New Age Movement

New Age Movement. The name popularly given to a constellation of ideas originating in the late 1960s and related to paradigmatic cultural changes in the last third of the twentieth century.Broadly, such changes may be characterized as the move from a modern to a postmodern worldview; from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics; and from mechanistic to organic understandings of reality. These shifts emphasized the resacralization of the cosmos; the interconnectedness of all things; change or process, rather than stasis, as the nature of reality; the emergence of a planetary culture; and the reintegration of such dualisms as spirit and matter, emotion and reason, and science and religion.

The origin of the New Age movement has been traced variously to the “occult explosion” of the 1960s; metaphysical movements and interest in alternative and Eastern religions in the nineteenth century; and even to ancient Gnosticism, alchemy, Renaissance magic, and the search for the “perennial philosophy.” Evaluations of the New Age movement are polarized, ranging from accusations of self‐serving foolishness, crass marketing of products, satanism, and idolatry to the conviction that the New Age will bring with it spiritual transformation and hitherto unknown global harmony and ecological responsibility.

With its fluid boundaries; eclectic sources, concerns, and practices; and multiple levels of sophistication and depth, the New Age movement helped give shape to a wide‐ranging cultural conversation related to the search for an adequate worldview for American culture as the twentieth century ended. This worldview, New Age representatives insisted, must recognize the realities of religious pluralism; discoveries in the physical and biological sciences; the efficacy of alternative healing methods; and the place of humankind within, rather than outside, nature. The New Age can also be seen as a reblossoming of America's persistent metaphysical tradition and as offering an arena outside established religions for spiritual speculation and experimentation.
See also Environmental Movement; Post–Cold War Era; Postmodernism; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

David Spangler , Emergence: The Rebirth of the Sacred, 1984.
James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, eds., Perspectives on the New Age, 1992.
Duncan S. Ferguson, ed., New Age Spirituality: An Assessment, 1993.

Mary Farrell Bednarowski