Personal experience - a modern metropolis and ancient traditions in the XXI century

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

Moscow is a multinational city, the inhabitants of which rank themselves among the most diverse religions from Orthodox Christianity to Buddhism and Hinduism, exotic for our latitudes.

Against this background, neo-paganism looks even more exotic - its followers are considered to be the followers of any reconstructed religious teachings, for example, the ancient Egyptian tradition or Wicca, which became popular in the 50s of the last century. According to the survey, in Russia there are only 1.5% of neo-pagans. Nevertheless, numerous public pages and blogs are devoted to various neo-pagan trends in social networks, and members of some of them even created their own religious communities in Moscow.

What do they believe in, how does religion affect their life and is it always possible to observe traditions in a big city?

Alexey, odinist

I refer myself to the northern pagan tradition - sometimes it is called Odinism. I am not German or Swede, but I am surrounded by Scandinavian gods, spirits and other characters whom I perceive as accompanying higher powers. From a scientific point of view, Slavic paganism and the Scandinavian tradition may not intersect, but for me it is still a single whole, from which one part is better preserved - the northern tradition. Moreover, the Slavs were terribly perverted by popular prints: shirts, kokoshniks - it literally turns me out of it.

All my relatives are ordinary Soviet people, far from religion. But when I read "The Elder Edda" in my youth, I realized that this is what my parents taught me, in about the same words. For example, why wisdom is a virtue. Why do I need to go to get an education? In order to pass on something to your children. After all, a person is one of the links in the chain, where on the one hand there are ancestors, and on the other - descendants. This is the main idea of my worldview. On the one hand, you must be worthy of your ancestors, and on the other, you must become a worthy ancestor for your descendants.

Many religions represent man as the center of everything, but this is not true. A person is, first of all, a part of society, clan and his family. He is not the most important phenomenon in this world, after which there is even a flood. He must leave something to his children. I constantly feel the ancestors behind my back. It seems to me a long table stretching into an endless distance, at which they all sit. I would like them to say to each other after death, when I come, “Oh, look! I came. Let's move, let him sit next to him. " Or they may say: “Who are you anyway? Get out!"

Our community is built on secondary clan ties, and in fact it is a community of people with similar ideas about the world. We do not live in the same area, but modern means of communication allow us to constantly be with each other. We see each other on all holidays, often visit each other, help each other. And sometimes we can go to a pub or to the park.

My wife fully shares my faith, although we did not meet on this basis. It turned out that she always looked at the world in a similar way, she just did not know what it was called. Any person needs religion as a system of landmarks. Now, for example, many speak out in support of people of the so-called non-traditional orientation. I don't care who and what is doing there in their hut, but to propagandize this is a dead-end way of development for a kind. I have a daughter, and I hope there will be more children. Maybe the son - as the gods decide, so it will be.

Moderation is important, the ability to enjoy what is, without extremes. We try to buy products with a minimum amount of chemicals, we don't eat sausages and sausages - there are only E25. But the rules are also good in moderation - if you want to go eat a cheeseburger, go and eat it. Vegetarians? The climate determines a lot. Those who live in Bali may not need to eat lard, but why should we forbid ourselves? Here comes a vegetarian to Valhalla for the feast of the ancestors, where they eat wild boar, so what? He will not run there looking for grass. They will say: "Sit hungry."

In appearance, we do not copy anyone and do not imitate any idols. Our men wear beards because beards are beautiful. For a man, walking with a naked face is a kind of disgrace. But in general, I try not to go to extremes while observing the rules. The realization that there are nine worlds of Yggdrasil does not prevent me from using gadgets and the achievements of modern science. Our world and the rest are several different parallels of one integral world, in which there are many different faces. It is important just not to confuse one with the other.

Now I work as a sorcerer, helping people to come to a state of harmony - regardless of faith and views, everyone has the same problems. I like to be aware of my usefulness, to read grateful reviews about my work. Sometimes, however, people come and the first thing they ask is: "How does the Orthodox Church treat your amulets?" So it is necessary to ask the church.

I do not slaughter cats in the cemetery and do not commit any other madness. I help people. When the rhythms of the inner vibration do not coincide with the vibration of the world around, a person comes to discord with himself. To fix this, certain rituals are needed. Fire helps - you don't have to make a fire, you can take a burner, pot or torch. Form is always secondary. It is just important to remember that we are people of action, our meditation, unlike the eastern one, is always active.

I am the head of the community and a priest, I know the ways of communicating with gods and spirits. There are many of them, and not all are equally good relations. Spirits can be seen and heard, they surround us everywhere, and with proper training, anyone can notice them. It is difficult to explain, but after learning, you seem to feel them through some other channel, which can resonate more through sight or hearing. In childhood, we all see spirits, but then our brain is taught that all this does not exist.

Ekaterina, Rodnover

I call myself a Rodnover. There are different schools, and our branch, for example, is about a thousand years old. In Ukraine, with the introduction of Christianity, it has not been interrupted, and for the last twenty years it has even existed as an official religious denomination. Its head grew up in a family of keepers of the tradition, and until the 1930s in the Carpathian region they continued to openly carry out their rituals together with other members of the community. During the rest of the Soviet period, the community gathered on major holidays.

I have walked towards my faith since childhood, and this is the great merit of my parents. Mom sometimes jokingly said that all her life she considered herself a pagan. My father, a radio engineer, according to her, was always an inveterate materialist and believed only in what he saw himself. Later, when I was born, he was drawn to spirituality and began to read a lot of historical and philosophical literature, took up yoga, became interested in bioenergetics. Parents have always been very concerned about the environment. They met in a student Soviet organization called the Green Druzhina. Since childhood, I was taken on hiking trips, from the age of six - to the mountains, and as far as I can remember, we constantly traveled to the village, where from an early age I knew many herbs and knew how to use them. I treated everything around me as a living organism. Later, reading the diaries of my hunter grandfather with detailed descriptions of constant walks in the forest, I was surprised how much he knew about every bush and every tree.

At school, no one wanted to communicate with me: I rarely adjusted to others and did not want, for example, to listen to the same music as my classmates. But the turning point for me was a severe emotional crisis in my fifth year at Moscow State University. It's just that the quantum physics that I studied turned out to be not at all what suited me. I went on academic leave and after that I lay on the bed for a long time, staring at one point, even my mother, not me, took the documents from the university. This difficult state of mine lasted until I came across a book at home about the Slavic Vedic worldview and decided to try the rituals of karmic healing described there. I just picked up the book, opened it to the first page that came across and followed the practice described there. Probably, then my life changed.

I began to look outside for what I had inside for a long time. On the Internet, I found many sites dedicated to Slavism, but they all looked frivolous, and it seemed to me that these people were just playing. Everything changed one evening. Then I did a certain practice, and in the morning I entered the same combination of words into the search engine that I had entered before, and suddenly the very first link brought me to the site of my community. I called the indicated number and went to study - I had the feeling that I had come to my home. I also met my future husband there.

Now my husband and I are studying at the spiritual academy of priests in Ukraine, we conduct ceremonies, personal receptions and psychological consultations for everyone. But the external must correspond to the internal attitude, and this is not easy. For example, while there is not a single kindergarten or school in the city where I could send my future children. Shops and cafes do not correspond to my tradition either. It turns out that I still can't live the way I want. Of course, gradually the society in which my grandchildren will grow up begins to manifest itself - we in the community pursue just such a goal, therefore we are actively engaged in educational activities. We go to all festivals dedicated to the Russian spiritual tradition, and there we hold lectures, ceremonies and master classes.

Often people do not understand why it is useful to adhere to the traditional worldview of their people. But this is a clue about what to do with your life. Studying foreign languages, I discovered that many words with the same root in our language in many others are not. Take at least two Russian words "forgive" and "simplify". Our ancestors understood: forgiving someone, we simplify life for ourselves. In English, these words are far from the same root. It turns out that we have a different perception of the most common everyday processes with the Western world. Therefore, when a Slavic person tries to live in accordance with Catholicism or even Buddhism, he seems to be trying to install a program tailored for one operating system on another operating system. Trying to adopt a worldview that is optimally adjusted for a completely different organism, we make ourselves worse. In the now popular yoga, there are breathing practices that are absolutely inappropriate for us, selected for people from a country with a hot climate. And why do we need someone else's, if the Slavs have their own, giving answers to all questions? It's the same in the family. The optimal union of a man and a woman is still a union between people of the same people. I know many different stories about how Russian women tried to live with Germans or Americans, but in such a marriage one cannot count on full understanding.

We have specific areas that, in fact, provide satisfaction of day-to-day needs. For example, being alive is the art of managing your energy, shaping events around you. In India there is a teaching about prana, in China - qigong. And our work through the body is expressed in yargo - this is when you, with the help of physical exercises, clear your energy blocks, establish certain areas of life. Alive is healing with your own hands.

We also have the science of Rodolad, which is somewhat similar to Chinese feng shui. She talks about what and where in the house is better to put and what colors to keep in it. There are many rituals associated with the road - from traffic cops, from traffic jams. For example, you mentally put on a “cap” on the car and set the setting so that no one can see you. But do not overdo it: you can get into an accident. There was a case: a military man, our man, crossed the border by car on his way to Ukraine. He was stopped and found in the glove compartment of a license that cannot be taken out. The woman accompanying him took out a tambourine and began to beat it. Then the border guards could not stand it and let them go with the words: "Go!"

It is not easy to organize everyday life in the city corresponding to the tradition. We are not in conflict with the city, but let's say I go to the grocery store and what do I buy there? Milk with antibiotics, which is no longer milk at all. White flour bread with flavor enhancers and other additives. The most common yeast bread is a very unhealthy product. Industrial yeast is full of toxic substances, and refined, refined flour is very difficult to digest. I gave up on conventional baked goods for a long time and understood the difference. At home I cook from whole grain flour - both bread and even pizza. This kind of cooking takes a lot of time, because we eat a lot of bread. But it is better to take food as medicine than to eat pills instead of food later. Now good products have started to appear in regular stores as well. But what amazes me is that it has turned into an expensive toy: polished cereals sometimes cost three times cheaper than unpolished, although much more work was invested in the first.

We live in Krylatskoye, we gather there and sometimes kindle fires. Recently, mounted policemen began to frequently appear on the territory of the park, who had already warned a couple of times that the fine for starting a fire in the wrong place is 5 thousand rubles. And we are not ready to go to Bitsevsky forest: this is not a good place, it would be cool to clean everything there, but for now we will not do this. The power industry does not have it there.

The whole immense world is an integral living organism. This is the Almighty God, whom we call so - the Most High Rod. He has no gender, no personality, but he is material. The power that created this world is dual and is divided into masculine and feminine. The hypostasis of the male is called Svarog, of the female - Lada. They are considered creator gods, and the rest of the gods are called either the children of Svarog and Lada, or faces. The strength of Svarog as a young and ardent man is Yarilo. Makosh is the female manifestation of Lada as the mistress of the hearth. Mara is death. Every god has a dark side to it. Only the word "dark" in Russian was distorted, but in Ukrainian it remained in the same meaning - "dark", that is, secret. We are not afraid of the dark gods, we interact with them, although not every day. By the law of nature, connecting with the force of destruction, you will collapse. But it is impossible to create something without destroying it. Many diseases are healed best of all by the power of destruction. If you think about it, then every second we act as destroyers and creators at the same time. You need to master this duality in order to live happily.

The external form of worldview is a tradition, it organizes the whole life, like the holidays. For example, winter and New Year's Eve are the best times to start dreaming. It is no coincidence that they are guessing at Christmas time, when the energetic space blurs the line between reality and the mysterious. Our nearest big holiday is Kolyada, December 22. The winter solstice lasts a total of three days, we celebrate Christmas on the 25th. Let's just say we celebrate the birth of a new Sun, not the death of the old one. This holiday has its own attributes, and since our people are still agricultural, most of them are associated with grain and ears. At Christmas, a didukh was always made - a sheaf, an element in the form of a tree, denoting the trinity of worlds. Kutia is an important Christmas symbol, but in Moscow it was preserved only at commemorations and is made from rice. In fact, kutia is cooked from wheat or barley. This porridge, when it is just being prepared and, as it were, disperses in a pot, symbolizes the primary chaos and something from which matter is created. Traditionally, poppy seeds, nuts, seeds, honey are added there. By the age of seven, the girl should have already been able to cook kutya, the recipe was passed from woman to woman, from generation to generation.

Tradition should not turn into a fanatical ritual without understanding why you are doing it. In Christianity, this very often happens, and among the clergy it is normal to live according to one concept, and to believe in another.