The criticism of the church is apparent in the name of the club: the organization is a собор, a synod, parodying both the Catholic church that Peter was introduced to abroad as well as his own Orthodox faith (though it is worth noting the Peter was well-acquainted with Lutheranism in his youth). For his inner circle, I would definitely start from Massie. Massie's biography does discuss the role of the group, but not in-depth beyond the political roles of Peter's associates: which in one reading is the essential story here. Peter repudiated what he saw as antiquated customs while engaging in social-cum-political drinking and exuberance (all-drunken, all-joking!). There are some wonderful and uncommon contemporary portraits that show these figures dressed as fools, quite the contrast from traditional 17th-century Russian painting.

There are a few fictional portrayals worth looking at as well. In Alexei Tolstoi's socialist realist novel Peter the First, he does describe the synod rather curiously (at one point "...according to the cursed calumny of foreigners"). But at the same time the group is of critical importance to Peter: Fyodor Yuryevich Romodanovsky, the head of the secret police and de facto leader of Russia when Peter was on the Grand Embassy, "can be relied on without hesitation--faithful without slyness." Tolstoi uses the title 'prince-caesar' for Romodanovsky here, in reference to the synod. Tolstoi describes them celebrating Christian holidays with revelry and some vulgarity, with the merrymakers urinating at the table, rather far from traditional Orthodox celebrations.

Another English text that touches more specifically on the symbolic role of the group is an article from the ever-eminent Paul Bushkovitch; the relevant section describes the withering away of the Epiphany ceremony, crystallized centuries before Peter's ascension:

Where was Peter? Juel did not see him, but he wrote with Lutheran indignation of Peter's wild carousings in Moscow, in which the Tsar and his court drank wildly, rode through the streets and visited his friends and associates, often in costume. In other words, Peter celebrated sviatki [a pre-Orthodox folk celebration from Christmas Eve to Epiphany characterized by revelry and free spirits]. Part of his celebration of sviatki was dressing up, more specifically the election of Nikita Zotov or someone else as Patriarch of the All-drunken Council, which took place as early as 1692 in Preobrazhenskoe. What Peter did was to allow a ceremony of the Russian church that was part of the Russian court ritual to die, a clearly high-culture ceremony. In its place, Tsar Peter and his friends brought the folk culture to the court by producing their own version of sviatki, one close to the popular custom, with its drunken parties, eroticism, and dressing up. Peter also used the carnival atmosphere of sviatki to substitute a ceremony that mocked the church for one that had visually demonstrated the superiority of the church to the Tsar. That is why Nikita Zotov became the mock Patriarch precisely at this time of year: Peter was constructing a counter-ritual to the traditional Epiphany with its blessing of the waters...

In Bushkovitch's characterization, Peter adopted a drunken folk ceremony in place of one that placed the church above the tsar; again, the titles of members of the 'synod' are clearly satirizing the gravitas of the church.

The role of the group has been contested; Peter's rejection of Orthodox tradition led him to be labelled as the Antichrist by both commoners and theologians alike. The symbolism of the group was adopted by nineteenth-century writers as an example of the Tsar's justified rejection of backwoods traditions (the adoption of yet-older revelry notwithstanding) or of his abandonment of the Slavic identity. Indeed Peter plays a central role in the philosophical historical trilogy "Christ and Antichrist" by Dmitry Merezhkovsky: the third book is, quite tellingly, Antichrist, Peter and Alexei.

Bushkovitch, Paul A. "The epiphany ceremony of the Russian court in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." The Russian Review 49, no. 1 (1990): 1-17.

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