Vseyasvetnaya Gramota (Russian: Всеясветная Грамота; literally "Universal Script", "Universal Alphabet" or "Worldwide Writing"; acronym: ВГ, VG) is a Rodnover (Slavic Neopagan) movement based on an elaborate doctrine of esoteric linguistics or natural philosophical linguistics, holding that there is a continuity between language, script, the cosmos and God, corroborated by the etymological relation that in East Slavic languages exists between yazychnik, "pagan", and yazyk, "language". The movement was begun in Russia by Anany Shubin-Abramov (1938–2019) in the 1980s, and was later incorporated as a homonymous public organisation.
The adherents of the movement are known as Vseyasvetniks, but they also call themselves—as the founder himself did—Orthodox. They believe that the Vseyasvetnaya Gramota is an ancient, primordial script which gave rise to all the other writing systems of the world; a "magical script" whose letters are representations of multidimensional divine archetypes manifesting as entities and events, proving that the world is divinely designed by God, and providing means to work with the universe. The Cyrillic script and especially its ancestors, the Old Church Slavonic and Glagolitic scripts, are considered to have preserved some magical properties of the original Vseyasvetnaya Gramota of which they would be simplified descendants.
Overview History Anany Shubin-Abramov (1938–2019) was the leader and founder of the movement of Vseyasvetnaya Gramota, who set out the doctrine in the Bukovnik ("The Book of Letters") and in over one hundred Vseyasvetnik bulletins. According to controversial narratives, Abramov began to spread the doctrine in 1979 proclaiming himself as a descendant of the boyar kin of the Shubins, who would have decided to disclose the doctrine—previously held as a family secret—to save humanity from its current decayed state. Shubin-Abramov also claimed to be connected to secret psychic military projects, in particular mentioning the military unit 10003 and General Alexey Savin.
Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, various Vseyasvetnik ideologists began to emerge and propagate their ideas. According to the scholar Kaarina Aitamurto, the movement was actually formed in this period, by Shubin-Abramov in collaboration with Nina Belyakova. After the end of the Soviet Union, Vseyasvetnaya Gramota spread through conferences, lectures and classes to study the Bukovnik, the doctrine was systematised and a number of practices took form. At the same time, many mainstream Rodnover organisations began to reject the doctrine, which nonetheless remained popular throughout the 2010s. The Peterburgian Vedists Oleg Gusev and Roman Perin continued to support Vseyasvetnaya Gramota. During the 2000s and the 2010s, various regional communities of Vseyasvetniks were founded, and they began to organise various activities, for example regular meetings at the museum of the artist Konstantin Vasilyev in Moscow, which is a landmark of the Rodnover movement.
Academic definition According to the scholar Svetlana Tambovtseva, although it is an autochthonous Russian or Slavic movement, the roots of Vseyasvetnaya Gramota sink into a rich European philosophical and esoteric ground which goes back to the Renaissance. The movement was also influenced by Russian cosmism. The Vseyasvetnik letters are ontologised, seen as archetypal geometrical figures and are interpreted through a numerical symbolism; Vseyasvetnaya Gramota thus provides a hermeneutic model for interpreting the world comparable to that of Jewish Kabbalah, which was introduced into Russia by Vladimir Solovyov. Tambovtseva also defined Vseyasvetnaya Gramota as a philological project, as it strives to reconstruct a primordial language, repairing modern "corrupt" language and writing systems, by building a new type of semiotics; such applied philology is of a cosmic scale, as the world order and human history are believed by Vseyasvetniks to be regulated linguistically. This project, according to Tambovtseva, can be inscribed in one of the most ambitious cultural trends in European culture, that is to say what Umberto Eco described as "the search for the perfect language"; a Russian "grassroots philology" which has absorbed pan-European linguistic nationalism, as the Vseyasvetniks believe that the Slavs are the root nation from which all the European peoples descended.
According to Tambovtseva, the letters of Vseyasvetnaya Gramota resemble the uncial and semi-uncial Cyrillic lettering used in the 19th-century Russian Empire, prior to reforms of the writing system, and some of them keep Church Slavonic names. According to Karina Y. Povstyeva, they recover ancient graphic principles of the Cyrillic tradition combined with a new "esoteric ornamentalisation". They also show some similarities with other systems of Slavic or Russian runes (runitsa), and especially with the velesovitsa, the writing system of the alleged original version of the Book of Veles, a 19th- or 20th-century literary composition which is widely popular among Rodnovers, which could have inspired the emergence of the Vseyasvetnik system. In the movement's practices, scholars have observed possible influences from the George Gurdjieff's Fourth Way and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, and similarities with Eastern spiritual medicine. For its sacralisation of some works of Russian literature, Vseyasvetnaya Gramota has been compared to Bazhovism, another Russian Rodnover movement built on a similar operation.
Beliefs God and the divine letters
The supreme God of Heaven of Vseyasvetnik theology is the concept of supreme God of ancient Egyptian religion, Ra. Vseyasvetnik adepts believe that the letters of their script were given to humanity by God about seven-thousand five-hundred years ago as a Vedic "universal knowledge" (vseyasvetnoye znaniye), carried by a kin, the Aryan Rus, who later spread throughout the Earth and disseminated it. "Rus" indicates at the same time the luminous cosmic force which gives shape to matter and organises the universe, and the original human kin who received it; "Aryan" indicates the right modality of life taught by the Rus kin.
Humanity has a single divine spirit, which expresses itself in an original language and in the divine letters which codify it. The letters are multidimensional devices which allow a cooperation with the universal order of God. They represent ontological, transcendental "bioenergetic" divine archetypes which manifest themselves as natural phenomena, human physiology and universal processes, thereby proving the providential design of the universe and the dynamics of its creation. Modern alphabets are degenerated versions of the original letters which have lost spatial multidimensionality and have become plane, a historical process which led to a loss of knowledge, connection with reality and power to cooperate with God.
The total number of Vseyasvetnik letters is 147. Each one of the letters has its own esoteric meaning, allowing to read any word as an acronym and to interpret such word's hidden meaning. The rotation of the Vseyasvetnik letters from different angles changes their meaning, a belief analogous to that found in other systems of "Russian runes" emerged since the 1990s. Both the sound and the outline of the letters represent their meaning. The system of interpretation is thus phonosemantic, but semiotisation also involves objects and the human body: almost all the Vseyasvetnik letters correspond to "bodily poetics", that is to say bodily positions mimicking the outline of each letter, which are believed to provide harmonisation with the rhythms of the universe. According to Tambovtseva, this iconic interpretation of the letters is aesthetically inspired to the illustrative tradition of medieval figurative alphabets, for example the works by Karion Istomin.
Tambovtseva observed that the doctrine of Vseyasvetnaya Gramota is based on an irregular semiotic system in which the sign can belong simultaneously to three different types of the Pericean triad: iconic, indexal, and symbolic. The conventionality of the signs is discarded, and they reveal themselves as "natural"; metaphorically or metonymically connected with the natural world, which is ultimately the source of the original language and primordial system of signs itself. Tambovtseva called this view "natural philosophical linguistics".
Only one among the Vseyasvetnik letters is considered negative, the letter zelo, which means "sunset without subsequent sunrise" and resembles the Latin letter S, iconically representing a snake; such letter is present in words for things and practices considered evil by the Vseyasvetniks. It is considered the opposite letter to that resembling the Latin letter C, which represents the "connection of heavenly and earthly forces". In medieval art the snake represents sin, and the fight against it represents the psychomachia, the fight against evil within one's own soul; this symbolism is reinterpreted by Vseyasvetniks so that language in its written form is the main battlefield between good and evil.
Cosmology
According to Vseyasvetnik cosmology, the universe is a "creative spiral" of the luminous Rus, and such configuration is reflected in all entities, and especially in the form of many beech (buk) trees, a tree used as a symbol of all reality in Vseyasvetnaya Gramota; "beech" is a metaphor for "letter" and for the original "script" of Vseyasvetnaya Gramota itself. The same word for "universe" used by the movement, vseyasvet, expresses the idea that everything within the spiral is made of light: vse means "all", ya is the first person singular of the verb "be", and svet means "light"; entities manifest from the light of heavenly bodies governing them within the universe. The Earth is regarded as "a speck of dust in the universal Rus".
The letters themselves live in this universal "Spirit-Mind" (Dukh-Razum), similar to both Carl Jung's "collective unconscious" and Vladimir Vernadsky's "noosphere". The spiral structure is also that of language and of the single words themselves, the minimal semantic units of language. An analogous belief is also found in the thought of the Orthodox Christian theologian Pavel Florensky. Letters possessing a spiral outline are often arranged by the Vseyasvetniks in motifs which emphasise the configuration of the universe.
The Vseyasvetniks also mythologise as Lukomorye the "supra-real" world where the universal "codes of construction" live in their perfection. Baba Yaga is believed to bring "gifted" children to this world, where they are raised by observation and imitation of the animals living there and are taught the wisdom of Vseyasvetnaya Gramota. Contrarily to her character in traditional Russian folk tales, in Vseyasvetnik mythology Baba Yaga is not a malevolent goddess but she is a bearer of the "genealogical knowledge" of Vseyasvetnaya Gramota and helps children to return to the origins of the world; tales which portray her as malevolent are considered false by the Vseyasvetniks. Lukomorye does not have a specific location but it is believed to be interspersed throughout reality. The real and the supra-real world intersect in some places and during some events, such as in some parks which "reify" Lukomorye—for example, the Pushkin Museum Mikhailovskoye—and during the ceremonies held by Vaseyasvetniks.
Eschatology