Subculture

The subculture that would later take on the descriptive term "New Age" already existed in the early 1970s, based on and continuing themes originally present in 1960s counterculture. Although more rock than new age in genre, the 1967 major hit musical Hair with its opening song "Aquarius" and the memorable line "This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius" showed the emergence of the New Age concept into mainstream awareness.

Term "New Age"

Use of the term New Age began in the mid 1970s, reflected in the title of a new monthly periodical, the New Age Journal, and was taken up by several thousand small metaphysical book and gift stores that increasingly defined themselves as "New Age bookstores". In the mid 1980s, the term was further popularized by the American mass media to describe the alternative spiritual subculture, including activities all the way from meditation, channeling, reincarnation, crystals, psychic experience, to holistic health or environmentalism, or belief in anomalous phenomena, or for other “unsolved mysteries” such as UFOs, Earth mysteries and crop circles.

Activities deemed to be New Age

might include: participation in study or meditation groups, attendance at new age lectures and fairs; the purchase of new age books, music, or different products such as crystals or incense; healing or energy pyramids; or patronage of fortune-tellers, healers and spiritual counselors.