World Famous Cults and Fanatics

by Colin Wilson

  The man who was to blame was, in many ways, very like Grigory Rasputin.

  Nikon Mordvinov was a peasant who turned to religion when his three children died. He made the acquaintance of the Tsar Alexis on a visit to Moscow in 1645, became a favourite, and was soon the most powerful man in Russia. He was appointed Patriarch in 1652, and while the Tsar was away at the wars, Nikon acted as his regent and governed Russia.

  Nikon was a fanatic and a bully, and he decided to reform the Church by force. Things were slack in the Russian Church; the priest was usually regarded as of small importance, and could be ordered about by the village commune. Nikon treated the priests sternly; he ordered them to demand respect and obedience, and when he thought they were not fulfilling their duties, he had them tortured and imprisoned. He also decided to revise the service and prayer book of the Russian Church. Some of these revisions sound absurd. He ordered a slight change in the spelling of “Jesus”, and decreed that believers should cross themselves with three fingers instead of two. He also made many arbitrary changes in the prayer books – for example, changing “temple” to “church”, and vice versa.

  The violent resistance that he met was almost certainly not due to the changes he proposed, but to dislike of being bullied. Those who resisted him called themselves Old Believers. After twelve years, Nikon overreached himself and lost the Tsar’s favour; his chief enemy, Avvakum, was recalled from a Siberian exile, and took Nikon’s place as the Tsar’s favourite. But the Old Believers had not won. The struggle went on with increased bitterness for the rest of the century. Huge numbers of Old Believers committed suicide – sometimes en masse by burning themselves on huge pyres. (Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina ends with such a scene.)

  Violent passions were aroused, but they were not necessarily religious passions. As in England at the same period, religion and politics were closely entangled. Still, there were many deaths, many mass executions, much cruelty, and the struggle produced convictions where they had not previously existed. As a result, Russia became a country in which religion was an important issue. While the old-fashioned Greek orthodoxy had prevailed, Russia was a country with only one form of Christianity. The schism in Russia produced the same effect as Luther’s Reformation in Europe; new sects began to spring up overnight.

  Two of these – and perhaps the most interesting – are closely related: the Khlysty and the Skoptzy, the Flagellants and the Mutilants.

  It has been suggested that the Khlysty existed as long ago as 1363. This is possible, but it is certain that the great schism gave the sect a new vitality. The Khlysty have a certain amount in common with the ancient sect of the Manichees: they divide the world into spirit and flesh, and believe the spirit to be good, the flesh evil. But their most important characteristic is the belief that Christ keeps returning to earth as a man. The resurrection is understood in this sense. Christ’s body remained in the tomb, but his spirit took another body, and has continued to do so throughout the ages. Averzhan was one of these Christs, and was crucified on the battlefield of Kulikovo in 1380 by Dmitri Donskoi. (Kulikovo is the Russian equivalent of the Battle of Hastings, when Dmitri defeated the Mongols.) Another Christ, Yemeljan, suffered under Ivan the Terrible, according to Karl Grass’s Russian Sects. But the most important of the Christs was Daniel Philipov, who was a contemporary of Nikon. Philipov was a peasant from Kostroma who deserted the army and supported the cause of the Old Believers. The spirit of God descended on him one day when he stood on the hill of Golodina in the Volost of Starodub (in Vladimir), in the form of the god Zebaoth, who descended with a host of angels and entered Philipov’s body. The Khlysty call this “the second advent”. He began preaching in the village of Staraya, which in Khlysty mythology has the same kind of importance as Medina in Mohammedanism, and moved to Kostroma, which is the Khlysty Mecca. He produced a Bible called the Dove Book, and preached that men should not marry, should not drink or swear, and should look out for martyrdom. If one of his converts was married, he should abandon his wife, and his children should be called “sins”. He was allowed to take a new “spiritual wife”, a member of the Khlysty, who might sleep with him in the same bed as his old wife – but there should be no carnal relation.

  The most frequently repeated story about the Khlysty concerns their method of worship. This was always held in the utmost secrecy: The celebrants were dressed in white, and danced around a fire or a tub of water, chanting their hymns. Yussupov’s account of their practices declares:

  They attained this heavenly communion by the most bestial practices, a monstrous combination of the Christian religion with pagan rites and primitive superstitions. The faithful used to assemble by night in a hut or forest clearing, lit by hundreds of tapers. The purpose of these radenyi, or ceremonies, was to create a religious ecstasy, an erotic frenzy. After invocations and hymns, the faithful formed a ring and began to sway in rhythm, then to whirl round and round, spinning faster and faster. As a state of dizziness was essential to the “divine flux”, the master of ceremonies flogged any dancer whose vigour abated. The radenyi ended in a horrible orgy, everyone rolling on the ground in ecstasy or in convulsions. They preached that he who is possessed by the spirit belongs not to himself but to the spirit who controls him and who is responsible for all his actions and for any sins he may commit.

  Finally the lights were blown out, and the worshippers coupled freely – the results, according to one writer, frequently being incestuous.

  This is an interesting account, but it should not be taken too seriously. No doubt this kind of thing did occur, but it was not the rule. In his book Russian Dissenters, Frederick Conybeare gives a less sensational description.

  The celebrants danced around the tub of water (which, he says, would begin to boil and give off a golden steam of its own accord) and flagellated one another, meanwhile chanting their hymns, many of them containing nonsense words that are supposed to be the utterance of the Holy Spirit. Some of them would have hallucinations and declare that a raven or a mother and child were rising from the vapours of the tub. They would finally collapse with exhaustion, and lie asleep for hours. No doubt these rites often led to orgies in the dark. They are reminiscent of the modern snake-handling cults of southern America described by William Sargant in Battle for the Mind:

  The descent of the Holy Ghost on these meetings, which were reserved for whites, was supposedly shown by the occurrence of wild excitement, bodily jerkings, and the final exhaustion and collapse, in the more susceptible participants. Such hysterical states were induced by means of rhythmic singing and hand-clapping, and the handling of genuinely poisonous snakes . . . brought several visitors unexpectedly to the point of collapse and sudden conversion. But a young male visitor . . . was attending these meetings with the deliberate object of seducing girls who had just been “saved”. The fact is that . . . protective inhibition causes a breakdown and leaves the mind highly susceptible to new behaviour patterns . . .

  No doubt a great deal of this kind of thing occurred with the Khlysty.

  The Skoptzy were a development of the Khlysty, and should be mentioned here to complete the picture of the background of religious dissent in Russia. The Khlysty judged a man’s “Christhood” by his ability to suffer bodily pain. Daniel Philipov was, according to tradition, crucified twice. Philipov’s “spiritual son” and successor, Ivan Suslov, went one better, and was crucified three times (either at the order of Alexis or Peter the Great). He was also tortured by red-hot irons, and had his skin flayed off him. (On this occasion, a virgin managed to get hold of his skin, and handed it over to him when he rose from his third crucifixion.) Philipov died in 1700, ascending bodily to heaven. Suslov, who had carried his preaching to Moscow, and established his right to remain there by refusing to stay dead, died about three years later.

  Seventy years later, an ancient lady called Akulina Ivanovna was known by the Khlysty as “the mother of God”. It was she who recognized the “Christhood” of a man called Ivanov,
who became reverenced under the name of Kondrati Selivanov, and became the founder of the Skoptzy. Selivanov went further in asceticism than the Khlysty, and declared that men should be castrated, and that women should have their breasts amputated and (if they could bear it) also have their genitals mutilated. In his early fifties, shortly after “the mother of God” had recognized him as her spiritual son, Selivanov emasculated himself with a red-hot iron. (Later he declared that he had done this at fourteen; even his followers did not accept this estimate.) By this time, Catherine the Great was on the throne; she had murdered (or connived at the murder of) her husband, Peter the Third. This caused her some trouble, for Selivanov claimed to be Peter the Third. Later, a Don cossack, Pugachev, assumed the title and led a rebellion that was very nearly successful. Pugachev was finally caught and taken to Moscow in an iron cage, where he was executed with characteristic barbarity – his hands and feet were cut off and he was quartered alive. Again, in 1768, a Serbian adventurer successfully posed as Peter the Third and seized the principality of Montenegro in what is now Yugoslavia.

  Selivanov’s assumption of the title seems to have led to no violent repercussions; he was captured and placed in a mental home in the capital. When Alexander I came to the throne in 1801, he was released. By this time he had many disciples among the wealthy and influential, and he was allowed to conduct his “religion” openly. He wrote a book called The Passion which circulated widely, and he mutilated a hundred adults with his own hand. It was at this time that he actually changed his name from Ivanov to Selivanov. He continued to declare that he was Peter the Third, and his followers carried a coin with a picture of the sovereign on it (presumably it must have resembled Selivanov) and many kept pictures of the prince as an icon, and said their prayers in front of it. Selivanov lived until 1830, by which time he was well over a hundred years old. He had been interned in a monastery in Suzdal for the last ten years of his life, but this did not diminish his influence; his followers made it a place of pilgrimage. His followers – there were still many thousands of them at the time of the October revolution – believe that he will reappear in the neighbourhood of Irkutsk when the number of his followers reaches 144,000, and will inaugurate the Day of Judgement. The 144,000 will have to be virgins, male and female. Children born into the sect grow up with the knowledge that they will be mutilated when they reach puberty, any who try to escape are hunted down and assassinated, according to Conybeare. Mutilation is not obligatory among women, but is apparently expected. Sometimes the removal of a nipple is regarded as sufficient.

  Sacheverell Sitwell has written of the Skoptzy in his Roumanian Journey, and tells of a typical case that took place in 1868 (when Selivanov was generally believed to be still alive, although he had been dead for thirty-eight years). This took place in Tambev, and concerned a rich merchant called Plotitsine from Morshansk. Some of his servants were arrested for failure to pay taxes, and the merchant’s frantic efforts to get them released aroused suspicion of the police, who investigated his house. It was discovered to be a colony of about forty Skoptzy, many of them described as “beautiful young girls”. The men were flabby, with woman-like hips and high-pitched voices; the women who had suffered the operation (not all of them) were almost indistinguishable from the men. All were tried and sent to Siberia.

  It might seem that the Skoptzy would at least escape the accusation of sexual orgies so often made against the Khlysty, but this is not so. It is reported that many of the women were mutilated only perfunctorily, and actually became prostitutes who earned money for the communal treasury. Many men performed the operation on themselves, and halted before they emasculated themselves. These Skoptzy were known as the Skoptzy of the Lesser Seal, to distinguish them from the fully mutilated members of the Greater Seal. It is therefore possible that the accusations of sexual orgies made against the Skoptzy may have a foundation in fact.

  The Khlysty and the Skoptzy would not be the only strange sects that Rasputin probably encountered on his journeys through Russia. There was a sect of Ticklers, in which the men tickled the women to induce religious ecstasy; sometimes the tickling resulted in a state of exhaustion that ended in death, and those who died were regarded as lucky at having achieved salvation.

  In his book The Sacred Fire, B. Z. Goldberg mentions various suicide sects which seem to be related to the Skoptzy. In the reign of Alexander the Second, a man named Shodkin founded such a sect, and led his followers into a cave, which they proceeded to seal up. Two women became panic stricken and broke out. Shodkin then called upon his followers to kill one another before the police arrived. The children were murdered first, then the women; when the police arrived, only Shodkin and two of his acolytes were alive.

  Chapter Four

  More Massacres

  The Black Death and the Flagellants

  In AD 1345, a horrible disease called the Black Death began to develop among the corpses of earthquake and flood victims in China, and was carried by rats along the caravan trails to Europe. It reached the Crimea, in southern Russia, in 1346. In a manner that seems sadly typical of human nature, the Tartars looked around for a scapegoat, and decided that the Christians must be to blame. They chased the Genoese merchants to their fortified town of Caffa, then surrounded it and began to bombard it. But the plague had followed them, and the besiegers were soon dying in an agony of thirst, with swellings in the groins and armpits, and the black spots on the skin which gave the disease its name.

  Before they left, the Tartars decided to give the Christians a taste of the misery they were suffering, and used giant catapults to lob plague-ridden corpses over the walls. The merchants carried them immediately to the sea, but they were too late. The Black Death took a grip in the town, and soon the merchants decided to flee back to Europe. They took the Black Death with them. It quickly spread from Messina, the Sicilian port where the merchants landed, as far as England, killing approximately half the population.

  Again there was a search for scapegoats. In Germany, it was rumoured that Jews had been poisoning the wells, and fleeing Jews were seized at Chillon and tortured. Under torture, they confessed to the charge. They were executed, and there were massacres of Jews in Provence, at Narbonne and Carcassone, then all over Germany: Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Mainz and the trading towns of the north belonging to the Hanseatic League. Here Jews were walled in their houses and left to starve; others were burnt alive.

  Flagellants in medieval Germany

  Another scapegoat was the leper. In the Middle Ages, lepers were usually regarded with considerable tolerance and allowed to form grimly picturesque processions; now they were stoned to death, or simply refused entry into the walled towns.

  One of the stranger phenomena that flourished under the Black Death was the movement known as Flagellants. These had originated about a century earlier in Italy, when various plagues and famines convinced the Italians that God wanted them to show repentance, and took the form of pilgrimages in which people walked naked to the waist, beating themselves with whips or scourges tipped with metal studs. On that occasion it had seemed to work and had been tried periodically since then. Now the Black Death convinced increasing numbers of people that desperate remedies were necessary. A letter, supposed to have fallen down from heaven, declaring that only Flagellants would be saved, was first published around 1260, but reappeared in 1343 in the Holy Land – it was supposed to have been delivered by an angel to the Church of St Peter in Jerusalem. Now waves of flagellation swept across Europe with all the hysteria of religious revivals. The Flagellants – mostly fairly respectable “pilgrims” of both sexes – would arrive in a town and hold their ceremony in the main square: they would strip to the waist, then flog themselves into an increasing state of hysteria until blood ran down to their feet, staining the white linen which was the traditional dress on the lower half of the body. The pilgrimage would last for thirty-three days, and each Flagellant would have taken a vow to flog himself, or herself, three times a day for the wh
ole of that time. A Master also moved among them, thrashing those who had failed in their vows.

  A procession of Flagellants

  As Flagellants themselves carried the plague from city to city, public opinion suddenly turned against them. The magistrates of Erfurt refused them entry, and no one objected. It was best not to wait until the Flagellants were within a town to raise objections, for their own frenzy made them violent, and they were likely to attack the objectors – one Dominican friar in Tournai was stoned to death. Human beings seem to be glad of an excuse to change their opinions, and only a year after they had been generally regarded with respect and admiration, the Flagellants were suddenly attacked as outcasts and cranks. The Pope issued a bull against them, and the hysteria vanished as abruptly as it had begun.

  One of the major effects of the Black Death was a shortage of manpower; hundreds of villages became deserted because there were no men left to work the land. But the wealthy landlords themselves were forced to sell land to the peasants because it had become useless to them. And this meant a change in the balance of power. For centuries, the peasants had regarded themselves as little more than slaves. Suddenly, the Middle Ages were at an end. Suddenly, the peasants could pick and choose. In England in 1381, they rose up in revolt when King Richard the Second tried to impose a Poll Tax, and the king only succeeded in saving himself by promising them everything they wanted, then betraying them.

  But nothing could put back the clock. For more than a thousand years, all the power in the world had been divided between the king and the Church. Now the ordinary people wanted their share. A “mad priest of Kent” called John Ball preached a doctrine that we would now call Communism – that all property should be held in common, and that there should be no more serfs or lords. He was executed immediately after the Peasants’ Revolt; but his ideas continued to spread. A reformer called John Wycliffe caused deep offence by declaring that Christ is man’s only overlord, and that priests should not own property. Fortunately, he lived in England, and the Pope could not get at him, since England was at war with France, and regarded the Pope as no better than a Frenchman.