This essay will attempt to explore esoteric elements and connections in Hermann Hesses' final novel Das Glasperlenspiel and whether the narratives and beliefs held by the fictional realm of Castalia and the protagonist Josef Knecht fit into the tradition of western esotericism as defined by Kocku von Stuckrad and Antoine Faivre respectively. An attempt will also be made to explore why the novel has come to influence modern esoteric movements in what Wouter Hanegraaff defines as "New Age religion".

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It was expected that by the end of the twentieth-century, due to human achievement and technology, religion would be a mere fading memory in the minds and the history books of modernized western people. This has been expressed through the secularization thesis, which describes a “disenchantment” of western culture. Over the last ten years, however, there has been a growing movement seeking to re-enchant this culture by exploring and reconsidering religion, myth and spirituality. One of the most powerful expressions of this is popularly referred to as the New Age Movement. This thesis looks at the relationship between New Age and secularization theory, examining the reasons for an apparent turn away from secularization. By using Jacques Ellul’s interpretation of the history of the sacred, this thesis proposes that far from being a time of secularization, modernism ushered in an era where the sacred canopy of Christianity was replaced by a new sacred expression in the form of science and technology. In recent years, however, the perceived failure of modernism has generated a search for a new set of sacred expressions in western society. New Age and postmodernism are vehicles which people are using to initiate this search. Currently both phenomena are looking to three sources in order to recover meaning and control over life: the past and the distant, nature and the self. The theoretical challenge New Age and postmodernism represents to the secularization thesis is made concrete in the geography of the New Age Movement. This thesis makes a physical connection between the New Age and areas of gentrification, which contradicts the assumptions of the secularization thesis by proving that an area which should be highly secularized is in fact a place of spiritual exploration. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

The aim of this study is to get a better understanding of why people turn to astrology in todays secularized Sweden. More specifically, the purpose of the study is to investigate whether astrology functions as a mean of self-fulfillment in the pursuit of a deep self. Petteri Pietikäinen's five aspects of the deep self were used as theory in the study to define the concept of the deep self. To conduct the study, qualitative semi-structured interviews were used. Eight astrologically interested individuals participated in individual interviews. The result shows that astrology plays a function in all aspects of a deep self. How and when the respondents turned to astrology looked different. With everything from divination, narrative about the past and as maps of the deep self.

Many scholars have examined the religious phenomenon known as the New Age Movement, resulting in a large body of literature on the subject. Despite this abundance of prior research, only a small number of studies conducted in the United States investigate what it means to be a "New Ager" from the perspective of the members. In order to contribute to the academic understanding of New Age identities and communities, I conducted an ethnographic study of an alternative spiritual center in the Tampa Bay area, here called the Spirit Grove. My research includes over fifty hours of participant observations, ten in-depth interviews, and an analysis of documents collected at the center. My findings indicate that Spirit Grove members typically follow a career trajectory consisting of five stages. After they become members of the community, practitioners tend to interpret their journey as a spiritual discovery. Next, I identify and describe five community practices that are performed at the center, including discovering the self, healing the self, embracing diversity, creating order, and finding proof. In the conclusion, I discuss the larger implications of this study, including its limitations and possibilities for future research.

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Dark Retreat - to spend days in total darkness. A qualitative content analysis of people's experiences of dark retreats and the potential health benefits of such a retreat. This essay will examine spiritual and personal development YouTube channels where the content is about what it is like to do a dark retreat. The questions of the study is if they talk about that there are any health and physical benefits in doing a dark retreat and how their experience can be explained. This is linked to one of the key messages in the study which is to point to the altered state of consciousness and what life-changing transformation and positive change that can bring for the person who have experienced a transcendent and mystic state of consciousness. A dark retreat is one practice used in the tantric Tibetan Buddhist movement "the Great Perfection" Dzogchen where a person is for a long time in total darkness to gain knowledge of the emptiness of everything. The dark retreat tradition that is the focus of this study are linked to the new age movement that differs from the Dzogchen tradition regarding dark retreat in that there are no masters or rules that the person doing their dark retreat must follow. There is also an underlying commercial agenda for why people share their experiences of what it is like to do a dark retreat and upload their videos on YouTube. The pattern that became clear with the collection of the material was that those who are doing a dark retreat are working with some form of spiritual and personal development and it is these services that they want to sell by creating an interest by sharing their dark retreat experiences. This is something that is addressed and discussed in the study. The methods are conversation analysis to determine how genuine people are when they talk about their experiences in the dark. Content analysis is used to be able to find themes in the material for how the people experience their dark retreat stay, the focus on themes, phrases and words is linked to health or life-changing transformation. The findings from the content analysis are that people talk about surrender/acceptance when the situation became intense in the dark, that they met themselves/gained new insights, got a glimpse of relationships that have not been good and where there are things to work with and that there were a lot who were positive about their dark retreat stay.

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Studien undersökte huruvida naturljud och lugnande musik i new age-genren kunde reducera matematikångest hos universitetsstudenter genom ett digitalt medium. Syftet med undersökningen var också att jämföra dessa med varandra. Inspiration kom från tidigare studier som visat att klassisk musik har underlättat den här typen av ångest, samt att naturljud kan åstadkomma en lugnande effekt hos människor. Två kompositioner skapades: ett musikstycke och en ljudkomposition. Dessa fick deltagarna lyssna på samtidigt som de genomförde uträkningar från en matematik[1]hemsida, för att efteråt svara på tio intervjufrågor. Hälften av deltagarna upplevde någon grad av matematikångest. Kompositionerna upplevdes som lugnande, förutom vissa enskilda ljud som kändes distraherande för några av testpersonerna. Ungefär 50 % av deltagarna föredrog musikstycket, medan resterande tyckte bättre om ljudkompositionen. Framtida arbete diskuterades, där förslag på hur undersökningen skulle kunna anpassas under en längre tid lades fram.

Jediism is a new religious phenomenon where fictitious material is used as religious source material. The phenomenon is called hyper-real religion because the fictitious source material being used in the real world makes it ‘hyper-real’. This study explored Jediism and its usage of Star Wars as a religious source material.  Semi structured interviews with participants from the two largest Jedi communities were conducted: Temple of the Jedi Order and Force Academy. The informats only answered about the Light Aspect of the community, which means that there is still more to be explored in Jediism as it has sides primarily focused on the Dark and the Shadow Aspects of the ‘Force’. Furthermore the phenomenon of Jediism is put in the context within the theoretical approaches of secularization, sacralization and post secularity by Liselotte Frisk and Peter Åkerbäck. By using this theoretical framework the questions regarding who the people are that are looking for this kind of religion, why they chose to be part of it and how the informants from Temple of the Jedi Order and Force Academy speak of Jediism in terms of religious ideas and praxis were explored.     It is argued that Star Wars is the main source material for the studied communities and that it's part of a larger religious movement in Europe and the U.S through the processes of secularization, sacralization and post secularity. Jediism and hyper-real religion, as is shown by this study, should be included in the larger religious landscape that has been shaped by other forms of New Age religion.