chapter 11

Unconventional Religiosities and the New Age

in Vale do Amanhecer (the Valley of the Dawn),
Brasilia
Deis Siqueira

Introduction

The birth of Brasilia was accompanied by two grand creation myths: the
Utopian City and the Promised Land (Siqueira and Bandeira, 1997). The former
is found in the urban planning and futuristic architecture of the Pilot Plan.
This myth converges with another, mystical one, based on the prophecies of
Don Bosco, the Salesian saint from Italy who had a dream-premonition that a
new civilization, the Promised Land, would be born in the territory where the
capital of Brazil was later built. These two myths form the basis of a mystical-
esoterical phenomenon that calls Brasilia the mystical city, and capital of the
third millenium, or of the New Age.
As it happens, Don Bosco’s prophecy is coming true. There are a growing
number of unconventional religiosities in the capital and in the region. These
groups give themselves many different titles; for example, they might call
themselves an Association, or consider themselves Knights; they might be a
Center, a City, a College, a Space, or a Faith. They might be called Children, a
Fraternity, Forces, a Foundation, or a Group; or refer to themslves as an
Institution, a Legion, a Movement, an Order, a Bridge, a Sanctuary, a Society, or
a Temple (Siqueira, 2002, 2003 and 2003a). They are unconventional because
they do not claim to be religions; they declare themselves to be anti-clerical,
anti-hierarchical, and especially, anti-institutional. They do not classify them-
selves as Catholics Protestant, Spiritist or Afro-Brazilian, that is to say as
belonging to any of the four varieties of religion institutionally recognized as
such in Brazil.
Theirs is a religiosity that has been described as a broader religious field, a
diffused religion, a free floating-flexible religiosity or religious identity, a new
religious space, or as new forms of the sacred in contemporary society. It has
been referred to as a new mystical-esoterical sensibility, a non-religious holi-
ness; also as a sacralization of individual relations of transcendence. It has been
described in terms of a new syncretic religiosity, new religious movements and
new forms of religion, and has been regarded as a mystical-esoteric nebula with

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004316485_015

244 Siqueira

diffuse creeds, a heteredox nebula, and as a secularized religiosity. It has been

placed in the category of secular religions, and has been called inorganic reli-
gion. It has been referred to as a diversity of identities, or as diversity in New
Age ways of esoteric-holistic belonging; and has been called a multi-value and
versatile Mystical-Esoteric nebula (Champion, 1990; Heelas, 1996; Hervieu-Léger,
1993; Mardones, 1994; Piette, 1993; Carozzi, 1998; Rodríguez, 2000).
It has been established that in spite of the difficulties in defining New Age,
there is a consensus that it began in the 1960s, in the United States, as a small
counter-cultural movement reacting against the hegemonic values of modern
Western culture and society. This tendency, then, based on the possibility that
a New Age might appear or be created, was part of a wider movement of dis-
content and opposition that included the recovery of pre-capitalist and non-
western values, practices and beliefs, that had been denied or devalued by
modernity. The movement included the search for new unconventional religi-
osities, but was not limited to that. At any rate, this search for unconventional
religiosities is one of the tentacles of the movement and is in turn associated
with many, not necessarily or directly, religious, mystical or esoteric practices
(such as therapies, diet and health care regimes, massages, meditations). Thus,
according to Magnani (1999:10), the New Age movement includes currents
deriving from Eastern religious traditions, as well as from the encounters
between contemporary science and ancient cosmology, indigenous traditions
and new environmental proposals.
The New Age movement can be understood as a non-centralized group
organized primarily in networks, which unites a variety of Western and Eastern
cultural traditions (Siqueira and Torre, 2008). Its practitioners may not always
identify themselves as followers or New Agers (Possamai, 2001), given that they
may be only occasional adherents and also that beliefs may be exchanged, sub-
stituted or combined, according to the tastes of each participant (Clark, 2006).
Fundamentally, the movement seeks to recuperate a sacred and spiritual expe-
rience, to such an extent that New Age customs are often referred to as spiri-
tual practices: Guerriero (2014) and Heelas and Woodhead (2005) refer to the
New Age as a Spiritual Revolution.
To understand the sacred from a New Age perspective, it is important to
understand the three key elements of its beliefs: (a) its critical, counter-cultural,
anti-dogmatic, anti-doctrinal, and anti-institutional posture, (b) its holism,
and (c) its presupposition that the divine is to be found in the interior of the
person, rather than being external to the self, distant, absolute and powerful.
New Age philosophy is not only based on a critical perspective of modern,
Western capitalist reality, including its hegemonic religious institutions, but is