The New Age burst into public consciousness in a buzz of media attention around crystals, reincarnation, and channeling in the 1980s, but it has its immediate roots in the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. Tracing this history, Wouter Hanegraaff (1998) and Steven Sutcliffe (2003) have delineated two understandings of the New Age: the New Age in the Strict Sense and the New Age in the General Sense. The Strict Sense New Age refers to an apocalyptic/millennial movement that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s when a number of Anglo-American groups announced they were receiving messages from intelligent beings from other planets who were coming to bring a New Age to the Earth. These groups believed there would be an apocalyptic catastrophe followed by a new era of spiritual evolution, peace, and prosperity with only those attuned to “new age” consciousness surviving. Predominantly populated by white, middle-aged, and elderly adherents and characterized by a culture of austerity and morality...
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Gleig, A. (2020). New Age Movement. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_458
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