The Caretaker

The New Age - 2/feb/2025

Added 2025-02-25 17:54:17 +0000 UTC

THE NEW AGE

World War Two is over! People are frail, destiny is uncertain, death and disease are our constant companions, and Americans have cars now. These existential terrors have always existed, and there have always been folk practices who came up with responses to stave off that terror, but the world of 1970 is connected like never before. The catastrophe of the previous generation has given way to a breeding ground of new options and alternate ideas, for better and for worse.

The New Age was a movement that emerged during the 1970s and 80s. Ideologically, it was loosely focused around ideas of healing and spirituality. In practice, it was a bricolage of divination, eastern religious practices, psychoanalysis, and various alternative medical practices.

The overall structure of the New Age is a bit unique. The term Wouter Hanegraaff uses is “bricolage,” a french term meaning something halfway between “a mish-mash” and “a DIY project.” When it comes to religion, a bricolage is something that’s more organized than a cultural movement, and functions like a folk religion. It’s a bit like if everyone in the 1970s bought copies of the same magico-religious lego set. They’re all going to build different practices with the parts, but because they’re all working from more or less the same material, the practices tend to rhyme.

The scheme of that rhyme, what could be said to be the core doctrine of the new age, is as follows:

The world is not material objects bumping into each other, but a web of interconnected meaning. The fundamental fabric of that web is not atoms or quarks, but some cosmic stem-cell goo of energy and consciousness. Humans contain a spark of this energy with us, which allows us to understand and manipulate the universe to our will. Humans are not just a physical body, but a mind-body, and a spirit-body. These other bodies can be trained to manipulate the underlying energy-consciousness goo, but they can also get sick, and this is part of the cause of illness.

To properly understand the world, and thus the underlying energy-consciousness goo, the world must be understood intellectually, but also spiritually, with the tools of instinct and intuition. Pieces of this spiritual wisdom have been revealed to cultures across time and space, to everyone from ancient Egyptians to native Americans to Martians. Whatever the most recent scientific innovations are, they confirm all of this to be true. But this is not always important, as spiritual truth is attained not through following doctrines, but through individual experience, and the world would be a better place if we all practiced this type of individualist spirituality.

THE NEW AGE AND HEALING

Healing is a central pillar of the new age. But, when New Agers say “healing” they don’t mean the relatively strict medical definitions of health and freedom from illness. They mean something superhuman. To the New Ager, humanity is a fallen race whose nigh-immortal longevity and phenomenal psychic power are being dampened by the myriad excretions of modernity. Everything from radio waves, to high fructose corn syrup, to toxic smog, to vaccines, are poisoning the body, mind, and spirit. These poisons must be purged with the ritual consumption of fresh fruits and seed oils and whatnot, along with methods of spiritual healing like reiki, the application of crystals, and the laying of hands.

The human body is not just meat and bones. It also contains spiritual organ system of auras and chakras which move occult energies throughout the body. These occult organ systems can become diseased, which can cause bodily illness, and vice versa.

To this point, stress can have negative effects on your immune function, and being sick can ruin your mood. These fairly universal experiences of having a body provide, to new agers, real experimental proof for the validity of their beliefs. Illness can happen without warning, and without apparent cause. Illness can resist treatment almost as if by magic. The human body is incomprehensibly complex, and modern medical science regularly fails the ill. To explain this, the New Age constructed a metaphysics in which the mysteries of illness are explained by the movements of an occult consciousness-goo.

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 treating 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