Russian Army Warhammer Orthodox Space Marine Scrolls
TurquoiseTastic
Kerygmania Host
in Purgatory
This rather extraordinary Telegraph article describes how Russian (and, if I understand correctly, also Ukrainian) soldiers are wearing Christianized versions of the Warhammer 40000 Space Marine "Purity Seals" apparently blessed by Orthodox priests.
This could have gone in Hell, Ecclesiantics or Gadgets for God to name but three places. Since this is Purgatory I guess there should be a discussion point: I think "What on earth is going on with that?" more-or-less describes my query to Shipmates...
This could have gone in Hell, Ecclesiantics or Gadgets for God to name but three places. Since this is Purgatory I guess there should be a discussion point: I think "What on earth is going on with that?" more-or-less describes my query to Shipmates...
Comments
I'm trying to think if there is any precedent for a military adopting symbolism from a non-governmental hobbyist club. Like, say, the US army borrows a few symbols from the freemasons or scouting.
There is actually very little suggestion of syncretism in the article. AFAICT they've created a seal with Psalm 91 on it, in a style that somewhat resembles the seal used in Warhammer. There's a little reuse of imagery and that's about it, there's no suggestion of any belief being borrowed or - say - the Russian Army believing that Putin is the God Emperor.
"He said on X: “The seals have been blessed by priests at the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Kubinka near Moscow.”"
Yeah, but the Russian Orthodox priests bless loads of things - I believe Archbishop Kyrill has been pictured blessing Russian missiles in the past - so I'd be wary of necessarily reading anything deeper into this.
I'm sure it happens all the the time. Just recently there was an incident where some US Naval Units were sporting patches with the legend 'Houthi Hunting Club' depicting the Yemeni as the Sand People from Star Wars (not going to link the story here). The Grand Lodge in the UK is a signatory of the Armed Forces Covenant.
You take a bunch of (mostly) very young men and it's not surprising that they start to re-use the imagery they are familiar with from adolescence. Reading too much into it would be a category error along the lines of looking at these patches and deciding the US Air Force in the Pacific Theatre had a major problem with Satanism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VF-191
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMA-241
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VF-10
Interesting stuff. Thanks.
But what exactly does it mean in practice that The Grand Lodge in the UK is a signatory of the Armed Forces Covenant?
The Armed Forces Covenant is a fairly meaningless bit of fluff that basically says employers who sign it will be nice to any veterans or reservists that they employ. It’s a sop short of proper legislation.
Meanwhile, on a point of order, there is no ‘Grand Lodge in the UK’ - there’s the Grand Lodge of Scotland, the Grand Lodge of Ireland*, and the United Grand Lodge of England.
*Based in Dublin but covers NI
Sorry, that was the tail end of the paragraph about military lodges which apparently the internet just ate, leaving a non-sequitur, but yeah also what betjemaniac said.
The signature ceremony was surrounded by a certain amount of pomp and was attended by the Duke of Kent in his role of Grand Master - so I suppose if you were a mischievous non-English reporter you could produce something similar to the Telegraph article.
Nevertheless, I think it is sadly the case that both sides in the conflict in Ukraine - but particularly the Russians - are 'weaponising' Orthodox imagery and tropes. Patriarch Kyrill has been using the language of 'holy war' for some time, of course and there are some parallel tropes / eschatological guff in 'Holy Russia' that is rather reminiscent of the sort of stuff we might expect from US-style Protestant fundamentalists.
Russian recruitment posters and literature has been using this kkbd of imagery for a while. Yes, it's a sign of desperation and very reminiscent of the kind of thing we saw on WW1 recruitment posters and so on.
Let's not forget that plenty of people took Arthur Machen's short story about 'The Angels of Mons' and what-have-you seriously. Ghostly archers from Agincourt turning up to hold up the beastly Hun.
I wouldn't dismiss The Telegraph story out of hand like @Gramps49 seems to have done. I think @chrisstiles has the right angle on all this stuff, from whatever side it comes.
It's pretty shit. Stuff like this is shit whoever does it. Russia. The Ukraine. Britain in its imperialist heyday. The US whenever it goes into MAGA-mode. All instances of this sort of thing stinks.
Psalm 90 (Septuagint, Slavonic Psalter, etc.) = Psalm 91 (Hebrew and Protestant texts) is the text used.
Drone piloting in particular is a combat role where gaming skills are highly applicable.
Many video games and tabletop games (like D&D and Warhammer) have mythologies that either include fictional religions or pantheons of supernatural beings.
It doesn’t surprise me that young Russian soldiers would see an analogy between the war fought by Russia in Ukraine and the war fought by humans in Warhammer 40000 - a neverending war fought in a bleak universe on behalf of a heartless empire ruled by an emperor in a vegetative state kept on life support for all time because only his limited brain function can perform the magic needed to give humans a chance in their battle against demons and aliens bent on their destruction. The Warhammer series was always intended as a satirical, silly form of dark fantasy. The worship of the vegetative emperor by the Space Marines is an intentional critique of Christianity and of the militarism of the Cold War and the wars of the age of Imperialism that preceded it.
What surprises me is that the Russian Army and the Russian Orthodox Church would not worry about this satire and see it as dangerous. But it might be another example of how both Russians and the Russian regime (civil, military, and religious) know and expect cynicism and corruption from each other. So maybe Orthodox purity scrolls are a way of winking at the soldiers and saying, “we know you know you are being lied to and that any prospects for your future and the future of our country are bleak. And we know that you know that we don’t care. So go ahead and make this a game and try to get as many points as you can before being slaughtered.”
Ahem. With a few exceptions the Space Marines do *not* worship the Emperor as they do not consider him to be divine. The Imperial Cult is largely confined to regular humans (and some abhumans).
It's happening on both sides. The war-game / fantasy thing does seem to feed into all this. I've seen reports of Ukrainian troops referring to the Russians as 'orcs' and using LoTR imagery for instance.
The Russian Orthodox Church has always had close ties with the powers-that-be but there are brave clergy who resist that.
Interestingly, I'm also hearing that many Protestants in Russia are very pro-Putin, Baptists and independent evangelicals.
I'm not sure why that should be. You'd think it would be otherwise.
Perhaps it's all the 'we are the last bastion of Christian morality' shtick.
Apologies, not intended if to stalk you round the boards but as one of if not the only remaining Freemason (lapsed) on here:
The Duke of Kent is Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England. If you were a mischievous reporter there’s a lot more to chew on with the continuing influence on and jurisdiction within the British armed forces of the Grand Lodge of Ireland (emphatically *not* Northern)
Thanks for correcting me. YouTube has been recommending me cutscene videos from the Warhammer 40000 games for some time now (along with a lot of right wing stuff that most men on YouTube get recommended) but I don’t really know that much about the games or their lore.
Well, Putin's a SoCon, and I'm guessing maybe the various conservative Christians in Russia are undergoing the same ecumenical pull that conservative Christians in the USA did starting in the Reagan years? IOW they're all discovering that they hate certain minority groups more than they hate each other.
I had always thought the whole point of 40k was that there are no good guys. You get evil in different flavours: inherent/natural (Orks, Tyranids), chosen (Chaos, Dark Eldar), and "necessary" (Imperial, Eldar, Tau, Necrons). Anything that tries to be good gets stomped or corrupted.
Ah, I see! I picked up 40k with 2nd edition when it was trying to decide how blatant its satire should be, and it had already shed a lot of the obvious bits (I recall hearing the dubbing Birmingham "The Black Planet" caused a degree of consternation on the western side of the Atlantic), though of course we still had Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka.
The Fimir made it into Heroquest, of course.
I wonder if this is how religions start?
He's found this thread fascinating.
You're just the wrong type of nerds, is all [I deny the possibility that there are any Shipmates who aren't nerds of some description].
Warhammer 40 000 is what happens when you take 80s satirical sci-fi, mash it up with traditional fantasy tropes, paste over the top with parodies of mediaeval/early modern Catholicism and demonology, turn all the dials up to 11, and then hand over to the money men.
Yes. My name is Gamaliel and I am a Nerd.
Oh yes, I was purely talking about the setting.
Ah well, I though this might be the right place to ask about it!
(It occurs to me now that there may not be many people who know who Judge Dredd is but don't know what Warhammer is.)
In the Warhammer universe, there is a faction called Kislev, which is modelled very closely on Russian culture. In the Total War Warhammer 3, the voice actors for Kislev are Russian.
For more details, This will fill in some gaps.
“Great Orthodoxy” is the organised state religion of Kislev, complete with the clergy being called Patriarchs, worshipping a bear god called Ursun. One of the characters is called Tzarina Katarin. And so on.
I would think the 'real life soldiers' are tapping into the Kislev part of the Warhammer universe, while using 'real life Christian Orthodoxy' to (they hope) tilt the odds in their favour.
Yeah, but when it comes to this it's debatable where the boundaries between superstition and the 'this is cool' factor lie.
While that's true I'm not convinced - Kislev is a minor part of what is very much Games Workshop's secondary IP, and the Old World part that they've largely been ignoring for years.
Well I suppose you could say that’s one of those radical irregular verbs:
I’m religious
He’s syncretic
They’re notoriously open to superstition
Etc