Was Alexander II involved in magic or experiments in Time Travel?

Question by Nes Fan: Was Tsar Alexander II involved in magic or experiments in Time Travel?

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Answer by J to the O to the E to the Y!
I know for a fact that Alexander II was involved. Here are a few paragraphs I found on the Russian History Encyclopedia.

Occult books of fortune-telling, dreams, spells, astrology, and speculative mysticism entered medieval Russia as translations of Greek, Byzantine, European, Arabic, and Persian “secret books.” Their prohibition by the Council of a Hundred Chapters (Stoglav) in 1551 enhanced rather than diminished their popularity, and many have circulated into our own day.

The Age of Reason did not extirpate Russia’s occult interests. During the eighteenth century more than 100 occult books were printed, mostly translations of European alchemical, mystical, Masonic, Rosicrucian, and oriental wisdom texts. Many were published by the author and Freemason Nikolai Novikov.

As the nineteenth century began, Tsar Alexander I encouraged Swedenborgians, Freemasons, mystical sectarians, and the questionable “Bible Society,” before suddenly banning occult books and secret societies in 1822. The autocracy and the church countered the occultism and supernaturalism of German Romanticism with an increasingly restrictive system of church censorship, viewing the occult as “spiritual sedition.”

Nevertheless, Spiritualism managed to penetrate Russia in the late 1850s, introduced by Count Grigory Kushelev-Bezborodko, a friend of Daniel Dunglas Home (1833 – 1886), the famous medium who gave seances for the court of Alexander II. Their coterie included the writers and philosophers Alexei Tolstoy, Vladimir Soloviev, Vladimir Dal, Alexander Aksakov, and faculty from Moscow and St. Petersburg Universities.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia, like Europe, experienced the French “Occult Revival,” a reaction against prevailing scientific positivism. Spiritualism, theosophy, hermeticism, mystery cults, and Freemasonry attracted the interest of upper- and middle-class Russian society and configured decadence and symbolism in the arts.

Theosophy, founded in New York in 1875 by Russian expatriate Elena Blavatsky (1831 – 1891), was a pseudo-religious, neo-Buddhist movement that claimed to be a “synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy.” It appealed to the god-seeking Russian intelligentsia (including, at various times, Vladimir Soloviev, Max Voloshin, Konstantin Balmont, Alexander Skryabin, Maxim Gorky). A Christianized, Western form of theosophy, Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, attracted the intellectuals Andrey Bely, Nikolai Berdyayev, and Vyacheslav Ivanov.

Russian Freemasonry revived at the end of the nineteenth century. Masons, Martinists, and Rosicrucians preceded the mystical sectarian Grigory Rasputin (1872 – 1916) as “friends” to the court of Tsar Nicholas II. After the Revolution of 1905 – 1906, Russian Freemasonry became increasingly politicized, eventually playing a role in the events of 1916-1917.

The least documented of Russia’s occult movements was the elitist hermeticism (loosely including philosophical alchemy, gnosticism, kabbalism, mystical Freemasonry, and magic), heir of the Occult Revival. Finally, sensational (or “boulevard”) mysticism was popular among all classes: magic, astrology, Tarot, fortune-telling, dream interpretation, chiromancy, phrenology, witchcraft, hypnotism.

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