At first glance, New Age spirituality and far-right politics seem worlds apart. Yet they share certain cultural undercurrents that can flow in very different directions depending on social context (Asprem & Dyrendal, 2015). • Distrust of institutions. Disillusionment with modern systems — medicine, government, religion — can motivate seekers to find truth elsewhere. But without discernment, that distrust becomes conspiracism (Uscinski & Enders, 2022). • Purity and authenticity. Ecological and bodily purity can be life-affirming, but purity discourse can also justify exclusion and essentialism (Langer, 2021). • Holism and hidden truth. “Everything is connected” can mean planetary empathy — or totalizing paranoia (Dyrendal, 2016). • Sovereignty and self-responsibility. Personal empowerment is crucial, but when disconnected from social reality, it aligns easily with libertarian or reactionary worldviews (Ward & Voas, 2011). These are malleable goals — capable of fostering pluralism and inclusivity, or exclusion and elitism. The ambivalence we’re tracing sits inside the legacy of Lebensreform—“life reform”—and earlier esoteric vitalism. Many of these milieus shared a cosmology sometimes called a “great chain of life”: spirit → soul/consciousness → life/nature → matter. The political fault line appears in which level is idealized - represents the core of the definition of the sacred. Emancipatory turn: life-as-becoming. Here the sacred is immanent—the living, conscious middle of the chain. Romantic Naturphilosophie treats nature as ensouled spirit. Feminist mystics like Helene Stöcker sacralized eros and creativity. In Steiner’s more humanistic strands, the “I” awakens through conscious participation in life, not its repression. Think Reich and later counterculture: the body as a site of liberation and integration of nature and freedom. Ethically this emphasizes creativity, mutuality, and pluralism (Carrette & King, 2005). Authoritarian turn: spirit-as-order. Here the sacred is a transcendent form above life—archetype, law, destiny. Everything lower is judged by conformity to that higher order. In völkisch mysticism, spirit becomes racial essence and “blood-and-soil” destiny; Nazi biopolitics ritualized this symbolism (Goodrick-Clarke, 1985; Kurlander, 2017; Staudenmaier, 2014). Traditionalists like Guénon/Evola cast modern life as a fall from primordial hierarchy; salvation is purification and obedience to cosmic order. Ethically this valorizes discipline, purity, and sacrifice.

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Ecology,Spirituality,Ecovillages,Community-led Initiatives,New Age,Authoritarianism,Emancipatory politics,Prefiguration