New Age Religion & Postmodern Lyric
An excerpt from the introduction of my current scholarly project, "'A Blessing in Disguise': Contemplative Pedagogy in John Ashbery" (Aug 2025)
This project examines the relationship between 20th-century, or postmodern, religion and poetry in order to suggest improved possibilities for humanistic pedagogy. Following its development and proliferation in the 1960s and 70s, on to its explosion of popularity in the 80s and 90s, despite its fall from grace into the commodifying corruption of the so-called “spiritual marketplace”—think crystals, incense, tie-dye, white people chakra talk—New Age religion remains the dominant postmodern religious (or “spiritual”) orientation more than thirty years later—in California, at least, which center of technology has (unknowingly, perhaps) distributed the ideas and concepts of the New Age globally through its Silicon Valley products and services.
This project is in service of cultivating ensouling, inner-worlding pedagogy, and I am motivated by a desire to revive the classroom climate at the University of California specifically, since that is where I have learned, taught, and work, though of course the cross-pollination I suggest throughout the book can be applied successfully in education across the US. It is commonly accepted that New Age religion was profoundly influenced in its development by the California counterculture of the 1960s. Berkeley and Santa Cruz, where I earned my BA and PhD, respectively, were two of the strongest concentrations of New Age historical development, and palpably retain those cultural auras now. I attended the UC campuses in these towns in order to study poetry, poetics, and the theory of the lyric, and have been unable to do so in a satisfying way without dipping into the history of religion, and therefore the buried history of the academy’s relationship to what Wouter Hanegraaff calls “rejected knowledges,” including esotericism.
Hanegraaff suggests that we can interpret New Age religion as an expression of modern, secularized Western esotericism: a new direction developed out of the integral worldview of Renaissance esotericism (New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996), 401). For a full exposition of Western esotericism as a form of thought, Antoine Faivre proposes four intrinsic characteristics (NAR 397-8): a. Correspondences, symbolic or actual, are believed to exist between all parts of the visible and invisible universe; b. Living Nature: the vision of a complex, plural, hierarchical cosmos permeated by spiritual forces; c. Imagination and Mediations: the idea of correspondences implying the possibility of mediation between the higher and lower world(s), by way of rituals, symbols, angels, intermediate spirits, etc.; & d. Experience of Transmutation (what I would corollate to Christian conversion, cf. Rob Sean Wilson on this theme in the modern age), the notion of an inner process or mystical “path” of regeneration and purification…
“The transformation of esotericism into occultism is a clear manifestation of what Max Weber once called the ‘disenchantment’ of the world… [A]lthough New Age religion calls for a ‘re-enchantment,’ [Hanegraaff argues that] its own foundations consist of an already thoroughly secularized esotericism” (NAR 409). It is from this line of thinking that I wish to submit that literary theorists conceive of New Age religion as postmodern religion, and include examination of it in any scholarship on postmodern poetry.
Spontaneously undertaking an open-minded study of religion while enrolled at UC Santa Cruz was difficult. The location’s cultural reputation for spiritual openness did not extend up the hill to campus except symbolically and privately/anecdotally—not in the research methods or resources. I struggled to find a useful, reproducible vocabulary for my incredible experiences of how and what poetry had taught me all my life. Mysticism is the retroactively-invented, catchall category of religious experience I was using at the start of my studies in the pedagogical possibilities of the lyric, inspired by medieval German Catholic examples. With no prior training and short on time, however, I was discouraged from getting ‘lost in the weeds’ of medieval theology. The uselessness and meaninglessness of the term (for modern application, anyway) was impressed on me.
Other terms that kept cropping up, edgier and more modern, were gnosis and imagination. Holism was another unsettling concept (central to New Age religion) where my thinking with this concept was discouraged, suspiciously similar to those concepts the radically relativistic academy mainstream touted as no different from fascism: absolute and totality. Occultism was another concept I was recommended to avoid as anti-intellectual; besides, I was reminded, the Nazis loved the occult. This reductionist paranoia was the extent of understanding of alternative religious history in the departments within my grasp.
New Age religion provides a significant and relevant trove of intellectual history, materials, and methods, currently without an adequate body of scholarship, that relate directly to the art and writing (especially so-called experimental / avant-garde movements and figures) of the second half of the 20th century. This larger, longer move of excising religion from the academy naturally turned into dismissing and forbidding New Age from the contemporary critical scene, doubly fatal with the rise of hegemonic scientism in the university, and scholarship has therefore strategically undervalued a crucial ingredient for reading contemporary lyric. John Ashbery is my nominee for exemplar of the age. By reading Ashbery informed by the varieties of New Age experience, I hope to begin to soften and dissolve this long-standing resistance of modern history of religion by literary theory for use in the present-moment classroom.
As a child of 1990s California and a practicing poet, I see an obvious comparison between New Age religion and modern/postmodern poetry. Both are strategically undervalued wealths of knowledge, modes of knowing. Mystical themes unite them conceptually. Subjective experience of their content is often, superficially, mystifying. Historically, the movements overlap. Theoretically they are both impossible to study from the view of an empirical materialist; yet both have been primarily subjected to this treatment in academia. There has been an overall absence on the part of the scholar of either field of willingness to apply first-person critical subjectivity vis-a-vis personal involvement as practitioner. Examples include the literary critic who is a live poet themselves; or, in the case of religious studies, a scholar who acknowledges his own agnosticism (or faith) and explicitly considers its implications in and for his scholarship; or, even, the scholar of the lyric who considers it relevant and necessary to interrogate her own assumptions about religion and the role of religion in society before she turns to the dissection of a lyric poem, able to be genuinely open to the idea (obvious in history of lyric) that both text and context may have sacred properties or components, without knowledge of which any treatment of the material is doomed to woeful incompleteness.
In vastness, the theoretical question of a definition of lyric is on par with that of a definition of religion. In proposing a single-author study, I want to mark Ashberyan verse as representative of a postmodern, postsecular, mystical consciousness that underpins present-day expressions of the lyric. It is precisely that his work so famously cannot be understood, is mystifying, that supports the assumption of a rigorous critical first-person subjectivity on the part of the scholar, an acknowledged subjectivity not only of a ‘rational’ analyst but of a practicing artist, or ‘contemplative.’ The contemplative scholar spends time with the unknowable with equal dedication as he approaches what he would know. Resilient, balanced scholarship is the result.