The New Age and Gnosticism
The needs of today’s New Agers echo those of our ancient ancestors
The term “gnosticism” exists today in the eye of the beholder. I repeatedly have to correct the auto-spell function that capitalizes the word, because gnosticism, in my view, can no longer sustain a strict historical and religious meaning. This reflects its innate quality as a heterodox, syncretic, and questioning spirituality.
Indeed, gnosticism is a frustrating term for many scholars today due to the sometimes diffuse manner in which it is simultaneously used to describe practices in early church history and various modern mystical pursuits. For the purposes of this paper, I define gnosticism as a late-ancient religious attitude that regards spiritual traditions, practices, and liturgy as largely combinative, flexible, and open to broad reinterpretation and realignment. Gnosticism is, in a sense, a tradition of anti-tradition and, historically, a collection of loosely encamped seekers and syncretic movements stemming from the early Christian era and drawing upon Hellenic, Jewish, Persian, and Eastern religious currents.
In that regard, the gnostic thread has much in common with the recent culture of New Age spirituality. New Age is another term that has become largely amorphous but, in my view, can be defined very simply as a radically…
