Bloomsbury Prem Rawat and Counterculture: Glastonbury and New Spiritualities

Ron Geaves demonstrates how the convergence of Guru Maharaj Ji and Glastonbury Fayre 1971 reveals an important piece in the jigsaw that forms the bricolage that came to be known as New Age, or, more neutrally, contemporary spirituality. The book charts the discovery of Guru Maharaj Ji in India in 1969 by a small number of British, and then, North American hippies, and how his arrival in Britain in June 1971 and his speech from the pyramid stage at the Fayre at just 13 years of age, escalated his activities to become one of the key players influencing 1970s counter-culture spirituality. Both Glastonbury and Prem Rawat (Guru Maharaj Jis actual given name) have gone on to re-emerge in significantly different identities to the one presented in 1971. The meeting between the two demonstrates how alternative spiritualities were being formed in the 1960s and went on to develop into the New Age counter-culture and eventually permeated mainstream cultures in Britain and the USA.