From Buddhism to “Cosmic Religion”: Religious Creativity in Kalmykia

Abstract

This article explores aspects of religious innovation that have developed since the early 1990s in the process of the reconstitution of ethnic and religious identity in Kalmykia, a republic in the southwest of Russia. After a brief overview of Kalmyk history and the contemporary Kalmyk Buddhist landscape, the author focuses on new religious groups. Participants call themselves adherents of a “cosmic religion,” involving the worship of the deity the White Old Man. Their beliefs and ritual activities are based on texts allegedly dispatched from the cosmos in an unknown language. The article draws on anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012.