3. Rasputin launched a cult revolving around carnal relations
Rasputin, the illiterate Siberian peasant, charlatan, mystic, holy wanderer, faith healer, blasphemer, and notorious lecher, led an extraordinary life. As a teen, he was such a notorious womanizer that he earned the nickname Rasputin, meaning “the depraved” in Russian. Later in life, his inexplicable ability to soothe the suffering of the child Alexei Nikolayevich, the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne, won him the favor of his parents, the Tsar and Tsarina of the Russian Empire. The resulting proximity to the throne made him an incongruously powerful and influential figure in the Russian Empire’s final years.
In his youth, Rasputin fell in with a religious sect known as the Khlysts, who preached “holy passionless”, to be attained via exhaustion. So they wore themselves out with fervent prayer, dancing, and spinning. Rasputin built on that to invent a religious doctrine that he described as “driving out sin with sin“, to achieve holy passionless via total exhaustion: not just physical, but also via carnal relations. Rasputin led his cult into reaching exhaustion via orgies – prolonged bouts of debauchery by the entire congregation, to get all the base passions out of their system, then focus on God without distractions of the flesh.