Kabbalah and the Rise of Modern Russian Mysticism:
Social Prerequisites
The rise of the popularity of Kabbalah in Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was linked to the utopian and messianic beliefs of those disillusioned Europeans who anticipated the apocalyptic failure of the contemporary world and envisaged the return of the Golden Age. The mystical reception of Kabbalah was primarily stimulated by the attempt of European thinkers to confirm and evolve the religious and philosophical doctrines with which they were already familiar, such as Christianity and Neo-Platonism. Simultaneously, the occult interpretation of Kabbalah led to the formation of quasi-kabbalistic stereotypes that played a significant role in the later misrepresentation of Kabbalah among most Europeans. By contrast with Western Europe, kabbalistic teaching did not play a significant role in Russian thinking prior to the mid-1700s. When kabbalistic mysticism finally reached Russia, Russians used and largely copied those narrative forms and the literary images that originated in Europe. At the same time, however, Russian authors infused this narrative structure and imagery with new meaning that although sometimes derived from European literature, was original and new in many ways.
The three decades encompassing the 1780s to the 1810s comprised the literary era known as Russian pre-Romanticism, which largely reflected the imagery and ideas borrowed from Masonic mysticism. While most of the authors analyzed in this
chapter have undeservedly fallen into certain oblivion in the years since their deaths, they played a significant role in the creation of the tradition of Russian philosophical poetry. Those Russian poets who were influenced by Masonic mystical ideology willingly and widely utilized non-traditional kabbalistic mystical symbolism in their writings, partly because of the literary situation of the last decades of the eighteenth century, when Russian poetry, still at an early stage of its development, was strongly characterized by the search for new literary forms and new poetic language. Secular theosophical literature, a genre that had long existed in the West, had not yet been introduced into the Russian literary tradition. Those Russian authors who were interested in pursuing mystical ideas certainly remained Orthodox Christians in their beliefs. However, under the influence of the “secular,” Masonic form of mysticism that came from the West, they attempted to express their philosophical beliefs through the use of “Western” non-traditional mystical imagery.
Surprisingly, kabbalistic imagery and that particular type of
“mystical,” “kabbalistic” travelogue presented in previous chapter adapted itself very well to Russian literary soil; and, although this kabbalistic “subtext” of eighteenth-century Masonic poetry has been either largely neglected or strongly misrepresented (as in politically-biased anti-Semitic works), the broad use of “kabbalistic”
imagery and literary forms in late eighteen-century Russian works can actually be regarded as a courageous poetic experiment, which is extremely important for the understanding of that generation of Russian authors who first applied their theosophical knowledge to individual literary texts. The models borrowed from Jewish sources, although altered and adapted by Western theosophical literature, merged in these texts with Russia’s own religious and cultural tradition, thus creating a new type of “secular” mystical poetics opposed to already established Orthodox religious “poetic” devices, thus constructing a foundation for future Russian metaphysical literature.
The first reflection of kabbalistic ideas in Russian literature appears approximately in the 1780s. The kabbalistic imagery encoded in Russian literary texts of that time can be fully apprehended only if it is analyzed in light of Russian Masonic symbolism; therefore,
it is important to summarize briefly the development of Russian Masonic mysticism and the role that Kabbalah played in it. Archival materials bearing on Masonic ideology are scarce, often encrypted, and primarily unpublished, which creates objective difficulties for scholars. Nevertheless, the Russian Masonic archives available to researchers contain vast collections of materials devoted to Kabbalah and its Masonic interpretation; and these materials provide extremely valuable insight into the allegorical imagery of Russian eighteenth-century mystical literature.
In the Russian tradition of the study of the history of Russian Freemasonry there is a large gap that divides the old prerevolutionary school and the new post-Soviet school that has developed largely since the late 1990s. The “classical” nineteenth-century approach, exemplified most explicitly by A. Pypin, M. Longinov, and G. Vernadsky, concentrated on the ethical and moral aspects of Russian eighteenth-century Masonic ideology and overshadowed Masonic mystical ideology, first, because their positivistic views, largely characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century, prevented them from taking mystical ideology seriously, and second, because they completely lacked knowledge of either Western esotericism or Jewish mysticicm.
Later, in the Soviet period, the scholarly study of any mystical ideology was strictly forbidden. Western scholars that analyzed the Russian Freemasonry, primarily S. Baehr and D. Smith, followed mostly the same approach as their prerevolutionary Russian predecessors, deliberately avoiding the investigation of mystical and particularly Jewish mystical subjects. By contrast, in the works of young post-Soviet scholars, especially Konstantin Burmistrov and Maria Endel, the role of Kabbalah in the philosophical system of Russian Freemasons occupies the central role. Burmistrov and Endel have conducted a vast archival search and discovered a large number of writings and documents that prove that throughout the whole of the eighteenth-century, Russian Masons used Kabbalah and applied it to their own philosophical theories. Mainly, Burmistrov’s and Endel’s approach to the study of Kabbalah in Russian Masonic doctrine is historical rather than literary. Yet those Russian eighteenth-century poetic works that
have been influenced by Masonic mysticism broadly employ kabbalistic allegory as a literary device, manifested in a specific system of allegorical images and in a specific genre, best defined as a “mystical travelogue” that largely copies the narrative of “zoharic”
allegorical travelogue through the use of the same form and elements of kabbalistic allegorical imagery similar to those used in the West. A close look at the role played by the allegorical concepts of Adam Kadmon and Love-Wisdom in the literary embodiment of the mystical and philosophical system of eighteenth-century Russian Freemasonry brings forward an innovative argument that these concepts constitute the core of the particular type of literature that can be defined as Russia’s first metaphysical poetry. By contrast, such allegories are absent from eighteenth-century philosophical poetry that was not written under Masonic mystical influence, such as the works of Lomonosov or Derzhavin.
Therefore, the literary study of kabbalistic allegory in eighteenth-century Russian philosophical poetry is necessary not only to help to decode numerous images that remain enigmatic for most scholars and readers of eighteenth-century Russian literature, but also, and more importantly, to comprehend the cultural semiotic context that primarily contributed to the formation of Russian metaphysical poetics.
Therefore, the central stress of this chapter is placed on the close reading of the literary texts rather than on the study of the eighteenth-century Russian Masonic philosophy; in particular, it concentrates on the work of three authors, all very different yet all profoundly influenced by Russian Masonic mysticism: Fyodor Kliucharev, Mikhail Kheraskov, and Semyon Bobrov. Each of these authors represents a different type of writer. Mikhail Kheraskov, regarded as the most important Russian poet by Catherine the Great, hails from the tradition of Russian Classicism. Semyon Bobrov, well-respected by his contemporaries as an author of pre-Romantic works of the very late eighteenth century, exemplifies the poetry of the younger generation of eighteenth-century writers;
and Fyodor Kliucharev, whose poetic works were written primarily for Masonic occasions and were little known outside the Masonic circles, represents a typical “court” Masonic poetry. However, all
of these three broadly employ kabbalistic symbolism and narrative form in their texts.
The approach of this study derives primarily from Yury Lotman’s semiotic theory that anything linked with meaning in fact belongs to culture. According to Lotman, every period’s literary and ideological consciousness and aesthetics have a systemic quality of cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic values. In this case, the Masonic interpretation of kabbalistic concepts produced what Lotman would term a semiosphere, a particular “semiotic space,” the boundaries of which defined the devices used by all Masonic poets, thus making each of them, regardless of their own literary style and the literary school they belonged to, an explicit example of the manifestation of the role of kabbalistic allegory in early Russian literature.
Earlier scholars of Russian masonry, like G. Vernadsky and M. Longinov, described the birth of modern Russian mysticism as a part of Masonic philosophy that was in some ways a reaction to the Enlightenment thought of Voltaire that dominated Russian intellectual life throughout the period.1 The belief in the power of reason that Voltaire proposed characterized Russian masonry during its early stage of development. The early Russian lodges, constructed according to the rational English Masonic system, were created to unite various people who considered themselves the apostles of a new, non-religious morality. To Christian mysticism, they opposed what they called “natural mysticism,” similar to the doctrine expounded in Voltaire’s deistic philosophy. Yet the new morality that Voltaire’s philosophy required was impossible for a simple person to adhere to. The only solution in such a situation was the union of all those who called themselves “people of the new moral code,” and this organization had to be an exclusive, secret society. Thus, the religion of the rationalistic Masons was directly linked with the moral order created by Voltaire’s teachings.2
Rationalistic Freemasonry reached its peak in the early 1770s.3 The morality of this English-oriented Russian masonry was not deeply connected with mystical theories or mystical practices, although simultaneously a specific mystical subculture was starting to develop in Russia, with a definite set of stereotypes and symbols and an element of mystery.4 It was also at this time that the first
knowledge of Kabbalah entered Russia. One of most famous Masons of the age of Catherine the Great, senator and writer Ivan Elagin (1725-1793), was the first key figure in the dissemination of kabbalitic ideas in Russian Masonic thought. A Voltaire enthusiast at first, Elagin broke away from rational Freemasonry and created his own kind of mysticism, often called rationalistic mysticism, wholly adapted to the principles of religious morality. At this time he became interested in kabbalistic teachings, and immersed himself in reading the Old and the New Testaments and the writings of the Church Fathers. He also started studying Greek and Hebrew.
Natural religion and a moral code based on the principles of reason were the two keystones of Elagin’s masonry. In the 1770s lodges of the Masonic union led by Elagin became the centers of this new
“religion of reason.”
The early “English” Masonic lodges in Russia were connected through St. Petersburg Germans with Prussia and especially with the Berlin lodge The Three Globes.5 Its members comprised some devoted theosophists who studied Christian Kabbalah, magic, and alchemy. The archives of The Three Globes contain a number of pseudo-kabbalistic writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that were popular among German mystics. Among these were the writings of John Dee, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Raimond Lull, Robert Fludd, and Hermann Fichtuld, which became available to Russians through personal contacts with European visitors.
The mystical interests of Russian Freemasons of this period reflect the similar interests of their European partners: both were primarily interested in practical, alchemical “Kabbalah.”6 This interest in Kabbalah as a magical science related to alchemy is apparent in virtually all the texts that circulated among Russian Freemasons in the 1760s and early 1770s, as, for example, in an anonymous translation of Hermann Fichtuld’s Cabala Mystica Naturae from Elagin’s private collection: “Kabbalah is a natural philosophy devoted to the true comprehension of celestial spirits and elements with the help of the divine light. The greatest part in this doctrine is the theory of letters, since letters are inhabited by spirits and every letter is the home of a particular spirit.”7 The same alchemical
approach to Kabbalah can be seen in another manuscript of the same period that explains how to create an amulet that would help its owner to find the philosopher’s stone: “The base of the amulet should be made of crystal on which you should engrave the name Elohim so that the letters that form the name make a complete circle, and then inscribe a tetragram.”8 Elagin’s example shows that even rationalistic Freemasons took an interest in esoteric and alchemical subjects. Similar to seventeenth-century mystical thinkers, Elagin’s circle perceived Kabbalah as a “scientific” magic, that is, magic based on mathematical logic and the “rational” rather than supernatural powers; thus, its use did not oppose the rational beliefs of its adepts but went hand in hand with them. Thus, while two principal trends in Russian Freemasonry of the late eighteenth century are usually identified in criticism as rational and mystical, these trends were strongly interrelated.
Physician Stanislaus Pines Eli, a baptized Bohemian Jew who arrived in St. Petersburg in either 1776 or 1787, played an extremely important role as a source of the quasi-kabbalistic knowledge popular among the members of early Russian lodges. Elagin mentions him as “Eli, a person well-educated in the great science of magic, Jewish language, and Kabbalah.”9 Elagin claimed that Eli helped him to understand “the books of Fludd and Fichtuld, Egyptian myths and hermetic secrets, and above all, the kabbalistic mysteries hidden in the writings of Moses.”10 He also reported that Eli was the author of a Masonic work titled Bratskie uveshchaniia k nekotorym bratiiam svobodnym kamenshchikam (Fraternal Admonitions to Some Bretheren Freemasons). Elagin understood and interpreted this book in the same way as other hermetic manuscripts, which contained, according to his belief, the “great secret knowledge.” In Pypin’s opinion, this book was a typical example of “Rosicrucian nonsense, with its false depth and alchemical inventions.” He notes that, without any serious understanding of esoteric systems, Elagin finally “was lost in them as in the deep woods.”11 Indeed, Eli himself regarded Kabbalah much as did the scholars of the Renaissance, not distinguishing between Kabbalah and other esoteric studies.
Elagin’s most important composition, called Explanations of the Mysterious Meaning of the Creation of the Universe in Holy Scripture,
which is a key for understanding of the Book of Truth and Errors, is written as a personal diary and cannot be considered a literary text.12 However, it represents an extensive commentary on the key themes of kabbalistic doctrine, such as God and Creation, the elements, and the divine names, which later find their way into Masonic literary works. As K. Burmistrov correctly noted, “on the basis of Holy Scripture — using the kabbalistic concepts Ein-Sof, emanation of the Sefirot, Adam Kadmon, four worlds-Olamot, as well as the hermeneutical techniques of gematria, notarikon, and temurah — Elagin developed a kabbalistic version of the Masonic cosmogony.”13 It is likely that the composition is a decoding of the kabbalistic subtext of the famous mystical work Des erreurs et de la vérité (1775) by French mystic Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, whose books, largely influenced by seventeenth-century Christian Kabbalah, were very popular among Russian Masons. Elagin’s non-Christian interpretation of the New Testament presents, for the first time, an image that would become widely popular in later Masonic writings and widespread in Russian eighteenth-century literary texts influenced by Masonic ideology: he regards Jesus Christ as the perennial primordial man, Adam Kadmon — and thus also as a Mason, one of the “hieroglyphs of perennial Jews.” Elagin’s example shows not only how strong the interest in Kabbalah was among educated Russians of the mid-eighteenth century, but also how this interest altered their traditional Christain beliefs:
a phenomenon that is instrumental in understanding the peculiarities of the social and religious views of Russian Freemasons, and in decoding many of those images in Russian literary works of the second half of the eighteenth century that up to now have seemed largely vague and incomprehensible.
The Crisis of Freemasonry and the Emergence of the Masonic Circle of Nikolai Novikov
In the late 1760s rational masonry faced a serious crisis. The majority of Elagin’s lodges were nothing more than agreeable social clubs that flourished as “excellent places to dine and enjoy good company.”14 Without an understanding of the true mystical
meaning of what happened in the lodge, the secrets that usually drew a new adept to masonry soon lost their significance and the rituals became boring, bizarre, and even comical.15
Those intellectuals who looked for spirituality rather than for a social club, including Elagin himself, thus turned their attention to a parallel Masonic union established in Russia by Baron Johannes George von Reuchlin (1729–1791), an expatriate German who adhered to the Swedish-Prussian Masonic system that worked according to the “mystical” system of Johann Wilhelm Ellenberger, known also as Johann Wilhelm von Zinnendorf.16 The Swedish–
Prussian system, a fabricated variant of the orginal Swedish Rite, was created by von Zinnendorf in 1770 and observed by the Grand Lodge of Freemasons of Germany. By contrast with the Grand Lodge of England, the Swedish-Prussian system was characterized by a stronger interest in mystical subjects than the English Freemasonry and by a strong emphasis on the Christian nature of all Masonic activities practiced by its members. In 1771 Baron von Reuchlin opened the first Swedish-Prussian lodge, Apollo, in Petersburg.
From the beginning, von Reuchlin sought to merge with the Elagin lodges. Eventually Elagin, who had become disillusioned with the
“English” system, accepted von Reuchlin’s offer to merge, and soon von Reuchlin became his spiritual teacher and mentor. However, this union seriously disappointed some members of both Elagin and von Reuchlin’s lodges, who were dissatisfied with both superficial
“English” masonry and with the political interests of the members of the Swedish system. Among the disappointed was scholarly publisher and journalist Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818). In a famous dialogue between Novikov and von Reuchel, the former, distracted by his vain search for mystical truths in the lodges he had attended, asked the latter to help him distinguish true masonry from the false.
Von Reuchlin replied: “true masonry pursues no political goals but only serves those of morality and spiritual enlightenment, and leads a person through the study of oneself to the moral atonement through Christian faith and religion.”17
Unable to find such a Masonic lodge in Russia, Novikov and his colleagues created their own circle. This new Masonic institution, widely known as the Order of Russian Rosicrucians,
gathered around Novikov, and therefore was later often referred to simply as “Novikov’s circle.”18 The Order was strongly tied with the German Order of God and the Rosy Cross that emerged
gathered around Novikov, and therefore was later often referred to simply as “Novikov’s circle.”18 The Order was strongly tied with the German Order of God and the Rosy Cross that emerged