Chaos in Russia! Wagner’s pagan neo-Nazis. Is conspirituality unique to a failing American empire in the internet age? Does it require Californian New Age spirituality, with conspiracy theories that weave around alternative medicine, for-profit pharma with no social safety net, and the reactionary politics of White Christian Nationalism?
This week, Julian explores a different version of Conspirituality. This form translates QAnon for a European audience and calls for a return to the golden age of the Russian empire, but also to an ancient pre-Christian Slavic identity united across borders in pagan faith.
Show Notes
The Everyday Religious Life in Wagner PMC, via Observatoire
Candance Rondeaux on Wagner, Pan-Slavism, al-Qaeda
Jan Zabka’s piece on QAnon in Czech/Slovakia, Prophets of Freedom and Doom
Sofia Cherici’s piece on QAnon’s cross-cultural evolution, Translating QAnon
Marlene Laurelle on the Rodnoverie Movement
Fake News sites centered in Veles, Macedonia had Russian and American ties
A Photographer and an Artist Walk into a Fake News Factory from Coda Story
Original Book of Veles forgery
Main interstitial music: Bus Ride to Gulu — Pete Kuzma
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and
spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker and I'm flying solo today to present something I've been working on for a while now.
It's another installment on Conspiratuality in Eastern Europe.
And how it relates, as it turns out, to extremely current events.
Now, if you listened last week, we had promised a special episode for this week featuring a chapter excerpt from our audiobook, but breaking news has intruded upon that schedule, so bear with us.
A quick reminder here that our book is out now and available everywhere and a special note of appreciation to our Apple subscription and Patreon supporters who make our work here possible.
You can get access to our Monday bonus episodes via either service,
but Patreon supporters also get these main feed Thursday episodes and Saturday briefs
completely ad-free and have the option to sign up for live streams and the behind-the-scenes videos we create.
Conspiratuality 160 Empire of Lies with Sofia Chiarici and Jan Zabka.
Chaos in Russia.
Pagan neo-Nazis.
Is conspirituality unique to the failing American empire in the internet age?
Does it require Californian New Age spirituality, conspiracy theories that weave around alternative medicine and for-profit pharma in a culture with no social safety net, and the reactionary politics of puritanical white Christian nationalism?
Well, today I'm going to explore the version of conspirituality that calls for a return
not only to the golden age of Russian Empire, but even to a pre-Christian Slavic identity
and pagan faith.
I actually put the finishing touches to this episode to be released at that time in about
three weeks.
On this past Friday, June 23rd, in the afternoon, when I came up for air, I saw that Derek and Matthew were madly texting me Twitter threads about Yevgeny Prigozhin launching in the early hours of Saturday morning there what looked at first like an attempted coup in progress against Vladimir Putin.
Given that Purgosian is a character in this episode, and that I had suggested something like this might happen soon, this new development had my attention, along with the rest of the world.
No doubt you followed the news.
Purgosian, the increasingly disgruntled leader of the so-called private military group, Wagner, had escalated from his series of telegram videos attacking Russia's military brass for failing to provide Adequate munitions to his forces fighting in Ukraine.
He accused them of deliberately bombing a Wagner camp and declared that he was turning his troops around and heading toward Moscow.
He kept issuing venomous video and audio posts claiming amongst other things that the Ukraine war was really about enriching Russian elites and that the death toll was much higher than the Kremlin was admitting.
The convoy continued traveling north.
Prigozhin rolled into a key military city, Rostov-on-Don, where video showed him sitting with senior military officials there demanding an audience with Minister of Defense Shoigu and Top General Gerasimov.
Some Wagner vehicles also continued on past Rostov towards Voronezh, which is a kind of halfway point on the way to Moscow.
Eventually, Putin appeared on Russian TV, calling the Wagner maneuvers a stab in the back and promising punishment to those who had chosen the path of blackmail and terrorist methods.
But then it was all over as quickly as it started.
Within 24 hours, and Prigozhin and his men were cheered like heroes leaving Rostov by locals who chanted Wagner, Wagner.
Apparently Belarusian Premier Alexander Lukashenko had brokered a deal in which charges would be dropped against Prigozhin and he would be exiled to Belarus with his mercenaries integrated into the Russian military.
We'll have to wait and see what develops.
Observers say that this story and Prigozhin's role in it is likely far from over.
And that Putin has been shown in the process to be quite weak at home as well as in Ukraine, a humiliating development that makes some show of force from him in the near future quite likely.
Now, why all of this is relevant for our topic today will become clear as we continue.
As I record this now, it's been 16 months since Russia invaded Ukraine.
I mean...
At that time, I filed a piece for Conspirituality about Alexander Dugin titled Kali Yuga Chess.
It detailed how this philosopher, who reportedly has Vladimir Putin's ear, is enamored of a spiritual path called traditionalism.
His 1997 book, The Foundations of Geopolitics, is apparently required reading for Russian military personnel.
In it, he unfolds a strategy for how to make Russia great again.
The first step And actualizing that strategy?
Why, to take back Ukraine, of course.
In Kali Yuga Chess, I played a gloating excerpt from a tiny press conference on the day after the invasion began, in which Dugan gloatingly said, without Ukraine, Russia cannot be empire once again.
This is why we must win.
The endgame on this strategy?
A vast and powerful theocratic Eurasian empire that can challenge what he calls the unipolar hegemony of Western democracy.
We now know that these grandiose plans appear to have stumbled dramatically at the very first hurdle.
As part of this recap, I should add that The Foundations of Geopolitics describes specific strategies for how to destabilize, conquer, and partner with multiple other countries, including the following quote.
Russia should introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements, extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S.
It would also make sense, simultaneously, to support isolationist tendencies in American politics.
Of course, this was written before social media and ubiquitous internet access would become a vector for precisely the kind of activity we know has gone on in this way since at least the 2016 US election campaign.
And it turns out that that was masterminded not so much by Alexander Dugin as by this man named Yevgeny Prigozhin.
If you want to dig deeper into Dugin I encourage you to go back and listen to Kali Yuga Chess but here's the thumbnail.
He's enamored of something called Traditionalism with a capital T.
Adherents typically revere the writings of a Frenchman named René Guénon and an Italian named Julius Evola.
These guys are mystical syncretists.
They espouse a blend of theosophical, Sufi, and Hindu beliefs, and Evola actually also moved in early Nazi circles, while his writing played a role in influencing Mussolini's style of fascism.
Their blend of spiritual racism posits a framework of cosmic time borrowed from the Vedic notion of the yugas or cyclical ages that move from gold to silver to bronze and then into the dark age we are said to be living through at the present.
In each of these ages, a different stratum within the karmically designated caste system rules over the world.
In today's Dark Age, which you may have heard referred to in spiritual circles as the Kali Yuga, the slave caste is said to rule over a time in which materialism completely obscures the divine.
Traditionalists seek to bring about a return to the natural religious order of the Golden Age in which the priests of their particular persuasion rule over the Empire.
The only way to get there from here is by force.
You may remember that Steve Bannon is a fan of these ideas, and they serve at least in some way as an underpinning to the strategy-building conferences and gala dinners at which he's hosted a network of ultra-conservative leaders from around the world.
While these disparate figures are definitely not all deeply familiar with the spiritual path and beliefs of traditionalism, their nativist right-wing populism and appeals to whichever lost golden age mythology resonates with their own cultures evoke common cause against cosmopolitan social progress in western democracies since World War II.
Now, Bannon has been quoted as calling Trump a blunt instrument for his cause.
And the resurgence of white Christian nationalism, along with the 2020 phenomenon of QAnon and then Stop the Steal, all play into this prophetic neo-fascist fantasy that Bannon preaches from his War Room podcast, whose listener numbers regularly chart in the top 100 or even top 50 worldwide.
Dugin and Putin didn't count on Ukraine's resilience.
They also overestimated their own military prowess.
So much for prophecy and empire.
But now, as the brutal conflict rages on...
It's well known that the Wagner Group has continued its legacy of torture, rape, robbery, and other war crimes in Ukraine, as already acted in Libya, Syria, Central African Republic, Mali, and in the 2014 Donbass War.
The Wagner Group has, since then, operated in a way that gives the Russian government plausible deniability, while in fact deploying on the side of Russian interests around the world.
As mentioned, Yevgeny Prigozhin is their leader.
If Dugin is sometimes called Putin's brain, Prigozhin is often referred to as Putin's chef.
Starting at 18, he spent nine years in jail for robbery, and then sold hot dogs alongside his parents in a Leningrad flea market, before moving up to owning a grocery chain, then gambling establishments, and eventually very upscale restaurants.
Vladimir Putin was then a little-known chairman of the supervisory board of gambling and casinos, and would become a frequent patron of Yevgeny's restaurants, eventually, as Russian president, bringing foreign dignitaries as guests and forming an ever-closer bond with the chef.
The founding of the Wagner Group had been ascribed to someone named Dmitry Utkin, a former special forces lieutenant colonel whose call sign was the name of Hitler's favorite composer, Richard Wagner.
But in September of 2022, Prigozhin, who had previously denied involvement, claimed that he owned and had founded the group himself.
And he has been prominent in news media since due to the presence of Wagner in Ukraine as well as his disputes with official Russian military leaders and speculation that he may be on a pathway toward one day deposing Putin.
Pregozhin also stated in February of this year that he invented, financed, and ran the IRA.
Those are his own words.
That's the Internet Research Agency responsible for Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election.
Now elements within Wagner are involved in white supremacy and neo-nazism, but insiders say that Dimitri Utkin and many others within the group also identify as part of a modern, pagan, new religious movement often referred to either as Rodnovery or Slavic Native Faith.
Some groups refer to it as Vedism, Orthodoxy, or the Old Belief.
How big of a role this religious movement, which often, but not always, I should hasten to add, has ties to ethno-nationalism, really plays in the Wagner Group is hard to say.
Especially given that many of their fighters in Ukraine, who one former commander has described as being cannon fodder, are recruited from Russian prisons and fight with the vain promise of freedom in front of them and a bullet I don't think that Purgosian even remotely pretends to be a religious leader.
But the phenomenon of conspirituality within the context of an extremely unstable Europe these days is undeniable, and it predictably benefits right-wing and authoritarian politics.
Intelligence expert Candace Rondeau may be the world's leading academic authority on the Wagner Group.
Here she is on Amanpour & Company from earlier this month.
There is a very large contingent within the Wagner Group that seems to be very attracted to the idea of white supremacy and that is a very troubling part of kind of their organizational drive.
Many people have described the Wagner Group as a paramilitary And that is true, they are paramilitary, but they are also increasingly a social movement that represents a very extreme white nationalist, pan-Slavist mentality and ideology that Putin and others would like to see spread across Europe.
And we've even seen in Spain, for instance, there were a few letter bombs earlier in 2022 that were attributed to the Russian imperial movement, which is another kind of link to the Wagner group.
That is a very frightening pattern.
In some ways, this may seem extreme now, but in maybe a year's time or two years' time, we are looking at the early progenitor of an almost Al Qaeda or ISIS-like force in the sense of their extreme positions on social cohesion and their extreme positions on what it takes to kind of run a society.
An extremely frightening prospect is the idea that that social movement would start to seep out of Russia.
And we also know that there are a lot of fans of the Wagner Group online.
We've tracked that for the last several years and seen how the Wagner Group brand on social media has grown over time, largely because of that use of the neo-fascist symbolism and culture that they invoke when they try and kind of bring people on board.
As Sofia Kearichi and Jan Žabka will tell us later, the appeal to ancestral roots, old ways of living on the land, a birthright for Slavic people united against the dominance of the West, and New Age-infused ethnic spirituality All weaves its way through telegram channels that support Putin's war and promote QAnon-style conspiracies and prophecies, only they've been repurposed for a European audience.
Some of those channels promote an emerging guru named Igor Mikhailovich Danilov, whose organization, AllatRa, spreads pro-Russian and climate-denial messages, and preaches rising up against the elites and the media, who they frame, along with anyone who opposes their mission, as subhuman animals.
Alatra also prophesies a coming volcanic apocalypse.
But not to worry, they have a plan for how to restructure the world.
As with the conspiritualists we have tracked over the last three years, the Italian, Czech, and Slovak telegram channels researched by Chiarici and Zabka blend the feel-good spiritual commerce of guided meditations, channeled information about aliens and natural health remedies with Anti-GMO and anti-vax propaganda, COVID denialism, right-wing extremism, and at times even reference Donald Trump and aspects of QAnon lore.
So this virulent blend of conspiracism, ethno-nationalism, and back-to-the-earth religious appeals to a glorious past that will one day be restored is sadly not unique to American politics.
This concept of QAnon in Czech Republic and Italy I can see as how to say the way that they give us something like to fight against but also to fight for and we have like both sides of the same coin in the same time and they give us like That elites are bad, that media are bad, but also they will tell us that if we will believe in ourselves, in nature, in something like that, then we can solve this problem and the world can be better.
And this is something that wasn't so common in conspiracies before.
And I believe that this is the key why it's so widely spread and why it's so popular now.
And also that it's possible to share this conspiracy also in the context of Czech Republic or Italy and not only U.S.
because everyone wants to feel better in their life and they all want to solve the
problems what society has and this conspiracy tell them we have the key just open the
door. The perception is that spirituality and conspiracism are used by different movements and far-right
groups to attract and red pill ordinary people who would never otherwise define themselves
as far-right believers or general extremists.
So you enter, as I said earlier, in any of these groups, on these conspiritual groups on Telegram, and it's Really pure chaos.
We see a mix of ideological and extremist cocktails.
We see fake news and different types of conspiracies.
We see spiritual messages of peace and love and the boundaries among different extremist ideologies are very blurred.
And these groups don't seem to care anymore to have people join their ranks based on strong beliefs or allegiance.
This is something that may come after, later.
It's okay.
Like, they'd rather infiltrate whatever anti-establishment wave arises, so to generate confusion and steer the discourse where they want or need it to be.
As we've shown in our book, conspirituality thrives and mutates from the raw materials of existential uncertainty, political disinformation, and the promise of magical solutions for the initiated.
If it is always run through with fantasies and lies, that is because it exploits real vulnerabilities, longings, and alienation.
We can trace it back, at least, to the Middle Ages, even though today's proliferation, often associated with QAnon, is supercharged by social media.
Its versatility gives us a glimpse of the coiling Leviathan animating whatever cultural clothing, mythic prophecies, or historical tensions it might be shamelessly exploiting.
This actually touches upon a very important point, which is that it is definitely true that different references and symbols and the phenomenon in general has a country-specific characteristic, meaning that QAnon, for example, is getting more and more followers in Italy and the Czech Republic, like in many other countries in Europe, by tailoring its narratives and themes.
QAnon originally has a cosmology of reference that is very much rooted in the US politics and culture, right?
So there was a sort of a spontaneous need for the movement to adapt in order to take root in culturally distant countries.
And honestly, in the many groups that I have checked, I could hardly find references to the typical American QAnon teams like Satanist Elites and so on.
This is because it has adapted itself to follow the cultural environment in which he's trying to Also, in the QAnon focus groups in Italy and the Czech Republic, we see how national ideologies and local politics are being instrumentalized.
So in the Czech Republic, we see, for example, pro-Putin narratives, whereas in Italy, we find that there are messages talking about Meloni and Salvini and their salvific role.
Kind of regarded as the Trump of Italy in some cases, like both Meloni and Salvini, which is very weird.
Sometimes the messages that are circulated may even contradict the very American foundation and principle of QAnon, and QAnon is not an homogeneous movement.
But this allowed the cult to spread, of course.
The Lost Golden Age was a recurring theme in different groups.
So there is a need to adapt the discourse, to adapt certain themes, certain topics, of course.
And there is a need to make them country-specific for this movement in order to infiltrate But there are some general themes, like this Lost Golden Age, that work really well everywhere.
What I'm going to share with you today will be equal parts storytelling, analysis and excerpts as you've heard so far from my interview with Sophia and Jan.
This project has taken me on a fascinating journey and I'm excited to share it with you.
This is Empire of Lies.
To find our way into exploring the pan-Slavic conspirituality hovering behind the current war in Ukraine and Russia's role on an increasingly unstable global stage, I'm going to invite you into a segment built around just one single word.
Veles.
Veles is the name of a pagan god of earth, waters, livestock, and the underworld in Slavic pagan mythology.
But it's also the name of an Eastern European town.
But that's not all.
It turns out there are at least two different texts titled The Book of Veles, one of which may be a religious forgery, the other of which is part of a deliberate hoax.
But more on that later.
As the 2016 presidential election drew to a close, stories in The Guardian and on BuzzFeed told of how at least 100 pro-Trump fake news websites were being run by a group of teenagers out of a town of roughly 45,000 people in North Macedonia.
The New Yorker reported that Barack Obama was obsessed with this story as he barnstormed swing states in the final days of Hillary's campaign, calling it a digital gold rush in Veles.
Samanche Subramian visited the town and wrote for Wired Magazine about the young entrepreneurs profiting from the realization that Donald Trump drove clicks, Facebook drove traffic and Google ad revenue drove a steady stream of cash into the bank accounts associated with their websites as long as they kept churning out sensationalist fake news aimed primarily at Americans on the internet.
Now this is not the Russian Internet Research Agency or Chinese or Iranian state-sponsored disinformation campaigns as described to us by researchers like Rene Diresta.
This is usually distributed as part of a political agenda.
But this particular brand of fake news that came out of Veles was driven entirely by a profit motive from an economically devastated town in which factories and markets stood eerily empty.
With an average monthly salary barely exceeding $370 and a national unemployment rate of 24%, Subramanian reported that some of these Macedonian kids were making thousands of dollars a month from their online empire of lies.
In the town of Veles, that meant they were really living the high life.
That is, until Google pulled the plug on their scheme.
Oddly, given that it is two words, fake news was designated word of the year by Collins Dictionary in 2016.
Veles was the epicenter of fake news that year, but it was the location of a different kind of hoax in 2021.
Acclaimed Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen told Kodastory.com that he traveled to the town to create a project he called the Book of Veles.
Fascinated by the fake news phenomenon and also by how digital technology and artificial intelligence were confounding our human abilities to tell the difference between real and artificially generated images, he took artsy photos of deserted locations in Veles and then used 3D software to insert people And bears into the photos.
Now the bears are an interesting touch because the Slavic pagan god I mentioned before, who you'll remember is also named Veles, sometimes takes the form of a bear and is described as a kind of magical trickster.
Bendixson then fed real news stories by journalists covering the fake news revelations of 2016 into an open source AI text generator, which in turn wrote the 5,000 word introduction to his deceptive book.
Now to Bendixson's surprise, colleagues and reviewers failed to recognize the work as what it was on publication.
A hoax deliberately created to foster conversation about both the disinformation crisis and how easily we are fooled by technology.
Still keen to get the conversation started, Bendixson paid for social media bots to criticize his work as fake, only to have throngs of supporters defend him.
The photographer eventually had to break the real news himself on what he had been up to by holding a press conference.
There's one more piece to this story.
Jonas Bendixson also inserted excerpts into his text called the Book of Veles that were
borrowed from another book, the original Book of Veles, which I will tell you about now.
According to the small number of sources I can find, the Book of Veles was discovered in a looted
Ukrainian castle in 1919 by a lieutenant in the White Russian army named Isenbek Arthurovich.
and It consists of 42 birch wood planks, each 15 inches by 8.7 inches in dimension, into which an ancient, previously unknown language had been etched.
Arthurovich moved to Brussels, taking the planks with him.
and would eventually present the artifact to a Russian scientist named Yuri Mirolyubov, who is said to have spent 15 years studying, restoring, photographing, decoding, and translating the text.
He claimed it dated back to the 10th century BCE and contained the only existing record of both a pre-Christian Slavic religion and alphabet.
All of this work was then lost for a time after the Nazis came to Brussels.
But when Mirolyubov emigrated to the United States, he passed it along to a professor, Kurenkov, who would publish about it in a San Francisco-based Russian magazine called Tsar Titsa, or Firebird, between March 1957 and May of 1959.
Now, since then, the overwhelming scholarly consensus has concluded that the Book of Felis is clearly a forgery, and that the entire story was most likely concocted by the editor of Firebird and Mirolyubov, or that the, as it turns out, only one plank actually available was fabricated in the early 19th century by a notorious Russian collector and forger.
The reasons for this consensus That it's a forgery are many, but a chorus of linguists and historians concur that the purported text gives all the appearance of an artificial, invented language.
Slavic words from different time periods are apparently jumbled together along with grammatical, spelling, and structural inconsistencies that make actual translation incoherent.
Nonetheless, the Book of Veles is an oft-cited root text in today's pan-Slavic paganism, sometimes called Slavic Native Faith or Rodnovery.
This movement aspires to reclaim a pre-Christian religious and ethnic identity in the post-Soviet world.
But Slavic Native Faith is, as it turns out, actually a new religious movement.
It shares the familiar post-modern New Age emphasis on the eclectic construction of personal meaning with ancient authority via a decentralized spiritual path without institutionalized orthodoxy.
Existing in contrast to the hierarchical imposition of Christianity, proponents of Rodinovory seem equally likely to espouse polytheistic, monotheistic, or pantheist beliefs.
They may also invoke Slavic, Germanic, or Scandinavian deities, and some even make reference to Hindu gods and refer to their tradition as Vedic in origin.
According to historian and political scientist Marlene Lorel, Rodnovery represents itself as a natural religion.
It, I'm quoting here, insists on a return to nature.
She says that adherents condemn Christianity and other Abrahamic religions as anthropocentric.
By asserting that man was created in the likeness of God and that God could have been incarnated as man or transmitted his image and message through man, those religions distort the place of mankind within nature.
Only nature can be representative of the divine on earth, with man in a more modest position, she says.
Laurel relates this to the persistent idea of a Russian soul, which exists in relation to a characteristic landscape.
As distinct from the authoritarian structure of organized religion as it may be, Rodnovery, nonetheless, positions itself as a secret or hidden knowledge, available only to the small group of outsiders who have awakened to this ancient, original faith of the Slavs, deliberately suppressed by Christianity.
Now some of these appeals to an ancient historical basis correlate with the fact that around 3.2 billion people, or roughly 46% of the world today, speak a language that traces back to something called Proto-Indo-European.
A language thought to have first been spoken in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, which today corresponds with the regions of Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Kazakhstan, and the northern Caucasus mountains of Russia.
Nomadic tribes, who first domesticated animals for farming and learned to tame and ride horses between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago, would go on to conquer areas throughout Europe, South Asia, and today's Middle East.
The prolific success of these Proto-Indo-European tribes accounts for the similarities between languages as seemingly far-flung as Latin, French, German, Greek, Czech, Russian, Persian, and Bengali, to name but a few of the 445 tongues in this family.
19th century attempts to make sense of this linguistic dominance led to the now obsolete notion that the Proto-Indo-European tribes belonged to a superior race of humans, you guessed it, the Aryans, descended from those Caucasus mountains and hence also called Caucasians.
This so-called scientific racism carried within it the seeds of what would later become Nazism, along with its mythologized blood and soil and the mystical fetish for Indian spiritual symbology.
Now the term Aryan was actually first used by Indo-Iranians to designate those who spoke
Vedic Sanskrit and adhered to Vedic traditions.
In a pair of excellent articles on politics and religion via a website called Transitions,
Sofia Chiarici and Jan Zabka share their research into how QAnon-style conspiracism is metastasizing
on European social media via culturally relevant spiritual mythologies.
You've heard a little bit from them so far already, but what follows will be some more excerpts from a very wide-ranging two-hour conversation I had with them based on their research and journalism in a language I can only imagine is second or third to both of them, so I'm very appreciative.
But the historical storytelling is not over yet.
Discussing her piece titled Translating QAnon, I asked Sofia about an occultist and Russian secret agent named Yuliana Galinka who brought the infamous anti-Semitic forgery titled Protocols of the Elders of Zion from theosophical circles in Paris at the turn of the 20th century to Russia and later to Germany.
I found out about Juliana Glinka by accident, actually.
I was researching the topic of spiritualism and conspiracies for a personal story that was actually talking about my mother and her spiralling into magical hoo-hoo and disinformation.
And at the time I didn't even know about the term conspirituality.
When I found out the research on the historical roots of conspirituality that was conducted by historians of religion, Haspram and Direndal, I was actually very fascinated by how many hidden stories and characters populate the twisted but also very alluring world of conspirituality throughout history.
So, Juliana Glinka was an occultist and a theosophist.
And she was well integrated into the Parisian occult circles of the late 19th century.
And she also got involved with the Ohrana, the Russian secret service.
And it is interesting how she might have had a crucial role in bringing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Europe.
She was physically carrying them, this manuscript, from Paris to Russia.
And at the time, the network of occultists and theosophists was very far-reaching and very tentacular.
They had publications, magazines, international associations, and so on.
And they were fascinated by conspiratorial interpretations of the world.
In my opinion, it is not an accident that an extremist message, like the one that was conveyed by the Protocols, was brought to Europe at the hands of an occultist.
It's no coincidence.
In a way, it is something that is very similar to what is actually happening in today's networks of contemporary spirituality.
Today, it's like in the past.
These far-reaching networks have the power to circulate pieces of information, or disinformation of course, very fastly.
Sophia references a concept from two Italian sociologists, Palmisano and Panofino, called the paradox of invisibility, made possible through movements that exist outside of recognized institutions.
Yeah, this is something that was mentioned by Nicola Panofino.
who is an Italian professor of sociology.
During one of the many interviews that we conducted, he shared this concept with us.
And the paradox of invisibility basically does not let us fully understand the expansion and the proportion of certain phenomena.
It basically says that even if we don't see them, it doesn't mean that they are not there.
It's just that perhaps our eyes are not used to detect them.
In other words, it's like contemporary spirituality is living a revival, right?
And it may seem that it's a niche phenomenon, but actually it is not.
And it's far more common than we think.
Pannofino explained to me that it's easier to recognize a traditional religion like Catholicism, for example, because it has certain clear-cut manifestations, coined symbols, some things that we do recognize, like churches, for example, places to which we are accustomed to.
So it is not the case for many forms of contemporary spirituality.
And again, even if we do encounter the symbols that contemporary spirituality movements use, we might as well not recognize their meaning and belonging.
And that's the paradox of invisibility.
In my experience, I was very surprised when he was saying this is a very widespread phenomenon, because for me, I kind of felt like, yes, it was widespread, but I also felt like it was a niche phenomenon.
It was like a contradiction.
And it was explained to me that that's like an issue of perspective, like we don't really See it, because we are not used to see it, to recognize it.
But it's there.
Simply that the manifestation of the movement, we don't recognize it.
We don't recognize symbols.
We don't recognize the places.
It's not the same as Catholicism, for example, or any other religion.
It's very difficult to investigate this kind of movement because they don't have an orthodoxy.
They have different manifestations, they have different forms of expressing themselves.
They can also be practiced individually, at the individual level, so it's also difficult to detect them.
Their initial research and journalism focused on telegram accounts from Italy and Czech Republic.
So we had very limited time and resources, so we decided to focus on Telegram, of course, because Telegram is the melting pot of groups that are a movement that are being kicked out of other social media spaces like Facebook.
which tend to be a little bit more regulated, of course.
So on Telegram, we can find a lot like general extremists, like Nazis, fascists.
We could also find major disinformation hubs, conspiracies, QAnon propagandists, of course, and We also could find a lot of spiritual channels and groups of New Age wellness and what people were talking about, I don't know, foreign, far away distant alien species or healing practices, you know, the common stuff.
In Czech Republic, it's like specific situation because we don't have something like Czech Telegram.
It's mostly like Czechoslovak Telegram, which is like combination of Slovak and Czech Telegram because we were like formal Czechoslovakia.
And also we don't have no normal media companies are on Telegram.
So it's like really just mess.
From that perspective it was really interesting to investigate this social network because it's more and more known by these conspirators and disinformators and they use it as a channel to spread these theories.
I asked Sofia how similar the collusion of right-wing conspiracism and New Age spirituality in English-speaking countries was to what she was seeing on Telegram.
We were able to prove that there is actually a rapprochement of these contemporary spirituality themes with conspiracies and far-right ideologies, which is very similar to what happened at the time of Julena Glinka to the time when occult circles
We're playing a role in circulating extremist content, like in the case of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
We find in these groups a lot of mixed messages, and it's incredible because one moment you read about a series about alien species, and a minute later there is a post about how Trump would be part of a military operation against the 10-year plan of the Kaval against America.
And we believe, I mean, we found out that it's very dangerous because it's actually hidden.
These are not the typical groups where people join because they want to be among like-minded people, because they want to be with other extremists.
Yes, we're talking about these groups where people join because maybe they've heard about it in their yoga classes.
So what happens is that people join without realizing where they are getting into.
So these people end up joining, for example, a QAnon group without even knowing what QAnon is.
And it's a process of which this is just the start.
It's like it's part of a red pilling and is a sort of radicalization slash recruitment scheme.
It's like in several groups of QAnon ex-believers, for example, on Reddit, people are fully aware of these tactics, and they try to warn other people about it.
Because they know that this is how normal people, the so-called normies, end up believing in QAnon and other far-right propaganda.
Because it's important to clarify it's not only QAnon.
These QAnon ex-believers, for example, they know this is how it works.
This is how QAnon recruits new people because they've lived it on their skin.
We did find tons of groups in Italy and the Czech Republic where the exact same strategies of recruiting slash radicalizing were applied.
And so I'd say it's very widespread in that sense, although it's very difficult to really get a sense of the phenomenon only by looking at Telegram accounts because many might very well fall out of the radar, of course.
The mix of content that is being widespread in these groups is very similar and We found, like, a lot of spiritual groups, Novaks are in Q&A related, so it doesn't matter the topic.
They're all using the same strategy, okay?
And sometimes they're even resharing content and reposting or translating content across countries.
We found this, for example, in Italy and the Czech Republic.
So it is difficult, as I said, to fully gain, like, to gain full knowledge of their expansion and network.
I guess it's another effect of the paradox of invisibility.
I was very impressed by how well interconnected this online Telegram world is.
They were really reposting a lot of content and by entering one group you could easily end up in 10 other groups.
So I think that in terms of strategy, it's very similar to what is happening in Italy and the Czech Republic.
It might as well be very similar to what is happening in other English speaking countries.
It also explains why it's possible to find QAnon ex-believers from Italy, for example, on the Reddit groups of QAnon ex-believers, which is, I think, a group that was originally meant for English speakers and mostly Americans.
But already, when I entered the group as an anonymous user asking for, like, an Italian support group for QAnon ex-believers, I almost ended up creating one, actually, because a lot of Italian users were replying and suggesting that to create one would be a good idea, because there are a lot of people actually in need of that.
So it's not only Americans or English-speaking countries, it's all over.
And that's a fact, something that we need to face, of course.
As I listened, I was trying to make sense of the synergy between deliberately networked disinformation strategies and organic virality on the one hand, and the algorithmic intersections of different types of content on the other.
In tracking the QAnon phenomenon during 2020, part of that novel runaway success relied, it seems, on exploiting that synergy, which is Partly why short cryptic cue drops starting at the end of 2017 could metastasize into an elaborate fantasy role-playing game of supernatural science fiction political prophecy that started to impact the real world.
So I asked Sophia how much of the time she could tell if what she was tracking in Europe was organically emerging versus deliberately manipulated.
We couldn't actually go as far as to see if there was actually, you know, like a formal network behind all this, but definitely they are interconnected.
We don't know if it is because, you know, it's planned, it's a scheme, or it's just because they share the mix of content.
It's all the same, the boundaries are all blurred, so everything just makes up together.
Which is actually the old point of why this phenomenon is happening, I think.
And why it is working, why extremist messages do work out well with disinformation and conspiracies and spiritualism, because everything is just mixing up and people are not able to understand the difference anymore.
Something I think is really interesting is looking at QAnon's style, conspiracy theories, In other cultures and wondering, and I asked Sophia about this, how the phenomenon that they were observing could differ in content from QAnon while still exhibiting the same familiar dynamics and impact.
Like, is it really right to still call it QAnon related even if an online political conspiracy theory is not really about blood-drinking satanic pedophiles?
That's actually, that's an important point because it's actually very difficult sometimes to identify the QAnon content.
And it's also difficult for, that's why also for people following these groups to identify whether or not they are following a Q, you know, post or not.
Sometimes it's like it's hidden.
It's like a rhetoric that is behind the message.
It was very difficult to go through, like to use on Telegram to be able to identify this Q&A on topics and groups because like the automatic search didn't work in certain cases because it wasn't enough to search for the Q or for, you know, Q and O in general or other keywords that may very well be used in this environment.
We needed to read and go through all the messages and understand whether or not There was, you know, this sense of, OK, is this talking about QAnon?
Is this QAnon related?
And then you feel it.
Once you read it, you understand, yes, this is definitely like something that is QAnon related.
For example, there is this reference about the truth.
like the need that this time is coming and it's going to be the truth is coming if you know you know sentencing that you recognize the twist you recognize that yes this is QAnon related so but I didn't find anything for example related to the satanic stuff which was very weird. And instead of this satanic stuff we
could find something else, a lot of references to, as I told you, like national
politics, European politics for example.
But this varies a lot depending on the group. Over time I've come to think that there is
one phenomenon, a specific belief system that we call QAnon.
But then there's also a way that the term QAnon perhaps can be used to describe the style of an emergent online phenomenon that exploits the tools and vulnerabilities of social media to spread political and religious conspiracy theories.
Yes, that is completely right.
And with all the interviews that we did with anthropologists and sociologists, they were all saying basically the same.
It's partly this movement, they do attract people also because they create a sense of belonging.
So it's not anymore about what the movement is actually saying, right?
It's not about the message.
Like, we don't know anymore in Italy what's the message of QAnon.
It's not the same of the message that QAnon has, for example, in USA.
So it's not about the message, but it's about, as you said, the feeling of it,
about the belonging, about feeling full, feeling that you have a purpose.
If the first of the two articles that drew me in by Kiaricia Dżabka covers the morphing
cultural and political reference points that QAnon style conspiracism is exhibiting in Europe,
the second one explores the more spiritual piece.
It's titled, Prophets of Freedom and Doom.
Jan explained to me the idea of a pan-Slavic identity that unifies people in different Eastern European countries in opposition to the West.
I think the problem now in Czech Republic and Slovakia is that the Slavic and pan-Slavism is a big topic because of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which is often portrayed by these conspiracy theorists as a war between the West and Russia, the largest Slavic nation.
And it's logical for people or some people in Czech Republic and Slovakia that pan-slavism is way of this conflict and to like making world better, I would say.
But it's really important to understand that it's not about a coherent and unified movement that is aimed at uniting all Slavic nations.
Rather, it's one of many storylines that can be used to explain complex events like war or international politics.
It's often associated with the idea that the age of the Slavs will come after Anglo-Saxon domination ends.
So the war in Ukraine now is just about that.
Will the Anglo-Saxon world win or it will end and we will have Slavic domination?
Because many people in these countries believe that the dominance of the United States is unsustainable, actually.
I think this is all about the idea of us versus them, which is typically in the post-Soviet world regarding whether we as Czech belong more to the West or to the East.
Like this debate is constant from the fall of the Soviet Union.
I asked Jan how New Age pan-Slavism was showing up on far-right conspiracist social media channels.
Spirituality is also a really big part of pan-Slavism.
In these posts on Telegram we can see that Slavs are being associated with love of nature or connection to the world and conscious perspective on human problems and we are like Slavic people are portrayed as people at the highest level of evolutionary development.
It's funny, but it is like that in these texts.
And interesting is that the rhetoric of spreaders of pan-Slavism nowadays is really similar to QAnon rhetoric.
We can see like the phrases like, uh, we are warriors of light, or we are trying to defeat the darkness or, uh, that the new golden age is coming and, uh, age of light is coming and things like that.
And it's really similar to QAnon and sometimes it's also spread with QAnon, like in the same channel, sometimes in the same posts.
QAnon came from US, which is Western.
But now they are trying to use this concept.
And to make it more, like, pro-Slavic.
It turns out that the death of the English queen, Elizabeth II, last year got sort of baked into this pan-Slavic narrative.
Jan also told me that Western opposition to Putin's invasion is often framed in these channels, on these posts, as anti-Slavic racism.
When British Queen died, a mix of conspiracies were circulating.
Actually, I love the conspiracy about that she was the main lizard, and when she died, the main lizard died, and it means that now It can be end of reptilian dominance.
Probably you know the conspiracy theory about reptilians.
But this lizard conspiracy was also spread in connection to QAnon or panslavism.
And when she died it means that this Anglo-Saxon dominance is coming to the end.
And they also calculated with Really simple numerology.
They said, for example, that because she died in September, 8th day of September actually, and September is the 9th month, and it means that, if you will sum it up, then it makes 17, and 17th number of alphabet is the letter Q.
Yeah, also it was spread in the telegram, these conspiracies, in the same channels as anti-Slavic racism is commonly discussed and the war in Ukraine is seen as an anti-Slavic campaign or an attempt to divide the Slavic nation.
Also, it's really important that such rhetoric often leads to Vladimir Putin being seen as the good guy and Queen Elizabeth or Joe Biden and other leaders of the Western world are seen as bad guys, of course.
Jan read me this post from a Telegram account that calls itself the Slavic Newspaper.
It is not secret that the key problem for the US was and is Russia.
For them, the Slavs are an inferior race, but also a permanent obstacle to world dominance.
So now we come to a fascinating phenomenon.
There is, situated within the milieu that we've been exploring, a spiritual sect called AllatRa.
And they have a kind of public-facing organization that they call the Creative Society.
I asked Jan to tell me more about this group.
The AllatRa sect is a Russian-centric religious movement that reportedly originated in Ukraine and produces content that is described as interesting for all people who seek self-improvement, spiritual and cultural development, and the strengthening of better qualities in themselves and in the surrounding society.
Like, it means that AllatRa claims to stand outside politics and religion, but in reality, actually the sect and its religious movement.
Because AllatRa has its own leader with whom it is trying to prevent the inevitable catastrophe which should be like the series of devastating volcanic eruptions because of the global warming.
It sounds Good that they are talking about global warming but they describe it in really wrong way and they are not too scientific because they have no like proof for their claims about the volcanic eruptions for example and they say that they know the exact date when it will happen and it should be in 2036.
The interesting thing is that they think that only so-called creative society can change this devastating catastrophe, like that we can actually save the world, but only if we all will be part of so-called creative society.
Like this is because the creative society should allow people to awaken forgotten knowledge to free ourselves from our animal nature and merge with our spiritual nature actually.
In such a creative society we should all be like in the peaceful brotherhood then the world will be better and like it will last for centuries in peace.
But the problem is that this creative society, and also Al Atra, is pan-Slavic.
It's only about the Slavic nations.
So it's mostly popular in Eastern and Central Europe, and I think it's not so popular in other parts of the world.
But this creative society is trying to influence also people in different countries that are not pan-Slavic.
Interesting part of this sect or this movement is that it's something like their Bible.
You will find out that, for example, the leader is the person so-called Nomo, and when they described who is Nomo, It all fits on the person of Vladimir Putin.
But they say, when you will talk to them, they will tell you, oh, we are not pro-Russian, we are not pro-Putin.
Well, they might say that.
But as Jan describes the New Age movement, AllatRa's online content further, and the dogmatic apocalyptic guru for this sect, there's something else very interesting here too.
Just as during 2020, mommy bloggers and yoga teachers in the U.S.
sharing what came to be called Pastel Q and hashtag Save the Children content were often blissfully unaware that they were promoting QAnon, some followers of AllatRa may not know that they're caught up in a pro-Russian far-right movement.
Jan explained that on the surface the movement presents itself as politically neutral and pro-peace but that this actually supports Russian aggression.
It's visibly pro-Russian and pro-Slavic because these thoughts are really like shared in not only these texts but also in videos which are made on YouTube and spreading widely on internet.
For example the main person who is talking in this video is Igor Mikhailovich Danilov and he acts as a guru of this creative society.
He is like sitting there really calmly explaining and answering all the questions how world works and how international politics should be like done and what is really good for people.
But When you will listen for 10-20 minutes, you will say to yourself that it doesn't sound so bad.
Why should we be against this movement?
Why is this movement wrong?
Because we don't see anything wrong with it.
But when you read between the lines, You will hear something like that only an animal can oppose this creative society.
So everyone who is against creative society, for example, we as journalists, we are describing it and writing something what like maybe doesn't fit to their perspective and they don't see us as a human.
So they think we are like animals and we as animals must be brought under the control.
That we should not have the rights and status of a human being.
Because creative society is not for non-humans and traitors.
We can see now that it was one of the fastest growing movement in Czech Republic for a while, but now when journalists as me and Sofia are describing the real face of this movement, it stopped and people are leaving it.
I asked Jan about the size of these social media accounts associated with AllatRa and the Creative Society.
It's a network of many YouTube channels, Telegram channels, Facebook channels.
They are on all platforms and they are all around the world.
Actually, when you go into the website, you will see that they translate their videos into I don't know, more than 100 languages.
It's really crazy.
So we don't even know who is financially supporting this.
They say we are just voluntarily making these videos and trying to spread the idea of a creative society.
nowadays in the reality of this moment you will be i don't know if it's on purpose but you will help
them uh to spread prussian propaganda actually another piece of jan's reporting that is familiar
to us is how these messages proliferate through wellness channels in which influencers with
established followings are more than willing to monetize the increased engagement such content
brings them so Spreading sensationalist dark conspiracism on the one hand and then offering miraculous solutions in their very next post.
One example is quite famous bro science influencer Wim Hof who's well known for his Wim Hof method which includes breathing techniques and ice baths.
I'm sure you've heard of them.
He claims these are a beneficial approach to treating cancer and Parkinson's and during the pandemic he said it would boost immunity against COVID.
Jan says his book, Wim Hof's book, translated into Czech, is a huge bestseller there.
I think Wim Hof is one of the examples when the purpose can be good, like in helping people to care more about their body and start to do really, for example, useful things for yourself.
I think the idea is really good but when I was in a musical festival in my my hometown it was two years the COVID was already like spreading and many people died due to COVID and he came to the on the stage And we're starting to talk about that we are something like captains of our souls, warriors of the light.
I hope that the similarity to QAnon is not on the purpose, but like he says, that More than going to hospitals and to the real doctors, we should believe in ourselves, do the cold baths and create this so-called army of love who is all spiritual and believing in nature and then we will be like
powerful society and we will not need doctors in hospitals.
And I think it's quite disrespectful, disrespectful because a million people died during the COVID and also doctors, like they had a lot of work and they did an incredible job.
And then one guy will start to say that we don't need them.
In his article, Jan wrote about a religious studies professor and anthropologist named Jan Kozak, who talks about conspiracy theories as serving a kind of mythological function, and he also uses the term conspirituality in his work.
Oh yeah, the Czech anthropologist Jan Kozak, he described quite nicely this conspiritual thinking.
It starts with a belief in the power of one's body and the power of nature, which is what Wim Hof is doing actually.
They put it in contrast to civilization with its corrupted products, like genetically manipulated foods, viruses, vaccinations.
It's interesting that these people are telling us what is the problem of our society, And it's civilization, it's our leaders, it's media, it's elites, but then they will give us the solution on it.
And that's like the way of turning back to ourselves and returning to nature and our own abilities.
I want to thank Jan Żabka and Sofia Kiariczi for their fascinating investigative articles,
which I will link to in the show notes. And especially for being willing to do an English
language interview with me.
I learned a lot, and I'm sure our listeners did too, and I really enjoyed our time together.
If this episode has a point, it is perhaps that QAnon and conspirituality as they appear in the West are manifestations of a deeper dynamic at play in multiple cultures at this moment in history.
That includes Italy under Giorgio Moloni, and the former Soviet states that have a Slavic identity, as well as Ukraine and Russia's invasion, and now the counteroffensive that is being put on so valiantly.
So here we are in 2023 with a phenomenon of digital disinformation as a delivery system for the fascist tactic of using conspiracism to disrupt social consensus on facts and evidence and to find scapegoats for populist dissatisfaction while hearkening back to either traditional fundamentalist religion or a more primordial ancient spirituality.
The appetite for new scapegoats becomes insatiable, which may be one saving grace given how stateside, unhinged, and self-serving MAGA types will at times turn on one another quite viciously.
But the 2023 conspiracist trend of taking a victory lap as if all of their pandemic era misinformation and disinformation has turned out to be true, has now turned increasingly toward dark public fantasies of vengeance.
With even Bobby Kennedy calling for Anthony Fauci to be punished for his supposed crimes.
There should be an investigation, he says.
As I'm recording this, you probably know that vaccine scientist Peter Hotez is being bullied online by the richest man in the world and current owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, who is amplifying and endorsing the bullying of probably the biggest media figure in the world, Contrarian meathead podcaster Joe Rogan.
Rogan recently hosted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
for an hours-long bullshit session in which that vaccine scientist was called out for refusing to publicly debate the Kennedy crank.
But it's not just online bullying.
As with The Daily Wire and Fox News hosts sensationalist and false accusations of drag queens and trans people and queer teachers grooming young children like pedophiles, Musk and Rogan, and now NFL Antivax quarterback Aaron Rodgers, all of their social media attacks on Hotez, ...are translating into online death threats because vaccine developers and proponents are supposedly complicit in murder, you see.
And true believers are also showing up, alarmingly, outside his home.
Last month, CNN ran a propaganda clip, critically I should add, that Putin had staged alongside an academic historian using an ancient map of Russia to prove that Ukraine didn't really exist anyway.
And malign culture war tropes, fairly specific to the US, are now part of far-right discourse in several European countries.
As I said at the end of my Kali Yuga chess episode, which is sort of a part one to today's recording, I don't have any solid answers.
I do have a five-year-old child though.
And my hope for all of us who have children, and for children everywhere, is that adults are thinking really hard right now about social media, About the internet.
And about how to equip young people with both media literacy and some kind of immunity to radicalization and pseudo-skepticism.
And that's only going to get more pressing as the technology keeps evolving.
I hope they're also thinking, as my wife and I are, about how to form and nurture offline experiences, relationships, and education that values and sustains the vital human layers of empathy, genuine curiosity, and a drive to know about our world and its history in substantive ways that can pull back from immersion in this fever dream moment and contextualize all of it insightfully.
That's what we try to do here as best we can at Conspirituality.
Thank you for listening and I'll see you soon here on the main feed and also on our Monday bonus projects.
