ABSTRACT
The function of this chapter is to link the previous historical narratives with the ethnographies of ‘New Age’ activities in Chapters 6 to 8. First, this chapter profiles the impact of the counterculture and a new generation of seekers on ‘New Age’ enclaves of the late 1960s. Second, it shows how a shift in the hermeneutics of ‘New Age’ – from ‘public’ event to ‘private’ gnosis or from apocalypse to self-realisation – came about in the 1970s. Third, the chapter portrays the subsequent referential heterogeneity of the expression: in effect, its gradual fragmentation as a unifying ideological emblem or metanarrative device. I do not, however, pursue a strict chronology of developments beyond this point, since once the basic hermeneutical shift from ‘emblem’ to ‘idiom’has been made, the hermeneutical floodgates are flung wide, and historical sequence becomes redundant.A general pattern of disintegration and diffusion can be plotted in which the seekers, groups and networks characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s simply diversify and proliferate radically, indeed almost beyond measure.As a result, in this ‘late’ period of use, ‘New Age’ can mean just about anything, as we will see.
