POLITICS AND SOCIETY

PAGANISM AND NEO-PAGANISM

SOURCE. Viktor Shnirel'man, compiler. Neoyazychestvo na prostorakh Yevrazii [Neo-Paganism on the Expanses of Eurasia]. Moscow: Bibleisko-bogoslovskii institut sv. Apostola Andreia [Biblical-Theological Institute of the Holy Apostle Andrew], 2001.

This collection of pieces on "neo-paganism" in various parts of the former Soviet Union is based on papers presented at a conference held by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in June 1999. It is the first book devoted solely to the subject.

The first three papers deal with neo-pagan movements in Russia, with one focusing specially on St. Petersburg, the main center of Russian neo-paganism. Next come papers on neo-pagans in Belarus, Latvia, and Abkhazia. In his concluding essay, Viktor Shnirelman fills in the gaps by examining neo-pagan movements in Ukraine, Lithuania, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan, as well as the pagan revival among various peoples of the Middle Volga (Mari, Chuvash, Mordva, Tatars), the Far North (Komi), the North Caucasus (Ossets), and Siberia (the Altai Territory).

It is clear that two quite distinct phenomena are under consideration. Among the Abkhaz and some of the Volga peoples, traditional pagan beliefs have never been forgotten. Now they can be professed more openly, but there is an underlying continuity that makes the prefix "neo-" superfluous. In all the other cases, we are dealing with efforts by modern urban intellectuals to reconstruct long-forgotten peasant cults, or even to invent cults that never existed except in their own imaginations, in order to give their peoples more "authentic" roots and identity. To the extent that these neo-pagan cults receive political expression, they tend in the direction of fascism.

The attitude taken by neo-pagans toward Christianity and Islam, the world religions that displaced their primeval ethnic gods, varies. Many aim to restore the old gods -- whether it be Perun, Svarog, and the other members of the ancient Slavic pantheon or Tengri, sun-god of the Turkic peoples before they adopted Islam -- in all their pristine glory. Others strive to construct a synthesis of pagan and Christian elements, such as the doctrine of the Ancient-Russian Ingling Church of Orthodox Old Believers, founded in 1992 in Omsk by the occultist "Father" Alexander Khinevich.