5. A Lecherous Religious Charlatan Who Got His Congregation into the Habit of Prolonged Love groups
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869 – 1916) was a charlatan, mystic, holy wanderer, faith healer, blasphemer, and a notorious lecher who became one of Russia’s most powerful figures. An inexplicable ability to ease the pain of the child Alexei Nikolayevich, the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne, earned him the gratitude of his parents, Russia’s Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra. That made Rasputin an influential figure in the Russian Empire’s final years. It was an unexpected rise. As a teenager, Rasputin was notorious for his relentless pursuit of women, from women of the night to respectable matrons. He had a magnetism that enabled him to rack up carnal conquests with ease.
Rasputin invented and led a religious cult that combined Orthodox Christianity with physical pleasure, plus bizarre rituals deemed heretical and blasphemous. A core belief of Rasputin’s cult was that nearness to God is achieved by a state described as “holy passionlessness”, which is best achieved via exhaustion. Such exhaustion was to be attained by a lot of intimacy – a religious doctrine he described as “driving out sin with sin“. So he led his cult into reaching carnal exhaustion via love groups. He and his followers got into the habit of indulging in prolonged bouts of debauchery by the entire congregation, in order to get base passions out of their system.
