Author: Octavian Bernaz
\nCo-author: Eugen Muravschi<\/p>\n
“[…] Sandu doesn’t decide anything, she’s just a puppet in the hands of the West […] A woman is at the helm in Moldova, and that must be eliminated<\/span><\/i>.” – <\/span>@TaroVneformata<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n “Russia is the STAR […] all paths lead to it […] Russia will provide a lot of moral and material support.” – <\/span><\/i>@JuliaErmish<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n “Everything is heading towards disaster […] Moldova is being handed over to someone […] – to Romania. […] Maia Sandu is the last president of the country.” – <\/span><\/i>@aneliaTaro<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n “In the future, Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania will be united in a single coalition […] of domination over the Black Sea.” <\/span><\/i>– <\/span>@SwitTaroPrognozy<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “Dorin Recean is linked to death and negative energies […] he is difficult to read and you never know what his intentions really are.”\u00a0 – <\/span><\/i>@elena.astrologia<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These messages could easily pass for a press release from a pro-Kremlin party, but in our case we are dealing with esoteric prophecies from the catacombs of politicized occultism. Everyone has heard of fake news, paid influencers, bot networks, and mouthpiece politicians, but a lesser-known element is mysticism and astrology. The more prone people are to conspiracies, the more fertile is the ground for Kremlin propaganda.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In sociology, there is the term <\/span>“conspiritualism<\/span><\/a>” \u2013 which refers to thinking that combines conspiracy theories with spiritualist\/new age thinking. Belief in conspiracy theories <\/span>is correlated<\/span><\/a> with a lower level of critical thinking. Paradoxically, however, both those with a high predisposition and those with a low predisposition to conspiracies tend to consider themselves critical thinkers. Respectively, although it is a niche social fragment, the “conspiritualist” movement presents substantial risks of radicalization and dissemination of hostile narratives, following the model of an echo chamber.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In this analysis, we aim to understand how spiritual discourses (tarot, astrology, esotericism, etc.) are instrumentalized to deliver political narratives aligned with Kremlin propaganda. The study is based on monitoring 21 active channels on <\/span>TikTok <\/span><\/i>or <\/span>YouTube <\/span><\/i>specializing in esoteric topics, with content targeting Moldovan politics. We extracted the main ideas from each analyzed material, then coded (cataloged) the content according to three dimensions: theme (what is said), rhetoric (how it is said \u2013 e.g., alarmism, fatalism, labeling), and topics covered (current events or political figures). In total, we analyzed 48 videos, covering the period from the beginning of 2024 to August 2025 <\/span>(for more details, see Appendix 1).<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n