HANEGRAAFF New Age Spiritualities As Secular Religion Grifado

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Social Compass
DOI: 10.1177/003776899046002004
1999; 46; 145 Social Compass
Wouter J. HANEGRAAFF
New Age Spiritualities as Secular Religion: a Historian's Perspective
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Social Compass 46(2), 1999, 145160
Wouter J. HANEGRAAFF
New Age Spiritualities as Secular Religion:
a Historians Perspective
The New Age movement represents the historically innovative phenomenon
of a secular type of religion based upon a radically private symbolism. This
thesis is developed against the background of a three-part definition of
religion, according to which religion in general may manifest in the form of
either religions or spiritualities. Secularization, in this context, refers not
to a decline or disappearance but to a thorough transformation of religion
under the impact of new developments. The essence of this process lies in the
autonomization of spiritualities with respect to religions: while
spiritualities had traditionally been embedded in the collective symbolism of
an existing religion, New Age spiritualities are manifestations of a radically
private symbolism embedded directly in secular culture. From a historical
point of view, this phenomenon is new and unprecedented. Special attention is
given to how and why private symbolism in the New Age context tends to
concentrate on the Self and its spiritual evolution.
Le mouvement du Nouvel Age est un phnomne innovateur en ce sens quil
reprsente un nouveau type de religion sculire base sur un symbolisme
priv. Lauteur dveloppe cette thse dans le cadre dune dfinition tripartite,
selon laquelle la religion en gnral peut prendre la forme soit dune
religion, soit dune spiritualit. Dans ce contexte, la scularisation ne
consiste pas en un phnomne de dclin ou de disparition de la religion, mais
en une transformation de la religion sous linfluence de facteurs nouveaux.
Le cur de ce processus rside dans lautonomisation des spiritualits par
rapport aux religions: alors que les spiritualits traditionnelles
senracinaient dans le symbolisme collectif dune religion dj existante, les
spiritualits du Nouvel Age trouvent directement leur fondement dans la
culture sculire. Ce processus est un phnomne sans prcdent du point de
vue historique. Enfin, la question se pose de savoir comment et pourquoi le
symbolisme priv du Nouvel Age a tendance se focaliser sur le Soi et sur
lvolution spirituelle de celui-ci.
Some statements in the rst chapter of Durkheims Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (Durkheim, 1995: 4344) may serve to suggest the challenge
of the New Age movement for the historian of religion. Having dened
religion as a social phenomenon, Durkheim mentions the alternative
possibility of individual religions that the individual institutes for himself
and celebrates for himself alone. Some people today, he writes, pose the
00377686[199906]46:2;145160;008521
question whether such religions are not destined to become the dominant
form of religious lifewhether a day will not come when the only cult will
be the one that each person freely practices in his innermost self. Could it
be true that we witness the emergence of a new form of religion, which will
consist entirely of interior and subjective states and be freely construed by
each one of us? Durkheim recognizes that if this were the case, his own
denition of religion would be in need of adaptation. But, he continues,
since such radically private religion remains as yet no more than an uncer-
tain future possibility, the scholar is justied for the moment in restricting
himself to the religions of the past and the present. The implication is clear.
Were such a radical religious individualism to become a fact, this would
represent a radically new phenomenon: an unprecedented break with
religion as we know it from the past and the present.
I will argue that the new type of religion referred to by Durkheim has
indeed become a fact, and that the contemporary New Age movement is its
clearest manifestation. New Age exemplies a new phenomenon which may
be dened as secular religion based on private symbolism. As such, it
presents a challenge to sociologists as well as to historians of religion. The
challenge consists in trying to understand what the New Age phenomenon
can teach us about the processes of modernization and secularization, and
their signicance with respect to the systematic study of religions.
For my basic understanding of New Age religion, I must refer the
reader elsewhere (Hanegraaff, 1996, 1998a). Since most studies of New Age
had been written from a sociological perspective, I decided to concentrate
on aspects which tend to be neglected in that literature. On the basis of a
representative selection of written primary sources, I analyzed the funda-
mental ideas of New Age religion and interpreted these from a historical
perspective. I concluded that New Age religion can be dened as a form of
secularized esotericism: it is rooted in so-called western esoteric tradi-
tions which can be traced back to the early Renaissance, but which
underwent a thorough process of secularization during the 19th century.
The new phenomenon of a secularized esotericism is best referred to as
occultism; it had come to full development by the beginning of the 20th
century and was eventually adopted by the New Age movement as it
emerged during the 1970s. In the present article I would like to further
develop this distinction between secularized esotericism on the one hand (a
phenomenon belonging primarily to the history of ideas, and which had
emerged during the 19th century), and the New Age movement on the other
(a social phenomenon, which has emerged during the 1970s and which has
adopted and further developed a secularized esoteric belief system).
Religion, Religions, and Spiritualities
My discussion of New Age as a form of secular religion presupposes a
more general theory of religion, which I have developed in some detail
elsewhere (Hanegraaff, 1999a). I dene religion in terms of a critical
reformulation of the analysis proposed by Clifford Geertz in 1966:
1
146 Social Compass 46(2)
Religion = any symbolic system which inuences human action by providing possibil-
ities for ritually maintaining contact between the everyday world and a more general
meta-empirical framework of meaning.
Under the terms of this denition, New Age evidently qualies as religion;
but this does not by any means imply that it is a religion. The class of
religions (sing.: a religion) can be dened as a subcategory of the general
class of religion; this subcategory is characterized by the fact that the
symbolic system in question is represented by a social institution.
A religion = any symbolic system, embodied in a social institution, which inuences
human action by providing possibilities for ritually maintaining contact between the
everyday world and a more general meta-empirical framework of meaning.
In other words: religion may (and frequently does) manifest itself in the
form of religions, but need not necessarily do so. For example, the Dutch
Reformed Church is religion as well as a religion; the New Age movement,
however, qualies as religion but not as a religion. But of course nothing
prevents a group of New Agers to organize themselves in some sort of
institutional framework. The result will then be a New Age religion: the
equivalent of what is often referred to as a New Age cult.
Religion may also manifest as what I propose to refer to as a spiritual-
ity:
A spirituality = any human practice which maintains contact between the everyday
world and a more general meta-empirical framework of meaning by way of the
individual manipulation
2
of symbolic systems.
This concept of a spirituality (plur.: spiritualities) is basic to my inter-
pretation of New Age, but in order to elucidate the different forms it can
take, I will rst develop my understanding of religion in slightly more
detail.
Collective Symbolism: Religious and Non-religious
Current theories of symbolism and the neighboring domain of myth show a
great complexity, but I will here bypass these discussions and restrict myself
to a very basic observation. So much has been written about symbol and
myth that one may easily forget that symbols are images just as myths are
stories. And reversely: not only images, but stories as well, may function as
symbols in the human imagination. Applied to the study of religions,
symbols and myths can therefore be discussed quite simply as images and
stories which have an important function in a certain religious context. They
can have such importance because their meaning is not restricted to the
literal level. The Christian cross is more than two pieces of wood put
together; the life of Jesus is more than a biography. But, as will be seen, even
highly abstract discursive or scientic propositions normally do not get a
hold over the popular imagination, unless they are capable of being grasped
as images.
Hanegraaff: New Age Spiritualities as Secular Religion 147
A commitment to common symbols is essential to religions generally. As
formulated by Gershom Scholem: one of the main functions of religious
symbols [is] to preserve the vitality of religious experience in a traditional,
conservative milieu (Scholem, 1969: 22). Indeed, an implicit but crucial
assumption in my denition of religion is that the doctrines and theologies
of a given religion are ultimately far less important to preserving religious
community in space and over time, than the fundamental images and stories
shared by its members. For example, Christian doctrines and theologies
have undergone tremendous changes and transformations between the rst
centuries and the present day; indeed, the disputes of theologians appear
usually to have produced discord and discontinuity rather than maintaining
certainty and safeguarding the cohesion and continuity of Christianity as a
religion. But whatever their doctrinal opinions, both theologians and the
community of believers shared a commitment to certain powerful images
and stories, i.e., to a collective symbolism. Such collective images and stories
make a powerful moral appeal to the individual, who is stimulated by them
to conform to the communitys code of conduct. By providing access to a
more general framework of meaning, images and stories are supremely
important means of binding the adherents of a religion together in space and
over time.
But images and stories may function in a non-religious context as well, as
can be demonstrated by a comparison with the collective symbolism of
contemporary secular society. The point I just made about the importance
of images and stories for maintaining the cohesion of religions can be
applied equally to the prevailing wordview of secular society. On the
popular level, for example, few people have even a rudimentary under-
standing of Cartesian philosophy or Newtonian science; but they
immediately recognize the image of the world as a machine. Likewise, the
problem of the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a highly technical
subject involving subtle philosophical problems; but the popular image of a
subatomic particle whichparadoxicallyis a wave appears to be so excit-
ing to the imagination that one encounters it everywhere on the popular
level, sometimes in highly surprising places. In fact, this latter image has
become a supreme symbol of dissent: to invoke it is to criticize the symbol-
ism of an earlier, mechanistic worldview. Nevertheless it remains a scientic
symbol, not a religious one. And moving from symbol to myth, we nd the
same thing. Few people will be able to explain the differences between the
philosophical, scientic and mystical evolutionary theories of the German
Idealists, Darwin, Lamarck, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Ilya
Prigogine, or Ken Wilber, to mention just a few. No matter. What does
matter is that the biblical story of creation has been replaced, in their minds,
by another and better story, which satises the imagination of people who
were brought up to respect the ultimate authority of science. And, nally,
the power of secular symbolism is not restricted to physics and biology. In
our days, for example, the economic concept of the market appears to
have become a highly important popular symbol; like many religious or
quasi-religious symbols, it is able to bind people together in the conviction
that they pursue a common cause, which is for the greater good of humanity
(Loy, 1997). In order to have that conviction, they need not understand the
economic theories involved.
Such is the stuff of the collective symbolism of contemporary secular
society. My point is that contemporary society is not based upon science
and rationality any more than pre-Enlightenment Christianity was based
upon Christian theology. It is not science but popular mythologies of
science which provide society with its basic collective symbolism.
Spiritualities: With or Without a Religious Foundation
Now, within any symbolic systemreligious or non-religious
spiritualities may appear, and indeed, inevitably do appear. This is quite
simply because people may interpret the collective symbolism of a religion
in individual ways, but may do the same with non-religious symbolic
systems. In traditional pre-secular contexts, such spiritualities do not consist
of a strictly private symbolism and can not be seen as examples of the type
of religious individualism referred to by Durkheim. They can be correctly
characterized, however, as private interpretations of collective religious
symbolism.
This distinction is essential, as will be seen. I will demonstrate it by two
examples. One characteristic case of a private interpretation of collective
religious symbolism, leading to a spirituality rooted in a religion, would be
the theosophical system developed by the 17th century mystic Jacob
Boehme. Boehme earned his living as a cobbler in Grlitz, a small town on
the present border between Germany and Poland. Tormented by questions
about the origin of evil and suffering in the world, he nally experienced an
interior illumination which changed his life. He describes how God per-
mitted him a momentary gaze into the innermost center of nature, thus
enabling him to perceive all earthly things in the light of the divine mystery:
the mystery of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, divine Love and divine
Wrath, and the reconciliation of these opposites by Christ. Boehme would
devote the rest of his life to a continuing attempt to explain his interior
experience in human language, and develop the implications of his vision.
His writings are the work of a visionary genius, and were to become the
foundation of a rich spiritual tradition.
Boehmian theosophy is a characteristic manifestation of the complex of
traditions referred to under the general label of western esotericism
(p. 146). Now, it is evident that this perspective belongs to the domain of
religion in terms of my denition. Moreover (in spite of his problems with
a local minister who considered him a heretic), Boehmes esoteric teachings
are undoubtedly rooted in a religion: Christianity as such, and the Lutheran-
ism of his time in particular. But we are evidently dealing here with a
spirituality as well. Boehmes work is the product of an individual
manipulation of the various symbolic systems he had at his disposal:
Christian symbolism in general, the more recent symbolism of Lutheranism
in particular, mystical traditions in the line of Eckhart and Tauler, the
nature-philosophical and esoteric symbolism of alchemy, and the teachings
of Paracelsus. Using elements of these various symbolic systems, he created
a new synthesis: a new way of understanding his native Christian faith. It is
not necessary here to enter into the historical backgrounds of the traditions
just mentioned; what concerns me here is Jacob Boehmes work as an
example of a spirituality rooted in (the collective symbolism of) a religion.
Now let us compare this rst example of a spirituality with a second one,
characteristic of New Age religion. I have intentionally chosen an example
which displays certain similarities with Boehme, in order to make the
differences stand out all the more clearly. On 9 September, 1963, the New
York science ction writer Jane Roberts was suddenly hit by a powerful
psychic experience. She was quietly sitting at the table when, as she
describes, between one normal minute and the next, a fantastic avalanche
of radical new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if my skull
were some sort of receiving station, turned up to unbearable volume
(Roberts, 1970: 11). The experience included not only ideas, but also
extreme and unusual physical sensations and a sort of psychedelic experi-
ence of travelling through many dimensions. When she regained her
composure, she found herself furiously scribbling down the words and ideas
that had ashed through her head. In an attempt to nd out what had
happened to her, she and her husband started experimenting with spiritistic
techniques. After some time, they contacted a spirit, who eventually began
to communicate directly through Jane Roberts body. In this way, she
developed into a so-called trance medium or channel for a higher entity
who referred to himself as Seth. Seths messages were published and have
exerted an enormous (and still underestimated) inuence on the develop-
ment of the New Age movement. The core of his teaching is that we all
create our own reality, in a process of spiritual evolution through count-
less existences on this planet as well as in an innity of other dimensions.
Few New Agers realize how many of the beliefs which they take for granted
in their daily lives have their historical origin in Seths messages.
The intriguing phenomenon of channeling is not my subject here. I would
merely like to emphasize how strongly Seths messages appeared to t
within Jane Roberts personal frame of reference. As may be checked by a
comparison with the books she published under her own name, this frame of
reference consisted of a highly eclectic combination of religious and non-
religious symbolic systems. They included the Romantic cosmology and
evolutionism of the American Transcendentalists, the positive thinking of
the New Thought movement and related traditions usually referred to as the
American Metaphysical Movements, spiritualism and parapsychology in
the wake of magnetism and American mesmerism; but also science ction
literature, popular science, and popular psychology. From the elements of
all these symbolic systems, Jane Robertsor Sethcreated a new, original
synthesis.
The Seth teachings evidently qualify as religion in terms of my deni-
tion. But they do not constitute a religion, nor are they rooted in a religion,
as was the case with Boehme. They are clearly an example of a spirituality:
the product of individual manipulation of available symbolic systems (reli-
gious as well as non-religious). This spirituality fullled the function which
it still fullls in the context of the New Age movement today: it inuences
human action by providing the possibility for maintaining contact between
the everyday world and a more general meta-empirical framework of
meaning. It is therefore undoubtedly religion.
I should add one important note. In both the examples just given, we are
dealing with the spectacular product of unquestionably gifted individuals,
whose published writings made such an impression on readers that their
spirituality (or elements of it) was adopted by others and took up a life of its
own. But when talking of spiritualities we should denitely not think
merely or even mainly of the comparatively rare phenomenon of religious
virtuosi. In principle we are dealing with an everyday phenomenon: every
person who gives an individual twist to existing religious symbols (be it only
in a minimal sense) is already engaged in the practice of creating his or her
own spirituality. In this sense, each existing religion generates multiple
spiritualities as a matter of course; and it is only the more spectacular cases
which sometimes become the basis for a new spiritual tradition.
Spiritualities and religions might be roughly characterized as the
individual and institutional poles within the general domain of religion. A
religion without spiritualities is impossible to imagine. But, as will be seen,
the reversea spirituality without a religionis quite possible in principle.
Spiritualities can emerge on the basis of an existing religion, but they can
very well do without. New Age is the example par excellence of this latter
possibility: a complex of spiritualities which emerges on the foundation of a
pluralistic secular society.
Secularization and the Autonomization of Spiritualities
In terms of the above discussion, secularization cannot be interpreted as a
process in which the social importance of religion, or even religion as such,
declines or vanishes altogether. But secularization can very well be under-
stood as a thorough transformation of religion under the impact of historical
and social processes, particularly since the 18th century. From a strictly
empirical and historical perspective, secularization can be dened as the
whole of historical developments in western society, as a result of which the
Christian religion has lost its central position as the foundational collective
symbolism of western culture, and has been reduced to merely one among
several religious institutions within a culture which is no longer grounded in
a religious system of symbols.
One might argue that, from the perspective of the history of religions,
such a process of transformation is nothing new. No religion has ever been
stationary; all religions have always been in a process of change and
transformation, and the process of secularization might therefore be seen as
merely another phase in the history of religions in western societies.
However, I believe that there is reason to consider the western process of
secularization as a historically unique and unprecedented example of such a
transformation: a deeper and more fundamental caesura than any other
change known to us from the history of religions. The complicated histor-
ical, social and political causes of this transformation are the subject of an
abundant historical and sociological literature, which we do not need to go
into here.
I am concerned mainly with dening in which respects contemporary
western society is different from all other societies before the period of the
Enlightenment. As far as we know, never before has there existed a human
society, the common culture of which was not religious: i.e., a society whose
commonly-shared collective symbolism was not of such a nature as to
provide a framework for ritually maintaining contact with a more general,
meta-empirical framework of meaning. Precisely such a non-religious com-
plex of symbolic systems, however, is fundamental for contemporary
society. In this sense, secular western society can be regarded as a historical
anomaly, which breaks in an unprecedented way with previous human
cultures. The distinction between religions and spiritualities can be used as
an analytic instrument to get a grip on the secularization process in this
sense. Secularization by no means implies that religion declines or that
religions die out; but it does mean that religion is transformed in a crucial
way. The essence of this transformation is that religions are faced with
increasing competition by spiritualities which are themselves no longer
based upon and embedded in an existing religion but become wholly
autonomous. This process of autonomization may be described as the
emergence of secular spiritualities based upon a private symbolismin a strict
sense.
3
This is a crucial characteristic of New Age religion: it consists of a
complex of spiritualities which are no longer embedded in any religionas
was the case with all spiritualities in the pastbut directly in secular culture
itself. All manifestations of New Age religion, without exception, are based
upon what I called an individual manipulation of existing symbolic sys-
tems. In this way, new syntheses are continually being created, which
provide exactly what religion has always provided: the possibility for ritually
maintaining contact with a more general meta-empirical framework of
meaning, in terms of which people give meaning to their experiences in daily
life.
Spiritualities in a traditional religious context did not need to start from
point zero. The religion in which they were embedded already served to
provide meaning; the primary function of new spiritualities was to clarify
and further develop existing religious symbolism, so as to ne-tune it to
the specic needs of the person in question. Hence, Jacob Boehme certainly
did not develop his esoteric system because he doubted that Christ had
saved humanity from sin; he did it in order to better understand what that
meant.
New Age spiritualities, in contrast, do not grow on the soil of an existing
religion. They are based upon the individual manipulation of religious as
well as non-religious symbolic systems; and this manipulation is undertaken
in order to ll these symbols with new religious meaning. As for existing
religious symbolic systems, New Age spiritualities generally concentrate on
whatever is not associated too closely with the traditional churches and their
theologies. Hence their preference for alternative traditions, from gnosti-
cism and western esotericism in their own culture to various religious
traditions from other cultures. As for their use of a non-religious symbolic
system: by far the most important area is that of the popular mythologies of
science to which I made reference above. In countless ways, New Agers
give a spiritual twist to the symbolism of quantum mechanics and relativity
theory (Hanegraaff, 1996: Chs 3, 6), various psychological schools (Hane-
graaff, 1996: Chs 8, 15), sociological theories (Hanegraaff, 1996: Ch. 5), and
so on. The common basis of New Age religion is therefore no longer the
symbolic system of an existing religion, but a large number of symbolic
systems of various provenance, bits and pieces of which are constantly being
recycled by the popular media. Since there is no longer a commonly shared
source of authority which indicates how all this information ts together
within a religious framework, one is left to ones own devices to gure out
the religious implications of available symbolic systems. At most, one may
nd assistance in a continuing stream of popular literature (which, however,
does not follow one clear direction either).
As such, New Age is the manifestation par excellence of the seculariza-
tion of religion: religion becomes solely a matter of individual choice, and
detaches itself from religious institutions, i.e. from exclusive commitment to
specic religions. Even more: what is considered to be real religion
according to a New Age perspective is hardly compatible (if at all) with
religious institutions. Here, as in many other things, New Age religion
reveals itself as a characteristic heir of the Enlightenment. A consistent
refrain in New Age sources is that people have nally managed to free
themselves from the tyranny of religious power structures; religions are
pictured as being based upon blind acceptance of dogmas, by which the
faithful have been prevented from discovering the divinity that resides
within themselves.
The Symbolism of the Self and the Myth of its Evolution
Whereas traditional spiritualities consisted of private interpretations of
existing collective religious symbolisms, New Age religion exemplies the
far more radical phenomenon of private symbolism. Only this latter phe-
nomenon catches the essence of the new type of religious individualism
foreseen by Emile Durkheim at the beginning of the 20th century.
Now, in what respect does this view of New Age religion differ from
existing ones? We have seen that New Age religion initially looks like a
strange mixture of secular and non-secular elements. One certainly nds
here a mythology of science, but defended for what seem to be essentially
religious reasons; and one nds various elements of traditional religious
symbolism, but presented as compatible with and actually validated by
avant-garde science. Accordingly, some have perceived New Age religion
as a direct product of contemporary secular society, while others have
described it as an attempt to revive pre-secular religious traditions.
4
The
former option has been especially popular among sociologists, who have
tended to pay little attention to the historical roots of New Age religion in
western religious traditions. The latter option is popular among critics who
denounce New Age as a regression to pre-scientic obscurantism, as well as
among defenders who see it as a revival of traditional wisdom; both of these
perspectives have tended to neglect the modernity of New Age. From a
historians point of view, both interpretations are one-sided: the specic
modernity of New Age religion can only be understood by situating the
phenomenon in a historical framework. It seems to me that a bridge can be
built between existing disciplinary approaches by recognizing that New Age
religion is based neither on the collective symbolism of one religious
tradition or another, nor on the collective symbolism of secular society
which I referred to as a mythology of science, but on the characteristically
modernist tendency to move from collective symbolism to an eclectic
private symbolism.
The key to this phenomenon is the religious individualism and eclecticism
which is so fundamental to contemporary culture as a whole. New Agers do
not want to be told by others what they are supposed to believe. In principle,
they take this attitude not only to religious ideas, but to scientic ones as
well. Thus, they indignantly reject the so-called Cartesian/Newtonian para-
digm, because this materialist and mechanicist conception of the universe is
experienced by them as a stiing dogma which limits spiritual freedom. But
this sensitivity to overtly dogmatic authority hardly protects them from
submitting to the more subtle hegemonic claims implicit in the mythology
of science as such. Accordingly, New Agers typically ght old science with
new science, arguing that quantum mechanics proves the truth of a new
paradigm which has room both for science and spirituality. It is highly
uncharacteristic for New Age religion to suggest that science as such might
have its limitations, which might make it simply irrelevant to the domain of
the sacred.
5
Specic mythologies of science (or paradigms) may be accepted
or rejected in truly eclectic fashion, but the basic assumption that spiritual
truth must be in harmony with scientic truth is hardly ever questioned. We
are thus led to an important observation: there is no type of collective
symbolismbe it religious or scienticwhich New Agers as a group
accept as authoritative; but the mythical authority of science as such is
nevertheless strongly in evidence.
Now, the opposition of New Age against religious as well as scientic
authoritarianism and dogmatism still remains on the level of reasoning; but
I have been emphasizing that the coherence of a religious perspective is
ultimately based on shared images and stories rather than on reasoned
beliefs. What, then, are the fundamental common images and stories basic
to the many private symbolic worlds found in New Age religion? For it is
true that, in spite of all their individualistic emphasis, these myriad manifes-
tations of private symbolism do have something in common. The solution to
what looks like a paradox is almost predictable (at least once one knows the
answer). Try to imagine a central, unifying symbolism that should be proper
to a secular religiosity based on religious individualism. What else could it
be, than a symbolism circling around that most individualistic of all con-
cepts: the Self? Indeed, the Self can be seen as the symbolic center of New
Age religion (cf. Heelas, 1996); and its most universal story or myth
describes how this Self undergoes a process of spiritual evolution. Although
the unifying symbolism of the Self is basic to all forms of New Age religion,
it cannot be regarded as a collective symbolism. We saw that collective
symbolism typically binds the adherents of a religious perspective together
as a community. The symbolism of the Self is perhaps a unique phenom-
enon, because whenever it is seriously made into the core and center of a
religious movement, it practically prevents this movement from functioning
as a religious collectivity! And this observation can be reversed as well: only
a movement which regards religious individualism and freedom as essential
will adopt the Self as its central symbol. It can therefore be no surprise that
the so-called New Age movement still shows no signs of becoming a
religion (in the sense of my denition) but remains an informal net-
work.
In developing a wide array of private symbolic worlds centering around
the symbolism of the Self and the mythology of its evolution, New Age
religion makes eclectic use of whatever materials it can nd. But the
materials are not selected at random: they have to be in accordance with an
underlying motivation. As I have argued elsewhere, the idea structure of
New Age religion is based upon a deep-seated culture criticism, which
rejects various forms of dualism and reductionism and seeks to develop
holistic alternatives. A similar pattern of culture criticism is found in some
other movements, such as the womens movement and the ecology move-
ment. The New Age movement differs from them because its culture
criticism is expressed in terms of a secularized esotericism. For the complete
argument I have to refer the reader elsewhere (Hanegraaff, 1996: Ch. 16);
here I merely wish to point out that the centrality to western esotericism of
gnosisknowledge of the Self interpreted as knowledge of Godappears
to provide a perfect foundation for the individualistic symbolism of the Self
in New Age religion.
I will illustrate the New Age symbolism of the Self with two examples.
The rst is taken from the Seth messages already referred to. In an early
book, Seth describes how the universe sprang forth from God, who is
referred to as All That Is. He describes how, in a primary state of non-
being, prior to all manifestation, all possible realities existed as unconscious
dreams in the mind of All That Is. These dreams, as Seth says, yearned to
be actual:
All That Is saw, then, an innity of probable, conscious individuals, and foresaw all
possible developments, but they were locked within It until It found the means . . .
The means, then, came to it. It must release the creatures and probabilities from Its
dream. To do so would give them actuality. However, it also meant losing a portion of
Its own consciousness . . . All That Is had to let go . . . With love and longing It let go that
portion of Itself, and they were free. The psychic energy exploded in a ash of creation.
[All That Is] found the way to burst forth in freedom, through expression, and in so
doing gave existence to individualized consciousness. Therefore is It rightfully jubilant.
Yet all individuals remember their source, and now dream of All That Is as All That Is
once dreamed of them. And they yearn toward that immense source . . . and yearn to set
It free and give It actuality through their own creations. (Roberts, 1970: 264268)
There are gnostic, neoplatonic, kabbalistic and theosophical echoes in this
creation myth; but it also provides a metaphysical background to the
extremely common New Age belief that we all create our own reality. Each
conscious individual, according to Seth, is the manifestation of a creative
Soul or Higher Self. And each Self is a spark of the great universal Self
called All That Is (who, by the way, may in turn be a spark of an even greater
Self). Thus, the Self is modeled on God; and the essence of both God and
the Self is limitless creative expansion. The result is a world-afrming
perspective in which each Self continually creates its own reality as
naturally as breathing. Thus, according to Seth, my own Higher Self is at
this very moment creating a reality in which IWouter Hanegraaffam
writing an article on the New Age movement. And each of my readers lives
in his or her self-created reality, which happens to be one in which he or she
is reading an article on New Age. Now, it is basic to New Age religion that
each self-created reality functions as a learning experience. Our limited
personalities have become alienated from their own Higher Selves; and so
they come to believe that the worlds created by their own Higher Selves are
the only real world. Many of these self-created learning experiences are
more or less painful and involve a degree of suffering (including, no doubt,
the ordeal of working ones way through articles in academic journals!), for
it is only in this way that souls can evolve and develop spiritually. The more
they evolve, the more satisfying will be the realities they create for them-
selves.
This is the basic outline of New Age symbolism of the Self and its
evolution. The logic of this perspective inevitably leads to solipsism: each
private Self quite literally lives enclosed in its own private symbolic world.
The actress Shirley MacLaine, who became perhaps the most prominent
representative of New Age in the 1980s, managed to scandalize even many
of her New Age friends by openly drawing precisely this conclusion:
. . . since I realized I created my own reality in every way, I must therefore admit that I
was the only person alive in my universe . . . And human beings feeling pain, terror,
depression, panic, and so forth, were really only aspects of pain, terror, depression,
panic, and so on, in me. If they were all characters in my reality, my dream, then of
course they were only reections of myself . . .
Now, that truth can be very humorous. I could legitimately say that I created the
Statue of Liberty, chocolate chip cookies, the Beatles, terrorism, and the Vietnam war
. . . I knew I had created the reality of the evening news at night. It was in my reality. But
whether anyone else was experiencing the news separately from me was unclear,
because they existed in my reality too. And if they reacted to world events, then I was
creating them to react so I would have something to interact with, thereby enabling
myself to know me better . . .
If what I was proposing was true, would it also be true that I did nothing for others,
everything for myself? And the answer was, essentially, yes. If I fed a starving child, and
was honest about my motivation, I would have to say I did it for myself, because it made
me feel better . . . I was beginning to see that we each did whatever we did purely for self,
and that was as it should be. (MacLaine, 1987: 171173)
Shirley MacLaine indeed takes private symbolism to its logical conclusion.
This permits me to briey touch upon the question of the ethical implica-
tions of New Age religion. In order to understand the momentous shift from
collective symbolism to the emergence of a private symbolism, and the new
type of religion which has emerged from it, this aspect is of central impor-
tance. I noted above (p. 148) that collective images and stories make a
powerful moral appeal to the individual, who is stimulated by them to
conform to the communitys code of conduct. What, then, might happen to
morality when collective symbolism gives way to private symbolism?
I will not attempt to tackle all the ramications and implications of this
question in the space of this brief article. The most important aspects of it
may be brought out by concentrating on the contrast between the private
symbolism of New Age, on the one hand, and the private interpretations of
collective symbolism found in western esoteric traditions, on the other. I
was originally inspired to explore the differences between collective and
private symbolism by a casual remark made by Gershom Scholem in an
interview, which might be put side by side with Durkheims remarks in the
rst chapter of The Elementary Forms. As I have argued elsewhere (Hane-
graaff, 1999b), Scholems remarks about Jewish esotericism apply equally to
its Christian parallels:
Modern man lives in a private world of his own, enclosed within himself, and modern
symbolism is not objective: it is private; it does not obligate. The symbols of the
kabbalists, on the other hand, did not speak only to the private individualthey
displayed a symbolic dimension to the whole world. (Scholem, 1976: 48)
The specically mystical symbolism which Scholem saw as basic to
traditional esotericism was based upon the collective symbolism of Judaism;
it had its center in a divine mystery which radically transcended human
understanding but could nevertheless be experienced in the created world.
With respect to morality, traditional mystical symbolism clearly obligates;
it reects the understanding that human actions in the world must nd their
justication (or not nd it) according to a normative system which is divinely
instituted and may therefore not be fully accessible to human under-
standing, but the existence of which is not in any doubt. New Age, in
contrast, has its logical center not in God but in the Self of each individual;
and in principle there is no limit to the potential of the Self to unlock even
the deepest mysteries of the universe. With respect to morality, New Agers
claim that suffering exists for the purpose of spiritual education, but there
does not exist such a thing as evil. This basic message is repeated over and
over again: evil is an illusion, the belief in which merely reects spiritual
ignorance (Hanegraaff, 1996: Ch. 10). Under such conditions, a concept of
moral obligation to anything but ones own spiritual development
becomes impossible ex principio. The implications are shocking if formu-
lated in all clarity. Even acts of the most horric kind, such as the rape and
murder of a child, are not evil or wrong: in essence, they constitute a
learning experience for both parties, which their higher Selves have cre-
ated together and in mutual collaboration. The victim participates in the
crime no less than the criminal; and even the bereaved parents should
eventually learn to see the murder of their child as a learning experience
chosen by their own higher Selves.
Conclusion
In the end, the foundational myth of New Age religionunlimited spiritual
evolution in which the Self learns from its experiences in many self-created
realitiesmust be recognized as deeply rationalistic.
6
On the crucial
assumption that evil does not exist and whatever is, is right, this spiritual
evolutionism actually succeeds in providing a consistent, reasonable and
conclusive explanation of suffering. The unquestionable explanatory
strength of this foundational New Age myth is undoubtedly a main reason
for its attraction for many contemporary people who wish to make sense of
human existence. The hard core of fully convinced believers in its truth are
enabled to consider themselves part of an invisible community of like-
minded individuals, as distinct from the mass of human beings who have not
yet discovered the true meaning of existence. Those who are not convinced,
and must therefore consider themselves as belonging to the latter category,
may perhaps be permitted to wonder whether the proclaimed arrival of the
New Age would leave any room for common moral values.
NOTES
This research was supported by the Foundation for Research in the Field of
Philosophy and Theology in the Netherlands, which is subsidized by The Nether-
lands Organization for the Advancement of Research (NWO).
1.
At rst sight my reformulation may look rather different from Geertzs famous
ve-part denition of religion; for a detailed account, see Hanegraaff (1999a,
forthcoming).
2.
My use of the term manipulation might create misunderstandings. I do not
intend to make a statement about the extent to which an individual is capable of
dissociating or distancing him/herself from the various symbolic systems present in
his/her cultural and social context. I defend neither an extreme view of the autono-
mous subject which is supposedly at full liberty to make its choices among the
various symbolic systems which are made available to it in the religious super-
market of contemporary western society, nor a (no less extreme) view according to
which this so-called subject is merely an exponent of supra-personal collective
forces. Symbolic systems are products of human beings, who are in turn products of
symbolic systems. The power of existing social structures is no less crucial than the
capacity of individuals to make individual choices. In this context, the term manip-
ulation means merely the empirical fact that people come up with personal and
creative interpretations of existing symbolic systems. The question of where pre-
cisely lie the limits of their freedom of interpretation can be disregarded here.
3.
Obviously, that religion is becoming more and more a matter for individual
choice is hardly an original statement. I merely refer to Peter Berger (1980) for the
fundamental point that, in contemporary western society, religion has become a
subject of individual choice rather than a matter-of-course dimension of the symbol-
ism available in everyday life, woven in the fabric of the common culture. We choose
whether to become a member of a religion or, if we are raised in one, whether to
remain a member. Such a religion may be a Christian church, but it may equally well
be one of the innumerable new religious movements which ourish in secular
society. And of course any existing (large or small) religion may spawn new
spiritualities, some of which may in turn give rise to yet other new religions. This is
how all religion functions in a pluralist secular society.
4.
For a more detailed discussion, see Hanegraaff (1996: 406410).
5.
But there are occasional exceptions such as Ken Wilber, discussed in Hane-
graaff (1996: 176181).
6.
See my comparison between New Age and the Enlightenment perspective
represented by the character of Settembrini in Thomas Manns Magic Mountain
(Hanegraaff, 1998b). The relation between New Age and the Enlightenment is
discussed in Hanegraaff (1996: Ch. 15, Section 1, and passim).
REFERENCES
Berger, P. (1980) The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious
Affirmation. London: Collins.
Durkheim, E. (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E.
Fields. New York: The Free Press.
Firth, R. (1973) Symbols: Public and Private. London: Allen & Unwin.
Geertz, C. (1966) Religion as a Cultural System, in Michael Banton (ed.)
Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. London: Tavistock Pub-
lications.
Hanegraaff, W.J. (1996) New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the
Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: E.J. Brill (US edn, Albany: SUNY Press,
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Concepts & Contests. Leiden: E.J. Brill, forthcoming.
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la question du symbolisme religieux, in Symboles et Mythes dans les mouvements
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Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser. New York:
Schocken.
Wouter J. HANEGRAAFF is Research Fellow in the Department for
the Study of Religions at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands.
He specializes in the history of so-called western esoteric traditions
from the period of the Renaissance up to the present. He is the author
of New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of
Secular Thought (E.J. Brill, 1996/SUNY Press, 1998) and is at present
working on a book on conceptualizations of magic. ADDRESS: Oude-
zijds Armsteeg 4-c, NL-1012 GP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email:
wouterha@xs4all.nl]

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