Porfiri Ivanov was an Ukraine spiritual mystic who conquered Nature, made miracles, and healed people.
He was born on February 20, 1898, in Orekhovka village, in the Luhansk region of Ukraine to a poor coal miner's family. His youth passed very much like that of other people of his generation and social status in Ukraine. There was a hard work in the mine to help his father to feed family, troubled years of revolution and civil war in Russia, a marriage with two children, usual concerns for daily bread and the self-education at late night hours.
Since his young years he was often asking himself: why do so many people suffer and live such a hard life? Why is it that whatever man does, however good living conditions he creates for himself, he can rarely escape illnesses and feelings of dissatisfaction and can never escape death? Is man doomed to that fate, or maybe there is a way to change the course of human life?
On April 25, 1933, as Porphyry Ivanov wrote in his diaries, a "new", "unprecedented" idea came to his mind, the answer to his questions: opening oneself to Nature and independence in nature.
It was necessary that someone lead the way and prove that the alternative, "independent" path does exist in Nature and it is not just a fantasy. Porphyry Ivanov realized that he was the very person whom Nature selected for this mission. "I have been required in Nature," he would write later.
So, at the age of 35, Porphyry Ivanov changed the course of his life. He started to go gradually without clothes, testing different natural conditions. Ultimately he remained in knee-long black shorts only. Barefoot and almost naked, he could stand at 30—40 °C frost, or spend a winter night outdoors wandering in the snow-covered fields. For quite long periods of time (up to 100 days) he abstained from food and water, exploring whether man can preserve himself by means of another source which exists in the surrounding natural bodies — air, water and earth.
Although his practices look very simple, behind each of them stands a unique experience of the man who passed through hardest ordeals. His way had never been easy. Eyewitnesses recall that sometimes he was trembling all over with cold. He used to say, "I'm a living man, and I feel this cold a thousand times as strongly as you do. But I take it with patience." What was even harder to withstand, as Porphyry Ivanov wrote, was the "coldness of human hearts". Most people did not understand what he had been doing and why. Because of his "strange" ideas and "improper" appearance, he was often subject to mockeries and insults. With bitterness he wrote, "People hated my naked body and said it had no place in civilization. 'Go away,' they told me. 'You are not one of us but an unwelcome stranger. Get off the face of the earth!'"
Soon he started helping sick and needy people. Wherever he went, he never refused to receive those who asked him for help. He cured thousands of people of such diseases as cancer, ulcer, tuberculosis etc. He raised the paralyzed, brought back sight to the blind. For his extraordinary power people often called him Master of Nature.
Official medical authorities and society dismissed Porphyry Ivanov as insane. More than that, as a "socially troublesome element" he was often locked up — a method frequently used by Soviet authorities of that time to exterminate all phenomena not fitting into official ideological and behavioral patterns. Porphyry Ivanov spent close to 12 years in harsh conditions of prisons and mental hospitals.
Throughout the years of his experiment (1933—1983) Porphyry Ivanov sought to make his ideas and practice familiar to a broad audience. He addressed many local and central newspapers and magazines, sought meetings with renowned doctors and scientists, wrote letters to the Ministry of Health, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and other organizations. However, he was constantly turned away and denied any access to the mass media. In the late 1970s, he was even put under house arrest at his home in Verkhny Kondryuchy village, in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. It was only in February 1982 that the first large article about the Teacher came out in Ogonyok, a popular Moscow magazine. After this publication which was titled A Half a Century Experiment, restrictions were eased and Porphyry Ivanov was allowed to receive people coming to him from all over the Soviet Union.
It was particularly in the 1970s—1980s that more and more people, looking at the life and deeds of this man, came to call him God, or God of the Earth.
On April 10, 1983, Porphyry Ivanov died. His body was buried near his home in Verkhny Kondryuchy.
