The ASANAS conference is a continuation of the annual Contemporary and New Age Religions annual conferences, which began in 1993 at Bath Spa University College, as a small gathering of like-minded researchers. From these small beginnings, this year's ASANAS conference attracted some 200 attendees, including participants from other European countries and the U.S.A.
The name ‘ASANAS' indicates a new endeavour at finding an appropriate name for ‘New Religious Movements' (NRMs) and ‘New Age', both of which have come in for criticism in recent times. Various speakers raised terminological and typological issues regarding the various new forms of spirituality. Did the term ‘New Age' ever describe a coherent set of spiritualities? In what sense, if any, is the New Age ‘dead'? Does the term ‘alternative spirituality' do justice to the phenomenon?
The conference began with presentations from Eileen Barker, ‘New Age' author William Bloom, and Prudence Jones, Past President of the Pagan Federation. Barker provided some demographic details about NRMs, and how they served to form group boundaries, while Prudence Jones sought to correct some basic misconceptions of Paganism. Bloom argued that the New Age now formed part of a global culture, and that the strong emphasis given to ‘body, mind, spirit' in mainstream bookshops was an indication of its occupying a central role in the spiritual arena.
Bloom was the first of a number of speakers to question the appropriateness of regarding New Age spirituality as ‘alternative'. Olav Hammer (University of Amsterdam) argued that the New Age had moved away from being a deviant ‘cultic milieu', and that Christianity itself — like the New Age — was not monolithic, and offered a number of alternative spiritualities. Paul Heelas — one of four keynote speakers — described the recent ‘Kendal project' (an extensive study of religious and spiritual communities in Kendal), suggesting that, if the present decline in traditional religion continues, coupled with the growth of alternative spiritualities and therapies, new spirituality will have overtaken the old in Kendal by the year 2035!
Other keynote speakers argued for the retention of the term ‘New Age'. Christoph Bochinger acknowledged that it was a ‘fuzzy term', but argued that fuzzy terms were nonetheless useful. Wouter Hanegraaff, speaking on ‘Swedenborg and New Age Religions' said it was a useful ‘theoretical construct', and the question of whether the term might function ‘etically', if not ‘emically' was raised at various junctures in the duration of the conference. Hanegraaff argued that New Age ideas had become assimilated within mainstream society and religion, and hence it was difficult to disentangle the two. Other speakers commented on the term ‘spirituality', and there were differences of opinion as to whether one could speak of a ‘spirituality' that was not identifiable with any particular religious expression of it.
Issues of mapping new forms of spirituality inevitably arose. Michael York — another keynote speaker — raised the question of the relationship between Paganism and New Age. Despite the Pagans' attempts to distance themselves from New Age, the latter was in fact a subset of Paganism: the development of Paganism as a discrete religion that attempted to revive a pre-Christian spirituality, came later. Paganism featured largely in two of the sessions, and others dealt with related concepts such as Teen Witchcraft, which appears to be receiving increasing academic attention, as well as indigenous religions.
The esoteric tradition featured prominently in a number of presentations throughout the conference. Astrology occupied one major slot, and reappeared in several other sessions. Much attention was given to the roots of esotericism, Emanuel Swedenborg, Gurdjieff and Theosophy being identified as important precursors. However, several speakers drew attention to the fact that this is true predominantly of the American and British tradition, but that different influences are at work in other parts of Europe. Daren Kemp examined some key New Age writers in France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain, while George Ronnevig focused on the New Age in Norway, and Peter Clarke and Inken Prohl examined aspects of new spirituality in Japan.
Despite the apparent ‘fuzziness' of New Age, a session on ‘New Age and Modernity' highlighted the ways in which the New Age is, to a significant degree, becoming organized, and caught up in wider societal phenomena such as secularisation, capitalism and globalisation. Reference was made at various points in the conference to the relationship between New Age and commercial publishing, and its self-promotion at commercial events such as Mind-Body-Spirit festivals. A relationship with capitalism is further forged by the ‘management ASANAS', which occupied two full sessions.
A UFO-religions session got off the ground, despite technological hitches and some uncertainty about which speakers had arrived: Mikael Rothstein spoke on first generation UFO-contactees, George Chryssides on Heaven's Gate, and Susan Palmer on the Raëlians.
The content of all these various and distinctive belief systems inevitably raises the issue of how people are persuaded to join, what their state of mental health is, and whether they suffer from delusions. Interestingly, the panel on ‘Psychological ASANAS', which included two experimental psychologists, one clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist, found no evidence that those who espoused alternative spiritualities were in a worse state of mental health than the rest of the western population.
Finally, LTSN had a presence at the conference. A rather thinly-attended, but nonetheless important, seminar discussed the place of New Age and new spirituality studies in the teaching of RS, their new proposed guides on ‘People of Faith in the HE Environment', and whether New Age ideas might themselves be taught in the classroom. (A separate report from LTSN on these issues can be found elsewhere in the BASR Bulletin .)
All in all, some 65 papers were presented at this important conference: space does not permit reference to each and every presentation, even if had been possible to trek round them all. Marion Bowman, Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis are to be congratulated on their excellent organization of the event: their efforts have been well worthwhile.
George Chryssides
Report from BASR Bulletin, displayed here with permission of author