Positive Thinking & Witchcraft. A Brief History of the New Age Movement (PDF)

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject History - Miscellaneous, , language: English, abstract: This essay explores the Western Witchcraft Tradition in connection to the New Age Movement, providing a short history.
In America at least, we know the New Age stereotypes mostly through pop-culture. The stereotype of the new ager is a pyschedelic indulging, positive thinking, vision boarding, crystal loving, strange neo-shaman feminist hippie. Said new ager seems to love everything relating to nature worship, non-duality and Buddhism-all the while not exactly committing to anyone one particular trend or tradition, and usually tiring (in the ADD sense) of any one trend or spiritual practice ... eventually.
Thus, in America typically the subject of spirituality and many other new current ageisms take the form of an all you can eat buffet, where you're free to pick and choose amongst various callings of world religion, all the while saying they are equal and yet never fully subscribing to any of it. The business of profiting by selling lifestyle trends-not the least of them being crystals-often acts simply as a means of distracting themselves from what could be seen as more archaic forms of traditional witchcraft.