“And This Spiritual Pride Began to Appear in Him”: Between Guidance and Your Own Spiritual Path in the New Age Community on Lake Svetloyar

Abstract

The paper is devoted to two spiritual communities at Lake Svetloyar in the Nizhny Novgorod region. Lake Svetloyar is a “place of power”, a sacred place for followers of New Age culture, holistic new spirituality, that flourished from the 1960s in the West and gained mass popularity in late-Soviet Russia, especially from the 1990s. Using the example of the two communities, the author deals with the discussion of personal spiritual experience and practices of following spiritual guides in the New Age. The author touches upon the questions of how the values of individualism or collectivism / mentoring are contested in the communities, how responsibility is distributed, in what terms following a leader is described, and how his or her charisma is maintained or fails. The article shows that consultants’ rhetorical strategies in reasoning about spiritual guidance are similar to Orthodox material. The influence of Soviet rhetoric — a specific bureaucratic language — on spiritual practices is also noted. The most important ways of maintaining charisma turn out to be improvisation and the moral image of the leader. These aspects, as well as the background and age of the followers, are, in the author’s view, important for understanding why one community continues to grow whilst another loses its members. The author develops the thesis that the New Age, in the late Soviet and post-Soviet context, was not only a product of Western counterculture, but also experienced significant influence from local ideas and practices. The article is based on fieldwork within the communities — spontaneous conversations and participant observation.