Power Trips: Making Sacred Space Through New Age Pilgrimage

Abstract

Travel to sacred sites constitutes an integral part of New Age spiritual culture. As a largely middle-class phenomenon, New Age travel shares much with the culture of twenty-fi rst century tourism, but it differs in key respects. Some scholars have argued that New Age spirituality is a form of ‘self-spirituality’, an expression of the trend within advanced capitalism to commodify everything and convert it into a marketplace of choices for individual consumers (e.g. Bruce 1996; Heelas 1992, 1996; Johnson 1995; Lasch 1980; Urban 2000; van Hove 1999). This chapter will examine the phenomenon of New Age pilgrimage at a prominent centre of New Age activities, the town of Sedona in north-central Arizona. By comparing it with tourist activities more generally in the Sedona area, however, we will see that despite some overlap, New Age approaches to space, place, landscape and nature depart markedly from the tourist commodifi cation of landscape that analysts have identifi ed as part and parcel of consumer capitalism. Such a comparison sheds helpful light on the ways in which New Age spirituality both refl ects and contests popular understandings of the relationship between self and the natural world. It should be mentioned that not all spiritual travellers to Sedona and other New Age sites identify themselves as New Age. Such recognised New Age hubs as Sedona, Glastonbury in southwest England, and others, are notable by the overlapping and mutable nature of religious and spiritual categories (see Bowman 2000; Ivakhiv 2001, 2003; Riches and Prince 2001). They have become hubs of spiritual creativity, where New Age adherents mix and mingle with Neo-Pagans, extraterrestrial ‘contactees’, Theosophists, occultists, liberal Christians, and others, resulting in a hybridisation and cross-breeding of alternative spiritualities. Due to the prominent role of New Age discourse in the pilgrimage activities at these places, however, what emerges from this mix could justifi ably be considered a form of ‘New Age culture.’ Let us begin by examining the geographical contours of New Age culture.

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