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...
Tagged: USA
M.I.C.E. – the KGB, the FBI, and Me. Part 2
Author: Jim Hickman The John Denver adventures began in 1984, shortly after the first meeting of the ASE in France. Through a mutual friend, John asked me to arrange a series of...
M.I.C.E. – the KGB, the FBI, and Me. Part 1
Author: Jim Hickman Beginning in the late 1970s and ending as the 20th century came to a close, I traveled extensively between the US and the USSR. For seven years, I was...
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...
The Telempathy Experiment
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...
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...
“She Was Awakened by a Tall Humanoid”: Why People Need Alien-Abduction Narratives
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...
The Hippie Way of Spirituality or What а Piece of Soviet Hippie Samizdat Can or Cannot Tell us about Hippie Spiritual Beliefs
Author: Juliane Fürst In 2017, I took receipt of a strange delivery from Moscow. A friend and colleague of mine met me in Los Angeles, where I was working with the Wende...
New Agers and the Spies who Loved us
Author: Jim Hickman Beginning in 1972, I spent three decades collaborating with Soviets researching exceptional human abilities including parapsychology, all modes of healing, accelerated learning, shamanism, and what the Soviets called “hidden...
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...
New Age Diplomacy: The Role of the Esalen Institute in Ending the Cold War
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...
Report on Our St Petersburg Workshop, 1–3 October 2019
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...
New Age Astrology in the Time of Computer Technologies
Author: Anna Tessmann Occult knowledge transforms itself quickly, responding to the technology and the commercial spirit of the time. One of the most obvious beneficiaries of the recent technological achievements in the...
Birgit Menzel on the New Age Project
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...
