Magister Ludi - The Bead Game Author:Herman Hesse In a remote mountain province a community of scholars devotes itself to a complex, mystical Bead Game, a universal language of the intellect in which all knowledge is reduced to a single principle. The time is the future, in a Europe engulfed in a second dark Age after a series of devastating wars. In Castalia a brilliant young student rises to ... more »achieve the ultimate honor: he becomes Magister Ludi, or High Priest of the Game. Yet Joseph Knecht slowly discovers that the ideal of his community does not satisfy him. He seeks elsewhere to fulfill the true task of the intellectual: to maintain contact with the common man.« less