NEW AGE MOVEMENT. "New Age" was originally a buzzword that achieved widespread popularity in Europe and the United States during the 1980s. It referred to a wide array of spiritual practices and beliefs perceived as "alternative" from the perspective of mainstream Western society. To many observers, the increasing visibility of "things New Age" in the media and popular culture conveyed the impression of something radically new: the birth of a grassroots movement of social and spiritual innovation, prophesying a profound transformation of Western society that some claimed would culminate in a vastly superior culture—the "Age of Aquarius."

The phenomenon that came to be known as the New Age movement during the last two decades of the twentieth century actually had its immediate roots in the counterculture of the 1960s and some of its immediate predecessors, while its fundamental ideas had much more ancient...