This article is about the New Age movement and its spirituality. For the astrological age in western astrology, see Age of Aquarius. For other uses with the term New Age, see New Age (disambiguation).

The New Age movement is a religious or spiritual movement that developed in Western nations during the 1970s. Precise scholarly definitions of the movement differ in their emphasis, largely as a result of its highly eclectic structure. Nevertheless, the movement is characterised by a holistic view of the cosmos, a belief in an emergent Age of Aquarius from which the movement gets its name an emphasis on self-spirituality and the authority of the self, a focus on healing (particularly with alternative therapies), a belief in channeling, and an adoption of a "New Age science" that makes use of elements of the new physics.

The New Age movement evolved from an array of earlier religious movements and philosophies, in particular nineteenth-century groups such as the Theosophical Society and Gurdjieff. It also incorporates strands from metaphysics, perennial philosophy, self-help psychology, and various Indian teachings such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Yoga[1] In the 1970s, it developed a social and political component.[2] Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational psychology".[3] The term New Age refers to the coming astrological Age of Aquarius.[4]

The New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from monotheism through pantheism, pandeism, panentheism, and polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy; particularly archaeoastronomy, astrology, ecology, environmentalism, the Gaia hypothesis, psychology, and physics. New Age practices and philosophies sometimes draw inspiration from major world religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Chinese folk religion, Christianity, Hinduism, Sufism (Islam), Judaism (especially Kabbalah), Sikhism; with strong influences from East Asian religions, Esotericism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Idealism, Neopaganism, New Thought, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Universalism, and Wisdom tradition.[5]

Religious studies scholar Paul Heelas characterised the New Age movement as "an eclectic hotch-potch of beliefs, practices and ways of life" which can be identified as a singular phenomenon through their use of "the same (or very similar) lingua franca to do with the human (and planetary) condition and how it can be transformed." Similarly, historian of religion Olav Hammer termed it "a common denominator for a variety of quite divergent contemporary popular practices and beliefs" which have emerged since the late 1970s and which are "largely united by historical links, a shared discourse and an air de famille." Sociologist of religion Michael York described the New Age movement as "an umbrella term that includes a great variety of groups and identities" but which are united by their "expectation of a major and universal change being primarily founded on the individual and collective development of human potential". Adopting a different approach, religious studies scholar Wouter Hanegraaff asserted that "New Age" was "a label attached indiscriminately to whatever seems to fit it" and that as a result it "means very different things to different people."

Many of those groups and individuals who could analytically be categorised as part of the New Age movement nevertheless reject the term "New Age" when in reference to themselves. Thus, religious studies scholar James R. Lewis identified "New Age" as a problematic term, but asserted that "there exists no comparable term which covers all aspects of the movement" and that thus it remained a useful etic category for scholars to use.

York described the New Age movement as a new religious movement (NRM). Conversely, Heelas rejected this categorisation; he believed that while elements of the New Age movement represented NRMs, this was not applicable to every New Age group. Hammer identified much of the New Age movement as corresponding to the concept of "folk religiosity" in that it seeks to deal with existential questions regarding subjects like death and disease in "an unsystematic fashion, often through a process of bricolage from already available narratives and rituals". York also heuristically divides the New Age movement into three broad trends. The first, the "social camp", represents groups which primarily seek to bring about social change, while the second, "occult camp", instead focus on contact with spirit entities and channeling. York's third group, the "spiritual camp", represents a middle ground between these two camps, and which focuses largely on individual development.

The term "new age", along with related terms like "new era" and "new world", long predate the emergence of the New Age movement, and have widely been used to assert that a better way of life for humanity is dawning. It has, for instance, widely been used in political contexts; the Great Seal of the United States, designed in 1782, proclaims a "new order of ages", while in the 1980s the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed that "all mankind is entering a new age". It has also been widely used within various forms of Western esotericism. For instance, in 1809 William Blake described a coming era of spiritual and artistic advancement in his preface to Milton a Poem by stating: "...when the New Age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right..."[16] In 1864 the American Swedenborgian Warren Felt Evans published The New Age and its Message, while in 1907 Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson began editing a weekly journal of Christian liberalism and socialism titled The New Age.

Two nineteenth-century esoteric philosophers greatly influenced the New Age movement: Helena Blavatsky (left) and G.I. Gurdjieff (right)

The New Age movement is a form of Western esotericism, and thus has antecedents stretching back to southern Europe in Late Antiquity. As such, it has various antecedents within the esoteric milieu. Some of the New Age movement's constituent elements appeared initially in the 19th-century metaphysical movements: Spiritualism, Theosophy, and New Thought and also the alternative medicine movements of chiropractics and naturopathy.[4][20] The author Nevill Drury claimed there are "four key precursors of the New Age", who had set the way for many of its widely held precepts.

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