The New Age and New Religious Movements: Eclectic, Individualistic Spiritual and Religious Tourism Carole M. Cusack University of Sydney Introduction New religious movements (NRMs) have been variously described as religions that emerged from the nineteenth century onwards (an early example being the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded by Joseph Smith in 1830), and as being of more recent origin, in the mid- to late-twentieth century up to the present (Ashcraft 2018). There are scholarly disagreements about whether the defining characteristic of such groups is their ‘newness’ (Barker 2014), or whether, given no new religion is completely original, historical links with ‘parent’ traditions offer a more accurate way to classify NRMs (Melton 2004, 76). The New Age is often treated as a sub-group of NRMs, although early scholars of the phenomenon noted that it was more fluid and eclectic than many NRMS, which had strong organisational boundaries. The New Age and many NRMs had in common their origins in the “cultic milieu” (Campbell 1972), a reservoir of alternative and non-mainstream beliefs and practices that were rejected by Enlightenment science and Western Christianity alike. The secularization of Western culture, which saw the Christian churches retreat from public life, experience diminished membership, and lose relevance for sizeable sectors of the population, was an enabling context for the growth of NRMs. The secularized public space encouraged those who were dissatisfied with both traditional Christianity and modern science, “seekers” as Colin Campbell termed them (Campbell 1972), to experiment with the spiritual marketplace that was facilitated by late capitalism (Roof 1999). The spiritual marketplace is a powerful lens through which to view contemporary spiritual seekers, who reject the ‘New Age’ label yet are engaged in similar practices; it is also a reality that drives many of these activities, including “secular pilgrimage” (Digance 2006) and “spiritual tourism” (Norman 2011; Norman 2012). These two phenomena overlap and stand in relation to religious pilgrimage and secular tourism. All these forms of travel have the capacity to be life-transforming (Cohen 1979), and for certain Western individuals the encounter with the ‘other’ and the journey into the self, synergistic processes, are spiritual rather than recreational. Just as NRMs often have parent traditions, spiritual (formerly New Age) activities have evolved from older beliefs and groups. Wouter J. Hanegraaff situated the New Age in a secular, open marketplace which rendered previously esoteric and occult ideas and cultural strands both publicly available and commodified (Hanegraaff 1996). The sacred sites that are the focus for NRMs are fewer and more specific in appeal than those that appeal to the spiritual milieu. This is explicable in terms of NRMs having an exclusive approach to institutional religious belonging, and because their comparatively recent origin means that sites of religious significance, whether natural or constructed, may not emerge immediately. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a case in point; it is almost two centuries old, and yet going on pilgrimage as a devotional or quasi-devotional activity is a recent phenomenon. Sites of interest to Mormons include the 150 acre Sacred Grove in Palmyra, New York, where the founder Smith’s first vision occurred (Brown 2018), and the