Occult Communism: culture, science and spirituality in late socialist Bulgaria

“Occult Communism” explores the unlikely infusion of state-sponsored spiritualism into the materialist ideology of Bulgarian late communism. In the 1970s, Minister of Culture Lyudmila Zhivkova initiated grandiose state programs to inject the “occult” into Bulgaria’s national culture, art, science and even political philosophy. Inspired by her Eastern religious beliefs, she sought to ‘breed’ a nation of “all-round and harmoniously developed individuals,” devoted to spiritual self-perfection, who would ultimately “work, live and create according to the laws of beauty.” My project focuses on how Zhivkova translated her religio-philosophical worldview into state policies. I examine three realms of what I have termed “occult communism:” Zhivkova’s domestic and international cultural initiatives; occult religiosity and the mystical movement known as the White Brotherhood; and occult science as embodied by the Scientific Institute of Suggestology. I contend that as quixotic as Zhivkova’s vision was, her policies contributed to the liberalization of art and culture in a period that has long been associated exclusively with stagnation and decay. In so doing, my work questions the failure of utopianism in late socialism and demonstrates that impulses to attach "a human face” to the communist project endured even after the Prague Spring of 1968. Occult Communism” demonstrates that late communism was far less monolithic and dull than typically imagined while challenging our understanding of the relationship between communism, spirituality, and science in the global 1970s and 1980s