Selections: New Ages

The forms of historicism include the myths of eons and epochs. Our model leads us through this terrain, yet gives us a handle on the mythological confusions. We live in an age when the millennial calendar of eschatological Christianity, a very ancient cousin of the idea of a New Age, suggests an illusory finish to our affairs that might distract from the practical efforts demanded by problems that have no miraculous solutions. Behind the idea of the last age lies the idea of a ‘new age’, and the endless echoes of antique notions of epochs, ages of man, and great cycles of nature. Ideas of a ‘new age’ braided with that of an ‘eschaton’ and its strange futures are clearly evident in the thinking of the New Testament.

For the onset of the New Age, if this has any meaning, has already come and gone as far as historical Grand Dramatics is concerned. Beyond the issues of the greater future on a scale of millennia, our ‘new age’ crisis might be very real on a scale of mere centuries: a loss of momentum or postmodern chaotification in the unfolding of a new phase of ‘civilization’ from its roots in the period of the earliest modernity. Our moment, that one might wish to move ‘toward a new enlightenment’, instead moves quickly ‘toward a new age movement’. A further confusion lies in the idea of decline, near ideas of the rise and fall of civilization, such as those advocated by Spengler and Toynbee. These views cleverly find the Enlightenment the onset of the fallen man’s last hurrah, in some hellish finish of ‘western’ civilization. But secular thought lays the best claim to the ‘new age’.[i]

The confusions of eschatology, new ages, last ages, and cyclical views of history are chronic, and in the recent versions, come with an anti-modern ideological twist. The eonic effect produces a useful commentary on the issue. We should note that the term ‘eonic’ was made a synonym for ‘intermittent’, and invokes a systems analysis metaphor (e.g. digital samplers), but also obviously puns on the word ‘eon’, and this is both an afterthought, and a means of seeing why myths of ‘New Ages’ are endemic to history for a reason the eonic effect makes clear. Our ‘eonic sequence’, will elicit the confusion over myths of the Great Year, and hopefully displace that with something else.

The great shockwave of modernism is the onset of a great new period of history and joins the short list of two previous such transitions, the great force of the first civilizations, and the second great wave of change that gave birth to the classical world. One and the same pattern of geographical differentiation followed by ‘globalizing’ integration is clearly at work, with, however, a rising expansion of scale in each case. The resemblance of the modernist transformation to these early cousins completes the list of three ‘new ages’. Is any of this important? Our eonic pattern moves through this territory, and it is good to be wary of merely recycling archetypes. Our approach is different, purely empirical. The New Age obsession is much ridiculed, but contains a valid impulse. An age of spiritual democracy is clearly coming into existence amidst considerable confusion. Further, the ‘new age’ idea is an outstanding challenge to the legacy of the great religions now challenged to a great renewal.

The issue of the New Age is simple. Everyone is observing fragments of the eonic effect, without seeing the whole pattern, which is ‘evolutionary’ in our sense. This has nothing to do with current New Age ideas of ‘evolution’ as personal transformation. The eonic effect grants no foundational status to the idea of a new age, but solves the problem at once on a de facto basis by suggesting the mistake of periodization in most efforts to periodize New Ages. The quest for the Age of Aquarius was silly, as is the postmodern attempt to undermine the rise of the modern with a ‘New Age’. There is even a new myth of the ‘Second Axial Age’ appearing. The myths of the ‘New Age’ spring from the lore of the Great Year, a total red herring, whose astrological periodization of the precession of the equinoxes is too short and throws everything else our of whack, leaving the field in total confusion. The mystery of historical cycles has always haunted civilization, for reasons that we will see. It is time to lay the issue to rest. It is hopeless question, but we can take a chance and use our eonic model to attempt some clarification.

One reason for the importance of the idea of a New Age is that the periodic renewal of religious formations, correctly anticipated by many New Agers and Eastern thinkers, is a force to be reckoned with and can have devastating impact on received religions. It is probably the case that the religions generated in the wake of the Axial period will slowly pass away, or be transformed into something else. The effect is very clear from the Axial period itself, which pressed against the remains of still earlier religions, and we can see the issue clearly in the modern world where all the old religions are clearly falling to pieces. The place of the better idea of evolution here is obvious, although Darwinism, due to its reductionist account of man has, if anything, miscast the tone of secularization which was proceeding in more intelligent fashion before the false metaphysics of selectionist theories gave religious reaction a fresh impetus. Consider that preeminent New Ager, Spinoza, giving birth promptly in the early modern to Biblical Criticism. Also, please note, the Protestant Reformation, in the mainline of our eonic sequence recycles a Christian stream. We should therefore be wary of any predictions.

The mysterious discontinuity of the sixteenth century, and the onset of the modern in the nineteenth are a de facto resolution of the Great Expectation predicted, but whose secular character was not wished for. That the early champions of revolution and change, during the French Revolution, saw fit to periodize a New Age in the ‘revolution’ of time by attempting to invent a new calendar of the Year Zero is altogether apt, and not quite as ridiculous as the swift reactions of conservatives were soon to make that seem.

Thus, the rise of the modern world has often been seen as the beginning of a New Age, Novus Ordo Seclorum. But this falls out of sync with the periodization of the Great Year. We can breathe a sigh of relief, determining the onset of the Aquarian age is superfluous. But a host of ‘New Age’ gurus, plying the ‘standard postmodern strategy’ pioneered by Spengler, find the rise of the modern to be an aberration, and the situation to require their ministrations, please forget the many achievements of human liberty attending the old New Age. The new New Age requires the sacrifice of human autonomy, in the name of spiritual guidance. We are presented with the Old Age movement, in a flood of cults promoting archaic confusions.

The condemnation in spiritual terms of the new age of the modern with its revolutionary struggle for freedom is currently being amplified by the postmodern strategies of forces of reaction. In a strange irony, the West was the last place on the planet not subject to the concealed domination of spiritual or ‘esoteric’ mystifications. It has produced in short order the groundwork for a new disposition of the true spiritual man, able to inherit his autonomy as the natural freedom of his own self-consciousness. We are still living in the future of this moment of this transition to a new era of world history, symbolically climaxing in the generation of the French Revolution, in the sense that our current culture came into existence very swiftly in the century from 1750 to 1850. This greater significance of the Revolutionary period was clearly in the mind of the philosopher Hegel who, ideas of the ‘end of history’ apart, was inspired both to the early enthusiasm for and the reactionary rejection of this event in its excesses, as one of its most notable observers.

As Hegel notes in his Phenomenology of Spirit, written on the eve of Napoleon’s approach to Jena, as the supposed (hubristic) World Spirit on horseback:

Our epoch is a birth time, a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things, and with old ways of thinking. The spirit of the times, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one piece after another of the structure of the previous world. That it is tottering to its fall is now indicated only by symptoms here and there...but something else is approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces will be interrupted by the sunrise, which in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world.

Hegel is useful in one way for he restates a classic mystical theme of the ancients, but slips in the idea of freedom. The guru game will never be the same, and the current New Age conspiracies against human autonomy using the postmodern strategy should soon play themselves out. Hegel, of course, is sometimes well challenged for his version of the Freedom idea. Indeed, is he not a sly version from the same game? His concealed occult roots should leave us wondering. But the point is clear. Failing Hegel, the pack of left Hegelians, New Agers in the vein of Feuerbach, rewrote the terms of the New Age rather well, although Marxist ‘materialism’ is too constricted to handle these issues. The terms are set, the ‘class struggle’ is very much present at the core of religion. The Enlightenment theme of autonomy creates quiet alarm in the spiritual authorities of antiquity. And why would that be so? The dark rumors of the occult fascism pass through the New Age underground.

In the end, there is no theoretical basis for the New Age concept as such in the eonic effect with its crude stages of self-organization, but the battle of the ancients and moderns takes its place, and now takes new forms so visible in the ‘old and new’ of the vigorous movements styled ‘New Age’. But the new age of the modern is real enough, and connects to historical dynamics. The postmodern swindles of the gurus attempting to displace modernity with their own ‘New Age’ should hopefully prove transparent, and proof they have little grasp of history.

[i] Page Smith, A New Age Now Begins (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), Vol I, Introduction, and Chapter 10, “What Then is the American, This New Man?”, John Robert, Revolution and Improvement (Berkeley: University of California, 1976), Chapter 7, “A New Age?”, Forrest MacDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1985). The world of the Young Hegelians was the classic of all seminal New Age Movements, the more convincing for its wild gyrations: Feuerbach, “…One who understands the language in which the spirit of the world speaks, cannot fail to recognize that our present is the capstone of a whole period in the history of humanity and is precisely the starting point of a new life.’ Quoted from Karl Lowith, Martin Heidegger & European Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Alexander Macfie (ed.), Eastern Influences on Western Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), David Smith, Hinduism and Modernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).