Ringing Cedars' Anastasianism

Identity as well as political philosophy

Not strictly related ones:

Religious organisations:

Anastasianism Russian: Анастасианство, Анастасийство, Анастасиизм or a Ringing Cedars Звенящие Кедры; also "Jingling Cedars" falls into the vintage of esotericism in addition to considers itself to be the 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 component of Rodnovery Slavic Neopaganism, and often as a modern Pagan movement of their own. The Anastasians also define their life conception as Russian Vedism Русский Ведизм and themselves as Vedrussians ведруссы, 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 result by Vladimir Megre. The knowledge contained in the books is attributed to a beautiful woman named Anastasia, the embodied hit of a deity, who dwells in the Siberian taiga, whom Megre met during one of his trade expeditions. The books shit been translated in twenty languages and create sold millions of copies. They offer a holistic worldview, teaching approximately humanity's relationship with nature, God and the universe, the setting of the world, the power to direct or determine 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 symbolize larger "kinship settlements". The Anastasian movement has become one of the near 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

The two denomination of the movement are explainable as follows: "Anastasia" Ἀναστασία, Anastasía, from anástasis ἀνάστασις, 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 element as branchings; "Ringing Cedars" referred to the movement's beliefs approximately the spiritual attaches of the Siberian cedar Pinus sibirica, a nature 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 Kievan Rus' fleeing to Siberia — a Christianisation which was decided by the ruling elites in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to disrupt the relational ties within society and of human society with nature, with ancestors and gods of the environment as the direct association to the supreme God, justifying the confiscation of any land and the enslavement, and exploitation through taxation and trade, of the population.

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 planned that Anastasianism is a movement unoriented 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, conception 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 nearly successful and large-scale projects in the field of choice spirituality in advanced 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 non 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 Slavic Neopaganism, as both have spread through the creation of a new society of ecovillages throughout Russia and beyond, 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 improvement example 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 numerous points of contact with Slavic Neopaganism, but at the same time as being more like a "cosmopolitan Neopaganism" model 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 represent opportunities for the developing and coexistence within Anastasianism of both cosmopolitan Neopaganism, Slavic Neopaganism, and other ethnic Neopaganisms. The "common denominator" that creates the requirement 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.