Unidentified flying objects (UFOs)[1] were one of the key themes of the Soviet paranormal discourse – the “Soviet improbable” (Konakov 2022, 7) or “the unknown”[2] – along with psychics, Bigfoot, telepathy, and...
While preparing the conference “New Age Cultures in Late and Post-Soviet Russia” in June 2022 with recommendations of films to watch, we realized that so far no one has examined a single...
Author: Nikolay Smirnov Now, when I hear the term ‘Russian New Age’ in the context of the war in Ukraine with the ongoing transformation of Russian society into something more and more...
Author: Viktoria Vitanova-Kerber The “Bulgarian Nostradamus,” the “Pythia of Petrich,” or more conventional “Grandmother Vanga” (Baba Vanga) – many names have been attributed to the clairvoyant, healer, and recent internet celebrity Vangeliya...
Author: Agnès Kefeli I entered the field of New Age spirituality by accident. For years, I focused on the history of conversion to Islam in Eurasia. Then, an encounter with one particularly...
text: Birgit Menzel, Anna Tessmann & Romina Heim wordclouds: Daria Shevtsova in collaboration with Amelie Hahmann, Daniel Drosdezki, Anna Manukyan, Yuliya Folschette, Swetlana Ostrowski, Melis Sari, Evgenia Schäfer, and Laura Hülsenbeck In...
Author: Alexander Panchenko Whether we consider New Age ontologies to be “religious” or not, we still need to analyze which super- or non-human intentional agents are involved in New Age beliefs and...
Author: Birgit Menzel This paper has been presented at the 51st ASEEES Annual Convention held in San Francisco, CA, on November 23, 2019. In the early 1980s, one of the most dramatic...
Author: Andrey Tiukhtiaev On November 15–16, 2019, European University at St Petersburg hosted the annual conference “Exhibition of Academic Research Achievements”. This event, which has already become a tradition, is intended to...
Author: Andrei Tiukhtiaev The second workshop of our German-Russian research group “New Religious Cultures in Late and Post-Soviet Russia” was conducted from 1 to 3 October 2019 at European University at Saint...
A week ago our project team reunited in Amsterdam to attend, for the very first time, a conference as a group. The 7th Biannual Conference of the European Society for the Study...
Birgit Menzel, project leader on the German side, has been asked about her views on New Age in general and on Russia in particular, which represents the main focus of our international...
This research blog is dedicated to the socio-anthropological study of new religious cultures that attracted global attention at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries and that...
