Almost nobody inside the New Age ever called themselves a New Ager
Scholars built a whole field around the New Age, yet the people they studied mostly rejected the label, preferring to call themselves spiritual seekers. By 2003 one researcher found the phrase was optional, episodic and fading, used mainly in quotation marks. Some academics now think the phenomenon is simply over.
The New Age grew rapidly in the West during the early 1970s, when its centre of gravity was largely in the United Kingdom, and spread widely through the 1980s and 1990s. Its roots run back to eighteenth and nineteenth-century esotericism, drawing on figures like Franz Mesmer and Emanuel Swedenborg and on movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism and New Thought. Closer to hand came the UFO religions of the 1950s, the 1960s counterculture and the Human Potential Movement.
Beneath the eclecticism some common ideas surface. Divinity is usually seen as pervading the whole universe, humans included, which gives great weight to the individual's own spiritual authority. Angels and other semi-divine beings are thought to speak through human channels. History is often divided into spiritual ages: a lost era of advanced technology and wisdom declined into violence, and an Age of Aquarius is about to put things right, which is where the name comes from. Healing through alternative medicine and attempts to marry science and spirituality are also central.
Defining it has frustrated academics. Paul Heelas called it an eclectic hotch-potch held together by a shared vocabulary of personal and planetary transformation, Olav Hammer a fluid, fuzzy cultic milieu, and Wouter Hanegraaff a label slapped on whatever seems to fit. Others prefer zeitgeist, holistic milieu or everyday spirituality. James R. Lewis defends the term anyway, since nothing else covers the whole territory, and George Chryssides compares it to Hinduism, another outsiders' word scholars still find useful.
The phrase itself is much older than the movement. A new order of ages is announced on America's Great Seal, a design from 1782, and in 1864 the Swedenborgian Warren Felt Evans published a book titled The New Age and its Message. Participants range from dabblers who adopt a few practices to people who reorganise their lives around it. Christians, modern Pagans and Indigenous communities have all criticised it, and religious studies scholars have researched it seriously since the 1990s.
Source: New Age
