"Alatyr" Antithesis to "Latinism": on the Alien Religious Expansion of Schismatics

Abstract

The article contains a number of little-studied facts about the disgusting variety of Russian skopchestvo, which came to Russia from Greece and Bulgaria. It shows the spread of this religious culture in the 17th-18th centuries across the territory of Simbirsk and other provinces, deprived of the restraining framework of Christian commandments, trampling on the institutions of marriage, family values, morality, etc. The genesis, circumstances of the emergence and reasons for the spread of sectarianism and the Khlyst-skopchestvo process as a whole are shown, fragments of a meeting of the Ethnography Department of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (1865) are presented, held on the example of the “Alatyr ship” or “Miliutina” faith as an antithesis to “Latinism”. The need to understand universal human values taking into account the skopchestvo ritual sphere of the Middle Volga region in the 17th century is substantiated. and religious dogmas of the past to solve modern problems of spiritual and moral education of the younger generation, the formation of strong social immunity, the formatting of the internal spiritual forces of society that have remained outside the field of vision of society and the scientific community of Russia for the settlement of future regional conflicts.