Alternative Archaeology and New Age Traditionalism in Contemporary Russia

This article examines how esoteric traditionalism in contemporary Russia searches for legitimisation using alternative archaeology. Although New Age spirituality is often considered a private religion, some of its manifestations have a significant impact on the public sphere. The author demonstrates that the New Age in Russia contributes to redefining of categories of religion, science, and cultural heritage through the construction of sacred sites and discursive opposition to academic knowledge. The research is based on analysis of media products that present esoteric interpretations of archaeological sites in southern Russia and ethnographic data collected in a pilgrimage to the dolmens of the Krasnodar region.

"EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED": NETWORKED CONSPIRITUALITY IN NEW AGE MEDIA

Conspirituality refers to the confluence of New Age spirituality and conspiracism that frame reality through holistic thinking—connecting events and energies, the inner self to the outer world in unseen ways. Conspirituality has thrived online: between the pleasure of the weekly horoscope and the obsession with the QAnon drop is a mode of causal promiscuity in which, as Q puts it, “future proves past.” This panel traces forms of conspirituality from MAGA mystics to New Age influencers, from technolibertarian imageboards to Silicon Valley vision quests. While conspirituality marks an online psychographic segmentation, it also traces a formal quality that organizes ways of navigating, knowing, and critiquing the internet, which is undergirded by New Age spirituality’s perennialism: a belief that different spiritual traditions are equally valid, because they all essentially worship the same divine source that emanates throughout the cosmos and the human body. The internet supercharges perennialism, providing a connective medium for New Age ideology of manifesting: the belief that we create our own reality. As users trawl the internet for snippets and statistics to feed their confirmation bias and populate their vision boards, the connective medium of the internet manifests toxicity and misinformation at scale. The papers in this panel develop a line of research on the coevolution of spirituality and technology from organized to new religious movements. Instead of demystification, we use ethnographic, textual, and hermeneutic approaches—examining internet users, governance, genealogies, and internet studies itself—to politicize networked conspirituality as vernacular theories of power and powerlessness.

New Age in Australia: Social transmission and the quest for meaning

The emergence of New Age spirituality in Western cultures during the 1960s and 1970s has been described as a rejection of traditional values, fuelled by disillusionment with the Christian church and a feeling of alienation in mainstream social and work environments. While New Age has been characterised as a ‘turning away’ from dominant cultural ideologies, there is comparatively less discussion about what New Age actors are ‘turning towards’ in their pursuit of subjective spirituality. Research from Australia demonstrates that individuals were primarily searching for deeper meaning and looking for spiritual answers when they first engaged with New Age pursuits. In addition, social and intergenerational transmission are both important factors in the cultivation of New Age spirituality.

The Concepts and Ideas of ‘Spirituality’ Within Worldviews of Alternative Religiosities in the Post-Communist Region: Vissarionites and Anastasians

The article presents research on contemporary religiosities related to individuality and subcultural features, influenced by the processes of social change and religious diversification in the post-communist region. Its aim is to discuss individual and communal thinking (orientated to esotericism, magic, and ecology) typical for representatives of two nature-based spirituality movements—Vissarionites and Anastasians, which is expressed through concepts of New Age spirituality of Oriental origin. The concepts of energy, non-violence, vegetarianism, karma, and reincarnation are used in both movements and appear as an example of how such concepts arrived through Western cultural influences, transformed, and took root in the post-communist cultural context of New Age spirituality. The findings are based on data obtained from fieldwork in 2004–2015, including participant observation and interviews with respondents in the Baltic states and Russia.

Millennial America and the World to Come

This chapter addresses another pair of seeming opposites — New Age spirituality and Christian evangelicalism — in order to reveal their shared embrace of the spiritual possibilities on offer in the free market. The chapter considers the rising belief in the end times alongside the emergence of “channeling,” the period's other popular mystical movement, in which earthbound mediums become conduits for otherworldly spirits. Adherents of rapture and channeling profess a stronger reverence for self-authorization and reason than the precepts of their faith might lead us to imagine. Then, too, they predicate that respect on the kinds of social sorting we are used to seeing in various seventies enterprises. As with other movements, rapture and channeling reveal the friction between freedom and equality in millennial America.

Mystifying Kabbalah

The book offers a study of the genealogy of the concept of “Jewish mysticism.” It examines the major developments in the academic study of Jewish mysticism and its impact on modern Kabbalistic movements in the contexts of Jewish nationalism and New Age spirituality. Its central argument is that Jewish mysticism is a modern discursive construct and that the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as forms of mysticism, which appeared for the first time in the nineteenth century and became prevalent since the early twentieth, shaped the way in which Kabbalah and Hasidism are perceived and studied today. The notion of Jewish mysticism was established when Western scholars accepted the modern idea that mysticism is a universal religious phenomenon of a direct experience of a divine or transcendent reality and applied it to Kabbalah and Hasidism. The term Jewish mysticism gradually became the defining category in the modern academic research of these topics. Mystifying Kabbalah examines the emergence of the category of Jewish mysticism and of the ensuing perception that Kabbalah and Hasidism are Jewish manifestations of a universal mystical phenomenon. It investigates the establishment of the academic field devoted to the research of Jewish mysticism, and it delineates the major developments in this field. The book clarifies the historical, cultural, and political contexts that led to the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as Jewish mysticism, exposing the underlying ideological and theological presuppositions and revealing the impact of this “mystification” on contemporary forms of Kabbalah and Hasidism.