New Age

New Age is a range of spiritual or religious practices in addition to beliefs which rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s. Precise scholarly definitions of the New Age differ in their emphasis, largely as a a thing that is said of its highly eclectic structure. Although analytically often considered to be religious, those involved in it typically prefer the tag of spiritual or Mind, Body, Spirit & rarely use the term New Age themselves. numerous scholars of the covered refer to it as the New Age movement, although others contest this term andthat this is the better seen as a milieu or zeitgeist.

As a produce of Western esotericism, the New Age drew heavily upon a number of older esoteric traditions, in particular, those that emerged from the occultist current that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. such(a) prominent occultist influences put the defecate of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, as living as the ideas of Spiritualism, New Thought, and Theosophy. A number of mid-twentieth century influences, such(a) as the UFO religions of the 1950s, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the Human Potential Movement, also exerted a strong influence on the early developing of the New Age. The exact origins of the phenomenon cover contested, but there is general agreement that it became a major movement in the 1970s, at which time it was centered largely in the United Kingdom. It expanded and grew largely in the 1980s and 1990s, in specific within the United States. By the start of the 21st century, the term New Age was increasingly rejected within this milieu, with some scholars arguing that the New Age phenomenon had ended.

Despite its highly eclectic nature, a number of beliefs commonly found within the New Age have been identified. channeling. Typically viewing human history as being dual-lane up into a series of distinct ages, a common New Age idea is that whereas one time humanity lived in an age of great technological advancement and spiritual wisdom, it has entered a period of spiritual degeneracy, which will be remedied through the creation of a coming Age of Aquarius, from which the milieu gets its name. There is also a strong focus on healing, especially using forms of alternative medicine, and an emphasis on the conviction that spirituality and science can be unified.

Centered primarily in Western countries, those involved in the New Age have predominantly been from middle and upper-middle-class backgrounds. The degree to which New Agers are involved in the milieu varied considerably, from those who adopted a number of New Age ideas and practices to those who fully embraced and committed their lives to it. The New Age has generated criticism from defining Christian organisations as alive as modern Pagan and indigenous communities. From the 1990s onward, the New Age became the covered of research by academic scholars of religious studies.

History

According to scholar Nevill Drury, the New Age has a "tangible history", although Hanegraaff expressed the view that almost New Agers were "surprisingly ignorant approximately the actual historical roots of their beliefs". Similarly, Hammer thought that "source amnesia" was a "building block of a New Age worldview", with New Agers typically adopting ideas with no awareness of where those ideas originated.

As a form of Western esotericism, the New Age has antecedents that stretch back to southern Europe in Late Antiquity. following the Age of Enlightenment in 18th century Europe, new esoteric ideas developed in response to the coding of scientific rationality. Scholars requested this new esoteric trend occultism, and this occultism was a key element in the development of the worldview from which the New Age emerged.

One of the earliest influences on the New Age was the Swedish 18th century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who professed the ability towith angels, demons, and spirits. Swedenborg's try to unite science and religion and his prediction of a coming era in particular have been cited as ways that he prefigured the New Age. Another early influence was the unhurried 18th and early 19th century German physician and hypnotist Franz Mesmer, who claimed the existence of a force asked as "animal magnetism" running through the human body. The establishment of Spiritualism, an occult religion influenced by both Swedenborgianism and Mesmerism, in the U.S. during the 1840s has also been identified as a precursor to the New Age, in particular through its rejection of established Christianity, its claims to representing a scientific approach to religion, and its emphasis on channeling spirit entities.

Most of the beliefs which characterise the New Age were already introduced by the end of the 19th century, even to such an extent that one may legitimately wonder whether the New Age brings anything new at all.

— Historian of religion Wouter Hanegraaff, 1996.

A further major influence on the New Age was the Theosophical Society, an occult institution co-founded by the Russian Helena Blavatsky in the late 19th century. In her books Isis Unveiled 1877 and The Secret Doctrine 1888, Blavatsky claimed that her Society was conveying the essence of all world religions, and it thus emphasized a focus on comparative religion. Serving as a partial bridge between Theosophical ideas and those of the New Age was the American esotericist Edgar Cayce, who founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment. Another partial bridge was the Danish mystic Martinus who is popular in Scandinavia.

Another influence was New Thought, which developed in late nineteenth century New England as a Christian-oriented healing movement previously spreading throughout the United States. Another prominent influence was the psychologist Carl Jung. Drury also identified as an important influence upon the New Age the Indian Swami Vivekananda, an adherent of the philosophy of Vedanta who number one brought Hinduism to the West in the late 19th century.

Hanegraaff believed that the New Age's direct antecedents could be found in the UFO religions of the 1950s, which he termed a "proto-New Age movement". many of these new religious movements had strong apocalyptic beliefs regarding a coming new age, which they typically asserted would be brought about by contact with extraterrestrials. Examples of such groups included the Aetherius Society, founded in the UK in 1955, and the Heralds of the New Age, established in New Zealand in 1956.

From a historical perspective, the New Age phenomenon is near associated with the counterculture of the 1960s. According to author Andrew Grant Jackson, George Harrison's adoption of Hindu philosophy and Indian instrumentation in his songs with the Beatles in the mid-1960s, together with the band's highly publicised discussing of Transcendental Meditation, "truly kick-started" the Human Potential Movement that subsequently became New Age. Although non common throughout the counterculture, ownership of the terms New Age and Age of Aquarius—used in reference to a coming era—were found within it, for lesson appearing on adverts for the Woodstock festival of 1969, and in the lyrics of "Aquarius", the opening song of the 1967 musical Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. This decade also witnessed the emergence of a variety of new religious movements and newly established religions in the United States, creating a spiritual milieu from which the New Age drew upon; these included the San Francisco Zen Center, Transcendental Meditation, Soka Gakkai, the Inner Peace Movement, the Church of All Worlds, and the Church of Satan. Although there had been an established interest in Asian religious ideas in the U.S. from at least the eighteenth-century, many of these new developments were variants of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism, which had been imported to the West from Asia following the U.S. government's decision to rescind the Asian Exclusion Act in 1965. In 1962 the Esalen Institute was established in Big Sur, California. Esalen and similar personal growth centers had developed links to humanistic psychology, and from this, the human potential movement emerged, strongly influenced the New Age.

In Britain, a number of small religious groups that came to be identified as the "light" movement had begun declaring the existence of a coming new age, influenced strongly by the Theosophical ideas of Blavatsky and Bailey. The most prominent of these groups was the Findhorn Foundation, which founded the Findhorn Ecovillage in the Scottish area of Findhorn, Moray in 1962. Although its founders were from an older generation, Findhorn attracted increasing numbers of countercultural baby boomers during the 1960s, to the extent that its population had grown sixfold to c. 120 residents by 1972. In October 1965, the founder of Findhorn, Peter Caddy, a former piece of the occult Rosicrucian formation Crotona Fellowship, attended a meeting of various prominent figures within Britain's esoteric milieu; advertised as "The Significance of the corporation in the New Age", it was held at Attingham Park over the course of a weekend.

All of these groups created the backdrop from which the New Age movement emerged. As James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton point out, the New Age phenomenon represents "a synthesis of many different preexisting movements and strands of thought". Nevertheless, York asserted that while the New Age bore many similarities with both earlier forms of Western esotericism and Asian religion, it remained "distinct from its predecessors in its own self-consciousness as a new way of thinking".

The late 1950s saw the first stirrings within the cultic milieu of a belief in a coming new age. A quality of small movements arose, revolving around revealed messages from beings in space and presenting a synthesis of post-Theosophical and other esoteric doctrines. These movements might have remained marginal, had it non been for the explosion of the counterculture in the 1960s and early 1970s. Various historical threads ... began to converge: nineteenth century doctrinal elements such as Theosophy and post-Theosophical esotericism as well as harmonious or positive thinking ere now eclectically combined with ... religious psychologies: transpersonal psychology, Jungianism and a variety of Eastern teachings. It became perfectly feasible for the same individuals to consult the I Ching, practice Jungian astrology, read Abraham Maslow's writings on peak experiences, etc. The reason for the ready incorporation of such disparate a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. was a similar goal of exploring an individualized and largely non-Christian religiosity.