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: USSR
Entangled Late Soviet Sufism
The complex esoteric milieu in Soviet society, although centered around influential figures and groups in major cities of the European part of the USSR, was not homogenous. Less noticeable peripheral areas in...
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...
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...
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...
Books Instead of Lineage: Mystic Underground in the USSR (1960s–1980s)
Author: Boris Falikov The re-enchantment that started in the USSR after many years of forced secularization was unique as the continuity from pre-revolutionary Russia was mainly broken, and the iron curtain separated...
Dzhuna and Soviet (Para)Science Experiments
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...
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...
Birthing the American “Peace Baby” in Leningrad, USSR
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...
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...
Underground Hare Krishnas and the KGB: ISKCON in Late Soviet Lithuania
Author: Rasa Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson The ideas of Krishna Consciousness in Lithuania came from Moscow (Russia) through Tallinn (Estonia) and Riga (Latvia) in 1979 and spread among students in Šiauliai who were interested in...
“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...
