NEW AGE AS ENCHANTMENT

There is a very concrete question motivating this chapter: what do contemporary people do with angels? In more general terms the question points to making things happen in life and, more particularly, in the religious field that we might call New Age. Here is one example of the kind of setting I have in mind: a group of women are taking part in an evening course “The World of Angels”! The course takes place in a private home, and the organizer plays soft music in the background and leads us in guided meditation – a visualized journey that takes us to meet our own angels so that we can ask them for something important we need in our lives. Accompanied by butterflies we walk along a winding sandy path and through a meadow and a secret garden to meet our angel in an imaginary house of our liking. We sit down with him/her, hold hands and have a long intimate chat. Soon our angel gives us a gift (a word, an object, a symbol) after which we are slowly led back along the same path to where we started. We quietly return to the everyday world and start to share our experiences of our personal angels with each other and begin interpreting the message of the gifts we received and what we could do with them.