When you’ve been an experimenter with New Age - type stuff for a while, you start to connect the dots. Most of the things you will find - courses, books, orations, oracular offerings, healings, meditations and more - plug into universal human angst, anxiety and longing, and draw on various ancient practices, wisdoms or long- held beliefs.
Consider the popularity of oracle decks, which revolve around shamanistic principles (invisible spirits existing in the visible world), the occult, divinity, nature and spirituality. Once again, the options are numerous; something for every traveller. While it’s not unusual to see indigenous mythologies or figures from Eastern religions and traditions in card decks, I was surprised when I flipped through The Divine Feminine Oracle by Meggan Watterson, just one deck that draws on many traditions. Not unlike the goddess decks in the oracle marketplace, this one also brings in the feminine energies often referred to as ascended masters. Where Watterson truly departs from the norm is her inclusion of Muslim women from Islamic history: Rabi’a al-Adawiyya, the Sufi mystic and saint; and a veiled Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammed.
In her book Wellmania, Brigid Delaney’s description of her search for serenity through religion explores the idea of ‘spiritual shopping’. She speaks of global journeys that brought her into contact with the world’s major religions, but also people who had reinvented them, stripping them ‘for parts’ to deliver ‘something new, modern and strange’.
Global cultures are the make-up of New Age
Global cultures are the make-up of New Age. Perhaps it’s a distillation process of sorts for the restless traveller: we accumulate knowledge, and recognise that older traditions understand human complexity and desire in ways that still tap into the emotional and spiritual experience of being human. The New Age tends to ‘innovate’ things, but it plays with timeless truths. Just about everything I have encountered over the years, and continue to find, is a reinterpretation of philosophies and belief systems and ideas that have served humans for millennia.
There is no denying that cultural and religious appropriation - or worse, theft - occurs across many industries. You see it often in modern gastronomy: how many Western chefs are experts in another culture’s cuisine, or offer a fusion of East and West? It can get political in food, too. There is a difference between being influenced by flavours or food, and claiming them as your own. Do you want the cheap food court version with no nutritional value, or the authentic, nourishing one? Similarly, do you want the bargain- basement pre-packaged crystal kit, or the one you know has been imported honestly and fairly?
A friend recently raised this when she told me that she struggles to do yoga. She feels like it’s not her culture, that it’s disingenuous to attend classes. I’m not convinced that’s true. Yoga was brought to the West by Indian monks (not Gwyneth Paltrow) and embraced heartily in many forms. It is OK to have a Western audience. Experiences don’t necessarily belong to one culture. Having said that, I do believe it is inappropriate to disrespectfully traffic in cultural and religious traditions, using them incorrectly or dangerously, or purely for profit.
The troubling result of blind appropriation or wild embrace without understanding can be found in the recent success of a Japanese woman who has taught people about how decluttering their possessions will change their lives.
Amal Awad, author of 'In My Past Life I Was Cleopatra'. (Image: Hoda Afshar) Source: Hoda Afshar
Marie Kondo exploded onto the scene with her book, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up, and a series on Netflix, which sees the diminutive and softly spoken Japanese woman enter the homes of American families and instruct them on her KonMari method (disposing of or giving away anything that doesn’t ‘spark joy’, and following a particular folding technique for clothes).
Even though Westerners jumped on Kondo’s work, swore by it, decluttered feverishly and drove op-shop workers insane following the Netflix series, they also didn’t fully understand it.
Writing for HuffPost, Margaret Dilloway thoughtfully tackles this ignorance, with an article headlined ‘What White, Western Audiences Don’t Understand About Marie Kondo’s “Tidying Up”’. Dilloway points to the Shinto roots of Kondo’s method. She recalls how her mother, who ‘practised a Shinto mindset, stubbornly and daily’ at home, guided her to an idea that all creations deserved respect. Her mother would instruct her to clap her hands three times, ‘so the kami know you’re here’.
‘Kami are Shinto spirits’ that exist everywhere, in every being thing and nature, Dilloway explains, before delving into Shinto animism and its concepts. Dilloway artfully unpacks Shinto ways of life, which sees observers treat objects they own as having value rather than as disposable.
Dilloway notes the disparaging comments and memes, criticisms that insulted Japanese culture and mockery that was xenophobic, even from peers who are ‘otherwise empathetic and culturally sensitive’. She cites white writer Anakana Schofield who, in an article for The Guardian, seems offended by the suggestion to tap on books to ‘wake them up’. She indignantly mocks tapping books with ‘fairy finger motions’, arguing that reading its contents aloud achieves this. Schofield points to the ‘woo-woo nonsense territory we are in’.
The New Age looks enlightened and exotic, exciting and mystical. It is otherworldly and expansive, but it borrows freely from non- Anglo cultures. It is based on ideas, beliefs and knowledge that is as old as human civilisation, except it’s also modernised, shrink- wrapped and sold to the masses in convenient bite- sized chunks.
The world is increasingly accessible in its globalisation. In Western multicultural societies, it’s easy to import exotic and mysterious traditions, otherness that speaks your language.
The world is increasingly accessible in its globalisation. In Western multicultural societies, it’s easy to import exotic and mysterious traditions, otherness that speaks your language. Writing for NITV in Australia, Natalie Cromb lays into the generous pilfering of cultural iconography and sacred objects: the white artist who dons a geisha outfit in a music video; the lingerie model who wears a Native American headdress as she struts down the runway in her underwear. ‘Indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to their culture being appropriated by non-Indigenous people and due to their minority status, most often are not listened to by the mainstream populace,’ she writes.
Cromb also calls for a better understanding of when appreciation becomes appropriation. ‘The difference between appreciation and appropriation comes down to respect.’
It’s something I spoke to oracle card expert Colette Baron-Reid about, about a year after I saw her at CYL! In Phoenix. In recent times, she has faced serious challenges to her overall thinking - a journey that has been important, but also liberating.
‘I’d adopted the kind of hippy New Age attitude that all of it is based in genuine appreciation and desire to show diversity, like many of my contemporaries in this arena,’ she told me. Good intentions are fine, but are not enough. Rather than play out a lengthy and ineffective apology, Colette hired two diversity and inclusivity, and anti- racism coaches. She also inspected her own ancestry and spiritual influences.
‘Once you start opening your eyes you can’t unsee these things... Some people refuse this when they’re hit with it. But I honestly don’t think we can ignore any of it if we want what we say we want - a unified world!’
Colette dived deep to address the situation. ‘I faced my own personal biases, looked at how my privilege plays into things, and came to realise how I was participating in a harmful system,’ she said. ‘I started to make changes, which I will likely be working on for the rest of my life.’
In My Past Life I Was Cleopatra by Amal Awad. Source: Murdoch Books
Colette calls herself a student in an ongoing situation. ‘But I believe we’re all responsible for how we engage the subject of racism and appropriation and why we need to change.’
With eleven decks behind her, Colette has applied a new lens to her efforts, revisiting her decks to address the use of Native American imagery following numerous criticisms. Colette’s publisher, Hay House (founded by Louise Hay), was amenable to her request to rework some of her decks - replacing certain cards, no matter the expense. Moving forward, Colette will not be using any specific Indigenous art and she removed a card depicting the Native American figure White Buffalo Calf Woman from her Goddess Power Oracle. ‘Once I dove into the history of how the symbolic pipe was gifted to the Lakota tribe, I realised that I was not successful in being as respectful as I hoped. The Eagle King in Wisdom of the Hidden Realms had to go, too, and be replaced.’
‘Yes, awkward; yes, difficult; but so what? If any progress is to be made, we need to get with the program and do our own work on this.’
Colette’s Wisdom of the Oracle deck has seen some new card designs to be more diverse. ‘I may be white but the world is not all white and this is part of the evolution of things,’ she said. ‘Yes, awkward; yes, difficult; but so what? If any progress is to be made, we need to get with the program and do our own work on this.’
Colette pointed to up-and-coming deck creators who are already wise to the importance of cultural awareness.
‘Bottom line: there is nothing New in the New Age, including how all this plays out. I am committed to do my part to make the world a better place, to see unity in diversity and to be part of the positive changes that are happening and not expect everything to play out “nicely”.’
‘If we really are “one” in spirit we need to dismantle whatever it is we’re doing that doesn’t support that. One imperfect, messy, awkward and joyful day at a time.’
Images and text from In My Past Life I Was Cleopatra by Amal Awad. Murdoch Books RRP $32.99.
