbyterian culture, the directory Alternative Scotland (Wright and
Worsley 1975:114) reported‘a great upsurge of non-Christian religion’and‘an
increasing number of groups simply interested in borrowing from any religion
or none for the purpose of developing the potential of the individual’. By the
1990s the Church of Scotland (1993: 44) was reporting ‘active promotion of
New Age ideas and practices in Scotland’ with Drane (1993: 57) now claiming
that ‘most unchurched people in Scotland today are more likely to construct
EMBLEM
14
their worldview from aspects of the New Age outlook than from elements of
mainstream Christianity’.And a founder-proprietor of the successful‘Body and
Soul’bookshop in Edinburgh told me in January 2000 that the‘NewAge’idiom
was now diffused through the general culture and was actually ‘more widely
accepted’ in Scotland than in England, where he thought it had become a
middle-class preserve.
Overall the Scottish experience serves to emphasise the ability of ‘New Age’
to override certain indices of social and cultural difference through trafficking
in a common currency, a point reinforced by Hanegraaff’s (1996: 13)
observation on ‘New Age’ discourse in The Netherlands and Germany as
‘an English–American affair by any standards’. The Scottish ethnographies
presented in Chapters 6 to 8 can thus be read as a particular – a Scottish – case
study in the dissemination of an Anglo–Americanised praxis. That is, their
Scottish markings represent a vernacularisation of a common stock predominantly
moulded by Anglo–American popular cultural values. These in turn
reproduce a model of ‘spirituality’ in which reflexive and interactive agents
work within a web of egalitarian social relationships, drawing upon a cluster of
populistic beliefs and practices.4
The emics and etics of New Age
All notions of replicability and testability fly up the chimney when the
world as seen by the observed is capriciously muddled with the world
as seen by the observer.
(Harris 1969: 33)
The final product,it seems to me,should reflect a kind of biculturalism
in which the ethnographer understands cultural phenomena in both
emic (native) and etic (outsider) ways.
(Wagner 1997: 90)
Earlier I referred to the ‘emics and etics’ of ‘New Age’.This terminology refers
to the epistemic frame of the interpretations we hear in any particular account
of cultural events.The neologisms‘emic’and‘etic’were first used in print in the
1950s by a linguist,Kenneth Pike,who dropped the prefix from the conceptual
pair ‘phonemic/phonetic’ to develop a more parsimonious, higher-order
terminology derived from linguistics but applicable to culture in general
(Headland 1990: 15).According to Pike ‘an emic unit’ is ‘a physical or mental
item or system treated by insiders as relevant to their system of behaviour and
as the same emic unit in spite of etic variability’ (Pike 1990: 28).An etic unit,
on the other hand, is an ‘outside disciplinary system’ (ibid.) formulated for
the purposes of scanning and then de-coding an unfamiliar emic system (ibid.:
34). In Pike’s view,‘etics’ – or cross–cultural ‘science’ – is the means to emic –
indigenous – ends.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
15
In the 1960s the anthropologist Marvin Harris began to theorise the emic/
etic distinction in a way that challenged Pike’s prioritisation of ‘emics’ (Harris
1990: 48–50). Harris accepted Pike’s basic understanding of the emic unit but
introduced a strong etic agenda: namely, ‘the task of building a diachronic,
synchronic, comparative, and global science of society and culture’ (ibid.: 49).
For Harris, etics are something more than emics writ large; indeed, if etics can
be shown to be merely artificially extended ‘local’ categories, they fail the test
and remain merely emic. In Harris’s view etics provide the basic epistemology
of academic knowledge: they are literally that which ‘makes the social sciences
possible’ (ibid.). They are ‘accounts, descriptions, and analyses expressed in
terms of the conceptual schemes and categories regarded as meaningful and
appropriate by the community of scientific observers’ (Lett 1990: 131).
Clearly the emics and etics of culture go to the heart of contemporary
debates on the flaws in the so-called ‘Enlightenment project’ of generating
universal categories and explanations. For my purposes, it is the cognitive, and
specifically epistemic, dimension of emics/etics that is particularly stimulating:
as Lett (1990: 132) notes, ‘it is our understanding of the phenomena, not the
phenomena themselves, that is either emic or etic’. Emics and etics are not
a fixed dichotomy of representation but dynamic and symbiotic frames of
discourse: emics can transform into etics and back again.The important point
is making the epistemic shift a conscious, predictive and transparent act, which
underscores the active or operative nature of the distinction between emics
and etics.That is, while etics cannot but be emics at their point of origin, etic
viability lies precisely in the ability to function as cross-cultural explanatory units.
In claiming to have achieved this, etics lay themselves open to testing as
‘fakes’, and indeed may be exposed as such. In this sense, an etic formulation is
falsifiable whereas emics simply are not. Purported etic formulations such as
‘The New Age’or‘NewAge Movement’are a case in point:as we shall see,they
are fakes.
Hence I would agree withWagner’s‘biculturalism’,quoted at the head of this
section:that is,an appropriate academic agenda for an intercultural,polycentric
world is to obtain and‘broker’both kinds of knowledge – emic and etic,‘insider’
and ‘outsider’. This strategy is particularly applicable to the task of reconstructing
the subjectivities of religious discourses on the one hand,and locating
these in historical and cultural context on the other,such as I attempt to do here
with‘New Age’.However we juggle the precise weighting of emics and etics in
the final reckoning, what is crucial is to preserve the creative epistemic tension
between them. This functions to preserve alterity or ‘otherness’ in social life
because it builds in cognitive difference.This in turn exposes the ‘moccasinwalking’
model of ‘empathetic’ Religious Studies as a hollow, even mystified,
metaphor: we can never ‘get into someone else’s shoes’ in any useful academic
sense. By explicitly and transparently differentiating between emic and
etic ‘voices’, then, we can avoid this ‘capricious muddle’ of categories and
explanations.
EMBLEM
16
This brief excursus into emics and etics benefits ‘New Age’ studies twofold.
First,it allows a real emic history of the‘New Age’emblem to be envisaged and
recovered, something impossible before, because the (false etic) discourse on a
‘New Age Movement’ erased traces of difference. Second, the genealogical
approach I use also throws light on the wider field of alternative spirituality in
which ‘New Age’ has been deployed (Sutcliffe and Bowman 2000). Neither
of these benefits is available in extant portrayals of the field, which overwhelmingly
homogenise ‘New Age’ by collapsing emic and etic differentials,
as we see in a brief review of the secondary literature to follow. In short,
throughout the book I counterpoise emic and etic categories to generate a
dynamic, reflexive and transparent account of ‘New Age’ and its location in a
broader field of alternative spiritual practice.
Fieldwork: roles and ethics
Fieldwork practice invariably shades off into a grey zone in which the line
between the ‘informed’ and ‘uninformed’ consent of practitioners becomes
blurred (Richardson 1991: 64). As Fine (1993: 268) bluntly asserts,‘the world
is secured on secrets’.5
Taking into account these realistic constraints on a
theoretically‘pure’fieldwork,I nevertheless almost always worked openly rather
than covertly: that is, telling participants who I was, what I was doing, and – if
I knew at the time – why. Usually I mentioned my own thoughts and feelings
on the practice or issue at hand. But sometimes I was vague about my motives
and opinions since – as Fine (1993:274) shrewdly puts it –‘not only are we unsure
of the effects of explaining our plans but often we do not know what we want
until well into the research project’. An open or ‘overt’ approach allows for a
degree of negotiation, accommodation and – if necessary – disillusion on all
sides. Consequently the difference between emic and etic perspectives that a
covert approach would collapse through concealment is stimulated in overt
work:
There can be no question of total commitment, ‘surrender’ or
‘becoming’. There must always remain some part held back, some
social and intellectual ‘distance’. For it is in the ‘space’ created by this
distance that the analytic work gets done,
(Hammersley and Atkinson 1992: 102)
We can now grasp emics/etics as a cognitive correlate to the fieldworker’s
embodied marginality.Instead of the alterity of researcher and researched – and
of emics and etics – being a problem, it becomes a boon, a positive tool for
comparative knowledge and theory. Nevertheless, the indeterminate nature of
the role of participant–observer, the dynamic relationship between emics and
etics, and the fluid and deregulated arena of practice that constitutes the ‘New
Age’field created an ambiguous experience of fieldwork,since my presentation
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
17
to other practitioners was hard to distinguish from the exploratory,‘taste it and
see’ tactics adopted by novices, the ‘creative exploitation’ of opportunities for
spiritual growth practised by the dedicated ‘seeker’ (Straus 1976). Drawing on
her own experience of research with a small spiritual group,Wagner (1997: 91)
explains a delicate situation well:
To me, I was a member of the group because I was studying it. To
the group, I was a member who was also studying it. Although the
group leaders and most of the members knew I was a student of
the group, they insisted from time to time that I was undergoing
spiritual growth, just as they were. If I did not protest, I would be
uncomfortable. If I protested too much, it would make the group
uncomfortable.
This, of course, replays the esoteric interpretation of a hidden purpose behind
my research mentioned earlier. Such a ‘cosmic’ level of unfalsifiability
defies all attempts at transparency and disclosure and suggests that
Shaffir’s (1991: 77) conclusion is realistic: ‘Despite a commitment to
conducting research overtly, deception is, nonetheless, inherent in participant
observation’.
History and genealogy
People who profess to ignore history are nevertheless compelled to
make historical assumptions at every turn.
(Tosh 1984: 1)
The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the
contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it
fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of
what was imagined consistent with itself.
(Foucault 1977: 147)
Factoring emics and etics into the methodological equation convinced me
that historical perspective, in particular a Foucauldian genealogical analysis,
was also required to complete the reconstruction of ‘New Age’. As I have
said, my approach conforms to Martin’s (1990: 116) call for histories of
religion to be ‘conceived in an ethnographic grain’. This is in one sense
simply to follow Baird’s (1971: 33) theory of history of religions as a
‘temporal study [which] attempts to locate religion in its cultural setting,
and to reveal sequential connections’.6
But the special problem of the ‘New
Age’ field lies in the fact that its boundaries are highly indeterminate, its
empirical history is largely unknown and its celebration of subjectivities
corrodes a steady morphology. I cannot therefore simply ‘read off’ the
EMBLEM
18
history of an agreed phenomenon. ‘New Age’ must be reconstructed from
scattered and internally inconsistent sources. To do this properly we must in
the first place acknowledge as serious empirical evidence spiritual practices
and ideological motifs that until recently have been disparaged and marginalised.
It also means taking seriously Foucault’s call for genealogy to maintain
‘passing events in their proper dispersion’, which means identifying ‘the
accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals –
the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to
those things’ (Foucault 1977: 146). Following the lead of cultural studies in
restoring subcultures, countercultures and popular culture to the scholarly
agenda, not only is there intrinsic interest in recovering the history and
ethnography of ‘lost’ spiritualities but considerable theoretical pay-off accrues
in understanding the cultural dynamics of religious change and innovation.
The sum is that this book is not a celebration of ‘colourful’ marginality
or eccentricity but a genealogical reconstruction that leads us from an
‘exteriority of accidents’, through murky arenas and surprising contiguities,
to the heart of contemporary religious expression.
Popular sources
Alongside my ethnographical and historical work, I trawled the field of
‘New Age’ writing and publishing. An important body of evidence lies in
correspondence, newsletters and mailing lists, particularly in the 1950s and
1960s. Much of this is by nature ephemeral or held in private collections and is
thus difficult to trace.From the outset I interpreted‘texts’very broadly from the
conviction that a search for a ‘canon’ is particularly inappropriate to this field.
For while most practitioners – Findhorn residents, UFO contactees, spiritual
healers – continually test their experiences against written material of all kinds
(including their own) they have little use for textual ‘closure’, preferring to
study what comes to hand through personal recommendation and network
culture.An idea of the voracious appetite for popular printed material can be
had from the pages of the bulletin of the New Zealand-based Heralds of the New
Age, begun in the mid-1950s.An editorial in 1964 reveals the domestic storage
and dissemination of group texts:
Completely unpaid, our librarian runs what amounts to a suburban
library (housed in her home). She selects, wraps and despatches
hundreds of books monthly.7
An article by the librarian herself lists her most borrowed stock, ranging from
the Christian Bible and the Bhagavad-Gita to Shakespeare and Swedenborg,the
Theosophical writings of C. W. Leadbeater and H. P. Blavatsky, the Oahspe
and Urantia bibles, the spiritual healers Edgar Cayce and Harry Edwards
and assorted popularisers of ‘Eastern’ spirituality such as Paul Brunton and
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
19
Paramahansa Yogananda.8 That the library content remained ‘open’ to new
spiritual trends is proved by material in later issues: a 1986 bulletin gives
considerable space to the Indian guru Sai Baba whose teachings, we are now
told,‘many of our readers have come to accept’.9
Searching for a fixed canon in this popular marketplace of ideas only
perpetuates an implicit model of Christian biblical exegesis.What is required in
‘New Age’ studies as elsewhere in Religious Studies is the contextualisation of
textual exegesis in an ethnography of readership. This will certainly include
analysis of textual content but it must pay attention to popular rather than elite
hermeneutics and it must address the material culture of texts. In short, what is
of interest to me is less what the texts‘say’,‘defer’or‘elide’than their conditions
of production and distribution,and the ways in which their audience uses them.
This point refers not just to the manufacture and circulation of ideas typical of
this domain but to the physical properties of the material in which discourse
is inscribed and transmitted. In ‘New Age’ groups of the early period, talks
were taken down in shorthand, letters typed (with carbon copies kept and
filed), newsletters and information sheets crudely duplicated, contact rotas
maintained, mailing lists up-dated on card files, and – in larger groups – several
hundred envelopes stuffed and posted by hand.The resulting ‘endless typing’
– in the words of the editor of the Heralds bulletin – indicates the ‘home
industry’ conditions under which ‘New Age’ discourse gestated and circulated,
suggesting a degree of physical time and effort which lessened markedly once
fax and computer culture began to kick in in the 1970s.This also hints at the
powerful, if masked, material base of discourse, since it suggests that the earlier
career of‘NewAge’as a specific social emblem reflects in part the pioneers’substantial
investments of domestic space and elbow grease.Once the material gets
into the hands of its audience,a new set of problematics arise,for as Avryl Lambert,
the Heralds’ librarian, herself put it:‘There are hundreds of books to help
stretch your mental horizons, but we must all seek to digest and to  
 the wisdom of authors’. Only an ethnography of readership can
gauge how,if at all,this norm translates into practice.There are some indications
of the fruitfulness of such an approach in the ethnographies of Chapter 6
and 7.
So I draw upon a spectrum of popular primary sources, including an
extensive private archive of the foremost international ‘New Age’ organisation,
the Findhorn Foundation. As a reflexive ‘check’ on these I also draw on
my own occasional correspondence and conversations with practitioners
over ten years or more. Since I am principally interested in the corroborative
value of these sources in tracing the genealogy of ‘New Age’ and in their
function as populist modes of expression, my discussions of textual content
per se are restricted. But I do provide a broad discussion of Alice Bailey’s
texts of the 1930s in Chapter 2, and I discuss the popular hermeneutics
of ‘New Age’, encoded in some seminal texts of the 1970s onwards, in
Chapter 5.10
EMBLEM
20
Hunting the snark: the
‘New Age Movement’ in secondary sources
If the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics,if he listens
to history, he finds that there is ‘something altogether different’ behind
things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have
no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion
from alien forms.
(Foucault 1977: 142)
There is now a vast literature on ‘New Age’, including Christian theological
assessments (Saliba 1999) and rationalist debunking (Basil 1988), neither of
which I will treat here. Nor will I consider anthropologies of distinctive
practices or sites classified as ‘New Age’ – for example, Danforth (1989) on
firewalking, Brown, M. (1997) on channelling, or Prince and Riches (2001)
on Glastonbury – although clearly these are the kinds of contextualised study
the field urgently requires. But here I am interested in the bigger picture, and
so I will focus upon a handful of major texts that, from the late 1980s to
the present, have manufactured the academic orthodoxy that there is an
identifiable religious movement known as the ‘New Age’ or the ‘New Age
Movement’.
J. Gordon Melton has provided several wide-ranging accounts of ‘New Age’
as a ‘new popular religious movement’.11
In his view ‘New Age’
is a genuine movement – it has no central headquarters, and its
adherents hold widely varying opinions concerning its exact nature
and goals. . . . The movement is, however loosely, held together by
its very real transformative vision of a new world and of new people
who will transcend the limitations of narrowly chauvinistic cultures,
religions, and political systems, and will surpass the outmoded
thought-forms of ‘old age’ theologies and beliefs.
(Melton 1988: 35–6)
Actually Melton is describing no more than a collection of individuals with a
common utopian ideal. Ironically the absence of just those empirical variables
appropriate to a new social movement (NSM) or new religious movement
(NRM) – leader, headquarters, prescribed text, boundaries, public policy,
common goal – is seen as confirmation.12 Certainly when it comes to questions
of doctrine and belief, Melton acknowledges some discrepancies:
The ideas of the New Age Movement are difficult for many to grasp,
as they grow more out of intuition and experience than doctrines
or logical reasoning. Moreover, the movement tends to embrace
mutually contradictory ideas, and among its spokespersons are people
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
21
who voice opinions completely unacceptable to the movement as a
whole.
(1988: 45–6)
This representational indeterminacy also colours the collection of essays
entitled Perspectives on the New Age (Lewis and Melton 1992) which contains
a vast range of phenomena said to constitute ‘New Age’, as a brief tour of
chapter contents makes plain.‘New Age’ is variously linked to humanistic and
transpersonal psychology, to Hinduism, to Spiritualism; it interacts closely with
New Thought, Pagan witchcraft and alternative spirituality in general; it
penetrates corporate business; and it permeates popular arenas of healing and
channelling.13
The editors’ introduction identifies ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’
definitions of ‘New Age’ (Lewis and Melton 1992: x–xi) linked with a ‘spiritual
subculture’ on the one hand and media stereotyping on the other.To confuse
matters they say that the ‘spiritual subculture’ includes people who would
‘explicitly reject this particular label [New Age]’ due to perceptions of media
stereotyping.They also say that ‘one of the traits of the New Age is that major
subjects of interest vary from time to time’;hence‘NewAge will persist in some
form (though perhaps under a different name) into the foreseeable future’
(ibid.: xii, x). The sum of these generalisations is a remarkably chameleonic
‘movement’, one that can apparently change its corporate stripes, shift its
principal interests and synthesise everything from witchcraft to corporate
business while simultaneously cohering as an empirical collectivity. Lewis
(1992: 2) even claims – without explanation – that researchers ‘can no longer
simply ask respondents in a straightforward manner whether they consider
themselves part of the New Age’. But what kind of viable movement – save
for one in enemy territory or with illegal or clandestine aims (clearly not the
case here) – would be put in jeopardy by simple public affiliation? The data
presented under Lewis and Melton’s editorship in fact suggest a far more
amorphous phenomenon of collective behaviour that is insufficiently
institutionalised to be certain of goals, ideology, or even formal identity.Their
attempt to make the expression ‘New Age Movement’ – or even ‘New Age’ –
stick to this diffuse collectivity is pursued in the teeth of the evidence.
An assumption has been made and a trend set. Most accounts of the 1990s
accept a priori the existence of some kind of movement connected to ‘New
Age’: the main task is now assumed to be identifying the kind of movement
it is. For example, in the introduction to his pioneering study The Emerging
Network, MichaelYork explains that his aim is ‘to arrive at some understanding
of what the New Age Movement is; how it is formed; who is involved, who its
leading spokespersons are’ (York 1995: xiii). But elsewhere York’s account is
interestingly contradictory, for he also correctly says that ‘New Age’ is ‘an
umbrella term that includes a great variety of groups and identities’, that
adherents ‘drift between a range of meetings, workshops, lectures or
ceremonies’, that it is ‘not doctrinaire and consequently means many different
EMBLEM
22
things to many different people’, that it is ‘largely composed of short-lived
groups’ and hence is characterised by ‘ephemerality’ and, finally and crucially, it
does not ‘formulate any clearly expressed idea of religious or organisational
boundaries to be maintained’ (ibid.: 1, 26, 35, 148). But whileYork is prescient
in stressing the field’s network properties, his ultimate solution to the
definitional problem is to subsume ‘New Age’ under an impossibly inclusive
higher-order category,the‘holistic movement’(York 1995:330),which includes
New Age, Neo-paganism, the ecology movement, feminism, the
Goddess movement, the human potential movement, Eastern
mysticism groups, liberal/liberation politics, the Aquarian Conspiracy,
etc.
That Fortean ‘etc.’ gives the game away:‘New Age’ is still an open case.
York’s hyper-inclusive ‘holistic movement’ bears some resemblance to Paul
Heelas’s The New Age Movement (Heelas 1996), in which the term ‘New Age’ is
uncoupled from emic usage and read back into twentieth-century alternative
religion as a whole. Encouragingly, Heelas (1996: 5) understands ‘New Age’
as a ‘cultural and practical resource employed in everyday life’ and presents ‘a
study of “popular” values, aspirations and endeavours’. Chief among these is
‘interest in the self, its values, capacities and problems’ (ibid.: 173). But Heelas
compromises this important enquiry by extravagantly extending the boundaries
of ‘New Age’: his ‘key figures’ are Blavatsky, Jung and Gurdjieff, while men as
diverse as A. R. Orage, Carl Rogers, Prince Charles, Aldous Huxley, and Paul
Tillich are yoked in; even NRMs likeTranscendental Meditation, Soka Gakkai
and the Church of Satan are incorporated. The problem is that there is no
useful boundary to Heelas’s‘NewAge Movement’.He himself admits this when
he writes that ‘the word “movement” should not be taken to imply that the
New Age is in any sense an organised entity’, but his alternative definition –
‘the assumption that humanity is progressing into a new era’ (ibid.: 16) – is not
convincing, an ‘assumption’ being far too weak a term to evince a sociocultural
movement. By uncritically adopting ‘New Age’ as an etic term, the very real
emic career of the emblem is lost. It is then only a short step to conflating
‘New Age’ with modern alternative religion as a whole. Consequently the
analytic purchase of the taxon,and the empirical history of the field,are severely
compromised.
In contrast, Chrissie Steyn’s phenomenological investigation Worldviews in
Transition (Steyn 1994) patiently reconstructs emic content and categories.The
bulk of her text stems from thirty extensive interviews in South Africa in the
early 1990s with activists and purveyors of ‘New Age’ services.This attention
to ‘insider’ accounts yields a very different profile. Steyn finds that a diffuse
Theosophy structures ‘New Age’ in South Africa (ibid.: 27). In particular, twothirds
of her interviewees ‘had been markedly influenced by the [Alice] Bailey
teachings’ (ibid.: 101). Heelas (1996: 45), in contrast, claims that Theosophy is
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
23
‘not especially significant today’ and makes only passing reference to Alice
Bailey. Consequently Steyn models a gently other-worldly, millennialistic
approach against Heelas’s (1996: 16) humanistic ‘inner spirituality’. Like Lewis
and Melton, Steyn acknowledges the controversy attending ‘New Age’ selfidentification
among practitioners, observing that many of her interviewees
‘were reluctant to use the term’ and some were ‘appalled at the idea of being
labelled“New Agers”’(ibid.:xiii).She also problematises the‘movement’tag:‘it
is not an organisation which people can join and it has no creed that everyone
should confess’ (ibid.: 6). Nevertheless, she uses the construct ‘New Age
movement’throughout the book and even concludes with a profile of an‘idealtypical
New Ager’ (ibid.: 302).14
In New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996) Wouter Hanegraaff depicts
‘New Age’ as a commodification of Western esoteric thought for a secular
culture. The text is thus in part given over to an historical discussion of
‘esotericism’. Hanegraaff’s argument for its impact on modern alternative
spirituality is potentially instructive but his presentation of ‘New Age’ suffers
from the by-now familiar definitional a priorism:
Whatever the nature of the New Age movement will turn out to be,
the absence of generally recognised leaders and organisations, normative
doctrines and common practices effectively distinguishes it as a
whole from the many movements which do have these characteristics.
(ibid.: 14)
‘New Age’ is rendered a priori unique. But how could a ‘movement’ exist
without the kinds of feature repudiated by Hanegraaff? He finds a solution to
the problem of fuzzy boundaries in Colin Campbell’s (1972) notion of the
‘cultic milieu’, meaning the alternative spiritual subculture which has been a
persistent feature of modern urban societies. Hanegraaff conflates ‘New Age’
with this ‘cultic milieu’ (op. cit.: 17, 522), suggesting that the latter became at
some point self-consciously aligned as ‘the New Age movement’. But he
advances little evidence for how,why,when,where,and by whom this transformation
came about.The bulk of New Age Religion andWestern Culture consists of
detailed expositions of ideas and themes culled from over one hundred texts
selected by Hanegraaff from ‘leading New Age bookstores’ (ibid.: 17).This certainly
provides a rich digest of the popular religious imagination in post-1960s
Anglo–American culture.But since he asserts rather than demonstrates his bold
claim that ‘a considerable part of the literature is little more than the written
reflection of New Age practices’ (ibid.: 18), and since the tag or emblem itself –
‘New Age’ – scarcely features in the titles of his representative publications,
Hanegraaff’s model of ‘New Age religion’ remains curiously decontextualised.
Finally, I come to Jon Bloch’s interesting but restricted sociological study,
New Spirituality, Self and Belonging (Bloch 1998). Despite the fact that this is the
slimmest volume on offer and is based entirely on a small sample of interviews,
EMBLEM
24
it takes emic discourse seriously, a position sorely under-represented in other
studies.15 Bloch’s method is qualitative ethnographic interviewing, from which
he develops an argument that what he calls the ‘new spirituality’ is a style
of popular discourse constructed by participants to minimise the social strain
they experience between diverging needs of self-autonomy and collective
belonging. The performative function of this discourse is well-observed by
Bloch,but his argument that this amounts to‘a fluid,modern social movement’
is constrained by the book’s brevity and the lack of sustained examination of
wider sociocultural factors moulding the discourse.
What can we make of these key secondary sources? They share a consensus
that beneath the outward diversity of ‘New Age’ is a substantive core of ideas
and values. Holding to this almost as an article of faith allows the authors to
speak either of a ‘New Age Movement’, thereby aligning themselves with a
major sociological sub-industry on NRMs, or of an entity or timespan,‘The
New Age’, in which case identifying with emic metaphysics. Melton andYork
represent this homogeneity largely in terms of a family of networks; Heelas
via an ambiguous relationship with the values of modernity; Steyn through
Theosophical lineage; Hanegraaff in terms of textual ideas; and Bloch through
innovative communication codes. The sum is a complex overview that – as
one might expect – is strong on texts, beliefs and ideas, but less sure, even
contradictory, on ethnography, genealogy and empirical structure. In other
words, the precise location in time and space of ‘New Age’ remains remarkably
unclear despite the assumption that ‘New Age’ is now a secure etic term.16
Is it
‘a religion of revelation’ (Hanegraaff 1996: 27), a ‘genuine movement’ (Melton
1988: 35) or an embodiment of ‘self-spirituality’ (Heelas 1996: 18)? Or is Steyn
(1994: 6) correct to claim that ‘it is not an organisation which people can join
and it has no creed that everyone should confess’?
The fact is, no one is sure.
‘New Age’: tangled emics
The special potency of‘NewAge’lies in its range of possible interpretations and
associations.These include a modernist‘new world order’,a resacralised cosmos
and – not least – an era of human empowerment and fulfilment in a postscarcity
society. In short, the phrase ‘New Age’ evokes large-scale cultural
change, reflecting exciting yet also risky developments in the modern world:
technological revolution and the boom in travel and cultural tourism,certainly,
but also the disruptions of the industrial revolution and, more darkly, the
globalisation of war and the money economy.These multiple meanings ensure
that ideological ambiguity inheres in any particular invocation of ‘New Age’.
The eschatological question of whether the ‘New Age’ is to be ‘secular’ or
‘religious’, (human) made or (divinely) revealed, is left unresolved.
There is scattered usage of ‘New Age’ from the mid-Victorian era onwards,
but here I want to focus on a twentieth-century genealogy, when the emblem
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
25
is used with increasingly stylised connotations and the social contexts of its use
can be cross-referenced. InWellesleyTudor Pole’s Private Dowding, for example,
a Spiritualist exegesis of the sufferings of the FirstWorldWar,a Christ-like figure
called ‘The Messenger’ tells the author that ‘a spiritual remedy is becoming
available [that] will veritably prove the elixir of the new age and will be within
reach of all mankind’ (Pole 1917: 95). The appeal to things ‘spiritual’ and
egalitarian are perennial ingredients of dissident religiosity. But a Christian
element also enters in:harbinger of this‘new age’is‘the Christ spirit’which‘will
dwell among men with healing in its wings’. Pole later surfaces in ‘New Age’
circles in England in the 1960s, as we see in Chapter 4. Meanwhile, in South
Africa, Johanna Brandt, wife of a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church,
received a series of revelations from a ‘Messenger’. First published in Dutch in
1918, Die Millenium: ein voorspelling [The Millennium: a Prophetic Forecast]
announced that‘an altogether new epoch’was imminent and that‘the first great
miracles of the new age of mystic revelation’were about to be revealed in South
Africa (Steyn 2001).
The relationship of ‘The Christ’ to this imminent new era, which had
preoccupied Wellesley Tudor Pole in England and Johanna Brandt in South
Africa, was taken up in earnest in the US in the 1930s by Alice Bailey, a former
Anglican and Theosophist who eventually published a vast corpus of books
outlining her system of ‘eschatological Theosophy’ (Ellwood 1995: 321).
Culminating in the two-volume Discipleship in the New Age (1944, 1955), The
Return of the Christ (1948), and Education in the New Age (1954), Bailey’s epic
texts prophesied an esoteric‘NewAge’to be inaugurated by Christ’s return.But
although Bailey’s‘NewAge’was persuasive,it was never entirely hegemonic:the
deregulated, lay praxis of what would soon be termed ‘postmodernity’ put paid
to that. Others who toyed with the emblem could put their own spin on it
to suit the moment.For example,among groups providing spiritual alternatives
in the aftermath of the Second World War was ‘World Union’, which offered
study courses in ‘New Age Citizenship’ and ‘New Age Health’ from a London
address.17 An indefatigable English pamphleteer, Basil Stewart, added a twelvepage
booklet entitled The Aquarian Age:What it Connotes and the Phenomena that
Will Usher it In (Stewart 1942) and the more substantial SpiritualTruth: the Pure
and Universal Religion of the New Era of the Aquarian Age (Stewart [n.d.]) to his
roster of self-published tracts on a range of issues from Spiritualism to antiCatholicism.And
as we already know, in New Zealand in 1956 the Heralds of
the New Age began to publish booklets of messages channelled from spirit
guides,‘space brothers’ and deceased religious leaders, while pockets of a ‘New
Age subculture’ emerged (Spangler 1984: 26) in the US.
In 1967 two modest English publications championed the ‘New Age’
emblem. They merit a few comments, since the late 1960s is a key period
for mapping the hermeneutic shift in New Age.18
Revelation for the New
Age (Brooke 1967) and A Faith for the New Age (Vaughan 1967) were both
published by Regency Press, an outlet associated with Spiritualist and
EMBLEM
26
Psychic publications. Indeed, the author of the former was a member of both
the Society for Psychical Research and the Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical
and Spiritual Studies,while several well-known Spiritualist sources are included
in the extracts of writing in A Faith for the New Age.This is essentially a plea for
a more broadly ‘supernaturalistic’ (ibid.: 200) and millennialistic Christianity,
based on what the author calls ‘widespread expectation’ of an ‘immanent
Manifestation or Second Coming’ (ibid.: xliii) that will ‘open up vast new
continents of mind and soul for mankind to explore in a truly New
Renaissance and a truly New Reformation in a truly New Age’. Similar
influences shape the collage of views and experiences in Revelation for the New
Age, a collection of talks given by the author in the early 1960s to small groups
in the US and UK. Brooke’s material adds some exotic seasonings toVaughan’s
neo-Christian manifesto, including Indian mysticism, psychic surgery, UFOs,
and the lingua franca of Esperanto.These and other elements are considered to
be ‘signs’ foreshadowing ‘a dramatic breakthrough of spiritual values which will
sweep us all into a worldwide co-operative community’, which Brooke calls
‘the world administration of the new age’ (ibid.: 7).
But ambiguity haunts the form this revelation will take.Will Christ return
as the bearded Palestinian famous from European church statuary, as the cover
picture of Revelation for the NewAge suggests? Or in the guise of a contemporary
charismatic figure – perhaps the emerging Korean guru, Sun Myung Moon
(Brooke was among the first to publicise Moon’s Unificationist theology in the
West), or Sri Aurobindo? Or perhaps the revelation will be more diffuse – a
matter of ‘a new realisation dawning in the hearts of men’? (ibid.: 8).
It is clear that in these early statements on ‘New Age’, authored between the
1930s and late 1960s, there was real discussion and debate, and even a degree of
consensus, on the timing and nature of this new order. The meaning of the
emblem at this time was evidently in part negotiated within a community of
users. In other words, ‘New Age’ carried literal status, in sharp contrast to
the proliferation of referents, and their increasing metaphorisation, that
characterises ‘New Age’ discourse from the 1970s onwards. I explore this point
in detail in Chapter 5, but it is worth emphasising here that in the 1960s a
variety of small projects explicitly identified themselves with a dawning ‘New
Age’, presented as a public revelation of spiritual power on the point of
engulfing the whole planet. In the US an information network called, simply,
‘New Age Teachings’, issued a monthly bulletin of ‘channelled’ messages to
subscribers in some thirty countries around the globe (Melton et al. 1990:
326). In north-east Scotland, a small community beside the coastal village of
Findhorn described itself as ‘pioneering a new way for the New Age’.19
An
American activist,David Spangler,lived at Findhorn in the early 1970s and wrote
a book there called Revelation:The Birth of a New Age (Spangler 1977 [1971]).
In contrast, there are also references in several directories of alternative
spirituality documenting an emergent ‘umbrella’ function. A self-styled ‘New
Age Group’ in Blackpool, England, for example, was holding regular meetings
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
27
to discuss ‘colour, numerology, practical mysticism, esoteric astrology, unity and
yoga’, while ‘The New Age Research Fellowship’ in Epsom concentrated on
‘absent and contact healing,rescue work,meditation,[and] discussion on occult
matters’(Strachan 1970:120–1) and the Middle Piccadilly Farm at Sherbourne,
Dorset, listed itself as a ‘small New Age community’ specialising in ‘selfexploration
workshops’ (Khalsa 1981: 50).What exactly is ‘New Age’ about all
these latter associations? Since they do not explain their grounds for adopting a
‘New Age’ identity we can only surmise that the term was ‘in the air’ and
seemed a potent and accessible slogan to organise and perhaps market diverse
wares and practices. The so-called ‘New Age Travellers’ who emerged in the
1980s were different again. A picaresque hybrid of punk and ‘free festival’
hippies in the English countryside (Lowe and Shaw 1993,Hetherington 2000),
the ‘travellers’ were for a time entirely identified with ‘New Age’ in popular
discourse in the UK and counted as the most common category mistake made
by friends and colleagues when I first told them of my research in the mid-
1990s. Confusions stemming from the co-existence of at least two broad
currents of popular hermeneutic – one apocalyptic and eschatological, the
other expressive and humanistic – reminds us of the point of embarking on a
genealogical investigation in the first place, since the a prioristic assumption of
a ‘New Age Movement’ obliterates nuanced emic differences by default.
Enough has been said here to indicate that some specific historical currents
of alternative spirituality that fall short of a ‘movement’ in any useful sense have
nurtured ‘New Age’ discourse.A recent revival of the term ‘Aquarian’ as a rival
emblem must also be mentioned for the sake of completeness. It derives from
astrological calculations on the earth’s movement from Pisces into Aquarius,the
new sphere of celestial influence (Kelly 1990).Astrology had been popularised
in the 1920s – for example, The Message of Aquaria (Curtiss and Curtiss 1921)
and The Riddle of the Aquarian Age (Bennet 1925) – and in the 1930s it entered
British daily newspapers. In the contemporary period the ‘Aquarian’ motif can
be traced to the late 1960s: the musical Hair had the chorus line ‘this is the
dawning of the Age of Aquarius’, and the famousWoodstock music festival was
billed as an ‘Aquarian Exposition’ (Makower 1989: 106).The trope also drives
texts like A Vision of the Aquarian Age (Trevelyan 1977) and The Aquarian
Conspiracy (Ferguson 1982). Sometimes the expressions ‘New Age’ and ‘Age of
Aquarius’are interchangeable:a recent book by David Spangler is called Pilgrim
in Aquarius (Spangler 1996). But ‘Aquarian’ has also been an alternative tag for
Pagan practitioners seeking to celebrate the dawn of a new cycle of spirituality
while distancing themselves from the stark modernism, and perceived
mercantilism,20
of ‘New Age’.Thus Marian Green, editor of Quest magazine in
England, is said to be typical of some British Pagans in the early 1990s in that
she ‘entertains the New Age idiom as a compatible frame of reference’ (York
1995: 151). And in the US, Adler (1981: 402) reproduces a 1973 ‘Aquarian
Manifesto’ celebrating ‘Aquarians Together’, denoting ‘Witches, Warlocks,
and Wizards, Psychics, Priests and Parapsychologists; Mystics, Mediums, and
EMBLEM
28
Magicians;Astrologers, Diviners and Occultists’. In the light of this and other
evidence of blurred boundaries, recent Pagan claims of sharp differentiation
from ‘New Age’ must be treated as strategy rather than history.21
Deconstructing ‘New Age’
The term ‘New Age’, like the earlier terms ‘hippie’ and ‘yuppie’, is
partly an accurate designation and partly a mass media stereotype, a
symbolic canopy beneath which a very wide variety of phenomena are
thrown.There is something going on, everyone agrees, but what?
(Simmons 1990: 203–4)
The search for descent . . . shows the heterogeneity of what was
imagined consistent with itself.
(Foucault 1977: 147)
In short, I argue in this book that ‘New Age’ was originally an apocalyptic
emblem and is now a tag or codeword for a‘spiritual’idiom.In both cases‘New
Age’ lacks predictable content and fixed referents: it is always interpreted
vernacularly,although the literalist tendencies of the earlier period allow far less
hermeneutical latitude than do the polysemic fragmentations of post-1970s
spirituality. In order fully to deconstruct ‘New Age’ and refocus academic
attention, I need to show how ‘New Age’ is intimately linked to wider spiritual
experimentation.To this end I exhume in the first part of the book, entitled
‘Emblem’, some key early episodes in ‘New Age’ discourse.The ideology of an
imminent ‘New’ or ‘Aquarian’ age that became available in the 1930s has as a
primary source the post-Theosophical writings of Alice Bailey, but it also
reflects complex popular cultural dynamics in the period and a growing
constituency of seekers hungry for new spiritual syncretisms.After the Second
WorldWar the nuclear age and the ‘space race’ added urgency to this discourse;
one sketch of the régime at the Findhorn community in 1968, before the
incursions of the counterculture, characterises this ‘early’ New Age discourse as
a spiritual cargo cult,waiting for something to happen.From the skies,
through world events, or from within, they were waiting for that
signal, that sign, the ineffable essence of a new ‘reality’ that would tell
them that the old was passing away and the New Age was beginning.
(Hawken 1990: 180–1)
In the second part of the book, entitled ‘Idiom’, I build a contrastive profile of
‘late’ New Age. Following a hermeneutical shift in the early 1970s, and under
pressure from new developments in alternative religion – including the
vigorous evangelising of NRMs (Clarke 1987), the ‘do your own thing’ ethos
of the counterculture (Neville 1970) and the diffusion of ‘personal growth’ and
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ‘NEW AGE’
29
human potential pursuits in popular culture (Heelas 2000, Puttick 2000) –
‘NewAge’became an increasingly multivalent signifier.By the 1980s and 1990s
‘New Age’ had metamorphosed into a label for a sensual and somatic idiom of
contemporary popular religion containing a little bit of just about everything.
This shift from sharply-focused, apocalyptic emblem to diffuse humanistic
idiom is the axis around which the book turns.
EMBLEM
30