Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, an official at special assignment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, actual state councilor, known to the general public under his literary pseudonym Andrei Pechersky, in his two most famous books "In the Woods" and "On the Mountains" presented the richest ethnographic material about religious sects in the Volga region. For twelve years, Melnikov-Pechersky served under the governor of Nizhny Novgorod, dealing with the eradication of Old Believers and sectarianism. In the course of his "raids" he collected a unique collection of observations and ancient manuscripts.
One of the news about the whips in his story "On the Mountains" sounds very mysterious. One of the Khlyst sects practiced prayer, in which many words were similar to Indian ones. Prayer was especially revered precisely because of its incomprehensibility. She sounded, in the transmission of Pechersky, as follows:
"Savishran samo / Kapilasta gandrya / Daranata shantra / Sunkara purusha / My maiden Lusha."
Regarding the last expression, the writer himself made a note that initially the last phrase sounded like "Maya the wonder of the ray."
Who are the whips
First, a little about who the whips were. This sect arose among the schismatics-bespopovtsy (that is, they did not recognize any priesthood) in the second half of the 17th century and moved quite far from Orthodoxy. The sect's creed bears great resemblance to the numerous Manichean heresies in the Middle Ages (Bogomils, Cathars, strigolniki, etc.), since it is based on dualism - the idea that the entire material world was created by Satan, and only the spiritual one by God, and between the two worlds there is a clear division. It is necessary to reject the material world in favor of the spiritual, therefore the Khlysty practice severe asceticism (their offshoot - the sect of eunuchs - began to practice, "in order to avoid temptation", castration). The nickname "Khlysty" came from their custom of self-flagellation. The whips called to reject all worldly attachments,all responsibilities to society and the state. At the same time, since the Khlyst sect was subjected to severe persecution, its followers imitated obedience to the authorities, up to visiting churches, in order to deflect suspicions from themselves.
The Khlyst communities were called “ships”, where people who had lost faith in official Orthodoxy were attracted by absolute equality, regardless of class. Every member of the community could preach in a state of ecstasy. Such collective zeal of the Khlysty caused the spread of many defamatory rumors about them among the people - for example, as if sexual orgies with elements of sadomasochism are practiced in Khlyst's "ships", as they would call it now (the famous Grigory Rasputin was also suspected of such "Khlysty").
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The incoherent prayers and "prophecies" shouted by members of the community during their ecstatic joys served as the main source of their spiritual creativity. Some of these prayers became firm and firmly rooted. These include the above, recorded by Pechersky from the words of witnesses. It only at first glance looks like a meaningless set of words.
Scraps of the hymn in honor of the god Vishnu
Domestic specialist in Indo-Aryan languages N. R. Guseva suggested that the source of this prayer could have been some prayers of the gypsies, whose language is also Indo-Aryan. However, according to her, "the representatives of the Roma intelligentsia", to whom she turned to clarify this issue, "rejected her hypothesis." Then she proposed for decoding the meanings that words heard in prayer have in Sanskrit (taking into account the correction for the distortion of their sound by Russian whips). As a result, she got the following semantic translation:
"O all equal, bestowing, dwelling in the sun, pacified owner of the shell, doing good to man, a miracle shining from heaven."
The owner of the shell is one of the names of the supreme god of Hinduism Vishnu. It is possible, of course, that this prayer is a set of individual phrases, accidentally memorized by whips from some Vishnu hymn, but the hymn itself was not known to them in full. But that the source lies in the Hindu religious incantations is obvious.
Guseva believes that Hindu chants could penetrate the whips while sailing in the lower Volga and on the coast of the Caspian Sea. There have always been many merchants in the Khlyst sect, and far from being poor. Since ancient times, the Volga served as an international trade route, and in Astrakhan in the 17th-19th centuries. there has always been a flourishing variety of different nationalities. The Caspian countries and Astrakhan were also visited by Indian merchants. There, Russian merchants could witness Hindu services in the open air. From here, heard Indian hymns could get to the whips on the Volga.
But it is hardly possible to test this very plausible hypothesis in our time.
Yaroslav Butakov