Gilhus/New Age in Norway, 9. Contemporary Spiritualism in Norway

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.