Semiotic analysis of new age healing practices

Human beings have benefited from religious elements in their centuries-long adventure of making sense of the world; they have been able to shed light on the path of life with mythical, magical and esoteric teachings. Civilizations that started to abandon religious structures and institutions with modernization continued to build their modern social structures until the mid-1980s. This period is defined by elements such as secularization, rationalization, democratization, individualization and the development of scientific thought. The phenomenon of rationalization was undoubtedly the main source of modernity and the social changes associated with it. In education, faith, science, medicine, culture, art and literature, traditional constructs were replaced by rational reason and the pragmatist trend. The traditional man, who sought answers to the questions he sought answers to in his daily life through faith, turned into the modern individual who found the answers he sought through rational reason and secular beliefs. The modern individual was rational, pragmatist and secular. Although the secularization theory that the process of rationalization would -inevitably - remove the influence of religion from the map of human meaning was accepted for many years, especially towards the end of the eighties, the fact that the religious/religious influence did not disappear, but evolved in the process of the individual's self-understanding and reintegrated into social life was confronted. The new age system of religion and beliefs, which the late modern period constructed with an individual-centered, pragmatist and hedonist approach, was seen as a way out of the social, cultural, economic inequalities and subjective and structural/institutional handicaps brought about by modernity. The fact that the medical institution, one of these structures, abandoned the treatment of the individual from a holistic perspective and adopted materialist health policies that reduced the individual to a mere living organism left its approach to holistic health and human structure in an uncertain position. With the proliferation of new age diseases caused by the modern lifestyle and especially the stress burden of urban life, the modern individual has sought new age healing methods. The modern individual could be cured by choosing from a wide range of Western and/or Eastern-based therapies, free from modern medicine and its uncertainties. As a result, the sacred individual, who is a part of this neoliberal predicament, has become a figurehead in the process of reproducing social, cultural and economic predicaments. Keywords: Cult of the Individual, Neoliberalism, New Age Healing Practices, Post-secularism, Semiotics.