Tag: history

Using the Force on Uranus

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Most of the planets in our universe were discovered by some guy looking up saying, “Hey, lookee there.” And another guy saying, “That right there, that ain’t no star, Jed, that’s a damned planet.” That’s how most planets were first discovered, as far back as 1,000 BC. Neptune was different. Neptune is too faint to be seen by the naked eye. Neptune had to be theorized and mathematically predicted.

This probably reads like a perfunctory narrative at this point in history, because we have the technology and all of the tools and gadgets necessary to uncover numerous mysteries of the universe. They didn’t in 1845. It’s almost a “Who cares now?” story that is so over it’s over, but some of the my favorite stories from history aren’t necessarily about the event in question, but the mind over matter quest to achieve the unachievable. They’re about human ingenuity and/or the power of the human mind. Two men used the science and all of the data available at the time, a pencil and paper, some mathematical theory, and little more than their brains to declare that there should be a planet should be … right there! And they were wrong, initially, and then they were wrong by one degree! This is the story about the discovery of a planet we now call Neptune, a story that illustrates the beautiful idea that every problem we face is one genius away from resolution.

When it comes to the discovery of planets, there’s basically two stories. The unofficial record involved some guy spotting a Saturn, but he was an ancient who didn’t know anything about “the record”. Once the record was established, another guy beat everyone else to get his name on the record for being the “first to spot Saturn.”

“Crock of stuff is what it is,” the naysayers say whenever we talk about the first to discover celestial bodies. “There was always someone who discovered it first, before the record existed, AND, and someone would’ve discovered all of these planets eventually. Most of these names we applaud and memorialize were just right time, right place opportunists. We’re not talking dots of light in the sky when we talk about planets. We’re talking about massive complex bodies that have their own geology, weather, and sometimes even their own atmosphere or moons. They’re huge honking worlds in their own right that would’ve eventually been discovered by someone. The whole idea behind celebrating the humans who first discovered a planet is so ridiculous that it’s hardly even worth talking about.

“It’s like talking about the guy who, according to the record, discovered the moon. You discovered the moon? That right there? You discovered that?”

On July 26, 1609, Thomas Harriot discovered the moon. There is no record of the laughter, derision, or humiliation that followed Harriot’s discovery, but Harriot became the first known person in history to look at the moon through a telescope and draw what he saw. He made multiple maps, including recognizable features. Mr. Harriot either forgot to put his name on the record for his discovery, or his friends started mocking him so ruthlessly for trying to be the first guy to spot the moon that he decided not to submit his name for the discovery. 

The father of modern observational astronomy, Galileo Galilei didn’t give a crud about all that. He knew how to bite that apple. Galileo was an ambitious fella who knew how to get history to celebrate his name, so months later he published findings that mirrored Harriot’s. 

How many of you have heard the name Thomas Harriot? How many of you have heard of the name Galileo? Exactly. Thomas Harriot fell prey to the “publish or perish” dictum that haunts history’s otherwise anonymous names, by failing to publish his detailed maps of the moon, and he died anonymously. In fact, Harriot’s July 26, 1609 findings stayed hidden in notebooks for centuries, until he received proper accreditation in the 19th–20th centuries. The Thomas Harriot story might sound like a miscarriage of justice, unless you’re one of those “I’m pretty sure someone would’ve eventually discovered the moon” naysayers. 

The Perturbing Force 

On March 13, 1781, a man named Sir William Herschel used his trusty telescope to discover a planet we now call Uranus. His observations found that it wasn’t a comet, but a planet, and after his findings became “official” the society of astronomists pretty much thought “Ok, that’s it, Woo Hoo and all that, we’ve discovered the end of the universe.” There was one problem; the astronomists who used Herschel’s findings could not correctly plot point Uranus’ orbital positions based on mathematical projections. Uranus was so all over the place that it made no sense. 

Alexis Bouvard

Using all of the data available to him at the time, Astronomer Alexis Bouvard made seventy-seven projections on where Uranus should be at any given time, but his fellow astronomers called him out. They told him all of his projections proved incorrect. We can guess that Bouvard called them ordures, French for trash, but he went through the projections versus the reality, and he found that they were right. Much to Bouvard’s humiliation, this occurred after he published his seventy-seven projections. He probably could’ve simply corrected the record and published again, but that would’ve meant finding his initial errors and correcting them.

We can only imagine how much time, sweat, and passion Bouvard put into creating those tables, and we can guess that he tried to save face by saying,

“Hey, I didn’t just throw that out there. These were precise projections based on all the data I had at my disposal, coupled with Newtonian laws. I wouldn’t just guess and then publish those guesses to subject myself to this level of humiliation. There’s something more going on.” He initially blamed the data, but when that didn’t satisfy anyone, including himself, he came up with a “Perturbing Force” theory.

Bouvard’s Perturbing Force theory suggested that there was something beyond Uranus pulling and pushing on Uranus in a way that caused irregularities in its orbital path. He suggested that it might even be another planet.He submitted the idea that Uranus might not be the end of the universe to the Paris Observatory, but unfortunate for the legacy of Alexis Bouvard, the member of the astronomical society who received that request for a follow up left his position soon after Bouvard submitted that request for further findings. Furthering the unfortunate nature of Bouvard’s legacy, he died before anyone would substantiate his idea of a perturbing force gravitationally pulling and pushing Uranus off what should have been the precise data points dictating its orbit. Thus, we can only guess that Alexis Bouvard probably died believing himself a failure, or at the very least that everything he accomplished in life ended with a huge stain, in the form of an exclamation point, at the end. 

Skeptics argued that since Bouvard’s projections relied on Isaac Newton’s theories, Newton’s theories must be flawed. Mathematicians, like John Couch Adams, insisted that Newton’s theories were sound and after studying Bouvard’s projections, Adams insisted that he could use Bouvard’s projections, and all of the data the man compiled, coupled with Newton’s laws to deduce the mass, position, and orbit to discover Bouvard’s perturbing force. 

Couch Adams devoted four years of his life to studying, calculating, and projecting where a possible perturbing force could be, and he submitted that work to British Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy. The esteemed Airy was understandably skeptical, as the mathematician submitting these findings was a twenty-four-year-old, and we can also guess that Airy was unwilling to put his reputation on the line without detailed computations. He did respond to Couch Adams, however, asking for greater precision, as Couch Adams’ findings turned out to be twelve degrees off, and unfortunate to the legacy of John Couch Adams he did not respond.Some suggest that the failure to respond may have been due to Adams’s unprofessional demeanor, his nerves, procrastination, or that Adams did not have the numbers required for greater precision. Whatever the case was, Couch Adams’s failure to respond in a timely manner cost him sole credit for the discovery of the planet Neptune.   

Some suggest that Frenchman, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, was unaware of John Couch Adams work, his subsequent submission, and his failure to complete the work, but Le Verrier was very aware of Alexis Bouvard’s work. He paid particular attention to Bouvard’s idea of a “perturbing force”, and it fascinated him. He thought he could find the missing link, and he thought he did. He thought he made the discovery of a lifetime, one that could make him famous. 

He first sent those findings to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, but due to bureaucratic inertia and a lack of proactive observation, the Academy did not follow up. They did not reject Le Verrier’s math, as they found it rigorous, but his findings did not translate into instant acceptance as a confirmed discovery because it remained theoretical until it could be observed. The Academy also had “other concerns”, and they may have lacked the capacity to immediately follow up. Whatever the case was, Le Verrier took some of the complaints The Academy had about the absolute precision of his findings, and he refined his coordinates and submitted them to Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory on September 18, 1846. Berlin had a powerful new refractor telescope, and they provided a more agile response, partly because Galle and his assistant Heinrich d’Arrest were eager to test the hypothesis. 

On September 23, 1846 Galle confirmed, through Verrier’s detailed calculations, that the perturbing force affecting the orbit of Uranus was possibly and probably a planet that we now call Neptune. Galle’s confirmation did note, however, that Le Verrier’s detailed calculations were one degree off. Here we reach another “think about it, before we move on” moment. The Frenchman took Alexis Bouvard’s precise projections, based on pre-discovery data, and he joined Bouvard’s mathematical calculations on his errors, coupled with some theoretical notion of a perturbing force, pushing and pulling Uranus off what should be its orbit, and it should be right there! And those calculating his math,using nothing more than their own math(!), found that he was one degree off! [Note: The international astronomy community eventually decided to settle the international dispute by giving credit to both the British Adams and the French Urbain for Neptune’s discovery, even though Adams unofficially discovered it first.] Astronomy.com also states that “Adams [eventually] completed his calculations first, but Le Verrier published first. Le Verrier’s calculations were also more accurate.” The lesson here for you kids looking to submit astronomical findings to a governing body, when they approach you for detailed calculations to support your astronomical findings make sure you either respond immediately, or maybe you should have your detailed calculations ready before declaring your findings. 

The naysayers have a point when they say someone would’ve eventually discovered something as massive as a planet, but Neptune is different. Someone would’ve eventually discovered it, as the technology advanced, but a couple of guys, we’llsay three in total with Bouvard paving the way with his perturbing force theory, located Neptune by mathematically predicting where it would be based on the irregularities in Uranus’s orbit. Is that phenomenal? No? How about we put ourselves in their era and learn that when they went to the office to complete their theories, they road a horse on a dirt road to get there, if they were lucky enough and rich enough to own a horse. Also, their definition of the heart of the city was often just a bunch of wooden store fronts, like the recreations we see on the old HBO show Deadwood. Most of what these 19th century astronomers and mathematicians saw in the nighttime sky is what we can see by stepping outside and looking up into the sky. They had some technological assistance back then, in the form of relatively weak telescopes, and some theorize that astronomers, like Galileo Galilei in 1613, Jerome Lalande in 1795, and John Herschel in 1830 may have used this technology to spot Neptune first, but they didn’t know they were seeing a planet, because their telescopes were not powerful enough for them to know that. Those of us who write articles about such topics and the geniuses who made ingenious discoveries or theories that proved slightly incorrect or somewhat flawed should asterisk our modern critiques by saying, “I am smart. No, really I am, really, really smart, but as ingenious as I am, I don’t know if I could’ve done what they did with the primitive technology they had, primitive when compared to ours. So, before I go about correcting and critiquing their findings with the technology I have at my disposal, thanks to those who developed it for me, I’d like to say how impressive it is that they came so close that it’s impressive that they did what they did with what they had.” 

The Killing Kind: Caligula

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The most powerful man in the world wasn’t just mad, he was raging. His furious anger stemmed from the fact that Roman law prohibited him from killing whomever he pleased. The law stated that he could only murder non-citizens, prisoners of war, and slaves, and he had Romans saying he wasn’t just wrong, but corrupt. He didn’t think the most powerful man in the world, at the time (AD 37-41), should have to put up with that. To right this wrong, the emperor of Rome, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula, created a law that would allow him to kill whomever he damn well pleased.

After issuing this law, Caligula didn’t just want to kill dissenters, detractors, and other enemies, he wanted to send a message. He commissioned the purchase and shipment of five of the largest lions that his minions could find to be shipped from North Africa to Rome. They found five five-hundred-pound lions. Reports suggest he ordered lions, based on what his advisors called “Their unique dietary habits. Tigers and panthers kill before consuming flesh,” they informed him. “Lions prefer devouring their prey while it is still alive.” We’ve all watched these scenes play out on TV, a tiger stalks their prey, and after catching them, they go for the throat to suffocate their victims before gorging on them. They do this, for the most part, to prevent getting injured during the skirmish. Caligula’s advisors informed him that Lions don’t have such concerns. They informed him lions “prefer devouring their prey while it is still alive.” While this is not necessarily true, the promise of excruciating agony thrilled Caligula, and he wanted that scene, and that amplified message, sent to all future opponents.

We can speculate that Caligula’s opponents informed some elements of the historical record, as often happens in the years following the end of a world leader’s rule. Some of it might be 100% true, some of it might be based on the truth but exaggerated, and some of it might be hearsay and outright fiction. If this characterization is even close to the truth, however, we can guess that Caligula also chose lions, because he thought they would provide great theatrical value. The record states, in numerous places, that Caligula had a particular fondness for blood and all of the screaming that comes from long and intense torture.

Caligula chose five lions for the five most pesky, annoying and frustrating dissidents who challenged his authority on a routine basis. He alleged that they were engaged in a plot to depose him. Caligula also knew that anytime we deal with nature, they’re unpredictable. He was probably advised that there is the possibility that these lions might do nothing when they see humans, and that his show could fall flat. To assure maximum entertainment for himself, and his audience, Caligula ordered the lions’ handlers to avoid feeding them for the three days preceding the event.

For all the theatrical torture Caligula planned, there were no public mentions of bloody carnage he planned. There were no mentions of it on the billboards Caligula commissioned scriptores (professional sign painters) to create, or in the pitches heralds were commissioned to shout in forums or streets. There was also no mention of whether this was a pay-per-view event, as Caligula carried on the tradition of making entry free for all audience members.

The billboard and heralds did not advertise violence for violence’s sake, as historians like Suetonius portray Caligula as craving chaos in the arena, such as beating a gladiator manager to death slowly or burning a playwright alive mid-performance. They characterize Caligula as someone who preferred spontaneity when it came to the violent scenes involved his shows. Did it make him feel more powerful to order a playwright to be torched in the middle of his reading, or did he just get bored? The historians characterize most of the violence occurring during Caligula’s events as those resulting from impulsive orders to liven matters up a little, as opposed to any form of proactive promotion to attract crowds.

When the event Caligula planned since the day he put the law in place finally took place, the five dissidents who dared speak out against Caligula were given short swords in defense, but as with most brutal sports, the purpose of giving them short swords was to prolong the event. They proved more ineffective than Caligula imagined, as the five starved, five-hundred-pound lions devoured the dissidents in twenty-five minutes, not as long as the average situation comedy of the modern era.

Caligula found the sight of the ferocious power of the lions, blood, and all the screaming, thrilling, but after all of the planning and work he put into the event, he was disappointed that it was all over so fast. As a man who enjoyed theatricality, we can only guess that he was divided over being personally bored and worried that his audience may have found his event boring.

During the intermission, Caligula summoned the arena guards to his private suite, and he ordered them to invite individuals in the packed, 15,000 capacity amphitheater to participate in a second act with the lions. (The record does not clarify if Caligula selected the individual audience members to invite, or if he allowed the guards to select them randomly. It does state that at times, he ordered entire sections to participate in events.)

How random was random might be the first question the invited asked. Did random mean that the arena guards selected some who were loyal to the emperor, others who weren’t, and everyone in between? If random is truly random, did the guards choose women and children? We don’t know. No matter who those first randomly chosen participants of the second act were, we guess that they had some questions for the guards, as they were being led through the chambers to the floor of the amphitheater. We can guess that they probably thought that they were all a part of Caligula’s wild and crazy sense of humor. They probably guessed that he would stop the proceedings at the last second and have a laugh at their expense. They may have flirted with the notion that this was a test of their loyalty to the emperor, and they probably tried to outmatch each other in displays of loyalty. Whatever the case was, they realized they were wrong when the lions began encircling them.

When they began screaming and pleading for mercy, Caligula found that as entertaining, if not more than the first act. He probably tried to remain stately, but as the lions began ripping them apart, he couldn’t control his laughter anymore, as they cried and screamed. Did the audience laugh cheer at the spontaneous spectacle of this second act, according to the record they did. The question is why? Did they have a bloodlust that enjoys any and all bloodsport, or did they fear if they didn’t cheer, they could be next?

If this is all true and not exaggerated, we could say that TV has saved countless lives since its invention, because an overwhelming majority of us just love violence. We have a need for violence coursing through our veins. It’s a part of our primal nature. We might watch it and cheer it on from our couch with some reservations, but we still cheer it on.

We have a couch, they had a sedes (Latin for seat) in an amphitheater. They watched Caligula’s show from a distance, we watch a TV programmer’s show from a distance. What’s the difference? Well, there’s fiction versus non, but what happens when a fictional shows’ creators fail to produce a realistic murder scene? We’ve all seen graphics that were a bit hokey, and an actor who failed to properly simulate the pain involved in their death scene. It’s a cheat, right? We say things like, “There’s ninety minutes of my life I’ll never get back!” We don’t mind it when creators use computer-generated-imagery (CGI) if it adds to our experience. If a creator can make it more real for us and provide us the satisfactory, vicarious experience of murdering someone, we’re all in. If the actor “Flopped like a fish out of water!” after being riddled with bullets, we might laugh in the same manner Caligula laughed at the screams and cries of the victims of the creative ways he found to cure boredom. And we may have both said, “Now that’s entertainment!” at the end of the show. If we say that and laugh in the company of someone else, they might say, “That’s just wrong on so many levels!” We might agree, but we both know that no one was actually harmed during this production, and we had our bloodlust for bloodsport satisfied. How many of us have left an excessively violent TV show or movie so satisfied that we no longer felt the need to commission the purchase of five, five-hundred-pound lions to rip our enemies apart? How many lives has TV saved?

When we hear people say we live in the best of times and the worst, the ‘yeahbuts’ talk about how they’d love to visit historical figures from the past. We get that, but what would we say to those historical figures? Would we inform a Caligula that history will not be kind to him? Would you tell him that that has a lot to do with his impulsive rage and the carnage that follows? Fortune telling and prophecy were so deeply woven into Roman life during Caligula’s reign that he might have viewed our claims as a visitor from the future as nothing more than a new branch of the whole fortune teller circuit. As evidenced by the historical record, Caligula did not deal with negative news in a rational manner, and our fact-based information about his legacy “from the future” could’ve landed us in the center of his show screaming and pleading our case with five, five-hundred-pound lions looking at us as an ideal way to curb their hunger.

Grigori Rasputin V: Sorcerer or Charlatan?

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“Was Gregori Rasputin really an occult mystic who used treacherous sorcery to ingratiate himself to Tsar Nicholas II by performing miracles on and curing the pain of the Tsar’s son? Or was he, no less impressively, a most gifted Counter-Agent who disarmed his country’s most powerful rulers through sheer charisma and manipulative charm?” –asks Adam Lehrer in the Safety Propoganda. 

“No!” say some historians. “Rasputin wasn’t any of those things. He was nothing more than a right time, right place charlatan.” Anytime one accuses another of absolute fraud, deceit or corruption, their first responsibility is to prove that the provocateur knowingly deceived. We can all read the conditions of the Russian empire at the time and see that they were susceptible and vulnerable to a charlatan. We can read through the health conditions of Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, and know that the Romanovs were desperate for a miracle worker to spare him the pain and possible death of hemophilia. We can take one look at Rasputin, the ill-educated peasant from nowhere, Russia and know that if he didn’t do something spectacular, he was doomed to a life of anonymity, but there is ample evidence to suggest that Rasputin believed he had an ability, if not the otherworldly powers, to cure the Tsar’s son. To believe otherwise is to suggest that Rasputin knowingly deceived his family since birth, and the friends and neighbors who surrounded him in the early part of his life. There’s an old line on subterfuge that it’s not really a lie if you believe it. When we say this, we usually do so tongue in cheek, but Rasputin’s bio suggests that he truly believed he had God-like powers? “Christ in miniature,” Rasputin often said when asked to characterize himself. Was he a deceptive person? Did he attempt to deceive the Empress Alexandra, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich’s mother, to weave a way into the empire, or did he attempt to prove to himself as “The Chosen One!”

At the moment of his birth, Rasputin’s mother believed he was the chosen one, and we can guess that she told him as much on a daily basis throughout his youth. We might cut her some slack for this fantastical notion, seeing as how Rasputin may have been her only child of seven, or eight, to survive childhood. (Evidence suggests she had a daughter who may have also survived for a time.) Anytime a mother has a child, they consider that child special, but in Rasputin’s Serbian village of Polrovskove death among children was so common that the miracle we know as childbirth was increased tenfold in that world of peasants. The idea that Rasputin was special may have grown in her mind as he did, until she was convinced that Grigori was a gift from God, and she eventually made a crossover to the idea that her son was the chosen one. 

What would we think if our mother told us we were God’s messenger throughout our youth? What if she bolstered her claim by telling us that at the moment we were born a rare celestial event occurred to mark the occasion of our birth. “A shooting star of such magnitude that had always been taken by the God-fearing muzhiks as an omen of some momentous event,” she said.

What if everyone we knew and loved growing up believed, as our mother did, that we were gifted with the ability to read minds, and/or “see things that others could not”. Rasputin grew up in a climate where everyone he encountered on a daily basis, and presumably throughout his life, believed he had divine powers. If we marinated in the thoughts of our own divine nature throughout our youth, how many of us would end our believing it? Our parents are powerful influences on our lives, and how we think, but as we age, we begin to see the errors of their ways. If Rasputin went through this natural course of maturation, his friends and neighbors in Polrovskove only bolstered his mother’s claims. Rasputin was also involved in a death-defying accident that took the life of his cousin. He spent years wondering aloud why he was spared and his cousin wasn’t. His conclusion, one which we can assume that his friends and family encouraged, was that divine intervention spare him, so he could go out and spread God’s message. 

When historians say Rasputin fell into a right place, right time era, they’re talking about an era that followed executions for anyone who attempted the heretical notions Rasputin espoused to a time when minds were just beginning to open up to the idea that man could manipulate his surroundings for the purpose of massive technological advancement. Those from the era also learned, mostly secondhand, of some of the advancements made in medicine that suggested man could wield God-like powers over life and death in a manner deemed heretical in previous eras. The early 20th century Russian citizen was likely more amenable than ever before to the belief that man could now manipulate the bridge between life and death, and generally make life better for his fellow man without necessarily being a heretic. Based on that, we could say that Rasputin was a right time, right place charlatan, or we could say he, more than any other, took advantage of this window in time. Those who call him a charlatan, however, must still address the notion that Rasputin knew he wasn’t the chosen one, and that he was lying to the vulnerable, desperate Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse) to convince her that he was. 

How did Rasputin discover that Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich was sick? The Russian empire, in the era of the Romanovs rule, was a vault. No state secrets, or leaks, found their way out, and the illness of the Tsarevich was one of the most guarded secrets. The Romanovs had nothing to gain by announcing their only male heir’s illness and everything to lose. Through the connections he made, as a man “known to possess the ability to heal through prayer” Rasputin was called upon to heal the Tsarevich by Anna Vyrubova, the empress’s best friend. Did Rasputin struggle with this newfound information, did he consider it his patriotic duty to try to save the young heir to the throne, or did he see this as an opportunity to finally prove himself to himself? If he failed to convince his family, friends and neighbors of his special powers, there was nothing lost. If he was a fraud, and he knew it, he would surely have a list of excuses he could use to explain it. If he failed the Empress, the embarrassment of trusting the health of her only begotten son to a lowly peasant could lead the Empire to try to silence any fallout by imprisoning Rasputin or executing him, and needless to say, this empire had no moral qualms executing peasants. Failing the empire, at the very least, would ultimately reveal to Rasputin and everyone else in the empire that he was a fraud and a charlatan. This presumed struggle goes to the heart of this article, because Rasputin eagerly accepted the invitation to try to heal Alexei. 

The arguments about what Rasputin did to eventually calm the conditions of Alexei Nikolaevich are wide and varied, but most historians agree that Alexei was never cured of his case of hemophilia, because there is no cure. To this date, modern medicine has yet to find a cure. Alexei had hemophilia the day he was born, and he had it when he was murdered, a month before his fourteenth birthday. The very idea that he almost made it to fourteen, and he could’ve lived well beyond that, had he not been murdered, was viewed as one of a series of Rasputin’s miracles. The fact that Alexei was relieved of his pain, and many of the symptoms of hemophilia, was also viewed as one of Rasputins’ miracles.

Some argue that Rasputin may have been so familiar with hemophilia that he knew certain techniques he could use to help calm the Tsarevich down, and thus give the illusion that he was cured. We still consider it something of a miracle that our body often manages to heal itself. Some call it the power of the mind, others call it the power of prayer, and still others call it the mysterious power of the miraculous machines in the human body to heal itself. No matter what we believe, it appears that in some cases, if our mind believes we are being cured, it can go a long way to encouraging us that we are. 

No matter the arguments, details, and conclusions, Rasputin did it. Rasputin did what the most brilliant minds of medicine in Russia, in the early 20th century, could not, and when he advised Alexandra on how to maintain Alexei’s health, and that advice proved successful, Alexandra fell under Rasputin’s spell. She thought he, more than any of the other men of medicine in the empire, could cure her son of a malady to which her side of the family was genetically susceptible. The idea that she believed Rasputin could cure her son, led her to convince her son of it, and that presumably led Alexei calming to the point that his hemophilia was not as debilitating as it would’ve been otherwise. So, Rasputin did help provide what Alexandra considered a miracle, but our modern understanding of the relationship between body and mind suggests that it was not as mystical or unprecedented as Alexandra and those who love the narrative want us to believe.

The interesting nugget here, and the import of this story, is that Alexandra may have followed Rasputin’s advice on how to cure her son so often that she may have also followed his other advice on greater matters of the Russian Empire, and she may have whispered that same advice into Tsar Nicholas II’s ear as if it were her own. 

“What was he?” “Who was he?” “What exactly did he do to spare the life of the Tsarevich?” “Was he the most gifted sorcerer the world has ever known?” How great was his influence over Alexandra? Reports suggest he had no influence over Nicholas II, but Alexandra did. Did Rasputin whisper things in Alexandra’s ear that she whispered into Nicholas II’s, as if they were her own ideas. British intelligence believed this, and some suggest that the Britain commissioned Rasputin’s murder, because they feared his influence in the Romanov Empire might prevent Russian entry into World War I?

We’ll probably never know the truth of any of this, because the Romanovs had a situation in their empire where they were able to control their narrative. They had very little in the way of leaks, and no one from the empire wrote a tell-all after the empire collapsed to detail what really happened within the confines of its walls. It was a situation modern politicians would salivate over, but historians, not so much. As a result of the tight Romanov ship, most of the literature written about this Russian era and the relationship between Rasputin and the Romanovs involves a great deal speculation. That’s the fun part for the rest of us, because we can use the base details of what happened and submit our own subjective beliefs into the story for fantastic and fantastical conclusions. One of us can speculate that Grigori Rasputin was a sorcerer with otherworldly powers, another can say he was an absolute charlatan, and the rest of us can say that the man landed in the perfect time and place for nature of his actions are almost impossible to prove or disprove. The one thing we can state without fear of too much refutation, is if we took all of these ingredients and threw them into a big stew of rhetorical discussion, is that Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was one of the most enigmatic figures in world history.