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Updated: May 24, 2025
After being denounced and sentenced, and after performing the forced labour allotted to them a punishment specially reserved for the members of sects considered dangerous to orthodoxy the skoptzi, men and women alike, were permitted to establish their separate colonies, like those of Olekminsk and Spasskoïe.
They insisted, however, upon the sacredness of their initiation ceremony which invariably ended in deportation for life, or the delights of the prison-cell. From the physiological point of view, the skoptzi resembled the Egyptian eunuchs, described by M. Ernest Godard. Those who had undergone the initiation at the age of puberty attained extraordinary maxillary and dental proportions.
Indeed they preyed upon one another to such an extent that in the village of Spasskoïe there were, among a hundred and fifty-two skoptzi, thirty-five without land, their portions having been seized from them by the "capitalists" of the village. Their ranks were swelled chiefly by illiterate peasants.
Deprived of the sweetness of love or family life, without children, and at the mercy of hardened egoists, such as the skoptzi usually became, their sequestered lives seemed to be cut off from all normal human happiness.
As to their religion, it consisted almost exclusively in the practice of a ceremony similar to that of the Valerians, the celebrated early Christian sect who had recourse to self-mutilation in order to protect themselves from the temptations of the flesh. The lot of the skoptzi was not a happy one, but they were upheld and consoled by their belief in the imperial origin of their faith.
Thus came into existence the self-mutilators, or skoptzi, victims, no doubt, of some mental aberration, some misdirected sense of duty, but yet how impressive in their earnestness!
Yet we have evidence that the latter Jewish kings employed foreign eunuchs in their harems, who often held the most important positions as ministers of the court. Besides the eunuchs, another group of people have presented material for the study of the interstitial glands. These are the Skoptzi of Russia and the Lipowaner of Roumania. Among them castration is a religious ritual.
The skoptzi were allowed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to form separate communities, and the life of these communities under quite exceptional social conditions, without love, children, marriage or family ties, offers a melancholy field for observation.
Platonic unions between the self-mutilators and the Siberian peasant-women were fairly frequent, so deeply-rooted in the heart of man does the desire for a common life appear to be. The skoptzi loved money for money's sake, and were considered the enemies of the working-classes.
Young home-born slaves were bought up by the dealers, castrated, because of the increased price they brought when in this condition, and sold for huge sums: Seneca, Controv. x, chap. 4; and kidnapping was frequently resorted to, just as it is in Africa today. In Russia there is a sect called the "skoptzi," whose tenets, in this respect, are indicated by their name.
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