80% of Vissarion’s followers have a higher education. Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images
I’m starting to get a bit worried about the Son of God. Vissarion Christ, the messiah formerly known as Sergei Torop, was arrested atop his Siberian mountain eyrie a few weeks back, on charges of extortion and inflicting “psychological violence” on his followers. But after the initial flurry of reporting, I’ve not heard anything since. How is Vissarion getting on in his jail cell, I wonder? Is he making many converts?
I met him once, a few years back, atop his holy mountain. Of the numerous Christs knocking about in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, Vissarion was the only one of any significance still active and was, it must be said, rather successful. This ex-traffic cop had established a spiritual community of several thousand apocalyptic vegetarians who lived in villages around the mountain. They were all awaiting the end of the world, somehow avoiding the attention of the Russian state, which is, I think it’s fair to say, not known for its tolerance.
Out there, Vissarion dictated his “The Last Testament” into existence in weekly meetings with his closest followers. I must admit that I was pretty pleased when his gospel writer, Vadim Redkin, wrote my visit to the mountain into its pages (I returned the favour by including both Vissarion and Vadim in my book on post-Soviet alternative realities, Strange Telescopes). So far it is the only holy book in which I have ever received a mention, and, if truth be told, the only one in which I expect to appear.
I didn’t expect that, of course, although before flying out to Siberia I was confident enough in my Orthodox-style holy man look (I was regularly asked for directions to churches on the street in Moscow) that I had been planning to challenge Vissarion to a Jesus-off. Like Vissarion I, too, had long hair and a beard, but I had the added advantage that I was in my early 30s and had not yet outlived Jesus by more than a decade, unlike the forty-something Russian messiah. Naturally, no self-respecting saviour would descend to such low japery, but I thought that maybe I could arrange the contest surreptitiously, by posing for a photograph beside him, which I would then publish in my book.
Yet the moment I entered the room and saw Vissarion standing before me, resplendent in his white robes, I knew that all was lost. It wasn’t just that he dressed the part; there was a mysterious, mesmerising look in his eyes, and he had a powerful presence, an aura, if you will. Clearly the years spent on top of a mountain surrounded by people who believed he was divine had left a mark on him. Surrounded by all that belief, he absorbed it, and reflected it back: to compete I would have had to persuade several thousand people I was Christ, and then believe it myself.
There was little chance of that, so I abandoned the Jesus-off. And it was probably a good thing that I did so, because in truth I was actually very serious about understanding the allure of Vissarion. Just why would anybody accept a burly ex-traffic cop’s claim to be the Son of God? It seemed that if I could understand that, then a few other things about human nature might also stand revealed.
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Subscribe‘It was not a little unnerving, to see what a charismatic leader with a hodge-podge of not terribly original ideas cribbed from the world’s religions could achieve.’
Sounds a bit like Blair.
Interesting. Some years ago I taught history at a seminary in Novosibirsk and asked the students to write papers on indigenous religious movements of which they were aware. I was astonished at what surivived and thrived in remote forests and villages. The experience made me as an urban American find equally fascinating the movements that have surfaced in the U.S. led by people like Benjamin Purnell, Warren Jeffs or Ammon Bundy. Some psychological reflection on what creates extremists would be interesting. Yet judgement might also be disouraged since minority extremists have often discovered truths even majorities have found helpful.
Sounds like the Dukhobors, although the Dukhobors seem to have backed off the Great Leader thing after awhile. I don’t know what happened to the Dukhobors in Russia, but in Canada, to where some of them moved, they were evenutally crushed by the state who found a bunch of rural religious anarcho-communist pacifist vegetarians absolutely intolerable.
I hung out in very High North Mennonites area a tiny bit but never with the the Dukhobors, although remembered the old stories of them marching in protest nude, and the arson, a tough bunch, and a little time around the Hutterites. But my main memories of odd religious groups was the times I lived on the road in the late 1970s when I spent numerous years living rough on foot, on the road, in poverty.
Several groups were cool, I got to know the Moonies a bit, and some Krishnas, even some time around Rosicrucians, although they can be a bit scary, and some others. The road is where you meet up with the fringes. But the ones I liked best, and they lived solitary on the road, walking alone in brown robes, dressed like Christ and with a vow of poverty, and I cannot remember their name, something like brothers of Christ, were admirable in their niceness and misery. We would walk up and down Florida highways and hear some of their life as wandering lost souls. It takes a lot to become a wandering hermit in Biblical dress and a vow of poverty and celibacy, and I admired them for that, I lived somewhat similar, and I knew how rough that was.
But I will tell one of these poor guys story, told to me at an Interstate rest stop in Florida, we had met several times that year as I hitched up and down the country, and he disappeared, so meeting again I asked what he had been up to. He had done a bit in jail and then in penance, just getting the OK to go back on the road from his order. The lack of any contact with women had almost broken him, there is no thing as soul destroyingly hard as the loneliness of the road during hard times, and he had gotten a rep for being awkwardly friendly with women at the interstate rest area, and finally pestering one young woman and scaring her, and got arrested (he did no actual harm, and would not, but..) Then he went back to their center for further instruction and help, and then given the Ok to return to the endless wandering of his kind. So I asked him if he was OK being back to the solitary life, and he assured me he was doing well; he had been given special dispensation allowing him to masturbate, and was getting by.
And I have to say I was very sad with the writers almost jeering and snide telling of this story. His Jesus-Off, and what felt like a complete lack of empathy with the followers and situation, a kind of ‘Oh, Well’ to end the tale of off to the gulag for this man. The road is full of a human equivalent of birds with broken wings just getting by as well as they can, and if you do not feel their humanity in their lost ways, you have little to learn from the road as you just do not get people.
As we’re fond of saying in our family when confronted with similar ‘messianic’ situations like these,
‘It isn’t Jesus, it’s just a fella.’
….the fantastic line from the 60s ‘children’s’ film, Whistle Down The Wind.
Yes, a great film. But not really a children’s film, I would say.
Maybe I just come from a darker more cynical family background than most, Fraser.
Yes, but did he turn vodka into water or anything like that? That’s what I want to know.
Jesus said “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming ‘ I am the Christ’, and will deceive many”.
Jesus of Nazareth is the one and only Christ ( Greek for Messiah). He proved it by rising from the dead and being seen by over 500 people before returning to Heaven on the first Ascension Day. One day He will return in glory and complete the work He began 2,000 years ago and the world will become as God intended to be. Today 2.3 billion people (31.2% of the world’s population) believe that He is not only the Messiah but also the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
Well, he’d better come back quickly, there’s lots to be done.
He’s already here, and called Tony Blair.
Christian heresy is common in the past with Islam being the most successful. Christian heresy is much easier today as most people have given up religion but have kept all the trapping except, just like Islam the capacity of forgiveness, which is the entire point of Christianity.