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Paper short abstract:

The paper presents an analysis of the construction of the public discourse on religion in Lithuania in the 1990s-2000s. The analysis looks at how normative discourse constructed religion as not power-seeking realm of RELANTIONSHIP, opposed to ethnical and occult practices as unverified technologies.

Paper long abstract:

In Lithuania, the 2000s were marked by public discussions concerning the problem of occultism and esotericism. In 2002-2009 the Parliament discussed draft laws aimed to restrict public information concerning “paranormal phenomena” defined as “an event, phenomenon or fact that has a physical expression and cannot be not explained by science, and individuals’ abilities that have not been proven by experimental methods”. The purpose of the laws was to control and discipline the discourses in the public sphere, relegating so called occult and esoteric discourses to the private sphere. The analysis of the public discourses of the period suggests that the obsession with the danger of “esotericism and occultism” should be associated with the document on the New Age published by the hierarchs of the Lithuanian Catholic Church in 2003. Lithuanian public intellectuals who represented the intellectual discourse on religion at that time joined the discussion. Vilnius University organized a seminar focused on the topic. Gintaras Beresnevičius, a leading Lithuanian historian of religion, tackled the issue in his paper “Occultism and Pragmatic Thinking” criticizing modern occultism as the bourgeois, capitalist and consumerist endeavour eager for quick results, empirical accessibility and manipulation of the sacred that had resulted from the decline of religion. Occultism was also associated with the development of technologies in the 19th century. Both the Church documents and the discourse of the public intellectuals considered occult practices as an outcome or expression of the decline of religion and the rise technological development. The rhetoric employed two perspectives: 1) crediting the normativity to the seeking of power exclusively by the methods and technics verified by sciences; 2) normalisation of the concept of religion exclusively as a non-pragmatic, not power-seeking RELATIONSHIP with the divine realm.