What Is The New Age Movement

Many people are talking about new age. New age music, new age literature, new age stores . . . you name it. But what is New Age?

The New Age movement is a term used to label the movement of the late twentieth century and contemporary culture. This movement is exemplified by an eclectic and individual methodology to spiritual exploration. The New Age movement is sometimes called self-spirituality, new spirituality, and mind-body-spirit. New age is also used to refer to individuals who implant new beliefs to a typical religious affiliation.

The New Age movement also has aspects of older and more traditional spiritual and religious traditions and beliefs from both East and West. Many of these traditions and beliefs have bonded with ideas from modern science, especially psychology and ecology.

Ideas of New Age movement are inspired by many aspects of all major world religions. Much of its influence come from spiritualism, Buddhism, Hermeticism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Shamanism, Ceremonial magic, Sufism, Taoism, new thought, and even wicca, or witchcraft. Paganism has an especially strong influence in the formation of the new age movement.

This collection of influences produced a wide range of literature on spirituality; new musical styles, particularly new age music; specialty shops, particularly those that are found in New Age fairs; and other festivals.

Although the New Age movement is quite recent, constituent elements and movements in it are prevalent under spiritualism, theosophy, new thought, and the metaphysical movement dating back as far as the nineteenth century. In turn, these movements originated from transcendentalism, mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, and other earlier Western esoteric or occult traditions. Other factors influencing New Age movement were from Hermetic arts, astrology, magic, alchemy, and cabbala.

The modern popularity of the New Age movement came from the works of D H Lawrence, W B Yeats, and other early twentieth-century writers. A journal of Christian liberalism and socialism which later became the British literary magazine The New Age said that the movement started as early as 1894. Then in 1907, the magazine was sold to a group of socialist writers.

The magazine became a forum for politics, literature and arts. It became essential in starting the British avant-garde. It became less a venue for literature and art but instead focusing more on mysticism and other spiritual topics. The New Age became instrumental in shaping modernism from 1907 to 1922.

Detailed information about the origins of the New Age movement can be found in books and in websites.
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