The New Age in Cultural Context: The Premodern, the Modern and the Postmodern

This issue attends to a relatively ill‐explored, albeit culturally well‐established, topic. Serving to introduce the contributions, an initial task is to characterize the New Age. It is suggested that there is a dominant lingua franca, to do with ‘self religiosity’. Another task is to locate the New Age with reference to the premodern, the modern and the postmodern ‘conditions’. Arguing that the New Age has two main wings, and that it can also be used in consumeristic fashion, it is possible to tease out the various ways in which the three conditions have contributed to its development. Finally, attention is paid to the question of whether the New Age is of any real significance.