Quest for Mystical Enlightenment and Transcendence

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This novel describes the quest of four rebellious college students to find arcane wisdom, an obscure cult, and the secret of immortality, all of which are supposedly located in a secret monastic order in the Arizona desert. Their journey, which starts with their departure from a New England college and proceeds across the North American continent to Arizona, is at times a vivid and almost hallucinatory experience; but it ends tragically with the suicide of one of the students and the murder of another by a third. In short, this novel is an ironic version of the theme of the quest for mystical enlightenment and transcendence.

Perversion of Religious Experience

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The search of the four oddly assorted students is in reality not an enriching and ennobling pursuit of religious experience, but instead a debased perversion of such a quest: Its main concern is the longing for assurance of personal immortality, through entry into a communion which requires one to sell one's soul (metaphorically, if not literally).

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