Verbal Clichés of Followers in the “Anastasia” New Religious Movement

Abstract

The article features the new religious movement “Zveniashchie kedry Rossii” [Ringing Cedars of Russia], also named for its prophet “Anastasia,” which appeared in Russia in the mid-1990s. The movement emerged after the publication of an eponymous series of books by Vladimir Megre. Followers of the community have developed their own language based on the works that have served as the movement’s source. The concepts highlighted in the article are part of the global New Age movement as well as the fruit of Megre and his readers.

Keywords:

• New Age
• language
• positive thinking
• New Religious Movement
• Anastasia
• Ringing Cedars of Russia
• Vladimir Megre

Notes

1. Kin-based homestead [rodovoe pomest’e]—an out-of-town parcel of land of at least one hectare, designated for one family. Several such homesteads comprise a kinship settlement [rodovoe poselenie]. This is one of the main ideas of the Anastasians.

2. It is interesting that “System” was the name for the 1980s youth association of hippies in the Soviet Union, where it was understood as a nonconformist phenomenon. According to one theory, such a self-appellation was juxtaposed to the state machine of repression of the individual and to elaborate their own system (Shepanskaia 2004, p. 36). However, for readers of Zveniashchie kedry Rossii, some of whom could easily have been in the midst of the hippies of the late Soviet time, this concept in its positive meaning is already irrelevant. In so doing, they continue the tradition of aversion to official state structures, but the semantics of the preceding subculture are lost on them.

a. Translator Stephan Lang has researched the citations of all English sources the author uses, with varying success online. Readers should be aware that nuances of translation have been lost in the author’s relevant glosses of Wouter Hanegraaff’s and Rachelle Gould, so that I have taken the liberty of adding the word “compare.”

b. This appropriate citation from Jeff Wilson is accurate, taken directly from the original English.

c. Translator Stephan Lang notes that wikireality.ru estimates the worldwide association of “solar bards” includes about 300 individual singer-songwriters. They have existed since at least the year 2001, when a festival of optimistic “Dawn bards” was hosted in Ukraine.

d. Literature on the painter, explorer and mystic Nicholas Roerich [Rerikh] and his famous early twentieth century family is enormous. For context, see Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ed. “Art, Identity and Ethnicity” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia 2015 Vol. 54, no. 3, especially the article by Svetlana Tyukhteneva. See also www.roerich.org.