Marian Revelations in the Russian Context The Cosmopolitics of Blessed John J. Eugene Clay ABSTRACT: Modern Marian apparitions have often responded to vari- ous incarnations of rational Enlightenment political thought, from the 1830 French revolution to Soviet socialism and the international Communist movement. Through her apparitions, the Virgin and her devotees have engaged in ‘‘cosmopolitics’’ by offering an alternative to a purely secular political order. Denying a mechanistic universe, Mary testifies to the existence of a compassionate, personal, miracle-working God. Although primarily a Roman Catholic phenomenon, Marian appa- ritions are also part of the Orthodox tradition, and the Virgin’s appear- ances in Russia and Ukraine after 1917 served to critique the new Marxist order. In 1984, the Mother of God continued her venture into cosmopo- litics when she first spoke to Soviet citizen and spiritual seeker Veniamin Bereslavsky (‘‘Blessed John’’). Over the following decades, as the Communist world collapsed, Bereslavsky built an ecclesiastical organiza- tion and an international movement on the charismatic authority of these continuing revelations, which gradually have led him away from tradi- tional Christianity to gnostic dualism. With thousands of followers, meet- ing in congregations from Ulan-Ude in eastern Russia to Glastonbury, England, Bereslavsky, who now lives in Spain, preaches ecumenical esotericism as a cosmopolitical alternative to Western secularism. KEYWORDS: cosmopolitics, Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God, Blessed John Bereslavsky, Mother-of-God Center, New Cathar Church, Veniamin Iakovlevich Bereslavskii, Transfiguring Theotokos 26 Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Volume 21, Issue 2, pages 26–42. ISSN 1092-6690 (print), 1541-8480. (electronic).  2017 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2017.21.2.26.