Educational Philosophy and Theory

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New age spiritualism, mysticism, and far-right

conspiracy

Michael A. Peters

To cite this article: Michael A. Peters (2023) New age spiritualism, mysticism, and
far-right conspiracy, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55:14, 1608-1616, DOI:
10.1080/00131857.2022.2061948

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Educational Philosophy and Theory
2023, VOL. 55, NO. 14, 1608–1616
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2061948

Editorial

New age spiritualism, mysticism, and far-right conspiracy

When the moon is in the Seventh House

And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
–‘The Age of Aquarius’, 5th Dimension

Origins of western esotericism

The origins of the New Age movement which flourished in the West during the 1970s and
1980s heralded the coming of a new age. It was an inspiration to music, politics, education
and therapy as part of the 1960s counterculture fostering values in opposition to mainstream
consumer capitalism such as a search for social justice and equality. It grew up in late 1960s
USA West Coast out of a blend of cross-cultural spiritualism and a new awareness of Eastern
philosophy and ascetic practices that sought to provide a mantle that emphasized progressive
change and the possibility of deep personal transformation. It contributed to anti-Vietnam was
protests – ‘make love not war.’ Love and peace were terms commonly used to describe the
anti-violence orientation based on an alleged higher awareness about the nature and future of
human beings and, in particular, what the species might become – a kind of spiritual evolution
that preserved a Christian New Testament optimism about a coming spiritual age. Esoteric
knowledge, that known to a few wise people or gurus, or spiritual teachers, was passed on
through many ascetic practices including fasting, dieting, purification rites, yoga, meditation,
and encounter group sessions that adopted a variety of psychological techniques and procedures.
In ‘The New Age 4o Years Later’ Rick Heller (2017) interviews Mark Satin who suggested that
New Age has gone mainstream resulting in American an interpretation of God at once both
personal and on a literal reading of the Bible but also life experiences and revelations based
on non-traditional encounters. Satin himself argues that our problems are not a result entirely
of capitalism but rather point to a prison-like ancient consciousness based on ‘patriarchal atti-
tudes, egocentricity, scientific single vision, the bureaucratic mentality, xenophobic nationalism,
and the "big city outlook"’ that together anchored materialistic values1. New Age proliferated
and there appeared new age spirituality, politics, music, theology, cosmology, astrology, healing
and alternative medicine, science, ethics, education, business, media, religion and paganism,
non-Western and indigenous applications. By the 1990s a number of commentators suggested
the Age of Aquarius had not taken place and astrologers argues whether it is the current age
or the one to come. As the 1990s drew to a close critics began to question its politics and
whether it was too acquiescent to both capitalism and liberalism. As an ideology it easily lent
itself to the age of conspiracy converting many of its positive ideas into anti-science, anti-state,
anti-politics, and some argued also anti-Christian beliefs. In the years following especially those
of the Trump administration much of the progressive elements of New Age had been stripped
on its critical components to expose a malleable and vulnerable core of beliefs that could be
recruited for any cause and even forms of violence. The holistic health movement including

© 2022 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

 Educational Philosophy and Theory 1609

massage, yoga, homeopathy, psychic healing, bodywork, biofeedback and so on gave way to
the commercial instinct and became big business.
New Age spiritualism developed out of the western tradition of modern esotericism that can
be traced to early Christian religious Gnostic movements. The esoteric tradition was based on
the rediscovered Coptic texts in the 18th and 19th centuries (the Nag Hammadi collection2) that
belonged to the Egyptian Hermetic tradition, emphasizing secret philosophy taught only to an
inner circle of disciples. The word ‘gnostic’ connotes ‘knowing’ and the term came to distinguish
early followers of Christ that claimed direct personal knowledge and revelatory experience of
God based on ‘authentic truths of existence’ and secret scared traditions and rituals.3 This direct
knowledge based on personal experience and revelation rather than rational propositional
knowledge became the basis for western mysticism and the ‘uncreated self’, the so-called ‘spark
of divinity’ where to know oneself was to also know God. Gnosticism also had a referential
attitude to scared texts and the experience of mystical union and oneness that began the
ancient tradition of inner knowing. Elements of the esotericism can be found in both Freemasonry
and Theosophy.
Freemasonry traces its origins to stonemasonry in the 13th century based on the medieval
craft guild, said to be based on the Regius Poem4, the earliest of the Old Charges,5 that describes
how masonry was brought from Egypt to England during the reign of Kind Athelstan. The
manuscript however dates from 1390 and with over 100 other manuscripts it details masonic
rituals. Freemasonry is a non-religious organisation that, nevertheless, affirms a belief in a
supreme creator and is a social organisation that began in 17th century Scotland with William
Schaw, who was Master of Works to James IV in 1583. Schaw issued a series of statutes that
include reference to renaissance esotericism and the ‘art of memory’, a set of mnemonic tech-
niques. The teachings of Freemasonry were devoted to fellowship and moral discipline.
Anthroposophy aimed to present a spirituality open to objective and rational inquiry and
demonstration: it found roots in German idealist and mystical humanism of spiritual knowl-
edge and human freedom – principally Goethe’s notion of humans as supernatural entities
capable of spiritual development and inner transformation. Steiner’s unification of science
and spirituality was based on Goethean science and epistemology but he also had an exten-
sive knowledge of the history of spiritual life in the East that he tracked back before the
Vedas and Vedanta philosophy. He sought to discover a perspective on spirituality that was
based squarely on the mystical traditions of European culture. (Steiner, 1922, 2008). Theosophy
as an older esoteric religious movement in the US was founded by Helena Blavatsky (1831–
1891), a Russian immigrant who drew on Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, the ‘masters of ancient
wisdom’ and Asian philosophies including both Buddhism and Hinduism. She was one of the
first to convert to Buddhism, arguing that Buddha sought a return the Vedas was more accu-
rate than Hinduism and she pursued an anti-Christian occultist line of Hermetic thought that
preserved ancient tradition of magic and ancient wisdoms religion. Blavatsky was clearly
responsible for the revival of western esotericism and occultism and her influence was strong
especially in India with the Hinduism Reform movement and also with the modernization of
Buddhism.
Theosophy is ‘teaching about God and the world based on mystical insight’. It was founded
by Helena Blavasky in the US in 1875 following her writings drawing on forms of neoplatonism
as well as Buddhist and Brahmanic theories that emphasised pantheistic evolution and rein-
carnation.6 As a new religious movement it drew on the occultist movement of Eastern and
western esotericism. The Tibetan Book of the Dead involving ‘liberation through hearing in the
intermediate state (bardos)’ composed in the 8th century was first published in English in
1927 translated by Evans-Wentz who used a Theosophical framework to interpret it to which
Carl Jung added his commentary that included in the 1965 English edition. It was appropri-
ated by Timothy Leary who interpreted it as a spiritual guide to those seeking the path of
liberation.
1610 EDITORIAL

The significance of Eckhart’s mysticism

Eckhart’s mysticism was another source of guidance after his work was rediscovered by German
Romantics in. the 19th century and later also serving as an inspiration to Martin Heidegger and
Jean-Paul Sartre. Many since have expressed approval for Eckhart’s relationship between God
and the individual soul. Eckhart is now the source of inspiration for many New Age therapists
and religious mentors. Meister Eckhart (b.1260–d.1328) was a Dominican mystic influence by
Thomas Aquinas who taught that there were four stages in the union between God and the
soul, a process of detachment from nothingness, through identity with God to breakthrough
where the soul no longer seeks anything at all. He held that ‘All creatures are pure nothingness’
only receiving being derivatively from God. His mysticism emphasized the ‘quite mind’ free from
all self-seeking becomes receptive to the presence of God and he taught detachment of the
mind from all things earthly. His mystical teachings influenced the anonymous Theologia
Germanica written during the Avignon Papacy (1309–78), edited by Martin Luther in 1516, that
held a mystical union with God could be achieved by following the exemplary life of Christ. It
helped shaped the German philosophical tradition of mysticism that included Schopenhauer,
Wittgenstein, and influenced western esotericism and spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle.7 Eckhart
also clearly influenced Jung and analytical psychology in depicting the mystical experience, the
psychoanalytical notion of the subject and the displacement of ego psychology.
Eckhart’s mystical works were also the ground for fertile comparisons with Theravada Buddhism
and Zen Buddhism by the likes of D. T. Suzuki, Shizuteru Ueda and others. The English trans-
lation of Eckhart’s German sermons and Latin works have only recently taken place since the
late 1970s - first begun by Maurice O. C. Walshe (2009) and revised by Bernard McGinn.8 Walshe
begins his Introduction to Eckhart’s Sermons by tracing the Christian mystical tradition to the
Neoplatonism of Plotinus (ca. 204–70) ‘who in his Enneads taught that all things emanate from
the One, the return to which can be achieved by the contemplative path of detachment from
all compounded things and a turning to ‘pure simplicity’ (p. 3). It was a metaphysics incorpo-
rated into Christian thought by Dionysius the Areopagite (ca. 500) and highlighted by German
Hugo of St. Victor in Paris (d. 1142) ‘who in turn influenced the famous St. Bernard of Clairvaux
(1090–1153)’ (Walshe, 2009, p. 3). He continues his analysis claiming ‘In Germany, the so-called
St. Trudperter Hohelied (ca. 1 140) is the first work to show true mystical tendencies’ (p. 3) which
is an interpretation in the vernacular of the Old Testament Song of Solomon, attributed to the
alleged place of origin in the St Trudpert Monastry in Briesgau.
Supposedly written by nuns it emphasized that God can be found in isolation from the world
in prayer and meditation where the soul might be prepared for union and the divine embrace.
The Dominicans, a monastic order to which Eckhart belonged were influenced by both mysticism
and scholasticism in fierce rivalry with the Franciscans, the other order of medieval Christianity
in the 1300s, debating what was the highest power of the soul and the nature of Platonic
‘universals’. In this same tradition Walshe mentions both William of Ockham (d. 1 349) and St.
Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). He also mentions that Eckhart was not the type of mystic who had
visions but in Sermon 19 he writes of a where Man ‘became pregnant with Nothing, like a
woman with child. And in the Nothing God was born: He was the fruit of Nothing’ (Walshe,
2009, p. 16). Eckhart’s mysticism was ‘speculative’ in the sense that mystical experience came
from above but expressed in intellectual (and ‘orthodox’) terms where God is regarded as ‘pure
being’ and all other beings are derived from God such that God in the trinity represented
knowledge, life and love in radical union with one another ‘not one Person: unum non unus’
(Walshe, 2009, p. 18).
Eckhart’s doctrine of Incarnation and the birth of Christ are not historical events but given
a mystical reading: ‘God begets His Son in the soul continually and without interruption ….
What, then, is the essential prerequisite for the birth of Christ in my soul? It is detachment,
self-abandonment (gelassenheit, abegescheidenheit)’ (ibid., 19).
 Educational Philosophy and Theory 1611

It’s the ‘spark in the soul’ (synderesis) that allows for the birth of the Son in the soul and the
soul and mind must be made receptive. As Walshe indicates Eckhart’s mysticism is the result
of personal experience both ‘indescribable and ineffable’ – and thus, ‘negative (or apophatic)
theology’ (ibid., 21). Eckhart ‘s neglected treatise On Detachment treats detachment as the
highest virtue by which a man can attach himself to God: ‘only pure detachment surpasses all
things, for all virtues have some regard to creatures, but detachment is free of all creatures’ (p.
566). As he says ‘I extol detachment above any love’ (St Paul) because ‘detachment compels
God to love me’ and because ‘love compels me to suffer all things for God’s sake, whereas
detachment makes me receptive of nothing but God’; ‘detachment is receptive of nothing but
God’ (p. 567). Eckhart extols detachment above humility, but ‘perfect detachment cannot be
without humility’; and he praises detachment over compassion’ (p. 568). As he writes: ‘true
detachment is nothing else but a mind that stands unmoved by all accidents of joy or sorrow,
honor, shame, or disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands unmoved by a breath of wind. This
immovable detachment brings a man into the greatest likeness to God’ (p. 568/9).
During the 1970s I was introduced to Buddhist texts and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, (the
Bardo Thodol) revealing the dharma of self-liberation describing experiences after death. Earlier
during my years of study I was introduced to the I Ching (The Book of Changes; Book of Zhou)
an ancient Chinese text (10–14 century BC) divination through random numbers to form hexa-
grams (six broken or unbroken lines) that became cosmological with layers of philosophical
commentary and spread rapidly through Asia, spreading the philosophy of yin and yang. A
westerner introduced me to the ancient text and then use it to determine the future (or divine
in the original use); he was interested in its use whereas I was fascinated by its history including
its foundational status for Confucianism and Daoism. Leibniz wrote a commentary in 1703 and
there had been much discussion thereafter by western philosophers. The French Jesuits mis-
sionaries were early translators. Richard Wilhelm’s translation in 1923 (itself translated into English
in 1950) is perhaps the most popular and came to play an important role in the new age
movement. Wilhelm spent twenty-five years in China as a Jesuit missionary. He invited Carl
Jung, another ‘new age’ inspiration, to write the introduction. In his autobiography Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, (pp. 373–377) Jung (1989) writes about Wilhelm whom he met at the ‘School
of Wisdom’ in Darmstadt in the early 1920s. Jung recounts how he experimented with reeds
trying to sort the ‘riddle’ of the I Ching. The oracle gave him answers he could not fathom.
Speaking of Wilhelm he writes:
He was deeply influenced by Chinese culture, and once said to me, ‘It is a great satisfaction to me that I
never baptized a single Chinese!’ In spite of his Christian background, he could not help recognizing the
logic and clarity of Chinese thought. ‘Influenced’ is not quite the word to describe its effect upon him; it
had overwhelmed and assimilated him. His Christian views receded into the background, but did not
vanish entirely; they formed a kind of mental reservation, a moral proviso that was later to have fateful
consequences.9

Jung described Wilhelm on his deathbed as a conflicted man torn between East and West,
a conflict that ran so deeply he couldn’t explain or talk about it: ‘because such matters went
straight to the bone.’ Jung continues: ‘There is, as Goethe puts it in Faust, an "untrodden,
untreadable" region whose precincts cannot and should not be entered by force; a destiny
which will brook no human intervention’ (p. 377).

Esalen, humanistic psychology and new age therapy

New age spiritualism was a heady combination of German transcendental idealism (Kant); Gestalt,
humanistic and transpersonal psychology; the western postwar rediscovery of Buddhism and
other Eastern philosophies; the assemblage of Eastern techniques of ‘self-cultivation’ such as
meditation, yoga and martial arts; and the fostering of experimental psychotherapies and
1612 EDITORIAL

therapeutic cultures of the self, based the encounter group, the workshop and ‘trusting the
process’ that defined therapeutic practices at Esalen. It is ‘a holistic education center’ established
at Big Sur in 1962, that explored ‘emergent transformation and internal exploration’ during the
1960s and after.10 Founded by Michael Murphy and Richard Price, Esalen came to represent the
eclectic new mix of Eastern philosophy, therapeutic culture, and spiritual transformation that
served as a catalyst for a holistic philosophy of humankind with early programs by Alan Watts,
Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Will Schutz. Maslow, one of the most cited psychologists of the
20th century, fell under the influence of anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer, the
Gestalt psychologist while studying in New York and laying the foundations of humanistic
psychology with his hierarchy of needs, Being-values (eg., truth, goodness, beauty, uniqueness,
playfulness, autonomy) and positive regard for persons who were held as responsible for their
own actions.
Esalen was emblematic of the Human Growth Potential Movement (HGPM) that grew out of
the 1960s counterculture and the belief that human beings have untapped resources to lead
happy, self-fulfilling and creative lives by achieving their full potential. Abraham Maslow first
introduced the term ‘self-actualization’ and with Rollo May, Carl Rogers and Charlotte Buhler
founded the American Association of Humanistic Psychology in 1963. HGPM represented a third
way between Skinnerian behaviorism and psychoanalysis where the emphasis shifted to ‘personal
growth’ and ‘the peak experience’ (Maslow) that highlighted the legitimacy of emotional expe-
rience in a ‘person-centered approach’ (Rogers) where the therapist became a ‘facilitator’.
Therapists of the HGPM sought to open up people emotionally, to help them expose their
cultural conditioning, to achieve psychological insight through altered states of consciousness
through transcendental methods of meditation and experimentation with psychedelic drugs
such as LSD. It was a marriage between Eastern religions and Western humanistic psychology
to achieve personal growth and interpersonal sensitivity. Esalen was directed toward health and
spontaneous healing rather than the mainstream psychiatric treatment of mental disease,
emphasizing the mystical experience in relation to the larger cosmos.11 Later Maslow worked
with a group of practitioners such as Victor Frankl, Anthony Sutich and Michael Murphy to
found the school of transpersonal psychology devoted to the empirical study of mystical, ecstatic
and spiritual experiences and established the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1969.

‘The Age of Aquarius’

New Age Spiritualism was given expression as ‘The Age of Aquarius’, the dawn of a new astro-
logical age based on the Earth’s precessional slow motion, taken by the New Age movement
to signal harmony of the spheres, peace and love on Earth. Some astrologists indicate that
2021 is the beginning of the Age of Aquarius and the attempt ‘to find commonality across
what it means to be human’.12 The New Age movement specifically grew up in the 1970s out
of the counterculture of the 1960s embodying spiritual themes and occultist influences that
represented a spiritual holism dating back to a philosophy of self that is both transformative
and healing. It was an age that sought to redeem ancient wisdom and to develop a self-spirituality
that achieved a oneness often through experimental altered states of consciousness and the
experience of religious ecstasy, achieved in secret cults of the Greco-Roman worlds and by
prayer in the early Christian tradition of mysticism.
‘The age of Aquarius’, made popular by the rock musical Hair (1967) was characterized by
the passage of the vernal equinox through the air sign Aquarius every 2,160 years, a slow
rotation of the Earth that purported influenced the cultural tendencies associated with the
rise and fall of civilizations and humans take responsibility over their own destiny based on
the revelation of truth and the growth of consciousness. The age of Aquarius based on the
revival of medieval astrology, the return of Christ, the equality of women (the age of feminine),
 Educational Philosophy and Theory 1613

the age of peace and love: ‘When the Moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with
Mars, then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars’ (‘The Age of Aquarius’,
Hair). It also represented the restoration of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) and the ecological
movement who founded an esoteric spiritual movement that attempted to find a middle path
between science and spirituality in holistic education, biodynamical agriculture, and alternative
medicine.
Marilyn Ferguson’s (1980) The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our
Time was warmly praised and became an instant best-seller. Ferguson was the editor of the
Brain/Mind Bulletin for nearly 20 years and was a founding member of the Association of
Humanistic Psychology. The book was well received by a range of luminaries including Carl
Rogers, Arthur Koestler, and Jacob Needleman and touted to infiltrate the fabric of American
life in a non-threatening way. Ferguson (1987) was unashamedly positive about fear and death
and she claim that the ‘Movement that Had No Name’ had implication for the whole of life by
integrating magic, science, art and technology. Aquarius Now (Ferguson, 2005), though less
successful commercially, hammered home the same message of hope and personal transforma-
tion. Depak Chopra (2011) wrote in his Appreciation:

Ferguson was a uniter and a futurist. By showing feminists what they shared with environmentalists, New
Age spiritual seekers with peace activists, her book inspired a movement that didn’t define the future in
terms of technology. Cell phones and computers were incidental. The real future lay in consciousness-raising
on a global scale.13

Part of the appeal of Ferguson’s work was that it seemingly made connections among dis-
parate elements in a comprehensive analysis that offered hope and light to a new generation
with the promise of leaving the prison of our conditioning to achieve enlightened awareness.
In an age dominate by the wars and skirmishes of great powers, overpopulation, biodiversity
loss, ecological collapse and the prospect of nuclear war her message might be deemed overly
optimistic and not focused enough on forms of world apocalypse and the very survival of
humanity.
Ferguson’s message and text was very different to Theodore Roszak’s (1969) The Making of
a Counter Culture only a decade earlier. Roszak’s message by contrast was against technocracy
and technocratic control that sought to rationalise all aspects of life. Roszak in a tradition that
owe multiple allegiances to critical theory, existential phenomenology, poststructuralism and to
the growing antipsychiatry movement comprised of R.D. Laing, Tim Leary (‘turn on, tune in,
drop out’), Gregory Bateson, Herbert Marcuse, Paulo Freire and Michel Foucault taught us to
seek freedom from totalitarian practices and institutions. This was conscientization of a different
sort, relentlessly political based on the suspicion of ‘one-dimensional society’ and responding
to the growing totalitarian tendencies in Western society.14 Yet it was still premised on the
possibility of a change of consciousness and on the work that such a change might provide
to enhance and improve the human condition.

New age spiritualism and far-right conspiracy

In the first decades of the 2000s there have been a number of new appropriations of New Age
spiritualism by right-wing and far-right organisations. Eva Wiseman (2021), for instance, notes
the connections between spiritual beliefs and far-right conspiracies.15 Lisbeth Latham (2021)
similarly suggests ‘The Australian far right has joined forces with New Age spiritualists, snake-oil
salesmen, and wellness gurus to take advantage of social alienation caused by the pandemic.
Despite the new branding, their anti-union, anti-working-class politics remain the same.’16 Joachim
C. Häberlen (2021, p. 239) suggests that ‘understanding the fascination with spiritualism’ by
West German ‘alternative’ leftist authors and organisations:
1614 EDITORIAL

as part and parcel of a moment when old, confrontational forms of politics were rapidly losing appeal
and were replaced by a politics concerned with questions of self-hood. Spiritual politics were, to quote
Michel Foucault, part of the struggles that attacked ‘not so much “such and such” an institution of power,
or group, or elite, or class, but rather a technique, a form of power’, namely a power that determined ‘who
one is’.

Marisa Meltzer (2021) is another critic who observes the ‘strange convergence of countercul-
ture and hate’ in ‘Q’Anon’s Unexpected Roots in New Age Spirituality’.17 Triumph Kerins (2021)
has written about ‘The Disturbing Relationship Between New Age and Far Right Movements’18
where ‘The targeting of the New Age community by these far-right agitators was clearly delib-
erate.’ Jules Evans (2020) notes that ‘Both the New Age and the far right are drawn to conspiracy
theories’.19 The relationship between New Age and extreme forms of nationalism are also clearly
evident when notions of ‘state’ are dressed up in religious terms, and white supremacist hate
symbols.20
White supremacist and the ultra-right or far-right conscious use both mysticism from
Christianity and racial pagan Nordic mythology based around Odin ‘to justify threats, criminal
activity and violence.’21 Just as in the 1970s and ‘80 s New Age spirituality was used politically
to bolster leftist ideologies of freedom from ‘democratic’ forms of totalitarianism, so today
far-right groups dress up their racism through appeals to aspects of the New Age movement.
Mark Townsend (2022) reports on ‘Fascist fitness’ and how ‘Anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate
says extremists present self-improvement as part of wider political struggle.’22 Certainly, it is
clear that strong elements of the wellness/wellbeing/naturalness movement have been to the
forefront of anti-vax and anti-state movements around the world pushing so-called ‘natural
remedies’ to Delta and Omicron viruses while backing political and health conspiracies as
weapons against public health and governmental health officials. These conspiracies have the
effects of bonding radical disparate groups of protestors including anti-vax and anti-state around
appeals to a crude notion of negative ‘freedom’ and an ideological commitment to violence.
While New Age spiritual encouraged universal peace, hope and love as the basis for spiritual
transformation in the 1970s and 80’s, today aspects of these beliefs have been peeled away
from the spiritual heart of the movement to emphasise the ‘dark Enlightenment’23 and the
organising forces of the European and American far-right, often dressed up with allusions to
Nietzsche, and embellished with spiritual values of health and self-improvement. Spiritualism
and experiences of closeness to God that underlined the New Age movement and produced
much of value in humanistic psychology and education, not least a persuasive narrative of
personal transformation, can be easily ideologically manipulated and appropriated by far-right
groups. Perhaps the time is ripe for a reappropriation and interpretation by the left of spiritual
values that sustain social democracy, given that many of the main inspirations came from those
like Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, and other German or Austrian existential humanist psy-
chologists of Jewish extraction, who fled the Nazi onslaught?

Notes
1. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-new-age-40-years-late_b_9765486
2. The Nag Hammadi Library is a collection of thirteen ancient books discovered in Egypt in 1945, including
the Gnostic Gospels translated in the 1970s - http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html
3. http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhlintro.html
4. http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/regius.html
5. http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/prescott07.html
6. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theosophy
7. Eckhart Tolle’s books The Power of Now (2000), Stillness Speaks (2003), and A New Earth (2005) are often
talked of in terms of New Age Spiritualism combining elements from Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism
and the Bible. He changed his name from Ulrich to Eckhart in honour of Meister Eckhart. I am grateful to
Kiyoshi Suzaki for alerting me to Tolle’s work.
 Educational Philosophy and Theory 1615

8. See The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart https://german.yale.edu/sites/default/files/meister-eckhart

-­maurice-o-c-walshe-bernard-mcginn-the-complete-mystical-works-of-meister-eckhart-the-crossroad-publishin
g-company-2009.pdf
9. http://www.log24.com/log08/saved/080810-JungOnWilhelm.html
10. https://www.esalen.org/
11. https://www.esalen.org/memorial/richard-price
12. https://www.vogue.in/culture-and-living/content/according-to-astrology-the-age-of-aquarius-is-coming-this
-is-what-it-means-for-you
13. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marilyn-ferguson-an-appre_b_142193
14. https://aeon.co/essays/the-dropout-a-history-from-postwar-paranoia-to-a-summer-of-love?utm_medium=So-
c i a l & u t m _ s o u r c e = F a c e b o o k & f b c l i d = I w AR 0 6 2 M W 4 u F e t E S 0 U e v u M b n - g P R 9 H j r J V - W j l
cYV1OROJKXJb6hvom6-owXs#Echobox=1643773960
15. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/17/eva-wiseman-conspirituality-the-dark-side-­of-wellness-how-
it-all-got-so-toxic
16. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/australian-new-age-wellness-right-wing-covid-lockdown-anti-vax-pro-
tests
17. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/03/29/qanon-new-age-spirituality/
18. https://www.mironline.ca/beyond-the-qanon-shaman-the-disturbing-relationship-between-new-age-­
and-far-right-movements/
19. https://sxpolitics.org/nazi-hippies-when-the-new-age-and-far-right-overlap/21990
20. https://religiondispatches.org/q-shamans-new-age -radical-right-blend-hints-at-the -blurr
ing-of-seemingly-disparate-categories/
21. https://w w w.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence -repor t/2018/holy-hate -far-right%E2%8
0%99s-radicalization-religion
22. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/06/fascist-fitness-how-the-far-right-is-recruiting-with-o
nline-gym-groups?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
23. A constellation of anti-democratic reactionary philosophy developed by Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land that
has strong conceptual links to the ‘alt-right’, hoping to accelerate capitalism to a fascist final stage.

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1616 EDITORIAL

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of-wellness-how-it-all-got-so-toxic

Michael A. Peters
Beijing Normal University, P.R China
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1482-2975