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New Age is a range of spiritual or religious practices and beliefs which rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise definition difficult. Although many scholars consider it a religious movement, its adherents typically see it as spiritual or as unifying Mind-Body-Spirit, and rarely use the term New Age themselves. Scholars often call it the New Age movement, although others contest this term and suggest it is better seen as a milieu or zeitgeist.
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George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was a philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, composer, and dance teacher. Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and serve our purpose as human beings. The practice of his teaching has become known as "The Work" and is additional to the ways of the Fakirs (Sufis), Monks and Yogis, so that his student P. D. Ouspensky referred to it as the "Fourth Way".
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A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii was a Russian philosopher and esotericist known for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian teacher of esoteric doctrine George Gurdjieff. He met Gurdjieff in Moscow in 1915, and was associated with the ideas and practices originating with Gurdjieff from then on. He taught ideas and methods based in the Gurdjieff system for 25 years in England and the United States, although he separated from Gurdjieff personally in 1924, for reasons that are explained in the last chapter of his book In Search of the Miraculous.
The Goddess movement is a revivalistic Neopagan religious movement which includes spiritual beliefs and practices that emerged primarily in the United States in the late 1960s and predominantly in the Western world during the 1970s. The movement grew as a reaction both against Abrahamic religions, which exclusively have gods who are referred to using masculine grammatical articles and pronouns, and secularism. It revolves around Goddess worship and the veneration for the divine feminine, and may include a focus on women or on one or more understandings of gender or femininity.
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The academic study of new religious movements is known as new religions studies (NRS). The study draws from the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, history, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and theology. Eileen Barker noted that there are five sources of information on new religious movements (NRMs): the information provided by such groups themselves, that provided by ex-members as well as the friends and relatives of members, organizations that collect information on NRMs, the mainstream media, and academics studying such phenomena.
New religious movements and cults have appeared as themes or subjects in literature and popular culture. Beginning in the 1700s authors in the English-speaking world began introducing members of "cults" as antagonists. Satanists, Yakuzas, Triads, Thuggees, and sects of the Latter Day Saint movement were popular choices.
A nature religion is a religious movement that believes nature and the natural world is an embodiment of divinity, sacredness or spiritual power. Nature religions include indigenous religions practiced in various parts of the world by cultures who consider the environment to be imbued with spirits and other sacred entities. It also includes modern Pagan faiths, which are primarily concentrated in Europe and North America.
Linda Jane Pauline Woodhead is a British sociologist of religion and scholar of religious studies at King's College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is best known for her work on religious change since the 1980s, and for initiating public debates about faith. She has been described by Matthew Taylor, head of the Royal Society of Arts, as "one of the world's leading experts on religion".
Peter Bernard Clarke was a British scholar of religion and founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary Religion.
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Modern paganism and New Age are eclectic new religious movements with similar decentralised structures but differences in their views of history, nature, and goals of the practitioner. Modern pagan movements, which often have roots in 18th- and 19th-century cultural movements, seek to revive or be influenced by historical pagan beliefs. New Age teachings emerged in the second half of the 20th century and are characterised by millenarian ideas about spiritual advancement. Since the counterculture of the 1960s, there has been interaction, mutual influence, and often confusion in the popular mind between the movements.
References
- Chryssides, George D. (2001), Historical Dictionary of New Religious Movements , Lanham, Maryland and London: The Scarecrow Press, ISBN 0-8108-4095-2
- Heelas, Paul (1991-10-01), "Western Europe: Self-Religions", in Clarke, Peter (ed.), The World's Religions: The Study of Religion, Traditional and New Religion, London: Routledge (published 1991), pp. 167–173 [170], ISBN 978-0-203-41397-5 , retrieved 2010-02-18
