Anna Ozhiganova

The Children of New Age: a Utopian Project of Anastasia Movement

Anna Ozhiganova - Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Science (Moscow). anna-ozhiganova@yandex.ru

The article explores the imagination of childhood and parenting practices of contemporary alternative communities in Russia, which draws upon Utopian religious and social ideals. Among those communities there are "ancestral (rodovye) settlements" of a New Age, Neo-Pagan movement "Anastasia", or "Ringing Cedars of Russia". The childhood, taken as a unique phase in human lifetime, is particularly emphasized: children are seen as little angels and great sages, because they are not corrupted by civilization. Parenting practices are based upon a conception of "natural parenthood". Referring to "ancestral traditions", the members of the alternative communities construct, in fact, a brand new tradition believing that their children will give rise to a new Generation (Rod) and a new humanity, which will solve all the social, political and ecological problems and create a new, just world order. The article draws upon field data at the Blagodat' (Grace) settlement and a series of interviews collected in 2010 - 2011.

Keywords: New Age, "Anastasia", "Ringing Cedars of Russia" movement, alternative communities, Neopaganism, primitivism, children and Utopia, "natural parenthood", "ancestral settlement".

The New Age movement in its heyday (1970 - 1980s) gave rise to many local utopian projects - communes, communities, eco-settlements. They can be combined using the concept of an alternative community as a common denominator, since, while condemning modern civilization as unhealthy, harmful to both people and nature, they are pre-emptive.-

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They decide to work on creating some kind of "alternative" - a fair, healthy, harmonious society. Some of these communities continue to exist today, in what one of the greatest researchers of modern religiosity, J. Melton, describes as a post-New Age situation.1 In the late 1980s, New Age leaders, including David Spangler, founder of the Feidhorn Commune, were forced to admit that the movement as a whole was in crisis: the belief in the imminent arrival of the Aquarian Age had lost its appeal, and spiritual practices had become part of popular culture and commercialized. Nevertheless, the concept of New Age remains relevant and unites various, including newly emerging groups of European occultism, Eastern religiosity, neo-Shamanism, and neo-Paganism.2
The New Age worldview is based on two ideas that unite different groups, trends, and local communities. One of them is waiting for the arrival of the "New Age" - an era of high spirituality, which should put an end to all the ills of humanity, primarily diseases, wars, poverty, and racial intolerance. These social transformations, according to the ideas of New Age ideologists, will be the inevitable result of the spiritual awakening of the entire population of the Earth, which should occur during the life of the next generation. The second fundamental idea of New Age is to recognize the possibility of personal spiritual transformation by following an individual system of psychophysical improvement practices.3
New Age has the characteristic features of a utopian worldview. First, utopia is characterized by a belief in the omnipotence of man, in his limitless possibilities, a kind of titanism inherited from the Renaissance humanists. Secondly, utopia presupposes the extreme plasticity of the natural and social world, and allows for its arbitrary alteration, if this is required for the realization of a certain ideal. 4 In the case of New Age, titanism is expressed in the idea of a radical transformation of human nature: the discovery of supernatural abilities (yasnovide-

1. Melton, J. G. (2014) New Age Movement. Encyclopedia Britannica.

2. Barker A. New Religious Movements, St. Petersburg: Russian Christian Humanitarian Institute, 1997, pp. 224-225.

3. Melton, J. G. (2014) New Age Movement. Encyclopedia Britannica.

4. Chertkova E. Utopia as a type of consciousness//Social Sciences and modernity. 1993. N3. P. 73.

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telepathy, teleportation, etc.), overcoming aging, acquiring resistance to diseases. The idea of developing children's spiritual abilities turned out to be tempting for representatives of the New Age, which led to the active use of such practices as home ("natural") childbirth, refusal of vaccinations, long-term breast-feeding, hardening, baby yoga, early swimming, which later took shape in the concept of "natural parenthood".

The most widespread and prominent of the Russian alternative communities is the Anastasia movement (Ringing Cedars of Russia). But there are also many small independent communities, such as the settlement" Pravovedi " (Moscow region), Tiberkul (Krasnoyarsk Territory), Grishino (Leningrad Region), Nebo-Ekovil (Karelia).

The Anastasians themselves, claiming to be the successors of some ancient tradition, consider themselves to be modern paganism. Researchers, however, consider the Anastasia movement as a variant of the "Russian New Age", thus emphasizing its eclectic nature and the fact that the main ideas of the movement belong to the modern era. I. Kanterov calls the Anastasia movement a" New Age utopia "5; Yu. Andreeva suggests using the concept of the" Anastasia New Age Movement " 6.

The worldview that characterizes such alternative communities can be attributed to the tradition of"primitivism". At one time, A. Lovejoy and J. The Boas who proposed this concept wrote:

The history of primitivism is part of a broader historical trend that represents one of the strangest, most powerful, and most persistent driving forces in Western thought - the use of the term "nature" to express the measure of human values, the identification of the good with what is "natural" or "consistent with nature."7
The main basis of primitivist ideas is the key opposition of natural - artificial, nature-civilization-

5. I. Kanterov A New-Age utopia//NG-religions. 02.07. 2008.

6. Andreeva Yu. O. "Places of power", "spirits of dolmens" and "knowledge of primary sources": archaeological monuments and the New Age movement "Anastasia". 2014. N5. pp. 73-87.

7. Boas, G. et Lovejoy, A. (1935) A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas. Vol. I. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, p. 11. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.

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operations. This tradition includes the work of J. - J. Rousseau, G. Thoreau, L. Tolstoy, who glorified the "natural" man.

Researchers of new religiosity refer neo-paganism to paradoxical phenomena of modernity. A. Coscello notes that modern pagans who claim to" revive "an authentic cultural tradition, in fact, create a "reconstruction of the totality of adapted religions": "The emphasis is no longer so much on restoring or reviving some lost faith of their ancestors, but on determining the true spiritual path, on the creative construction of an essentially new religion " 8. In fact, community leaders are creating a new tradition, constructing it from materials from ethnographic and folklore studies and New Age mythology. One of the key concepts of modern paganism - "rod" - is understood not as a community of blood relatives, but as a community of like-minded people. At the same time, the most important task of the family is to create a "kind", its own line of descendants. Thus, the neo-pagan gender is a community that looks not to the past, but to the future. In this regard, the attitude of representatives of alternative communities to children and to childhood becomes very important, because the "bet" placed on children is very high: it is the success or failure in raising children that will determine the future of these communities.

The article is based on field materials collected in the Blagodat settlement in August 2010 and a series of interviews with representatives of the Anastasia movement (Moscow, 2010-2011). In addition, an important source was the materials of Internet forums where Anastasians discuss the problems of parenting and caring for children. The article also used field materials on the topic "Natural parenthood": interviews with parents and managers of centers of preparation for natural childbirth (Moscow, 2010; Samara, 2009)-

Anastasia Movement/Ringing Cedars of Russia " and its children

Anastasia Movement/Ringing Cedars of Russia " is based on the teachings of the prophetess Anastasia, set forth by the writer and entrepreneur-

8. Koskello A. Modern pagan religions of Eurasia: extremes of globalism and anti-globalism//Religion and globalization in the vast expanses of Eurasia/Edited by A. Malashenko and S. Filatov, Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009, p. 302.

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author Vladimir Megre in the series of books "Ringing Cedars of Russia", which has become a kind of Bible of Russian New Age.

Anastasia, the heroine of Megre's books, declares herself "Vedrusskaya":

More recently, just five thousand years ago, in the real world, our people were still happily awake on the territory from the Mediterranean and Black Seas to the extreme northern latitudes [ ... ] We-Asians, Europeans, Russians and those who recently called themselves Americans-in fact, people are gods from one civilization Vedrusskaya 9.

However, this project of reviving the "ancestral" way of life is addressed to all of humanity. It is significant that Anastasian communities are emerging all over the world: in the USA, Western Europe, Bulgaria, and Turkey. The website of V. Megre provides information that the total circulation of his books, translated into 20 languages, reaches 11 million copies. This data cannot be verified, because publishers specializing in popular esotericism, in most cases, simply do not indicate the circulation of published books.

Readers of the series "Ringing Cedars of Russia" have united in the social movement of the same name, the key idea of which is the self - sufficiency of the family through the "family estate" - a plot of land measuring at least 1 hectare, allocated to the family of settlers for eternal use and used in accordance with the "teaching of Anastasia".

At the beginning of 2015, according to the resource poselenia.ru, 2,264 people (981 families) live permanently in" family estates"; 8,725 people (4,725 families) are at various stages of construction of their future "estates"10. More than 10 years have passed since the appearance of the first settlements, but the number of "landlords" (as the owners of "family estates" call themselves) has almost not increased, most of the ancestral settlements continue to exist only hypothetically.

The utopian goal of the movement is to create an ideal, just society. However, none of the" ancestral settlements " of the Anastasians came to the stage of communality that was indicated in the previous century.-

9. Koskello A. Modern pagan religions of Eurasia: extremes of globalism and anti-globalism//Religion and globalization in the vast expanses of Eurasia/Edited by A. Malashenko and S. Filatov, Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009, p. 302.

10. Statistics // Electronic resource "Ecovillages, ancestral settlements, family estates". 2014.

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swarm they dream of. The participants of the movement refer both to the unwillingness and immaturity of Russia as a whole to implement these projects, and to their own failure.11 Nevertheless, the Anastasians are convinced that the time will come when everything will happen by itself: people will move to family estates, human consciousness will change, which will lead to a radical transformation of the existing world. The answer to the question of how this will be possible for Anastasians is simple-thanks to children. Anastasians believe that children born in "family estates" will grow up to be wiser, more conscious and knowledgeable than their parents, and will be able to easily solve all the problems that seem insurmountable today. According to Anastasia, the child is the ideal of a person, "the most perfect being in the universe." The child is pure and pure, like an angel, and, like a wise man, owns the whole world:

The still-open temechko receives a huge flow of universal information. The abilities of each newborn allow him to become the wisest being in the universe, like God 12.

Maigret's writings talk a lot about parenting: Anastasia tells about her own childhood, readers witness the infancy and apprenticeship of Megre and Anastasia's children-son Vladimir and daughter Anasta, get acquainted with the experimental school of Mikhail Shchetinin in the village of Tekos in the Krasnodar Territory, together with Anastasia and Megre travel to the "Vedrussian past", visit the "school of the future".

According to Anastasia's teaching, all children have a natural gift for self-study. Mentoring Maigret, she says that during the first nine years of life, the child is able to independently learn the essence of the universe and the meaning of human existence. To do this, it is only necessary that the child is not surrounded by artificial objects, there are no toys, because the child can be occupied and carried away by other, more interesting things than "meaningless and even harmful communication with man-made objects": for example, it is very useful to involve him in planting plants. Ideally, there should be no artificial objects near the child.-

11. Andreeva Yu. Questions of power and self-government in the religious movement "Anastasia": ideal images of ancestral settlements and "the embodiment of dreams"//Anthropological Forum Online. 2012. N 17. P. 126.

12. Megre B. Anastasia. St. Petersburg: Dilya Publ., 1996, p. 23.

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tov, only Nature, "after all, Anastasia has nothing, and at the same time, she does not need anything and even provides for the child freely"13. The most important thing in education is the attitude of parents to the child, the thoughts produced around the child. Anastasia explains to Megre that every woman who believes that she will have an outstanding child can give birth to Christ (Buddha, Muhammad) 14.

In the artistic work of the Anastasians, the images of children correspond to the ideal created by Megre. The authors depict children primarily among the wild: children in the forest, children and wild animals. Often these are direct quotes from Megre's books: a boy plays with a wolf, flies through the sky on the back of an eagle. There are also quite numerous drawings depicting children in the "family estate" engaged in some useful activity: they feed animals, rake hay, plant trees 15.

The settlement "Blagodat" was established in 2003 in the Yaroslavl region, near the city of Pereslavl-Zalessky. Currently, the settlement consists of 130 "estates", but only 22 families

13. Megre V. Space of love. St. Petersburg: Dilya Publ., 1999, p. 42.

14. Megre V. Who are we? St. Petersburg: Dilya Publ., 2001, p. 2.

15. On the International traffic portal (http://www.anastasia.ru/) within the framework of the international festivals "Ringing Cedars of Russia", the annual open competition of artistic creativity"Anastasia's Dream" is held.

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they live in the settlement permanently, while others use their "estates" as country houses. This ratio is typical for the movement as a whole, but this fact does not bother enthusiasts at all, since Anastasia speaks very favorably about summer residents, calling them "the vanguard of humanity", and acts as their patron. "Grace", like most of the Anastasia settlements, is located among abandoned collective farm fields, where the forest has already grown.

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There are no central communications, and each family solves the problem of life support in its own way: many have solar panels, but some have completely abandoned the use of electricity and are content with candles and splinters. The vast majority of the inhabitants of "Grace" are vegetarians (some have completely excluded meat from their diet, but use eggs laid by their own chickens), some settlers practice raw food.

Among their main achievements, such as laying gardens, creating vegetable gardens and flower beds, digging ponds, installing decks with bees, residents of "Grace" are particularly pleased to say that since its foundation, many children have been born in the settlement: 8 babies - in estates and 7 - in the city. Participants of the movement claim that the creation of" family estates "contributes to the improvement of the demographic situation, as" conditions are created for the birth, feeding and upbringing of children in favorable conditions for them, and the quality of upbringing and education of the younger generation is improved"16.

Wellness practices

In their daily lives, the settlers strive to literally reproduce Anastasia's advice. I have never met anyone among the followers of the movement who doubts that Anastasia is a real woman living in the Siberian taiga and has supernatural abilities. However, many of my respondents suspect that Megre misrepresented Anastasia's words ("he misunderstood something, wrote it down incorrectly"), and it is precisely these mistakes in Megre's writings that explain their failures.17
Anastasians pay great attention to the health of children, understanding it as a natural state of a person, which in practice often means a complete rejection of medical supervision. Among the basic "health-saving practices" are: home birth, refusal of vaccination, hardening, herbal medicine, treatment with honey and bee products, vegetarianism, raw food. Any medical intrusion is assessed as a violation of the integrity of the body and causing harm to health. In fact, "health" means something more:

16. Blagodat settlement //Rodomir. Newspaper of tribal settlements of the world. 2012.

17. PMA. The Anastasia movement. Moscow. 2010 - 2011.

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these practices exist primarily in a mystical context, because the Anastasians follow an alternative concept of man as an integral entity, possible only in the inseparable relationship between the spiritual and the physical.

The most important element of the "natural parenthood" system is proper delivery. It is absolutely necessary to give birth in "natural conditions": at home, in the bath, in the sea. It is important to completely abandon the medical support of childbirth and care for the baby and the woman in labor, because, in accordance with Anastasia's teachings, the maternity hospital, nursery, kindergarten, school, and institute are the main elements of the "slave training system". Medical obstetric care is declared almost the main crime of civilization against humanity: "In general, a maternity hospital is nonsense. It is a vivid illustration of the loss of the ability of women to have a birth instinct and the loss of modern man's knowledge not only of the primary sources, but also of the elementary culture of feelings"18. Many pages in Megre's works are devoted to the topic of correct childbirth: the maternity rite in ancient "Vedrussia" is described, and the story of a Moscow family that took the path of "natural parenthood"is given.

It should be noted that at present the idea of "natural childbirth" has become quite popular. 19 Thanks to the books of S. Grof and F. Leboyer, more and more people are thinking about the impact of the birth process on the health and psyche of the child. The first studies in the field of gender and the sociology of medicine appeared, considering "natural childbirth" as a social phenomenon. Researchers point out the complexity of the concept used, since "natural childbirth" is not really something simple and easy, which does not require special training.: "Natural childbirth in modern society is a special social practice that requires a lot of work from the woman who chooses it (and from the midwife)"20. However, enthusiasts of" natural childbirth " insist on their lightness, simplicity, and versatility. This rhetoric sends us off

18. Megre V. New civilization. Part 2. Rites of Love, St. Petersburg: Dilya Publ., 2006, p. 82.

19. Borozdina E. The language of science and the language of love. Legitimation of independent obstetric practice in Russia / / Laboratorium. 2014. N6 (1). pp. 30-59. Borozdina E. Social organization of natural childbirth (case of the Center for Obstetric care). Zhurnal issledovaniy sotsial'noi politiki [Journal of Social Policy Research]. 2014. Volume 12. N3. P. 425.

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to one of the basic New Age settings, where any practice is simple and accessible to everyone.

The idea of "natural childbirth" was further developed in the form of utopian projects to create a "new man" 21. The author of one of these projects is Igor Markovsky, President of the World Organization "Aquaculture" and an academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. He gained worldwide fame in the 1960s through numerous press publications and documentaries about "baby dolphins" - babies who learned to swim before they could walk. In accordance with the Markovsky method, a child must necessarily be born in an aquatic environment: in a home bath, in a special pool, or even better-in the sea, ideally-in contact with dolphins. Water delivery has become an essential element of the "Aquaculture" project developed by him, which also includes mandatory training of expectant mothers, swimming and diving of newborns, hardening and treatment with cold water. In addition, he developed a special gymnastics program for babies, the so-called "baby yoga". Markovsky raised the importance of "natural childbirth" to a fundamentally new level: now it is no longer just about safe childbirth and the health of children, but about "a possible revision of our understanding of the human self, about revealing its secret potential "22. For Markovsky, proper childbirth is only one of the means of creating a superman. He developed a broad utopian system of training special children, whom he calls " sensitives "(people with paranormal abilities, such as clairvoyance) and representatives of the "new race".

In the concept of the French obstetrician-gynecologist Michel Odent, "natural" childbirth becomes a means of social transformation and biological evolution of homo sapiens. Auden criticizes the modern social structure and one of its most "pernicious" aspects - the nuclear family, which ignores "fundamental principles".

21. Ozhiganova A. The birth of a "new man": a utopian project of the movement for natural childbirth//Constructing children's books (philology, history, anthropology). Proceedings of the seminar "Culture of Childhood: norms, values, Practices" Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH). Issue 9. Moscow, St. Petersburg, 2011, pp. 444-460.

22. Sargunas T., Sargunas A. Conversations with I. Charkovsky//Psychology and psychoanalysis of pregnancy. Samara: Bakhrakh-M Publ., 2003, p. 290.

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the needs of the pregnant woman, the woman in labor and the infant " 23 and advocates for the re-creation of an extended family and community lifestyle. Thus, Auden's utopia follows the tradition of idealizing primitive man ,the "savage", his closeness to nature, instinctive behavior, hypothetical social harmony (it is no coincidence that the maternity ward in the clinic of Pitivier, where Auden worked, is called sale sauvage). Auden believes that humanity has gone too far on the path of improving technology. Now, in order to survive and stop the destruction of the planet, you need to develop fundamentally new survival strategies.

For Anastasians, as for most proponents of "natural childbirth", the "esoteric" aspect of health is important, first of all, i.e. the preservation of a certain integral individual entity that is upset by medical intervention. Parents always note that children born outside the hospital are "completely different". And even though they have all the usual childhood health problems, they are still special for their parents.

In case of illness, members of alternative communities resort to self-medication, using herbs, honey and other bee products. A characteristic feature of the alternative attitude to health is the complete rejection of medicines. In particular, Anastasians believe that in any case it is impossible to bring down a high temperature, even in small children, because this violates the "natural immunity". Sometimes in such cases, even resort to spontaneous psychotherapy. "When my child gets sick - high fever, cough-I don't give him medicine. This is wrong. What is a disease? This means that there is some problem, resentment. So we sit down with him and talk, find out what's wrong, what he's offended about. We find the reason - and he recovers, "says the mother of a three-year-old boy, a supporter of "natural parenthood" 24.

On the forums of the Anastasia movement, parents are happy to share their experience in introducing children, including very young ones, to the practice of raw food. So, parents from the settlement "Volchye", located in Transcarpathia, proudly tell:

23. Auden M. Primary Health, Moscow: Century Publ., 1987, p. 71.

24. PMA. "Natural parenthood". Moscow, Samara. 2009 - 2010.

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Our youngest, Zoryanka, who was born at home, does not have the dubious happiness of communicating with hooch doctors, and it would be unfair to cram dead food into an ideal creature that grows by leaps and bounds, sleeps all night long, almost does not cry [•••] To put it bluntly, I am sure that it is a crime to give children born raw food eaters something other than mother's milk, and then freshly squeezed juices, apple and carrot purees, fruits and vegetables, nuts, honey 25.

However, such examples are the exception rather than the rule, most parents prefer to limit themselves to switching to "healthy writing". In addition, families living permanently in settlements, unlike urban Anastasians, have much less time and opportunities for specific practices of "natural parenthood", such as early learning to swim, baby yoga, and others. Hardening, for example, is carried out in the most "natural" way: in summer, children in settlements go barefoot, undressed, with their heads uncovered, and with the onset of cold weather, their parents are in no hurry to put them in warm clothes.

Upbringing and education

According to Anastasians, school in the usual sense is not necessary in principle, since the learning process only hinders the child's development. Parents should teach their children to the best of their abilities, and the study of science should never be considered an end in itself. The main thing that parents should teach their children is how to become happy. Anastasians claim that communication with nature is more important than reading books and welcome practical lessons while working in the garden, communicating with animals. According to Anastasia, every blade of grass, every bug is connected with the universe and helps the child "realize the universal essence and himself in it, his purpose." A child who is able to communicate with these perfect living beings becomes more perfect himself. One of the residents of" Grace " says:

25. Food-Nature//Diaries of family estates. Settlement "Volchye". Electronic resource "Family estate". 2009-The author's spelling is preserved.

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We should not teach them (children). They themselves know how and what to learn. The main thing is to pass on to them our experience of life in the ancestral settlement, so that they can also live here. Girls should be taught how to create harmony (harmony) in the family, know herbs to be able to heal. Boys should be taught differently. They should be able to build a house, build a stove, a barn 26.

According to Anastasia's teaching, education should promote, first of all, the development of speed of thinking. To do this, you need to ask the child questions and give him the opportunity to find the answer on his own. However, parents admit that this advice is difficult for Anastasia to implement:

I come home in the evening. My daughter, who is seven years old, is not at home. Where is she? I don't know. Of course, I wish she was smarter. Here Anastasia talks about her children, how they learn. We can't do that. I tried to develop my daughter's speed of thought. Ask her questions and don't talk to her until she finds the answer. It didn't work out. Not so simple, it turns out 27.

Anastasia refers her followers to the experience of "Vedrussia", where children were brought up, attracting them to participate in holidays and rituals:

"The holidays were both an exam for children and adults, and a means for information exchange. Knowledge was given to the child without compulsion, the learning process for parents and their children took place every minute, fun and non-intrusive." At the same time, Anastasia says that there were also special teachers in Vedrussia: "In winter, elderly people came to the village, especially sophisticated in various sciences. And if one of the children listening to them suddenly showed a special interest in astronomy, the teacher went to the child's parents ' house. The teachers in that house were very welcome. The scientist talked about the stars with the baby for as many days and hours as the child wanted. " 28
26. PMA. Settlement "Grace". 2010.

27. Ibid.

28. Megre V. Rodovaya kniga [Generic book]. St. Petersburg: Dilya Publ., 2002, p. 37.

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Megre's closest educational ideal is the experimental boarding school established in 1994 in the village of Tekos, Krasnodar Krai, under the leadership of innovative teacher Mikhail Shchetinin. The school does not have a class system, there is no point rating system, and groups of students of different ages master the material under the guidance of fellow students, and lessons can take place in any suitable room on the school territory or outside it.29 In addition to traditional school subjects, the curriculum includes folk dances, choral singing, and hand-to-hand combat techniques. Much attention is paid to physical development, tempering and work: students build their own buildings on the school grounds, do repairs, sew, and cook. M. Shchetinin himself calls the educational institution he founded a "Generic school":

There is a feeling that each person has personally lived everything, and then each person is not a separate human unit, but a kind of person... That is, each person is not just an eighteen-year - old, a thirty-year-old, or a fifty-four-year-old, but "I am the whole Race", and then I carry the personality of 30.

According to the concept of "ancestral school", children are separated from their parents, from their "ancestral estates". It should be noted that the

29. Sh. Amonashvili The idea of the Shchetinin School//The first of September. July 31, 1999.

30. Shchetinin M. "Russians always live in tomorrow..." / / Roman-gazeta XXI vek. 1999. N 8.

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Maigret is practically estranged from his fatherly duties: Vladimir and Anasta are raised exclusively by their mother Anastasia. This is explained by the insufficient level of development of Megre, his inability to give something to his children, who are more gifted by nature and not spoiled by civilization. Each participant in the movement faces a difficult dilemma: follow the letter of Anastasia's teaching and teach their children themselves, or leave this important task to like-minded professionals: create a school in the settlement, invite teachers, or send children to study at the Shchetinin boarding school. This is exactly what one of the residents of the settlement "Grace" did: her son studied at the Shchetinin school for several years and successfully graduated from it.

Many residents of alternative communities resort to the family form of education, which allows children to study at home independently, but at the same time remain in the class of a city school, receive free textbooks and teacher advice, write test papers, and take exams. Moreover, when registering such a form of education, parents receive some monetary compensation, which, if there are several school-age children in the family, becomes a serious source of income.

In some settlements, a new form of educational practices for children has appeared: teachers who are sympathetic to the movement, invited from city schools, conduct intensive training seminars, for example, "immersion in mathematics", "immersion in the Russian language", etc.In a number of settlements where there are school-age children, the idea of creating their own school is very enthusiastic. However, the implementation of such a project is usually beyond the capacity of the residents of the settlement and is postponed for many years. In the settlement "Native" residents dream of creating a whole cultural and educational center:

Older children, eighteen of our children go to a rural school 4_6 kilometers from home, there are also those who are in family training. Therefore, there is a desire and need to build our own school, or more precisely, a cultural and wellness center, where there will be a stadium, children's camps, glades for holidays and meetings, and of course, a warm room where you can hide from the rain and keep warm from the bitter cold.31
31. School project//Website of Rodnoye estates (Vladimir region). 2010.

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In the settlement "Grace" for many years there is a project "School-blooming garden". In the first years of the settlement's existence, classes for school-age children were held on an irregular basis in a specially designated classroom. In 2013, after much discussion, the residents of the settlement decided that it was necessary to distance themselves from the concept of the Shchetinin school and published a kind of declaration: "The school in the ancestral settlement will be fundamentally different from the school in Tekos. And even more: how many settlements there will be in the future, there will be so many different schools. After all, people everywhere will be different, and everyone will bring something unique. Our children will live with their parents on their Ancestral Land. It will reveal talents that we can't even dream of right now. " 32 Currently, the project is being implemented in connection with a state rural school located 10 km from the settlement.

Esoteric context of the birth of a "new person"

Although issues of upbringing and teaching children are given a significant place in Maigret's writings, the content of his statements does not allow us to present a more or less complete educational strategy. The formation of a new person among the Anastasians is surrounded by elements of mysticism. For example, a "new person" can be born only as a result of special "rites of creation". Anastasia says that in mythical Prussia, great importance was attached to" rites of love", among which:" Matchmaking "(the essence of which is interpreted as" rejection of a false image")," Wedding"," Creation of the three planes of existence "(during which a child is conceived),"birth rites". An important stage of the "Creation of the Three planes of Existence" rite is the selection of a plot for their estate, which the entire community helps the young family create:

Witnesses at the Vedrussky wedding ceremony are not two friends, as now, but all relatives, the entire district, and put the paintings not on a piece of paper, but on the ground with a "living creation". After the wedding ceremony, the Vedrusskaya family receives "a house built with joy by the best craftsmen, a garden with many plants planted by the hands of relatives, friends, neighbors in the village".-

32. Settlement "Grace". Image of our settlement//Electronic resource "Ecovillages, ancestral settlements, family estates". 2011.

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ektu of young lovers. In fact, they get the true space of Love. A holy, truly divine, living nest, in which the conception of the child will later take place. " 33
Anastasia explains that a child is born on "three planes of existence" that have merged in one place, namely, in the "family estate":

The thoughts of two people in love will merge into one. Here is the first point, its name is the parent thought. The second point, or rather, the human plane will be born again, a new star will light up in the sky, when in love and with the thoughts of the beautiful creation, two bodies will merge into one. And the third point - a new plan in that place should work out. Where the child was conceived, the birth should take place there. And my father should be there. And the great Father who loves us all will raise up a crown over the three of us 34.

It is expected that in the "Space of Love" created by parents, children will be born who are not crippled by civilization, children who can save the world, or rather, as Anastasia says, "find the Paradise originally given to us."

In the artistic work of the Anastasians, the esoteric plot of birth on the "three planes of existence" is common, represented by images of "magic towers".-

33. Megre V. New civilization. Part 2. Rites of Love, p. 39.

34. Megre V. Space of love. P. 147-148.

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tsev". The drawings of Anastasians dedicated to children illustrate their attitude to the birth and maturation of man as a mystery, which in the historiosophical constructions of the participants of the Ringing Cedars movement should end with the victory of the "new man", harmonious and perfect, over the existing civilization.

In the fifth book of the series - " Who are we?"- it tells how in the near future, a five-year-old girl Dasha, who grew up in one of the "family estates" and has the ability to influence remote objects with the power of thought, destroys all modern weapons that threatened humanity. Russia's Security Council issues landmark statement:

Everything in the world is relative. Regarding our generation, the new one is like the gods. It should not look up to us, but we should look up to it. The entire military power of the planet, with its unique technological achievements, was powerless in front of a single little girl of the new generation. And our task, our duty, our duty to the new generation is to clean up the garbage. We must make every effort to clear the Earth of all kinds of weapons.35
Thus begins a new era in the history of mankind, an era of prosperity and justice, without wars, violence and deception.

Conclusion. Childhood and Utopia

Images of childhood that are close to the ideas of Anastasians can be found in various utopian projects. The authors of well-known literary utopias pay great attention to educating new generations: they talk about the practices of caring for babies, the benefits of a large family, and taking care of health by following nature. In T. More's Utopia, it is said that it is important that babies are fed by their own mothers, and not by wet nurses.36 Solarians in Campanella's "City of the Sun" are convinced that virtues are developed thanks to a perfect physique-

35. Megre V. Who are we? P. 22.

36. Mor T. Utopia, Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1978, p. 51.

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a level that cannot be achieved by exercise, "so the main focus should be on procreation"37.

The image of the "natural" person of the Anastasians is close to the educational ideal of the primitivists. So, in the treatise "Emil, or On education" by J.-J. Rousseau criticized urban life and called for moving to the countryside: "Cities are the abyss for the human race. In a few generations, races perish or degenerate; they need renewal, and this renewal is always provided by the village. "38 Emil's education program consisted primarily of" following nature." Rousseau promoted free swaddling, maternal breastfeeding, tempering, and the rejection of toys.

None of this is necessary - no bells, no rattles! Small tree branches with fruits and leaves, a poppy head with rattling seeds, a licorice root that the child can suck and chew, will amuse him as much as these magnificent trinkets, and will be good because they will not teach him to luxury from birth 39.

Rousseau also believed that it is better not to rush into teaching children to read and write, but to follow the peasant traditions of treating children.

The ideas of primitivism were actively adopted by the New Age movement. For example, in one of the most famous communes, Auroville in South India, at an early stage of its existence, in the 1970s and 1980s, it was supposed to create "a completely new pedagogy for a completely new education system" 40. For this purpose, the "International Institute for Educational Problems" was opened, which was engaged in the development of various experimental programs. The Institute published the book "A Good Teacher and a Good Student", a kind of textbook of progressive pedagogy, which included, in particular, the texts of Plato, Rousseau, Ramakrishna, Montessori, Hesse, Exupery. The main one

37. Campanella T. Gorod Solntsa [City of the Sun]. Biblioteka fantastiki v 24 tomakh [Library of Science Fiction in 24 volumes]. Volume 15. Foreign fantastic prose of past centuries, Moscow: Algorithm Publ., 1989, p. 12.

38. Rousseau J.-J. Emil, or About education//Rousseau J.-J. Pedagogical works in 2 volumes (edited by G. N. Djibladze). Moscow: Pedagogika, 1981. Vol. 1.

39. Ibid.

40. Ozhiganova A. A. Auroville - "living utopia" of our days//Ethnographic review. 1993. N 4. P. 24.

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the condition of "new education "was considered to be the creation of a favorable atmosphere that ensures the" naturalness " of the learning process.

However, pedagogical concepts have only a relative value for the New Age. New Age communities are groups of like-minded people, not communities that are replenished by natural reproduction. When the first children born in the commune grew up in Auroville, it turned out that the education they received allowed them to enter the best European universities. This is a considerable achievement, but not the result that their teachers, who dream of creating a "new person", expected.

In the Anastasia movement, communitarian values are expressed rather weakly; in fact, communities ("settlements") are only a collection of individual"estates". All issues of life support and child rearing are resolved at the family level. It is to the family, parents, and not to the community as a whole that Anastasia appeals to leave the cities and build a new world in the countryside.

The Anastasian child is the most important element of the utopian project: it is endowed with superhuman abilities, destroys the old civilization and creates a new one, perfect and happy. The fate of communities, therefore, depends on how children born in "ancestral settlements" will grow up, and parents admit that they themselves "cannot know this."

Relying on miracle children in practice is accompanied by a weakening of parental responsibility for their upbringing and education. Such an attitude towards children is generally characteristic of modern parenting culture, in which such new educational approaches as the so-called "non-mandatory parenting"are emerging41. It is hard not to notice how parents, making more and more significant investments in their children, have an increasingly poor idea of their future. One of the authors of the "end of childhood" theory, Neil Postman 42, says that the concepts of "childhood" and "adulthood" formed in the modern era are currently undergoing a significant transformation. Childhood disappears because in the open information space

41. Maiofis M., Kukulin I. Novoe roditelstvo i ego politicheskie aspekty [New parenthood and its political aspects]. January-April, 2010. pp. 6-19.

42. Postman N. The disappearance of childhood //Domestic notes. N 3 (18). 2004.

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there are no more secrets from children and since access to knowledge no longer requires a long learning period. On the other hand, the position of an adult is also washed out of modern culture: he does not have the former authority, and his position is no different from that of a child. This blurring of the boundaries between childhood culture and adult culture becomes even more pronounced in New Age communities, which are a kind of artificially constructed play spaces.

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