New Age

A distinctive set of terms circulates in this current, usually offered without provenance and often with an implication of antiquity. Most of them can be dated, and several to a single book.

Indigo children is the most precisely traceable. Nancy Ann Tappe, who described herself as seeing people's auras as colours, introduced the idea in Understanding Your Life Through Color in 1982, reporting what she took to be a new aura colour among children born from the late 1970s. Lee Carroll and Jan Tober turned it into a movement with The Indigo Children in 1999, attaching a character profile, difficulty with authority, unusual sensitivity, a sense of purpose, poor tolerance of routine, that overlaps substantially with descriptions of attention and autism-spectrum conditions. That overlap is the source of the practice's most serious criticism, since the framework offers parents a flattering spiritual reading of behaviour that might otherwise prompt an assessment.

Starseed comes out of the American UFO-contactee literature of the 1970s, where it named a person believed to have originated with, or to carry the consciousness of, another world. It has since detached from the flying-saucer context that produced it and now circulates as an identity, with an elaborate taxonomy of home systems that would have been unrecognisable to the writers who coined it.

Lightworker came into wide use in the 1980s for a person understood to have incarnated in order to raise the general level of consciousness. It functions as a vocation and, increasingly, as a professional category, since a great deal of paid spiritual service is now offered under the name.

Twin flame is recent, spreading principally online from the 2000s, and it is the term on this list with a documented pattern of harm attached to it. Its content is that a single soul divides into two bodies, so that exactly one other person is one's counterpart, and that the relationship will be turbulent because its purpose is to force growth. Every one of those features works to keep a person inside a painful relationship: conflict is reinterpreted as evidence of the bond, absence is reframed as a stage in a chaser-and-runner pattern, and the uniqueness claim removes the option of leaving, because there is no second one. A coaching industry has grown around it selling readings and programmes to people in acute distress about a specific named individual, and journalists and former clients have documented what that produces. There is no pre-modern source for the concept. Earlier esoteric writing speaks of soulmates and of twin souls, which is related and is not the same thing, and which carries none of this apparatus.

Christ consciousness is a Theosophical and New Thought usage in which Christ names a universal state of awareness available in principle to anyone, distinguished from the historical Jesus, who is held to have attained it first or most fully. It is not a Christian doctrine and no mainstream church recognises it as one.

Cord cutting is a visualisation exercise in which a person imagines an energetic attachment to another person, a place or a period, and severs it. It draws on the etheric-body model that Theosophy supplied, and it was popularised in the healing literature of the later twentieth century.

Past lives as a therapeutic subject, reached under hypnosis or guided regression and read for the origin of a present difficulty, is a twentieth-century Western development. Rebirth itself is of course ancient and central in Indian religion, but the traditional doctrines do not offer recall of particular former identities as a service, and where regression material has been investigated it has repeatedly been traced back to ordinary sources the subject had encountered and forgotten.

Synchronicity is the one term here with a named author from outside the movement. C. G. Jung coined it for meaningful coincidence understood as an acausal connecting principle, worked on it from the 1920s, and set it out fully in a 1952 essay published alongside work by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Jung intended a carefully bounded proposal about the relation between psyche and world. In general use it has become a word for any coincidence that felt significant at the time, which is a very considerable loosening of what he argued for.

The indigo-child idea did not stay put. Once a special kind of child could be named by an aura colour, further colours followed, and the New Age acquired a small taxonomy of spiritual identities, most of it traceable to a single author within a few years.

Crystal children were introduced by Doreen Virtue in The Crystal Children (2003) as a wave said to follow the indigos, born from roughly the turn of the millennium, gentler where the indigos were combative, and marked by late speech and large eyes. As with the indigo profile, the described traits overlap heavily with autism, and the same criticism applies: the framework offers a flattering spiritual reading of the very features that might otherwise prompt an assessment. Rainbow children were added as a still-later, still-purer wave, said never to have incarnated before and to arrive without karmic baggage. Virtue built much of this vocabulary and later, in 2017, publicly renounced her entire New Age output on becoming a Christian, which has not slowed the terms' circulation.

The adult counterpart to the special child is the lightworker, treated elsewhere in these notes, and around it a set of finer job-titles has grown:

• A wayshower is a lightworker cast as one who leads by visible example, having 'gone first' along a path others will follow.
• A gridworker or gatekeeper is held to work with the earth's energy grid and its supposed nodes and portals, rather than with individual people.
• An earth angel, a term Virtue popularised in Earth Angels (2002), names a person believed to be an angel, elemental or star-being incarnated in human form to help, and shading into the starseed vocabulary at its edge.

The common structure is worth naming. Each term converts a felt sense of difference, or of not belonging, into a spiritual vocation, and several attach that vocation to traits, sensitivity, difficulty with ordinary life, a sense of mission, that are open to gentler and to less flattering readings alike. Dated plainly, this is a body of vocabulary assembled largely between the late 1970s and the mid-2000s, much of it by identifiable authors selling identifiable books.

Three overlapping words describe the central experience the New Age is organised around: a decisive shift into a higher state of consciousness. They come from different places and are worth keeping apart.

Ascension is the most specific. It descends from the Ascended Masters of Theosophy and of the 'I AM' Activity of the 1930s, beings held to have completed their human evolution and risen to a higher plane while retaining an interest in humanity, and in later New Age use it broadened into the idea of a collective ascension, a raising of the vibration of the whole planet. That collective sense attached itself strongly to the year 2012 and the end of a cycle in the Maya Long Count, publicised through Jose Arguelles and the Harmonic Convergence of 1987; when 2012 passed without visible transformation, the language survived by becoming open-ended.

Awakening, or spiritual awakening, is looser and older in its roots, drawing on the genuine vocabulary of religious enlightenment but used in the contemporary current for any sense of having seen through ordinary consciousness to something realer behind it. It carries less specific machinery than ascension and is correspondingly harder to date or to pin down.

Kundalini awakening is the one term here with a real and ancient source that modern use has substantially altered. In Hindu tantra, kundalini is an energy imaged as a serpent coiled at the base of the spine, raised through disciplined practice under a teacher up through the chakras to the crown. The traditional setting is one of long preparation and supervision. The modern Western use often describes a spontaneous awakening, self-diagnosed and unsought, and this is where an honest account has to note documented harm: the sudden or forced rising of kundalini is associated in both the traditional literature and in contemporary clinical reports with real and sometimes severe distress, what has been termed 'kundalini syndrome' and treated within the wider category of 'spiritual emergency'. A vocabulary that frames such an episode purely as a stage of enlightenment can discourage a person from seeking help they may need.

The idea that sacred and ancient sites lie along invisible lines of power is one of the most widely held in the current, and its history is a clear case of a claim changing under a later hand.

The term ley line was coined by Alfred Watkins, a Herefordshire brewer and amateur antiquarian, in The Old Straight Track (1925). Watkins proposed something entirely down-to-earth: that ancient Britons had laid out straight trackways between landmarks, hilltops, standing stones, churches on older sites, for travel and sighting, and that these alignments could still be traced on a map. He made no claim of energy of any kind. The archaeological objection to even this modest version is statistical: given the density of old sites in the British landscape, apparent alignments of three or four points are exactly what chance produces, and rigorous tests bear that out.

The energy version is a later graft. In The View Over Atlantis (1969), John Michell fused Watkins's lines with Chinese feng shui and its 'dragon lines' and with earlier speculation about earth currents, and produced the ley line as a channel of subtle energy connecting power-places, the form in which almost everyone now knows it. From there the vocabulary multiplied: the planetary grid, a proposed global lattice of such lines and nodes, was elaborated in the 1980s; vortexes, sites of concentrated upwelling energy, became attached above all to Sedona, Arizona, where the term was popularised around 1980 by Page Bryant.

Portal dates are the calendar version of the same intuition, and are almost entirely a recent, internet-era phenomenon. The best known is the Lion's Gate, dated to the eighth of August (8/8) and tied to the heliacal rising of the star Sirius and to the numerology of the number eight, promoted as a day when a cosmic 'portal' opens and intentions carry special force. Eclipse dates and repeating-number dates function similarly. None of these has a pre-modern pedigree as a portal; they are contemporary coinages that borrow the authority of astronomy and of old sacred geography without the substance of either.

A cluster of terms describes relationships as spiritually pre-arranged, and they are routinely run together though they carry different claims and different histories. The most damaging of them, the twin flame, is treated separately in these notes and is explicitly not the same as a soulmate; the rest are worth distinguishing.

A soulmate is the oldest and mildest. The romantic modern sense, one person uniquely suited to another, is often traced to Plato's Symposium, where Aristophanes tells a myth of beings split in two who seek their other half, but that is a source borrowed after the fact; the English word in its current meaning is a nineteenth-century coinage (Coleridge used it in 1822), and it spread through Spiritualist and New Thought writing on affinity between souls. In common use it need not even be romantic and carries none of the compulsion the twin-flame idea does.

A karmic partner, or karmic relationship, applies an Indian-derived vocabulary of karma to a specific relationship: the two are said to have unfinished business from a past life, and the relationship, often a difficult or short one, exists to work it out. The traditional doctrines of rebirth do not, in fact, offer this kind of named, recallable person-to-person accounting; it is a modern Western adaptation of karma to the concerns of the self-help relationship.

A soul contract generalises the idea into a pre-birth agreement: the soul is said to have planned, before incarnating, the major people and difficulties of its life, so that even painful relationships and losses were chosen in advance for their lessons. The vocabulary was popularised by books such as Caroline Myss's Sacred Contracts (2001) and Robert Schwartz's Your Soul's Plan (2007).

The three share a structure and a risk. Each reframes an ordinary relationship, including a harmful one, as fated and purposeful, and the more strongly the framing is held the more it can work to keep a person inside a situation they might otherwise leave, by recasting distress as a lesson that has not yet been learned. As spiritual consolation the vocabulary is old and human; as counsel for a specific bad relationship it can do the same work the twin-flame idea does, if more gently.