In 2006 Rhonda Byrne releases The Secret, first as a film and then as a book: the law of attraction, ask and the universe answers, presented as the secret of the ages known to Plato and Einstein alike. The Secret outsells every predecessor, draws Oprah Winfrey's two-part endorsement, and marks the movement's full passage into the commercial mainstream, and its critics' charge that the New Age ends as a sales technique.
Tagged: New Age
The Event
- Date
- 2006 (exact)
- Era
- The Commercial Afterlife; Standard periodization of New Age history
- Location
- New York; today New York, New York
- Traditions
- New Age Spirituality
- Streams
- New Age
- Key figures
- Rhonda Byrne
- Key texts
- The Secret
Connections
Primary Sources
- Byrne, Rhonda. The Secret. New York: Atria, 2006.
Secondary Sources
- Hanegraaff, Wouter J. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
- Heelas, Paul. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
- York, Michael. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.
Provenance: HIST-1482; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.
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World View
New Age Spirituality
New Age spirituality is an eclectic search for the divine within: through healing, meditation, and ancient wisdom, each person awakens to their own sacred power.