ABSTRACT
Read against the grain of the world religions paradigm, new age phenomena show continuities with a level of popular beliefs and practices expressed within and across a range of dierent religious traditions. Sorting new age data according to dierent criteria – for example, portraying them as “local” (introducing the dimension of geography) and “popular” (introducing the dimension of social strata and power) – can help to steer new age studies away from constructing marginalia and exotica, and towards the recovery of a hitherto camou aged data set located as much “within” as “outside”
traditional formations, and which also straddles the religious-secular divide. Reading the data in this way frees the study of new age from captivity within a self-reinforcing model of the sociology of “new religions”, and instead contributes to a larger comparative project of reconstructing what Durkheim one hundred years ago called the “elemental” or “elementary” forms of religion (Durkheim [1912] 2008).
