Esotericists have, among many other things, conjured spirits, received messages from disincarnate beings, cast spells, interpreted horoscopes, and healed people by manipulating invisible “energies” that purportedly flow through the body. For at least some outside observers, this plethora of beliefs and practices is so outlandish that they have been led to wonder, in the words of sceptic Michael Shermer, why people believe “weird things.” The study of religions has developed a range of answers – cognitive, sociological, and historical – to the question of why people believe in the things they do. The issue of whether any of those beliefs are, to borrow Shermer's term, weird or irrational is another matter entirely.

Many people seem to find the purported irrationality of others to be a pressing issue: a vast literature exists in which entire fields of human activity are denounced as profoundly deluded. One fundamental problem with a sizeable part of that literature and its reactions to questions such as “is magic/channelling/astrology/healing irrational” is that the answers are often based upon little more than a subjective comparison between one's own cherished beliefs and those of others. It can, for instance, be deemed quite unremarkable to believe in the Trinity or the resurrection of Christ, while it is seen as irrational, weird, or even stupid to assume that the movements of the planets have anything to do with our character and destiny, or that reincarnation in a new body awaits us after death. For various reasons, not least in order to avoid the taint of being associated with this particular form of subjective mud-slinging, historians of religion have claimed that they either cannot or should not pass judgment on the behaviours and ideas of the people they study. This reluctance has deep historical roots: the founding father of the academic study of religion, Max Müller, defined the fledgling field as the value-free investigation of religious phenomena.

Besides using the words “rational” and “irrational” as subjectively wielded epithets, there are many cases where it seems appropriate to use the terms in some gut-level, pre-theoretical sense. If your long-term goal in life is to preserve your physical well-being, you will be more likely to achieve your goal by eating healthy food, refraining from smoking, and getting enough exercise than by casting spells against disease-bearing demons.

Introduction: “The New Age,” A Catchall Term?

In modern society, an astounding range of religious or “spiritual” alternatives to organized religion are available. A very incomplete list includes tarot reading, Reiki healing, swimming with dolphins, astrology, (neo-)shamanism, crystal healing, psychic phenomena, the recall of past-life memories, Aura-Soma remedies, fire walking, and various modes of “positive thinking.” Among the list of the spiritual, one also finds vast numbers of books, with titles such as A Course in Miracles, Conversations with God, and The Celestine Prophecy. The term “New Age” is often affixed to them all, at least by people who do not personally share any of these interests. Insiders will, on the contrary, often insist that the label is derogatory or even meaningless. Rather than seeing their own beliefs and practices as part of any wider social movement, many hold that they have embarked on a thoroughly individual quest. Scholarly literature hovers uncertainly between the two views, some authors insisting that there is a minimal shared discourse uniting these various practices and ideas, others rejecting “New Age” as a thoroughly vacuous term. One difficulty with the expression is that, in common with many other terms employed in the study of religion, it was a designation coined by the members of a particular religious milieu and has since become employed in a wide and not always compatible variety of ways.

The concept “New Age” is diffuse also because it consists of a combination of a common adjective and an equally common noun and has therefore historically been repeatedly used in contexts that would seem to have few points of contact with the modern concept. William Blake uses the term in a publication dated 1804, in a context that has roots in the writings of the eighteenth-century visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, and earlier. Other early references are Warren Felt Evans's book The New Age and Its Messenger (1864), and the literary magazine The New Age founded in 1894.

New Age as label for a utopian vision with an occultist tinge is a later creation.

THE RATIONALE FOR THIS BOOK

“Religion” is an amorphous concept which has been defined in numerous ways, without any scholarly consensus in sight. Its main features seem to us to be (a) having socially shared activities which bear no direct relation to subsistence, (b) demanding some specific attitude towards death and/or the dead, and (c) generally including a discourse including entities which are beyond this world. Whatever it is, religion seems to be uniquely linked to the human race. It was in Europe and the Middle East that the culture of our immediate ancestors first combined the attributes which are the necessary precursors of religion – burials, plastic art and paintings. It was the religions of groups as diverse as the Greeks and the Scandinavians which seem to have given birth to important traits of our civilization as we define it today. Thus the history and prehistory of Europe is fundamental to the history of the human race and religion – and the history of religion is fundamental to Europe.

Anatomically modern humans, that is, the type of humans to which we belong, arrived on the European continent approximately 40,000 years ago. Their arrival in Europe is associated with the end of the Middle Palaeolithic (which began perhaps 250,000 years earlier in Europe) and the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic.

THE “MODES OF RELIGION” THEORY

In a number of well-known publications, Harvey Whitehouse proposes (2000, 2004a) that religious practices and concepts are transmitted by one of two fundamentally different modes: the imagistic and the doctrinal. The “modes of religion” theory has attracted considerable scholarly interest, and only the bare essentials need to be summarized here. The theory is based on the observation that religious elements, in order to survive, must be committed to memory, and that there are two distinct forms of memory with divergent properties that profoundly influence the nature of those religious elements.

Episodic memory stores single, salient events. We remember specific details from our last birthday or what we did when we heard of the attacks on the iconic date of 9/11. Semantic memory allows us to recall general knowledge, procedures and routines. This is what enables us to remember as a general fact that Moscow is the capital of Russia, and makes us able to easily recall what we usually eat for breakfast, whereas we presumably don't remember how we found out what the Russian capital is called, or what we specifically had for breakfast on a random day several years ago.

The sheer fact that religious concepts and ritual actions, like any other information, need to be stored in memory and recalled implies that religions are subject to the strictures inherent in each of the two memory types. Imagistic religiosity depends on single events with considerable emotional impact being stored in episodic memory.

NEW RELIGIONS AND RELIGIOUS INNOVATION

Religions resemble living organisms. They emerge as distinct entities in the religious landscape when, for example, innovations are introduced by a charismatic leader or a schismatic group leaves its parent organization. They gain momentum if they manage to attract adherents, often shifting shape in the process: the leadership of the charismatic individual is replaced by a more bureaucratic institution, or the initial emotional effervescence of the schismatic group subsides. Some religions disappear in the earliest, formative stages, while others manage to survive the turbulent first years. As time passes, they may enter into a phase of relative stability. Changes still take place, but often at a pace that is so slow that established doctrines and rituals seem to be seamlessly transmitted from generation to generation. Only when a new charismatic authority figure takes center stage, a schismatic group breaks out of the organization, or when external forces undermine the stability of the tradition, do changes once again become visible as equilibrium becomes threatened. Finally, even traditions that have subsisted for centuries or millennia can pass into insignificance or oblivion. Gods that were venerated in the distant past – Marduk of the Babylonians, the Egyptian goddess Isis, Zeus of classical antiquity, and countless others – are reduced to names in the annals of research, as rituals in their honor are no longer performed and stories about them cease to be told.

INTRODUCING THE THEME

Texts devoted to religious matters can be categorized in various ways. One common way of doing so is to divide the corpus according to genre. The terminology of religious genres is extensive and includes categories such as myth, legend, creed, homily, apology, hagiography, commentary, eschatology, theological tract, hymn, psalm, and prayer. Founders of and spokespersons for new religions have produced all of these well-known types, confirming one of the main points made in the Introduction to this volume: there is nothing extraordinary or strange about new religions.

A cross-cutting distinction of more immediate concern in the present context is based on the status accorded the writings within a given religious tradition. Most if not all traditions have selected a small sub-set of writings as being particularly sacred, effectively creating a canon. Thus, Hindu texts are divided according to status ranking the direct revelations from the divine – shruti – highest, while the recollections of sages since the dawn of time, the smriti, occupy a secondary position. And of course, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions also set certain texts (Bible, Tanakh, Qur'ān) apart as canonical. Some religions go further and distinguish several levels of sacredness. Mahayana Buddhism grants canonical status to a large corpus of works, but suggests that certain texts present religious truth in its highest form, while others are formulated in a manner appropriate to the spiritually less astute, because the Buddha was a master at deploying skillful didactic means.