The Russia of Soothsayers and Shamans

According to research by the Modifiers agency, Russians are turning to both psychologists and representatives of the esoteric arts in their fight against stress in these war years. While traffic on astrology, fortune-telling and numerology sites has increased by 38% in the past year, the Moscow Duma is seeking to ban the advertising of fortune-tellers.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Interest in the esoteric arts is growing rapidly in Russia, with traffic on astrology, fortune-telling and numerology websites up 38% in the past year, according to data published by the Yota agency. More and more hours are spent by Russians consulting these portals, and magic rituals are highly sought after, bringing in increasingly profitable business: in Siberia and the European part of Russia, the prices of spells and invoices are estimated to have risen by 40-50%.

To perform a chakra cleansing today, one has to pay a sum of over 15 thousand roubles (150 euros), while ‘liberation from destructive influences’ goes up to 25 thousand roubles. While last year the occult market was moving around 2 trillion roubles, today it continues to grow month by month, and the Moscow Duma is trying to ban the advertising of fortune-tellers, tarot cards and other esoteric services.

In Siberia, shamans are especially active at the end of December, on the longest nights of the year, when, according to esoteric beliefs, the world of the living is closest to that in which the dead dwell. For this reason, rituals are celebrated on weekend nights with the eating of cakes and pancakes of the spirits of one's own generation.

In the Siberian region of Kemerovo, for example, an event was held in agreement with the local department of culture, gathering a group of shamans from Kuzbass, Khakasia and the neighbouring Krasnoyarsk region in the Kuznetsky Alatau Museum, with free access to the population advertised in the regional media.

The most fervent adherents of shamanism actually consider these public rites of kamlanija to be nothing more than ‘theatrical performances’, while the authentic ones are only known through the dedicated chat rooms of followers, who gather around the shaman not only to appease the spirits, but also to heal people in the course of the ritual, and one can participate in these special sessions by paying around 10-15 thousand roubles, as many people in search of salvation do.

As Kemerovo resident Olga Minakova, who has been taking part in the shamanic rituals since 2022, tells Sibir.Realii: ‘I went the first time because I felt really bad, I didn't know what to do with my future, I was afraid that my husband would be called to mobilisation, and I could only see hunger and impenetrable darkness ahead’. At first, she went to the Mabon festival on the day of the winter equinox, also known as the ‘day of the falling leaves’.

She assures that ‘not even the sessions with the psychologist had given me such deep peace’, receiving from the shaman ‘a sense of purification, a source of energy and peace at the same time’. Then she also went to the solstice for the feast of hope, entrusting all her wishes for the coming year, asking for the blessing of her ancestors and peace for the whole world, even though the shaman said that the war in Ukraine would only end in 2034, according to what the spirits revealed.

According to research by the analytical branch of the Modifiers agency, Russians turn to psychologists as well as representatives of the esoteric arts in their fight against stress in these war years. Many believe that Vladimir Putin's first trip to Mongolia in 2024 was also motivated by an encounter with shamans, as his trusted advisor Sergei Šojgu, a former defence minister originally from the Mongolian land of Tuva, has implied.

As revealed by political scientist Abbas Galljamov, the super-Putin oligarch brothers, Mikhail and Jurij Kovalčuk, are funding a major project to study shamanism, along with Tibetan Buddhism and Lamaism. In 2021, there were over 4,000 shamans in Russia, but their numbers have increased considerably during the war years, helping people even at a distance, ensuring the effectiveness of magic rituals even on Telegram channels and other network platforms, teaching the actions to be performed to find peace or support one's husbands and sons in war, obviously for a fee.