Vseyasvetnaya Gramota

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.