“Séance” in this text refers to a setting where there is contact with spirits during a special procedure, be it a spiritualist session or shamanic ritual.
I use “esotericism” as a general category that includes occultism, spiritualism, and New Age religions, among other traditions.
Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (State University of New York Press, 1994), 88.
Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (E. J. Brill, 1996), 441.
Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 439.
Piers Vitebsky analyzed this situation in terms of negotiations between the local and global: “It is no longer possible to make a watertight distinction between ‘traditional’ shamanistic societies … and the new wave of neo-shamanist societies … The shamanic revival is now reappearing in the present of some of these remote tribes—only now these are neither remote nor tribal.” Piers Vitebsky, “From Cosmology to Environmentalism: Shamanism as Local Knowledge in a Global Setting,” in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (Routledge, 1995), 188.
“Sakha” is the name for the region used by the Yakut people who live there, while “Yakut” is an exonym coined by Tungus people, borrowed by Russians, and used for a long period. The official name of the territory since 1991 has been “The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).”
Vladimir Kocharian, Iakutskoe kino. Put’ samoopredeleniia (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2024), chap. 9, EPUB. All translations from Russian are my own.
Maappa (Sakhafilm, 1986) →. Alexei Romanov would later take the name “Uot Ayarkhan” to reflect his Yakutian heritage.
Alexei Romanov, “Rekonstruiruia poteriannoe proshloe,” in Iakutskoe kino, chap. 1.
Eva Ivanilova, “Uzhas belogo lista: istoriia iakutskogo khorrora,” Iskusstvo Kino, December 27, 2019 →.
Ivanilova, “Uzhas belogo lista.”
Iakutskoe kino, chap. 3.
Iakutskoe kino, chap. 12.
Iakutskoe kino, chap. 12.
Iakutskoe kino, chap. 14.
Orto Doidu (The Middle World) (Sakhafilm, 1993) →.
Ekaterina Romanova, “TSvet snega: Severnost’ i kinoiazyk kholodnoi zemli (landshaft i prostranstvo smyslov),” in Iakutskoe Kino, chap. 36.
Romanova, “Tsvet snega.”
Uraankhaĭ sakhalar. 2 Fil’m. Son shamana (The Shaman’s Dream) (Sakhafilm, 2002) →.
See for example The Invention of Sacred Tradition, ed. James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 331.
Although Vitebsky’s argument is different, it fits this model perfectly: “A rhetorical emphasis on Sakha ethnic wisdom fits in well with the pragmatic move towards a localization of political authority and of control over economic resources … The Sakha share certain features with the New Age movement in the West.” Vitebsky, “From Cosmology to Environmentalism,” 195.
Ulrich Beck, “The Reinvention of Politics,” in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, ed. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash (Stanford University Press, 1994), 3.
Harry Lehmann, “Die Kunst Der Reflexiven Moderne,” in Orientierungen: Wege Im Pluralismus Der Gegenwartsmusik (Schott, 2007), 36. Translation mine.
This second modernization often looks ambiguous when viewed from different geographical perspectives. Applying the lens of a second modernism to the Russian context, Maria Engström discerns “imperial pop-art or imper-art.” Maria Engström, “Neo-Cosmism, Empire, and Contemporary Russian Art: Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt,” in Russian Aviation, Space Flight and Visual Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Vladimir Strukov (Routledge, 2017).
Today scholars try to “transcend the confines of Western esotericism” as an analytical concept and a scholarly field, proposing instead global perspectives, such as the program of global religious history, which regards esotericism as a globally entangled subject. See for example Julian Strube, “Towards the Study of Esotericism without the ‘Western’: Esotericism from the Perspective of a Global Religious History,” in New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism, ed. Julian Strube and Egil Asprem (Brill, 2021) →.
Talking about Western neo-shamanism, Kocku von Stuckrad notes the prominent role of the concept of nature and of the holistic feeling of connectedness to it: “Each neo-shamanic workshop can be considered a council of all beings.” Kocku von Stuckrad, “Reenchanting Nature: Modern Western Shamanism and Nineteenth-Century Thought,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70, no. 4 (2002): 780.
Wilson Harris, Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Andrew Bundy (Routledge, 2007).
The Evenki people, formerly the Tungus people, are an Indigenous Tungusic group of Eastern Siberia, living today in China, Russia, and Mongolia. In Russia, the majority of Evenki live in the Sakha Republic.
Literal translation by the author from the Russian version of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, quoted in the film.
