In our 67-1 issue, we feature two essays that explore alternative ways of predicting the future: namely, clairvoyance and astrology. If you’ve not read them, have a look.
Mary Neuburger and Adam Hanzel. Mediums, Media, and Mediated “Post”-Truth: Baba Vanga in the Russian Imagination. 67(1):197-222.
Omri Elisha. Mirrors of the Past: Time and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary Western Astrology. 67(1): 223-248.
The arguments are tantalizing. So are the abstracts. Here’s how Neuburger and Hanzel sum up their piece:
It is impossible to understand the phenomenon of disinformation without unraveling the more perplexing notion of “truth.” This article explores how a Bulgarian psychic or prophet named Baba Vanga (1911–1996) became one of the most noteworthy mediums of “truth” in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian imagination. With Bulgarian-Russian transnational ties as context, we trace how belief in Baba Vanga’s abilities and prophecies was propagated by witnesses via word-of-mouth, newspaper articles, books, TV programming, and the internet. We periodize the ways Vanga secured a place in Russian “truth worlds,” drawing upon both science and religion or a conglomeration of both. We look deeper into the origins and more recent circulation of a purported Vanga prophecy from 1979: namely, that Russia would rise to be the ruler of the world. The dissemination of this message, we argue, is not a Russian state plot to bolster aspirations in Ukraine and its standoff with the West. Instead, it has been transmitted in far more fragmented and mediated ways and even countered by the Russian Orthodox Church. A deeper pondering of these mediations of Baba Vanga can help us better understand what we call the “post”-truth world, in which truth is crafted by online “posts.” In contrast to the notion of “post-truth” that posits a dearth of truth, our concept of “post”-truth recognizes that truth is not just in unprecedented excess today but is built through a complex and participatory bricolage that uses science and religion to build shared realities as never before in history.
And here is Elisha in a nutshell:
How do invocations of history inform speculative discourses in Western astrology? This article examines how events from the recorded past factor into predictive forecasts among professional astrologers for whom celestial patterns are indicative of shifting and evolving world-historical trends. Drawing on examples from prominent voices in the North American astrology community, across a range of commercial and social media platforms, I outline the parameters of what I call “astrological historicity,” a temporal orientation guided by archetypal principles closely associated with New Age metaphysics and psychodynamic theories of the self. I argue that while such sensibilities reinforce an ethos of therapeutic spirituality, they are not so narrowly individualistic as to preclude social and political considerations. Astrological historicity is at times a vehicle for culturally resonant expressions of historical consciousness, including critical awareness of historical legacies of racial and social injustice that directly link the past to the present and foreseeable future. Furthermore, while astrological accounts of history emulate aspects of modern historicism, including its orientation toward linear temporality and developmental themes, they rely on a nonlinear framework predicated on recurring cycles, correspondences, and synchronicities, bringing a complex heterotemporality to bear on world-historical circumstances. In seeking to understand the moral and political entailments of this area of occult knowledge production, this article aims to shed light on astrology’s cultural appeal not just as popular entertainment, spirituality, or therapy, but as an intellectual and cultural resource for many people searching for ways to express their frustration and disillusionment with reigning political-economic systems and authorities.
Clairvoyance and astrology can generate knowledge claims at odds with those of mainstream science and established religion. Indeed, each of these thought traditions operates at varying levels of disagreement with the other three. Yet advocates of these belief systems often speak each other’s languages fluently, or claim to, and they form tactical alliances in which it can be hard to determine who has the upper hand. When does the seer become a saint? Is modern astrology even possible without astronomy?
As these fuzzy zones proliferate across Russian and American media cultures, how do they affect the politics of truth? Or claims on the future? Or authoritative accounts of the past? We wondered if Neuburger, Hanzel, and Elisha would see new potential for their arguments in this expanded space of comparison.
We asked them to share their thoughts.
CSSH: Welcome, everyone.
Elisha: Thanks for inviting us to contribute to this feature.
Neuburger and Hazel: Yes. Many thanks.
CSSH: It’s our pleasure. Your essays are already talking to each other, so this exchange should be more a reverberation than a formal introduction. Mary and Adam, why don’t you start us off.
Neuburger and Hanzel: OK. We’re excited to bring our work on prophecy into conversation with Omri’s article on astrology and historical consciousness. Our approaches and subjects are quite different, but there are intriguing intersections and parallels that have the potential to deepen our thinking on these subjects.
CSSH: How would you characterize the overlaps?
Neuburger and Hanzel: As we see it, there are two main areas of synergy. The first is how knowledge or belief is produced, by whom, how, and through what tools and logics. The second is the role of history, historical consciousness, and historicity. History is central to Omri’s article, and it’s an important thread in ours, though less theorized. In both essays, predictions or prophesies – what Omri calls “anticipatory knowledge” – are grounded in shared understandings about the (also predicted) past. In both articles, knowledge about the past and present scaffolds belief in what Omri calls a “medium of futurity.”
CSSH: We like the way you weave historicity and futurity together in your papers. Baba Vanga, the prophet you write about, is still seeing into the future. She’s still generating new predictions. But she’s a historical figure. Much of her appeal depends on the fact that she’s dead. Could you tell us more about her?
Neuburger and Hanzel: Baba Vanga (1911-1996) was a well-known Bulgarian psychic, prophet, or medium who became regionally and even globally renowned. In our paper, we’re interested in how her pronouncements and predictions were discovered and distributed over time and in various media, especially in the Russian language space. We look at the role of “witnesses” in amplifying and distorting her messages from beyond, often in personally (or collectively) enriching ways. Omri’s discussion of “culturally resonant expressions of historical consciousness” applies to the ways in which so many Russians have embraced Baba Vanga as a mouthpiece of “truth,” especially given her supposed prediction that Russia would rule the world by 2030. Vanga became a vessel or avatar for constructing and projecting “truth” over time, through books, film, and finally, the internet, a medium dominated by “post”-truth. The term “post”-truth, as we use it, does not signify a time after truth, but one in which truth is crowd-sourced and crafted by online “posts.”
CSSH: It’s a useful term. And it serves as a clever double entendre in your analysis, since so much of Vanga’s fame as a truthteller comes after her death.
Neuburger and Hanzel: That’s right. In this “post”-truth world, Vanga has a robust afterlife (she died in 1996). New predictions are constantly being rolled out. The Vanga phenomenon highlights how “post”-truth allows believers to draw selectively on religious and scientific evidence to engineer powerful, creative, often hybrid truth architectures. These can take on circular, self-referential, and subjective forms. Vanga becomes an important purveyor of the past and predictor of the future. Science and religion are not binary opposites in the Vanga phenomenon; rather, they are in a mutually constitutive dialogue that supports alternative truth worlds.
CSSH: How does that work?
Neuburger and Hanzel: We argue that science requires belief, just as religion, astrology, and prophets do. Likewise, religion (or alternative spiritualities or divinatory practices) appropriates scientific methods like evidence, witnessing, or historicity for reinforcement. The tendency to create consistent systems of knowledge and truth competes with the production of knowledge (or truth) through a more flexible “bricolage” of the scientific and supernatural. The latter process lends itself to soundbites and online posts.
Baba Vanga (via her interpreters) and Western astrologers can serve as divinatory figures. They reinforce, validate, or amplify sentiments that are already resounding through the social networks and media worlds in which they circulate. Rather than writing off these truth worlds, we take seriously their complex structures. We explore their logic and resonances in multiple communities and publics. With the online production and circulation of knowledge and the rapid development of AI, not to mention challenges to structures of higher education, will consistency, logic, or scientific methods become even more entangled with these alternative truth worlds?
CSSH: They will. Yes. And faster than any of us thought!
Neuburger and Hanzel: If so, understanding how these entanglements are filtered and mediated across distinct cultural spaces and how they are metastasizing around the globe will continue to be a critical project for academic inquiry.
CSSH: Omri, I’m sure you agree with that point. Could you offer us some variations from the realm of planets, signs, and horoscopes?
Neuburger and Hanzel: We’re curious to know, Omri, if our case study of Baba Vanga makes you think differently about the contemporary world of American astrologers?
Elisha: Thanks, Mary and Adam, for that question. There are several ways to answer it. First, let me say that I’m charmed by the parallels between our articles; the case studies themselves as well as our respective interpretations. The centrality of witnessing/testimony in the “post”-truth afterlife of Baba Vanga and attendant efforts by her interpreters to “create new kinds of ‘truth’ from a patchwork of spiritual and scientific claims” are salient themes that shed light on my own analysis of astrological world-historical speculations. The work of astrologers is similarly multivocal and sustained by diverse metaphysical, cultural, and intellectual entailments. What makes the resonances even more intriguing, I would add, is how the differences between our cases clarify the broader stakes involved. They reveal the truly expansive nature of the discursive practices and mediascapes through which new “hybrid truth architectures” (to borrow your elegant phrase) are routinely constructed.
CSSH: How would you describe the broader stakes, and the differences?
Elisha: In my article, I examine how contemporary North American astrologers invoke historical precedents when anticipating potential outcomes associated with major planetary transits, such as when outer planets align in rare conjunctions, or when a planet leaves one zodiac sign and enters another. In identifying archetypal “synchronicities” that are understood to permeate human affairs across space and time, astrologers who engage in such commentaries – often under the rubric of “mundane astrology” – reproduce linear narrative tropes of Western historicism. At the same time, they represent history in terms of a recursive, nonlinear temporality, defined by cycles of meaning and moral purpose, ordained by a transcendent cosmic intelligence. A point that I don’t bring out as explicitly, but which Mary and Adam’s essay has got me thinking more about, is that although there are notable consistencies among prominent astrologers, especially in the themes that tend to inform their narratives, the “truth” that is being crowd-sourced in the ever-widening arena of astrological content is not any one particular vision of history or future prediction, so much as the validity and cultural currency of astrology itself.
CSSH: It’s like a toolkit, or a decoder. Facility with the technique matters. The integrity of the equipment matters, too.
Elisha: This is important. Because if we adhere to Mary and Adam’s emphasis on “process, rather than product,” we are obliged to recognize a distinction between Baba Vanga’s predictions, which are prophecies attributed to the visionary gifts of a single person, and horoscopic forecasts, which are varied and based on codified techniques of pattern recognition and esoteric symbolism that anyone can conceivably learn and interpret on their own. Moreover, unlike prophecies that flourish and evolve posthumously, taking on new meanings as they are remediated and entextualized, concrete astrological predictions are often forgotten, ignored, or modified as they cease to be relevant and as temporal circumstances change.
This is not to say that the contents of astrological predictions don’t matter, or that because they are situationally contingent, they carry less weight. Rather, what I mean is that when it comes to the “post”-truth of astrology – the normative assertions to which astrological musings collectively attest – it appears that the medium is the message. While there are certainly individual astrologers who command greater attention than others, there is also a sense in which astrological speculations of all kinds are cumulative drops in an ocean of practical demonstration, each testifying to the principle that astrology is an authoritative, universally intelligible, spiritually transcendent, yet ultimately accessible framework (or “language”) for making sense of reality and anticipating transformative possibilities.
CSSH: As comparativists, what should we make of that distinction?
Elisha: What I can offer is not a novel conclusion perhaps, but what strikes me as significant about these otherwise disparate case studies is how they reflect, on a large scale, how forms of revelation and knowledge production that have traditionally been marginalized or dismissed as folk superstitions, heresies, and heterodoxies are thriving amid new forms of mediation that draw legitimacy from established modes of inquiry (science, historicism, testimony, empiricism, etc.) yet also deviate from dominant systems by privileging occult technologies and metaphysics as authoritative in their own right. In short, the circulation and politicization of Vanga’s prophecies, and the increased popularization and commercialization of astrology as a source of spiritual as well as historical insight, suggests that we are witnessing far more than the information anarchy of a digital age. Do we live in a time uniquely suited to the amplification of occult sensibilities, no longer suppressed by institutional restraints and doctrines of immanence? I am not an astrologer, but one thing I do know is that for many practicing astrologers today, attuned to all manner of shifts in the cosmic weather, the answer seems to be a resounding yes.
CSSH: We’ll second that “yes.” We’re sure it’s the right answer because your papers are excellent examples of what a math instructor would call “showing your work.” They help us understand why Baba Vanga and popular astrologers are now acquiring (and defending) new intellectual territory, in new publics. You’ve contextualized key historical shifts (in media and information technologies; in the strength and normalizing capacity of religious institutions and governmental agencies). You also remind us that astrology and prophecy are durable belief systems with widespread appeal. They’ve been with us, in diverse forms, for ages. Along with all the “post”-truth, your articles point us toward important “pre” and “para”-truths as well.
Thanks for this extra round of insight. You’ve laid out crucial infrastructure for comparison. We hope other authors will build on it.
Omri Elisha is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches (University of California Press, 2011) as well as essays and articles on American evangelical revivalism, religious activism, ritual performance, and astrology.
Adam Hanzel is a PhD fellow in the EU-GLOCTER Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action and PhD candidate in the International Relations and European Studies Department at the Metropolitan University Prague. He holds BAs in computational linguistics and Slavic and Eurasian studies and an MA in Slavic and Eurasian Studies from University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in mixed methods and interdisciplinary approaches combining regional expertise and qualitative analysis with natural language processing and machine learning.
Mary Neuburger is a Professor of History, the Director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), and the Chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas (UT) of Austin. She is the author of three books on Bulgarian history: The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Cornell, 2004); Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Cornell, 2012), winner of the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize; and Ingredients of Change: The History and Culture of Food in Bulgaria (Cornell, 2022). Neuburger is co-editor of Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2012) and The Wider Arc of Revolution. She is also co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary History.
