"Something stronger than humanity -- call it what you will, necessity, fate, God -- has laid hold of humanity and will not lose its grasp.  To be sure, even the leaders of the race have often been tempted to discouragement.  Man has given them hemlock to drink, crucified them, burned them at the stake.  But always the falling torch has been caught by another hand, and somehow the light has gone on."

                                                                                                   -Harry Emerson Fosdick

The New Age is not really new at all, but the latest incarnation of a philosophy with roots deep in history. The ancient Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Zen provide the movement’s basic ideological foundation, as well as giving us many of the terms we use to describe New Age principles.  

But although New Age ideas spring largely from Eastern philosophy, it is well-mixed with the legacy of Western idealism first developed by the ancient Greeks (Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus), and later defined by the great idealistic philosophers of Europe (Spinoza, Kant and Hegel). 

Yet despite these far-reaching roots, the modern New Age is commonly traced back only to the early 19th century, a time when the previously sharp line between Eastern and Western philosophy was smudged by Westerners looking curiously to the East.  This exploration was made possible with the birth of the United States of America, a nation dedicated to preserving religious freedom.  The Bill of Rights allowed a new religious liberalism and ideas about a “universal spirituality” to take root in newly free soil.

Indeed, several Founding Fathers apparently believed a new religious age would be the inevitable outgrowth of the new religious freedom.  As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1822 about the new liberal denomination of Unitarianism, “I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.” 

Likewise, Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense -- the wildly popular pamphlet that convinced the American colonists to fight for their independence in 1776 -- later wrote in his Age of Reason that he “saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion,” a system he believed would be unmediated by church and dogma, a system of “pure” belief based on one’s own experience of God.

Such sentiments sound not unlike many a New Ager of the 1980s, who were convinced that the Age of Aquarius was just about to break…

The Transcendentalists

In the fall of 1836, a group of intellectuals that included Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson began meeting to exchange their ideas about the innate worth of the individual and the superiority of the intuition over the senses.  This group called themselves "The Hedge Club," but were later known as Transcendentalists.  Inspired in part by Immanuel Kant's transcendental Idealism, this group also found inspiration in Hindu holy books, especially the Bhagavad Gita. 

In 1842, Emerson described Transcendentalism this way:  "The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine.  He believes in the perpetual openness of the human mind to influx of light and power, he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy."  New Age philosophy greatly mirrors the Transcendentalist viewpoint in general, and the philosophy of Emerson and his friend David Henry Thoreau in particular.

A generation later, Transcendentalism still enjoyed an intellectual vogue among writers and poets like Bronson Alcott and Walt Whitman. Their expansive prose and poetry opened the way to the forming of the Free Religious Association in 1867, a group that met for decades to explore the idealistic basis of a universal spirituality, and “to wake America from the dream of exclusive revelation.”   

The trend reached a watershed moment in 1893 with the convening of the first World’s Parliament of religions.  As Leigh Eric Schmidt describes it in his book, Restless Souls, “The spiritual drift into eclectism, openness and ‘rich soul experience’ that Whitman embodied was as much a cultural trend in the 1890s as it was in the 1990s.”

The Theosophical Society

The first large-scale wave of Eastern-based philosophy was ushered into America by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian medium.  After spending years “studying” Hindu and Buddhist scriptures in India, she joined with Henry Steele Olcott in 1875 to form the Theosophical Society.  Their purpose:

• To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color.
• To encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy and science.
• To investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.

The goals of the Theosophical society can equally describe the modern New Age Movement, and Madame Blavatsky certainly deserves credit for popularizing many of the Eastern ideas and terms which are now part of New Age philosophy.

After Blavatsky’s death 1891, the group splintered, with adherents breaking up to follow three different leaders, including Annie Besant. It was Besant, along with C.W. Leadbeater, who introduced J. Krishnamurti to the world in 1909 as the second coming of the Maitreya Buddha.

However, Krishnamurti himself denounced this role in 1929, and disbanded the group that had been organized on his behalf.

“Truth is a pathless land,” he told his followers, “and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect…Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path.”

Krishnamurti’s writings remained popular throughout the 20th century, and today can still be found in many a New Ager’s book collection.

The New Age dawns

By the 1950s, Zen philosophy had begun to filter into American culture through writers like D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts.  Then, in 1965, the U.S. Government rescinded the Asian Exclusion Act and this, says New Age Almanac, "opened the dams of Asian teachings established at the beginning of the century."  The new immigration law allowed Eastern spiritual teachers to come to America and share their teachings with an increasingly receptive Western audience.

Soon after, the counterculture movement exploded in America and mass numbers of people loudly expressed a hope and hunger for change. 

Advancing science had amassed new facts about the physical universe, but in the process it had largely discredited the claims of Western religion.  Eastern philosophy was able to fill the void with its powerful ideas about the cosmic order and the value of man.  Millions rejected the old orthodox systems of belief and embraced this new idealistic way of relating to God and each other.

It was during this turbulent period that the New Age coalesced into a recognizable movement.  In 1971, East West Journal became the first national periodical to focus on the issues of the new movement, and Ram Dass its first national prophet. 

The New Age, wrote J. Gordon Melton in his essay, "A History of the New Age Movement," "jettisoned most of its older supernatural trappings and wed itself to newer models derived from science."  Science and psychology, especially humanistic psychology, also "lent scientific respectability to a new language of consciousness, creativity and personal transformation."

Yet the majority of Americans did not know of the expanding New Age movement until the early Eighties when Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb was published.  MacLaine's publicized personal transformation brought the New Age into the national spotlight and sparked a wave of interest in the movement.

The movement’s popular peak was probably August of 1987 with the Harmonic Convergence, a single-day event that inspired tens of thousands of New Agers to flock to “sacred sites” throughout to world to meditate together for world peace.  Or, perhaps the peak was the runaway success of James Redfield’s New Age parable, “The Celestine Prophecy,” one of the best-selling books of the early 1990s.

Either way, by the mid-1990s the term “New Age” began to be used to describe any vapid spiritual nonsense, and the movement began a long slide into irrelevance.  Even the valiant effort by the New Age’s most popular authors and teachers -- Marianne Williamson, Neale Donald Walsch, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra among others -- to form a “Global Renaissance Alliance” in 1999 was unable to slow the movement’s demise. 

How did a movement that grew from such a rich history, based on such well-established and long-lived ideals, disappear so quickly?  What in the world happened to the New Age?

Go to Case For Revival.