As the end of the millennium approaches, the New Age seems to be everywhere but continues to elude specific definition. The genealogy of New Age thinking can be traced to the sixties and the Age of Aquarius, and, much earlier, to Positive Thinking, Mind Cure, Christian Science, Theosophy, and spiritualism, and even further back, to Transcendentalism and the influence of of Indian religions on American Protestantism. But the New Age cannot be accounted for in terms of a single root influence. It includes phenomena as diverse as Yoga and the Kabbalah, holistic healing and Wicca, veganism and acupuncture, contact with angels and spiritual computer interfaces, wilderness trips and tours of holy places, self-help and Jungian psychology, goddess revivals, and even the mythopoetic men's movement, the subject of the preceding chapter. It is a decidedly eclectic collection of phenomena, drawing from a variety of cultural and religious traditions, past and present, Western and Eastern, modern and primitive, familiar and exotically Other.

There are at least two ways of viewing this ferocious eclecticism. Supporters praise the New Age's freedom from dogma and capacity to acknowledge that many traditions offer valuable insight into how to integrate body, mind, and spirit with the powers of the universe. From this point of view, the New Age is the culmination of forces that have been developing throughout the millennium, and the movement's miscellaneous constitution is a strength, not a weakness. Skeptics counter that the New Age is a cluttered void tautologically defined by whatever happens to be featured in magazines or housed within bookstores on New Age shelves at any given moment. From this point of view, the movement's variety shows it to be rudderless, lacking in substance and direction.