Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia

6—The Occult at Court: Mariia Puare and the Fate of Occultism during the Great War

6 The Occult at Court Mariia Puare and the Fate of Occultism during the Great War i n the autumn of 1916, a scandalous court case gripped the russian public. in front of the st. Petersburg district court, Count aleksei Orlov-Davydov, wealthy scion of a prominent aristocratic family, entrepreneur, Freemason, and member of the Duma, claimed that he had been duped by his second wife, the actress Mariia Puare, and her dabbling in occultism. his wife’s deception was so grave, Orlov-Davydov argued, that he ought to be granted a divorce by the judges. Puare, on her part, refuted the allegations of deceit in the witness box and insisted that the count had been privy to their shared quest for spiritual happiness and astral family planning. The court case, which promised insights into the private lives of the rich and the famous—replete with spirit communication , love, jealously, betrayal, and sex—became a cause célèbre. It received daily news coverage in the press and provided the material for a popular novel. The supernatural played a prominent role in these reports, with Petrogradskii listok entitling its accounts “V tsarstve dukhov” (“in the realm of the spirits”).1 Prominent witnesses called by the prosecution and the defense described an array of occult practices that had allegedly been conducted at the count’s st. Petersburg residence. They provided the judges with an almost complete list of the practices that had been popular throughout the previous decades. in 1916, the public assessment of these occult activities, however, differed significantly from the largely favorable descriptions that had predominated within accounts of supernatural forces in recent decades. The marital dispute of Orlov-Davydov versus Puare took place against the backdrop of russia’s involvement in 164 MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA the Great War, a conflict that changed the public assessment of supernatural occurrences and magic practices. With the outbreak of hostilities, the supernatural became—at least for a time—enlisted in the patriotic mobilization. When disillusionment with the war spread in the summer of 1915, the character of the occult changed once more and did not return to its prewar status. The movement from patriotic expression to the perception that associated the occult with social degeneration is the focus of this chapter. The Supernatural Turns Patriotic When hostilities broke out in the summer of 1914, the war immediately became a topic in publications dealing with the supernatural. Prophecies dominated mainstream newspapers; they were printed as brochures, pamphlets, and with some delay, also in occult journals. soon thereafter, reports about supernatural events at the front line also made it into the press. These publications marked a significant change in popular discussion of the supernatural, for they returned traditional Christian figures and Orthodox symbols to a prominent position , thereby sidelining occult explanations and spiritualist manifestations.2 During the early months of the war, clairvoyants could be found among all social strata, and a flood of prophecies inundated the printing market. Numerous contemporaries claimed to have foreseen the hostilities before the summer of 1914. symbolist writers such asandrei Belyi,aleksandr Blok, zinaida Gippius , and Viacheslav ivanov interpreted their earlier premonitions of doom and anxiety as prophetic.3 While they welcomed the war and expected the conflict to usher in a new era of spiritual renovation, other prophets remained more down-to-earth. Rebus declared that the english medium alfred Wood-Peters had strongly alluded to the war during his last visit to Moscow in the spring of 1914. During his communications with the spirits, Wood-Peters had allegedly urged russians to learn German, a piece of advice that had proven to be very useful for those who found themselves in German spas in august 1914.4 Popular pamphlets focused on the immediate future and predicted a resounding and swift russian military victory over the Central Powers. such prophecies addressed at the mass market were printed on poor quality paper, with numerous typographical and grammatical errors, suggesting that they had been put through the press with considerable haste. according to Petrogradskii listok (formerly Peterburgskii listok), which among other prophecies serialized predictions by a certain Madame Teb, the THE OCCULT AT COURT 165 war would last five months and fourteen days, after which Germany would disintegrate and Bavaria would gain independence.5 The pamphlet From the Depth of Time: A Seventeenth-Century Monk on the War of the Twentieth Century , published in 1915...