Book overview
When attorney-turned-psychic Nancy du Tertre traveled to St. Petersburg to train with Russia's most renowned psychokinesis experts to learn how to bend metal with the mind, she discovered, that instead they were bending her mind. Her surreal descent into a strange world of Russian psychic training resembled both a Cold War science experiment and a psychological thriller.
In The Cult of the Occult: Falling Down the Russian Rabbit Hole, du Tertre takes readers deep into a shadowy Institute where the promise of learning to move objects with the mind is tangled with something far more sinister. The Institute keeps du Tertre and her fellow American student colleague in a state of total isolation, locked in rooms for hours, deprived of meals, bathroom breaks, and often sleep, lied to about the training, blackmailed, and deliberately confused. At the center, is Roza, the mercurial second-in-command to the founder of the Institute, the so-called "wizard," Vadim Medvedev. Roza's method alternates between friendliness and heartless cruelty - classic prisoner methods used for interrogation and brain-washing.
Through chaotic travel, cultural barriers, and experiments in psychokinesis under suffocating pressure, du Tertre begins to see the Institute for what it really is: a tightly controlled, cult-like environment employing the same mind-bending tactics used in the CIA's own highly classified MK-Ultra "super soldier" program and prescribed prisoner interrogation techniques. Even with her background in law and psychology, she struggles to maintain her sense of self.
Part memoir, part cautionary tale, and part exploration of the strange intersection between psychic phenomena and raw power, this book offers a front-row seat to an unnerving world where belief, control, and manipulation collide. Du Tertre's journey is a riveting reminder that the most dangerous illusions aren't just supernatural-they're the ones we let into our own minds.
