Apr 17, 2015 08:23 AM
http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/the-high...e-beliefs/
EXCERPT: [...] It’s easy to scoff at the totemic kitsch of the New Age movement. But it’s impossible to deny its importance, both as an economic force and as a cultural template, a way of approaching the world. The New Age is a powerful mixture of mass-market mysticism and idealistic yearning. It’s also, arguably, our era’s most popular ex novo spiritual movement [...] New Age is not so much a discrete collection of beliefs as it is a Venn diagram (or a mandala, if you like) of intersecting interests, objectives and motifs. The New Age ‘movement’ is not a single movement at all. The term contains multitudes.
[...] Even scholars who have spent years studying the New Age movement disagree about what precisely it is. [...] I would argue that if there is one thread that binds together the various New Age movements, it is that they represent a resurgence of magical beliefs in a modern world supposedly stripped of them.
In his now-classic book Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), the Oxford University historian Keith Thomas framed religion and magic as antagonistic social forces. In his view, when early modern Protestant and Catholic religious leaders persecuted witches, they were effectively trying to eliminate their competition as explainers of the unexplainable. In this, they largely succeeded. [...] ‘The official religion of industrial England was one from which the primitive “magical” elements had been very largely shorn.’ In the process of this rejection of supernatural explanations, post-Enlightenment religious beliefs became increasingly standardised and grounded in the concept of natural laws that it was within the ability of human minds to fathom.
As the German sociologist Max Weber put it 100 years ago, a distinguishing feature of modernity is ‘the disenchantment of the world’. For Weber and the countless historians and social scientists who have taken his theories as starting points, the rise of modern science and ‘scientifically oriented technology’ replaced the ‘mysterious incalculable forces’ that pervaded pre‑modern worldviews.
But what if Weber and Thomas were wrong? Ironically, at precisely the time when Thomas was anatomising the death of magic in the 1970s, bohemian mystics in places such as California and London were reviving it. Perhaps the sole characteristic shared by the modern-day inheritors of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture – from Neo-Druids in Stonehenge and eco-feminist witches [...] to practitioners of alternative medicine, Indigo children and aura readers – is this desire to ‘re-enchant’ the world.
Yet if New Agers seek to recapture a pre‑modern belief in ‘mysterious incalculable forces’, they do so using all the tools of contemporary technology and the networks of modern globalisation. It’s not coincidental that the earliest calls for a ‘New Age’ of spiritual awakening coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Or that the triumph of a more formalised and commoditised New Age movement in the second half of the 20th century converged with the rise of television infomercials, books on tape, local‑access cable channels, and the early internet. Today, New Age aesthetics and modes of thought have filtered into mainstream society, influencing everything from the rise of alternative medicine (a $34 billion industry, by one recent estimate) to the triumph of yoga in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, formal religious affiliation is on the decline in the Western world, but this rejection of traditional organised religion does not imply a rejection of spirituality. Instead, it has created a vacuum in which the eclecticism and vagueness of the New Age movement emerge as strengths rather than weaknesses. Which begs the question: if the early modern era witnessed a ‘decline of magic’ and a rise in institutionalised religious affiliation, are we now witnessing the opposite?....
EXCERPT: [...] It’s easy to scoff at the totemic kitsch of the New Age movement. But it’s impossible to deny its importance, both as an economic force and as a cultural template, a way of approaching the world. The New Age is a powerful mixture of mass-market mysticism and idealistic yearning. It’s also, arguably, our era’s most popular ex novo spiritual movement [...] New Age is not so much a discrete collection of beliefs as it is a Venn diagram (or a mandala, if you like) of intersecting interests, objectives and motifs. The New Age ‘movement’ is not a single movement at all. The term contains multitudes.
[...] Even scholars who have spent years studying the New Age movement disagree about what precisely it is. [...] I would argue that if there is one thread that binds together the various New Age movements, it is that they represent a resurgence of magical beliefs in a modern world supposedly stripped of them.
In his now-classic book Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), the Oxford University historian Keith Thomas framed religion and magic as antagonistic social forces. In his view, when early modern Protestant and Catholic religious leaders persecuted witches, they were effectively trying to eliminate their competition as explainers of the unexplainable. In this, they largely succeeded. [...] ‘The official religion of industrial England was one from which the primitive “magical” elements had been very largely shorn.’ In the process of this rejection of supernatural explanations, post-Enlightenment religious beliefs became increasingly standardised and grounded in the concept of natural laws that it was within the ability of human minds to fathom.
As the German sociologist Max Weber put it 100 years ago, a distinguishing feature of modernity is ‘the disenchantment of the world’. For Weber and the countless historians and social scientists who have taken his theories as starting points, the rise of modern science and ‘scientifically oriented technology’ replaced the ‘mysterious incalculable forces’ that pervaded pre‑modern worldviews.
But what if Weber and Thomas were wrong? Ironically, at precisely the time when Thomas was anatomising the death of magic in the 1970s, bohemian mystics in places such as California and London were reviving it. Perhaps the sole characteristic shared by the modern-day inheritors of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture – from Neo-Druids in Stonehenge and eco-feminist witches [...] to practitioners of alternative medicine, Indigo children and aura readers – is this desire to ‘re-enchant’ the world.
Yet if New Agers seek to recapture a pre‑modern belief in ‘mysterious incalculable forces’, they do so using all the tools of contemporary technology and the networks of modern globalisation. It’s not coincidental that the earliest calls for a ‘New Age’ of spiritual awakening coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Or that the triumph of a more formalised and commoditised New Age movement in the second half of the 20th century converged with the rise of television infomercials, books on tape, local‑access cable channels, and the early internet. Today, New Age aesthetics and modes of thought have filtered into mainstream society, influencing everything from the rise of alternative medicine (a $34 billion industry, by one recent estimate) to the triumph of yoga in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, formal religious affiliation is on the decline in the Western world, but this rejection of traditional organised religion does not imply a rejection of spirituality. Instead, it has created a vacuum in which the eclecticism and vagueness of the New Age movement emerge as strengths rather than weaknesses. Which begs the question: if the early modern era witnessed a ‘decline of magic’ and a rise in institutionalised religious affiliation, are we now witnessing the opposite?....
