Notes For a New Age

The summer of 1986 arguably marked the crest of the New
Age movement.

The signs were everywhere in the culture. You could see it
in the preponderance of natural foods stores, which in some
cases supplanted the vitamins-only health food stores of the
past. You could see it in the profusion of book titles — not to
speak of actual publishers and bookstores — dedicated to the
subject. You could see it in the New Religious Movements
which sprang up in the time, some related to traditional
religion, and some not. You could see it in its excesses, such as
flying saucer cults and “channels” or mediums.

This book chronicles my involvement in what my friend
and colleague Bill Kelly would call “the historical New Age.”
With the encouragement of some enabler editors I knew, I
became in the 1980s a kind of participant-specialist in the
subject. Under this guise, I traveled to conferences on subjects
such as yoga and New Age spirituality, I participated in
workshops to expand my spirituality, and devoured hundreds
of books on everything from crystal healing to the relationship
between Buddhism and physics. I did everything short of
installing a meditation-inducing pyramid in my living room.

When I describe to my more conventional friends my life
during these times, I often disingenuously characterize my
involvement in matters New Age as “in it but not of it,” as an
insider who was also an outsider. I lived outside the movement
because I was a writer, by nature an observer and not a
participant. I lived outside the movement because of my African
American heritage; despite its universalist yearnings, the New
Age was a largely white or more specifically European
American affair. Most of the non-whites who participated
were somewhat exoticized spiritual teachers from other
traditions, be they Native American, Japanese, Chinese, or
Indian.

I lived outside the movement, I’d (truthfully) tell my
conventional friends because I eventually became burned out
and somewhat disaffected by the scope and direction of the
movement. After conference after conference, workshop after
workshop, similar message after similar message, I came to
believe that there was no essential difference between the New
Age and Old age. People were pretty much doing the same
things they had always done, yet were using different vocabulary
to describe their ways of being in the world.

Despite these pat and somewhat coherent characterizations,
the truth is I was much more of a player than an observer. I for
example bought hook line and sinker into the notion that we
were living in a time of calamitous Earth Changes, in which
vast quantities of humankind would be destroyed. I also drank
in the wisdom of many of the various “channels” of the time,
although I could never make sense of Jane Roberts’ Seth Speaks
or the channeled Course in Miracles. I had a never-quite-
successful shiatsu (acupuncture without needles) practice,
experimented with trance channeling, and subsisted on a
macrobiotic diet of brown rice, vegetables, coffee and beer.

What you will not find here is any attempt to chronicle the
history of the New Age movement. Although there have been
surprisingly few attempts to do so, the history of the New Age
is covered adequately in James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton’s
Perspectives on the New Age and Paul Heelas’ The New Age
Movement. But, as both books suggest, covering the New Age
as a historical movement is a questionable approach. Bill Kelly,
in this text’s concluding essay writes: “New Age philosophy
deals not with present-day or past social conditions, but with
human spiritual yearning and the ways in which this yearning
can be satisfied. It helps people to understand the truth that
they seek, a truth that cannot be ultimately understood through
words.” This book might best be described, then, as a collection
of columns that capture both the goings on of the most recent
New Age period and the spirit of what Kelly might call the
ahistorial New Age.

I’ve organized the book into a series of six sections. Section
One, Trends and Passages is a set of columns that give snapshot
portrayals of the texture and mood of the times; Section Two,
Culture Notes, depicts the culture of the period. Section 3, Heroes
and Heretics, includes sketches of personalities that embodied the
era; Section 4, Travels, finds me on the road; Section 5, Body Mind
and Spirit, documents the advent of the modern holistic health
movement which crystallized during this period; Section 6, Notes
for a New Age, combines autobiography and a few impressions of
the ahistoric New Age. The book’s concluding essay, What is the
New Age, contextualizes the set of phenomena that exists under
the rubric, New Age.

Enjoy and be in touch.

Angelo John Lewis
Lambertville, New Jersey
June 2004
ajl@angelojohnlewis.com