The occult was a significant factor in developing the culture and politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Researching local occult groups contributes to a deeper understanding of East-Central European national movements, our understanding race and ethnicity, and socialist regimes existing in the region, thus shedding light on the complex and complicated histories within the region. This is an introduction to the special issue of PJAC.NS, which concisely summarizes recent scholarship, presents the activities of the Central and Eastern European Network for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism (CEENASWE), the regional network of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, and introduces the ideas behind the special issue.

The aim of the article is to show the European diffusion of an esoteric doctrine that originated in Lithuania in the nineteenth century and its circulation during the European uprisings of 1848. The article focuses on a case study of heterodox Catholic thought promoted by Andrzej Towiański. Towianism was diffused in Central and Eastern Europe and consolidated its presence in Western and Southern Europe. The Towianists acted to influence politics and participated in several key historical events of the nineteenth century. Using archival sources, the article investigates the relationship between Romantic nationalism and esotericism, its transnational nature, and its contribution to a turning point in European history.

My paper maps the most important representatives of the occult and esoteric currents in twentieth century Hungary. Their works and tes- timonies encompass the genesis of modern esotericism in Hungary, but their careers also demonstrate the catastrophic watershed caused by fascism and the Second World War, only to be continued (however mostly secretly) during the communist era. The paper first provides an overview of the development of major esoteric trends in modern Hungary (from the late nineteenth century to the time of the regime change in 1989), then focuses on three outstanding seekers of holistic enlightenment: Ervin Baktay (1890‒1963), Béla Hamvas (1897‒1968), Mária Szepes (1908‒2007). All three developed their philosophy after WWI; all were influenced by Theosophy and Indian mysticism; all were scholars of various fields of the humanities, at the same time as being writers of “belle lettres” – poetry as well as fiction. After WWII, all three were looked at with suspicion and were silenced; however, they also found ways of expressing themselves and gathering disciples in various interesting ways.

The history of astrology in twentieth-century Hungary has not yet been a subject of research. Consequently, the attitude of Hungarian state security agency towards astrologers and astrology during the communist era is unknown – especially since the files of agents have not been made public in Hungary. In the present article, I examine the question through the cases of Sándor Raisz, András László, Zoltán Lemhényi and Viktor Juhász-Schlatter, using sources preserved in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára). I conclude that the secret service was only interested in astrologers because they met regularly with their students, all regular and secret meetings being politically suspicious. Astrology as an illegal activity or a subject of contempt only appears in sources from the 1980s. All the astrologers discussed in my article were in one way or another opposed to the ruling communist regime. Part of the reason for this is that astrology was a popular intellectual, middle-class activity in the Horthy era, and representatives of this stratum were considered enemies of the regime after 1945. Also, the communist system represented an avowedly materialist ideology, while astrology flourished primarily among those interested in mysticism, theosophy and anthroposophy. The picture that emerges from the sources is that astrology classes were not overtly political, but their participants were nevertheless bound together by the knowledge that they were listening to forbidden, secret teachings. In this respect, astrology can be classified as counterculture in the era. The topic also offers a valuable insight into the overlapping subcultures in twentieth-century Hungary.

Panhumanism was an intellectual movement in interwar Serbian culture that encompassed the idea of Yugoslav messianism. After research based on the archive material of the New Atlantis, we show that the circle of panhumanists from what was essentially the Serbian branch of network of esotericist Dimitrije Mitirnović. Apart from the work on spreading the ideas of Mitrinović, this circle was devoted to occult practices, also under the leadership of a teacher from London.

State Socialism aimed to create a utopian atheist society, where religion was supposed to become superfluous and therefore disappear. Despite the strong anti-religious campaign in 1950s’ and 1960s’ socialist Bulgaria, religion did not vanish but remained in the periphery of public and private life. That applied not only to traditional orthodox Christianity but also to different Theosophy-based groups and ideas, which became influential in the policy of the cultural minister of the 1970s Lyudmila Zhivkova. Her large scaled international cultural projects and the lively bilateral relations with India, Nepal and Sri Lanka not only aimed at increasing the country’s diplomatic prestige but also at popularising Zhivkova’s esoteric conception of national and personal development for which I introduce the term “esoteric nationalism”. Further discussing Bulgaria’s active participation at the general assembly of the United Nations in 1979, this paper will argue that non-hegemonic religious ideas were not always considered hostile by the Eastern European totalitarian authorities. Moreover, the Bulgarian case exemplifies the potential which an esoteric-socialist symbiosis had nationally and internationally.

This paper deals with the emergence and meaning of the term spiritual in modern, postmodern, and contemporary art with a particular focus on its transdisciplinary and transcultural aspects. The problem develops because of the hitherto neglected involvement of the spiritual in the development and expansion of the modernity program in recent European art history, with a particular focus on recent research redirected from traditional positions of national context to the transformation of visual language and transcultural character of some movements in modern art. This work covers the meaning and development of transdisciplinary spiritual art, the non-national character of its production, and the internationalization of its practice, focusing on the link with the reduction, abstraction, and tendencies of media dematerialization. It concludes with a review of innovative aspects of spiritual art and its apolitical character in times of intense social change.

This paper concerns Marian Grużewski (1885–1963), a spiritist painter, psychic medium and occultist associated with the Polish Metapsychic Society, who created homocracy, a socio-political movement based on occult and esoteric foundations, after the Second World War. The article discusses and analyses the most important features and standpoints of homocracy through materials (internal statutes and personal notes) confiscated by the Polish communist Security Service. The paper also describes a secret investigation against Grużewski and his supporters, which resulted in their arrest and conviction on charges of attempting to overthrow the People’s Republic of Poland.

The political orientation and participation of esoteric groups and movements remain under-researched and restricted by many stereotypes. There is an oversimplifying tendency to classify all esoteric groups as extreme right-wing and proto-fascist or, by contrast, as counter-cultural, left-wing, anti-authoritarian, and progressive. An equally persistent stereotype, often expressed by insiders, is that esotericism is beyond politics, immersed in thinking only about eternal or spiritual issues. In this paper, analysing the practices and discourses of Russian esotericists of the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we will show that the forms of interaction between the esoteric and political spheres are much more complex and ambiguous.

What were esoteric groups like in the times of political cataclysms, namely during the Soviet collapse and subsequent turbulences of the 1990s? Which political participation and exclusion forms were practised inside Russian esoteric communities? Analysing the 1990s esoteric biweekly newspaper Anomaly, published in St Petersburg (1990–2019), we have identified two types of esoteric civic activity, which we call esoteric citizenship (actions and political statements performed by esotericists) and metaphysical politics (esoteric forms of political participation, such as predictions, divination, channelling, and utopian projection). We consider these concepts helpful in describing different variants of esoteric civic participation while being aware that the boundaries between both are rather flexible.

The paper examines the complex social dynamics of publicly articulated attitudes toward esotericism in present-day Serbia within the last three decades of its history. The focus of my analysis is twofold: the changing attitude of the State towards esotericism, and the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in shaping its public perception. I am interested in the ways the Church articulates its impact on the State and the public and how it delineates the phenomenon of the occult as a menacing Other, a threat to the traditional Orthodox Christian and national values posed by the processes of globalization and liberalization. I argue that, in some of its aspects, public discourse on esotericism in Serbia is dominated by an exclusivist, anti-modernist, and totalizing approach that views all the alternative forms of spirituality as harmful and potentially dangerous. The paper, thus, contributes to a better understanding of the complex web of interactions between the Church, the State, and the public concerning the phenomenon of the occult.