New Age: The Politics of Promise

Mitch Horowitz is the author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation (Bantam, Sept.) and editor-in-chief at Penguin/Tarcher, which has a significant New Age list. PW recently asked him to explain the tangled relationship of New Age spirituality and American history and politics.

PW: Let's start with some definitions. What do we mean when we speak of “the occult” and “New Age”?

Mitch Horowitz: Occult is from the Latin occultus and it means “hidden” or “obscure.” So the occult refers to knowledge that is not necessarily readily available, but needs to be ferreted out to be understood. New Age, put simply, is therapeutic spirituality. New Age does not necessarily belong to any one faith or doctrine, and, in fact, a defining feature of New Age is that you can be a member of any religion, or no religion at all, and still participate in this therapeutic spirituality. One of the things I contend in the book is New Age philosophy stands on the shoulders of occultism. It grew out of the occult, as did many other religious ideas in America.

PW: What religious and political values characterize the New Age movement today?

MH: New Agers are very diverse, both geographically and demographically. But the belief systems they do seem to hold in common are liberal politics, the equality of all religions, body-mind healing and the principle that our thoughts to some extent can influence outer circumstances. They also believe that you can obtain spiritual understanding without belonging to a specific faith or religion, and there is a lack of emphasis on membership in a particular congregation or an allegiance to a particular doctrine. They move freely among religious movements and ideas, and believe that humans have some kind of intuitive faculty, and that it is possible for the mind to evolve to some kind of higher level. It is a theology, an ethics, a psychology and an outlook. In terms of politics, they tend to associate with various progressive political movements. And that is not a recent thing. Politics and esoteric spirituality grew up together in America. When Spiritualism began to sweep this country [in the 19th century], it created the first opening in the modern world for women to serve as religious leaders, in that case as trance mediums. So you had a tremendous crossover between the Spiritualist movement and the suffragettes and voting rights activism. This was a civic, spiritual movement that provided an opening for women both politically and religiously. New Age has always been reformist.

PW: You also write about the positive-thinking approach that characterizes much of the esoteric, or New Age, philosophy. Do you see a vein of that in the mood that brought President Obama into office?

MH: Yes. The positive-thinking approach is in the groundwater of our country. People who would never think of themselves as New Agers embrace the idea of positive or motivational thinking. This viewpoint arose partly out of transcendentalism. In 1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay called Success in which he discussed the power of enthusiasm. That aspect of the American character is so basic it travels across all our religious or political lines. Barack Obama identified Emerson's essay Self-Reliance as an influence on him. This tone of positivism is a key part of American spirituality.

PW: In the book, you discuss various occult and New Age movements and groups that have found fertile soil in America. Is there something about our country that makes it especially hospitable to such movements?

MH: Absolutely. It has to do with both the nation's founding and its geography. In the 1600s, the Thirty Years' War decimated portions of Central Europe where a lot of religious experimentation was going on. It left many parts of Germany devastated. So you had people who were religious radicals and experimenters who felt the need to flee. At the same time, in the American colonies, William Penn had founded Philadelphia, which was known as a religiously liberal place and had a variety of religious groups living side by side—Mennonites, Quakers and radical offshoots of the Lutheran church. Word began to spread across the Atlantic, and certain sects and mystic groups started to migrate to the Philadelphia area and set up communities. They did so without harassment. As the decades unfolded into the 1700s, the American colonies developed a reputation as a safe harbor for people with radical religious ideas, including those with supernatural ideas. In Pennsylvania, there were communities devoted to esoteric Christian ideas, numerology and astrology. They survived, and this created a magnetic pull for religious radicals looking for a safe home. Then you had unusual geography in America. It was this vast nation whose government had moved Indian tribes off certain parcels of land, which it then opened to settlement. So there began a flow of people moving west and spreading out, and these people were relatively liberal religiously, and they were on their own. They might have had some affiliation to a specific religion or church, but it was hard to keep that together on the frontier; so many of them were ripe candidates for the new religious movements that were cropping up: Mormonism, Christian Science, Spiritualism. It was a magnetic, dynamic combination of ideas flowing to America and new folks flowing around in America willing to listen to fresh ideas. It made America into a laboratory for experimental religion and that has continued to the present day.

PW: Where do we feel the impact of these groups today?

MH: The New Age movement's greatest impact on American culture is found all across the religious landscape, from liberal religious movements to evangelicalism, in the expectation that religion should be therapeutic, that it should be a healing force. That was a radical idea a hundred years ago, and today it abounds. For example, the most popular media evangelist in America today is Joel Osteen. Every Sunday, his talks and homilies are about the power of positive thought, and when he does that, he is standing directly on the shoulders of the occult and New Age movements, which are founded on the belief that our minds can shape outer circumstances. That idea began in this country in the mid-19th-century as the “mental healing” movement, and today it is a basic part of the most popular media ministry in the country. Osteen couches the message in biblical language, not the magical language that was coming out of the mental healing movement, but there is a direct bloodline from that earlier movement to him. So both the New Agers and the evangelicals are steeped in practical spirituality. Positive thinking began as an occult idea and became a New Age idea, and it represents the occult's most lasting impact on our culture.

Now, in terms of politics, Freemasonry played a real and positive role in influencing the growth of religious tolerance and liberty in early America. In the 1700s, Freemasonry embraced the principle that different faiths could flourish within a single nation, and it had the allegiance of some of the founding fathers, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock. Freemasons endorsed the idea that America was beginning a “new order of the ages,” was breaking from the sectarianism of the Old World. Masons believed that in this new republic the spiritual search was entirely a matter of the individual's conscience. And I think that idea became established in the firmament of the colonies and continues to find renewal in this country through other religious movements including the New Age movement, which builds on it. What's interesting is that even during the Bush era, a conservative Supreme Court upheld the rights of a Brazilian-based sect to use psychedelic drugs in its rituals. In 2007, a consortium of Wiccan families in the military sued the Department of Veterans Affairs because they wanted the VA to recognize Wicca as an official religion and wanted fallen servicemen to be entitled to be buried with a pentagram on their headstone. After first resisting, the VA agreed. To me, this is a sign of America's success. We continue to be a place where people can be free to hold radical religious beliefs. It says something about the atmosphere of religious experimentation in our country, an atmosphere that is often fed by esoteric religions.

PW: What should publishers and booksellers bear in mind while serving the New Age audience?

MH: New Age readers demand practicality above all. They believe that religion should be a workable system of thought that can help them through life's challenges. So any publisher or writer who puts out a New Age book without defining its aim and its payoff to the reader will probably fail to find an audience. People do not have time to figure out a book's message. Of course, some people might shake their heads at that statement and say, “Isn't that shallow to demand that religious thought have a payoff?” But the truth is the transcendentalists were never afraid of saying what they wanted to get across to the reader. And in the early self-help field, consider titles like Think and Grow Rich and How to Win Friends and Influence People. I want New Age publishing to take a leaf from the past and look at how the pioneers crafted their messages. They did so with great boldness and clarity and were never embarrassed to make a promise to the reader—as long as they believed in that promise. If you do not have a promise to make to the reader, it may be worth asking whether this book needs to be published.