New Agers do not spend much time analyzing the past. They believe that ancient societies were wiser and contained spiritual wisdom that was lost with the Age of Pisces. What matters is that we are living in the present and the long-distant future in the Age of Aquarius. The New Agers have no axe to grind with the past. This is not so with Neopagans, as we shall see next.
Attitudes towards Christianity
Neopagans are very aware of what Christians did to pagans at the end of the Roman Empire. The brutal killing of Hypatia and the burning of the Alexandrian library is just the tip of the iceberg. In the Renaissance, pagans had to hide their magical practices. The centralized state, along with the Protestants and Catholics, persecuted the witches in Early Modern Europe. Pagans for the most part are anti-Christians, and even today have to worry about being persecuted. Many Neopagans neither forgive nor forget.
New Agers are much more likely to be eclectic and incorporate Christianity. For example, in response to Marilyn Ferguson's questionnaire, the Christian paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was named as their greatest inspiration. Barbara Marx Hubbard's book Conscious Evolution is modelled on Chardin's work. Paolo Soleri's building of "Asrcosanti" in central Arizona has been inspired by Chardin. Furthermore, New Agers have welcomed Dominican Catholic priest Matthew Fox into the fold. Fox's Creation Spirituality even made room for wiccan Starhawk on his teaching staff.
Attitudes to authority, community, subculture and countercultures
The wiccan tradition was visited by a passing comet, during the radical wing of the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some women were not satisfied with promises of the patriarchal churches to reform and they searched for a women's spirituality beyond all organized religion. They found it in wicca. These women carried the same leveling tendency into wicca that they carried with them into the New Left. They met little resistance from wiccan covens that were already established. Neopagan communities generally consist of many people who are self-educated and are hostile to most authorities. The culture that they create is a strong counterculture which consists of covens, bookstores, coffeehouses in cities, and self-sustaining farms in rural areas. These are countercultures which are in conscious opposition to the dominant culture. While pagans can be very individualist, most of their practice is community-based.
New Agers have had less of a history of persecution and are far less afraid of being harassed by mainstream religious authorities. They are more respectful of authorities (especially Eastern teachers) and are much more likely to be victims of cults. There is a New Age culture that can be seen at talks, conferences or festivals, but it is not built out of necessity and it is much more loosely formed. New Agers are more at home with structured authorities and do not have communities which gather together to create a New Age experience. As we shall see, most New Agers come out of professional settings, are more individualistic and less experienced in creating a community independent of the authorities.
Drug-induced mystical vs magical states of consciousness
Hallucinogens have been important in New Age Culture, going all the way back to Huxley's use of mescaline. Psychologist Stanislav Grof has studied and advocated for LSD and Terence McKenna has argued for the power of hallucinogenics in tribal societies. Setting aside the issue of drugs, an altered state of consciousness can be achieved in two ways. One is through sensory deprivation, which can create a mystical experience. The other, sensory saturation, creates a magical state of consciousness. For New Agers, since their major influences have been Eastern, various forms of meditation have been the road to a spiritual state of mind. While Neopagans may use meditation as an initial starting point to ground themselves at the beginning of a ritual, the ritual itself is not meditative. The use of drumming, singing, dancing, colorful costumes, incense, and food saturate the senses to create enthusiasm or ecstasy. This is an active, trance state in which the participate "travels" or in some cases is possessed. Mystical states create calm, passive revelation. Magical states create controlled pandemonium - where all the gods speak.
Paranormal, archetypes and supernaturalism
Marilyn Ferguson's questionnaire for New Agers indicated that there was very high belief in ESP, clairvoyance and telepathy (85%- 94%). Margot Alder gave no corresponding results for Neopagans, but it is safe to say a large number of Neopagans also believe in paranormal phenomenon. However, there are two important differences. There are more Neopagans who not only are interested in the new sciences, but are more skeptical and willing to criticize them from a knowledge of scientific methodology. New Agers, in my experience, are more likely to commit to the confirmation bias and not look for evidence that contradicts what they already believe.
The second important difference about belief in the paranormal is that Neopagans have seasonal rituals in which they have positive group experience on a repeated basis. They are aware that the social group has the power to alter their state of consciousness. They have less need to believe in paranormal experiences in order feel connected. In addition, many Neopagans do not even believe in the independent existance of goddesses or gods. Some think they are Jungian archetypes which are the product of humanity, not a spiritual world.
Human nature and individual power
Since New Agers tend to see matter as an illusion, it seems hardly far-fetched to think they see dark and negative forces as products of short-sightedness, ignorance or egotism, but in no sense real. This has led to them being called pollyannish, seeing the world through rose colored glasses. The spiritual power that comes with enlightenment is so powerful that it is thought that individuals create their own reality (as Shirley MacLaine has argued).
Just as Neopagans see matter as real and recalcitrant, they also understand forces that are considered dark as real and which are much deeper than short-sightedness or egotism. Neopagans might draw on evolutionary psychology, specifically sexual selection to explain conflicts between males and females. So too, they might explain conflicts as evolutionary mismatches between the conditions under which we formed our human nature (hunter-gatherers) and our contemporary industrial capitalist societies, which are far from those conditions. What follows is that for Neopagans neither individuals or groups "create their own reality". We are limited in what we can achieve as both the biophysical world and the socio-historical worlds are larger systems and cannot be pacified or reduced to background.
Politics and Economics
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