Modeling the sacred in nature among nature-based spirituality movements: the case of Vissarionites, Anastasians and Romuvans

The book was published with the support of the Polish National Center of Sciences as a part of the research project 2011/01/N/HS1/02667The representatives of alternative to the mainstream, contemporary spiritual movements orientate to variously understood search for spirituality and establishment of communities. Diverse movements, focused on ecology and spirituality, are also recently spreading. Many new religious movements can be examined as offering an alternative to the mainstream forms of religion. In the Western culture, the disappointment with the progress of civilization revealed itself in the second half of the 20lh century (in the post-Soviet society - after the collapse of the Soviet Union), which induced a fragmentation of the cultural, ethnic and religious mainstream and raised a focus on natural, ethnic, and indigenous aspects of localities. The manifestations of orientation toward localities in various worldviews, as well as the based on them socio-cultural movements, have been related to the revival of some particular notions. They include traditionalistic and nationalistic ideas, nature-based spirituality, the (reconstruction of local ethnicities and the need to return to the ethnic and pre-Christian identities, to the old customs, indigenous values and traditional pre-Christian religions. In such a socio-cultural context, the motif of the "back to nature" philosophy becomes visible among a wide range of alternative worldviews and life-styles. The "back to nature" motif often appears as an ecological form of a reflection of the Golden Age myth - imagination of a harmonious life-style of archaic nations17. Here a search for the unity and harmony with surronding environment becomes possible to be implemented by personal spiritual reconnection with nature in a particular, important to a man, locality.[...]Kultūrų studijų katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta