He Founded a Sexo-Religious Cult
Rasputin became a full-blown strannik, and took to leaving home for months or years at a time to visit holy sites. During those travels, he would sometimes walk for days on end without stopping or eating. He also stopped bathing or washing himself for months at a time, and to increase the hardship of his pilgrimage and bring himself nearer to God, he took to wearing heavy shackles.
Back in his home village, when he was not on the road and traveling to and between holy sites as far away as Greece, Syria, and Jerusalem, Rasputin invented and led a religious cult. His sect combined some tenets of Orthodox Christianity with sexual practices and some odd, or flat-out bizarre rituals, that were considered heretical and blasphemous.
It began after Rasputin encountered and joined a flagellant sect known as the Khlysts – an underground breakaway splinter of the Russian Orthodox Church, which throve between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. However, it was not long before he perverted the Khlystys’ beliefs that nearness to God is best achieved by a state described as “holy passionlessness”.
According to the Khlysts, the way to reach “holy passionless” was via exhaustion, which they achieved with rituals that combined fervent prayer with even more fervent dancing and spinning until the congregation was worn out. Rasputin decided to do them one better by inventing a religious doctrine he would describe as “driving out sin with sin“.
To drive out sin with sin, Rasputin reasoned that the requisite exhaustion to attain a state of holy passionlessness should be total – not only physical but sexual as well. That being the case, Rasputin led his cult into reaching sexual exhaustion via orgies – prolonged bouts of debauchery by the entire congregation in order to get all the base passions out of their system. That way, they could get nearer to and focus on God without distractions of the flesh.