‘I don’t believe in a future life,’ said Raskolnikov.
Svidrigailov sat lost in thought.
‘And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort?’ he said suddenly.
He is a madman, thought Raskolnikov.
‘We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.’
‘Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?’ Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.
‘Juster. And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it’s what I would certainly have made it,’ answered Svidrigailov, with a vague smile.
This horrible answer sent a cold chill through Raskolnikov.
Similarly in The Brothers Karamazov, when Ivan has a nightmare in which he is visited by the Devil, neither Ivan nor the reader believes that this is just a delusion. Dostoyevsky is telling his readers that devils may squeeze through into the material dimension. No other single writer so powerfully conveys the undercurrents of evil that welled up in the second half of the nineteenth century. His work is pervaded with a sense of vital contact with other mysterious worlds, some of them hellish. There is, too, the spiritual extremism, the sense that there is no middle way, that if you do not run to embrace the most spiritual, the demonic will fill the vacuum. Those who try to follow the middle way are nowhere.
Like Swedenborg he looked forward to a new age, but in Dostoyevsky’s case this grew out of a very Russian sense of history.
‘EVERYDAY I GO INTO THE GROVE,’ wrote the poet Nikolai Kliuev in a letter to a friend ‘and sit there by a little chapel and the age-old pine tree. I think about you. I kiss your eyes and your heart… O mother wilderness, paradise of the spirit… How hateful and black seems all the so-called civilized world and what I would give, what Golgotha would I bear so that America should not encroach upon the blue feathered dawn, upon the fairy-tale hut… Western Christianity among whose heedless gifts to the world we must count rationalism, materialism, a technology that enslaves, an absence of spirit and in its place a vain, sentimental humanism.’ This is the Russian perspective.
Orthodox Christianity had taken a different path from Roman Christianity. Orthodoxy preserved and nurtured the esoteric doctrines, some of them pre-Christian, that Rome had discarded or declared heretical. The mystical vision of Dionysius the Aeropagite continued to illumine Orthodox Christianity with its emphasis on direct, personal experience of the spirit worlds. In the seventh century the Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor wrote urging disciplined introspection, the monastic or wandering life. ‘Illumination must be sought,’ he wrote, ‘and in extreme cases the whole body will be illumined too.’ The same phenomenon was reported by the monks of Mount Athos. Monks deep in prayer would suddenly illuminate their entire cave or cell. This was a vision of God, the hesychast, which could be achieved by rhythmic breathing exercises, repetitive prayers and meditation on icons.
In Russia the Church emphasized supernatural powers attainable after severe spiritual discipline. But then in the seventeenth century the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Nikon reformed and centralized the Church. It was left to the Old Believers (Raskolniki) to keep the beliefs and spiritual disciplines of the early Christians alive. Their outlawed communities were driven underground, where they survived as a living tradition. Dostoyevsky kept in touch with them throughout his life.
Out of the Old Believer tradition came the Stranniki, or Wanderers, solitary individuals who renounced money, marriage, passports and all official documents as they moved across the country, promising ecstatic visions, healing and prophecy. If caught, they were tortured, sometimes beheaded.
Another later movement which came out of the Old Believer tradition was the Khlysty, the People of God, a persecuted underground society famous for its extreme asceticism and rejection of the world. They were reputed to meet at night, sometimes in a forest clearing lit by banks of candles. Naked under flowing white robes, they danced in two circles, the men in an inner circle in the direction of the sun and the women in an outer circle moving in the other direction, widdershins. The aim of this ceremony was liberation from the material world and ascent into the spirit worlds. They would collapse, speak in tongues, heal the sick and cast out demons.
There were rumours of orgies at these midnight meetings, but more likely they — like the Cathars — were sexual ascetics, practising the sublimation of sexual energies for spiritual and mystical purposes.
The young Rasputin stayed at the Orthodox monastery of Verkhoturye where he met members of the Khlysty. His own doctrine seems to have been a radical development, proposing spiritual ecstasy attained through sexual exhaustion. The flesh would be crucified, the little death of orgasm would become the mystic death of initiation.
After a vision of Mary, in which she told him to take up the life of a wanderer, Rasputin walked two thousand miles to Mount Athos. He returned home two years later, exuding a powerful magnetism and displaying miraculous powers of healing.
In 1903 he arrived in St Petersburg. There he was taken up by the personal confessor to the royal family who said, ‘It is the voice of the Russian soil which speaks through him.’ He introduced Rasputin to a court already fascinated by esoteric ideas and eager for experience.
Martinism was already much discussed in Russia’s Freemasonic lodges. Maître de Philippe and Papus had visited the Russian court in 1901. Papus made Nicholas II the head of a Martinist lodge, and acted as the Tsar’s healer and spiritual adviser. He is said to have conjured up the spirit of the Tsar’s father, Alexander III, who prophesied the death of Nicholas II at the hands of revolutionaries. Papus also warned the Tsar against the evil influence of Rasputin.
Rasputin would be slandered and murdered by Freemasons, but in 1916 his contemporary, the great initiate Rudolf Steiner, said of him, ‘the Russian Folk-Spirit can now work through him alone and through no-one else’.
IF, AS WE MOVE TOWARDS THE FIN DE SIÈCLE, we look not at the very highest rung of art and literature but at the next rung down, we find a literature of explicit occult themes that would dominate popular culture in the twentieth century. Oscar Wilde was teeped in the lore of the Order of the Golden Dawn. His The Picture of Dorian Gray, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, brought the occult notion of the dopplegänger into the stream of public consciousness. M.R. James, the Cambridge don who has some claims to be the father of the ghost story, translated many of the Apocryphal gospels into English, gave a lecture on the occult sciences to the Eton Literary Society and wrote a story called Count Magnus in which the count, an alchemist, goes on a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Anti-Christ, a city called Chorazin. The fact that Chorozon is the name of one of the demons who held lengthy conversations with Dee and Kelley suggests James knew what he was talking about.