Rasputin had always possessed the gift of second sight. One day during his childhood, this gift had revealed to him the identity of a peasant who had stolen a horse and hidden it in a barn. Now, on his second round of travels, he also began to develop extraordinary healing powers. He would kneel by the beds of the sick and pray; then he would lay hands on them, and cure many of them. When he came to St Petersburg, probably late in 1903, he already had a reputation as a wonder worker. Soon he was accepted in aristocratic society in spite of his rough peasant manners.
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.
***
It was November 1971 in London on a day like any other. In one of the city’s underground stations, a train was approaching the platform. Suddenly a young man hurled himself directly into the path of the moving train. The horrified driver slammed on the brakes, certain that there was no way to stop the train before the man was crushed under the wheels. But miraculously the train did stop. The first carriage had to be jacked up to remove the badly injured man, but the wheels had not passed over him and he survived.
The young man turned out to be a gifted architect who was recovering from a nervous breakdown. His amazing rescue from death was based on coincidence. For the investigation of the accident revealed that the train had not stopped because of the driver’s hasty braking. Seconds before, acting on an impulse and completely unaware of the man about to throw himself on the tracks, a passenger had pulled down the emergency handle, which automatically applies the brakes of the train. The passenger had no particular reason for doing so. In fact, the Transport Authority considered prosecuting him on the grounds that he had had no reasonable cause for using the emergency system!
***
Chapter Two
Waiting for the Warrior-King
Although 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?
The 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 Roman
s 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.
***
The inhabitants of the Melanesian islands in the Pacific have, since their first contact with Western travellers, developed the so-called “cargo cults”. Cargo refers in the islanders’ pidgin to goods of any kind given by visitors.
First contact occurred with the arrival of the Russian Count Nikolai Mikiouho-Maclay in 1871. He was received
as a god, due to the incredible nature of his transport, a Russian frigate, and his gifts, which were amazing to a culture that was still in the Stone Age. German traders and Christian missionaries only served to reinforce the natives’ awe and faith. The basic tenets of the religion became set: visitors who give “cargo” are good, those who do not are evil, as they withhold what are seen as spiritual gifts.
In 1940 the Americans built a military base on the Melanesian island of Tanna in the southern Hebrides. Cargo planes zoomed in and out leaving radios, canned beer and other Western necessities. The natives observed the American service men in uniform; and wishing to bring more planes and enjoy similar luxuries they improvised uniforms and spoke into empty beer cans, as they had seen the Americans speak into microphones.
What began as adoration and emulation soon turned to dissatisfaction as their rituals failed to get the desired response. The faith changed its nature, becoming a conviction that the present Western presence on the island was of the wrong kind. Soon a messiah would come to give the natives what the Americans refused to give them. John Frum or Jonfrum was the name that the natives gave this messiah, although the reason is not clear. Some say that Frum is a corruption of broom, to sweep away the white man. Others put forward the simpler explanation that the name is derived from “John from America”. He is described as a small man with bleached hair, a high-pitched voice and a coat with shiny buttons.
The cult persists in many different forms on each of the remote Melanesian islands. What began as simple worship of Westerners has developed into an entire liberation theology in a very short time: John Frum will one day arrive and hand over all of the “cargo” to the natives, while getting rid of the Westerners. After that the islanders would live on as normal, only richer and happier than before.