New Age Afflicts Russia

As I prepared the altar for a morning celebration of the Eucharist, my attention was caught by a woman who had entered the church clutching a piece of paper listing certain icons which, by offering candles and incantations to them, would cure her son from the affliction of alcoholism. She had been sent by an agency dealing in pagan New Age "nontraditional healing" calling itself Saturn, which bears no relationship whatsoever to the Russian Orthodox Church and which, naturally, takes a fee for its services. I explained that only a deep inner transformation of the person and a turning away from sin can heal such tragedies, not pagan spells.


Another woman came to me with the belief that the slips of paper on which the names of the departed are passed to the priest for commemoration at the Eucharist were actually petitions to God to strike people down and requested that I should pray for the death of her despised husband. Evidently, she viewed Orthodox liturgical ritual as a type of voodoo.


Both these and other bizarre incidents I have encountered in my experience as an Orthodox priest here are what prompt me to offer a few words on why the New Age movement, although originating in the West, is finding a receptive audience in Russia.


Nikolai Leskov wrote that "Russia has been baptized, but not enlightened." Christianity came to Russia via Byzantium in 988, yet has never fully succeeded in rooting out pagan superstition. This dual faith -- in Russian, dvoyeveriye -- is still very much alive today. While Orthodox Christians in Russia celebrate the midsummer feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, today's New Age followers in Russia have rediscovered the old pagan festival of Ivan Kupala, "John the Bather," when the elements of grass, water and fire are said to assume magical healing properties. It is marked by licentious behavior, the cult of the human body, not the love of one's fellow human beings. Those who have seen Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Andrei Rubelev" will understand the gulf that separates the pagan grotesqueness of this feast from Christianity.


Warlocks, witches and faith healers abound in Russian folk culture. Priests in Kievan Rus 900 years ago inveighed tirelessly against pagan practices and 20th-century Orthodox should be no less vigilant. The case of Grigory Rasputin (who, incidentally, was neither "mad" nor a "monk" or "priest" but a married Siberian peasant from a sectarian background) is well documented.


New Age in its more familiar Western form-- a hodgepodge of Eastern mystical religions, theosophy and pagan superstition -- has now come to Moscow in the shape of a commercial enterprise called Put k Sebe (The Path to Oneself), which trades in tarot cards, amulets, crystals, etcetera, as well as accommodating the more sinister cults such as Scientology.


To dismiss all of this as simply a Russian predilection for the occult and the superstitious would be to close one's eyes to a national tragedy.


Paganism, whether in the form of the worship of the fire god Perun in the ninth century or the present New Age cult, involves a retreat from the responsibility of morally engaging the world in which we live. It is a step into the morbid mysticism of astrology and faith healing which grasps rapaciously at the secrets of the invisible world without any ethical distinction between good and evil spirits. Or again paganism can denote a moral capitulation in the face of reality by creating false gods out of matter, whether it be the worship of the natural elements or the cult of money, prosperity or the human body. There is something eerily logical in the way pornographic material, books on success in business and the occult are lumped together on the newsstands outside almost every metro station in Moscow.


It has been noted that Nazi ideology has its roots in the occult. Marxism-Leninism, too, is no less of a pagan creed, for it recognizes the material world as the only objective reality. The dialectical process of class struggle is the god that moves history and, like all pagan gods, demands human sacrifices. The firing squads, the labor camps, the destruction of the church, the millions of victims of Bolshevism -- this is evident testimony of its demonic nature. Lenin had the psychology of a sectarian religious fanatic, while Marx had a youthful flirtation with witchcraft.


Communist ideology, as the philosopher Karl Popper has pointed out, views history and the lives of people deterministically and relativizes, if not altogether abolishes moral choice: Good is what aids revolution, bad is what hinders it and must be destroyed. New Age, by contrast, has no reference to a Savior outside of man -- man, in both worldviews, is his own moral arbiter. Both scorn Christianity, both offer facile solutions to the problems confronting mankind.


The church's position vis-?-vis the new "spirituality" is unambiguous: "It is destroying the traditional way of life formed under the guidance of the Orthodox Church, a single moral and spiritual ideal and threatens the integrity of national self-awareness and cultural identity"


And let us who come from the West be a little less fanciful when dilating upon the famed Russian spirituality, dukhovnost. Genuine dukhovnost is not the option for the pagan and the occult, nor necessarily a love of the theater or literature, or for the kitchen-table philosophical talk on the "Russian soul" that so captivates visitors here. No, dukhovnost is the ability to make the difficult moral choice between right and wrong, good and evil.


Love, compassion, repentance, the self-denial elicited either by family life or the spiritual sobriety of monasticism -- these reflect the values taught for centuries by the Russian Orthodox Church, but they constitute a hard path: the "path to oneself" is an easy one, but one that can lead to destruction.





Father Christopher Hill is a priest of the Orthodox Church of St. Catherine, Moscow. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.