Mainly focusing on the big picture regarding the research concerning the religious sphere in Bronze Age Scandinavia, the research field has been missing out on the smaller picture. The results have a tendency to produce a picture where the big landscape monuments, social structures and cosmology appear in the foreground. This essay is a comment to this phenomena and a methodological and terminological discussion regarding the way in which we as archaeologist?s works with questions about religion and rites. The main task though is to make an attempt in trying to identify the ritual performers and to answer the question whether it's possible or not to do that.

This paper deals with the question of whether the symbolic language of the late Neolithic and middle Bronze Age was transferred from ceremonial monuments and barrows into the domestic sphere in the late Bronze Age. I will consider such elements as doorway orientation, the significance of boundaries and depositional practices to see if Early-Middle Iron Age settlements were indeed a major scene for ritual behaviour..

This essay is about the burial rites in the passage graves of Falbygden, Västergötland. My questions were: Can the burial ritual be understood by comparing the material culture inside and outside the tombs? What kind of grave offerings did the dead have? Most peculiar are all these beads of amber, what kind of meaning did they have? Was the position of the body a part of the ritual? The time period is the middle Neolithic.I selected four passage graves to investigate: Hjälmars rör (Falköping 3), Rössberga (Valtorp 2), Näs sn 7:2 Kvättak 5:1 and Frälsegården (Gökhem 94).My conclusion was that there are differences between the material culture inside and outside the tombs. Outside the ritual includes fire, inside the material culture are not burned. The material culture outside is more dominant than the finds inside, although the beads of amber are only represented inside and dominates the findings inside.

This thesis discusses South Scandinavian cup marks in general, and cup marks in Kronobergs County in particular. The question is whether the cup mark phenomena can be viewed as an ordinary family-based cult for a kind of everyday use, or more likely as a community passage ritual. The thesis also suggests that cup marks were made by ritual participants in, or in the process of trying to reach, an altered state of consciousness..

This essay concerns the Celts during the Iron Age, and their ritual practice in human sacrifice. The method applied is an eclectic historic-critic reading of the few classical sources that exist together with archeological material and scholars conclusions of literal sources and archeological material. The hypothesis is that human sacrifice in the Celtic realm not is to be seen as a primitive act of violence, but that it filled a social function to preserve society and the Celtic way of life.The question this essay strives to answer is Which function/s do human sacrifice fill in a Celtic context during the Iron Age? The question is analysed with the aid of Radcliffe-Brown?s and Catherine Bell?s theories on ritual, as well as Malcolm Chapman?s postmodern ideas of the conception of the Celtic. The conclusion of the essay is that the prime functions of Celtic human sacrifice are to preserve society and the Celtic social way of life, combined with an aim to eliminate disturbing elements in that same society, such as crime and individuals who did not fit in to the social community..

Vårt syfte har varit att exemplifiera hur fredagsmys kan gestalta sig i barnfamiljer och vad fredagsmyset kan innebära för familjens individer och individernas familj samt dess sammanhållning. Detta är en kvalitativ undersökning. Vi har valt att anta ett induktivt angreppssätt vilket innebär att vi har utgått från vårt material och därefter har alla uppsatsens delar färdigställts. Vi har med andra ord gått upptäckandets väg. Vi har varit intresserade av att undersöka varför människor gör som de gör och vad det har förbetydelse för dem men även varit intresserade av att finna mönster.

The aim in this bachelor thesis is to describe and analyze ritual performance and transference of religious traditions in some Hindu homes in Varanasi (India). In particular from the children?s perspective. The curriculum of Religious Education in the Swedish schooling system focuses on religious life, expression and practice. Thus, this thesis is about ?lived Hinduism?, ritual performance and religious practices.

This essay describes the phases of funeral rituals between the Syrian/Assyrian, and compares the homeland with Sweden. It describes the stage of rituals according to Victor Turner schema of separation, margin or limin, and aggregation. The rituals religious significance agrees with Clifford Geertz?s theory about the importance of religious beliefs for the human being.

This thesis examines five deposits, some of which contain stone axes, at the settlement in V?nersn?s, Sweden. Two of them date to the late Mesolithic era. The aim is to explore the ritual world of the late Mesolithic in V?sterg?tland, Sweden and its relationship to the landscape.

Is there a specific tradition of songs within the swedish environmental movement? What kinds of music has been performed in different situations and what does it mean to the movement and its inner life? The essay deals with a town meeting and action against plans of establishing passenger flights at a former military airport in Uppsala, looking at the action as a performance and as a ritual. The second part of the essay is built on interviews of three veterans of the movement's organisations one of which is as a singer-songwriter originally active in the peace movement of the 60's. The paper is about the songs and the situations in which they were sung, concluding that there is, the limited material considered, little evidence of considerable transfer of songs within the movement, though some coherence exists. The connection to between environmental movement and the swedish radical music movement of the 70's is also slightly mentioned.

This paper attempts to trace the journey of Adonis from ancient Mesopotamia, through Phoenicia and finally to Greece, and to see how his function and cult have evolved during this migration. It starts with a short summary of previous research regarding Adonis and goes on to describe the myths and the rites of Adonis as they were celebrated in Alexandria, Byblos and Athens. I then examine possible connections to ritual drama, the mystery religions and whether there is any evidence that the Adonia might have been a germination ritual.My conclusions are that Adonis loses his connection to the growing cycle and the ideology of sacred kingship with the move to Greece where the political system with independent city states is different, and that there has been too much focus on Adonis as a vegetation god. Since Adonis is connected with the ancient Near Eastern cults of sacral kingship it might be more rewarding to consider the death aspects associated with his cult and the possibility of ancestral worship in relation to a ruler. This would make some of the otherwise puzzling aspects of his cult more understandable..

This paper investigates the relations between the fantasy genre and the phenomena of escapism. It also delves into the factors which motivates consumption of various fantasy mediums. This is done through interviews with six different fantasy-consumers, along with two observations; of which one is performed at a science fiction convention and the other at a table-top role playing game. The study resulted in a basic understanding of escapism ? it is not limited to the fantasy genre, and fantasy consumers do not deny that fantasy is a form of escapism.

This essay takes its start in the problematic situation concerning source material in the study of the Norse religion before the Christianization of Scandinavia. There is a lack of written sources from the time when the religion was still practiced. There are plenty of archeological sources economic situation than their religious beliefs. The Icelandic stories written in the 13th and 14th centuries give us a broad pictureof the Norse mythology, but the writers were Christians which makes their reliability questionable.The focus of this essay is therefore on two texts written during the time when the Norse religion was still in practice. The first source is the travel notes written in 922 by the Muslim scholar Ahmad ibn Fadlan who met a group of the Rus? people.

From being an exotic small religion that has existed at a fading presence in southern Iraq and Iran mandeism has moved to the West and Sweden. As more and more Mandaeans encounter a new culture and a new society in Sweden it affects not only them as individuals but also their religion mandeism. In this essay, I have begun to examine how Mandaeans think about their identity and religion. I have taken my starting point in a broad theoretical discussion of identity, religion and secularisation. Mandeism is a gnostic religion that probably has its roots in today?s Israel / Palestine and sees John the Baptist as the last prophet.

AbstractThis essay discusses different explanations and interpretations of what characterizes large areas containing clearance cairns (cairn fields). Results from the analyses show that there are different explanations about when and why cairn fields and clearance cairns occur. Explanations vary from introduction of the wooden ard in the early Bronze Age to the introduction of rational hay-making in the Roman Iron Age.  There is, anyway, relative agreement considering why and when cairn fields were abandoned. The reason suggested is an increasing pasturage with the consequence of reducing soil to poverty during the period of the Great Migration or in the Viking Age.The most likely cultivation system in cairn fields is a system consisting of both intensive and extensive characteristics. The latter coincides with the probable mobility of settlements.