Children of the New Age

Children of the New Age, a history of the New Age phenomenon, combines ethnographic research with archival material to give an overview of New Age belief and practice from the 1930s to the present day. It chronicles the development of alternative spirituality from embryonic beginnings to a universal trend: from its inception within the underground enclaves of Rosicrucians, occultists and Alice Bailey's neo-theosophists to its modern-day incursion into mainstream political, musical and artistic culture. But this is also a critical history. New Age culture, says author Steven J. Sutcliffe, is notoriously variegated and hotly contested, exposed to competing strands of revelation and apocalypse. Caught between the hippy explosion and the doomsday scenarios of millennial Christianity and UFO groups, it has been the preserve both of extreme religious individualists and of humanistic countercultures lauding the Edenic perfection of this worldly existence. At stake in its history are controversial questions of value, and of its perceived status as a discrete and unified "movement." This book contains firsthand accounts of the author's adventures in counterculture, including firewalking, spiritual healing workshops and life within a Findhorn communitiy, and archival correspondence and publications from the 1950s and 1960s.