برای انسان معاصر خیلی راحت است که معجزه و قدرت های جادویی را مسخره کند. اما همین انسان بدبین ضمن آنکه روز به روز از مذاهب رسمی بیشتر فاصله می گیرد ولی به انواع خودساخته و بسیار قدیمی معنویت، علاقه نشان می دهد.
اما نگاه ریشه دار و به هم پیوسته ای که مورخ امریکایی Benjamin Breen از بازگشت جادو به جهان سرشار از تکنولوژی ما دارد بیش از آنکه این پدیده را مذهبی بداند از آن به عنوان « بازگشت احساس شگرف» یاد می کند.
او معتقد است بازار بزرگ علاقه به مصرف داروهای طبیعی و ویتامین ها ( ۳۵ میلیارد دلار در سال)، رغبت افزاینده به یوگا و مدیتیشن و ایجاد انواع فرقه های عجیب و غریب، همگی نشان از آن دارند که بشر می خواهد بخشی از معنویتی که توسط مذاهب و تکنولوژی از بشر محروم شده است را به تمدن انسانی برگرداند.
چرخش جدی به نوعی از « New Age » که از دهه ۶۰ در امریکا و اروپا در بین نسل جوان شیوع یافت در حقیقت نوعی از ترکیب انواع افکار فرا مادی بود که ریشه اش را می شود هم در فلسفه کهنسال بودیسم، هندوئیسم، صوفی گری و ادیان بسیار قدیمی تر از مذاهب دره نیل سراغ گرفت.
به نظر Benjamin Breen همه تلاش متفکرین قرن ۱۹ به بعد نظیر نیچه در این نهفته بود که بشر به قدرتی دست یافته است که می خواهد هر پدیده ای را اندازه گیری کند و به همین دلیل دست رد به وجود نیروها و اعتقاداتی زد که خود را بیکران و غیرقابل اندازه گیری بشری می دانسته است. اما در کنار طرد مذاهب مطلق گرا اندیشمندی مثل Max Weber به طور مشخص عنوان کرده است که بشر « دلزده از مادیات» و معنویتی است که توسط ذره بین علم و قدرت طلبی مذاهب، منفی جلوه داده شده است.
او به عنوان یک مورخ، مشابهتی را مطرح می کند که ایده های جادوگرایانه و فرقه ای همواره در طول تاریخ اجتماعی بشر در مقابل مذاهب بسیار قدرتمند و رسمی در جوامع وجود داشته اند. اعتقادات معنوی که ضمن دلبستگی به نوعی از سکولاریسم و پرستش طبیعت، همچنان به احساسات معنوی نیز گرایش داشتند. در خود کشور ما نیز بازگشت مجدد به صوفی گری، محفل های درویشی، فرقه های کیهانی و بسیاری از اعتقادان تلفیقی منطقه حتی بازگشت به ایین زرتشتی را شاهد هستیم.
https://aeon.co/essays/will-new-age-ideas-help-us-in-the-high-tech-future
r eyes, and envision a glowing crystal suspended in infinite space. Now breathe in slowly, counting backwards from 10. Energy pulses along the interstices of the crystal. Exhale, and imagine a second crystal, precisely like the first – then a dozen, a hundred, 100,000 crystals multiplying into an infinite void. And 100,000 dream catchers. And semiprecious stones inscribed with chakras. And ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers, Alex Grey posters, Tibetan prayer flags, wellness magnets, and ionising Himalayan salt lamps.
Now open your eyes and imagine how much they all cost.
It’s easy to scoff at the totemic kitsch of the New Age movement. But it’s impossible to deny its importance, both as an economic force and as a cultural template, a way of approaching the world. The New Age is a powerful mixture of mass-market mysticism and idealistic yearning. It’s also, arguably, our era’s most popular ex novo spiritual movement, winning adherents with a blend of ancient wisdom traditions, post-Enlightenment mysticism and contemporary globalisation that is as nebulous as it is heady.
It’s worth noting at the outset: New Age is not so much a discrete collection of beliefs as it is a Venn diagram (or a mandala, if you like) of intersecting interests, objectives and motifs. The New Age ‘movement’ is not a single movement at all. The term contains multitudes.
Arguably, the aspect of New Age that is easiest to pin down is also the most superficial: the look. The term conjures visions of chakra charts, indigo auras, psychedelic paintings of bodies radiating energy, crystals, candles, ambient music and dream catchers. One can guess with reasonable certainty that the crowd at a New Age gathering – a solstice ceremony in Golden Gate Park, say – will display a collective taste for dreadlocks, aromatherapy, South Asian or Andean textiles and accoutrements such as utility kilts, gnarled oaken staffs and coin pouches that wouldn’t look out of place at a Renaissance Fair. The aesthetic is one of unabashed pastiche.
So, too, are the beliefs undergirding it. Even scholars who have spent years studying the New Age movement disagree about what precisely it is. For the sociologist David J Hess of Vanderbilt University, ‘New Agers’ are religious seekers ‘who accept the paranormal in the context of a broader quest for spiritual knowledge’. The anthropologists Ruth Prince and the late David Riches of the University of St Andrews, who conducted a study of Neo-Druids at Glastonbury in the late 1990s, framed the New Age as a form of social organisation that recreates hunter-gatherer patterns of life and seeks ‘to rethink in terms of first principles the very nature of human society’. In 1994, Christoph Bochinger, now a professor of religion at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, wrote a monograph on the New Age movement, despite arguing that the term is in fact an ‘invention of the media’. Meanwhile, many in the natural sciences and the skeptic community use ‘New Agers’ indiscriminately as a blanket term for contemporary snake-oil salesmen who profit from a recent turn away from Western medicine.
I would argue that if there is one thread that binds together the various New Age movements, it is that they represent a resurgence of magical beliefs in a modern world supposedly stripped of them.
In his now-classic book Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), the Oxford University historian Keith Thomas framed religion and magic as antagonistic social forces. In his view, when early modern Protestant and Catholic religious leaders persecuted witches, they were effectively trying to eliminate their competition as explainers of the unexplainable. In this, they largely succeeded. Because representatives of institutionalised religion had ‘all the resources of organised political power’ on their side, they were able to force magical practitioners into the shadows: ‘Magic had no Church, no communion symbolising the unity of believers,’ Thomas writes. ‘The official religion of industrial England was one from which the primitive “magical” elements had been very largely shorn.’ In the process of this rejection of supernatural explanations, post-Enlightenment religious beliefs became increasingly standardised and grounded in the concept of natural laws that it was within the ability of human minds to fathom.
As the German sociologist Max Weber put it 100 years ago, a distinguishing feature of modernity is ‘the disenchantment of the world’. For Weber and the countless historians and social scientists who have taken his theories as starting points, the rise of modern science and ‘scientifically oriented technology’ replaced the ‘mysterious incalculable forces’ that pervaded pre‑modern worldviews.
But what if Weber and Thomas were wrong? Ironically, at precisely the time when Thomas was anatomising the death of magic in the 1970s, bohemian mystics in places such as California and London were reviving it. Perhaps the sole characteristic shared by the modern-day inheritors of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture – from Neo-Druids in Stonehenge and eco-feminist witches in San Francisco to practitioners of alternative medicine, Indigo children and aura readers – is this desire to ‘re-enchant’ the world.
Yet if New Agers seek to recapture a pre‑modern belief in ‘mysterious incalculable forces’, they do so using all the tools of contemporary technology and the networks of modern globalisation. It’s not coincidental that the earliest calls for a ‘New Age’ of spiritual awakening coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Or that the triumph of a more formalised and commoditised New Age movement in the second half of the 20th century converged with the rise of television infomercials, books on tape, local‑access cable channels, and the early internet. Today, New Age aesthetics and modes of thought have filtered into mainstream society, influencing everything from the rise of alternative medicine (a $34 billion industry, by one recent estimate) to the triumph of yoga in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, formal religious affiliation is on the decline in the Western world, but this rejection of traditional organised religion does not imply a rejection of spirituality. Instead, it has created a vacuum in which the eclecticism and vagueness of the New Age movement emerge as strengths rather than weaknesses. Which begs the question: if the early modern era witnessed a ‘decline of magic’ and a rise in institutionalised religious affiliation, are we now witnessing the opposite?
