ABSTRACT
Personal spirituality has been described as part o f the significant subjective turn o f 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 o f beliefs and practices which have become culturally significant since the late 1980s (Bruce 1996: 196) in organising personal spiritualities. Many o f these ideas trace their roots to the esoteric culture o f the late nineteenth century; others are extensions o f the new religions and human potential movements o f the 1970s. Despite these origins there are sufficient differences o f belief and structure to justify treating N ew Age spirituality as a subject in its own right and not just as a continuation o f older movements (Hunt 2003: 131). N ew Age spirituality is also referred to as self-spirituality (Heelas 1996), spiritualities o f life (Heelas 2008) or, most frequently, just simply the shorthand term 'spirituality’. In discussing N ew 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 o f spiritual ideas and practices. Sutcliffe has called for a problematising o f the category 'New Age’ itself, by 'question[ing] the representations o f unity and homogeneity undergirding typical models o f the "New Age movement’” in order to connect N ew Age studies to wider issues in the politics o f representation (Sutcliffe 2003: 13). There is, he says, 'a need to shift attention away from an entextualised "New Age movement” and towards an analysis o f the discursive and practical uses made o f the "New Age” emblem’ (Sutcliffe 2003: 14). N ew 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.
