New Age in Norway - Ingvild Sælid Gilhus

New Age in Norway - Ingvild Sælid Gilhus

Contemporary Spiritualism in Norway: Faith Assemblies and Market Products

New Age in Norway - Ingvild Sælid Gilhus

Anne Kalvig [+-]
Anne Kalvig is Professor of Religious Studies at University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research interests are alternative therapy, alternative medicine, new religiousity, spiritualism, shamanism, popular culture, gender and mediatization of religion. She is author of several articles, chapters and monographs, including The Rise of Contemporary Spiritualism (2016), and has co-edited the anthology Living Religion (2015, in Norwegian). She is chair of Finyar, The Nordic Association for Information and Research on New Religious Movements and Alternative Spirituality.

Description

Communication with spirits of the deceased has been one of the major themes of the New Age movement. It was an important current prior to and in the days of the Theosophical Society and similar innovations in the nineteenth century, and has been a lasting component of and impulse within modern New Age and alternative spirituality. In this chapter, I present spiritualism in contemporary Norway, offering an overview over a wide field that has not received much scholarly attention. I outline organizations with spiritualist content, as well as provide examples of actors and practices of spiritualism within a more loosely organized, market-oriented field. I thus consider how spiritualism is lived out in Norway today, and how the variegated forms, actors and organizations influence each other and contribute to a varied, yet identifiable, thematic field of transgressive communication – with the dead and with other entities in “the spirit world”. In my concluding remarks, I explore whether and how spiritualism in Norway today might be seen as religion here, there, anywhere and everywhere.

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Citation

Kalvig, Anne. Contemporary Spiritualism in Norway: Faith Assemblies and Market Products. New Age in Norway. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 181-203 Mar 2017. ISBN 9781781794173. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=28885. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.28885. Mar 2017

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