The indigo-child idea did not stay put. Once a special kind of child could be named by an aura colour, further colours followed, and the New Age acquired a small taxonomy of spiritual identities, most of it traceable to a single author within a few years.
Crystal children were introduced by Doreen Virtue in The Crystal Children (2003) as a wave said to follow the indigos, born from roughly the turn of the millennium, gentler where the indigos were combative, and marked by late speech and large eyes. As with the indigo profile, the described traits overlap heavily with autism, and the same criticism applies: the framework offers a flattering spiritual reading of the very features that might otherwise prompt an assessment. Rainbow children were added as a still-later, still-purer wave, said never to have incarnated before and to arrive without karmic baggage. Virtue built much of this vocabulary and later, in 2017, publicly renounced her entire New Age output on becoming a Christian, which has not slowed the terms' circulation.
The adult counterpart to the special child is the lightworker, treated elsewhere in these notes, and around it a set of finer job-titles has grown:
- A wayshower is a lightworker cast as one who leads by visible example, having 'gone first' along a path others will follow.
- A gridworker or gatekeeper is held to work with the earth's energy grid and its supposed nodes and portals, rather than with individual people.
- An earth angel, a term Virtue popularised in Earth Angels (2002), names a person believed to be an angel, elemental or star-being incarnated in human form to help, and shading into the starseed vocabulary at its edge.
The common structure is worth naming. Each term converts a felt sense of difference, or of not belonging, into a spiritual vocation, and several attach that vocation to traits, sensitivity, difficulty with ordinary life, a sense of mission, that are open to gentler and to less flattering readings alike. Dated plainly, this is a body of vocabulary assembled largely between the late 1970s and the mid-2000s, much of it by identifiable authors selling identifiable books.