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| Villagers in his native Siberia predicted a bad end for their local wild boy. As a youth he enjoyed outraging authorities by diligence only in drunkenness, theft and lechery. His sexual appetite was legendary and Grigory Yefimovich Novykh became known as Rasputin, “the debauched one.” But at age eighteen he shocked the community by joining a Russian Orthodox monastery. There Rasputin lingered for three months and found exactly what suited his tastes. Within its cloistered walls he discovered the Khlysts, a sect of flagellants. Adherents believed that the way to reach God was through prodigious sexual debauchery that left all passion spent. Holiness lay in lack of desire.
Rasputin adapted the robes of a monk, which he was not, and assumed the guise of a starets, a self-proclaimed holy man who could heal through prayer and predict the future. His fame flourished and inevitably led him to the royal Romanovs, Nicholas and Alexandra. When Nicholas left for the front in WWI, Alexandra ran Russia – but by that time Rasputin certainly ran Alexandra. Rasputin’s became notorious for his drunken parties, lechery, and corruption, inspiring one of the most bizarre assassinations in history. Read the full account in the current Witches’ Almanac.
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