Delving into the odd and unusual (i.e. the sick and the twisted) certain themes begin to emerge: if it’s intellectual eccentricity done with meticulous dedication then it has to be British; if it’s a surreal public festival done with grinning blindness to surrealism it’s Japanese; if it’s a surreal public festival done with bloody earnestness then it has to be Indian; and if it’s a horrifying Christian cult then it has to be Russian.Maybe it’s the winters, or the vodka, or that there’s nothing to do during the long, cold winters but drink vodka, but no one approaches Christianity like the Russians.
Rasputin aside, the Russians have always approached their religion as it requires one part faith to one part blood.
Sure, the Indonesians have recently tried to claim the title of most violent dedication to Christ with their flagellations, but for anyone who delves into such things they come off as Johnny-come-latelies.
I mean, come on, flagellation is old hat - the last act of the desperate for appeasement or debasement.
The Russians though, have pretty much set the standard for outrageous dedication to Christ - and they set it in 1700.
What makes the Skoptski cult so fascinating isn’t just what they did - through it was more than a little extreme - but the rationalization they used for their practices. It’s one thing, after all, to castrate yourself for Christ but quite another to earnestly (zealously) believe that the Son of God was himself missing his member and wants the rest of us to follow in his footsteps is quite another.
While there have never been that many Skoptski they still managed in 1715 to freak the Tsars. Their royal hysteria extended to ordering that the grave of one of the Skoptski leaders to be violated - his body exhumed and burned - because it had come a martyr’s landmark. The cult’s reached it greatest numbers in the second half of the ninetieth century - in Orel and Petersburg, for instance, one in every hundred thousand was a Skoptski. They were their greatest concentrations however in Galicia and Romania, where they were one in twenty thousand was believed to belong to the cult. As quoted by Paul Tabori in his The Natural Science of Stupidity (an essential resource) every cab driver in the town of Jassy was pretty much a Skoptski. Whether or not this improved their demeanors is not recorded, but considering the New York cabbie situation it’s worth considering as a possible solution.
In the Skoptski faith, there were degrees of involvement - degrees of membership so to speak. Using such terms as “blanching” and “mounting the white horse” the Skoptskis sought in their elaborate rituals to destroy the sexual parts of their devotees. So skilled where the Skoptski priests that there were rarely any serious side-effects from the surgery - many of the faithful being able to continue with their day-to-day lives just hours after making their sacrifice. What is even more surprising is that often the procedure didn’t interrupt their Skoptski’s in sexual pleasure or procreation - though the details makes one scratch the head ... or hold the stomach.
If women are feeling safe and superior during this trip to religious mania in Russia ... well, I hate to burst your bubble but the Skoptski’s also had many ‘nuns’ who went through a female version of “blanching” - and like the men their operations also often left them with the ability to still function sexually. In fact, after the cult was persecuted and the members dispersed it was not unheard of for ex-nuns to successfully give birth or even become prostitutes.
Luckily, the Skoptski’s dropped the practice of their religious forbearers, the Valerians. Valerians began a policy of castration outreach, enlisting new members with fanatical zeal - by prowling the streets of ancient Arabia collecting genitals. Over 690 men were thus converted during these Valerian ‘harvests’ until the cult was destroyed and the leader’s imprisoned or beheaded.
Odd and unusual (or just sick and twisted) the Skoptski’s are just one example of the faithful trying to comprehend (or appease) the divine. In their case, they believed that sacrifice was necessary: a sacrifice to attempt to be more like their savior. Many groups have tried to emulate their version of the Lord: the Skoptski’s simply resorted to personal surgery to accomplish their vision.
