Creativity, auto-ethnography, and the reinvention of sacred space in new age spirituality and healing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

New Age practices and their ritualized actions have been primarily based on the creation of sacred spaces through immediate interaction, proximity, affect, healing, bodily engagement, and emotional exchange. In the COVID 19 pandemic context, however, such spiritual intimacy has been challenged if not compromised. New Age practitioners have faced the necessity to become ritually and spiritually innovative and establish new forms of sacred spaces to accommodate their performances. Drawing on long-term fieldwork on the theme of New Age spirituality and healing in Lisbon, Portugal, and Athens, Greece, this article offers an account of how New Age spiritual creativity was performed in the context of the pandemic, while exploring how different yet intertwined sacred spaces are created, and the role that (auto)ethnographic embodiment and research knowledge plays in this process.