ABSTRACT
Personal spirituality has been described as part of the significant subjective turn of modern life, whereby people increasingly come to live their lives and construct their identities according to internal beliefs and ideas about who they ‘really are’, rather than according to external roles, duties and obligations (Heelas et al. 2004; see also Chapter 1). ‘New Age’ is a term used loosely to refer to a wide range of beliefs and practices which have become culturally significant since the late 1980s (Bruce 1996: 196) in organising personal spiritualities. Many of these ideas trace their roots to the esoteric culture of the late nineteenth century; others are extensions of the new religions and human potential movements of the 1970s. Despite these origins there are sufficient differences of belief and structure to justify treating New Age spirituality as a subject in its own right and not just as a continuation of older movements (Hunt 2003: 131). New Age spirituality is also referred to as self-spirituality (Heelas 1996), spiritualities of life (Heelas 2008) or, most frequently, just simply the shorthand term ‘spirituality’. In discussing New Age, a balance needs to be struck between presenting it as so heterogeneous as to defy all attempts to identify common features, or as a joined up, integrated system of spiritual ideas and practices. Sutcliffe has called for a problematising of the category ‘New Age’ itself, by ‘question[ing] the representations of unity and homogeneity undergirding typical models of the “New Age movement”’ in order to connect New Age studies to wider issues in the politics of representation (Sutcliffe 2003: 13). There is, he says, ‘a need to shift attention away from an entextualised “New Age movement” and towards an analysis of the discursive and practical uses made of the “New Age” emblem’ (Sutcliffe 2003: 14). New Age should therefore not be seen as a standardised movement; there is no centralised structure, bureaucracy, creed or authoritative beliefs and rituals (Clarke 2006: 30), and this chapter offers a case study that can be seen as specific to New Age cultures in the UK.
