RASPUTIN:A WITCH’S VIEW.

A LECTURE GIVEN TO THE CHESTERFIELD PSYCHICSTUDIES GROUP ON JUNE 9th, 2006.

GRIGÓRY YEFÍMOVICH RASPÚTIN was a man aboutwhom strong but widely divergent opinions weresincerely held. Some of his contemporariesbelieved him to be a saint, or even a livingincarnation of divinity, like Jesus or Krishna.If he’s remembered at all today it’s probablyas his worst enemies described him: one ofhistory’s great villains, or even a devil inhuman form. I don’t believe in gods or devils,so to me, necessarily, he’s just a man – but avery remarkable man indeed. Despite his badreputation, I’ve always liked him; and tonightI’m going to tell you why. What was Rasputin anyway? In Russia theycalled him a stárets – a word which didn’t reallyhave a colloquial English equivalent in histime, although it does now: guru. A stárets wasa kind of living saint: someone who had becomeremarkably holy through having loads of intensemystical experiences, and was thereby bothenabled and obliged to help those who came to

him with their problems. Not every stáretshealed, although most of the famous ones did;and some exhibited other seemingly supernaturalpowers. But what they basically did was makepeople feel better: healthier, happier, holier.Like their Hindu counterparts these men oftenattracted fanatical devotees. Dostoyévsky says:Having chosen a stárets you surrender your will and give it tohim in complete obedience, with complete self-abnegation.Some stártsi became famous, and might bepowerful men in their local communities; butnone was ever more famous or more powerful thanour man Rasputin, this semiliterate peasant whorose to be the Emperor’s bosom friend. He made his entry onto the stage of theworld on January 10th, 1869, in the remotevillage of Pokróvskoye, in Western Siberia.Rasputin’s father Yefím was one of the moreprosperous peasants: what we in England wouldhave called a yeoman, and the soviets a kulák.He kept a stable of horses, running a smallbusiness as a carter in addition to working hisfields and fishing in the river Túra. He wasconsidered a heavy drinker, even by Siberianstandards, and so it seems likely that Grigóryinherited from him a predisposition toalcoholism.

Life for the villagers of Pokróvskoye, asfor most in rural Russia, wasn’t much differentfrom that of their ancestors in the MiddleAges, or even earlier times. They lived closeto the edge, and death was never far away.Grigóry was the only one of five siblings toreach adulthood. At the age of ten he nearlydied trying, and failing, to save his elderbrother from the river. Such an experiencewould make any child thoughtful. Grigóry seems to have been a ratherwithdrawn and dreamy child. Once, recoveringfrom a childhood fever, he said that he saw abeautiful lady sitting by his bed and soothinghim. Animals liked him instinctively, and heenjoyed their company more than that of people.He liked wandering alone in the woods, losinghimself in the beauties of nature. He alsoseems to have taken pleasure in the beautifulrituals of the Russian Church. The religion in which he was brought upwas a curious hybrid of Paganism andChristianity. Russia had been officiallyChristian for about a thousand years, but theclergy had been relatively slack about teachingit to the masses. So overt Paganism hadlingered, in pockets, till the seventeenth

century, and even in Rasputin’s time thereligion of the people was, in the opinion ofmany, more Pagan than Christian. Generally whathad happened was that a lot of Pagan practiceshad survived, but under a veneer of Christianbelief. Just the same kind of syncretism of thenew religion and the old can be found inCaribbean voodoo, where African gods areworshipped under the names of Christian saints.Indeed many of the most popular Russian saintsare generally agreed, by scholars, to have beenChristianized forms of former Pagan gods. StVlas, protector of cattle, is in name andfunction almost identical with the old deityVolós. Much of the folklore about Pyérun, godof thunder, has been transferred to St Ilya.And so on. The most important deity of the PaganRussians seems to have been the Earth Goddess,whose worship was now carried out in the nameof Dyéva María, the Virgin Mary – or, as she wasmore commonly known, the Bogoróditsa, or DivineMother – and in that of other female saints: anebulous bunch who tend to shade into oneanother, as if they were all aspects of agreater being. The status of the Virgin wasastonishing to a western sensibility. This was

not the meek, subservient Virgin Mary of modernCatholicism; the Divine Mother of the Russianpeasantry was the female face of divinity, and– just as in Pagan times – the recipient ofmore adoration than her male counterpart. Although their Church held the doctrine ofthe Trinity, the peasants seem not haveunderstood it; to them ‘Trinity’ was just anhonorific title, used sometimes of Christ, andsometimes of the Divine Mother. The Holy Spiritwas likewise thought of simply as the power ofone of these two. Since the Orthodox Churchforbade representations of God the Father, thepeasants seem to have thought of him not as aperson but as a rather abstract Godhead. Christand the Divine Mother, Our Lord and Our Lady,were the twin manifestations of this abstractdivinity in personal form: a divine dyadcuriously like that of modern Wicca. The Divine Mother had many aspects,usually distinguished by the name of a townwhere a wonder-working ikon of her was kept;these aspects were visualized differently andthought to have different powers anddispositions – being, for example, particularlygood at healing a certain disease.

Likewise among the lesser Holy Ones, thesaints, some were supposed to be good for onething and some for another. A good way ofenlisting their aid was to go on pilgrimage totheir shrines. In less extreme cases one mightlight candles to them and pray before theirikons. The Holy Ones were really present intheir ikons, and looked back at you from them.Most saints had a feast day, the most importantof which were those which coincided withsignificant points in the agricultural year. Russian writers debate whether this folkreligion, the so-called ‘orthodoxy of thepeople’ was really Pagan or Christian. Itcertainly had a large element of both. Anyway,that’s the kind of religion Rasputin was raisedin, and as far as he knew, it was simply calledChristianity. As a child Grigóry may have aspired tosainthood; as he grew older he found that hisflesh got in the way. Like most young men in Siberia (and indeedelsewhere) the teenage Rasputin drank too much,got into fights, and chased pretty girls withwhom he sometimes got lucky. Sometimes he evenwent in for a bit of petty larceny. Theapparent contradiction between this kind of

behaviour and his spiritual aspirations seemsto have troubled him, but he continued to livethe contradiction, unable to destroy eitherpart of himself. Much later Rasputin would describe hisadolescence to the journalist Ménshikov:

At the age of fifteen in my village, when the sunshine burnedbrightly and the birds sang heavenly songs – I would dream ofGod. My soul yearned for what was far away. I often weptwithout knowing why or where my tears came from. In thatway my youth passed, in a kind of meditation, a kind of dream.And then, when life had touched me, I ran to a corner andsecretly prayed. I was unsatisfied: could find no answer tomany things. And I was sad and took to drinking.

Even after a hundred years and in anotherlanguage, that still works for me: more likepoetry than prose, it tells me what hisadolescence felt like, even if it’s short ondetails. As to his dreaming of God, that takeson additional significance if one knows that inRasputin’s later visions, God was to bemanifest in the form of a beautiful woman. Onethinks of the lady who appeared by his sickbed,and wonders whether his childish imaginationhad modelled her on the lovely image of the

Divine Mother that hung in his father’s hall:the manifestation known as the Virgin ofKazan’. Perhaps Rasputin decided that (as hiscontemporary Dr Freud might have told him) hisdivine longing was just sexual frustration,because at nineteen he married a girl of abouthis own age, called Praskóvya. She is said tohave been tall and very beautiful, with goldenhair and big brown eyes. They seem to have beenhappy together, and were to love each otheruntil the end of their lives. During the earlyyears of their marriage he gave up drinking,not to take it up again seriously until thedark days of the First World War. Rasputincontinued to live in his father’s house, and inthe course of a few years he fathered fourchildren. Grigóry had done the things that weresupposed to bring a man fulfilment, yet hedidn’t feel fulfilled: a comfortable home lifewith a wife and family was undoubtedlypleasant, but had done nothing to assuage hislonging for the divine. That’s what hisdaughter tells us, anyway. His father thoughthe was just too lazy for farm-work. Maybe theywere both right. I think he must have been

feeling a bit trapped in the old farmhouse,wondering about all the roads he hadn’t taken,and all the girls he hadn’t kissed. About this time, according to his friendMísha Pechyórkin, Rasputin had a visionaryexperience while ploughing. What he saw, heidentified as ‘the Virgin of Kazán’’ – or, moresurprisingly to a western ear, as God in theblessed form of the Virgin of Kazán’. This aspect of theDivine Mother was a ‘Black Virgin’, Moynahansays, whose darkly sensual and majestic features were saidto have been dug up from the earth. She was alwaysrepresented in a red cloak, sharing with Kaliand the witches’ Goddess her fondness for thatcolour. Rasputin’s daughter María heard the storyof her father’s vision too, much later, and shegives us a few extra details. Rasputin wasploughing when he saw a blaze of light in thesky. He fell to his knees; and, as he watched,the light shaped itself into the form of abeautiful dark-haired woman.

Her right arm reached down toward him, palm outward,granting him the boon of illumination; her left hand was raised– conferring her divine blessing.

The overwhelming feeling Rasputin had wasof love: his love for this heavenly woman, andher love for him. When, after what seemed likean eternity, the vision faded, he discoveredthat he had been kneeling on a sharp stone, andwas bleeding. Now, there’s probably a physiologicalexplanation for this experience: sleepdeprivation will make most people hallucinate,and we know from other sources that Rasputinwas a chronic insomniac at this time. But thatdoesn’t make the vision any the lessinteresting or significant. Most insomniacs’hallucinations are banal or grotesque;Rasputin’s vision was beautiful, and it changedhis life. It seems to me that C.G. Jung was surelyright to say that there is a deep part of thehuman mind much wiser than our consciousthoughts; and that this deep, wise part cancommunicate with consciousness through dreamsand visions. The most important thing that thedeep mind knows is that all things are one, andit can try to share that wisdom though symbols;through meditating on these we can come to knowthe oneness directly, as our deep mind knowsit. Jung would no doubt have categorized

Rasputin’s vision as an appearance of theAnima; to me, it sounds like an epiphany of theGoddess, but these are two ways of saying thesame thing: she’s the world-as-a-wholesymbolically represented in a human form ofunbelievable beauty. In the case of Rasputin’s vision one maysay more particularly that the Divine Motherrepresented, as he put it, what was far away: allthe women whom he longed for and knew that hecould never have; all the wonders of the worldthat he feared he would never see; all theglories of life that he felt were passing himby. She was the one that medieval German poetscalled Frau Welt, a personification of the realmaterial world with all its potential delights.She was, in brief, the Goddess of the witches. There’s a common saying among modernwitches that if you have a vision of theGoddess you have to spend the rest of your lifeworking for her, and Rasputin seems to havefelt the same: it seemed to him that he’d beencalled to do something – but what? A clue seemed to be offered when he wasengaged to drive a young theology student tothe monastery at Verkhotúrye, about 250 milesaway. Naturally, they fell into conversation on

the journey. The student took Rasputin’sexperiences seriously, and urged him to seekguidance at the monastery. Once there, Rasputinhad a number of conversations with an oldhermit, whose advice was radical indeed:Rasputin was to leave his home and his family,and become a stránnik, until he foundillumination. The stránniky were very like thesannyásins of India: mystical hobos who’d givenup their possessions for a life of perpetualpilgrimage, praying and meditating as theywent. Taking to the road like this was normallysomething one did towards the end of one’slife; it was a recognized way of becoming astárets. Praskóvya must have really loved her man,because she let him go; and she must have knownwhat she was doing, because the farm seems tohave prospered without him. It’s hard to besure about the exact dates, but he probablystarted his wanderings in 1899, and came homesometime in 1902. Rasputin had found what hewas looking for. Now he was a man of power, astárets; confident, charismatic, and capable ofworking what seemed to be miracles.

What had happened to him? After the fashion ofHindoo fakirs, says Yusúpov, he underwent privations todevelop his strength of will and his hypnotic powers. He hadoften been hungry, often cold. He would havespent a lot of time alone in wild places.Nature, he said, taught him to love andconverse with the divine. In the words ofRadzínsky: his was a God who lives in the trees andresounds in the voices of birds and gazes at the traveller fromevery blade of grass. We know very little of Rasputin’s wanderingsthrough steppe and forest, by mountains andrivers, and through the holy places of MotherRussia. He slept in stables and barns, or inthe homes of pious peasants eager to earn meritby helping a stránnik. Sometimes they would askhim to light a candle for them in some distantholy place; sometimes they would ask for hisblessing. We know he went as far as Mount Athosin Greece, two thousand miles from Pokróvskoye.And almost all his biographers agree thatsomewhere on this journey, perhaps in the cityof Pyerm, he was initiated into the mysteriesof a secretive, illegal cult, half-Pagan, half-Christian, known to outsiders as the Khlýsty, butto themselves as the People of God.

He never admitted this; but then hewouldn’t. Apart from the flogging and theprison sentence which such an admission wouldhave earned him, there was a strongerdeterrent. The Khlýsty’s initiation ceremonyinvolved swearing a solemn oath never to revealone’s membership of the cult, nor any of itssecrets, to outsiders. Only those who had swornthis oath could take part in the cult’sworship, the radéniye or ‘rejoicing’, whichinvolved meeting at night in a forest clearing,a barn, or a cellar set aside for sacredpurposes. Once there, the worshippers wouldsing and dance, wearing little or nothing,whirling like dervishes around a steamingcauldron or a bonfire until they fell intoecstasy, possessed by the Spirit. The male andfemale leaders of the group would be worshippedas divine: Christ and the Divine Mothermanifest in the flesh. So might other membersof the group, particularly if they wereinspired to make prophetic utterances. TheKhlýsty considered all holy people to bemanifestations of the Divine in one of its twoaspects, male and female. Generally theradéniye would continue with a feast,considered the true communion; according to

Yusúpov and most other writers, it would endwith a promiscuous orgy. In a previous lecture for the AlisterHardy Society I set forth my thesis thatEuropean witchcraft was, like the Indian SháktaTantra, a survival of an age-old Goddess-worshipping cult, whose transgressive ritualswere chiefly aimed at producing mysticalexperiences. Those of you who remember thatlecture should easily spot the many likenessesborne by this nominally Christian radéniye toboth the Indian chakrapuja and the sabbats ofEuropean witches. Personally I can’t doubt thatwhat we have here is a superficiallyChristianized version of the old Russian witch-cult. Goddess-worshipping witches are known inRussian folklore, but as far as I know none wasever brought to trial. It seems most likelythat the Pagan form of the witch-cult wouldhave died out in the seventeenth century, alongwith other explicit manifestations of Paganism,at the same time that the existence of theKhlýsty is first documented. Perhaps a similar Christianization ofwitchcraft occurred in western Europe: thesixteenth-century scholar Pico della Mirandolatells us (in his work La Strega) that the Goddess

of the witches, who was worshipped in his timewith sexual orgies, was sometimes identifiedwith the Mother of God. One thing that seemed to me a littleunsatisfactory in my account of Europeanwitchcraft was a curious dichotomy in the imageof the witch: we saw that on the one hand thewitches were members of a transgressivemystical cult, worshipping the Dark Goddess,and that on the other hand some witchespractised as healers, which brought them intocompetition with the wizards and cunning-men;but there didn’t seem to be any necessary linkbetween the two aspects of witchcraft. TheKhlýsty enable us to see what that link mayhave been, because they believed that those whotook part in their ceremonies, and experiencedmystical ecstasies, would often receive thepower to work miracles – especially forpurposes of healing. (One thinks of the siddhisthat Indian yogis are supposed to acquire.) What we know of the healing methods of theKhlýsty we know largely because their mostfamous initiate, Rasputin, was later observedin practice. It is intriguing to think that theaccounts of him may have unwittingly preserved

for us some of the ancient techniques ofwitchcraft. The Khlýsty were gentle pacifists, whoabstained from meat, alcohol, tobacco, and allkinds of sweets and cakes. Unlike the Indian tantrics, who observecelibacy only for the week before theirchakrapuja, most accounts of the Khlýsty saythat they were supposed to have no sex at all,except during the holy orgies of the radéniye.We don’t know the cause of this abstinence. Myfirst thought is that it was due to Christianinfluence; but perhaps it was a relic from thefirst farming communities, back in the earlyNeolithic. In that distant age, according tosome eminent anthropologists, includingProfessor Karl Pearson, the people lived inmatrifocal clans, and only came together withthe people of neighbouring clans for periodicfestivals. Obviously Neolithic people couldonly have had procreative sex at the festivals,because at home everyone of their own age wouldhave been closely related, and consequentlytaboo, like a brother or a sister. So perhapsthe sexual abstinence of the Khlýsty issomething that goes back to the ancient worshipof the Goddess.

It was the one aspect of the cult’steaching that Rasputin didn’t follow. He hatedwar and violence; he didn’t touch meat orsweets for the rest of his life, and he wasalready on the wagon as far as alcohol wasconcerned. But he liked sex a lot, and now hehad found a way to use it as a means ofworship. Though in talking to outsiders heoften used the conventional religious languagethat described sexual activity as sin, to hisintimates he spoke in very different terms: forhim it could be a holy sacrament, not just in thecontext of the radéniye but generally. Thissounds very tantric. Did he learn it from theKhlýsty? Or had he intuitively rediscovered thewitch-cult’s ancient reverence for the sexinstinct in all its manifestations? We shallnever know. Either way, the paradoxical resultis the same: here’s a man who sincerelybelieves himself to be a Christian, but whoseactual practices look virtually identical tothose of Pagan witchcraft. At home in Pokróvskoye, he excavated aritual chamber under the stables, hung itswalls with ikons collected on his travels, litit with candles, and set up a brazier in the

centre of the room. Rasputin spent long hoursdown here in prayer and meditation. Before long he had about a dozenfollowers, mostly female, who met in the ritualchamber. We don’t know exactly what they did.In the village there was talk of naked dancingaround the fire, of strange incense beingburned, and, inevitably, of sexual rites. Not just straight sex, either; kinkystuff. Rumour tells of what Yusúpov describedas mystico-sadistic practices: rituals of submissionand domination, including oral sex, andsometimes involving a whip. Speaking of thesepractices, Rasputin remarked: ‘When someone ishumiliated, he understands a lot.’ Knowing what we doabout his character, it seems likely that thedomination went both ways. In these ritualsmasochistic submission to a human being becamea sacramental means of mystical self-surrenderto the divinity manifest in that person. The occult philosopher Erik Davis tells usa secret of the Indian tantrics: that ritualizedsubmission to dark and aggressive sexual energy can provokean egolessness that may, if you are lucky and the cosmos kind,bloom into spiritual ecstasy. Rasputin seems to haveknown this, too.

Wiccans may be reminded of much that wenton in Gerald Gardner’s coven, fifty yearslater: ritual nudity, circle-dancing round afire, flagellation, the worship of a nakedpriestess and the kissing of her yoni. But of course Grigóry was a much youngerand more vigorous man than Old Gerald, and thesexual stuff that had become purely symbolic inWiccan rituals was literally enacted inRasputin’s. He seems to have been good at it.According to his murderer, Prince FelixYusúpov, he had a huge penis with a usefully-placed wart (usefully placed for stimulatingthe G-spot, I suppose he means). But becausethis is confirmed neither by the account ofRasputin’s friend Filíppov, who saw him nakedin the bath-house, nor by a medical examinationof 1914, I’m more inclined to attributeRasputin’s sexual prowess to technique than toanatomy. “I know how to fuck really well,” was a chat-upline he used on at least one occasion. Despiteits characteristic bluntness, it’s probably notthe worst chat-up line in the world. Anyway,most of the women he had sex with seemed toenjoy it a great deal and to love him quiteunselfishly thereafter. None of them seems tohave been jealous – not even his wife,

Praskóvya, who used to say: “He has enough foreveryone”. On a couple of occasions Rasputinapparently used sexual intercourse as a meansto cast the demons out of possessed women,restoring them to sanity and happiness. One ofthese women was Sister Akulína, a disturbed nunwho under his influence renounced her vows andbecame a happy nurse. She would in later yearsbecome one of his closest female friends. Other women who were burdened with guiltand anxiety found that after having sex withRasputin they felt good about themselves forthe first time in years: as if all their sinshad been washed away. I think we can safelyassume that he gave them an orgasm; but morethan that we don’t know, because none of themsaid much about it. Maybe he could do some kindof tantric sex thing where orgasm is prolongedand turned into an intense mystical experience.Astonishingly, despite the number of women hebedded, he doesn’t seem to have made any ofthem pregnant – except Praskóvya, of course.Apparently some of the Indian gurus are capableof having sex without emission, and going onfor hours; perhaps Rasputin knew a similartechnique.

Whatever he did, his considerate naturemust have made him a good lover. Colin Wilsontells us that he adored women – every woman seemedto him a miracle and aroused instant curiosity. It seems tome that in the assemblies of the Khlýsty hewould have learnt to see the Bogoróditsa, thedivine female of his vision, incarnate in everywoman’s body, and that sex for him couldthereafter be an act of worship; the pubictriangle the place of sacrifice, and he himselfthe sacrificed Christ, the dying andresurrected male principle, offered to theeternal feminine. Sometimes, we know from later sources, heused to worship women without actual sexualintercourse, asking them to stand naked whilehe gazed at them. He told his friend Iliodor:“I direct my lust from here – the loins – to my chest, myhead, and my brain.” That sounds very tantric to me– like the kundalini going through the chakrasup to the top of the head and exploding therein mystic bliss. This style of sexual mysticism might havegone down well in 60s California; but back in1902, in Pokróvskoye, the parish priest took adim view of it, and instituted anecclesiastical investigation; which naturally

proved nothing, as none of Rasputin’s followerswere willing to betray him, and no one elsereally knew enough to convict him. The Khlýsty were always ready to conformoutwardly, pretending to be orthodox to escapepersecution. Rasputin seems to have held theview that there were different levels of truthappropriate to people at different levels ofspiritual development; that for the mass ofpeople it made sense to speak of sin andrepentance, and to make use of the sacramentsof the Church, while for the more enlightenedthere was no such thing as sin, and no need ofa priesthood to mediate between them and thedivinity. To people on the lower level ofunderstanding one would talk as if the bible-stories were literally true; to the enlightenedone might speak of metaphorical meanings. Asimilar view is taken by some Buddhistthinkers, I believe. Although Rasputin had hisdifferences with individual clerics, he neverdenounced the institution of which they wererepresentatives. He just thought that he knewof something better. In the summer of 1903 Rasputin was off onhis wanderings again, walking as far as thecity of Kiev, to visit the holy places there.

On its streets he first encountered a likeableyoung rogue called Simánovich, a Jew, later tobecome one of his closest friends. According to Simánovich, Rasputin, thoughphysically strong, was a lazy man, who did notlike regular work, and had no interest inmoney; he loved women, music, dancing, and long andinteresting conversations, particularly on spiritualsubjects. Despite his lack of formal education,the young stárets greatly enjoyed taking partin philosophical discussions. Simánovich spokeof his commanding demeanour and his amazingwillpower; summing him up admiringly as aconnoisseur of the human psyche. Rasputin clearlywasn’t a plaster saint, but he sounds likesomeone who would have been good to know. On his way back to Siberia, he passedthrough Kazán’, pausing there to pray at theshrine of the Divine Mother. Apparently he didsome healings while in the city, talked abouttheology and mysticism with the priests, andtried to give spiritual consolation to sometroubled people. The Archimandrite of Kazán’was sufficiently impressed to give him lettersof introduction to the rector of thetheological seminary in St Petersburg.