A profile of New Agers: social and spiritual aspects

In the literature, New Agers are profiled as urban, educated, middle-class and middle-aged, the majority being women-a portrait mainly based on quantitative analyses. This article aims at providing a richer sociological description through a qualitative analysis of thirty-five interviews conducted in 1996-97 in Melbourne. This qualitative approach to New Agers will describe them as religious individualists, as technical mystics, and as people who locate authority in their inner self. However, even if they perceive themselves as unique in this spirituality, they also mix with other people in 'affinitive' networks. They tend to move in or toward New Age through crises and through a consumption of New Age symbols that predispose, provoke and reinforce alternation to New Age.