Arnold of Brescia, Abelard’s most gifted student, leaned against the papacy. He wanted the church to return to the form of the first Christian congregations. With wild enthusiasm the people listened to his teachings, that the power of the church should only be spiritual, as Christ had wanted it and for the first time the unheard of battle cry resounded, “Rome must be free!” Pope Lucius II was killed and his successor, Eugene III had to flee in order to escape the vengeance of the people.
The kings of Castile had the entire works of Aristotle translated and in its wake came the Arabs and the Jews with the pantheism of Averroes and the subtleties of the kabbalah. Under the protection of Emperor Fredrick II, Arabian doctors dared the unheard of—to cut open a human corpse. And Frederick II, debaucher and atheist, a witty and refined philosopher—with a big grin—asked the Muslims, “My dear Gentlemen, what do you think about God?”
A spirit of skepticism and disbelief seized all the people and the “I” was brought to the fore with drunken enthusiasm. To be able to prove everything and at the same time refute it, that was considered the highest philosophical art. Simon de Tournay suddenly cried out after brilliantly laying bare the essence of the Christian doctrines, “O pètit Jèsus, petit Jèsus, comme j’ai èlevè ta loi! Si je voulais, je pourrais encore mieux la rabaisser!” (“O little Jesus, little Jesus. How I have fortified your teachings! If I wanted to, I could refute them even better!”)
Richard the lionhearted declared himself a brother-in-arms with the Sultan Malek Adhal and offered him his sister for a wife. Henry II, king of England, threatened the pope that he would become Muslim and King John charmed everyone with the most beautiful jokes about his excommunication.
The people of the twelfth century paid no attention to God. They believed that Christ had ruled for a long enough time already and that is was finally time for the Holy Spirit to have its turn. One messiah after another stepped up. Countless sects began to form. The people no longer sought after an external God. He was inside them and spoke through their own mouths.
*****
Into this time of the unleashing of the striving individual, which had been unheard of up to this point; into this time of disbelief and complete out of bounds and unshackled instincts, there fell a terrible depression in the wake of the failed Crusades. God slept while Mohammed showed his power in ever greater Muslim victories. The troubadours sang melancholy songs in which they accused God of betraying them, because he patronized the Muslims in preference to Christians. Louis the Holy even warned God that he would just allow his people to go back to the homeland in peace. “que il ne woit contreint renier ton saint nom”.(“So they won’t deny Your holy name.”)
The warning was thrown into the wind. Instead of finally putting a halt to the terrible plagues, He heaped up even more torments upon a despairing humanity. The people were just looking for any possible opportunity to once and for all fall away from God. And that opportunity came.
The Slavic Satan, Chernebog or Diabol ,who ruled the world alongside the good god as an equal principle of evil, prepared himself for a journey to shake the foundations of the church with iron fists.
The Bogomils moved out of Bulgaria, through Constantinople and Italy, and settled into fortified areas in southern France, after their troops had been strongly thinned out along the way.
The south of France had long been the promised land of all heresies. It was the favorite seat of Satan. It was the classic ground of sorcery and witchery, and it was from here that the epidemic of witchcraft spread across all of Europe. The entire south was full of Jews and Saracens. Here the rabbis had public schools everywhere and formed bonds between the Christians and the Arabs through their exchange in Salerno, and especially in Cordova, the seat of black magic, where the various arts were so often turned to criminal purposes: distillation, syrups, ointments, the first surgical instruments, Arabic numbers, arithmetic and algebra.
At the same time the cabalistic teachings of the Jews were a tremendous influence on the thoroughly non-Christian minded people. In the grimoires of Ashmidai excellent spells could be found to conjure S’maäl (cf. the Samiel of German folktales) and to force him into service. Naturally he only allowed himself to be of service for evil. The power that God had given him was great, and his servants, the Satanim, continuously lived inside man and tempted him.
Here, in the borderland between the European culture and the by far superior mystical culture of the Orient, ancient Manichaeism re-established itself in a newer form. It was from here that Satan began his triumphal campaign across all of Europe.
The new Manicheans taught against the doctrine of the church; that only the Good is truly substantial, while on the other hand evil was only an absence of good, incidental and meant nothing. The new Manicheans, the Cathars: taught that evil was just as substantial as good, both, in eternal opposition, were equally essential and this opposition went back to the innermost roots of existence and extended itself even to the godhead.
Therefore Sin was not a debt; it was not the result of free will, but rather it was the work of the Black God. There was no sin, because evil actions were carried out as a result of the will of a God. There was no punishment for sin, eternal damnation was a nonsensical invention. The sacraments of penance and communion were invalid and ridiculous because regret after an evil deed was as useless “as if a dog were to bite a stone,” as Nietzsche said.
“Nous voilà en plein satanisme” (“We are correct in Satanism!”)
But just as they divided God into a good and a bad part, so too did they strictly divide the human being into spiritual and bodily parts. People belonged to the Black God with their bodies, and to the Light God with their spirits.
Then there came a double division within this sect: those who decided for the light god, lived according to an unbelievably strict code of behavior and a mortifying asceticism. They were the zealots and those who spread the sects. They were revered as saints and they had the power to completely purify a person at the time of his death by the simple laying on of hands and thus commend the dead to the Good God.
The others, on the other hand, those who worshipped the Evil God, established secret organizations and celebrated their dark, carnal mysteries in forests, caves and on the tops of mountains.
In this way the opposition between Christianity and paganism was repeated within this sect. But this time the opposition was required and sanctified by their doctrine.
In possession of oriental magical techniques, the “perfected ones”, the perfecti, performed strange miracles, and the sect spread itself rapidly. A thousand smaller sects were formed, all of which mangled and destroyed the Christian faith under the name of the Cathars. Secret societies were formed for the exclusive purpose of pursuing obscene objectives. Gradually the speculative and philosophical core of Manichaeism was lost, but the main characteristic that unified all the sects remained, the one point on which all the various sects agreed, their wild and fanatical hatred for Christian dogma. This hate developed to the point of a mania.
Namely The God of the Old Testament was despised. This God was an infamous evil spirit. He knew that Adam and Eve would die from the tree of knowledge, why then did he allow them to eat of it? He lied as well because our ancient ancestors did not in fact die! He was a common murderer. The guilty and the innocent both were allowed to miserably perish at Sodom and Gomorrah, etc . . . etc.
The Christians said the Good God suffered death on earth upon the cross. That was a profanation. How could a God suffer, how could he come back to earth at all when the earth was already a part of him? How could a God eat and drink, as Christ did? What about the myth concerning his body; which the Christians still ate to this day? Even if his body were as big as the Alps it should have long since been eaten up by now. And sin! Ha, ha, in what way are the sexual glands different from those of the stomach? Do we sin when we eat or drink? How can we sin by procreating? “Nemo potest peccare ab umbilico et inferius!” (No one can sin from the navel and below.)
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