New Age, Socialism and Other Millennarisms: Affirming and Struggling with (Post)socialism

This article focuses on one of the most successful proselytising religious phenomena in postsocialist countries: New Age. Rather than considering it as a sort of postsocialist curiosity, I compare New Age, as a millenarianist movement, with socialism, a rival millenarian movement. As millenarianist movements, New Age and socialism shared many common characteristics; however, in many ways they were radically opposed to each other. The situation has changed in the postsocialist era. What was previously New Age opposition to the social reality has now become an affirmation of the new social context in postsocialism. Those aspects in which New Age and socialism used to agree are the same aspects which are now at odds with postsocialism. Hence core socialist values have been brought into the new social reality.