Ringing Cedars' Anastasianism
Anastasianism or the Ringing Cedars falls into the category of esotericism and considers itself to be a new religious movement, often classified as New Age, that started in central Russia in 1997 and has since spread across the world. Ringing Cedars' Anastasians are sometimes categorised by scholars as part of Rodnovery, and often as a modern Pagan movement of their own. The Anastasians also define their life conception as Russian Vedism and themselves as Vedrussians, and Anastasianism has therefore often been classified among the various self-styled "Vedic" religions arising in post-Soviet Russia.
The movement is based on the series of ten books entitled The Ringing Cedars of Russia written by Vladimir Megre. The knowledge contained in the books is attributed to a beautiful woman named Anastasia, a remarkable woman embodying the natural qualities of mankind without technocratic influence, who dwells in the Siberian taiga, whom Megre met during one of his trade expeditions. The books have been translated in twenty languages and have sold millions of copies. They offer a holistic worldview, teaching about humanity's relationship with nature, God and the universe, the creation of the world, the power of thought in modelling reality and the future, a cyclical eschatology, the relationship between men and women, and education. Family, tradition and environmentalism are core values for the Anastasians.
Anastasianism proposes a whole new model of social organisation, that of the "kinship homesteads", many of which constitute larger "kinship settlements". The Anastasian movement has become one of the most successful new religious movements in Russia, and from there it has then spread to other Slavic countries, broader Eastern Europe, and communities have also been established in the West. In Russia, Anastasians have faced the hostility of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Overview
Etymology and definition
The two names of the movement are explainable as follows: "Anastasia", from anástasis, is a Greek word meaning "resurrection", and "incorruption", according to the Anastasians implying the reconnection with the never-ending spiritual flow of life emanating from God, visualised as the universal tree of life of which all entities are part as branchings; "Ringing Cedars" refers to the movement's beliefs about the spiritual qualities of the Siberian cedar, a kind of pine.According to the Anastasians, the theme of the "singing trees" or "ringing trees", that is to say trees emitting vibrations transmitting information, is part of an ancient Eurasian and worldwide wisdom, a way of life consisting in the cultivation of Rod —God conceived as continuous "Generation", "Nature"—which has been preserved over the centuries in its purest form by Russians and volkhvs who escaped the Christianisation of Kievan Rus' fleeing to Siberia—a Christianisation which was decided by the ruling elites in order to disrupt the relational ties within society and of human society with nature, with ancestors and gods of the environment as the direct link to the supreme God, justifying the confiscation of all land and the enslavement, and exploitation through taxation and trade, of the population.
Academic categorisations
Anastasianism has been studied by scholars of religion as a new religious movement, a nature religion classified as New Age and Neopagan. The scholar Julia O. Andreeva noted that Anastasianism is a movement difficult to define because of its "blurred boundaries". Similarly, the scholars Vladimir B. Yashin and Boris I. Kostin defined it as a "soft-frame movement" fillable with elements drawn from a variety of traditions. The scholar Anna Ozhiganova observed that "the Anastasians themselves, claiming to be the successors of some ancient tradition, consider themselves to be modern Paganism", and researchers, on the other hand, view them as "a variant of the Russian New Age". Yashin and Kostin found Anastasianism to be a mutual convergence of New Age and Neopaganism, and they defined it as "one of the most successful and large-scale projects in the field of alternative spirituality in modern Russia".Vladimir Megre's The Ringing Cedars of Russia manuals define the ideas they expound as "Vedism" and "Paganism", implying that the latter is a continuation of the former, and at the same time they explain that Paganism, and even more so Vedism, may not be defined as a "religion" but more correctly as a "culture of the way of life". Megre's books often make reference to specifically "Slavic" traditions, and most Anastasians identify the "Paganism" of Megre's books as the pre-Christian Slavic religion.
Some scholars regard Anastasianism as part of Rodnovery, as both have spread through the creation of a new society of ecovillages throughout Russia, while other scholars distinguish between the two, identifying two different ideologies underlying them: Slavic Neopaganism primarily emphasises the revival and reinvention of the ancient culture of the Slavs, while Anastasianism primarily develops within the framework of the ideas contained in Megre's books. Both the movements, however, are united in their ecological orientation, and the Anastasian movement is also defined as a wholly environmentalist movement.
Yashin and Kostin found Anastasianism to have indeed many points of contact with Slavic Neopaganism, but at the same time as being more like a "cosmopolitan Neopaganism" framework detached from any specific ethnicity and aiming at the reconstruction of universal archaic ideological concepts and life practices, including "ethnocentric Neopaganisms", that is to say the restoration of the ethnic religions of any specific ethnic group, Slavic or other. Megre's books create equal opportunities for the development and coexistence within Anastasianism of both cosmopolitan Neopaganism, Slavic Neopaganism, and other ethnic Neopaganisms. The "common denominator" that creates the prerequisite for the mutual exchange of ideas and practices between the three is "the axiological significance of family and kinship values". Andreeva has found that some Anastasians who are more focused on Slavic traditions tend to be dissatisfied with the cosmopolitan and international aspiration of the movement.
Beliefs
The books fundamental to the Anastasian movement, deemed the "Bible" of the Russian New Age, are The Ringing Cedars of Russia written by Vladimir Megre. According to the Anastasian belief, their content was transmitted to Megre by Anastasia, a prophetess, "bearer and keeper of ancient knowledge" living in Siberia. The books do not expound doctrines in a systematic way, and are characterised by "adogmatism and variability". A book giving more clearly teachings of religious mythology is the sixth one in the series, The Book of Kin. This book expounds the history and wisdom of the "Vedrus", an ancient kin who populated Eurasia and lived in full awareness of God and harmony with the cosmos, presenting them not merely as progenitors of the modern Russians and Slavs but of the peoples of the whole world. God is Rod, i.e. continuous "Generation", "Nature", and the reconstruction of society on the basis of the "ancestral", "tribal", or "genealogical" community, the central idea of the Anastasian movement, is proposed for all the peoples of the world. The seventh book The Energy of Life then defines Anastasia herself not just as a "Vedrussian", but as a "Pagan" of the Russian Slavic tradition.Regarding the ancient Vedrus and their descendants, Anastasia, in The Book of Kin, says:
Then, in The Energy of Life Megre says:
Yashin and Kostin defined Anastasianism as a "kind of puzzle" of communities of which it is "impossible to form a holistic picture", given that, despite being undergirded by the shared framework represented by Megre's books, each community develops its own varying beliefs. Studying the beliefs of the Anastasian community Inberen, in Sargatsky District, Omsk Oblast, the oldest and largest Anastasian settlement in Russia, they found that the members, apart from Megre's books, drew religious beliefs from the doctrines of a variety of Rodnover organisations and authors, from Aleksandr Khinevich's Ynglism, from Roerichism, and even from Orthodox Christian and Tibetan Buddhist sources.
Theology and cosmology
God and the gods
Anastasianism may be described as a nature religion, since Anastasian spirituality emphasises the sacredness of nature or generation, conceived as manifested divinity and as the means of communication with the supreme God ; the scholar Rasa Pranskevičiūtė characterised this vision as pantheistic, and noted how it is a fundamental influence in Anastasians' social project. They stress the importance of harmony, that is to say giving and receiving love and respect, appropriate reciprocal cultivation, good thought and good word, between individual and between the community of individuals and the divinity of all nature, since nature is the manifestation of God, and it reads, and is actively shaped, by the thought and word of humans.A Lithuanian Anastasian defined God as follows:
God is an energetic entity, and everything is born of its essence. Anastasians believe that nature is the "materialised thought of God", or the expression of the "divine power of God". All living things, and superior living beings or gods, are believed to be thoughts of God, and therefore by communicating with them humanity may communicate with God. The "divine thought" or "divine design" is reflected in the eternal cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death and rebirth, as well as in the cycle of the day and the seasons of the year; God is the spiral of time expressing itself in physical cycles, it is the year itself, and the "Kingdom of God" is not a transcendent dimension or an afterlife but is immanent and attainable in the physical dimension, "Heaven on Earth" is attainable in the "here and now".
According to the words of another Anastasian:
In Anastasian doctrines, the supreme God expresses itself as many gods or deities, who are "more or less concentrated energy clots in space", and influence the world on the energetic plane, and in turn the conscience of supreme God is the "unified conscience of all living creatures". God and the many gods are generally held to be impersonal and are not regarded as objects of worship. Megre's books also recognise the existences of "dark forces" associated with the Earth, which emerged when God created it as opposites of his action. These dark forces were used by the priests who invented the global religions and the modern technocratic system in order to subjugate the consciousness of mankind, hampering men's direct communication with God and projecting instead their consciousness towards the worship of the priests and of the dark forces themselves.