Christian Heresy
Heresy: from Thomas Wright, The Worship of the Generative Powers
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 29 July 2003
Heresy
In the earlier ages of the church, the conversion of the Pagans to Christianity was mostly a surface conversion, and that the Church was satisfied that people called themselves Christians without inquiring too closely into their sincerity or their practice. The expressions of disapproval in the writings of ecclesiastical writers and in the canons of the earlier councils show the prevalence among supposed Christians of the old festivals of paganism. The repetition of those canons and deprecatory remarks in the ecclesiastical councils and writings of a later period of the middle ages shows the practice continued still.
At an African council, in 381, Burchardus, who compiled his code of ecclesiastical decrees for use in his own time, derived his provisions against “the festivals which were held with Pagan ceremonies”. Even on the most sacred of the Christian commemoration days, Pagan rites were introduced, and people danced in the open street accompanied with lascivious language and gestures, so that respectable women were reported unable to attend the churches. These Pagan ceremonies were said to have been taken into the churches, and many of the clergy participated.
Eventually, Paganism was declared an offence against the state, and Pagans were persecuted, so they professed Christianity out of necessity, and formed sects to practise Pagan rites in secret conventicles. The church promptly put them among the Christian heresies. Phallic worship was among them. Among the earliest were the Adamiani, or Adamites, who proscribed marriage, and held that the most perfect innocence was consistent only with the community of women. They chose latibula, or caverns, for their conventicles, at which both sexes assembled naked together. This sect perhaps continued to exist under different forms, but it was revived in the fifteenth century, and continued to be much talked of till the seventeenth.
The Nicolaites, who held their wives in common, believed that the only way to salvation lay through frequent intercourse between the sexes. S Epiphanius, bishop of Constantia, speaks of a sect who sacrificed a child in their secret rites by pricking it with brazen pins, and then offering its blood. The Gnostics also held their women in common, were accused of eating human flesh as well as of lasciviousness, and taught that it was a duty to prostitute their wives to their guests. They knew their fellow sectarians by a secret sign, which consisted in tickling the palm of the hand with the finger. The sign having been recognized, mutual confidence was established, and the stranger was invited to supper. After they had eaten their fill, the husband removed from the side of his wife, and said to her, “Go, exhibit charity to our guest”, which was the signal for those further scenes of hospitality. The Gnostics were accused then of offering and administering semen as their sacrament.
The Millennium
There was no further trace of these doctrines until the eleventh century, when a great agitation began in Western Europe which brought forth a multitude of strange creeds and strange theories. It was the failure of the promised Return of Christ at the millennium! Still, the popular worship of the great annual festivals, and the local fetes, urban or rural, were hardly interfered with, or any secret societies belonging to the old worship, for the medieval church did not consider them as heresies, and left them alone. Some ecclesiastical council from time to time pronounced against continuing superstitions, which were hardly heard at the time and not listened to. They are passed over in silence. But the moment anything under the name of heresy raised its head, the alarm was great.
Gnosticism and Manichaeism, words for essentially the same thing, were the heresies most hated in the Eastern empire, and, as may be supposed, most persecuted. This persecution drove them westward. In the seventh century, they became the sect of Paulicians—it is said, from an Armenian enthusiast named Paulus—who provoked the hatred of the church by advocating freedom of thought and of ecclesiastical reform. Unable to resist persecution within the Byzantine empire, they withdrew into the territory within Asia Minor held by the Saracens, and united with them against the Christian Greeks. Others sought refuge in the country of the Bulgarians, who converted and the sect thence spread westward. In their progress through Germany to France they were known best as Bulgarians, from the name of the country whence they came. In Italy they retained the name, Paulicians, which became corrupted in Latin into Populicani, Poplicani, Publicani, etc, and, in French, into Popelican, Poblican, Policien, and so on.
They began to cause alarm in France at the beginning of the eleventh century, in the reign of king Robert, when, under the name of Popelicans, they had established themselves in the diocese of Orleans, in which city a council was held against them in 1022, and thirteen were condemned to be burnt. The name appears to have lasted into the thirteenth century, but the name of Bulgarians became more permanent, and, in its French form of Bolgres, Bougres, or Bogres, became the popular name for heretics in general.
These early sects, like those of their earlier sectarian predecessors, appear to have professed doctrines including the communality of women. One of the writers against the medieval heretics assures us that there were “many professed Christians, both men and women, who feared no more to go to their sister, or son or daughter, or brother, or nephew or niece, or kin or relation, than to their own wife or husband”. They were accused, beyond this, of indulging in unnatural vices, and this charge was so generally believed, that the name of Bulgarus, or heretic, became equivalent with Sodomite, and hence came the modern French word bougre, and its English equivalent.
Heretical Sects
In the eleventh century, the sectarians appeared in Italy under the name of Patarini, Paterini, or Patrini, said to have been taken from an old quarter of the city of Milan named Pataria, where they first held their assemblies. A contemporary Englishman, Walter Mapes, gives us an account of the Paterini and their secret rites. He says some apostates from this heresy related that they met in their synagogues at the first watch of night, carefully closed the doors and windows and waited in silence until a black cat of extraordinary size descended among them by a rope. As soon as they saw this strange animal, they put out the lights and muttering through their teeth instead of singing their hymns, felt their way to this object of their worship, kissed it, some on the feet, some under the tail, and others on the genitals, according to their feelings of humility or pride, after which each seized upon the nearest person of a different sex, and had carnal intercourse as long as he was able.
Their leaders taught them that the most perfect degree of charity was “to do or suffer in this manner whatever a brother or sister might desire and ask”, and hence, says Mapes, they were called Paterini, a patiendo. Generally, in Italy, they took their names from the towns in which they had their seats or headquarters. Thus, there were Bagnolenses, Concordenses, or Concorezenses, and Albigenses, or Albigeois, the most extensive of them all, which spread over the whole of the south of France, the heretics of Albi, now capital of the department of the Tarn.
A rich enthusiast of the city of Lyons, named Waldo, who had collected his wealth by mercantile pursuits, and who lived in the twelfth century, sold his property and distributed it among the poor, and he became the head of a sect which possessed poverty as one of its tenets, and received from the name of its founder that of Waldenses or Vaudois. From their posession of voluntary poverty they are sometimes spoken of by the name of Patiperes de Lugduno, the paupers of Lyons. Contemporaries speak of the Waldenses as being generally poor ignorant people, yet they spread widely over that part of France and into the valleys of Switzerland, and became so celebrated, that at last nearly all the medieval heretics were usually classed under the head of Waldenses.
Another sect, usually classed with the Waldenses, were called Cathari. The Novatians, a sect which sprang up in the church in the third century, assumed also the name of Cathari, as laying claim to extraordinary purity (catharoi, Puritans), but there is no reason for believing that the ancient sect was revived in the Cathari of the later period, or even that the two words are identical. The name of the latter sect is often spelt Gazari, Gazeri, Gacari, and Chazari, and, as they were more especially a German sect, it is supposed to have been the origin of the German words Ketzer and Ketzerie, which became the common German terms for a heretic and heresy.
Henschenius suggested that this name was derived from the German Katze or Ketze, a cat, in allusion to the common report that they assembled at night like cats, or ghosts, or the cat may have been an allusion to the belief that in their secret meetings they worshipped that animal. Some old writers tell us that they believed that the sun was a demon, and the moon a female called Heva, and that these two had sexual intercourse every month. Like the other heretical sects, these Cathari were accused of indulging in unnatural vices, and the German words Ketzerie and Ketzer were eventually used to signify sodomy and a sodomite, as well as heresy and a heretic.
The Waldenses generally, taking all the sects which people class under this name, including also the older Bulgari and Publicani, were charged with holding secret meetings, at which the devil appeared to them in the shape, according to some, of a goat, whom they worshipped by offering the kiss in ano, after which they indulged in promiscuous sexual intercourse. Some believed that they were conveyed to these meetings by unearthly means.
The English chronicler, Ralph de Coggeshall, tells a strange story of the means of locomotion possessed by these heretics. In the city of Rheims, in France, in the time of S Louis, a handsome young woman was charged with heresy, and carried before the archbishop, in whose presence she avowed her opinions, and confessed that she had received them from a certain old woman of that city. The old woman was then arrested, convicted of being an obstinate heretic, and condemned to the stake. When they were preparing to carry her out to the fire, she suddenly turned to the judges and said, “Do you think that you are able to burn me in your fire? I care neither for it nor for you!” And taking a ball of thread, she threw it out at a large window by which she was standing, holding the end of the thread in her hands, and exclaiming, “Take it!” (recipe). In an instant, in the sight of all who were there, the old woman was lifted from the ground, and, following the ball of thread, was carried into the air nobody knew where. With Christian justice, the archbishop’s officers burnt the young woman in her place.
A list of the errors of the Waldenses, printed in the Reliquiae Antiquae, enumerates among them that they met to indulge in promiscuous sexual intercourse, and held perverse doctrines in accordance with it, that in some parts the devil appeared to them in the form of a cat, and that each kissed him under the tail, and in other parts they rode to the place of meeting upon a staff anointed with a certain unguent, and were conveyed thither in a moment of time. The writer adds that, in the parts where he lived, these practices had not been known to exist for a long time.
In France, early in the eleventh century, there was in the city of Orleans a society consisting of members of both sexes, who assembled at certain times in a house there, for the purposes which are described rather fully in a document found in the cartulary of the abbey of S Pere at Chartres. As there stated, they went to the meeting, each carrying in the hand a lighted lamp, and they began by chanting the names of demons in the manner of a litany, until a demon suddenly descended among them in the form of an animal. Then, immediately, they all extinguished their lamps, and each man took the first female he put his hand upon, and had sexual intercourse with her, without regard if she were his mother, or his sister, or a consecrated nun, and this intercourse was looked upon by them as an act of holiness and religion.
The child which was the fruit of this intercourse was taken on the eighth day and purified by fire, in the manner of the ancient Canaanites—it was burnt to ashes in a large fire made for that purpose. The ashes were collected with great reverence and preserved, to be administered to members of the society who were dying, just as good Christians received the viaticum. It is added that there was such a virtue in these ashes, that an individual who had once tasted them would hardly ever after be able to turn his mind from that heresy and take the path of truth. If not utterly exaggerated, it is all reminiscent of Canaanite worship, their Tophets—cemetaries for the children offered to Molech (Melek)—being specially revered.
Accusations like this were used as excuses for persecution, religious and political. The district of Steding, in the north of Germany, now known as Oldenburg, was at the beginning of the thirteenth century inhabited by a people who lived in sturdy independence, but the archbishops of Bremen seem to have claimed some sort of feudal superiority over them, which they resisted by force. The archbishop, in revenge, declared them heretics, and proclaimed a crusade against them. Crusades against heretics were then in fashion, for it was just at the time of the great war against the Albigeois.
The Stedingers maintained their independence successfully for some years. In 1232 and 1233, the pope issued two bulls against the offending Stedingers, in both of which he charges them with various heathen and magical practices, but in the second be enters more fully into details. These Stedingers, the pope tells us, performed the following ceremonies at the initiation of a new convert into their sect. When the novice was introduced, a toad presented itself, which all who were present kissed, some on the posteriors, and others on the mouth, when they drew its tongue and spittle into their own mouths. Sometimes this toad appeared of only the natural size, but sometimes it was as big as a goose or duck, and often its size was that of an oven.
As the novice proceeded, he encountered a man who was extraordinarily pale, with large black eyes, and whose body was so wasted that his flesh seemed to be all gone, leaving nothing but the skin hanging on his bones. The novice kissed this personage, and found him as cold as ice, and after this kiss all traces of the Catholic faith vanished from his heart. Then they all sat down to a banquet, and when this was over, there stepped out of a statue, which stood in their place of meeting, a black cat, as large as a moderate sized dog, which advanced backwards to them, with its tail turned up. The novice first, then the master, and then all the others in their turns, kissed the cat under the tail, and then returned to their places, where they remained in silence, with their heads inclined towards the cat. Then the master suddenly pronounced the words “Spare us!” which he addressed to the next in order, and the third answered, “We know it, lord;” and a fourth added, “We ought to obey”.
At the close of this ceremony the lights were extinguished, and each man took the first woman who came to hand, and had carnal intercourse with her. When this was over, the candles were again lighted, and the performers resumed their places. Then out of a dark corner of the room came a man, the upper part of whom, above the loins, was bright and radiant as the sun, and illuminated the whole room, while his lower parts were rough and hairy like a cat. The master then tore off a bit of the garment of the novice, and said to the shining personage, “Master, this is given to me, and I give it again to thee”. The master replied, “Thou hast served me well, and thou wilt serve me more and better. What thou hast given me I give unto thy keeping”. When he had said this, the shining man vanished, and the meeting broke up. Such were the secret ceremonies of the Stedingers, according to the deliberate statement of Pope Gregory IX, who also charged them with offering direct worship to Lucifer.
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