Unsupported Speculation

There is a generalization about Russian spirituality, which leaves out the exceptions, such as the Hindus and Muslims to the south, and the Buddhists to the east, and it is that the people of Russia have a simultaneous duel-faith, which is Russia Orthodoxy and the pre-Christian Paganism.

But to cut to the chase, ‘Paganism’ is code for multiple higher powers, as well as people’s individual psychological systems to apply their theory about how they believe their mind works to get through life-stressors and accomplish goals. And the latter is the reverse-code for magic.

So hey, the Russians have a thing for magic. You can imagine the kind of tension this creates with the church, with their strong taboo against magic.

But where does this magic nonsense come from? It literally comes from the fasting culture of Russian Orthodoxy, with its controlled dips into low to no calories, according to scheduled fasting holidays within their church calendar. In Russia, even if you aren’t Orthodox, you often still can’t find all the food items you would normally buy at the grocery store when the Orthodox Church is in a fasting holiday.

Mix this with young people who don’t know how to make sure they eat what they need, and over a prolonged period of time, all of this leads to a naturally occurring kind of mental instability in segments of the population, Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike.

And so when you have what you could call the normalization of mental instability within Russian society due to dietary restrictions, then you have lots of people in the midst of such mental instability coming up with personal psychological systems for holding themselves together while they get through life. And that’s where all the rather famous Russian black magic crap comes from.

To continue, because Orthodoxy is socially accepted, and because of the strong taboo against magic, this creates a situation for all the Russians practicing a personal theory of psychology to keep their theory secret from others because it is indistinguishable from magic. It is probably stressful as well, because to people brought up in Russia, it is impossible for them to escape the concepts of Russian Orthodoxy they’ve been exposed to all their lives, and thus they are probably painfully aware that they are engaging in practices forbidden by Christianity and God.

But how is Russian magic used? They are like spiritual band-aids for people who are too busy with their lives and jobs to sit down and really sort themselves out. And so they help hold them together, as well as refocus attention and drive towards goals they want to accomplish. It is also methods of shielding themselves from stress. It can even include methods to try to help or harm other people by applying their own theory of psychology on others.

And in closing, the situation you have in Russia is really no different than anywhere else. People are born, and then have to grow older while developing a model of their own mind (Because no one can give you one). Some people are lucky enough to NOT be too busy to do this, while others spend the majority of their time out there hustling.

And then, at the grand scale, all of those people are out there together, with some sharing of ideas, but mostly just negotiating the city and society with their psychological models, protecting themselves from stress, determining what goals they need to focus on, and being on guard against people who may want to take advantage of them.

Sometimes psychological models are wielded against others, but this is the most iffy of areas in a strongly Orthodox Russia, because if they are caught, they can be run straight out of a village.