In Russia the conclusions of the “Synod of a Hundred Chapters,” of 1551, evidence a wholly primitive order of belief. Shaving of the beard and wrong handling of the cross both figure here as deadly sins--they were affronts to the dæmons. The “Synod of Antichrist,” of 1667, led to the vast secession of the Raskol movement, because thenceforward the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers instead of two, and the name “Jesus” was to be pronounced “Yissus” instead of “Issus”--whereby, for the strict believer, the power of this magic over the dæmons would be lost.[480] But this effect of fear is, after all, not the only one nor even the most potent. Why is it that the Merovingian period shows not the slightest trace of that glowing inwardness and longing to sink into the metaphysical that suffuses the Magian seed-time of Apocalyptic and the closely analogous period of the Holy Synod (1721-1917) in Russia? What was it that from Peter the Great’s time on led all those martyr-sects of the Raskolniki to celibacy, poverty, pilgrimage, self-mutilation, and asceticism in its most fearful forms, and in the seventeenth century had driven thousands, in religious frenzy, to throw themselves _en masse_ into the flames? The doctrines of the Chlysti, with their “Russian Christs” (of whom seven are counted so far); the Dukhobors with their Book of Life, which they use as their Bible and hold to contain psalms of Jesus orally transmitted; the Skoptsi with their ghastly mutilation-precepts--manifestations, one and all, of something without which Tolstoi, Nihilism, and the political revolutions are incomprehensible[481]--how is it that in comparison the Frankish period seems so dull and shallow? Is it that only Aramæans and Russians possess religious genius--and, if so, what have we to expect of the Russia that is to come, now that (just in the decisive centuries) the obstacle of scholarly orthodoxy has been destroyed? III Primitive religions have something homeless about them, like the clouds and the wind. The mass-souls of the proto-peoples have accidentally and fugitively condensed into _one_ being, and accidental, therefore, is and remains the “where”--which is an “anywhere”--of the linkages of waking-consciousness arising from the fear and defensiveness that spread over them. Whether they stay or move on, whether they alter or not, is immaterial so far as concerns their inward significance.