The church dissatisfies me. I know all the things they teach.
I want more, you know?
(Alison, Unit of Service, 1997)
We are trained to listen to experts in our culture and not to
ourselves. The premise of the New Age is the other way
around.
(Spangler 1996: 184)
The whole point is our journey, not our destination.
(Edwards 1993: 63)
Recapitulation
In this book I have reconstructed the genealogy of a multivalent emblem,‘New
Age’,within interconnected networks of‘alternative’spirituality from the 1930s
to the 1990s. In the first part, called ‘Emblem’, I examined Peter Caddy’s career
in the Rosicrucian Order, the activities of Sheena Govan’s group and the early
years of the Findhorn settlement. I found evidence of other networks active in
England, New Zealand and the US in the late 1950s and early 1960s – George
Trevelyan, the Heralds of the New Age, the North American ‘subculture’
delineated by David Spangler – for whom ‘New Age’ was an apocalyptic
emblem within a cocktail of occult, psychic and spiritualistic ideas and
practices. In this early period the expression had objective historical status
among communicants: a ‘New Age’ was imminent, its apocalyptic harbingers
were on the horizon and groups had to prepare themselves spiritually in
response.
In the second part,‘Idiom’, I traced the diffusion and disintegration of this
emblem in the 1970s and beyond under the influence of a youthful counter
culture and a concomitant decline in the authority of grand narratives (Lyotard
1979) in the culture at large.‘New Age’ became, as it were, adjectival, a loose
‘quality’ of a person, act or social process rather than a negotiated emblem.As a
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sign of this shift it became self-consciously problematised by both participants
and observers – one informant in Lowe and Shaw (1993: 227) said vehemently
‘I hate that cliche “New Age”’. It was increasingly rendered in inverted
commas (“New Age”) or lower case (new age) and it came to qualify
everything from an adumbrated religiosity to entire – sometimes mutually
contradictory – lifestyles:‘alternative’,‘yuppie’,holistic,‘traveller’.1 Significantly,
the ethnography of the last three chapters is notably thin in use of the emblem
although rich in genealogical association and folk memory.The international
‘New Age’ showcase, Findhorn, is now increasingly reluctant to deploy the
term, preferring to describe itself as a ‘spiritual community’ with ‘no formal
doctrine or religious creed’.‘New Age’ surfaces only serendipitously in holistic
health circles,and if it underpinsAlice Bailey’s writings,it is veiled in LucisTrust
discourse as we enter the twenty-first century.
But I have also uncovered considerable empirical evidence of social networks
sporadically associated with ‘New Age’.The reconstruction of these has been
one task of the present book, rescuing real emic histories from the false etics of
a ‘New Age movement’.These networks are manifestations of an ‘alternative’
spirituality that is self-consciously dissenting with regard to established religious
institutions and post-Enlightenment rationality alike. Created by self-taught
practitioners, amateur thinkers and ‘do-it-yourself’ seekers, this kind of
spirituality has been moulded by populist values and popular culture. It is
radically elective – supremely a ‘religion of choice’ – although constrained by
social variables of class, gender and ethnicity.Thus we have a series of interest
groups associated with ‘New Age’ that yet lack sufficient complexity of
organisation or public programme to constitute a social movement in any
meaningful taxonomy. In fact, far from amounting to a ‘movement’, the
defining properties of ‘New Age’ at any one time are largely the sum of
the activities of x number of mustered seekers: a ‘buzzing hive of virtuosic
individualists’ (Sutcliffe 2000a: 32).
In this final chapter I consolidate my critique of the concept of a ‘New
Age movement’. Simultaneously I reconstruct the organisational processes
that shape the constituencies of actors elided by this concept. This requires
further discussion of the role of ‘seeker’, the act of ‘seeking’ and the nature of
the preferred ideology,‘spirituality’. Finally I argue that the immediate future
for seekers – the metaphorical ‘children of the new age’ – is qualitatively
rich but quantitatively limited. By this I mean that inbuilt constraints in the
institution of spiritual seekership restrict its political impact compared to
the scale and complexity required to achieve the kinds of radical social change
invoked in the popular rhetoric. At the same time key features of spiritual
seeking and the ideology of spirituality redirect our attention to so-called
‘softer’ cultural spheres of feelings and relationships – and subjectivities in
general – that may play a more significant role in the reconfiguration of
contemporary religion in the longer term.The legacy of‘New Age’remains for
the time being an ameliorative, domesticated and localised Anglo–American
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discourse on spirituality, despite its often extravagant claims of universal
consciousness and global transformation.
The ‘New Age movement’: laying the ghost
In Chapter 1 we saw that most commentators understand ‘New Age’ to be a
movement of some kind. I questioned this position then and probed it further
in Chapter 5. The historical and ethnographical evidence of the remaining
chapters has added considerable cumulative weight to my argument. Let me
consolidate it now.
First, emic affiliation with ‘New Age’ is optional, episodic and declining
overall. A good index is the titles of representative source texts. Hanegraaff’s
(1996: 525ff.) formidable selection of one hundred and eleven primary sources
yields only six titles actually featuring the expression ‘New Age’, and none
mentioning a ‘New Age Movement’. In Bloom (1991: ix–xii), only two out
of fifty-one titles employ the term; in Satin (1978: 221–33), only one out of
two hundred.This pattern of marginal usage was confirmed in my fieldwork.
In a simple questionnaire I circulated during Experience Week at Findhorn,
only two out of ten respondents identified themselves as ‘New Age’ and
even then it was with qualifications: Martine from Brazil used the by-now
familiar inverted commas while Patrick, the Irishman, described his identity
as ‘New Age and still searching’. Nor are the founders of the Findhorn
colony keen to invoke the emblem. Dorothy Maclean told me: ‘We did not
use the term “New Age” much in the early days’, and Eileen Caddy likewise
wrote:‘No, Peter, Dorothy and I did not think of ourselves as part of a New
Age Movement’.2
In sum, historical, ethnographical and autobiographical
evidence strongly suggests that a ‘New Age’ identity is and has been
restricted to the predilections of discrete groups and individuals, instead
of defining the agenda of a substantial collectivity, let alone an operative
movement.
Certain bodies, of course, have persisted with the expression. The Arcane
School continues to offer the ‘training in new age discipleship’ it began in the
1920s. But such idiosyncratic projects only prove a general rule. Similarly,
individuals sometimes invoke the emblem while on other occasions they wear
a different hat. Button and Bloom (1992: 17) exemplify this laissez-faire
approach when they write:‘During the last ten years,“holistic thinking”,“the
green movement”,“new paradigm thinking”,the“new age”– whatever we choose
to call it – has become a significant force’ (emphasis added; also note the
indeterminacy conveyed by all those inverted commas). Despite Button and
Bloom’s implicit disavowal, taxonomies matter: they inscribe (or deny) power
and legitimacy in social collectivities.The ambiguities and qualifications in their
formulation directly reflect political uncertainty. More forthright is David
Spangler’s confession: ‘I have personal doubts that there really is something
called the “New Age movement”.The New Age idea, yes, but a movement, no –
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at least not in any ideological, organised sense’ (in Spangler and Thompson
1991: 64). But how could there be a ‘movement’ without ideology and
organisation? Elsewhere Spangler spills the beans:
There is no dogma, no orthodoxy, and essentially, no agreement
on where the boundaries of the movement are and who is or is
not part of it. In this sense, it is not so much a movement as a
sprawl.
(Spangler 1996: 34)
The notion of a ‘New Age movement’ is also problematic in etic terms in that
the phenomena lack the requisite sociostructural features to differentiate a
distinctive ‘New Age’ project from looser, slacker types of collective behaviour
such as the models of ‘crowd’,‘fad’,‘craze’, and ‘public’ proposed in Turner and
Killian’s Collective Behaviour (1972). Certainly several types of ‘movement’ have
been advanced historically, particularly new religious movements (NRMs) and
new social movements (NSMs).3
Part of the problem in this important but
strangely neglected definitional endeavour is that scholars on ‘New Age’
have generally avoided specifying their usage – York (1995) is an honourable
exception – or else,like Melton (1988),have proposed such an eccentric model
that ‘New Age’ is ipso facto rendered unique. But the ‘New Age’ field as a whole
is actually deficient in the typical features of NRMs and NSMs. It lacks a
distinctive corporate body, a legislative mechanism, historical consciousness,
organisational infrastructure, boundaries, and other indices of membership and
belonging, and, crucially, unambiguous self-identity and concrete goals. The
absence of these features sharply distinguishes ‘New Age’ from the mass of
post-1960s movements and associated fields of study, to which the ‘New Age
Movement’ taxon confines it through a basic category mistake. This point
becomes clearer if we contrast ‘New Age’ with prominent NRMs such as the
Church of Scientology, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness or
the Unification Church.It is obvious that‘NewAge’lacks a founder like L.Ron
Hubbard or Sun Myung Moon, has no corporate body to seek tax exemption
or ‘religious’ status (or which could qualify as a ‘church’ or ‘society’), has no
equivalent conversion identity to the ‘Moonie’, no dress code like the Krishna
devotee’s, and no unique argot like Scientology’s terminology of ‘clears’,
‘thetans’ and ‘orgs’. The comparison fares little better when we turn to
examples of social movements. Byrne (1997), for example, bases his analysis
on the ‘green’, peace and women’s movements in the UK. These certainly
share with ‘New Age’ characteristics of cultural diffusion and polycentric
organisation but they do have in each case a consistent signifier and referent as
well as an explicit political platform of self-identity, theory, method, and goal.
‘New Age’ – taken as a collective behavioural field – has none. Certainly a few
organisations tagged ‘New Age’ might individually meet these criteria, such
as Findhorn or the Lucis Trust, but that is an argument for qualification as a
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NRM or NSM, not for extrapolating from these very distinctive cases to a
generic ‘movement’.
I conclude my argument on this score by addressing the most persuasive
organisational model so far advanced for ‘New Age’: the ‘SPIN’ or ‘segmented
polycephalous integrated network’advanced in Gerlach and Hine (1968,1970)
and adopted by York (1995). Gerlach and Hine offer a loose yet nuanced
definition that appears at first sight promising for ‘New Age’ studies. For them,
a ‘movement’ is
a group of people who are organised for, ideologically motivated by,
and committed to a purpose which implements some form of personal
or social change; who are actively engaged in the recruitment of
others; and whose influence is spreading in opposition to the
established order within which it originated.
(Gerlach and Hine 1970: xvi)
Despite an unhelpful terminological vagueness,there are resonances if we apply
this definition to‘New Age’in the 1950s and 1960s at least:the emphasis on the
‘group’ as the organisational unit, the ideological motivation provided by an
imminent,concrete‘New Age’,the active networking with sympathetic others;
and the subcultural stance.But the evidence suggests that‘New Age’in its early,
emblematic period was only ever ‘in opposition to the established order’ in its
abstract rhetoric of a planetary ‘apocalypse’: it actually attracted most support
from a relatively privileged,occasionally aristocratic,social base and participants
clearly expected to be among the elect salvaged from the predicted planetary
destruction. Conversely, the later, idiomatic period shows just how easily a
countercultural discourse of ‘work on oneself’ could be recuperated by
popular and middle-class cultures increasingly shaped by postmodernising
forces (Harvey 1989; Lyon 2000) in which the adjective ‘alternative’ is as likely
to refer to consumer choice in the spiritual marketplace (Roof 1999) as it is
to signify political opposition. The fate of the SPIN model is settled once
we know that the empirical examples chosen by Gerlach and Hine were
Pentecostalism and Black Power, two clearly-demarcated social movements
organised according to sustained materialist programmes of recruitment and
advancement.As such they are anathema to ‘New Age’ instincts.
Indeed, one might say that the politics of change pursued by Byrne’s
examples in the UK and Gerlach and Hine’s in the US have been almost
completely absent in ‘New Age’, where a preoccupation with subjectivity,
interpersonal relationships and the general quality of experience has sidelined
questions of political mobilisation.This methodological individualism has the
effect of severely downplaying the historical potency of institutions both to
maintain and to resist the social order. Rather it has promulgated – with
uncertain results – a popular model of the percolating power of individuals,
networks and groups as a kind of ‘spiritual yeast’ in the social order.
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Seekers and Seeking: the popularisation
of an identity and a strategy
Writers [to Alice Bailey in the early 1920s] asked for guidance in their
search for truth without being subjected to the usual limitations of
dogmatic creeds.
(The Arcane School: Entrance Papers, Lucis Trust, London, n.d, p. 2)
I began to question many of the things that had been taught by
conventional religions, and started my own search for the truth
through many ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’.
(Peter Caddy c.1933, remembered in Caddy 1996: 25)
For the world, the only hope is for individuals to explore their own
journeys.
(Healer Jill Rakusen, in Coniam and Gibson 1996: 35)
The typical actor in‘New Age’is a religious individualist,mixing and matching
cultural resources in an animated spiritual quest. Standing in sharp contrast to
traditional participatory roles in Anglo–American religion such as ‘member’,
‘communicant’,‘congregant’or‘convert’,we can call this actor a‘seeker’and the
sum of her or his cultural ploys, ‘seeking’.The attendant social institution of
‘seekership’ raises issues of agency, identity, common culture, and impact.
There are both advantages and disadvantages in employing the term‘seeker’.
In its favour, ‘seeker’ is a term widely known and used among practitioners
themselves and has its own rich stock of theory and lore. So it carries emic
authority. But it can also function as a comparative anthropological category
connoting subjectivity and reflexivity.The impact of various social variables on
seekership can be mapped and analysed.These include class and ethnicity but
not gender: seekership in theory and practice carries weak gender ascription,
in contrast to the emergent popular discourse on spirituality (which I
discuss below). Seekership also crosses age cohorts and infuses autobiographical
narratives in suggestive but largely unexplored ways. And finally, not least,
the term is parsimonious. Negatively, ‘seeker’ has overly pious or ‘earnest’
connotations and may suggest a theological judgment or a neo-colonialist
interpretation (derived from orientalist fantasies of the ‘mystic East’; cf. King
1999) of what the proper approach to ‘religion’ should be.We must beware of
naturalising a normative role of the ‘seeker’ as a particularly holy or morally
righteous individual. Nor should we cast the seeker as a role-playing obsessive
or as a systematic theologian in disguise,since in practice the role may be lightly
carried or the person may not construct of her or his behaviour in these terms,
and values and practices are likely to be derived from popularised and syncretic
forms.In any case the boundaries between seeking and other roles and practices
adopted in the life course – in education, relationships, health care, work and
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leisure – are often quite fuzzy, as we have seen. In this book, then, ‘seeker’
functions as an anthropological role, not as a soteriological prescription.
Seekership has its own history; strategies change over time. The act of
seeking formerly demonstrated strong affinities with unusual biographies and
elite social class, as the examples of Annie Besant (Bevir 1999) and Ronald
Nixon/Sri Krishna Prem (Haberman 1993), or Alice Bailey and Sir George
Trevelyan in ‘New Age’ genealogy, amply demonstrate. But globalising cultural
flows have democratised and popularised what were previously largely leisured,
elite forms of identity and self-expression.The loosening of traditional kinship
and community ties during and after the Second World War, particularly in
urban and metropolitan centres, compounded already high levels of social and
geographical mobility among the general population,and these were stimulated
in turn by wartime refugee crises. We can posit that a measure of reflexive
seekership in individuals’ self-representations emerged across the cultural
spectrum – bolstered by middle-class traditions that esteemed the value of
qualitative experience and the character-building work of self-reflection – as
a strategy for managing the population displacements and exponential
‘pluralisation of life-worlds’ (Berger et al. 1974) characteristic of the post-war
world. Early ‘New Age’ seekers’ culture, for example, was in no way pure or sui
generis. It was a mongrel spiritual culture that, as we saw in Chapters 2 to 4,
incorporated occult ideas such as the existence of secret ‘Masters’ and Indian
teachings on karma and reincarnation alongside popular psychological
techniques and neo-Christian piety. These and contiguous ingredients can
easily be found in other spiritual microcultures of the period, as can the social
functions of group interaction,popular reading and the experience and wisdom
derived from the ‘university of life’, displayed as a lay antidote to scientific
rationality and the hegemony of ‘the experts’. The only really distinctive
element in seekership culture,as I have shown,was the‘NewAge’emblem itself.
The emergence of the ‘seeker’ as an etic model of reflexive identity is largely
a post-war development. In Canada in the early 1950s, for example, Mann
(1962: 39–41) identified a small segment of the population he called
‘metaphysical tramps’.These were‘intellectual critics of the churches’who were
‘eager to discover some new slant on religion’. From Mann’s data they appear
to have been single,unattached and mobile;he disapprovingly considered them
‘incorrigible drifters’. During the same period, Festinger et al. (1964) mapped
Mrs Keech and ‘The Seekers’ in the US and Buckner (1968) later identified
a type he called ‘the occult seeker’ among UFO groups. Lofland and Stark
(1965: 868ff.) derived a loose social institution of ‘seekership’ from their
analysis of spiritual consumers in California based on a cognitive model of
‘problem solving’: that is, the search for ‘some satisfactory system of religious
meaning’ to ‘interpret and resolve discontent’. Lofland (1977) subsequently
developed a simple typology of‘veteran’and‘freshmen’seekers:the former were
typically aged over forty and hence, like the ‘New Age’ pioneers in Chapters 3
and 4, born in the interwar period or earlier; the latter were implicitly part of
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the post-war baby-boom generation discussed in Chapter 5. Importantly,
Lofland noticed the ‘multi-directional, tentative seeking’ of the ‘freshmen’
seekers, which might just as easily lead to deeper commitment as to fresh
conversions or even to another kind of cultural ‘deviancy’ altogether (ibid.:
170). In other words, the trajectories of this new generation of seekers had
unstable arcs and unpredictable impact, and were already transgressing
boundaries between‘sacred’and‘profane’domains.By now the seeker signalled
an emergent type of reflexive cultural identity with diffuse, institutionally
destabilising effects.
Further analyses followed in the 1970s. In a seminal paper on the postSixties
‘cultic milieu’, Campbell (1972: 127) found its major institution to be
the loose, fluid ‘society of seekers’. Straus (1976) sought to rescue seekers’
agency and creativity from the reductive, even pathologising, accounts of the
1960s; he also contextualised the phenomenon, like Lofland, within broader
processes of cultural change in which‘the quest to change one’s life’(ibid.:269)
was now paramount. In a similar vein, Balch and Taylor (1977) explained the
‘metaphysical seeker’ as a socially-oriented problem-solver, rather than the
fantasist or sick individual portrayed in Buckner’s dismissive account of UFO
seekers. Rehabilitation of the term as an etic construct was completed in
the 1990s when Roof (1993) labelled the entire cohort of baby-boomers a
‘generation of seekers’and Sutcliffe (2000a) pointed to the entrenched function
of seekers and seeking as the biographical motor of ‘alternative’ and contemporary
spiritualities.
As we have seen in this book, seekers’ quests are simultaneously projected
onto the social world through travel, pilgrimage and social interaction, and
introjected within the self to create an expanding field of subjective, qualitative
experiences.Exploration of both realms is deemed vital:asAlison from the Unit
of Service says,‘the search without will prove little without the inward search’.4
For example, before setting up ‘Gandalf’s Garden’ in London, Muz Murray
(1989: x) spent seven years travelling widely, ‘sifting the sands of many
spiritual cultures for guidance’. Hollywood actress Shirley MacLaine (1983: 90)
demonstrates the diffusion of the model into popular culture when she writes,
‘I’ve always thought I was looking for myself whenever I travelled. Like a
journey anywhere was really a journey through myself.’ Seeking can cover
a wide geography, from regularly visiting a nearby fair or centre to making
journeys of, say, several hundred miles to visit an international colony like
Findhorn. Judith Boice (1990) narrates a five-year pilgrimage through several
international settlements including Findhorn, Auroville in India and the Bear
Tribe in North America. Similarly, Journey: An Adventure of Love and Healing
(Tattersall 1996) chronicles an intense episode in the author’s life: an American
living in Italy, he visits Findhorn for Experience Week and then travels to
Norway with a German man and a Norwegian woman to resolve a series of
emotional and spiritual crises. These and other journeys replay Anthony
Brooke’s international travels or the wanderings of the Findhorn founders, but
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in a more somatic and affective idiom where bodily contact and emotional
expressivity are affirmed as touchstones of spiritual authenticity.
When mapped out reflexively as ‘inner work’ (Caddy 1988: 84), seeking
transforms the self into a portable institution: a rich storehouse of subjectivities
with which to interpret the passing world. The books of Alice Bailey are
instructive in this regard, since they chart a satisfyingly complex ‘inner’ world
of subtle bodies, angelic forces and unfolding hierarchies of relationship.
Similarly, the field of holistic health is replete with esoteric anatomies and
aetiologies: meridians, astral and etheric bodies, chakras and zones, the
circulation of chi, prana and kundalini. And human potential discourse
encourages the seeker to harness the energies of his ‘inner team’ (Waters
1996: 115) through reflexive processes of ‘self-audit’,‘self-awareness’,‘self help’,
and ‘self-talk’, to cite a few entries in a dictionary of ‘personal development’
(ibid.: 178ff.).
Of course,the notion of intense searching and questioning to resolve specific
dissatisfactions, or perhaps a more general anomie, has a long pedigree in
theology, literature and folk tradition alike. I am thinking here of Augustine’s
seminal Christian Confessions, the apocryphal wanderings of Siddharta
Gautama, or the virtuosity of Hindu yogis, as well as the great variety of
reflexive ‘journals’ and ‘confessions’ in the modern period. And an implicit
search may, consciously or not, propel quite secular biographies in the ‘pursuit
of worldly success, health or consolation’ (Campbell 1972: 124). But the
significance of the social institution of seekership in contemporary spirituality
lies in its popularisation and diffusion of a previously elite, specialist role, which
has specific consequences for Anglo–American corporate religion. So Walker
(1994: 27) characterises ‘New Age’ by its insistence that ‘spiritual insight is not
just given to a few theologians, adepts, priests or shamans, but is available to all’
and in Bloom’s (1991: xv–xvi) rhetoric,‘New Age’ is merely ‘the visible tip of
the iceberg of a mass movement in which humanity is reasserting its right to
explore spirituality in total freedom’. In ‘New Age’ discourse and increasingly
in popular and middle-class cultures, the ‘spiritual quest’ is no longer the
prerogative of a social elite – superiorly educated monks, clerics and
philosophers with commanding cultural capital, or even the aristocratic
pioneers of ‘New Age’ – but a populist norm.This development suggests that
the intellectualist model of seeking as a rarefied ‘problem-solving’ perspective,
a strategy to reduce cognitive dissonance among the spiritually sensitive and
restless,needs to be contextualised within a wider culture of popular practice in
which the ‘seeker’ is now a familiar and accessible role model. Indeed, evidence
from other studies of popular religion (Schneider and Dornbusch 1958, Roof
1999) indicates that a pragmatic heterodoxy and customisation of practice and
belief among the ‘people in the pew’ is more widespread in Anglo–American
Christian cultures than ecclesiastical history has allowed.This in turn suggests
that a modified seekership culture may be less alien to institutional religion than
might at first be assumed.
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Two basic dynamic expressions of seeking can be distinguished: ‘serial’
and ‘multiple’.5 A ‘serial’ seeker has changed religious or spiritual allegiance,
typically more than once. Adhesion to each ‘spiritual path’ may last months,
years or decades, and any number of sequential affiliations may be pursued
over the course of a lifetime. This mode of seeking is well illustrated in the
biographies of the pioneers of Chapters 3 and 4. At a minimum count, Peter
Caddy passed through the Rosicrucian Order, Sheena Govan’s neo-Christian
piety and UFO prophecy. So orderly was his progression that he himself noted
that ‘each major change in direction is accompanied by a change in partner’
(Caddy 1996: 368). Dorothy Maclean was initiated into Western Sufism, then
explored a variety of ‘spiritual groups’ in the 1950s (Maclean 1980: 13) before
establishing contact with the nature spirits at Findhorn. George Trevelyan
studied Alexander Technique and Anthroposophy before promoting his
eclectic esoteric syllabus at Attingham Park. Liebie Pugh, we are told, had
‘travelled along or knew of most spiritual paths’ (Caddy 1996: 234). A steady
progression of sources of guidance appears in the Heralds of the New Age
bulletins from the 1950s to the 1980s. And each of these figures or groups
appropriated in some fashion, and for varying periods of time, the ‘New Age’
emblem.
Seriality remains a feature of ‘New Age’. The trajectory of David Icke’s
‘spiritual journey’ in the UK recapitulates early ‘New Age’ patterns in his
sense of ‘being guided’ (Icke 1991: 13ff.). Olsen (1991: xv) introduces her
compendium of alternative health treatments in suitably reflexive mode:‘This
book represents just the early phases of my personal health odyssey. I expect to
continue exploring health care options for as long as I live’. And McGuire
(1998: 116) reports that a ‘not atypical’ member of one American alternative
healing group‘tried (and was generally pleased with) rebirthing,crystal healing,
colonics, meditation journals, shiatsu, and dance therapy’. Serial seeking
dramatically reflects the impact on autobiography of an expanding cultural
menu. Nevertheless, in this mode of seeking one is not so much interested in
the thrill of the chase as resolving the quest: reaching closure of some kind.As
Gill Edwards (1993: viii) puts it:
For fifteen years, I had followed personal and spiritual paths – from
dreamwork to TM, from Gestalt therapy to yoga, from Buddhism to
the Quakers.But while each had enriched my life,none had led to the
transformation that I was seeking. I began, day after day, to call out to
Spirit, saying that I was ‘ready’.
A hankering for certainty instils a teleological undercurrent in the serial search:
not just to seek, but to find. In contrast, multiple seeking proceeds multidirectionally
and synchronically: an array of spiritual resources are exploited
more or less simultaneously.Ideas,methods and techniques are decontextualised
and reconstituted in new settings and adventurous juxtapositions.The practice
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of multiple seeking has a particular affinity with late ‘New Age’, when,
according to Bloom (1993a: 82) ‘all the spiritual traditions and cosmologies are
now available to us’. Data in Rose (1998: 15) support this hypothesis: of some
nine hundred Kindred Spirit subscribers, he found that fully two-thirds ‘follow
more than one teaching at any one time’. Of course, serial and multiple tacks
on spirituality are not mutually exclusive stances: many seekers alternate
between episodes of each. But the multiple strategy seems particularly wellsuited
to the task implied in the discourse of assembling a customised spiritual
‘kit’ of ideas, values and practices. Hence Bloom (1993b: 21) advises the tyro:
‘Spiritual practice is something that you and you alone can put together for
yourself’. Journey Towards Healing, the ‘personal search’ of alternative therapist,
counsellor and channeller Lori Forsyth (1993: 7), epitomises this attitude. By
her mid-thirties Forsyth had already tried out yoga, alternative medicine,
spiritual healing, psychic prediction, spirit guides, and Findhorn, to name just a
few resources, and she had also changed her name by deed poll the better to
express her personal sense of autonomy and originality. Similarly, McGuire
(1998: 95) reports that participants in one healing group ‘wove together
complex, eclectic, and continually changing strands from several approaches
for their personal beliefs and practices’. One respondent vividly illustrates this
customised approach to daily practice:
Her meals were selected for particular nutritional benefits; she used
mini-meditations during her hectic moments at the office, applied
acupressure and visualization to counter a headache [and] employed
breathing techniques and visualization at each stoplight to handle the
stress of a difficult commute home.At home she used a mantra, crystal
and visualization to ‘centre’ herself during and after an argument. . . .
Most days she spent one hour on exercise followed by stress-reducing
visualizations in the sauna . . . Later she had a cup of herbal tea and
meditated for half an hour.
(McGuire 1998: 184–5)
Here an inventive mix of spiritual, dietary and exercise practices has permeated
everyday life. Closure is spurned: practice remains open and mutable. This is
clearly useful in times of rapid cultural ‘turnover’, allowing new ideas and
practices to be slipped into the mix as and when they become available. As
Shirley MacLaine has remarked,‘every time I think I’ve got the answers I think
it’s different a week later’.6 Likewise William Bloom (1991: xviii) describes his
‘spiritual enquiry’ as ‘an exploration’ whose end ‘I cannot now even begin to
sense’.Hence the multiple seeker refines a customised lifestyle through pick and
mix and trial and error in the‘spiritual marketplace’(Roof 1999).In contrast to
the earnest, ascetic lifestyle of the ‘New Age’ pioneers, multiple seeking can be
light, laid-back, even fun. ‘Be playful’, suggests Spangler (1996: 181); Bloom
advertises his talks as ‘enjoyable’ and ‘fun’.7
Not so much pilgrim’s progress as
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pilgrim’s process, seeking itself has become the end. Gill Edwards (1993: 63)
acknowledges this:‘The whole point is our journey, not our destination’.
We can say, then, that a sense of history and alterity marks off the serial
approach from the hyperactivity of multiple seeking, which tends to scramble
boundaries of time and place. Although a spontaneous eclecticism implicit
in the earliest networks undermines a strict dichotomy between serial and
multiple dynamics, for analytical purposes we can usefully differentiate the
two. This ploy allows us to see a rough fit between early ‘New Age’ and
serial seeking, and late ‘New Age’ and multiple seeking.The careers of Mary
Swainson and Lori Forsyth respectively exemplify this rough template.
Swainson, born in the Edwardian era, progressed carefully and selectively
through life: she was thirty years old before she joined an esoteric group and
almost fifty before she began her ‘New Age’ work (Swainson 1977: 204, 208).
By contrast, Forsyth was born in the late 1950s and her career ranges hungrily
in both time and space.Her packed narrative comes to rest when she is still only
in her mid-thirties, at which point she has already covered more ground than
most serial seekers attempt in a lifetime, nonchalantly concluding:‘My whole
life has been an experiment, hasn’t it?’ (Forsyth 1993: 255).
In practice,both serial and multiple seekers must manage a trade-off between
choice and constraint, depending on factors such as whom one meets and
where, what one reads, which event one happens to attend, and how ‘available’
one is to exploit a given opportunity. Here is the route Mary Swainson (1977:
204) took to contact one particular group:
One day when I was about thirty, I was browsing in a public library.
Somehow my hand seemed led to touch an unknown book (many
seekers have had this experience). It turned out to be the first
publication of an esoteric group which, at long last,‘felt right’ for me,
at that time.
Notice how Swainson locates this carefully-nuanced act in a social anthropology
of readership. ‘Many seekers’, she casually remarks, ‘have had this
experience’. Here the outcome is positive: according to her own account,
Swainson is proactive and available, and jumps at the chance. But the rationale
of seeking can also accommodate negative experiences. A participant in a
workshop at Findhorn told us that he had been a long-term member of one
esoteric group whose leader was ‘exposed’ in a scandal. Far from becoming
embittered for having followed a corrupted practice, he reported that the
leader’s exposure had been a profound learning experience on the need for him
to repudiate powerful gurus on his ‘spiritual path’.8
These examples also show that seeking is neither naive nor antinomian
behaviour, but eminently social, legitimated by a wider cultural institution of
‘seekership’. Indices of this diffuse cultural institution in action range from
interpersonal networks and small groups to the popular readership tapped by
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lifestyle directories such as The Many Ways of Being (Annett 1976) and The
Seeker’s Guide: a New Age Resource Book (Button and Bloom 1992). Certain
reflexive linguistic tropes also operate, such as ‘path’, ‘quest’, ‘seeking’, ‘higher
self’, ‘energy’, being ‘centred’, and ‘getting in touch’, establishing a semantic
range nuanced towards American vernacular speech.At Findhorn, one resident
speaks of ‘a quest, a search for myself’.9 Across the Atlantic, Mark Satin (1978:
13) confesses to his own ‘inner search’. Back in the UK, David Icke (1993: 85)
writes:‘It is the seeking which expands the mind’. Simmons (1990: 81–2) neatly
summarises the gist of this popular discourse:
Each of us has his or her own path.At any given time we must choose
the sources of knowledge and experience that seem intuitively right,
moving on to other books, disciplines, and scenarios when the time
comes.
These normative claims beg the question of the strength of seekers’ agency and
its historical impact.There are several possible angles on this. On the one hand,
the act of seeking implies some basic level of discontent with religion: a ‘lack’
or‘loss’of some kind.As Alison from the Unit of Service put it bluntly:‘I know
all the things they teach. I want more, you know?’Whether or not they come
from socially and financially advantaged backgrounds (and many do), seekers
may still feel a lack of more tenuous cultural goods such as security, satisfaction
and belonging. In this sense the thesis of relative deprivation holds good
enough:that is,seekers feel themselves disadvantaged in access to scarce cultural
goods. Another possibility is that seekers have become caught up in the thrill
of the chase, with submission to a satisfying process overtaking achievement
of a particular goal (cf. Campbell 1972: 127). The mystification imputed to
seekership in earlier accounts stems from this interpretation, pathologising the
culture by portraying its actors as people ‘floundering about among religions’
(Lofland and Stark 1965: 869). It is certainly possible to find evidence for this
theory in some actors’ lives, although we need to proceed from specific
instances. Roof (1993: 88), for example, steers his assessment of Mollie Stone
(whom we met in Chapter 5) in this direction when he concludes that
‘life for her remains a quandary, her quest unfulfilled’. But a more positive
interpretation must take seriously (although not unreservedly) seekers’
testimony to real empowerment in the social world. This view sees seekers
reclaiming a hitherto marginal or avant-garde role whose personal reflexivity
and social flexibility actually equips them nicely for the ‘pluralisation of lifeworlds’
inherent in postmodernity. Hence Straus (1976: 252–3) models the
seeker as a person ‘acting creatively in order to construct a satisfying life’,
an agent who develops ‘tactics’ for exploiting ‘happenstance situations and
encounters’. Likewise Balch and Taylor (1977: 851) propose replacing the tired
model of the‘personally disoriented searcher’with that of a role‘socially oriented
to the quest for personal growth’. Here seekers are not so much ‘at sea’ in
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religion as attempting to refashion the self as an appropriate vessel – organismic,
reflexive, relational – for navigating the rapids of contemporary culture.
I do not wish to settle this issue one way or the other – indeed,this would be
to draw as false a dichotomy between models of mystification and empowerment
as that between serial and multiple seeking – but rather to call for nuanced,
reflexive accounts of particular instances such as I have attempted to provide in
the present book. In any case, whether as agents or subjects, actors or dupes,
seekers and their strategies are relational and contextual.This carries implications
for the collective structure and function of seekership, a consideration that
returns us to a central morphological issue. If certain collectivities, like those
associated with‘New Age’,depend entirely on the associative and disassociative
impulses of x number of individuals,they function as purely strategic assemblies
to gather,affirm and disseminate an aggregate of the same.The collectivity itself
has no intrinsic identity, no essential purpose or goal: the ceaseless seeking
undermines any overarching agenda beyond the mutual exaltation of spiritual
paths. It follows that testimony of belonging to a dynamic, purposeful collectivity
will be ambiguous, temporary, and necessarily contingent upon passing
moods, needs and instincts. And this is exactly what we find when we look
for evidence of clear self-identification as ‘New Age’ or for signs of a bona
fide movement. The collectivities associated with ‘New Age’ resemble simple
aggregates of self-reflexive individuals. Indeed, a movement of seekers must be
an operative contradiction,since one’s subjective freedom – indeed, imperative –
to ‘seek’ inevitably relativises congregational commitments and boundaries.
Seekers at large: the
structural dynamics of ‘New Age’
The right ordering of the New Society can be seen as a pattern of
group relationships, from the small cell of a few closely-linked
individuals to the world society of nations.
(‘The Significance of the Group in the New Age’,
October 1965,Attingham Park Prospectus)
Since I argue that there is and has been no ‘New Age Movement’ it may
seem perverse to have given over a good deal of this book to a genealogy of
historical collectivities connected with the emblem. But a distinction between
collectivity and movement is vital,and the sociology of collective behaviour can
help here.As Turner and Killian (1972: 5) explain:
Although a collectivity has members, it lacks defined procedures for
selecting and identifying [them]. Although it has leaders, it lacks
defined procedures for selecting and identifying them.The members
are those who happen to be participating, and the leaders are those
who are being followed.
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Contingency has replaced necessity in this account of collective interaction:
no one is irreplaceable and agenda and outcomes are left substantially to chance.
Such a collectivity may be ‘compact’ or ‘diffuse’ (ibid.: 111). The ‘compact’
collectivity, or crowd, gathers only at particular places for the duration of a
specified event, whereas the ‘diffuse’ crowd is scattered across time and space,
articulated partly through genealogies of relationships and partly through
popular media. Both types interact in ‘New Age’ culture, whether we think of
the compact collectivities of groups, workshops and conference gatherings or
the dispersed networks of seekers. Common characteristics of compact and
diffuse crowds, according to Turner and Killian (ibid.: 114), are uncertainty,
urgency,the communication of moods and images,constraint,suggestibility,and
permissiveness. As with the early analysis of seekership, it is not necessary to
swallow the implicit disapproval inscribed in the language of these traits, which
with just a little (emic) imagination could be re-described as the recovery of the
subjectivities of choice, passion, emotional expressivity, self-control, openness,
and tolerance.What actually obtains in a particular case will doubtless mix and
muddy the purity of these polarities. But enough has been said to show that
Turner and Killian’s model allows for a realistic play between agency and
constraint in the socialisation of the seeker. Hence
the individual encounters expressions of the same sentiments,
witnesses the same behavioural models, and quickly acquires the
sense that he is part of a collectivity, sharing uniform sentiments and
encompassing a large number of people.
(ibid.: 114)
In the specific terms of a genealogy of ‘New Age’, I am arguing that this
emblem enjoyed an episodic career as a ‘fad’ (ibid.: 129) within a diffuse
collectivity of seekers in the 1950s and 1960s but dissolved into a loose idiom
after the 1970s. Again, we need to read ‘fad’ not derogatively but anthropologically,
for the exposition makes clear its application in explaining the crucial
hermeneutic shift from emblem to idiom discussed in Chapter 5:
A fad does not consist of simple,unimaginative imitation.It has collective
enthusiasm for a wide range of individual innovation around a common theme,
in behaviour that is performed in association with others.
(Turner and Killian 1972: 130; emphasis added)
In other words, thinking of ‘New Age’ in terms of a social ‘fad’ or ‘craze’ allows
for substantial latitude of belief and practice while maintaining a minimum
common reference point, supplied here by the emblem itself. In short, ‘New
Age’ has been a discursive emblem used within certain networks of alternative
spirituality rather than constituting an entity in itself, which also means that
diffuse collectivities of seekers have predated, and will outlive,‘New Age’.
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We must now identify the mechanisms through which this collectivity or
diffuse crowd of ‘New Age’ seekers is articulated. Chapters 6 to 8 show the
ubiquitous forms of social organisation associated with ‘New Age’: the group,
the colony and the network.These structures function as secondary institutions
to regulate the collectivity, occupying an ambiguous zone somewhere between
traditional primary institutions and the virtuosic but unstable displays of
innumerable ‘wandering stars’ (Sutcliffe 2000a). I do not propose to say
anything more about ‘New Age’ colonies here.Although frequently upheld as
the premier international ‘New Age’ settlement, Findhorn is better designated
as one of very few colonies,perhaps the only colony,for which a sound case can
be made for classification as‘NewAge’.In other words,the colony is an unusual
form in ‘New Age’, and Findhorn features in the genealogy of ‘New Age’
not because the colony is representative of a wider type but because it is
the particular historical outcome of a seminal ‘New Age’ group. Indeed, as
Chapter 7 demonstrated, small interactive groups are effectively the building
blocks of Findhorn’s organisational structure. So I will concentrate here on
developing remarks I made in earlier chapters on the function of networks and
groups in socialising the seeker.
First developed in anthropology and in the sociology of the family (Barnes
1954, Bott 1957), the term ‘network’ has been deployed enthusiastically in
‘New Age’ studies, Melton et al. (1991: 416) describing it as ‘the single most
important New Age organisational form’. The most sustained treatment is
York (1995), who understands ‘New Age’ to be on the cutting edge of a vast
‘emerging network’ of postmodern religion.A more modest approach can be
made following Mitchell (1969: 12), who makes a simple but useful distinction
between ‘interactional’ and ‘morphological’ characteristics of a network.
Interactional characteristics concern the internal dynamics of networks:the differentials
of power among individuals and groups whereby authority is wielded
and political agendas are set. By contrast, morphology treats the shape and
structure of networks in relation to other patterns of organisation. I brought
out the interactional dynamics of the early networks in my discussion of the
acceptance and then repudiation of Sheena Govan’s authority by the protoFindhorn
group in the late 1950s,in the construction of a common apocalyptic
discourse on ‘New Age’ in the 1960s and in the hermeneutical shift in
‘New Age’ in the 1970s. The morphology of the networks emerges in the
ethnographies of the Unit of Service and holistic health in Chapters 6 and 8,
where I showed through my own entry into the field how insertion into a local
network can quickly lead to a series of interactions and exchanges.
My own experiences are broadly confirmed by other accounts of social
networking in action.In London,Barker (1994:330–2) briefly plots her passage
through what she calls the ‘extraordinary “intercommunication” of the New
Age scene’.And Luhrmann (1994: 36) has delved into magical networks in the
English capital. Her impression of the dynamics of networking is particularly
apposite:
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I became part of a complex, dense network which kept doubling back
upon itself: I would meet someone independently, who turned out to
have been initiated by someone I knew and whose name was known
to other people I also knew. I was familiar with groups at the centre of
this network and at its edge....No matter what my point of entry had
been . . . I would have ended up in contact with many of the people I
know now.
Networks also function at a regional level. In England, ‘North East Network’
bulletin, subtitled ‘Link up with New Age activities in the North East’ and
targeted at the ‘consciously expanding group of individuals’ practising ‘personal
development and natural/holistic therapies’, has been published since 1994
in Sunderland. Since 1993 the more populous and socially-advantaged
Bristol–Bath–Glastonbury triangle has had The Spark, a forty-page free
newspaper of co-operative, ecological and entrepreneurial listings focused
very broadly on ‘creative solutions for a changing world’.10
On a larger scale,
a similar kind of ‘intercommunication’ characterises holistic health in
California (English-Lueck 1990: 25) and ‘New Age’ in South Africa (Steyn
1994: 308).
This consensus suggests that a network model of alternative spirituality could
function as a predictive tool in plotting the trajectories of selected seekers
through an identified network, charting the effect of the network’s social and
ideological constraints on the development of seekers’careers.As the individual
enters the network, a series of options becomes available: at a talk by a teacher
at a holistic health fair she buys a pamphlet with an address on the back; she
visits this centre to attend a workshop; a study group emerges from this
workshop and one evening it is led by a facilitator from a long-term group,
which she joins and where she makes a new friend who duly invites her on a
spiritual retreat at another centre. In the course of time, to paraphrase
Luhrmann,she begins to‘bump into’people,to recognise‘familiar faces’,to hear
news through the ‘grapevine’ and in turn to be socialised into the network’s
norms and values. She may also extend the network by introducing friends and
family.In the most attenuated version of networking,intercommunication itself
becomes the ritual act. Hence during his talk at an alternative health fair in
Glasgow in 1996, Patch Adams said, almost as an aside (and recalling Anthony
Brooke’s international efforts),‘I correspond regularly with about 1600 people
around the world’.
But care is needed with the network model.If‘New Age’is not a movement,
neither is it – by the same evidence and logic – a network, for the latter is a
dynamic web or process of communication and interaction rather than a
material entity. Hence ‘New Age’ is a term within a network, or networks, and
should not be confused with the properties of the network itself, which are in
any case hardly the preserve of alternative spirituality but a ubiquitous feature
of modern culture – ‘the institution of our age, an unprecedented source of
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power for individuals’, as Ferguson (1982: 43) puts it. Fields where networking
has been formative are as diverse as business marketing, the world wide web,
clandestine operations and the so-called ‘old boy network’ in British public life
(Heald 1983).The boundary-crossing and variable-blurring properties of the
network can create the impression of the diffusion of a discourse,and a diaspora
of exponents, far in excess of what actually obtains. This helps explain the
attraction of network imagery in‘New Age’discourse.Melton et al. (1991:416)
sketch this exaggerated effect well:
The very existence of the networks creates an image within the New
Age community of a growing movement, permeating mainstream
society, and of a public, far beyond the boundaries of the movement
itself, which is participating in the creation of a New Age without
knowing it.
It is ironic that this exposure of ‘New Age’ rhetoric problematises the authors’
own analysis of a ‘New Age movement’. For ‘New Age’ networks are dynamic,
unstable processes of discursive intercommunication and exchange, a
mechanism whereby a sense of collective belonging can be generated among
otherwise fissiparous individuals and groups. In this way
the diffuse collectivity creates a sense of permissiveness and of
constraint, which aids the individual in resolving the uncertainty
that deters him from acting solely on the basis of his own
judgment.
(Turner and Killian 1972: 117)
Parameters of behavioural and ideological tolerance and restriction are
primarily established face-to-face in couples and small groups, but norms and
values are also disseminated via newsletters, mailing lists and telephone trees,
and more recently via e-mail, discussion lists and web pages.A scattered matrix
of small buildings, rented premises and private houses functions as the set of
material nodes in the network, offering seekers places to gather, interact and
express their solidarity.
When participants get together, social interaction invariably takes the form
of small groups.A few remarks on ‘New Age’ group culture follow to close this
section on the structural dynamics of the field. First, the group is pervasive:
it structures all sectors of the spiritual culture associated with ‘New Age’ now
and in the past, whether we look in holistic healing, Findhorn and meditation
practice today, inspect the bulletins, meetings and gatherings of the 1950s and
1960s,or unpackAlice Bailey’s oligarchic ideology of the 1930s.Groups may be
one-off gatherings, formed for a day, week-end or (exceptionally) week-long
‘workshop’: that is, an experiential, participative learning forum. Examples
include the firewalking event at Westbank, the ‘New Age’ group leaders
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gathering atAttingham and‘ExperienceWeek’at Findhorn,respectively.Groups
may also meet regularly, either for a limited series, such as the various teaching
groups run at the Salisbury Centre, or indefinitely and with considerable
commitment, like the Unit of Service meditation meetings, or the Rosicrucian
Order’s week-end gatherings in the late 1930s. Second, the groups tend to be
small, meaning for present purposes ‘a group all of whose members are known,
at least by sight, to everyone of them’ (Phillips 1965: 14).There were fourteen
in ExperienceWeek, six on average at full moon meditations, eight at the Alice
Bailey Sacred Dance day, and five in Sheena Govan’s Pimlico group. Low
numbers encourage intimacy and interaction among varied, sometimes
antagonistic personalities (‘chalk and cheese’ is how Eileen Caddy described
herself and Dorothy Maclean in Sheena Govan’s group). As Lucis Trust
spokeswoman Jan Nation put it in a workshop at Findhorn:‘groupwork entails
the coming together of individuals with completely different points of view,
each fulfilling a different function’.11
The facilitator at the Sacred Dance
workshop considered that the optimum group size was between ten and
twenty: any less meant insufficient ‘energy’ was generated, any more and
the group might break up or sub-groups hive off. Larger groups in which I
participated included twenty-one people at a Bach Flower Remedies day,
thirty at the firewalking event at Westbank, and thirty-six at the ‘Inner
Ashrams’ workshop mentioned above. These were more anonymous events,
incorporating structured teaching, formal exercises, and firm leadership by a
designated ‘expert’. But even here participation was encouraged and small
group interaction was used to break down a potentially intimidating mass. As
firewalker Hazel Price explained,‘no one will be able to stand back – it will
affect the energy’. Jan Nation put this more forcefully:‘someone who is critical
can be a poison in a group’. In any case size was, in theory at least, no barrier
to intercommunion: Nation also claimed that ‘if the group in this room had
meditated together for ten years we wouldn’t need to discuss anything’.Third,
a diversity of group leadership and decision-making models can be found,from
the relatively modest directives given us by our ExperienceWeek focalisers,and
the gentle shepherding by Alison in the Unit of Service, to the rousing poetics
of George Trevelyan, the presidential style of Liebie Pugh and Peter Caddy,
and the increasingly authoritarian decrees of Sheena Govan. Internal group
dynamics varied accordingly: sometimes consensus prevailed, at other times
‘spiritual rivalry’ might break loose and leaders get toppled or groups disband.
In the most sophisticated contexts a transparent obsolescence is built into
groups, for example at Findhorn.
The discourse of ‘New Age’ spirituality
I have never met anyone engaged in any kind of New Age activity
who has thought of herself or himself as having joined a new religion.
(Spangler 1993: 79).
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As Spangler says, the emic position actively repudiates ‘religion’ and
‘religiousness’. ‘I’m not talking of religion’,12 writes Alison of the Unit of
Service. MacLaine (1983: 8) says: ‘The religions of the world didn’t seem to
explain or satisfy our spiritual needs’.Trevelyan’s (1977: 2) book AVision of the
Aquarian Age is emphatically not about ‘a religious movement, but a spiritual
awakening’.Religion may not only be shunned but positively attacked.William
Thompson calls it‘one of the greatest forces for evil at work in the world today’
(in Spangler and Thompson 1991: 176). ‘I had little respect for the religious
institutions and priestly hierarchies’, writes Bloom (1990: 2), describing his
school vicar as ‘an extraordinarily boring man!’ (Bloom 1993b: 18).
‘Organised religion’, then, is constructed in the ‘New Age’ idiom as
unimaginative and socially constricting at best, pathological at worst. It is
contrasted unfavourably with a vivid, vital ‘spirituality’. In The New Age in a
Nutshell, Lorna St Aubyn (1990: 84–5) defines religion largely in terms of
‘mundane rules’, ‘Church control’ and ‘excessive dogma’. Spirituality, on the
other hand, is ‘not just for Sunday mornings’ but ‘for all day every day’.
Children raised in particular faith traditions, she thinks, have been ‘vaccinated
by religion’ and are thereby ‘immune to spirituality’. According to Liz
Hodgkinson (1993: 108) in The Personal Growth Book: ‘You can be genuinely
spiritual without ever going near a church or place of worship and, conversely,
go to church, synagogue or mosque several times a week without
ever understanding what spirituality is all about’. David Icke (1993: 12)
encapsulates this impatient discourse when he writes: ‘Religion has hijacked
spirituality’.
Sometimes the enemy is merely damned by faint praise. Patrick in the Unit
of Service told me:‘Without spirituality, there would be no religion, but not
vice versa’. Walker (1994: 27) explains that Findhorn is not ‘a religion’ but
‘a context within which all aspects of life, including religious observance, are
taking place’. Alternatively, ‘spirituality’ simply prevails by default. Thus
Simmons (1990: 11) portrays a ‘new spiritual awakening’:
Traces of this movement are everywhere if one wants to look. Every
week now, I hear about another group or activity or institute involved
in things spiritual, and they are scattered throughout the entire
Western hemisphere.
(ibid.: 204)
This kind of discourse proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s and can now be
found widely in newspapers, magazines and popular conversation. If we look
back at the ethnographies in this book, we see that an ideology of ‘spirituality’
underpins the general discourse. In Chapter 6, Patrick privileges spirituality
over religion in the work of the Unit of Service while Sinclair (1984: 46)
characterises the Bailey work in general as ‘the art of spiritual impression’. In
Chapter 7 we saw how Findhorn now typically calls itself a ‘spiritual’ rather
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than a ‘New Age’ community, and in the questionnaire I conducted there,
‘spirituality’ was overwhelmingly preferred by respondents to ‘religion’. The
latter was associated with ideas like ‘the system’,‘dogma’,‘organised belief’, and
‘narrow’ outlooks, whereas spirituality was linked to ‘living experience’ and to
‘open’,‘inner’,‘inclusive’, and ‘natural’ discourse.13 In Chapter 8, nearly threequarters
of respondents to the same questionnaire at an alternative health fair
juggled these terms and categories in very similar fashion (Sutcliffe 1995) and
the chapter showed that in networks of healing and well-being as much as
anywhere else in the general field, talk of ‘spirit’ and the ‘spiritual’ was plentiful,
of ‘god’ and ‘religion’ scant. Firewalker Stephen Mulhearn, for example,
made no references at all to the latter pairing; his most explicit theological
claim was ‘we’re not human beings being spiritual but spiritual beings being
human’.
Nor is the‘spiritual’merely a contemporary fad.In Chapters 3 and 4 we read
how Dorothy Maclean (1980: 12–13) explored avowedly ‘spiritual’ groups in
the late 1940s and early 1950s. Eileen Caddy (1988: 19) recalls of husbandto-be
Peter that ‘“religious” was not the way to describe him. I knew he didn’t
go to church, but I sensed a commitment to something spiritual.’ In the
interwar years, too, we find substantial traces of this discourse. In his very
successful book God is My Adventure, Landau (1935: vii, 148) addressed himself
to ‘contemporary spiritual life’ and ‘modern spiritual pursuits’. And talk of
‘spirituality’ permeates the Occult Review. In 1932 an editorial proposed setting
up a ‘Spiritual League’ to ‘weld together’ the many ‘scattered spiritual units’
among its readership while in 1935 the editor remarked approvingly that ‘the
type of literature which deals with the spiritual quest is becoming increasingly
popular’.14
An article by a Mrs Featherstonehaugh in 1932 concluded that
‘the real problem’ of the world was ‘a spiritual one’ and was not adequately
represented in the plight of religion, for ‘only to the superficial do the empty
churches represent the spirituality of the age’.15 Alice Bailey, too, used this kind
of language.In 1925 she wrote that‘behind all subjective phenomena’is a‘latent
spiritual cause’ which is the proper focus of ‘the spiritual man’ (Bailey 1991b:
392).And in 1936 she described the vanguards of the ‘New Age’ as
not necessarily people who could be termed‘religious’in the ordinary
sense of that word, but they will be men of goodwill, of high mental
calibre . . . free from personal ambition and selfishness, animated by
love of humanity.
(ibid.: 393)
In sum, since at least the First World War ‘spirituality’ has developed as a
discourse set over and against ‘institutional religion’. In contemporary culture
‘spirituality’ has emerged as a hybrid discourse constructed from ‘alternative’
and ‘popular’ sources. Indeed, practising ‘spirituality’ is no longer confined to
denizens of aristocratic, avant-garde or subcultural enclaves: it is increasingly
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done in the culture at large.An informant in Ferguson (1982: 401) could claim
by the end of the 1970s that ‘a person is no longer an oddball because he is
known to be on a spiritual quest’. By the 1990s, significant percentages in one
American survey were describing their identities as explicitly spiritual and nonreligious
(Zinnbauer et al. 1997). These individuals were reported to be ‘less
likely to evaluate religiousness positively’and‘less likely to engage in traditional
forms of worship such as church attendance and prayer’. In contrast they
were
more likely to be independent from others . . . to engage in group
experiences related to spiritual growth . . . to characterise religiousness
and spirituality as different and nonoverlapping concepts . . . to
hold nontraditional ‘new age’ beliefs [and] to have had mystical
experiences.
(Zinnbauer et al. 1997: 561)
Roof (1999: 177) concurs with these findings, emphasising the reflexive and
popular qualities of Anglo–American discourse in which the word ‘spiritual’ is
‘invoked positively as a basis of self-identity’ by a heterogeneous constituency
who simultaneously use the word ‘religious’ as a ‘counter-identity for clarifying
who they are not’.
This emergent ‘spiritual’ discourse demonstrates significant biographical
continuities across the decades, from the interwar seekers targeted by Alice
Bailey, through Sheena Govan’s post-war Pimlico group and to the new
seekers of the late-Sixties counterculture and beyond. It has three broad
qualities or instincts:it is dissident,lay and functional.First,it remains a dissident
discourse, although increasingly in latent rather than manifest function.
The agenda is consistently one of finding or constructing an alternative to
institutional religion: something other, something more, something better. ‘I
decided to give up organised religion’, says an informant inTomory (1996: 86).
‘It suited me perfectly that I could have a spiritual understanding and basis that
was nothing to do with religion’, writes Lori Forsyth (1993: 76).‘The church
dissatisfies me’, says Alison from the Unit of Service,‘I want more, you know?’
Other institutions are similarly scolded for their repression of populist freedoms.
‘People here have a right to be suspicious of academics’,an American told me at
Findhorn. A related strategy is to prospect further afield for a replacement
for the enemy ‘organised religion’, particularly in ‘Eastern’, ‘esoteric’ and
indigenous sources. Hence in the interwar period Alice Bailey located her
guru in Tibet (following Blavatsky), Paul Brunton prospected ‘secret Egypt’
and ‘secret India’, and the White Eagle Lodge sought legitimation in a
native American spirit guide. More recently, Bowman (1993b) has charted
the creative reconstruction of ‘Celtic’ spirituality while UFO groups have
looked to extraterrestrial realms – perhaps the ultimate ‘alternative’ source
(Melton 1995).
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Anti-authoritarian rhetoric seasons the mix. Icke (1991: 127) 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 personal link?
Similarly, Bloom (1990: 8) says:‘I advise people not to be cowardly about their
own spiritual authority’. But even these statements reproduce an established
message in the genealogy of alternative spirituality. Krishnamurti, for example,
told the Occult Review as early as 1932 that ‘authority is the antithesis of
spirituality’, Landau (1935: vii) acknowledged ‘something sacriligious’ behind
the intent of God is My Adventure and in the late Victorian period Helena
Blavatsky is reputed to have said,‘I wouldn’t be a slave to God Himself,let alone
man’.16
Second, the instinct is lay and populist, seen clearly in the theatre of
operation, which is largely everyday lives and interactions in Anglo–Amercian
culture.This ethnodomain has traditionally (and unaccountably) received little
scrutiny from academics but here it takes centre stage. Among holistic health
practitioners in California, for example, English-Lueck (1990: 138–9) noticed
that ‘conversations flip casually between discussions of hairdressers, spouses, and
massage oil to reincarnations, sensing auras, and chatting with one’s spirit
guides’. Gill Edwards (1993: 178) speaks of ‘the spirit of everyday life’,William
Bloom (1993a: 59) of ‘housework and daily yoga’.The chapters of the Crotona
Fellowship gathered in members’ suburban houses; Sheena Govan’s group met
in her Pimlico flat; groups associated with Liebie Pugh and the Findhorn
founders met in hotels; Trevelyan’s ‘New Age group leaders’ met at an adult
education college; and the Findhorn colony began in a caravan park.
Contemporary projects typically continue this pattern of domestic operation,
such as the Westbank Centre, a family home, and the Unit of Service, which
invariably met in Alison’s flat. And Findhorn now owns the hotel and
caravan site.
The domestic setting undermines traditional boundaries between public and
private space: everyone prepared to cross that threshold and muck in, is
welcome. In Marilyn Ferguson’s ‘Aquarian conspiracy’ – which she sees simply
as a vast networking of like-minded spiritual activists – the key point is that ‘a
conspirator can be anyone’ (Ferguson 1982: 21). Now, this is a direct populist
appeal, and Worsley (1969: 242–4) has identified two cardinal features of this
syndrome:‘the supremacy of the will of the people’ and the desire for a ‘direct
relationship between people and leadership, unmediated by institutions’.
Translating these from politics to culture – more specifically, to contemporary
spirituality – is a self-explanatory move: the former feature neatly captures the
collective institution of seekership and the latter addresses the demand for
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immediate access to the source of spiritual vitality. Populism’s inclusivity is
particularly salient here:Worsley explains that it can embrace a variety of smallscale,
entrepreneurial, marginal and even disgruntled identities that otherwise
repudiate or evade primary institutions.To these and other mobile identities,
populism offers ‘a new communal transectional identity’ (ibid.).
This brief account of the mechanics of cultural populism helps to explain
the popular appeal of ‘New Age’ spirituality. Consider various prominent
notions uncovered in this book: that self-identities or ‘labels’ fundamentally
mislead; that anyone can join; that ‘doing it’ rather than ‘talking about it’ is
what ‘New Age’ is about; that spirituality is innate and ‘instinctive’ (Bloom
1991: 221) and that our passions, enthusiasms and feelings – our manifold
subjectivities – are clues to its genius; that unmediated experiences of gnosis
and charisma are within reach of everyone; that ‘spirituality’ can function as
a unifying factor (a ‘universal link’) across the world; and that institutions –
particularly religion and education – only thwart it. Hence David Spangler
(1996: 220) thinks that ‘anyone can become a birthforce for a new world’, that
‘we may all become champions’; and Gill Edwards (1993: 192) declares
dramatically: ‘It is time for everyone to become a shaman, a metaphysician, a
dream-weaver, a walker-between-worlds’. Following on the heels of Alice
Bailey’s prototype‘true Aquarian’of the 1930s (Bailey 1991a:416),the ultimate
‘transectional identity’ has been proposed in some ‘New Age’ quarters: the
‘planetary citizen’ who cultivates a ‘planetary consciousness’ for a ‘planetary
culture’.17
Disciplinary control of knowledge and traditional educational credentials are
eschewed in these and other expressions of the emergent spirituality, a stance
that feeds a self-taught ethos.As Ross (1992: 539) remarks, the discourse urges
‘everyone’
to become the engineer/architect/designer of his or her own
environment. Reskilling oneself . . . can be seen as a way of
reappropriating, from the experts, folk skills that were once everyday
knowledge.
The authority to interpret is reclaimed by practitioners themselves, who are
typically not specialists trained by traditional institutions, but lay ‘doers’ and
‘thinkers’: ‘amateurs’ in the literal sense of ‘lovers’ or ‘enthusiasts’. In this
manner specialist discourses on psychology, physics and religion are retrieved
from university libraries and laboratories and factored into popular teachings on
the healing power of positive thinking, the importance of matching IQ with
‘EQ’ or ‘emotional intelligence’, the scientific basis of holism and the perennial
teachings at the heart of all religions.
Popular culture may also directly trigger amateurist spiritual reflection. For
example, an initially sceptical Peter Caddy (1996: 370) describes his visit to
Florida’s Disney World in the company of George Trevelyan:
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I saw Disney World through his eyes, as if through the eyes of a child,
and so entered into the spirit of the place. I felt that I’d learnt an
important lesson:‘Except ye be as a little child, ye can no wise enter
the Kingdom of Heaven’.
David Spangler (1984: 131) cites Richard Adams’s epic fantasy novel about a
rabbit colony,Watership Down (1972),as a favourite book.And in the mid-1990s
he kept three miniature models on his desk for inspiration: Mickey Mouse as
the sorceror’s apprentice inWalt Disney’s Fantasia (1939),Yoda the wizard in Star
Wars (1977), and Merlin the magician from Arthurian folklore.18
As well as the shamanic and the spectacular, more ordinary daily tasks and
transactions are brought to attention. Roof (1993: 64) found Mollie Stone
understood ‘spiritual’ to be ‘something very worldly, having to do with relating
to the earth and sky and animals and people; and something very bodily,
having to do with health, happiness, and feeling good about herself’. In the
Findhorn magazine One Earth, William Bloom (1993b: 18) lists various
everyday activities as opportunities for ‘practical spiritual practice’ such as
‘listening to music, making love, having a baby, painting, fasting or weeding the
garden’. Notice how his list casually, even innocently, reclaims intimate and
profane acts of everyday life as the stuff of spirituality. In her paperback manual
Stepping into the Magic Gill Edwards (1993: 179ff.) pursues a similar line, listing
some simple everyday tasks through which practitioners can ‘connect with
Spirit’: taking a bath or shower is ‘an opportunity to “cleanse” yourself of the
past’; mealtimes are a chance ‘to remember that the Earth has given this gift of
food’; glancing in the mirror is a moment for speaking an affirmation like
‘Today, I am open to miracles’; and even such simple acts as climbing stairs can
be used to ‘affirm that you are reaching for a higher perspective on your life’.
Domestic space itself receives special attention, and at the time of writing there
is a boom in feng shui, a traditional Chinese practice repackaged for
Anglo–American culture that deals in the harmonious management of interior
environments.The popularisation and diffusion of feng shui can be seen in a glut
of publishing: one feature in Here’s Health, a British popular health magazine, is
called‘20Ways to Heal your Home’and proposes approaches such as‘light some
candles’, ‘make a small shrine’, ‘harness crystal power’, ‘get the “vibes” right’,
and, simply,‘love your space’.19
The tedious side of human domesticity also receives attention. Bloom
(1993a: 60) says that ‘one woman I know always washes the dishes with divine
awareness’ and ‘another woman taught me how to wash and clean the lavatory
with love’. This sacralisation of housework is a persistent strain in Findhorn
spirituality: the central aphorism in the colony in the mid-1990s was ‘work is
love in action’. But despite (or perhaps because of) this celebration of what has
traditionally been regarded as‘women’s work’,an equivocal gender ascription is
at work here that exemplifies some wider political ambiguities inherent in‘New
Age’ spirituality. A full analysis of different stages in the gendering of power in
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‘New Age’ spirituality requires further detailed research, but by exhuming and
at least sexing a largely buried field, I hope to have made some empirical
inroads. Work traditionally ascribed to women – housework, childcare,
emotional labour – has certainly been revalued in ‘New Age’, even brought to
the centre of attention in the case of the incorporation of emotional work into
the ‘expressive ethic’ of the late-1970s onwards (Heelas 2000), seen particularly
in Experience Week. Findhorn’s domesticated habitat partly explains its
persistent popularity for women, and this holds true for ‘New Age’ circles in
general: in crude terms, this is where women’s expertise has been confined
by a dominant gendered discourse based on the segregation of women to the
‘private’ domain and men to the ‘public’ sphere. But determining the actual
power wielded by women in‘NewAge’circles is complicated by several factors.
On the one hand, women are prominent in the sex profile of ‘New Age’,
typically in a two-to-one ratio, and this is confirmed by my own findings: the
‘core group’ in the Unit of Service, Experience Week participants at Findhorn
and my questionnaire sample at an alternative health fair in Edinburgh repeated
this two-to-one ratio, and at a Bach Flower Remedies workshop and a talk by
firewalker Stephen Mulhearn,it increased to three to one.Rose (2001:330) also
found in his Kindred Spirit questionnaire that nearly four out of five alternative
therapists were women.On the other hand – and here’s the rub – he also found
in the same survey that female teachers were‘outnumbered two to one’by men
as role models and authoritative sources (ibid.). Now, this is just one study, but
its implication is that women may predominate as participants and ‘coalface’
practitioners (Reiki healers, Findhorn group focalisers, firewalk instructors)
without attaining parity in higher-profile leadership.
This pattern is substantiated in my genealogy. On the one hand Alice Bailey
can justly lay claim to being the modern ideologue of ‘New Age’. But playing
the role of ‘secretary’ to her Tibetan ‘Master’ effectively inscribed a familiar,
hierarchically-gendered relationship at the heart of ‘New Age’ epistemology.
In a different vein, Sheena Govan and Liebie Pugh each became a messianic
figure in the 1950s and 1960s – a female Parousia, in effect – but who now
remembers them? Sheena Govan’s historical memory is almost entirely
mediated by Peter Caddy’s autobiography (1996) and Paul Hawken’s
hagiography (1990), and it was Caddy who finally usurped her authority as
public face of the group, as we saw in Chapter 3. As for Pugh, she leaves almost
no historical footprint. And who remembers women networkers such as Sheila
Walker of the Scottish UFO Society, who first put Peter Caddy in touch with
George Trevelyan, or indefatigable international correspondents such as May
Harvey of the Heralds of the New Age? Likewise, Myrtle Glines was David
Spangler’s associate when he arrived at Findhorn, and her practical experience
in counselling and groupwork evidently grounded the crucial shift in ‘New
Age’discourse from apocalypse to self-realisation,but her part has been soundly
eclipsed by Spangler’s role.Likewise Findhorn was settled by more women than
men (three to one,if we include Lena Lamont with Eileen Caddy and Dorothy
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Maclean) and yet it was the man, Peter Caddy, who was the colony’s face to
the outside world up to 1979. And while George Trevelyan has been called
the ‘father of the New Age’, I know of no claims for a ‘mother’. More recently,
Marilyn Ferguson (1982) found in TheAquarian Conspiracy that only two out of
thirty-seven inspirational figures in a small Californian survey were women,
while the Findhorn Foundation continued to be represented by men as overall
directors into the late 1980s. The ambiguity of gender roles in ‘New Age’ is
encapsulated in the transgendered economy at‘God’s Hotel’in Forres in the late
1950s, where Peter Caddy managed the operation (using his intuition and
hunches) and Eileen Caddy changed nappies and cooked (while obtaining
hierophantic guidance).
So far I have discussed two qualities or instincts of the field:the dissident and
the lay.Third and finally, I wish to point out the functional dynamic of ‘New
Age’ spirituality.That is, the ‘New Age’ seeker is largely preoccupied with the
rational–functional application of spiritual skills. She wants a spiritual practice
that will do things, that will make things work, whether on the intimate scale of
biographies and relationships or on the global scale of co-operation and social
unity. Hence a problem-solving, ‘working’ approach to life characterises the
‘New Age’ ethos, emphasising short- and medium-term achievement of goals
and the active creation of meaning in everyday life. Here is Bloom (1993a: 84)
again on the ideal method:
If we commit ourselves to career retraining or returning to formal
education,we do so with great care and thought.We research the areas
in which we are interested.We taste what they are like before we make
long-term plans. We should have the same approach to spiritual
education.
In other words, individuals should assess risk and opportunity and make
appropriate plans and adjustments in spirituality as much as in anything else.
Implementing spiritual strategies is a matter of empirical trial and error,
conducted on oneself as the experimental ‘site’ but duly worked out in
relationship with others.Claims have even been made that such an‘empiricised’
spirituality upholds scientific method. Bloom implies as much in a typically
populist statement on the convergence between spiritual experience and
science, which supposedly is
coming to a more fluid understanding of nature and the cosmos, in
which there is a continuum between consciousness and matter, and an
understanding that everything is made up of energy in different forms.
(Bloom 1996: 18)
This actually sounds more like a metaphysical than a scientific statement.20
From Alice Bailey’s texts to contemporary takes on holism and energy, imagery
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lifted from the popular science of the day has invoked the authority of
scientific data and method, whether in terms of light waves, electricity, atomic
power, nuclear radiation, or extraterrestrial life forms. At the same time, it
is not clear that sufficient expertise (or even interest) exists among seekers to
evaluate such a statement properly.Yet science connotes modernity, and the
effect is to establish ‘New Age’ as a cutting-edge discourse.
But at the end of the day, personal experience – construed as pure and
irreducible – is the touchstone: as Bloom (1996: 18) also says,‘if you have not
experienced it, why should you believe it?’ Such functionality calls forth an
intense pragmatism among seekers.‘Anything can work’, says Ferguson (1982:
91).‘Do some sampling of ideas and images’,suggests Spangler (1996:181).‘Do
something,anything,to deepen your relationship with the sacred’,urges Bloom
(1993b: 18). This approach can veer towards a prosperity teaching. ‘If you
embark on this path you will never actually want for money, friends, or good
relationships’, says Hodgkinson (1993: 26). Lori Forsyth (1993: 130ff.) lists a
new job, a new car and a new home as cumulative examples of ‘the way
life flows when one works with Spirit’. But material success may also be an
intrinsic goal of spiritual practice,as in the Findhorn practice of‘manifestation’.
Eileen Caddy recalls that
sometimes it took a while after the thought was put out to achieve the
physical reality, but often it would happen quite quickly. . . .When I
received guidance about something, I knew it would come, and often
just the right object or amount of money would be given to us.
(In Walker 1994: 191)21
Learning and perfecting spiritual practice can be a highly technical matter.
Bloom himself (1993b: 19) speaks of ‘spiritual technology’22
while Ferguson
(1982: 91) introduced the term ‘psychotechnologies’, meaning techniques and
systems designed to trigger‘a deliberate change in consciousness’.In A Guide to
the New Age, Stuart Wilson (1989: 51ff.) offers nearly eighty different spiritual
techniques and strategies, including Peter Caddy’s advice to eliminate ‘if’
and ‘can’t’ from one’s vocabulary, adopt a vegetarian diet, take up meditation
and regularly use affirmations. In a clear summary of the lay functionalism
informing practice, he concludes:‘We should feel free to use any combination
of techniques for change that seems right to us and gives us good results’ (ibid.:
66; emphasis added). Finally, several self-styled resource books and catalogues
substantiate the ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos of alternative spiritual practice. Compendiums
like TheWhole Person Catalogue (Considine 1992) and The Seeker’s Guide
(Button and Bloom 1992) list groups, ideas, teachers, techniques, products,
courses,and treatments across the spectrum of meditation,healing and personal
growth circles. ‘Take time to look around’, advises Spangler (1996: 181).
‘Give yourself plenty of time to dip and to discriminate’, suggests Bloom
(1993a: 83).
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The end of ‘New Age’
What was once a mystery is now understandable.
(Wiseman 1979: 113)
I’m a spiritual person. I’m fascinated by all sorts of religions and I pick
from them what I want.
(Evelyn Glennie, musician)23
Local variation is all there is!
(Martin 2000: 282)
The title of this last chapter has deliberately carried a double meaning.We have
reached the ‘end’ in the sense that ‘New Age’ as a collective moment of utopian
change is over – as indeed Findhorn kindly informed me when I began this
work. But we have also reached an end in the sense of arriving at the kind of
popular, functional, everyday spirituality which is, in significant part, the legacy
of ‘New Age’: a product of its genealogy.
In this book I tested the consensus that New Age is a ‘movement’ and found
instead a diffuse collectivity of questing individuals.These seekers have certainly
used the expression ‘New Age’, and between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s
they briefly organised themselves around it, treating it as the emblem of
an imminent apocalypse. Apart from this, affiliation has been sporadic and
ambiguous.At the same time I have exhumed, described and analysed a series
of small groups and networks of seekers from the 1930s to the early twenty-first
century. I have also discussed the popular discourse generated in the field.
This has in part addressed the timing of an apocalyptic ‘New Age’, but has
increasingly dwelt since the 1970s on the promise of a pragmatic, worldaffirming
‘spirituality’.As we examine the archive material informing Chapters
3 and 4, the popular literature of Chapters 2, 5 and 9, and the ethnographies of
Chapters 6–8, we see that this discourse of ‘spirituality’ increasingly displaces
‘New Age’ and inherits the controlling instincts of dissidence, populism and
functionality outlined in this final chapter.By the early twenty-first century this
diffuse and popularised discourse of spirituality has become fairly comfortably
established across the cultural spectrum as a symbolic repudiation of ‘organised
religion’.It has an almost entirely white,middle-class demography largely made
up of professional, managerial, arts, and entrepreneurial occupations.24 It is also
well-represented by women by dint of its reclamation of skills and attributes
traditionally consigned to domestic realms and predominantly gendered as
‘feminine’, such as emotional empathy, bodily awareness and interpersonal
skills. However, notwithstanding superiority in numbers (and also in spiritual
gifts, according to some emic accounts), the relative social power and status of
‘New Age’ women remains an unresolved issue.
The demography underscores very real constraints around this spirituality.
Despite its rhetoric of inclusivity, it is clear that certain sectors of the
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population are more likely to get involved than others. Nevertheless, the norm
– and in a globalised age, the appeal – is of a universalised lay spirituality, open
to all, yet with no stigmatising label or fussy membership criteria.The apparent
paradox of how such an amorphous discourse can be learned and transmitted
is explained by the role of the seeker, located in a diffuse collectivity of
peers and mentors. No other social role has the requisite combination of
reflexivity and interdependence to generate the modicum of institutionalisation
required while simultaneously sabotaging levels of organisational complexity
beyond the most simple. We have seen how ‘New Age’ seekers resourcefully
sift and splice their sources. Consequently the presenting profile of individual
(and group) is constantly changing in line with the migration of ideas and
techniques (and individuals) in and out of the biography (or collectivity) in
question. Should stronger collective identity or mobilisation be sought –
when an aspiring leader emerges – there is inbuilt resistance at the heart of the
phenomenon, for the logic of seeking encourages movement laterally (to
‘share’ and ‘network’ with peers and colleagues) rather than vertically (scaling
a hierarchy). Clearly such lateral diffusion does not translate easily into
sustainable policy, as we saw in the case of ‘New Age’ in the 1960s, and as
still haunts Findhorn’s attempts to come up with a consistent self-identity.
Indeed,the history of‘New Age’is littered with temporary groups and mutated
identities, which is both a source of the restless, passionate creativity of its
actors as well as a factor in its elision from cultural history. As institutions
crumble and regroup (an apt term), seekers stand revealed by default, if not by
choice. And currently there are rich pickings for seekers:the cultural panorama
of the early twenty-first century provides a variegated spiritual landscape
for those with sufficient cultural capital, perhaps unique in the history of
religions in its sheer range of groups, quests, paths, and trips. In this sense we
can see that the instinctual drive of ‘New Age’ spirituality towards a simple,
direct and useful practice (Maldonado 1986) not tied to any particular host
institution, is the pre-eminent expression of popular religion in contemporary
culture.
But such a spirituality must be inherently unstable. Indeed, the career
of ‘New Age’ exemplifies the fickle public impact of this new spirituality.
The restlessness and mobility of its key agents militates against the level of
institutionalisation required by a viable NSM or NRM, as I have repeatedly
argued, and the fiercely subjective values and experiences of seekers are in
any case hostile to institutional recuperation.The revealing advice of Bloom
(1990: 8) ‘not to be cowardly’ about one’s ‘spiritual authority’ returns us to
the sociostructural indeterminacy haunting ‘New Age’, for which the
following observation, derived from the work of Max Weber, remains highly
pertinent:
Given the absolutistic moral fervor,the revolutionary disdain of formal
procedures, and the inherent instability of the lack of provision for
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succession,charismatic activities and orientations because of their close
relation to the very sources of social and cultural creativity, contain
strong tendencies toward the destruction and decomposition of
institutions.
(Eisenstadt 1968: xix)
‘Charismatic activities and orientations’ perfectly encapsulates the spiritual
seekership, groupwork and networking at the heart of ‘New Age’, and this
immediacy and spontaneity must be a major source of the biographical
attraction and resilience of ‘alternative’ forms of spirituality. But in structural
terms, this instinct is also the gravest obstacle to the lasting inroads on the
primary institutions of the modern world that this spirituality would dearly
like to make. For its reflexive biographies, its loose collectivities and its one
potentially explosive emblem – ‘New Age’ – lack a viable level of collective
focus and mobilisation effectively to deliver its challenge.
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