18. Founding a Blasphemous Cult
As a strannik, Rasputin left home for months or years to visit holy sites. He sometimes walked for days without stopping or eating, and also stopped bathing or washing himself for months at a time. To increase his suffering and hardship, in order to get nearer to God, he wore heavy shackles. Back in his home village, when not on the road and travelling to and between holy sites as far away as Greece, Syria, and Jerusalem, Rasputin founded a religious cult. His sect combined Orthodox Christian tenets with sexual practices, and other odd rituals deemed heretical and blasphemous. It began after Rasputin encountered and joined a flagellant sect known as the Khlysts – an breakaway splinter of Russia’s Orthodox Church, popular in the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries.
