A selection of little-known religions in Russia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The rituals of these religions alone can both scare away and attract thousands of followers. Others - become a pretext for prosecutorial inspections. We will tell you what little-known religions some Russians follow and how much it costs them.

In the forest there are cauldrons in which sacrificial geese are boiled. Before that, their wings, heads and paws were cut off and carefully laid out on wooden trays. Nearby, cutlets are made from the blood of sacrificial animals and a mixture of cereals. No one touches the dishes until everyone in one impulse reads a prayer at each of the five bonfires.

Molla (priest) of the village of Malaya Tavra, in which people of the Mari nationality live, conducts a prayer ceremony at the sacred tree. - Alexander Kondratyuk / Sputnik

This mysterious prayer is a pagan ritual that is officially practiced in Russia. Its participants can only be the Mari - a people mainly living in the Republic of Mari El, in the east of the European part of Russia.

A couple of centuries ago, for praying in the forest, the Mari were punished and exiled to Siberia, and their places for prayer were blown up. Today, the traditional religion of the Mari - Marla - is treated more respectfully. Although the right to pray to spirits, like all Russian neopagans, the Mari had to defend even in modern Russia.

Spirits in the grove

“We were the only Mari in the village. But we were protected and covered by our neighbors - they didn’t tell anyone that we were praying, and we didn’t say that they were performing Orthodox prayers. My father was a yumotan (from the Mari - “friend of God”, a man who could hold family prayers in any Mari family) and a communist at the same time, says a local resident of the village of Sernur.

This is how the ritual of sacrifice of cattle and poultry in the sacred grove looks like. - Maxim Bogodvid / Sputnik

The threat hung over the Mari many times. Perhaps the most significant - baptism - in the late 17th - early 18th centuries. Mari did not want to accept Orthodoxy even after promising to receive substantial privileges, and then the authorities decided to act by other methods - exile, beatings, even larger taxes, which had to be paid to Orthodox priests. Mari, in response, fled into the forest and continued to pray to their gods.

For them, a tree is a model of the world; it connects the underground, earthly and cosmos. It is an intermediary between the gods, of which the mari have from 70 to 140 (depending on whether the meadow mari or the mountain ones). Therefore, the Mari go to pray to the sacred groves - they are chosen by the kart (Mari priest) according to certain parameters. There are more than 400 such groves in the modern republic.

Over the long years of existence side by side with Orthodoxy, Mari has developed a mutually beneficial symbiosis of beliefs. According to official data, among the inhabitants of the republic 67.3% are Orthodox, 14% are pagans and 5% are Muslims. However, many of those who call themselves Orthodox also profess paganism. Doubt makes life easier when conditions change.

In the modern Republic of Mari El, there are more than 400 such groves for praying. - Maxim Bogodvid / Sputnik

The fact that the Mari are "extremists" began to be said in the late 2000s, after the missionary department of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church added the Mari religious center "Oshmariy-Chimariy" ("White Mari - Pure Mari") to its directory to the list of "New religious organizations in Russia of a destructive and occult nature."

It was then that marla was increasingly mentioned in the context of religious extremism. One of the high priests, Vitaly Tanakov, was put on trial for publishing the book “The Priest Speaks” (included in the list of extremist literature of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation), which impartially describes other religions.

Yet Mari paganism survived in more authentic forms than many other pre-Christian cults. "The last pagan reservation of Europe" - this is how the Mari are sometimes called. In fact, it is far from the last.

Pagan attraction

Rite of Algys in Yakutia, where one of the branches of Tengrianism is still worshiped. - Evgeny Sofroneev / TASS

According to the all-Russian study "Atlas of Religions and Nationalities" in 2012, in Russia 1.7 million people (this is 1.2% of the total population) profess the traditional religion of their ancestors, worship gods and the forces of nature. Most of them are ethnic religions, whose fate is largely identical to the Mari.

Aar Aiyy, the ancient religion of the Yakuts, was officially recognized in Russia only in 2014, after 316 years of ban. Both public performance of rituals and mass prayers in the sacred valley of Tuymaad were prohibited by a decree of 1696, with the arrival of Russians and Orthodoxy in these lands. The mass worship of Aar Aiyy faded away, by the twentieth century only a few professed this faith. How many followers she has now - no one counted.

Sacred Mount Kisilyakh in Yakutia. - Andrey Golovanov / Sputnik

“There is a religion Tengrianism, which was before all religions, it is the progenitor of all beliefs. Genghis Khan with this faith conquered almost the whole world. Aar Aiyy is its northern branch,”says Yakut David. He is engaged in the popularization of the culture and religion of the Sakha Republic and believes that Aar Aiyy is the strongest faith, "because in harmony with nature."

The Yakuts believe that the world consists of three parts: the upper world, where the supreme deities live, the middle world, where people live, and the underworld, the abode of evil spirits. The main difference from all other pagans is that for the Yakuts in the middle world, all objects are also spiritualized.

"Every Udmurt is a pagan in his soul," say the Udmurts themselves. This is what Udmurt idols look like. - Dmitry Ermakov

Every Yakut knows for whom a treat with ghee and white horsehair is being prepared or why sprinkling of the ground with dairy products is needed, but now these beautiful rituals are increasingly performed not by priests, but by local artists. The situation is approximately the same with the Udmurts, the Finno-Ugric people in the Middle Urals.

Back in 1960, 70% of the village of Karamas-Pelga, in which the Udmurt Anna Stepanovna was born, was pagan. She remembers all the villagers standing in the field with their hands up in the sky. Now the sacred hut-kuala, which looks like an ordinary Russian log hut, exists only in the Ludorvay Museum-Reserve.

Back in 1960, 70% of the Udmurt village of Karamas-Pelga was pagan. - Dmitry Ermakov

“Udmurts are polytheists. What we believe in - we ourselves do not know how to describe it. The essence of faith is Nature, and there are many gods in it,”said Svetlana, a researcher at Ludorvaya. This small village 1270 km east of Moscow is the only Udmurt reservation and has long turned into a tourist attraction. Press tours and schoolchildren on excursions are taken here.

New religious movements are gaining more popularity in Russia.

Vegans in the taiga

Meeting in the "City of the Sun" in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, where the followers of Vissarion live apart from everyone. - Alexander Ryumin / TASS

In 1991, former traffic cop Sergei Torop from the Krasnoyarsk Territory took the nickname Vissarion, declared himself the messiah, and founded the Church of the Last Testament. About 5 thousand people went to the south of the Krasnoyarsk Territory to build an ecovillage "city of the Sun" there according to his behests. To do this, they sold apartments and other property. Many of Torop's followers have nowhere else to return.

The Church of the Last Testament brought together a whole bunch of world religions and practices - from Hinduism and Buddhism to apocalypticism and atheistic teachings of Karl Marx. All its adherents live in anticipation of the end of the world, the dates of which are constantly pushed back by Vissarion.

One of the followers of Vissarion. - Alexander Ryumin / TASS

They adhere to a strict vegan diet in the Siberian taiga, reject traditional medicine, and encourage polygamy. And despite the fact that the ROC and religious scholars recognize the cult as a destructive sect, the “Church of the Last Testament” has existed unhindered in Russia for almost 30 years (with the registration of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, by the way) and has acquired followers in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. During this time, she only attracted the attention of law enforcement officers several times. The last time - in 2019, the investigative check has not yet been completed.

All adherents of the “Church of the Last Testament” live in anticipation of the end of the world. - Alexander Ryumin / TASS

Professor and deputy chairman of the expert council under the Ministry of Justice, Alexander Dvorkin, believes that the existence of this cult is “an absolutely impossible situation”: “Within the Russian Federation there is a territory the size of 2/3 of Belgium, which actually lives by its own laws, in which local authorities do not interfere.

This gives rise to suspicion that there is a huge number of unrecorded deaths. A child dies from lack of medical care or hunger, he is buried here, in the taiga, without any trial, and that's where the matter ends."

Throughout the entire time, the “Church of the Last Testament” has attracted the attention of law enforcement officers only a few times. - Alexander Ryumin / TASS

And, nevertheless, much more attention of the Investigative Committee is attracted by the economic successes of the Church of Vissarion. Over the years, she has collected as much real estate as the Russian oligarchs never dreamed of: apartments and houses were given by all the families of followers, but no one ever counted how many there were.

Here they do not know what a tax declaration and financial monitoring are, the flow of funds to all “those in need” goes “straight into the hands”, without control from the inspection authorities. There is a version that for a long time the "Church of the Last Testament" was not touched because of fears of mass suicide.

Occultism disguised as yoga

However, there are also such religious movements in Russia that seek to conceal their religious component as much as possible.

Followers of Agni Yoga (also known as "Living Ethics") believe that the family of the famous Russian artist and philosopher Nicholas Roerich, through clairaudience, received the teachings from above, which they formalized in 14 books. They are based on the theosophical concept of an infinite universe, reincarnation of souls, esotericism, transhumanism and all types of yoga. According to him, all the revelations were dictated to the Roerichs by the "Great Teacher" between 1920 and 1940.

Agni Yoga mimics social and humanitarian teachings and practices and denies any connection with religiosity. - Andrey Ogorodnik / TASS

This teaching, originally from Russia, has gathered thousands of followers around itself both at home and in the West, especially in the United States. Moreover, like all other New Age ideologies, it socially mimics social and humanitarian teachings and practices and denies any connection with religiosity. However, this does not always work.

In August 2016, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation revoked the rental certificate of the film "Call of Space Evolution" for promoting sectarian ideology, and the prosecutor's office prohibited the International Center of the Roerichs from holding religious rituals in the Center's premises in the very center of the capital.

Then it was about the Buddhist ritual "Sunju Kantsen" (the tradition of the Drepung Gomang monastery in India), for which the Roerichs still took a payment from 500 to 1000 rubles ($ 7-13) per person.