Menzel, B., Hagemeister, M. and Rosenthal, B. (eds) (2012) The New Age of Russia. Occult and Esoteric Dimensions. Munchen, Berlin: Verlag Otto Sagner. - 451 p.

Russia has always had, and still has, a reputation for a fluid, misty, mystically tinged spirituality; you will find it easy to detect various forms of irrational feelings and ideas here, since the space outlined for the rational is comparatively limited. Almost any original, independent system of thought rushes into the muddy waves that carry the esoteric and occult into the sea. For you as a researcher, this is a great opportunity, rich material, but at the same time - a temptation, because you are enchanted by your enchanted material and,

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if the hour is not even, you may lose your sense of proportion, and the boundaries of your research will begin to slip away before your eyes. You begin by saying that the occult and esoteric are all things that do not fit into the" official mainstream " of religion, art, and science, all things that are suspended somewhere at the intersection between these three areas... (While, of course, we must remember how difficult it is to determine what is, actually ,the "official mainstream" in all these three cases). Finally, you are immersed in the vague teachings of a vague movement like "Roerichism" or "cosmism" with their imperfect identity, and you are faced with the difficult task of describing this phenomenon without losing the minimal coherence that your subject itself lacks. So here's what we end up with: a certain nebula in a kaleidoscope of other nebulae in the midst of a nebula-prone culture.

All of this poses difficult challenges for the authors of the book under review. By the way, the compilers of the collection are fully aware of the problem: Birgit Menzel explains that the term New Age in the title was chosen as a metaphor to replace a difficult-to-achieve precise definition; she refers to researchers of the Western New Age, who call it a "theoretical construct" that does not denote a single worldview, ideology or organization. Even if we accept this metaphorical mode, and even though Menzel emphasizes that the book is about the Russian New Age, and not about the New Age in Russia, the title of the book still seems a little inaccurate, since it refers to the New Age environment of Western origin that developed in Russia in the early 1990s. mostly after the USSR, while the book has nothing to do with it.

Nevertheless, Menzel very well defines the thematic focus of the book. This book is not about folk beliefs, Orthodox mysticism, or even popular fascination with"everything mystical." The book is about something else: it is about "non-conformist spiritual seekers, about individual searches that lead beyond the political and religious dogma that historically dominated in Russia, especially in the XX century" (p. 11).1
1. "...About non-conformist spiritual seekers, about individual quests beyond the dogmas of both the political and the religious powers that ruled Russia

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Let's read this quote carefully. First, we are talking about "individual searches", and not about mass phenomena. At the same time, we must remember, as the authors do, the widespread beliefs and the general mystical credulity of the masses - the broad and deep cultural soil on which individual searches grew. Second, and most importantly, the authors pay special attention to the political and historical dimensions of Russian esotericism. Menzel continues: "The ambivalence of the new world and the uncomfortable recognition of the ultimate uncertainty of human knowledge stimulated the desire for completeness, harmony, and synthesis, and led to the occult teachings of many who were not satisfied with modernity" (ibid.). That's right: cultural frustrations in the modern world! And it is no less true, as Menzel goes on to write, that these were reactions to the political reality of Soviet power and to its ideological order. She writes: "The Soviet civilization defined itself as purea rational ideocratic society based on work, science, and concrete knowledge; however, the cult of rationality has been pushed to such an extreme that one can speak of the formation of a "rationalistic religion"" (p. 16; my italics are A. A.). Sic! Menzel calls the Soviet system rational, but also ideocratic, and this is the crux of the problem. Quite right: the occult was an "irrational" revolt against the irrational cult of"rationality"! This paradox looks like a convenient and reliable conceptual framework for the entire book.

This framework is again discussed theoretically in two very interesting articles that conclude the book. One of them is written by co-editor Bernice Rosenthal, a recognized expert in this field, and the second is written by Jeffrey Kripal, a well-known expert on Western mysticism. Rosenthal writes in the spirit of the model proposed by Menzel, understanding the occult/esoteric as a hidden discourse that carried a response to the "spiritual crisis" that was the result of the pressure of the dominant discourse (Rosenthal calls this dominant discourse a "myth", referring to Nietzsche). Although dominant discourses ("myths")

throughout its history, especially in the 20th century" (p. 11).

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in the pre-revolutionary Empire, in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia, the explanatory model is the same (the occult is opposed to" cultural hegemony", if we recall the terminology of A. Gramsci).

To prove the validity of this model, Rosenthal goes on to offer an elegant comparison of the Russian and American occult movements. Geoffrey Kripal expands on this comparison in the last chapter of the book, referring to the "historical process of silencing and occultation". that is, the process of "crushing" ("jamming") occult and mystical in both cases-both in the West and in Russia. But it also shows how the Russian case is specific, namely that Russian mystery writers dealt not only with "internal psychological censorship and the demands of academic respectability," as was the case in the West, but also with real live censors, secret service agents, and secret police. "They worked within the vast and intricate Soviet system, which strictly prohibited any breakthroughs beyond the 'material world', considering them illusory, dangerous and in some cases punishable" (p. 427).

Kripal goes on to delve into the very depths of methodology, encouraging researchers of the occult, and indeed all historians of religion, to take seriously the reality of individual mystical experience and, to some extent, try to try it on personally( by experiencing it); for example, to become a kind of shaman in order to gain the ability to describe the shamanic worldview (pp. 426 - 431). This appeal looks like a light rebuke to the authors of the book, who rather look at Russian occultists and mystics from an academic distance... Doesn't Kripal's invocation seem redundant? Perhaps he is calling for a deeper research tool in the future, in order to learn, as he writes, "to resist silencing ourselves with the rules of our own game" ( [being] silenced by the rules of our own game) (p. 426).

Returning to the comparison of Russia and the West, we should refer to the second article by the same Birgit Menzel, in which she gives a very logical and comprehensive analysis of the Russian "occultures" of the 1960s-1980s (the term occulture is used in English).-

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See Christopher Partridge 2), and then offers a nice, clear list of differences. Here is a summary of these differences. Transmission of esoteric knowledge: mostly intellectuals - in Russia, wider pop culture - in the West. Much more interest of the Soviet official science in what in the West was rather referred to as the field of "paranascientific". The Russian occult underground is much more intellectual and speculative, in contrast to the more corporeal one in the West; accordingly, in Russia there is only a marginal significance of sexuality and a much more pronounced dualism of body and spirit in general (pp. 184-185). To the list of differences, I would add one more, even if quite trivial: more individualism - in the West, and a greater focus on joint, common practices - in Russia.

Let's now look at the various specific studies included in the book. As I have already said, in the introduction, Menzel tries to define the boundaries of the subject and gives very convenient, broad definitions of the actual concepts of "occult" and"esoteric". But, in my opinion, some texts in the collection go beyond even these broad definitions. For example, the desire to discover traces of the occult and esoteric in modern literature (Maria Aptekman), in rodnoverie/neo-Paganism (Marlene Laruelle), or in shamanism/neo-Shamanism (Natalia Zhukovskaya) seems to throw the focus of the topic somewhat off. To take the first example: the three post-Soviet novels that mock and parody the Bolshevik revolution are hardly classified as occult per se - rather, they are part of the postmodern banter or commercial calculation that mainly drives modern literature with paradospiritual pretensions. (A good similar example of parody and banter is a well-known TV show from 1991. when the nonconformist musician Sergei Kuryokhin "scientifically justified" the theory that Lenin and his associates were mushrooms turned into people; it was perhaps funny, and it was, indeed, a counter-cultural provocation-playing with recently powerful symbols of ideological hegemony, but nothing in common

2. Partridge, Ch. (2004, 2005) The Re-Enchatment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Popular Culture, and Occulture. Vol. I-II. London: T&T Clark.

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with occult there was no.) In her article on rodnoverie, Laruelle describes the main trends of the movement very well, but she fails to prove that the occult was in fact the central element of Russian neo-Paganism. Zhukovskaya's chapter on shamanism simply offers an overview of the phenomenon and a not very deep interpretation of its revival and perception in Siberia (mainly in Buryatia), although neither the review nor the article as a whole, in my opinion, seems appropriate in a book about the occult, as it was defined in the Introduction.

Other texts present a varied picture of occult and esoteric pursuits during the long twentieth century - "long" because there are unavoidable excursions into the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Julia Mannherz's research focuses on occult motifs in popular entertainment before the revolution, as well as what became of them after 1917. The main intrigue lies in the twofold, complex relationship between official "scientific materialism" and occult. In another chapter, Konstantin Burmistrov writes about the fate of esoteric groups, such as the Freemasons, Templars, and others, in the 1920s and 1930s, when they were gradually crushed and destroyed. Oleg Shishkin analyzes the vague stories about how Soviet intelligence agencies were involved in "working" with esoteric groups; his hypothesis that this involvement was not only in control and surveillance, but also in cooperation, seems, however, unproven, since the evidence is entirely based on investigative materials in which the doctor was involved. and the medium Alexander Barchenko, already in prison, talks about his former connections with the GPU and the NKVD.

Two texts are devoted to the occult teachings of Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) and the revival of the Roerich movement in the post-Soviet period (articles by Markus Osterrieder and John McCannon). Russian "cosmism" - another vague, elusive Russian phenomenon that never became a" movement " - is considered in two strong texts by Michael Hagemeister and Marlene Laruelle. The first examines the amazing case of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ,the "father of Russian cosmonautics", while the second puts Tsiolkovsky in a broader context, including even the unique philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov (1829-1903), and makes sense of cosmism

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as a mixture of scientific utopia and secularized Christian soteriology.

Leonid Geller analyzes the occult trends in late Soviet literature, convincingly showing how they gradually shifted - in contrast to the pluralistic Western World of Adee-towards the right-wing nationalist ideology. Mathias Schwartz traces an interesting development at the intersection of occult quest and science fiction, a literary genre that in the Soviet Union was one of the channels of dissent; after the occult ceased to be underground, his motives became the material for parody play in later fantasy literature. This is followed by a rather fragmentary and poorly structured review of post-Soviet esotericism in an article by Demyan Belyaev, and then by a thoroughly documented sketch written by Mark Sedgwick of the bizarre intellectual route of the self-proclaimed half-mystic, half-politician Alexander Dugin, who, according to the article, opportunistically mixed Western and Russian esoteric elements. Finally, Boris Falikov describes the failure of transpersonal psychology in post-Soviet Russia; a failure attributed to the skeptical disregard of the psychological establishment, the curtailment of freedoms under Putin, and "monopoly claims to the realm of the irrational" by the growing Russian Orthodox Church.

In general, despite some of the shortcomings that I have tried to point out above; despite the fact that some important topics - for example, anthroposophy - are missing; despite the lack of an index at the end, which is absolutely necessary for a book densely populated with such an incredible number of organizations and characters; despite the fact that the general unified bibliography in the Russian language is the end of the book is quite different from the sources that the authors refer to in their articles - despite all this, this is a very useful collection of mostly carefully documented scientific research, which casts light on the deep-rooted secret spirituality in Russia, which grows on the field of confrontation between two cultural impulses-charm and disenchantment.

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