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These Times History Took a Turn for the Batty

Khalid Elhassan November 3, 2019 34 min

Khlysty wearing themselves out. Cultura Colectiva

6. Nearer to Thee… Through A Whole Lot of Sex

When he was a young man, Rasputin fell in with a religious sect known as the Khlysty. They preached “holy passionless”, to be attained via exhaustion: the Khlysts wore themselves out with fervent prayer, dancing, and spinning. Rasputin took that, and added a twist to it by coming up with a religious doctrine that he described as “driving out sin with sin“.

In a nutshell, Rasputin called for “holy passionless” via total exhaustion: not just physical exhaustion, but sexual as well. He founded a cult, and led it into reaching sexual exhaustion via orgies – prolonged bouts of debauchery by the entire congregation. The idea was to get all the base passions out of their system, so they could then focus on God without distractions of the flesh.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.