Angels-NEW AGE, ANGELS IN THE

The New Age can be viewed as a revivalist movement within a preexisting
metaphysical-occult community. As such, the New Age can be
compared with Christian revivals, particularly with such phenomena as
the early Pentecostal movement (i.e., a movement that simultaneously
revived and altered a segment of Protestant Christianity). Comparable
to the influence of Pentecostalism on Christianity, the New Age had an
impact on some but not all segments of the occult community. Also like
Pentecostalism, the New Age revival left a host of new organizations
and denominations in its wake without substantially affecting the
teachings of pre-existing organizations or denominations.
From another angle, the New Age can be viewed as a successor
movement to the counterculture of the 1960s. As observers of the
New Age vision have pointed out, a significant portion of New Agers
are baby-boomers, people who two decades earlier were probably participating,
at some level, in the phenomenon known as the counterculture.
As the counterculture faded away in the early seventies, many
former “hippies” found themselves embarking on a spiritual quest—
one that, in many cases departed from the Judeo-Christian mainstream.
Thus one of the possible ways to date the beginnings of the
New Age movement is from the period of the rather sudden appearance
of large numbers of unconventional spiritual seekers in the
decade following the sixties.
As a movement without a set doctrine or without religious authorities
to determine what new ideas should be admitted or excluded in
the new age belief system, the New Age subculture has otherwise
shown a remarkable permeability with respect to new notions. Without
letting go of its basic world view, various particular ideas, practices, and
so forth come and go as so many fads. Thus in the 1970s New Age, for
example, the focus was on Asian spiritual teachers and on such traditional
disciplines as yoga, meditation and tai chi. By the late 1980s
when the mass media began to pay attention to the movement, these
earlier interests were outshadowed by such phenomena as channeling
and crystals. To outside observers, channeling and crystals seemed to be
quintessentially New Age, so that, when these fads began fading, it
appeared to outsiders that the movement itself was on the wane.
In fact, however, what had occurred was that the ever-changing
surface of the New Age subculture was merely shifting to other interests,
such as neo-shamanism, “inner child” work, and angels. How
quickly such interests come and go can be seen in the entry list in the
New Age Encyclopedia. At the time that volume was winding up in
late 1989/early 1990, angels were so far out of the picture that no
entry specifically on angels was included. However, into the 1990s,
the subculture is virtually saturated by angel books, angel jewelry,
angel newsletters, and specialized angel stores, resulting in an angel
cover story in the December 1993 issue of Time magazine.
The point of origin for the current New Age interest in angels
seems to have been theosophical ideas about the devas (the occult
term for angels), as mediated to the larger New Age subculture by the
community of Findhorn. This community in northern Scotland came
to the attention of the occult-metaphysical subculture in the late
1960s. The early Findhorn community focused around a highly successful
vegetable garden in which, residents claimed, community
members were engaged in a unique cooperative arrangement with
agricultural devas—spiritual beings which theosophical writers have
claimed work at the etheric level to build up forms on the physical
plane. Thus the devas, whom Theosophists had long identified with
the angels of Western religious traditions, entered the consciousness of
the New Age, though it would be more than two decades before they
became the focus of attention.
Others believe this resurgence in angel interest may be an ancient
human yearning that is simply still evolving. It is said that early peoples
invented their spirits to help explain all they saw in the natural
world. In the Middle Ages, theologians and scholars read the holy
books and then theorized about angels for the joy of thought. Writer
Sophy Burnham embraces this theory in the modern age by writing,
“It is the existential longing for surcease that makes us believe that
something other must exist.”
Burnham is not alone in her belief: as a statistical indication of
increasing interest, a 1992 Gallup youth poll found that 76 percent of
American teenagers believed in angels—up from 64 percent in 1978.
How long angels will ride their current crest of popularity is difficult
to predict. One anomalous indicator is that, unlike other New
Age fads, the New Age shares its present angel craze with the conservative
Christian subculture—an unprecedented parallelism which
indicates that the interest in angels may be more durable than earlier
topics. A more historically-informed glance at angelic matters
indicates a high correlation between an interest in angels and millennial
expectancy. If this correlation holds true in the present case,
angels should be with us for the foreseeable future. In any event, like
earlier foci of New Age consciousness, angelic interest may never
completely disappear as a topic for books and lectures, even long
after the fad peaks.