“Ivan’s Nightmare” is a chapter near the end of Dostoyevsky’s famous The Brothers Karamazov. It is an extremely important chapter, saturated with historical and philosophical ideas pertaining to Old Russia, and the new Russia since the foundation of St. Petersburg. Compared with other parts of Brothers such as the Inquisitor, Ivan’s Nightmare is rather neglected.

The basic context of Ivan’s Nightmare is rather simple, but only represents a small aspect of this huge work. Dimitri Karamazov, as is well known, is accused of the murder of his father. Dostoyevsky skillfully keeps the true nature of the crime a secret until Ivan speaks with the mentally ill Smerdyakov (the “man of death”) who fully admits that he killed the elder Karamazov (or “black oil”). Ivan, as is typical of Dostoyevsky, gets progressively more sick as the novel proceeds, both mentally and physically, and the stress of the upcoming murder trial, the alienation of his beloved (Grushenka) and the death of his wicked father begin to weigh upon his brain. (It might also be noted that Dostoyevsky, skillfully, always mingles physical with mental sickness and pain; they are never separated). Soon after Ivan’s nightmare, the trial begins, which, again is well known, leads to Dimitri’s unjust condemnation to hard labor.

Dostoyevsky crafts Ivan’s nightmare with great subtly, requiring from the reader a great deal of knowledge of Russian history. He forces it, much like the more famous chapter dedicated to the Inquisitor, upon the reader, isolating it from the mainstream of the novel’s motion. In fact, one of Dostoyevsky’s most charming as well as most irritating qualities is to paint, not merely a simple novel progressing from one point to another, but rather a series of images or philosophical reflections concealed among specifically literary images that provide an eccentric grammar, if you will, to his longer work. This is most evident in the extremely difficult novel, The Idiot, which might be interpreted as a series of images and reflections that far outweighs the rather mundane story behind it.

Further, the reflections in Ivan’s nightmare provide significant glimpses into Dostoyevsky’s own philosophical and mental state at his mature years, and it is in this, in particular, that permits us to decry the relative inattention it has received in the criticism (though specific works dedicated to Brothers, of course, has much to say about it, none of it accurate.)

In the Signet Classic edition that I use, “Ivan’s Nightmare” runs a short, latter chapter from pages 599 to 615 (this is the June, 1999 edition, translated very well by Constance Garnett). It consists of a conversation between Ivan Karamazov and an individual that is clearly The Devil, or a demon (and in fact, identifies himself as such). In many ways, what Dostoyevsky does here is similar to what C.S. Lewis was to do later in his Screwtape Letters.

The narrator goes to great lengths to show the reader that Ivan was suffering from hallucinations, and was in the process of the famous Dostoyevskian long descent into madness. In Dostoyevsky, as well as in Orthodox theology, sin has physical, global consequences, affecting all that come into contact with it. In the Old Testament, where Orthodox worship derives, the unclean made all who came in contact with them also unclean. All actions, in the Orthodox vision, are synthetic in that they bring together moral, psychological, environmental and physical factors in its commission, as well as its effects, to say nothing of its punishment. For Dostoyevsky, as is very well known, the wages of sin are insanity, or, more philosophically, that sin is an all-encompassing entity. Archbishop +IOANN of the Holy Synod of Milan has made the statement that the reason God did not eliminate the phenomenon of bodily death after Christ’s resurrection is that sin has physical manifestations, at the very least in terms of brain chemistry at the root of habituation. A sinful man has a physical makeup different from the virtuous man; the brain more troubled and more unbalanced. Death is a liberation of the soul from these physical affects of sin. It seems that Dostoyevsky also shared a version of this view and wove it into many of his characters such as the Underground Man and the more famous Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment. In the midst of Ivan’s extreme stress, the image of a man sitting across from him appears as he sits in his rented quarters. The Devil’s appearance (or more accurately, a demon’s) is telling as to what Dostoyevsky’s is driving at in this chapter:

This was a person, or, more accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a particular kind, no longer young, about fifty, with rather long, thick dark hair, slightly streaked with grey and a small pointed beard. He was wearing a brownish jacket, rather shabby, evidently made by a good tailor. His linen and his long scarflike necktie were the kind worn by people who aim at being stylish. But on closer inspection his linen was not over clean and his wide scarf was very threadbare. The visitor’s trousers were of excellent cut, but were too light in color and too tight for present fashion. His soft, fluffy white hat was out of keeping with the season. In brief, there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means. It looked as though the gentle man belonged to that class of idle landowners who used to flourish in the time of serfdom. (600).

Russian nationalist historians will immediately see what Dostoyevsky is driving at, and who the Devil truly represents (other than Satan himself). Satan here is presented as a westernizer of the 1840s. That is very obvious from the context. The appearance of the Devil here is saturated with ideological symbolism.

The fact that the man is “no longer young” is extremely significant. It was normal to refer to the westernizing school of “Young Russia,” as referring to a “rebirth” of Russia that many liberals were publically claiming. There was a Young England movement that Dostoyevsky, given his love for English literature (which I, for one, cannot fathom), was very familiar with. But the fashionable ideology of the 1840s is no longer fashionable, but is just another threadbare fad promoted by many of means at the time. The Devil is wearing ideological clothes of a bygone era, though he wishes to feel fashionable and respectable by so doing.

The man is dressed, in case the reader has not figured it out, in a western style. The ideological content is that Young Russia was created by good tailors, or rather, gifted philosophers of western European descent. That is to say that the westernizing school was taking wholesale from the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau or Schelling, and seeking to impose such an order on Russia. This was evident at the Decembrist rebellion of 1825.On a Russian gentleman, however, such ideological baggage looks silly, old and out of date.

The necktie is very significant. In western Europe, as the state/capital complex slowly destroyed the vestiges of medievalism, that is, free farmsteads, the calendar based on the seasons, holy, festal days and fasting regulations, unregulated and unregimented labor, decentralized government and many other factors, the former free peasant was subjected to ever more rigid discipline from the capital/state alliance. The necktie became a fashion for the elites, as it symbolized the noose, or the direct control of the state over the individual. The necktie represented the rule of the state over the rule of the church, and usurped the place of God over decisions of life and death. This was the reason St. John Maximovitch refused to permit anyone who served at the altar with him to wear neckties. It is a symbol of the destruction of the freedom of the Church and the necessary rise of the secular bureaucracy in its place.

The powerful phrase “gentility on straitened means” is brilliant as it is damning. Dostoyevsky is indicting the Petrine experiment in Russian history. Becoming a western empire, as I have written elsewhere, was expensive, and came at the expense of traditional Russian liberties. Russia, given many exogenous and endogenous variables I have written at great length about in The Third Rome, did not have the ready cash to become an eastern version of France, nor was there any good reason for desiring to be so. Centralized bureaucracies, centralized, mass armies and the infrastructure of central command was an extremely expensive and delicate proposition, but the bureaucrat, so skillfully mocked by the greatest of Russian writers, Gogol, was slowly becoming the symbol of the destruction of Old Russia that was attempted in the 18th century. Of course, the primary victims of westernization were the peasantry, who were forced to work harder and harder to finance the grand experiments of Peter and many of his successors. Not only did the peasantry need to work harder to finance the growing state, but peasant culture, that healthy mixture of Slavic nationalism and Orthodox religion, was slowly being transformed by the Petrine machine so as not to threaten the western ideological pillars of the New Order. The final extinction of the Cossack liberties of the steppes by Catherine the Great was a necessary concomitant of the Petrine Order.

Dostoyevsky describes the visitor as “ready to assume any amiable expression as the occasion might arise.” This derives from solid theology: as the Devil hardly ever appears as The Devil, but always as some pleasant ideological or theological movement, loaded with plastic piety and prima facie plausibility. The point of this is to slowly convince the reader that this is no hallucination of Ivan’s, but is the Devil himself, taking advantage of an ambiguous situation so as to confuse and disorient his victim, Ivan, in this case. Documented cases of demonic possession consistently show this to be the case. Demons, often speaking in ancient languages the victim could not ever have known, sprinkle some truth with many lies and exaggerations, thereby spreading confusion and embarrassment to all concerned. All instructions, whether of eastern or western origin, instruct exorcists to always ignore the ravings of the demons, and never, under no circumstances whatsoever, enter into an argument with the possessing power.

Oddly, the Devil is wearing a large gold ring with a cheap opal in it. Why is this even mentioned? Opal, in western Europe, is the stone associated with October (it is my birthstone). October, bleeding into November and also made more blurry by the differences in the eastern and western calendars, is also the harvest festival, and is a central month of rejoicing in agrarian societies, as Russia. Westernizers have a habit of mocking and degrading traditional agrarian societies, regarding them as “backward,” never asking themselves whether those sort of people were happier than their industrial and post-industrial counterparts in the west. The significance of the harvest is that, in old Russia, peasants were given the right to leave a landlord at the end of harvest season in November (and the second feast of St. George, rarely observed in contemporary Orthodoxy) if all their bills were paid. By the time of Peter, and likely long before, this right of the peasants had been slowly whittled away, eventually falling into disuse. Now, not making any statements about serfdom (which has been dreadfully dramatized among western historians), the point is that the harvest season is representative of the freedom of agricultural work, and its promised reward. The crushing of agrarian Russia was the masonic fantasy of Peter and the westernizing school in general. The opal is placed into a gold ring, making a connection between the harvest season and “golden freedom,” very commonly found within the cycle of Serbian epic poetry.

The first words from Ivan’s visitor of any significance concern the nature of belief. Ivan does not want to believe that the Devil (Ivan has to have some premonition as to who his visitor is, and apparently, Ivan has had some contact with him before) prompted some of his previous actions (the nature of which need not detain us). The Devil’s reply is simple, “don’t believe it then.” And, “there’s no use to believing against your will.” Unsurprising words, given that the Devil is typified, especially in societies dedicated to the worship of one of the Devils’ manifestations, in self will and the very deification of willfulness. There are occurrences of Marxist “Orthodox priests” working for the Soviet system giving themselves away by attacking reason as the necessary foundation of faith. It derives from the caricature of Christianity common among many organizations dedicated to stamping out belief. The fact is, of course, that faith is not only an act of will, but derives ultimately from reasoned reflection about the nature of reality and man’s place in it. Blind faith is mindless and rejected by the church as detrimental to religion. The Devil making reference to faith as purely a matter of will is an extremely subtle attack on the mockery of Christianity common among university professors and recipients of grants from the Carnegie Endowment.

Then the conversation quickly turns to the existence of this “hallucination.” Ivan desperately wants to believe it is merely a product of his imagination, of his pressing sickness, but the Devil shows him otherwise.

Ivan persists in claiming, with increasing anger, that the visitor is a phantom. The Devil begins to justify himself on page 603, with some very interesting statements. The Devil says:

My dear friend, above all things I want to behave as a gentleman and be recognized as such. . . I am poor but. . . I won’t say very honest, a fallen angel. I certainly can’t conceive how I can ever have been an angel. If I ever was, it must have been long ago that there’s no harm in forgetting it. Now I only prize the reputation of being a gentlemanly person and live as I can, trying to make myself agreeable. I really love mankind, I’ve been slandered! Here when I stay with you from time to time, my life gains a kind of reality and that’s what I like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate equations. I wander about here dreaming. . .(603)

The Devil reveals much of his nature here. For him, appearance is more important than reality, as was the case among the Petrinists in Russia’s past or present. That is that the external garb of westernism is all Peter was able to accomplish, as well as his successors. However, Russia remains Russia: Orthodox, agrarian and, in that western slang term, “backward.” If the USSR could not root out Orthodoxy or the agrarian ideal, then no one will, not the least of which that group of hacks called “Russia watchers.” Peters reforms can be justified on military grounds, and that I fully admit. However, the ideological baggage attached to these reforms is another matter, and it is this veneer that existed solely as a product for export, having no resonance among the peasantry or small, rural gentry.

The reference to the geometrical will quickly set off red flags (no pun intended) for those familiar with Russian history. Freemasonry has as its central symbols the compass and square, showing their devotion to Pythagorus, and representing the nature of their god, the demiurgos of Platonic and gnostic philosophy. “God” in freemasonry is the devil, represented by the great architect, or the demiurge, who cannot create ex nihilo, but must build with what God has created. Therefore, Masons today believe that matter is by nature eternal. The notion of “building” according to geometric forms, expressible in numbers, represents the central core of all Gnosticism (institutionalized in many places, but to a high philosophical degree in upper level freemasonry), or the willful “correction” of nature, based on elite philosophical and scientific principles. Civilization, which Gogol deplored, is based on the idea of the deification of man, specifically, those who control the economy, and the enslavement of the “backward” peasantry, who are dragooned to feed the elites in the cities. Peter was initiated into the Lodge during his Great Embassy tour of western Europe (most likely in Amsterdam) and his agenda for Russia was a rather crude formulation of western Masonry.

Continuing the Masonic metaphor, the Devil continues in this vein about an ax. A game was played in Russian villages (and is common around the world) that the unwary was asked to lick an ax in zero degree temperatures. The tongue sticks to the ax, and the mouth bleeds. Ivan asks about the ax and the devil answers:

What would become of an ax in space? What an idea! If it were to fall any distance, it would begin, I think, flying around the earth without knowing why, like a satellite. The astronomers would calculate the rising and setting of the ax, Gatzuk would put it in his calendar, that’s all.

One needs to be familiar with the esoteria of Masonry to understand this reference, and no one has commented on this passage in English. The ax is an ancient symbol in Russia. It represents janus, of sorts, but of the dual nature of reality according to classical paganism. Dark being equal to light, and light existing only because of the experience of darkness. Further, it relates to the scythe, or the scythe of Saturn, the instrument which separates man from God, and man from His creation. It is a central symbol of Gnosticism, or the “ancient, antediluvian wisdom” that man is God and can create with “eternal and preexistent” matter what he will. Therefore, man’s “primitive” dependence on nature is replaced with technics as the central aspect of civilization, where man’s will filters perception and the very relations of man and nature. The city, Caanan, named for Cain, “the builder of the city,” was the civilizational apogee of the domination of adepts over cowans, or the uninitated.

Esoteric freemasonry believes that civilization, or the understanding of man’s “true’ role in the world derives from the dog star, the star of Sirius. Beings from this world visited primitive man and showed them the nature of “good and evil” and the nature of technics and civilization. Here, Dostoyevsky is laying out a challenge to Freemasonry, in language that only adepts, or serious critics, understand.

When speaking of himself, the devil, against justifying himself, as well as proving beyond any doubt that he is not a hallucination, says this:

No, live, I’m told, for they’d be nothing without you. If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen. There would be no events without you and there must be events. So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what is irrational because I’m commanded to. . . . Without suffering what would be the pleasure of life? Life would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but tedious. (606-7)

One of the great, and nearly inarguable of Dostoyevsky’s philosophical positions is that mankind is irrational. The Enlightenment posited an unreal man: the purely rational, calculating, pleasure seeking machine. Society, Dedirot, Voltaire, Compte and many others said, would be served if this was the model of economic, legality and politics. Empirical evidence, rather than fashionable theorizing, shows the opposite: mankind is irrational, passionate and often does what he knows will being him misery rather than happiness. The individual’s reaction to civilization, as well stated in Notes from Underground, is to deliberately subvert the Enlightenment by acting in ways considered to be irrational: to act impulsive, passionately, arrogantly, in a way that is ultimately self-destructive. Today, in late 2005, such forms of behavior are institutionalized and considered the norm.

Some distance on, the Devil continues, concerning his agenda:

As soon as men have denied God–and I believe that period, corresponding with geological periods, will come to pass–the old conception of the universe will fall itself without cannibalism and what’s more the old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. Extending his conquest of nature by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour that it will make up for all his old dreams the joy of heaven (613).

From all that has been said before, this is the Devil’s apogee. It requires little comment except that this is the official ideology of the Regime, or that coalition of elite forces worldwide bent on creating one world; a one world market and mass political ideologies that justify their power. It will be the Masonic elite (and here speaking broadly) that will provide the scientific and ideological components to the naked rule of anti-Christ (the man-god, the reverse of Christ, the God-man). AntiChrist is the fulfillment of all Masonic and esoteric Judaic dreams: he will perform great wonders, solve many of the world’s pressing problems. He will be a man of great piety, though of a general and vague nature. He will preach unity, but a unity based on vague and general principles. He will speak of freedom, but nothing about the basis on which one makes choices. According to Orthodox tradition, the man-god will appear once the gospel, in the Orthodox context, is preached worldwide. It is not accepted worldwide, but it is present worldwide. The unification of the globe; the advances of science capable of creating amazing wonders; the centralization of economic power (a la Nimrod); these are all necessary conditions for the rise of the man-god.

In a cryptic statement, back at the beginning of the chapter, the Devil says to Ivan: “I would like to join an idealistic society; I would lead the opposition to it.” “Idealistic” is left vague. But the conception of joining a society, and then leading the opposition to it is strange. In esoteric Judaic political thought, society is controlled by two pillars, one, the pillar of mercy, the other, the pillar of severity. These are artificial distinctions, showing that the pillars spring from the same source: it vaguely explicates the distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” in modern life. The two pillars are the two “paths” common to occult lore, often called the left and right paths. The left is characterized by the female and its typical “picture thinking.” It is based on an emotional attachment to such abstractions as “nature” and “ancient” that is, pre-Christian culture. It is egalitarian and vaguely socialist. At present, the left hand path in the occult is represented by neo-hippyism and a rather cliche environmentalism, anarchism and feminism. The right hand path is more structured and hierarchical, formally rejecting equalitarianism and representing the male, logical principle. It is represented by Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and many aspects of modern libertarianism. Of course, the two pillars, or paths, ultimately coincide, though by radically different means. The same is true of the division between liberal and conservative: same agenda, different means. For example, the female environmentalist and “eco-feminist,” a staple on college campuses, formally preaches equalitarianism. She often speaks in florid terms, though ultimately saying very little. She is motivated by symbolic, or picture thinking, to which adheres many emotions. Thus, she pictures herself as a tireless crusader, a moral preacher devoid of any personal interest. These images, and the image of the world she believes to be fighting, are products of symbol and its concomitant emotion. They are completely denuded of logical progression and often termed “intuitive.” She is often a whore, and usually preaches sexual liberty. However, the problem arises when the imposition of such equalitarian schemes is brought to bear. Does not she think of herself as a moral aristocrat, above the mundane cowan, considering only the interests of the planet and of women? Is she not part of some imagined vanguard, leading the repressed into a world of freedom and equality? Therefore, the link between the followers of Nietzsche and the “right hand” come in, assisting the left in imposing their Order. How else can she justify the erection of a massive infrastructure of repression to eliminate those not politically correct? An infrastructure logical, bureaucratic and definitely not egalitarian. Therefore, the two pillars are one; this is the essence of gnostic and Masonic thought, and precisely that which is exposed, however subtly, in Ivan’s nightmare.

This is likely the reason this important chapter is basically ignored in the literature. The few times when it is mentioned, it is interpreted completely out of the ideological and religious context that Dostoyevsky was familiar with, but the average “Russia scholar” has not a clue about. There is an entire side to Dostoyevsky completely unknown to scholars, that is, the side of this great author which takes aim at the secret origins of modernity, the secret origins of civilization, the sons and daughters of Sirius.