Category: New Age in Russia
Author: Sergey Pakhomov Gurdjieffism in Russia – its Heyday and Subsequent Development The third period in the development of the Gurdjieff Movement in Russia falls into the post-perestroika years. As Communist ideology...
Author: Sergey Pakhomov Terminology, Chronology, and Early Stages of Development The terms “Gurdjieff Movement” and “Gurdjieffism” are used here in their broadest sense, referring to the entirety of George Gurdjieff’s (1866–1949) ideas...
Author: Svetlana Tambovtseva The small project I undertook as a contribution to this blog focuses on the last few seasons of the long exhibition year in Russia’s two capitals. Although this time...
Author: John Middleton Following the reception, I was summoned across the park to the director’s office of the Naval Engineering Institute and ushered through the neo-classical columned halls to the head of the...
Author: Emanuel Landolt Evgeny Shiffers was a spiritual seeker and charismatic personality whose life and works had an impact on underground intellectuals in the two Russian capitals in the 1960–1990s. Shiffers embodies...
Author: Daria Shevtsova This article grew out of the research for my master’s thesis on the Soviet healer Evgeniia Davitashvili (1949–2015), also well-known to many Russian-speaking people as Dzhuna. What gave the...
Author: Kaarina Aitamurto Talking about contemporary Russian Slavic Paganism, Rodnoverie, politics and especially nationalism are topics that are difficult to avoid. Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union had enabled contemporary...
Author: Marina Alexandrova The 1923 ban on occult societies in the Soviet Union drove them underground and led to the appearance of an underground network of spiritual seekers who continued to share...
Author: Joan Channon The year is 1982. Michael Jackson has released “Thriller” and “Cats” opens on Broadway. Ronald Reagan is elected President of the United States and the British win the war...
Author: John Middleton The following article recounts a Russian-American episode of citizen diplomacy, which, unlike other examples of late 20th-century interaction between citizens, interacted with the military of the nascent Russian Federation and...
Author: Irina Sadovina Scholars have observed that Russian alternative spiritual movements invoke traditional gender stereotypes more frequently than their Western counterparts (Aitamurto 2014, Tiukhtiaev 2017). Historically, this makes sense. In the 1960s,...
Author: Ana Fatima Costa “It happened early in the morning on September 6. A foreigner came to stay at the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel in Leningrad, and the hotel administration knew absolutely nothing about...
Author: Anna Ozhiganova “Babies-dolphins” swimming freely underwater, “babies-psychics” (Russian: mladentsy-sensitivy) possessing paranormal capacities; women giving birth underwater in bathtubs or portable pools at home, and in the sea; “cold strengthening” of pregnant...
Author: Birgit Menzel The Association for the Study of Esotericism and Mysticism (ASEM), St. Petersburg, held by the Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy, together with the Center for the Study of Esotericism and...
Author: Dmitry Galtsin In Russia, various religions are practiced, which roughly fit into the umbrella identity of “(Neo)Paganism” or “Heathenism”. While different strands of Slavic Paganism (Rodnoverie (literally “Native Faith”), and others)...