The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity

by Paul Heelas

In his ground-breaking work, Paul Heelas traces the growth and development of the New Age Movement, identifies some of its key characteristics, and provides a critical perspective.This unique and extensively documented volume provides a balanced treatment of New Age "celebration of the self", and situates it within the broader cultural context for the first time. It shows how the New Age is ambivalently related to modernity, offering both a radical spiritual alternative to the mainstream and a celebration of some of the characteristic features of modern life. Heelas thus views the New Age both as an alternative counter-cultural movement and as a spirituality of our times. The volume, with its clarity of form and its critique of conventional opinion, serves as an excellent starting point and mature contribution to the study of contemporary spirituality. This will be a core text for courses on the Sociology of Religion, and should be of enormous interest to all those concerned with the study of culture and the utopian anthropologists of modernity, historians of oppositional movements, theology students, clergy, and New Age activists alike.

Genres: Religion, New Age, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published October 28, 1996

Reviews

[Lee Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting and informative overview of what seems to be the never-ending, ever-evolving New Age movement, written from the vantage point of the mid-90s.

Well worth reading if you are just beginning to explore spiritual practices, either for yourself or as a practitioner.

“New Age” has different shades of meaning based on the generations in which it is interpreted but the underlying principles are universal and can have importance in various other domains like history and political science. There’s really lots to learn here, and for me personally was both nostalgic and enriching.

[zo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting points, but the way it’s written, with so many never ending sentences, references to the authors cited in parentheses in each sentence, and lot of repetition make it less enjoyable to read, and harder to follow along. It’s definitely outdated today, the ending section on computers taking over the role of LSD is funny.

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The size of Heelas’s book (266 pp.) belies the massive substance contained within it. The fundamental theme that emerges as the connective tissue to the otherwise loose amalgam of practices and world views is “self-spirituality,” or the preoccupation with the self and the exercise of its inherent authority and freedom. The foundation for the emergence of this self-spirituality is the belief that life in this present world is not what it should be, but that the capacity to liberate the self from its confines and the oppressions of current existence can be teased out and disciplined in order to achieve liberation and perfection. Heelas offers a plausible argument to show that the beliefs and values of the constellation of spiritual practices that constitute the New Age Movement are responses (reactions?) to the cultural and intellectual contours of modernity. He also argues that the New Age Movement is neither “new” nor a “movement.” Rather, its differing groups draw variously on insights, practices and teachings that can be found in the traditions of the great world religions (especially from the East) in a syncretistic fashion, and they lack the unifying vision and social practices otherwise associated with cultural and religious movements. Nevertheless, he suggests, they are here to stay, though perhaps destined ever to be small and obscure as players in the larger sociocultural world of western societies. As a social scientist and anthropologist, he offers the treatment of his subject with the appropriate objectivity and distance of methodological “agnosticism.”