Do you believe in fairies? No? Then you aren’t convinced that they played a role in the 1990s anti-road-construction protests?
Well, you’re wrong.
Fairies, trolls and pixies in the eco-protest movement, which includes protesters’ accounts of meetings with fairy beings, is a serious piece of research by a wellrespected academic, Andy Letcher. Other research includes Origins of the New Age Triple Moon Goddess and The influence of popular media upon teenage witchcraft in America. Academia has fallen under the spell of the New Age.
A recent conference on Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies (ASANAS), hosted by the Open University, attracted around 150 researchers from the US, Europe, Australia and Japan, as well as this country. The lecture list – ‘A Course in Miracles’, ‘Popular Spell Books’, ‘Astrology, Magic and the Academy’, ‘Ireland’s Neo-Pagan Community’ – reads more like something produced by Hogwart’s School than a serious university.
Dr Marion Bowman, who is part of the Belief Beyond Boundaries Research Group in the OU’s Religious Studies department, co-organised the ASANAS conference with Jim Lewis and Daren Kemp. She says: ‘No matter what you think of religion, you cannot think it is irrelevant. There is a pressing imperative nowadays to understand how some people are seeing the world differently from others, so we might understand why people behave as they do.
Dr Bowman began her academic career at Glasgow University, but switched to Lancaster University where she came under the influence of Professor Ninian Smart, a revolutionary figure who has acquired almost mythic status in the field of Religious Studies.
It was he who inspired a new approach to the study of religion as a phenomenon in its own right. On the one hand it eschews the traditional theological approach that is concerned with religious truth and can be biased against other (non-Christian) religions; on the other hand it avoids the reductionist sociological view which sees all belief systems as socially-constructed and is often dismissive of the believer’s viewpoint (as, for example, Marx’s ‘opium of the people’). Dr Bowman explains:
‘You are looking at beliefs and practices without getting involved in whether or not they are true/false, right/wrong. You are trying to see what’s there, without imposing an agenda.’
So you don’t have to believe in fairies to study them – or rather, study the beliefs of those who do. After all, which of our beliefs can be objectively verified? ‘Even the rationalist’s belief that there is no God, is just that – a belief,’ says Dr Bowman. But defining and measuring ‘the New Age’ is no easy task for serious researchers.
It is very broad in scope. UFOs, astrology, sacred sites, paganism, healing, teen witchcraft, cyber-religion and the New Age in management were some of the main strands running through the ASANAS conference. And, unlike traditional religions, New Age groupings tend to be very loosely organised – if organised at all.
Take paganism – the label encompasses organised or semi-organised groups like Druids and Wiccans, but a lot of pagans are, as Dr Bowman puts it, ‘free range’. Nor is all peace and harmony between the different spiritualities. There is considerable suspicion among many of the more dyed-in-the-woad pagans of the ‘spiritual entrepreneurs’ who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and built flourishing businesses on the back of New Age pursuits.
The rivalry between the Fairies and the Trolls, groups of pagans camped at the same road protest site, is recounted in Andy Letcher’s study. The Fairies are mostly vegetarian, non-violent beings who play mandolins and sing songs about seeking to protect the beauty of the world; Trolls eat meat, drink alcohol, adopt a confrontational attitude and ban the playing of ‘Fairy-ish’ music.
But stare into the chaos, and a kind of order begins to emerge. ‘Behind all New Age and alternative spirituality lies the idea that every individual is responsible for their own personal spiritual development,’ says Dr Bowman. ‘You will use different spiritual tools – it could be yoga, meditation, personal experience, following the teaching of a particular person. But you will not expect to stick with one thing for life.’
The term ‘spiritual supermarket’ is often used to describe a situation where people are spiritual consumers with unprecedented access to a range of beliefs, old and new, from which they pick and choose according to their needs at any one time.
A few themes recur – Eastern (as opposed to Western Christian) forms of spirituality; concern for the environment; and the revival of indigenous traditions.
Topophilia – a strong sense of connectedness with a particular place – is evident in the rediscovery of sites such as Stonehenge, Avebury, Glastonbury and many others less well known. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that what most individuals are seeking is the antithesis of the urban, fragmented, highly mobile society which epitomises modern Western life. But in its preoccupation with individual choice the New Age would seem to be reinforcing, rather than undermining, a contemporary trend.
For all its harking back to the mythic past the New Age, it would appear, is very much a product of our times. So perhaps the fairies do have something to tell us.
More details on www.asanas.org.uk
The New Age features in the course Religion today: tradition, modernity and change (AD317).
This article first appeared in Open Eye in The Independent, September 2003
