The above account, which reads like so many spiritual initiations of the last several years, is actually taken from the eighteenth century, during America's first Great Awakening. As new as the New Age appeared, it is only the last in the lineage of several epochs when the world has awakened, stirred, quaked, or otherwise been called to the realm of the visionary, mystical, and spiritual. It is no mere coincidence that several of these spiritual awakenings have occurred under significant Uranus-Neptune alignments: the ministry of Jesus, the flight of Muhammad and the establishment of Islam, the rise of German lay mysticism and the teachings of Meister Eckhart, and the first stirrings of transcendentalism in America.

The New Age was the latest revival of the spirit of great religious feeling, visionary insight into the spiritual dimension of life, and influx of mystical union with something greater than our individual selves. The religious developments of the 1980's and 1990's were a strange admixture of Eastern and Western religious teachings, taking liberally from esoteric and exoteric strands of Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, theosophy, human potential movements, neopaganism and the occult sciences, nineteenth century spiritualism and indigenous traditions. Perhaps Richard Tarnas best captured the prevailing religious tone of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction with the following cataloguing of religious and spiritual streams that awakened and converged during the era: "The tremendous upswelling of interest today in an astonishing multiplicity of spiritual paths and traditions, in esoteric disciplines, in the transpersonal movement, in meditation and mystical religious traditions, in Jungian and archetypal psychology, in mythology and ancient religions, in shamanism and indigenous traditions, in the recovery of Goddess spirituality and feminine dimensions of the divine, in ecofeminist spirituality, in psychedelic self-exploration and new forms of experiential psychotherapy that effect profound changes of consciousness, in the emergence of holistic and participatory paradigms in virtually every field, in the unprecedented convergence of science and spirituality." ⁷

Regardless of religious orientation, sex, gender, ethnicity, or class, individuals and groups were getting "turned on" to the spiritual. Either through undergoing one-time peak experiences of incredible intensity or plateau states through dedicated religious practice, the spiritual dimension of life was entering through the cracks of our ordinary or otherwise secular lives. Housewives in the heartland began channeling, businessmen began receiving visions and became prophets of coming earth changes, students made pilgrimages to religious sites across the globe, lovers were indoctrinated into the strange land of spontaneous kundalini awakening, and former atheists began participating in communal events such as the "harmonic convergence." The numinous dimension cracked the walls of consensus reality: statues of Christ and Mary were seen to have cried tears, crosses of light were reportedly seen by thousands, mysterious healing waters allegedly cured otherwise terminal illnesses, and mysterious travelers thought to be spiritual masters made visitations to many. Crystals, ascension, angels, light bodies, reincarnation, meditation, and out-of body experiences—it was too much, too fast for some, just right for others, and not enough for a few.

As much as there was an otherworldliness to the New Age movement, one can't ignore the political and gender-based dimensions of the movement as well. Both sexes were looking to get in touch with the Neptunian divine feminine that had been ignored in social and religious contexts for years. In particular, women, looking to get out from under the patriarchal envisioned sky god of Judeo-Christian religion, began to resuscitate goddess worship in many forms and faces. Female ordination increased exponentially in most protestant denominations during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, with some denominations allowing female ordination for the first time. The resurgence of the female face of the divine also saw a grass-roots revival of faith in the Virgin Mary and an astonishing increase in academic reinterpretations of Mary.