A new look at the cultic milieu

The church-sect-cult typology has flaws when dealing with the organisational side of New Age Spirituality. One way to face this conundrum is to shift to a paradigm within sociology which accommodates the fluidity of the New Agers, i.e. the network paradigm. However, even if this paradigm explains the New Age form of aggregation in a better fashion, I argue that the notion of cult is still valuable because it describes various cells within the network paradigm. The task of this paper is thus to combine the concepts of cults and cultic milieu with the recent network paradigm, and to offer a viable sociological tool that is applicable to contemporary late twentieth/early twenty-first century developments.