Ratnik Tactical, the Russian military equipment maker, said on Telegram: “The best warriors of humanity applied scrolls with prayers and promises to their armour before the battle.
“We really liked this image, and we decided that Russian soldiers are rightfully the best warriors of humanity, and can also wear such scrolls into battle. Thousands of seals have already gone to the front, and gave hope to soldiers in the darkest hour.”
The seals, with the words of Psalm 90, are similar in style to Warhammer 40k and cost about £9. The psalm is about the brevity of life.
It replaces the space marine skull with a Christian symbol and is available in normal and “sooty versions”.
The phenomenon was spotted and researched by ChrisO_wiki, a military history author and blogger on the Ukraine war.
He said on X: “The seals have been blessed by priests at the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Kubinka near Moscow.”
“Again, this reflects Warhammer 40k lore, which has Space Marine Chaplains blessing purity seals ‘with chanted litanies in honour of the Primarch and the Emperor.”
He added that it reflected the huge popularity of the game in Russia and Ukraine and purity seals have been worn by soldiers on both sides as far back as February last year.
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The Ukrainians also have their own purity seals. Images shared online showed them being stuck on military vehicles.
Other soldiers sport real-life versions of the game’s battle badges and gruesome skull symbols.
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The Russian seals have been criticised by some for fusing Orthodox theology with pagan fantasy.
Alexander Soldatov, the religious journalist, said: “Amulets are not typical for the Orthodox tradition at all, they have always been perceived as an element of paganism, magic, in this case, combat magic.
“But in war, all means are good, and the Russian Orthodox Church no longer shies away from using any mechanisms, including purely occult ones.”
In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war
The question now is, how “far”. A bit like the main issue with Idiocracy is that it is set too far in the future.
The original thread the Telegraph draws from (why the article is rather “bitty”) and that has more photographs.
It has more weird information:
Soldatov attributes the ROC’s slide away from Orthodox tradition to the personal worldview of Patriarch Kirill, the church’s leader. He notes that Kirill was strongly influenced by esotericism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Kirill was friends with Russian faith healer Juna (Eugenia Davitashvili), who claimed to be able to cure cancer, heal broken bones, and prolong life beyond 100 years. He participated with Juna in spiritualistic sessions where she supposedly moved objects with her mind.
As Soldatov notes, Kirill’s decidedly heterodox influences have imprinted on the ROC “a peculiar mix of some Soviet ideas, late Soviet esotericism and individual elements of Christian rhetoric.”
So perhaps he’s been recruiting Librarians and other sanctioned psykers.
Thoughts and prayers…
