The New Spirituality

It’s claimed that today witchcraft, pagan and earthbound religions are the fastest growing groups and forms of the new spirituality. Errol Webster investigates where it has come from, its popularity and its influence.

T hey were an unusual pair. They were ahead of me as I waited in line to change some traveller’s cheques in New Delhi, India, and caught my eye. Their hairstyles reminded me of Bart Simpson and their clothes were hippie styled. There was an intense look on their faces.

My business transacted, I thought no more of them until in a restaurant I happened to be seated at their table. It was the only one available.

He was from England, where he’d been involved in witchcraft and drugs. She was from a wealthy family in the US, and had been sexually abused as a child. They had met in Tibet. Like many Western young people, they’d gone there to explore Eastern spirituality and meditation.

What followed was a horrific tale of demon possession and drug taking. He had surrendered himself totally—body, mind and soul—to demons. But now he was trying to get free. The only thing that helped him, he acknowledged, was the name of Jesus—in a rather superstitious way.

But then, as he talked about his demon possession, a strange thing happened. His voice changed. It was still “his” voice, but harsher and angry. His stare became intense and I felt great pressure leaning on me. I began to perspire, my breathing became laboured and I found speech difficult.

Desperately I prayed in my mind as even movement became difficult.

Eventually the pressure lifted and I was able to speak to them about Jesus. As I did, his voice became calmer and the intensity in his eyes softened. I assured them of Jesus’ love and protection, and then they went their way.

In recent decades in the West, despite a general shift toward rationalism and secularism, there’s been a parallel increase in interest in Eastern religions, witchcraft and satanism, the occult and spiritism, and New Age activities and beliefs. This is not surprising, as it turns out.

A little more than 35 years ago Anton Szandor LaVey—former lion tamer and police photographer—shaved his head in the tradition of black magicians and medieval executioners, and announced the establishment of the world’s first Church of Satan, in San Francisco. He declared 1966 to be the first year of the Satanic Age.

About the same time, for flower power people, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco become a Mecca for disenchanted drop-outs from all over the country, who converged on it to partake in their own social experiment. Much of the interest in the occult was a by-product of the psychedelic revolution.

The drug LSD managed to achieve the status of a religion, with advocates like Timothy Leary urging people to “go on to ‘the next stage’ by dropping acid and getting in touch with the ancient, reincarnation thing we always carry inside.” His catch phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out” became a popular counterculture slogan—and activity.

The Beatles’ songs “She Said, She Said” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” on the Revolver album (1966) were both LSDinfluenced.

In fact the lyrics of the latter are almost word for word from Timothy Leary’s drug bible, The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Ever since they followed the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to India in 1968, Eastern thinking has flooded the West, promising a semblance of spirituality. But it gives no certainty.

In Eastern thinking, you’ve got to “blow your mind” to find ultimate reality.

The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, considered by Rolling Stone magazine to be the most significant since the 1960s, clearly teaches drug taking and Eastern mysticism.

The song “Within You Without You,” accompanied by an Eastern Sitar, is a statement about reincarnation and pantheism: “When you’ve seen beyond yourself/ Then you may find peace of mind is waiting there/ And the time will come when you see we’re all one,/ And life flows on within you and without you.”

Hashish has been a part of Eastern meditation, or yoga as it is called in India, for centuries. Drugs became the sacrament of the new religion of the counterculture, which was a mixture of hedonistic free love, pot power and Eastern mysticism. But increasingly its adherants turned toward the occult.

Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, in the 1960s, discovered Alister Crowley (1875- 1947), who claimed to practise “magick.” Crowley took the name The Beast 666 and founded the West’s most comprehensive satanic system based on occult, sexual and homosexual practices. “Do what thou will” was the heart of his teaching.

It’s claimed that today witchcraft, pagan and earthbound religions are the fastest growing groups and forms of spirituality.

There’s no doubting its popularity and influence. Interest in the supernatural is evidenced by the popularity of TV programs that feature witchcraft and the occult, such as Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Goosebumps and The X-Files.

The New Age movement, of which segments of the Greenie Movement, holistic health practitioners, transpersonal psychology, the occult, spiritism, animism and others are part, is largely a Western form of Eastern mysticism. As with Eastern religions, its two main tenets are reincarnation (that we don’t die) and pantheism (that we are god). These concepts were virtually unheard of in the West until the 1960s.

Ultimate reality (Brahman for the Hindu and Nirvana for the Buddhist) is found outside rational conceptual thinking in a cosmic nothingness where there’s oneness, but not individuality—no pain or pleasure, no personal existence. In this sense, it’s no different to the Western concept of evolution that reduces the human person to merely a collection of atoms.

Theodore Roszak, in The Making of a Counterculture , says that while there has always been antirational groups at the margins of society, what’s new is the radical rejection of science and technological values closer to the centre.

Why such a change? The prevailing world view is that all life is the product of time plus matter plus chance. Charles Darwin, with his theory of evolution, gave credence to this view. His book On the Origin of Species (1859) did more to undermine belief in God and thus the meaning of life than any other book.

Freud declared that demons are merely “the products of the psychic activity of man,” and Bertrand Russell went even further, saying, “God and Satan alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.” This is what characterises our secular age.

The modern West is the first society “that knowingly and deliberately organises itself without any meaningful or major reference to a dependence upon the living God,” says Peter Toon in “Secularism,” from Encyclopedia of Biblical and Christian Ethics . “Earlier societies may have neglected their religion or acted contrary to its teaching, but they were organised on the assumption that God did exist and that this world is dependent upon another transcendent reality, namely God’s kingdom.” How strange that in this scientific, rational age that it should conclude there is no God and relegate the supernatural to the superstitious past, and that people should be turning to the nonrational religions and spirituality to find meaning!

Satanism, the occult, witchcraft and Eastern religions, like the increasing drug problem and escalating suicide rates among the young, are symptomatic of a wider problem—the lack of meaning caused by the collapse of the Christian world view in the West since the 1960s.

This has led to a spiritual vacuum, which has been, as analyst Os Guinness points out, a major factor in the growth of Eastern mysticism and the occult.

Without a basis for life, people are turning to alternatives, where, without an objective basis, they’re vulnerable. It’s a secular form of spirituality, if you like.

All these attempts to find meaning in the West, since the middle of the 20th century, are in the area of non-rational, therefore are non-verifiable. Fiona Horne, former singer with Sydney band DefFX, for example, says, “I don’t believe there are any divine plans, I believe you make our own . . . the way I choose to experience my life is a personal choice that isn’t under anyone or any god’s jurisdiction.” Yet she has been involved in witchcraft and the supernatural.

We’re warned that the last days of earth’s history will be marked by an increase in satanic activity. But the Bible clearly prohibits occult practices such as divination, sorcery, witchcraft, spell casting, channelling, spiritualism and consulting the dead (see Deuteronomy 18:10, 11).

The Bible speaks of a conspiracy of evil against God and His rule led by Satan (see Job 2:6, 7; Revelation 12:7-12). The New Testament is steeped in the view that we’re all involved in a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. But the devil and his evil ones will be defeated and God will set up heaven on earth for those who accept Jesus (see Revelation 13:11-18; 16:13, 14; 19:11- 22:21).

Of course, we should not see the general movement toward spirituality as necessarily destructive. Ruth Webber says, “The new outbreak of spirituality is a desperate attempt by youth culture to counter the advances of the profane and secular society, with its appalling materialism, disillusionment and absence of hope.” The danger lies in attempting to find spirituality outside of God.

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