This novel operates on two levels. First, it is a story concerning the fate of a young woman named Raven Adams, who is prompted into journeying westward after witnessing what she believes to be an omen. On another level, however, the novel is intended to be a philosophical questioning of western modes of “science-based” singular conceptualizations of reality, which argue that there is only one “real world” and anyone who deviates from this is “crazy,” “stupid,” or “wrong.” Raven as a character sees the world in terms of what might be called “magical thinking” in modern psychology; her closest relationship is with a living embodiment of a story, the ancient philosopher Diogenes, which she believes is capable of possessing others and directing her journey. As the story continues the reader comes to understand Raven’s perceptions of her reality, leading to a conceptualization of reality as being “multi-layered.” Eventually these layers are collapsed and unified in the final chapters. The novel makes use of many reference points including philosophy, classical mythology, folklore, religion, and internet social media in order to guide the reader along Raven’s story.

This thesis consists of a study of the motivational, cognitive and personality implications of adherence to New Age practices and beliefs. The New Age, unlike traditional Western religion, possesses no church-like structure and is usually characterised as a loose network of self-development practices, with a belief system centred on the spiritual evolution of the individual through successive reincarnations and the idea of a magical interconnectedness between all things. The studies carried out used a series of psychological measures, including self-report scales, analysis of self-concepts, autobiographical episodes and attributions to life events, and experimental visual and semantic tasks. Groups of traditional religious and non-religious individuals were also assessed to serve as contrasts to the New Age group. Following from previous sociological literature on the individualist character of the New Age, the first study dealt with individualist and collectivist motivations. New Age individuals were found to emphasise more individualistic values than Catholics, but still differed from non-religious individuals in that they stressed more self-transcendent universalism values and global-holistic self-concepts. This pattern was labelled as 'holistic individualism' and the second study sought to define it more accurately by focusing on the analysis of agency and communion motivations through the analysis of autobiographical episodes. In this study, the New Age group showed a higher frequency of agency and a lower frequency of communion themes than traditional religious and non-religious participants and, in particular, emphasised life stories of self-empowerment by non-material 'energies' or entities. The last two studies looked more closely at the New Age tendency towards highly abstract cognitions, in particular its sense of connectedness, by focusing on magical thinking and personality traits. New Age individuals were found to attribute events to magical rather than naturalistic causes much more often than the other groups. This cognitive disposition was confirmed in the last study, which found a positive association between the adherence to New Age practices and schizotypal personality traits, emotional hypersensitivity, and cognitive-perceptual looseness. Women were also found to be keener adherents to the New Age than men. Given this set of results, it is suggested that the New Age should be thought of primarily as a magical, rather than a religious, system of practices and beliefs. It is also proposed that an individual may be drawn to the New Age not only because of its modern individualistic appeal, but in virtue of possessing a particular personality and cognitive disposition towards magical ideation and unusual perceptual experiences.

The current study examined the relations among internalization of sociocultural attitudes towards appearance, magical thinking, muscle dysmorphia, and eating disorder symptoms in models of obligatory exercise for males and females. The results indicated that several different developmental trajectories exist that vary from person to person. Several of the models proposed were supported or partially supported. The first model demonstrated mediation and moderation; at low levels of magical thinking, eating disorder attitudes and behaviors fully mediated the relation between internalization of societal standards of appearance and obligatory exercise. The second model was supported for the female sample, and indicated that obligatory exercise partially mediated the relation between internalization of societal standards of appearance and eating disorder attitudes and behaviors. The second model assessing eating disorder attitudes and behaviors for the male sample was not supported. A third model evaluated a mediational effect of muscle dysmorphia, but was not evident. However, when magical thinking was high, muscle dysmorphia significantly predicted obligatory exercise. The fourth model evaluated obligatory exercise as a mediator of the relation between internalization of societal standards of appearance and muscle dysmorphia, and partial mediation was demonstrated for the males. The fourth model was not supported for the females; instead, it appears that both internalization of societal standards of appearance and obligatory exercise contribute to muscle dysmorphia. Collectively, the results of this study support the use of a transdiagnostic perspective when designing intervention and treatment programs for individuals who may suffer from eating disorders, obligatory exercise and/or muscle dysmorphia.

This M.A. thesis deals with the topic of magical thinking in the adult population. The theoretical section of the thesis summarizes the existing findings in regard to the theory and research of magical thinking. The empirical section is dedicated to the development and subsequent validation of the new testing method devised to measure inclinations to magical thinking. Proving the method's validity is firstly aimed at gathering convergent proofs based on the relations towards methods measuring similar constructs, the external criterion being the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (RPBS) and the subscale of Esoteric and Personal Superstitious Thinking of the Contrastive Thinking Inventory (CTI). The second part of the research focuses on the validity proofs gathered in relation to the categorical variable - group affiliation - where we test a selective collection of the general public against a selection of technical and natural scientists and a selection of people attending courses with esoteric content. The research results confirm the method's reliability based on the split-half method and they also confirm a high coefficient of inner consistence of Cronbach's alpha. The results of the validation study show a strong correlation between the research inventory and selected scales of the CTI method as...

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