Russian Christian Hermetic Tradition
By Guram Kochi, an ‘old sailor of the Ship of Fools of Master G’ The Way to Finding God Within Oneself At the beginning of the 20th century, Russian Christian Hermeticism experienced...
Tagged: Russia
Report on “Observations of Unusual Atmospheric Phenomena.” Memoirs of an Employee of a Secret Soviet Design Bureau
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...
Reading Fever and Samizdat Translations
The photograph of me sitting in the Lotus position on the shores of the Black Sea in Crimea is a document of my youth. Like my photo portrait, it was taken in...
New Age and Esoteric References in (Post-)Soviet Films
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...
Eurasian Alchemy as an Anti-Authoritarian Form of Esotericism
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...
Baba Vanga’s Afterlife in Russia: Reception, Construction, Instrumentalization
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...
Tatar New Age in a Muslim Shop
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...
Rowboat Diplomacy. Part Two
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...
Rowboat Diplomacy
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...
Conference Report on the 5th Summer School on Esotericism: Facts, Meanings, and Texts
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...
Non-Slavic Paganism in Russia: Russian Wicca and Asatru
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)...
Leader of the Last Testament Church Vissarion arrested
Author: Alexander Panchenko On September 22, 2020, Sergey Torop (also known as Vissarion Christ), Vadim Red’kin, and Vladimir Vedernikov, the leaders of the Last Testament Church (the LTC), were arrested in the...
Citizen Diplomats in the Garden: Biointensive for Russia from the 1980s to the Present
Author: Carol Vesecky Back in the day, as a homemaker and mother in Palo Alto, I volunteered at church and in community organizations, and fundraised for UNICEF. I managed our home for...
A Short History of Yoga in the USSR
Author: Sergey Pakhomov There is a huge empirical material on the topic of the history of yoga in the USSR, i. e. memories of contemporaries, photographic and film documents, various articles, and...
The Unveiling of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Author: Marina Alexandrova The legacy of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), the Russian-American occultist, philosopher, and writer, whose Theosophical teachings influenced generations of spiritual seekers of every shade worldwide, has ignited intense debates...
