The New Age - 21/feb/2025

THE NEW AGE

NOTES

• Emerged during the 1970s and increasingly in the 1980s

• Term originated in Theosophical literature + new age cults

• Post wwii millinerian tradition

• Originally, New Age meant something along the lines of using Divination and healing as mehtods of transforming the world, but as the movement gained steam

• Basically, it originally meant a millenarian belief system, but eventually came to mean the broader set of practices associated with that original sense.

Doctrines and Rituals

• People are frail, destiny is uncertain, disease and death are our constant companions.

• These existential fears are responded to in a thousand different ways by folk religions, 

• Hanegraaff calls it “bricolage” which means like, DIY, or a mish-mosh. Bricolage being the process of making a thing out of whatever you have laying around. 

• In this sense, the New Age is itself a large folk religion

• So you get various forms of folk healing, and the doctrines implied therein

• People telling the future with palmistry and astrology

• And explorations of past lives that offer an option beyond the oblivion of death

• Attempting to actually syncretize this is left up to the individual. Any two New Agers will likely conflict in the strict sense, but there are general worldviews that emerge:

• 1. The world is not material objects bumping into each other, but a web of connected meaning

• 2. The underlying strata of the universe is not atoms and quarks, but some cosmic stem-cell goo of energy and consciousness. 

• 3. Humans contain a spark of this energy within us, which allows us to understand and manipulate the universe to our will

• 4. The human mind is not just a physical body, but a mind and a spirit. Sickness also effects and can act upon the latter two. 

• 5. We are all companions on a spiritual journey which started before our birth, and will not end with our death. 

• 6. The world must be understood spiritually, not just intellectually. Here we find the tools of instinct, gut feelings, 

• 7. Spiritual insights into the true nature of reality were given to ancient cultures from the ancient egyptians to the native americans

• 8. Whatever the most recent scientific discoveries in pop-science are, they confirm this. 

• 9. Spirituality is made not by accepting doctrines, but through personal experience.

• 10. The world will be a better place the more people adopt this sort of spirituality

• This emphasis on the spiritual nature of sickness and the body lends itself well to the exploration of altered states and ritual healing. Especially, the act of accessing some deeper well of cosmic knowledge, known as “channeling.”

Healing

• Where medical science has fairly complex methods of determining states of illness and disease and health, the New Age seems to concieve of health as an extremely high level of function, and has a few common sets of doctrine that address failings

• 1. The human body is riven through with invisible currents of energy 

• 2. The body is a holistic system. The entire body is mirrored in the feet, the eyes, the outer ears, etc

• 3. The body and the soul are one. By treaating the body, the soul can be healed. And vice versa.

• 4. The human body has an occult anatomy. The aura is a cloud of energy which enwreathes the body, the body has chakras, etc

• This gave us shit like reikei, therpudic touch, crystal healing, the laying of hands, aura-soma therapy, color therapy, 

Channelling

• Throughout history, human beings have acted as bridges between the world, and spirituality

• This is basically a prophetic tradition for the new age, its called channelling. 

• Part of the idea is that if there were no fear or guilt, the flow of spiritual power through humans would not be blocked, allowing us to realize our full potential

• Also, we create our own reality. If you approach things with guilt and fear, the world will be evil and hateful. If you approach thigns with love, the world will give you miracles. If anything bad happens to you, its your fault. 

• The implications for affluence are pretty clear.

These basic doctrinal elements were at the core of an early series of channeled messages, known as the Seth material. → Jane Roberts’ books containing the messages of the discarnate entity Seth spread through the emerging New Age network throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, and became trend-setting for subsequent channeled messages. Hanegraaff 857

• Also A Course In Miracles

Divination

• A resurgence of astrology and birth charts, the popularity of tarot cards, all mechanisms of inner change. Thanks Jung.