New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion

305 Pages·2014·2.34 MB·English

by  Steven J. Sutcliffe

NEW AGE SPIRITUALITY
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NEW AGE SPIRITUALITY
Rethinking Religion
Edited by
STEVEN J. SUTCLIFFE AND INGVILD SÆLID GILHUS
To Jo for her kindness, from Steve
To Nils Erik for his support, from Ingvild
First published in 2013 by Acumen
Published 2014 by Routledge
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Editorial matter and selection © Steven J. Sutcliffe & Ingvild Sælid Gilhus, 2013
Individual chapters © individual contributors
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CONTENTS
Introduction: “All mixed up” – thinking about religion in
relation to New Age spiritualities 1
Steven J. Sutcliffe and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus
Part I: Rethinking New Age spiritualities
1. New Age, world religions and elementary forms 17
Steven J. Sutcliffe
2. “All over the place”: the contribution of New Age to a spatial
model of religion 35
Ingvild Sælid Gilhus
3. Towards a new paradigm of constructing “religion”:
New Age data and unbounded categories 50
Liselotte Frisk
4. On transgressing the secular: spiritualities of life, idealism,
vitalism 66
Paul Heelas
5. Hiding in plain sight: the organizational forms of
“unorganized religion” 84
Ann Taves and Michael Kinsella
Part II: Comparing New Age beliefs and practices
6. Narrow New Age and broad spirituality: a comprehensive
schema and a comparative analysis 99
Norichika Horie
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CONTENTS
7. Dolphins and other humans: New Age identities in
comparative perspective 117
Mikael Rothstein
8. New Age, Sami shamanism and indigenous spirituality 132
Trude Fonneland and Siv Ellen Kraft
9. The holistic milieu in context: between traditional
Christianity and folk religiosity 146
Dorota Hall
10. New Age and the spirit of capitalism: energy as cognitive
currency 160
Lisbeth Mikaelsson
Part III: Putting new spiritual practices to work
11. Beyond the spiritual supermarket: the social and public
significance of New Age spirituality 174
Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman
12. From New Age to new spiritualities: secular sacralizations
on the borders of religion 197
Frans Jespers
13. Cognitively optimal religiosity: New Age as a case study 212
Olav Hammer
14. Theorizing emotions in New Age practices: an analysis of
feeling rules in self-religion 227
Shu-Chuan Chen
15. Doing things with angels: agency, alterity and practices of
enchantment 242
Terhi Utriainen
Conclusion: New Age spiritualities – “good to think” in the
study of religion 256
Ingvild Sælid Gilhus and Steven J. Sutcliffe
Contributors 263
Further reading 266
Bibliography 271
Index 293
vi
INTRODUCTION: “ALL MIXED UP” –
THINKING ABOUT RELIGION IN
RELATION TO NEW AGE SPIRITUALITIES
Steven J. Sutcliffe and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus
THEORIES OFRELIGIONANDNEWAGESPIRITUALITIES
“New age” is among the most disputed of categories in the study of reli-
gion in terms of agreeing content and boundaries.1 Because such disputes
reproduce in miniature the debate about the cross-cultural stability of the
category “religion”, studying “new age spiritualities” tantalizingly reproduces
issues central to defining and theorizing religion in general. It is the aim of
this volume to bring two areas of research normally kept apart – empirical
study of new age spiritualities and serious theories of religion – into close
and productive interaction, with a view to opening up a new primary data
set for general theories of religion.
The classical theories of religion – for instance by Edward Burnett Tylor,
James Frazer, William Robertson Smith, F. Max Müller, Sigmund Freud and
Émile Durkheim – were built on a varied pick and mix of religious phe-
nomena. Some of these authors consulted ancient religions, as did Frazer
and Robertson Smith; some looked to India as Müller did (without actu-
ally going there); while many were interested in so-called “primitive” cul-
tures, as were both Tylor and Durkheim. None of these “armchair” masters
did fieldwork, but relied on reports from missionaries, travellers and other
reportage. And even if they tried to build their foundation on the data of
pluralized formations, their ideas were mainly inspired by their concept of
Christianity, as Evans-Pritchard persuasively argued in Theories of Primitive
Religion (1965).
Notably these authors were not really interested in examining contempo-
rary religious developments in their own societies, even less in using such
developments in their own attempts to construct a comparative category
of religion. For example, F. Max Müller writes in a letter about Theosophy:
“Unfortunately, the only thing that the large public admires in India is the
folly of Esoteric Buddhism and Theosophy, falsely so called. What a pity it is
that such absurdities, nay, such frauds, should be tolerated!” (quoted in Van
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INTRODUCTION
den Bosch 2002: 160–61). Somewhat exceptionally, Tylor was interested in
the contemporary phenomena of Spiritualism, but he seems to have pulled
back from using the term “spiritualism” instead of “animism” as the core
concept in his definition of religion (“belief in Spiritual Beings”) because
he felt it would confuse his universal theory with the particularities of the
Spiritualist movement. Frazer, meanwhile, was critically interested in the
fate of contemporary Christianity, but he only treated this matter implicitly
and on the basis of deductions from his history of comparative phenomena,
which precluded Christian data. In sum, the pioneers of the study of religion
largely ignored local phenomena in their own backyards and projected their
theories onto “others”, elsewhere.
Despite these blindspots, the academic study of religion from the begin-
ning of its modern institutionalization around the end of the nineteenth
century clearly wished to create a unified theory of religion (Thrower 1999;
Pals 2006; Stausberg 2009). The first generation of scholars in “comparative
religion” (Sharpe [1975] 1986) was driven by general theoretical questions
like: What is religion? How did religion originate? What function/s does reli-
gion have? These questions have acquired fresh life in recent years as schol-
ars have again started to present “grand theory” about the origin, function
and meaning of religion. However, relatively few of these scholars build their
theories on empirical studies, and even fewer on grassroots studies con-
ducted from the ground up. For example, only three of seventeen contem-
porary theories in a recent collection have a basis in empirical research, and
only one “has grown out of empirical work on a religious site” (Stausberg
2009: 11).2 Significantly, none of these theories take their point of depar-
ture from the phenomena of new age spiritualities. One question to raise at
the start, therefore, is how theories of religion can throw light on new age
spiritualities. The corollary is whether new age spiritualities can provide pri-
mary sources for defining religion. If not, it might be because new age phe-
nomena are seen as atypical. But to see new age as atypical could mean one
is arguing in a circle: new age data become atypical simply because they are
not included when the definitions and models of “religion” are first drawn
up. This implies that unexamined preconceptions may be in play about what
constitutes “proper” religion.
The presence of implicit models may explain why new age has frequently
been seen as a “special case” among the phenomena of “religion”, requiring
a distinctive terminology. The development of the model of a “New Age
Movement” as a special kind of new religious movement, or of “The New
Age” as a falsifiable substantive milieu, are examples of this kind of think-
ing. This erstwhile solution to the problem of how to classify new age can be
contrasted with the project of developing an inclusive taxonomy: one that
covers all known specimens. The argument of this volume is that we need a
model of religion that comprises new age phenomena, either as part of the
old model of religion in such a way as to expand its parameters, or as part of
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INTRODUCTION
a fresh prototype. The challenge, therefore, is to develop a general model of
religion, with a terminology to match, which can cover all known religious
phenomena in the present and in the past, including new age spiritualities.
DESCRIBINGNEWAGESPIRITUALITIES
But what are we talking about? The expression “new age” has been used
in the academy since the mid-1980s to describe a sometimes bewildering
variety of “holistic” or “mind body spirit” phenomena, including astrology,
tarot and other kinds of divination; practices of possession, channelling and
mediumship; magical ideas about multiple “bodies”, and occult ideas about
hidden anatomies; body practices like yoga, tai chi and ch’i kung; popular
psychotherapies and counselling ideologies; and forms of healing positioned
as either “alternative” or “complementary” to biomedical healthcare, from
Reiki to homoeopathy. The ontological commitments range from weak tran-
scendence to strong immanence: that is, from “a blend of pagan religions,
Eastern philosophies, and occult-psychic phenomena” (York 1995: 34) to
a “highly optimistic, celebratory, utopian and spiritual form of humanism”
(Heelas 1996: 28).
The historical background to the term “new age” is both millennialis-
tic and astrological (Sutcliffe 2003a; Campion 2012). In the 1930s, when a
traceable modern tradition of use and interpretation of the term effectively
began (Sutcliffe 2007), in large part through the dissemination of texts by the
Christian-turned-Theosophist Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949), the trope signi-
fied an imminent global upheaval preparatory to a golden age of abundance,
prosperity and peace. Popular prophecies in the 1950s and 1960s variously
identify the nuclear arms race between the former USSR and the USA, UFO
sightings, and environmental disasters as potential portents of this coming
upheaval (Wojcik 1997). In these early expressions, the “new age” was an
imminent historical phenomenon, poised to unfold through the agency of
supernatural beings. Although cataclysms of various kinds would attend its
“birth”, the eventual outcome would be a new global order of stability, peace
and mutual understanding.
Bailey’s Christian millennialism also drew on astrological sources to
broaden its appeal within the “cultic milieu” (C. Campbell 1972), in particu-
lar the core idea that the Earth was moving from the astrological “house” of
Pisces, a “water sign” symbolized by the fish, into “Aquarius”, an “air sign”
symbolized by a waterbearer, and associated in primary sources with notions
of the “Christ within” and the “cosmic Christ” (Campion 2012: 25). Titles
for sources as diverse as Levi Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the
Christ (1907) and George Trevelyan’s A Vision of the Aquarian Age (1977)
show that a variety of parties in modern cultural history have sought to posi-
tion themselves in relation to this astrological trope. It signalled collective
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