World Famous Cults and Fanatics (4 page)

It was in 1907 that he suddenly became the power behind the throne.
Three years before, Tsarina Alexandra had given birth to a longed-for heir to the throne, Prince Alexei.
But it was soon
apparent that Alexei had inherited haemophilia, a disease that prevents the blood from clotting, and from which a victim may bleed to death even with a small cut.
At the age of three the prince
fell and bruised himself so severely that an internal haemorrhage developed.
He lay in a fever for days, and doctors despaired of his life.
Then the Tsarina recalled the man of God she had met two
years earlier, and sent for Rasputin.
As soon as he came in he said calmly: “Do not worry the child.
He will be all right.”
He laid his hand on the boy’s forehead sat down on the
edge of the bed, and began to talk to him in a quiet voice.
Then he knelt and prayed.
In a few minutes the boy was in a deep and peaceful sleep, and the crisis was over.

Henceforward the Tsarina felt a powerful emotional dependence on Rasputin – a dependence nourished by the thinly veiled hostility with which Alexandra, a German, was treated at court.
Rasputin’s homely strength brought her a feeling of security.
The Tsar also began to confide in Rasputin, who became a man of influence at court.
Nicholas II was a poor ruler, not so much
cruel as weak, and too indecisive to stem the rising tide of social discontent.
His opponents began to believe that Rasputin was responsible for some of the Tsar’s reactionary policies, and a
host of powerful enemies began to gather.
On several occasions the Tsar had to give way to the pressure and order Rasputin to leave the city.
On one such occasion, the young prince fell and hurt
himself again.
For several days he tossed in agony, until he seemed too weak to survive.
The Tsarina dispatched a telegram to Rasputin, and he telegraphed back: “The illness is not as
dangerous as it seems.”
From the moment it was received, the prince began to recover.

World War I brought political revolution and military catastrophe to Russia.
Its outbreak was marked by a strange coincidence: Rasputin was stabbed by a madwoman at precisely the same moment as
the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo.
Rasputin hated war, and might have been able to dissuade the Tsar from leading Russia into the conflict.
But he was in bed recovering from his
stab wound when the moment of decision came.

Rasputin’s end was planned by conspirators in the last days of 1916.
He was lured to a cellar by Prince Felix Yussupov, a man he trusted.
After feeding him poisoned cakes, Yussupov shot
him in the back; then Rasputin was beaten with an iron bar.
Such was his immense vitality that he was still alive when the murderers dropped him through the hole in the ice into the Neva.
Among his
papers was found a strange testament addressed to the Tsar.
It stated that he had a strong feeling he would die by violence before 1 January 1917, and that if he were killed by peasants, the Tsar
would reign for many years to come; but, if he were killed by aristocrats – as he was – then “none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years”.
He was right.
The Tsar and his family were all murdered in July 1918 – an amazing example, among many, of Rasputin’s gift of precognition.

The lesson is simple: many messiahs are deluded, but it would be a mistake to dismiss them all as madmen.

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Chapter Two

Waiting for the Warrior-King

A
lthough many of the great mystics spent their lives as members of the Church, they did not believe that the Church was essential for
“salvation”.
Man can know God directly, without the need for priests and sacraments.
Some of them – like the thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart – came dangerously
close to being excommunicated, or even burned at the stake.
(Eckhart was tried for heresy but died before he was condemned – which he was.)

It was only one step from this belief that man has direct access to God, to the belief that there is no such thing as sin.
If man is truly free, then he has choice, and if he chooses to
reject the idea that something is sinful – for example, sexual promiscuity or incest – no authority has a right to tell him he is a sinner.
Preachers of this doctrine were known as
Brethren of the Free Spirit.

Was Jesus a Messiah?

T
he answer to that question may seem obvious, for his followers certainly regarded him as
the
Messiah.
But did Jesus agree with them?
The
answer is: probably not.
When his disciple Peter told him: “They call you the Christ, the Messiah,” Jesus advised him to be silent.
The claim obviously embarrassed him.

Why?
Because, as we have seen, the Jewish craving for a messiah arose out of the longing for someone to lead them to victory.
After the Assyrian invasion, the Jews became a conquered people,
oppressed by a series of more powerful nations: the Seleucids (descendants of Alexander the Great), the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans.
For the same reason, the British of a thousand years
later came to believe firmly that King Arthur would return to throw off the foreign yoke.
Jesus had no desire to be regarded as a military commander, which is what the word messiah originally
implied.

What is difficult for modern Christians to grasp is that Jesus was only one of many Hebrew prophets who were believed to be the Messiah; the historian Josephus mentions several of them.
He
regarded them all as charlatans and agitators.
Christians later changed Josephus’s text, in which Jesus is described as a small man with a hunched back and a half-bald head, to read:
“six feet tall, well grown, with a venerable face, handsome nose .
.
.
curly hair the colour of unripe hazel nuts .
.
.”, and various other details that transform the unprepossessing
little man into the early Christian equivalent of a film star.
So all the writings about Jesus have to be treated with great caution; the later Christians were quite unscrupulous in changing
anything that disagreed with their own image of “the Messiah”.

But if Jesus declined to be regarded as a military leader, why did anyone pay any attention to him?
The answer is that he announced that the end of the world was about to take place, and that
this would happen
within the lifetime of people then alive.
This is why he told them to take no thought for the morrow, and that God would provide.
The world would soon be ending.

It is also important to understand that it was the Jews themselves, not their Roman conquerors, who disliked Jesus.
The Sadducees, who loved Greek culture and disbelieved in life after death,
thought him an uncultivated fanatic.
The Pharisees, who regarded themselves as the guardians of the Law, reacted angrily to Jesus’s attacks on them as narrow-minded and old-fashioned.
The
Zealots wanted to see the Romans conquered and thrown out of Palestine, and had no patience with a messiah who preached peace and love.
While Jesus was wandering around the countryside preaching in
the open air, no one worried about him.
But when he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey (fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah) and was greeted with enthusiasm by the people, the Jewish establishment
became alarmed.
And when Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, they saw the writing on the wall and had him arrested.
The arrest had to take place in a garden at night to avoid causing
trouble.

Of the four Gospels, only one, that of John, claims to be that of an eyewitness.
When Jesus is taken before Caiaphas, the high priest asks him about his teachings, and Jesus tells him to ask
those who have heard him – to the indignation of the high priest’s servant, who slaps his face and tells him not to be impertinent.
It is in the other three Gospels – by writers
who do not claim to have known him – that Jesus answers the question about whether he is the son of God by replying that he is “Son of Man” who will sit on the right hand of
God.

In John’s account, Pilate asks him if he is the king of the Jews, and Jesus replies that his kingdom is not of this world – meaning, in effect, that Pilate should not imagine he is
claiming any political leadership.
“I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth.”
There is certainly nothing here about claiming to be the Messiah.

To Pilate’s disgust, the Jews then demanded Jesus’s execution, declining to allow him to be pardoned in honour of Passover.
And so Jesus died, like so many other messiahs and
political agitators, by crucifixion.

How, then, did Christianity go on to conquer the world?
The answer lies partly in the many stories of miracles that circulated about Jesus – including the story that he had risen from the
dead.
A Jewish sect called the Messianists (or Nasoraeans) believed that Jesus would return and lead them against the Romans.
At this point, a convert to Christianity named Paul produced a strange
and mystical new version of Jesus’s teaching that seemed to have very little to do with anything Jesus had actually said.
Paul declared that Jesus was the Son of God (which Jesus had denied)
who had been sent to redeem Man from the sin of Adam, and that anyone who believed in Jesus was “saved”.
In fact, Jesus had preached salvation through the efforts of the individual, and
insisted that the Kingdom of God is within everybody.
But since there was still a widespread belief that the End of the World would occur within a year or so, Paul’s version of the Christian
message was a powerful incentive to belief.
The Messianists regarded such a notion as absurd and blasphemous, and since they were politically stronger than Paul’s Christians, it looked as if
their version would triumph.

However, as it happened, the Messianists were among those wiped out by Titus, the son of the Roman emperor Vespasian, who was sent to put down the latest rebellion.
He did more than that; he
destroyed the Temple and carried its treasures back to Rome.
Paul’s “Christians” were so widely scattered that they were relatively immune from massacre.
And so, by a historical
accident, Paul’s version of Christianity became the official version, and the “vicarious atonement” – the notion that Jesus died on the cross to redeem man from the sin of
Adam – became the basis of the religion that went on to conquer the world.

By the year
AD
100 it was obvious that the world was not going to end within the lifetime of Jesus’s contemporaries, and that Jesus, like so many other messiahs,
had quite simply been wrong.
But by that time, Christianity was too powerful to die out.
It was now a political force, the focus of all the dissatisfaction of the underdogs and victims of Roman
brutality.
The belief now spread that the end of the world would occur in the year
AD
1000.
And, as we have seen, there was so much violence, pestilence and bloodshed around
that time that the believers had no doubt that the end was just around the corner.

Simon Bar Kochba

But even before the millennium, there were plenty of messiahs.
In
AD
132, a Jewish revolutionary named Simon Bar Kochba led a revolt against the Romans
in Judaea when he learned that the Emperor Hadrian intended to build a temple dedicated to Jupiter on the site of the temple that had been destroyed by Titus.
A celebrated student of the Talmud
(the Jewish book of law), Rabbi Akiva, told Simon Bar Kochba: “You are the messiah.”
And Bar Kochba behaved exactly as a Jewish messiah was expected to behave (and as Jesus had failed
to behave); he seized towns and villages from the Romans, had his own head stamped on the coinage, and built fortresses.
But he stood no real chance against the Romans, with their highly trained
troops.
It took Julius Severus three and a half years to destroy the rebels, and in that time he destroyed fifty fortresses and 985 villages, and killed over half a million people.
Since Bar
Kochba’s men were guerrillas, and guerrillas survive by being supported by sympathizers, Severus set out to kill all the sympathizers.
He finlly killed Bar Kochba himself in the fortress of
Bethar, and renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolana.
So one more messiah was proved to be mortal after all.
The Jews were so shattered by this defeat that there were no more Jewish messiahs for many
centuries.

Moses of Crete

In about
AD
435, an unnamed messiah from Crete, who called himself Moses, announced that, like his predecessor, he would lead his followers back to the
Promised Land, causing the sea to part for them so they could walk on the bottom.
Hundreds of followers gathered on the seashore, and Moses raised his arms and ordered the sea to separate.
Then he
shouted the order to march into the waves.
They obeyed him, but the sea ignored his order, and many of his followers were drowned.
Moses may have been drowned with them; at all events, he
disappeared.

The Christ of Gevaudon

In
AD
591, an unnamed messiah began to wander around France.
This man had apparently had a nervous breakdown after being surrounded by a swarm of flies
in a forest; he recovered after two years and became a preacher, clad himself in animal skins, and wandered down through Arles to the district of Gevaudon in the Cevennes (noted later for a famous
case of a werewolf).
He declared he was Christ, had a companion called Mary, and healed the sick by touching them.
(As we have seen in the case of Rasputin, this may be a natural gift.) His
followers were mostly the very poor, and they often waylaid travellers (most of whom would be rich) and seized their money.
The messiah redistributed it to the poor.
His army of 3,000 became so
powerful that most towns lost no time in acknowledging him as the Christ.

Before he arrived at the cathedral city of La Puy he quartered his army in neighbouring halls and churches, and sent messengers to announce his coming to Bishop Aurelius.
When these messengers
appeared in front of the bishop stark naked and turned somersaults, he decided it was time to end the career of this dangerous and disrespectful rebel.
He sent his men to meet him, apparently to
welcome him, and as one of them bowed down as if to kiss the messiah’s knees, they grabbed him and dragged him to the ground, his companions rushed forward and hacked the messiah to pieces.
With their “Christ” dead, the rebellious followers soon dispersed.
Mary was apparently tortured until she revealed the “diabolic devices” that had given the messiah his
power – St Gregory of Tours, who recounts the story, naturally assumed that it was all the Devil’s work.
But he also records that the messiah’s followers continued to believe in
him to the day they died, and to maintain that he was the Christ.

A century and a half later, about 742, a messiah called Aldebert, who came from Soissons, announced that he was a saint; his followers built chapels for him which he named after himself.
He
claimed to own a letter from Jesus himself.
Pope Zachary was so worried about “Saint” Aldebert’s influence that he tried hard to capture him, and, when that failed, excommunicated
him.
Aldebert went on for at least two more years, and seems to have died of natural causes.

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