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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Nicholas Campion’s The New Age in the Modern West is an intellectual history of the New Age as a modern expression of older Western hopes for a better world. Campion begins with millenarianism and utopianism, showing how Western culture repeatedly imagines a lost golden age and a coming repair. From Plato’s heavenly city, the book moves into Christian prophecy before tracing how esoteric teaching carries the same desire into later social reform. The nineteenth-century Theosophical Society gives the material its modern frame, while the Age of Aquarius brings the old hope into twentieth-century counterculture. Campion presents the New Age as one chapter in a much longer search for meaning inside time. His central subject is the belief that the future can arrive as spiritual awakening.
Nicholas Campion’s The New Age in the Modern West is a brilliant guide on the evolution of The New Age, and Campion’s commitment to laying it out is obvious on every page. The reader-friendly formatting helps, but the real strength is how well he explains why these ideas mattered to the people who carried them forward. I love the way Campion writes about Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist whose archetypes gave later spiritual writers a language for recurring symbols and inner experience. Campion is so great at writing in a way that those like me who are new to the topic will understand, but still with enough meat in what he teaches that it is also a solid choice for readers who are better versed. One of the most fascinating parts to me is Campion's tracing of how private conviction reaches public culture, the example being through Shirley MacLaine, whose channeling brought metaphysical belief into television fame and popular publishing. Well written and impressively researched, readers interested in modern spirituality will adore this book.
