1 From New Age to Alternative Spirituality. Remarks on the Swiss Case Jörg Stolz and Joëlle Sanchez 1. Introduction The New Age has never begun. However much some may have hoped for it to arrive – nowadays most people agree, that we will probably have to do without that fabulous new era full of love, harmony, and unity. The failure of the New Age to arrive is one of the reasons for the fact that the so called New Age movement (in a narrow sense) does not exist anymore and that rituals, beliefs and ethical ideas, that presented themselves under the banner of the New Age, nowadays use new generic terms, such as « spirituality », « alternative spirituality », « esoterism » or « Mind – Body – Spirit ». This does not mean that the New Age movement should not interest us. True, the predictions have failed, the ambitious goals have not been reached – but from a sociological point of view the movement has had important social effects which can be observed even today. One of these effects is the fact that occult techniques and views have been modernized and brought to the attention of the societal mainstream. The occult has thus become socially acceptable. The structure of our article follows this argument. First, in a general part, we give our conception of « New Age ». We argue that it is theoretically fruitful to view New Age as a social movement which criticizes the current society, and which proposes at the same time certain means in order to remedy the perceived problems and thus to arrive at a totally new form of society (the New Age). In our view, the New Age movement has started in the 1960s and ended in the 1990s, giving way to a different phenomenon which might be called « alternative spirituality ». The same might be said for many modern industrialized states – and also for Switzerland. In a second part, we show for the specific case of Switzerland, that the New Age movement in Switzerland has indeed receded and given way to an « alternative spirituality » which has at least partly become mainstream. We try to show this with the help of examples of alternative spirituality in the media, in the Christian Churches, in the everyday beliefs of the Swiss and of alternative medicine. 2. New Age : A revivalist movement Among scholars, there have been long arguments concerning the « type of social phenomenon » one might best attribute to the « New Age » phenomenon. For example, it has been suggested to define New Age as an « ideology » (Lacroix), a « meta-network » (Zoccatelli), or even just a « slogan » (Frenschkowski). The concept which seems most plausible to us, sees New Age as a « social