The Witches Hammer

In his immortal “Witches Hammer” Sprenger stopped short of the question as to why there were relatively more women practitioners of witchcraft than men so that of 10,000 witches hardly a single man was condemned. 

There were a number of reasons for this. It was well known that there were three things that nothing could stop, either for good or evil: the tongue, especially that of a priest— (in his nature something between a man and a woman)—and that of a woman . Furthermore women were gullible, and because the Devil principally worked against faith he most especially liked to attack them. They were also susceptible to suggestion due to the fallibility of their constitutions. Above all, however, they had indecent tongues and needed to share with other women what they knew of the mala arte (dark arts). Most deeply of all, however, the reason lie in the limited faith of women, which, according to Sprenger, was proven by the etymology of the word: “dicitur enim foemina a fe et minus,quia semper minorem habet et servat fidem  fe” (“because it is said by the woman and less, because she always has a smaller faith to keep”) .[1] Sprenger widely expressed himself on the topic of the depravity and sin of women, of their jealousy and impatience, their ambition, lust and lack of faith, their inconsistency and their vengefulness. Historically all kingdoms have fallen because of women, and with melancholy resignation the sad diabolist dreamed that a world without women would be a realm of the gods.

To bolster his view of women he told the story of a man whose wife had been drowned; he looked for her upstream, for in life she always talked back and acted so much against reason in every way that naturally she would have gone upstream even in death.

Additionally he cites Sirach and St. Chrysostomos, who called marriage a constant torture, and Seneca, who said in one of his tragedies: “Woman loves or hates, for her there is no third. The weeping of a woman is a lie. She has two kinds of tears: either true pain, or deception and artifice. If a women thinks at all, she thinks badly.”

In conclusion the learned lnquisitor says:

“Out of all this it can be concluded that women are most especially susceptible to the vice of magical heresy, and that one must give thanks to the Highest Who has protected men from such vice.”

Sprenger made things easy on himself, but the issue is not so simple, despite the fact that his views on women demonstrate great knowledge. 

More to the point we should seek the reason for all this in the physical conditions women found themselves in at that time. Immediately one’s attention is drawn to the strange disease in those days called “possession”, the seed of which almost everyone in the Middle Ages had within themselves.

Possession, or demonomania, appears to have been a variation of a mental illness of an especially epileptic nature which occurred frequently in the Middle Ages. It was accompanied by clairvoyance and somnambulism. The subject was led by visions and fell into terrible paroxysms the description of which might appear to be monstrous exaggerations to modem people, if they weren’t so well documented.

 At the lowest level, where there is only a disposition toward all of this the symptoms appear to be produced voluntarily and artificially by the use of narcotics and ointments. This level probably forms the basis for all demonic phenomena associated with witches.

The witch was born as such. From the beginning everything was inverted to her. The highest was the lowest, right was left, the front was behind. The complete inversion of basic values placed the afflicted individual entirely at odds with the nature of things. These were the first symptoms of possession. The witch was not outside of herself and not tormented by this, while a man would not succumb to the Devil of his own free will.  In the paroxysm of possession this reversal of all directions could be seen perfectly as day. The body of one possessed became shaped like a sphere or wrapped up like a “ball of twine,” first he would stand up on his toes and then throw himself backwards onto his head and face in such a way that his back formed the shape of a bow. In a flash the situation would change and the one possessed would lie on his back so that his arms and legs were held up in the air “like interwoven reeds.” Their hair stood on end like it wanted to fly out in all directions. The person would always walk backwards or would continuously go around in a circle from right to left—with his face turned outward. 

An unheard of flexibility and ability to bend was a characteristic of the witch in her ecstatic state. Her limbs could intertwine like pliable rods, her whole shape could be stretched in a superhuman fashion only to shrink back again. Her specific gravity was altered while she was in the ecstatic state. Her body would not sink in water, often she became lighter than air, rose up and hovered in the air for several minutes. Often those possessed could be seen quickly scampering over the roofs of cloisters. They climbed up the walls and playfully rocked back and forth on the thinnest tree branches that even a bird would cause to break.

The bodily surface of those  persons possessed by Satan was outwardly signified by a mark or sign. These were small places on the skin, never larger than a pea; which were insensitive and without blood or life. Sometimes, but only rarely, they were red or black spots. It was also rarely seen that they were accompanied by an indentation in the skin. In general they went unseen, and were usually found on the genitals. If one stuck a needle into one of them no blood would come out, no pain would be felt, which was the case whenever any other part of the body was pricked. De Lancre, one of the most brilliant diabolists, to whom the task fell in 1609 to cleanse an entire province of witches—the Basque-country—found that around 3,000 persons were marked in this way.

Very often several such marks were found on the eyelids, back, breasts, and sometimes, but rarely, the mark actually changed places on the body.

 

*****

---

[1] Sprenger is chiefly a fabulous etymologist; “Diabolus kommt von dia,quod est duo et bolus,quod est morsellus: quia duo occidit, scilicet corpus et animam.” (“The devil comes from diameter, which is the devil, and from two, which is the morsellus, because he slays the two, namely, the body and the lives of the faithful.”)

Read Full Post »

Woman as Life and as Goddess

The people hated Christianity. It was only through the idea of Hell and its torments that they were restrained. Pix, nix, nox, vermis, flagra, vincula, pus, pudor, horror (Pitch, snow, night, worms, whips, chains, sores full of pus, a sense of shame, horror )— this was what every person who was not a Christian could expect in the place of punishment. It was a deep, terrible valley, stinking with sulfur, where the devils played catch ball with souls and efficiently used thumbscrews, Spanish boots, wheel, and the rack. The entire forlorn and indescribably filthy conception of Hell was the only means by which the church suppressed the people in the Middle Ages.

The sermons revolved almost exclusively around the Devil and the punishments of Hell, The priests supported their degraded and filthy fantasies with the help of the Old and New Testaments. The nightly gatherings of the heretics and their dark masses gave the sermons a material background, while the Jews and Arabs popularized their magical arts, taught the preparation of ointments and philters. At the same time the Gypsies were spreading poisonous solanaceen throughout Europe. The people became intoxicated with this substance which caused an epidemic of mental illnesses amidst extremely strange phenomena. All this unbalanced the weak minds of the peasants and their hysterical imaginations were richly nourished. The smallest facts grew into monstrosities, the quietest murmur became a grand spectacle, and the will-o-the-wisp radiated like the sun.

But even after all of the additional ingredients and the monstrous exaggerations have been left out, the facts remain sufficient to fascinate the psychologist and artist— intensely—and it is only for these people that I am sketching the impressions I have gained from the massive source material.

 

*****

 

Satan loved evil because he loved life. He hated good because he hated stagnation and inertia. He loved women, the eternal principle of evil, the originator of crime, the leaven of life.

From the beginning woman was the lover of Satan, and he preferred her to popularize and service his cult.

To the Babylonians and Chaldeans the night-side of life, the hidden, the cosmic secret of decay, appeared as a woman—“Mylitta”—the goddess of ruinous lust and sexual excess. She induced people to song and dance, to lust, cruelty and murder.

Among the Syrian tribes the adversarial, evil and destructive divinity was also a woman— Astarte. She was a goddess with a bull’s head and horns, the goddess of the destructiveness of war and the originator of every calamity.

The temples of the Anatolian goddess Cybele were places of strange fornication and sexual orgasm.

The Assyrian Semiramis killed her lover with her inhuman sensual lust. Maya of the Indians was the goddess of deception and lies, she was that which made reality inaccessible to the human eye.

To the Iranian peoples the evil devas represented all the feminine virtues: untruth, deception, and the pollution of the purely created souls of men.

Among the Greeks the dark demons of death emerged from the womb of Gaia, and everything frightful and gruesome was dedicated to the terrible Hecate. She traveled by night through the air in the company of the Lamien, causing terrifying dreams and nightmares. She was the cruel mother of the Scylla and the daughter of Night. She drove men to madness with a torch in one hand and a sword in the other surrounded by large black dogs.[1]

The demons the Romans feared most were the Strigas. “With a loathsome shape, with a big head, with the beak of a bird of prey and sharp talons she came by night to suck the blood of children, to eat their bone marrow and to gobble up their entrails and then to fly off into the air.” It’s known that the witches of the Middle Ages were accused of all this as well.

The most terrifying demons of antiquity were always female. They were the demons of death, madness, debauchery, possession, crime, of nocturnal horror, and of spectral  terror. She was Lilith, the succubus, who annihilated men in her  destructive frenzy of lust, and as Lady Holda she was the leader of the Wild Hunt, the dark queen in whose company the witches fared forth to their nocturnal Devil’s mass. She was the landlady in the Hörselberge and who held her evil Sabbath there with her witches, the adroit spinners, who drew off the yarn of catastrophe from the spindle.

Beside this night-side of the feminine the people of antiquity also worshipped the fertility and life-giving power of woman. But it was always the man who had to protect life from the deceitfulness and the destructive desire in woman. Man was always seen as the real mother of life.

The Middle Ages only acknowledged the evil woman and personified her in Satan.

The worship of the virgin Mary, of which many blue stockings proclaimed, had an entirely different basis. The dogma of the immaculate conception was fought with great difficulty, and the entire cult had a very dry and dogmatic consideration as its background. Man needed the dogma, in order to not punish the prophets for lying; in any case the worship of the virgin first began in the 12^th to 13^th centuries, in the establishment of love’s court, and appeared to originate from out of very dubious grounds. The virgin was revealed to the cavalier in ecstatic sensual orgies.

Peter d’Amiani relates, that the virgin was so beautiful, that God himself burned with his lust for her, and he prized her very tastefully. O ventor diffusior coelis, terries amplior, capacitor elementis. (What a diffusion of heaven, earth and larger, more capable elements) In the Psalterium minus beatae Mariae virginis, which Saint Bonaventura wrote down, the first psalm began: Universas enim foeminas vincis pulchritudine carnis.(The Psalter, as the Blessed Virgin Mary, all women have the beauty of the flesh.) By the way, one can see how this portrayal often touches upon lewdness.

But it was in this that the medieval hatred of women was demonstrated. This was not just with the principle of evil itself. Only the breasts remain of the original feminine nature of Satan, breasts that hang down to the stomach like two sacks of flour. By and by Satan became entirely masculine and woman was degraded to a vile slave of Satan, an infamous temptress who led souls to Satan, a filthy concubine, who had to acquiesce to the sterile desires of the incubus with no will of her own.

While the magician commanded the prince of darkness and was able to force him to reveal the most secret forces of nature, the witch always remained merely an obedient handmaiden who learned how to practice the arts of destruction only through experience and otherwise gained nothing from their covenant.

The army of witches was magnificently disciplined and maintained in the strictest obedience. They were often beaten by the devils when they didn’t carry out a sufficient amount of evil acts, and many a witch moaned heavily under the boundless lust of their masters.

 

*****

---

[1] She was later transformed into the moon goddess Diana; after that the first diabolical witch appeared in the retinue of Diana.

Read Full Post »

The Cathars

With resignation the Cathars agreed to the idea that matter was evil, that everything that originated through evolution, that had its existence due to sexual activity and propagation, belonged to the Prince of Darkness.

The people completely shared this opinion. The church itself had actually Satanized the world with its hatred of instinct and nature, and the people understood nothing of the overly refined ideas with which the church attempted to salvage some moral freedom. To the people all the theorems about evil being mere negation, all the sophistries about sin and the cause of its origin seemed foreign. All of that was seen as an internal church affair over which a few church fathers exercised their minds. For the people, as well as for the entire practice of Christianity, there existed a fully developed dualism between what was worldly and what was heavenly. This was evil per se, and that was good.

And whether evil had become evil over time, or whether it had existed from the beginning as a second principle—no one really cared.

People in the Middle Ages knew next to nothing about God. He appeared in sculptures after the middle of the 13th century, usually at the side of his son, whom the theologians had abandoned. The entire Middle Ages knew only one religion, one fear, and one hope—Satan.

Evil demons flowed around people on all sides “as if someone is submerged in the sea and surrounded above and below by water.” Sometimes they surrounded them “like a dome so tight there was no space between them,” “The throng of demons is as great as the atoms of the sun; in every corner of life a demon is hiding. Humans are at no time, and in no place, safe from them,” said the Cistercian abbot Richalmus ( 1220).

Satan was the only true and sole governor of the earth and of mankind. He was no servant, no “ape” of God, as Irenaeus hatefully called him, but rather a God from the beginning of the cosmos whose sphere of power reached just as far as the white, indolent God, for it was He who taught the children of the light God how to enter ecstatic states, to produce stigmata, it was He who gave the saints the idea of neutralizing the evil miracle by means of a “choc en retour” (magical link). He alone was the father of life, propagation, evolution and the eternal return.

It was not evil, but rather good, that was a “negation”. The good was a negation of passion, through which everything had its origin, for every passion had its demonic aspect. Good was the negation of life, for all life was evil.

Satan was what was positive, the eternal in and of itself. He was the God of the brain; he governed the immeasurable realm of thoughts, which continually overthrew the law and shattered its tablets; he excited the curiosity to explain hidden things, to interpret the runes of the night; he gave the criminal courage to destroy the happiness of many thousands of people in order that something new might arise; he spurred on evil desires that rooted up the earth in a voracious appetite for new conditions of existence, moved  the most remote distances closer, dragged heaven down to earth and shook earthly kingdoms like dice. 

Persecuted, destroyed, he always emerged anew from his own ashes more powerful and more beautiful than before, and  as the eternally conquered, still remained the eternal conqueror. A thousand times the church believed it had destroyed him, and in so doing was itself Satanized and degraded—ruined in its head and limbs.

For Satan was the eternally evil; and the eternally evil was life.

Everything which originated in greatness originated contrary to the good God’s law as a raging negation of negation. The defiance of e pur si muove (“that which moves”) was evil, the curiosity that drove Columbus to unknown lands was evil, the mother of the chemical sciences was evil, and all misfortune were ascribed to the viewing of the stars—bad weather, widespread death, and famine.

Good was the pride of Gregory the Great who boasted of his own shameless stupidity and even forbade the study of grammar to the clerics. Good was the charming simplicity of St. Francis of Assisi, who all day long would imitate the braying of the donkeys that stood around the manger of the Savior—ad maiorem Dei gloriam (to the greater glory of God). Good was man’s killing of his own will in each and every tiny action to the point of life being merely a stupid Imitatio (imitation).

In the name of Satan Nietzsche taught the revaluation of all values, in his name the anarchist dreamed of the reformation of the laws of the world, in his name artists created works which could only be read or seen in secret. But by God’s grace a contemptible stupidity ruled the vast masses of the children of the “light,” for whom the only law of existence—“evolution” was an offence and a crime. Evolution in religion was a devilish heresy, evolution in art was a sign of weak- mindedness, evolution in politics was treason and evolution in life was a legally punishable perversion.

 

*****

 

Satan in the history of human evolution was ipse philosophus, daemon, heros et omnia (the Philosopher himself, a devil, the hero, and all); the father of the sciences, the torch that shone down into the most secret depths of human life, the despairing brooder who always had to draw his circle anew after it has been destroyed by stupidity, the lawless and the adversary.

This Satan was Samyasa, the Father—the magician, the mathematician, like all those are called who have dealings with the secret sciences. He was only accessible to a few. He was a dark aristocrat who only revealed his mysteries to a few—to an Agrippa, Paracelsus, Dee, van Helmont. He only allowed himself to be conjured by the most powerful, while he sent the hordes of his dishonest servants to the earth to enflame human passions; to sow hatred and criminality, to teach arrogance and pride to humans, to cause the human race to become enraged so that the blood washed away all care and consideration and awakened the beast, which, in order to satisfy its lusts, did not shrink back from any crimes.

 In the realm of the Satanic only one principle was valid: à rebours, (the reversal), of all values which were sanctified by law.

And the servants of Satan—as Samyasa came to earth, while he, Lucifer, the bringer of light, the Paraclete of humanity, practiced the “black” arts in locked laboratories together with the magicians.

The servants of Satan soon made themselves the masters of the earth.

It wasn’t difficult. The people had remained entirely pagan in their hearts. But the people were also desperate, desperate to the point of madness. They hated Christianity and they hated the crucified one, “the liar”, “who promised salvation and provided only torment.”[1] But above all, the people hated the church, the faithless, treacherous, licentious and malicious church that, with insatiable avarice, extorted the last penny from the peasant and the last piece of land from the noble by means of excommunication, interdict and banns.

They despised the bishops who in their quarreling accused each other of “adultery, whore mongering and perjury.”[2]  The synods of Tours and Agde attempted in vain to institute taxation against the measureless drunkenness of the clerics; to at least restrict it to the extent that the priests would not be seen falling over drunk at High Mass. Since the 10th century bishops were made to swear before their consecration that they had abstained from the following pleasures which were especially widespread. Pro arsenochita, qu. C. cum masculo; pro ancilla Deo sacrata, quae a Francis Nonnata dictur; pro quatuor pedes et pro muliere—but only muliere viro alio coniuncta, aut si coniugem habuit ex alio viro quod Graecis dicitur deuterogamia . Arsenochita for art. (copulation with a man, or a dedicated servant of God, with a Franciscan nun, with quadrupeds, the woman of another man or the wife of another man.)(Baluz. Cap. ll, append. p. 1372)

And just how far gone Christian love was, how kind and merciful it was, was shown by a quite characteristic, and in no way unusual bull issued by Clement VI against Louis V on the 13th of April 1346. In this document divine power was invoked to strike Louis with the power of God’s right hand, to pursue him (Louis) in such a way that he might fall into an unknown trap; he was cursed when he entered; he was cursed when he left. May God send the spirit of deception, error and foolishness over him. May he be consumed by the fire from heaven. After this the earth was also called upon that it might rise up and swallow him, it goes on: “may his children also be hunted down by their estates and fall into the hands of their enemies before the eyes of their very own father.”

In this age of repeated prohibitions against priests visiting drinking establishments, appearing before the altar drunk, carrying on with unnatural forms of fornication, in this time when—as the preamble to the church council says—“Sacrilege is piled up over our heads, our crimes are stacked to heaven, whore mongering and adultery, Godlessness and murder wash over us and kinsmen kill each other”—in this time it was not all that hard for the servants of the Devil to renounce everything divine and holy, to sully it, and to mock its impotence in the most perverse orgies. It is easily understood why the people were not able to separate the person from the object, and that they took every opportunity to attack the sacraments and to desecrate the church with filth and fornication.

 

*****

---

[1] Quoted from the rite of the Albigensian church.

[2] Gregory of Tours VIII.7.

Read Full Post »

An Insane Population Ruled by an Insane King

Then came the time when it appeared that all of humanity was going to go insane. A good fourth of Europe died out as a result of the plague that broke out in 1347 and lasted sixteen months. After the plague came famine, people ate vermin and dogs, “chair et trippes” (“human flesh and entrails”). Then followed another epidemic and again famine. Everybody wandered around aimlessly, no one worked anymore, they just waited for death in unrelenting despair. 

“fuyons”—(According to the Journal of the Bourgeois), the country people cried out:—“aux bois avec les bêtes fauves. Adieu les femmes et les enfants. Faisons le pis que nous pourrons. Remettons nous en la main du Diable.” (“Flee to the woods with wild beasts. Farewell to the women and children. Let’s do the worst that we can. Let’s put ourselves into the hands of the Devil !”)

Eight hundred thousand insane flagellants marched through all of France, the entire population was infected by the epileptic plague, and began to dance and as they faced certain death an orgiastic frenzy ensued that tore down every inhibition.

This insane population was ruled by an insane king.

In France there was the poor idiot Charles VI, who had lost what remained of his mind in wild orgies at the papal court in Avignon. In Bohemia there was Emperor Wenceslaus, whom no one had ever seen sober, a delirious madman in whose presence no one could be sure of his own life. In Portugal there was the dark maniac Dom Pedro, who went insane from his longing for his dead wife. Pope Benedict XIII was suspended from his office and the Romans raged against the false pope, Boniface.

People renounced the joys of heaven but in their ecstatic orgies could not forget the misery in their hearts. “Rien ne m’est plus plus ne m’est rien!” (“Nothing means anything to me anymore; things mean nothing to me!”) These desperate words of the widow of the murdered duke of Orleans appeared to have been the motto of the entire century,

There was no longer a king—and worse—no pope either. Pierre aux Boeufs read the royal letters to the assembled people in Paris which stated that from now on they did not have to obey any pope, either one of them. The ambassadors of the pope were drug through the streets in papal tiaras as the people mocked them and to the great delight of the people a monk cried: “quod anum sordidissimae  omasariae osculari mallet quam os Petri.” (“It is better to kiss the ass of an old woman than to kiss the mouth of Peter!”)

Magic came to unbelievable honor. Satan became popular and all the arts of sorcery enjoyed great favor. The witch-masters of every nation gathered in front of the palace of the king and conjured demons by which the king was possessed. The strangest herbs brought to Europe by the Gypsies were brewed in giant cauldrons. The poor king enjoyed himself with the emerald magical book. Pearls were ground down and the costly dust was given to magicians so that they might appease the Devil. The entire population, even the clerics, enthusiastically took part in these conjurations. Nicolas Flannel built enormous laboratories in order to manufacture gold—in the middle of Paris right next to the church of St. James.— The mixers of poisons did glorious business in the courts of the dukes and in the meantime the people were performing obscene dances on the mountaintops to the honor of the great Prince of Darkness.

The people no longer feared Satan, they loved him. He was even imitated in people’s dress. Women wore horns on their heads and shamelessly showed their naked breasts and lasciviously revealed their bellies.

Men’s clothing was very tight on their bodies like a stocking and was embroidered with magical signs. Their boots were tipped with pointed claws and their sexual organ was packed in a pouch so it would be readily visible.

Women’s chairs were church pews and their beds had the form of a confessional and they dressed themselves in precious material from the priest’s vestments.

Now, the time had come. In an instant the powerful sects of Satan worshippers rose up and blossomed mightily. From France they spread out over the entire world and ceaselessly grew. There was not a single village that didn’t have a loyal and dedicated Satanic congregation which committed countless crimes and which celebrated obscene orgies to the honor of Satan by night.

 

Read Full Post »

Ius primae noctis (the right of the first night)

The church sank even deeper. Benedict Xl, the successor of Boniface, shot off a raging bull of excommunication on the seventh of June, and by the fourth of July he was dead.

His death now completely delivered the church over to Philipp the Fair. Philipp made the archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Gott, pope—under strict restrictions which he had to swear to.

The new pope, Clement IV, begin his glorious reign with an inspection trip during which he stole and robbed wherever he could and ruined the entire body of French clerics. His mistress, Brunissende Talleyrand de Perigord, cost him more than all the Crusades combined.

But the tenth of the income of the church that Clement turned over to Philipp was not enough for the king. The pope gave him the Jewish prize. The operation was quickly accomplished. Under the protection of the pope the king reduced the weight of the coins and increased their value. An unprecedented confusion arose, and an uprising ensued during which the king  hung a couple hundred of the most vocal protestors on posts around Paris.

But what the pope had granted was not enough. The king wanted to have more: Pope Boniface was supposed to have been put on trial on the charge of heresy. That was a fatal move. If Boniface was a heretic, then so too were his cardinals, and Clement had been selected from among them, consequently his own election would be invalidated.

Clement coiled like a snake. He sought to curry the favor of the king by electing new cardinals whereby the election of all future popes would be under the control of the king. He withdrew the bulls of Boniface VIII which had ascribed all  sorts of sacrilege to the king. He made Philipp’s son the king of Navarra and his brother Charles of Valois was named chief of the crusading knights.

Still it was not enough! The trial against Boniface was postponed, but the pope had to deliver the Order of the Knights Templar to the king.

The destruction of this order and the trial that was subsequently opened against Pope Boniface VIII and the vulgar prostitution of the popes in Avignon sent the people into a terrible rage.

Satan, who had at first only revealed his works through magicians and only lived in a few secret societies, had now become the only God. The Manichean traditions came into abundant fruition, his power ascended to immeasurable heights.

Everything one could not expect to be given by God was now desired from Satan. God had withheld all his gifts for the afterlife; he delivered nothing but torments in this world.

In all this Satan was to help out. He alone could give power to the weak, honor to the despised, vengeance to the afflicted, return love to lovers. He alone was the Father and the god of the poor, the deceived and despised.

He was everywhere, in every house, he encountered the people at every turn. He was even sold in sealed bottles in the marketplace and in the meantime he had increased his numbers fabulously. According to Bodinus there was a total of 72 princes in Hell and 7,405,926 common devils.

Charges rained down. The bishop of Troyes, Guichard, who had cursed Philipp’s wife with a waxen image into which he stuck nails, was burned. Philipp’s daughter- in-law, Marguerite, was charged with sorcery and thrown into a subterranean hole. . . His second daughter-in-law, Jeanne, was strangled and the third, Blanche, was raped and impregnated while in a dungeon by the hangman’s assistant.

There followed a monstrous series of crimes. The wife of the king was poisoned; Philipp the Fair received poison from his ministers and the count of Flanders from his own son.

And all this happened again under Philipp’s son, Louis X.

Enguerrand de Marigny was hanged because his wife wanted to bewitch the king. Pierre de Latilly, bishop of Chalons, was broken on the wheel because he probably caused the death of Philipp the Fair with sorcery, the same with Raoul de Presles, advocatus praecipuus,  (an attorney}, who had every single bone broken during torture.

Those were glorious times! Satan rubbed his hands together over the tremendous harvest.

Isabeau, the daughter of Philipp the Fair, single handedly ripped out the eyes of Spencer, the lover of her husband, King Edward II of England. She watched with pleasure as an obscene operation was carried out on him. When that didn’t help and the king was not able to give up his pederasty, she received the following Pythic response to her request to the Bishop Hereford as to what she should do about the king: Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est. Since the bishop did not place any comma in the sentence, the queen put one after occidere, instead of behind nolite, and the king was then insidiously murdered by the cronies of his tender wife, Here I have only picked a few mild examples.

 

*****

 

“Gold,” said Christopher Columbus in a letter to Ferdinand after Columbus’ fourth voyage, “is a magnificent thing. With gold treasures can be formed. With gold one can do whatever one wishes in the world. With gold one can even get souls into paradise.”

Yes! Gold was needed, and around the year 1300 gold became the new God. The church turned it into dead matter—into crosses, reliquaries, and chalices. Important people used gold for jewelry and for luxury. There was simply no more gold anymore. Richard the Lionhearted even wanted to sell London, but no one had the gold: Everyone threw themselves into the search for gold with an enthusiastic zeal. Raymond Lully, Nicolas Flamel and, Helmont appeared to have been successful in the manufacture of gold, but it continually evaporated.

The people most especially had to have gold at any price. The prince of the earth possessed it, he hoarded it, and he distributed it as well—but in exchange for it he wanted one’s soul. Well now, that was a fatal mistake.

 But the Jews had gold! The Jews, those unclean animals who were linked to the Devil, they knew where the gold was. And so the Jews were set upon, burned and robbed—but their gold was not sufficient. Nothing helped, and people had to turn to the Devil.

And gold became the true Antichrist. Satan had turned himself into gold and had made the church into a bought-off whore, the government into a band of counterfeiters, the judges into scoundrels, the priests into shameless profiteers, the purest women into prostitutes and the most upright convictions into the most infamous depravity.

The Templars had gold and they were destroyed, the church had gold and it was confiscated, the Jews had gold and they were burned.

The nobles, made desperate by the low standard of the coin, set upon the peasants and took everything from them, and if they didn’t have any more then hot coals were put under their feet. Naturally the peasants had buried their gold, since they didn’t want to give it up.

And the people, mad with desperation, gave itself over to bestial acts, committed shocking outrages and were once again struck down to the ground.

During the time of Louis the Pious hoards of peasants marauded throughout France killing and plundering. They massacred the priests and befouled the sacraments—always the same thing over and over!—until they were eventually scattered and destroyed “quasi canes rabidi passim detruncati” (“hacked like rabid dogs”), as Nangis says with grim satisfaction.

After a generation there was another terrible peasant uprising. Again it was suppressed and the peasants were hanged after horrible tortures: “illic viginti, illic triginta secundum plus et minus suspendens in patibulis et arboribus. . .” (“There were twenty or thirty, more or less, hanging from the gallows and in the trees .. .”).

The worst and most violent uprisings took place in the Languedoc. In 1381 the peasants threw themselves on the nobles and priests. They had quite an entertaining time with the priests. Prière de la Bruyère, the chief of the bands, had their fingers hacked off, their tonsured scalps ripped off, and then had them burned à petit feu (on the lesser fire). And it was very bad: “L’on craignoit que toute la gentilesse ne perit!” (“It is feared that all kindness will perish!”), said Froissart. The peasants were paying the nobles back for centuries of torments, for all the beatings and the hunger and the blood-sucking of the nobles.

Again the people were suppressed with the most gruesome bestiality. But the nobles were a bit more refined in the techniques of their tortures than the peasants had been.

The peasants had to give themselves over to the Devil. He alone had compassion for them, he alone helped them find a few hours of happiness, for he alone gave them the means to avenge themselves on the nobles who did not even consider them to be human.

For the torments with which the nobles inflicted on the peasants were manifold and absolved a portion of their sins while they were still here on earth.

The famous Hugo of Guisay made it fashionable to kick peasants and make them bark like dogs.

Another traditional pastime was to throw a peasant into a barrel normally used to prepare dough. Then the barrel was tipped over and his wife was dragged over—the barrel and raped. And it was even thought more fun if a child was present. A cat was tied to the child’s leg with a short string. The more the child screamed, the wilder the cat would become.

And now picture this: The peasant crawls out of the barrel, he is completely covered in flour and looks like the most ridiculous clown in the world, his wife is crying and trembling from head to toe, the child is streaming with blood, all ripped up by the cat!

Ius primae noctis  (The right of the first night) was a nice  invention to alleviate the boredom of the nobles.

As far as sexual enjoyment was concerned, the nobleman was rather blasé. The divine show involved the observation of the distress of the cocu (cuckold)! And if he became unruly, God, how hilarious his screams were when he was beaten! If he didn’t quiet down after this, he would be hanged.

Those were the three main pleasures of the nobles. For the first they laughed, for the second they wept from laughter, and for the third —observing the grimaces of the hanged man—they burst with joy.

And for all this the people were to be God fearing!

 

*****

Read Full Post »

Pope Boniface VIII- the most terrible Father

The hatred of the Cathars for the church was terrible.  Rome was a den of murderers, Rome was the apocalyptic whore written about in the Book of revelation . . . Now, in this they were not far off. They derided and killed the priests wherever they could catch them, used the holy implements for obscene purposes, and a large part of their ritual was only a parody of the Catholic cult.

In their gatherings, their parody of the Mass, the Sabbath was already completely set out, right down to the smallest detail. In the later Sabbath hardly any additional elements are found, with the possible exception of a higher level of ecstasy brought about through artificial means by the consuming of so called narcotic materials.

Upon induction every novice had to denounce all Catholic belief, spit on the cross, renounce baptism and unction. After this he would be kissed by the whole congregation and hands were laid upon his head.

The church was powerless against this sect which was growing with tremendous speed. It was magnificently organized, had a powerful pope in Toulouse and held a council in Syon. The inhabitants of Languedoc kicked the priests, ridiculed them as they sang their masses, ripped their vestments off and put them on their wives. The greatest pleasure, however, was throwing the host into manure, breaking the legs of Christ, and soiling him with the most unbelievable filth. “Hugofaber iuxta altare purgavit ventrem et in contemptum Dei cum palla altaris tersit posterior sua”. (“The Hugofaber took the sanctified altar cloth and wiped it on his belly as a way of insulting  a God that was not his own,”) recounts a chronicle about one of these fanatics.

Now a Crusade against these heretics began to be preached. St. Dominic, the creator of the Holy Inquisition, was charged with conducting the campaign. He, the indefatigable weeper, who poured out streams of tears while praying, became one of the most gruesome executioners world history has ever known. At the head of the crusade stood Count Simon de Montfort, the most Christian of all the princes, who were otherwise almost all Cathars.

And then a horrendous massacre began.

During the conquest of Bériers 60,000 people were cut down. It was all the same if they were Christian or Cathar: “Caedite omnes, novit enim  Deus, qui stunt eius!” (“Kill them all, for God knows who are his!”) cried the abbot of Citeaux when asked whether the Christians should be spared. He himself confessed to Pope Innocent III that he was only able to kill twenty thousand. When the inhabitants fled into the woods and mountains, only Carcassonne remained. But no one dared defend Carcassonne. Hundreds were hanged and five hundred burned.

The Albigensians scattered and fled to the fortresses of the nobles. But one after the other was conquered and the church allowed the kindness of the savior shine in its fullest brilliance.

 At the conquest of the fortress of Minerva it was promised that those who repented would be allowed to live. Nevertheless they were burned: “S’il ment il n’aura que ce qu’il mérite, s’il veut réellement se convertir, le fen expira ses péches!” (“If he lies, he will get what he deserves, if the converts to the true faith, the fire will extinguish his sin!”) This was the standard formula used in this all too common procedure.

The knights of the Holy Spirit murdered, hanged, burned and broke on the wheel,  not just individuals, but hundreds and thousands of people. This was done at Lavour to a few hundred, “avec une joie extreme”,  (“With an extreme joy!”) Twelve thousand at Maurillac and Toulouse “avec une joie indicible” (“with an unspeakable joy.”)

The entire south was destroyed, and not a single stone remained standing. All of the fortresses were demolished, all the counts and barons were hanged or burned, and all the noble ladies were stoned out of gallantry.

The church believed it had triumphed. But never had Satan felt more powerful than in that moment. Only the external form of his church had been destroyed, but what did the visible form mean to him? The people remained loyal to him in their hearts. They crept into  subterranean catacombs, hid in mountain valleys, and never before had they worshipped him as ardently or as criminally as they did then after the fall of anti-Christian Toulouse.

Scarcely had the last Albigensian finished spitting out his venomous blasphemy against the kind and beardless youth [Jesus] as he burned on the stake, before the new priestess of Satan proudly and powerfully raised her terrible head—the witch.

 

*****

 

First of all, however, the ground had to be thoroughly prepared. As many poisonous seeds as possible had to spring up in order that the epidemic could spread out as quickly as possible.

An old allegory recounts how Satan once decided to take a wife in order to increase his kind. He had slept with Godlessness and conceived seven daughters with her. When these had grown up he married them off to mankind. The eldest, Pride, he gave to the powerful of the earth, Greed to the rich in gold, Infidelity to the common people, Hypocrisy to the priests, Envy to the artists (at that time there were no critics), and Vanity he gave to women. The seventh daughter, Fornication, alone was held back. Satan wouldn’t give his dearest daughter to anyone in particular, but instead kept her for everyone to enjoy in common.

And it appeared that in no other time period were Satan’s offspring more recklessly exalted than at the end of the hysterical l3th century.

Hysterical epilepsy was as common then as consumption is today. Almost everybody was a little bit leprous, and the leper’s extraordinary greed for sexual satisfaction is well known. The succubi and incubi destroyed people with weak blood. Women were seen everywhere who suddenly fell down, pulled up their skirts and turned to giving themselves sexual pleasure. This sexual hysteria was also nourished by the Albigensian theory, which by now was deeply ingrained in the popular mind: Nemo potest  peccare ab umbilico et inferius. (There is no sin from the navel and below.)

Namely it was the priests, those eternally unsatisfied servants of God, who made more than generous use of this theory and who developed it further to turn the cloisters into dens of pestilence.

“To kill sin by means of sin!”

That was the great principle behind the sexual orgies of the priests, negation of the individual and the death of the will! Those who sacrificed themselves became divine to the extent that they could no longer commit any sin. The upper part of the body had become so divine that it no  longer knew what the lower part wa s doing.

The priests went even further. They taught that to the saint every act was holy. The priest sanctified all the women who sinned with him. This theory was so common that the people in Spain and France called the nuns “consecrated ones,” i.e. that they were known as the mistresses of the priests.

Under the influence of this doctrine the church confronted its complete collapse. In his visitation diaries the Franciscan Eude Rigaud documented proof of horrendous corruption within the monasteries and the reports of St. Bertin are overflowing with such hair-raising accounts about monastic life that in comparison to them the sodomy which was so common in the Middle Ages appeared to be an innocent game.

The church was boundlessly despised, mocked and scorned, but the deathblow was given to it by Philipp the Fair. First he utterly destroyed at the stump what little bit of authority the church still had with the people.

In the midst of the people, who were dying of hunger, it was only the church that owned immense wealth. The monarchies were breaking up due to a lack of money in a time when every king had to be a counterfeiter of coins. In Germany the bishop was also a prince who could raise armies, in England the church owned half of the entire land and it was the same in France.

It became a popular idea to confiscate the church. Edward I incited soldiers against the priests and forbade the judges to hear their complaints. Philipp the Fair imperiously demanded a tenth of their enormous income.

On the throne of St. Peter at the time there sat a perjured lawyer who had attained a sad popularity by means of very disreputable practices. He was a savage atheist who depraved the church with his filthy blasphemies, le père très fecond, Pope Boniface VIII.(“the most terrible father”)

The church could be despised and mocked as much as one wanted—even the pope did this—but to require a tenth of its income, that would not do. The pope released bull after bull against Philipp the Fair. In response to these the pope received an answer from Nogaret, Philipp’s chancellor, which among other things contained the following gem: “Sedet in cathedra beati Petri mendaciorum magister, faciens se, cum sit omnifario maleficus, Bonifacium nominari.” (“He sits in the chair of St. Peter, the master of lies, making himself, in every respect a wizard named Boniface.”)

 The pope raged. Nogaret and Sciarra` de Colonna traveled to Rome in order to hand over the answer in person. The 80 year-old man was derided, insulted with the most offensive words, and when he dared to speak up; the representative of Christ was slapped across the face with the iron gauntlet of Nogaret.

But this was too much for the people. It liberated the pope, who in the meantime had gone insane. The pope gave the people absolution for all their sins, except for sacrilege or stealing from the church and died possessed by the Devil.

“You will ascend to the throne like a fox, you will reign like a lion, you will die like a dog,” his predecessor, Pope Celestine, had said of him.

Read Full Post »

The Bogomils in Southern France

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.)

Read Full Post »

The Heresy of Abelard

During this time it was considered a disgrace for any gentleman to be without lands. The land was not for purchase. It was indivisible like a person and had to remain undivided. It got passed on to the eldest son.

But what about the other children? Now that was what the church was there for. The temple of God became the synagogue of Satan so the good fathers could make use of their filthiest passions to engender the most fertile of evils. The countless children of the Barons and Dukes became abbots and bishops. The people were called together and told to choose or else… The people never desired the “or else” so they chose.

Atto de Veciel tells how the countless sheep elected a little child of six years to the highest ministry. The child climbed onto a chair, prattled a couple of sentences from the catechism and was proclaimed a bishop. At times a child would forget the sentences, and then a dove would suddenly land on its head and help the people to choose. Behold! That was even more favorable. The Holy Spirit itself had chosen. At the same time the worthy successors to St. Peter scandalized the entire world. Two women made their lovers into popes. The son of a Jew and a twelve year old boy decided over the fate of Christendom.

The good father of sin was satisfied. He knew that now his reign was established. The church took stock of itself.

“Reform the church!” screamed the entire world.

Pope Gregory VII began the reformation. Woman, oh ever and again it was the woman, whom had to be destroyed within the church. With wild fanatical zeal the monk pope proclaimed the requirement of celibacy.  He himself was a monk and incited the other monks against the worldly priests. The monks threw their burning torches underneath the people and a horrible terror began. The destructive instinct of the people, that eternally hungry beast, was unleashed without bounds.

Had there ever been a better opportunity for the people to avenge themselves on the blood suckers that raged against them a thousand times worse than the castle lords themselves? The people threw themselves upon the priests, who with stiff necked despair refused to give up their wives. They drove them away from the altars, beat them, mutilated them or tore them to pieces in the cathedrals. The people trampled them with their feet, soiled them, spit on those things that a short time ago they had revered as holy.

They drank the Holy Wine after mixing it with urine and threw the consecrated host to the four winds. The power of the priest was broken. The people no longer believed them to be the representatives of God. They had no power or authority. The monks and the pope ruled the world.

Dunstan permitted the concubine of an English king to be mutilated. Pope Gregory VII rewarded an abbot with a bishopric after the abbot had a monk castrated. The theologian Manegeld openly taught that married priests should be killed.

Nature was raped; the church pushed the woman away in disgust as an unclean animal, a serpent of Satan, as eternal death incarnate. The fanatical madman Pietro Damiani roamed throughout Italy and in countless sermons always renewed his attacks on woman.

“C’est ả vous que je mảdresse, e’cume de paradis, amorce de Satan, poison des âmes, glaive des coeurs, huppes, bijoux, chouettes, louves, sangaues insatiables…” (“I am talking to you, scum of paradise, bait of Satan, poison of the soul, spear of the heart, all dressed up with jewels, you little chicks, she-wolves, insatiable bloodsuckers…”)

The holy doctors declared that man should distance himself from woman. The world was populated enough and going to perish soon. Peter of Lombardy professed that marriage was a sin, at least a venial sin.

 

*****

 

The church was happily finished with nature. The hypocritical priest was torn away from his wife and began to perpetrate unmentionable sexual obscenities. His marriage was dissolved and now he began to rape and put horns on his male sheep. But, as previously mentioned, celibacy became the standard practice everywhere.

Then the church had to deal with logic and reason. Before this man had been forbidden to seek after the nature of God, now man was forbidden above all else to seek after the physical application of logic and reason.

“Every word corresponds to an idea and every idea is the essence of true reality. Thus it follows that grammar is logic and logic is the true science.”

With that logic and reason were settled. If an idea was the essence of true reality, then man didn’t need to see physical things at all, didn’t need to learn about them, didn’t need to observe them. Man perceived the world through his thoughts in the same way he perceived truth and reality. Everything was in his mind. Ideas were the ultimate reality.

Man gave up thinking about the physical world and turned with enthusiasm to some fragments of Aristotle that Harun al Rashid had translated into Arabic. Then they commented on poor Aristotle, wrote long commentaries on the commentaries. They mutilated the fragments, made the pagan into a Christian, and by splitting hairs showed how he proved the divinity of Christ and his martyrdom. The entire structure of Christian doctrine was found to originate from Aristotle and be based on his philosophy.

An airhead from Avicenna became the prince of thinkers and both great church doctors became sterile mules. Thomas Aquinas brooded over the psychology of the angels and Duns Scotus discovered the marvelous “machine cogitationis” (thinking machine).

If existence is a dream, then words are things! Beautiful! Yet even more: every combination of words represents combinations of things and their realities. Setting words together in certain sequences is called perception of reality. This logical sequence of associated words gives us the thinking machine, gives thought without thinking. Thus concluded the church.

Satan—as philosopher, he who had created the most unfathomable philosophical systems of the orient, he who delighted in the poetic subtleties of Plato, he who split the most competent heads of the good God with his Manichean heresies, smiled evilly and was amused at this child’s play.

“But how is it,” he asked with a sly wink of an eye to the church doctors, “How is it when a farmer pulls a swine to the market? What is doing the pulling? The farmer or the rope?”

An entire century painfully racked its brains over this question. Opinions were divided and the most competent athletes of lunacy could not resolve the question. The thinking machine had destroyed thought and the ability to think. The church exhaled in relief. But in that moment, just as the church thought it could proceed calmly and peacefully in its business of pulling the hide over the ears of the farmer, a fearful storm was raised.

Abelard dared utter a little, tiny thought, “The idea is not real. Abstraction is not reality.”

He was as beautiful and majestic as a god, according to the statement of a chronicler of the time. There was no woman in France that could resist him. He was extraordinarily learned for his time with a brilliant gift of eloquence. Abelard began to speak out as a man of men. He developed and popularized the most appalling jumble of church doctrines and came to surprising and new conclusions that threw the old doctrines of the church into the trash heap.

Anselmus had to believe in order to know. Now Abelard had to prove and understand before he could believe. The crime was not in the deed itself, but in the intention. Consequently there were no sins that came out of ignorance or habit. What was original sin? No sin at all, only a punishment. But what of the entire work of salvation? That was an act of love. God wanted to establish the law of love and for that reason he sent his son to earth.

That was a terrible heresy for the time, but Abelard’s philosophy spread with an unusual swiftness over entire Europe. The prime intelligencia of his time sat at his feet, from which later emerged two popes, twenty cardinals and fifty bishops. This new churchly philosophy penetrated into the populace. Abelard taught unceasingly that everyone had to interpret divinity according to their own understanding. With one stroke the spiritual power of the church was broken. All the people began to discuss sacred things. They began to form their own conclusions. Great and small, educated and uneducated, even little children violated the sacred sanctuary and the secrets of the church.

St. Bernard of Clairvoux lamented in his denunciation of Abelard, “Irredetur simplicium fides, eviscerantur arcana Dei, quaestiones de altissimus rebus temerarie ventilantur.” (“The faith of the morally simple people is derided; the secrets of God eviscerated and questions concerning the highest things are frivolously discussed.”)

Read Full Post »

The Church during the First Millenium

In this time of mass lunacy an infectious hysteria spread with racing rapidity over the earth and convulsed the people in thousands of various ways. It was a time when people were always and eternally awaiting the end of the earth and lived in wildest despair for the coming Day of Judgment. They awaited the Paraclete, the triune Satan, the Antichrist, because the time for his dominion was very near.

“In brevi tempore saeviet”, said Cyprian. (“He shall rage for a short time.”)

Lactanius said, “The time is already here.”

They envisioned the most curious things about this Antichrist. He would be a man of sins, a son of the corrupt, the lawless, the adversary and a criminal. He would be begotten from the union of a pope and a succubus, or else, “immundissima meretrice et crudelissimo neblulone” (“by a filthy whore and a good for nothing.”). Sin was his element. He would be great in sin, greater even than Christ was in virtue. Everything that Christ taught would be overthrown, every sin raised to a virtue. Christ had humbled himself, but the Antichrist would raise himself to the heavens, make his entry into the “temple” and proclaim himself as God.

He would cut down Christ’s servants and with an insolent proud mouth cry out, “Your blood covers us and our children!” He would perform miracles that were even greater than those that God’s son had performed and his power would be like those prophesied in the book of Job: 43.

“Upon the earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholds all high things: he is a king over the children of pride.”

And the Antichrist came, but not as a material ruler. Instead he came as one of the spiritual, the proud and the elevated, the godly Mani.

Satan became bored with the frenzied ravings of the epileptics, sated with living in the lewd dreams of the monks. The stupid game of exorcism did not amuse him anymore. He wanted to become God, to become God even before the real Antichrist was begotten. He wanted to be God in the kingdom of spirits, a proud and wild Anti-god that would push the Nazarene, the usurper of the earth, back into his invisible kingdom once more.

Thus spoke Mani, this ancient holy wisdom.

“There are two gods, equally powerful, equally mighty and eternally opposing each other. The invisible god of “good”, who is enthroned in heaven, who does not trouble himself over the earth and only lives for the perfection of his chosen ones—

Then there is another god, the god of sins, who rules over the earth. But sins are not really sins because they came from this god like the virtues that came from the other god, the indolent god who said, “Don’t exert yourselves, just follow me.”

Gnosticism and Manichaeism spread like wild fire across the Christian world and for the first time the question was raised, “Christian or Manichean, the fairy tale of free will or the fact of determinism, stupide imitatio or the self-ruling fantasy of the mystic, meek slavery or proud sinning in the name of Satan—as instinct, Satan—as nature, Satan—as curiosity, Satan—as passion.

Again the church was victorious. In the third century Satan had to lay down his weapons. His first grandiose anti-Christian Avignon was destroyed with terrible cruelty and Satan blasphemed in dark despair.

“I am the God of light! You, the evil God, have cast me down out of revenge because I am the light. Your jealousy of my beauty, my brilliance and my light is greater than my own power. But fear me now. Fear my pride and the hatred of the mighty. I, the eternal light, do not sleep and I have suckled my children with the eternal light that never sleeps. But your children, those that hate the light, those that fear the light, your children that crawl around your feet in base slavery, your children have tired of doing battle with me. They need to sleep. Behold!

I am the Prince of princes, I mingle with them, I dance with them—you are a dark despot that rules over crawling worms. Beware! Millions of my own have been sacrificed to your vengeance. I will sacrifice millions more, willingly sacrifice them. Those millions are only fertilizer for the one and only, for the one who can engender more. You have annihilated my congregations but you will never annihilate the one and only, the one who can engender thousands of new congregations. Beware and fear my vengeance!”

 

*****

 

And Satan’s vengeance came. He burrowed himself deeply into the earth until it became possessed. Around the year one thousand the people began to despair of God. Signs and wonders were happening all over the earth. The armies of Otto the great saw the sun go out and return as a pale saffron yellow. In Rome the devil visited Pope Sylvester V in person. The seasons of the year appeared to turn themselves around. It snowed in summer and heavy thunderstorms broke out in the middle of deepest winter. “Holy Fire” ate the flesh of the people until it fell from their bones in gangrenous tatters.

The earth was delirious and the people became beasts. Starvation was a problem over the entire world and at home the people began to devour the corpses of the dead. The craving for human flesh became a mania. People despised animal flesh, did not even consider it. Humans were supposed to devour humans. Thus Satan got the revenge that he desired.[1]

The vengeance seeking Satan first wanted the people to eat the flesh of children, then those that fell on the wayside, until at last it was dared to openly sell human flesh in public. Countless packs of wolves came out of the woods and devoured any others that still remained living. A great fear dominated that the world would become depopulated. The prelates and city officials gathered together and devised ways so that at least the strongest could stay alive and the world would not die out.

The people sought in vain to reconcile themselves with God. In vain they swore the “Treuga Dei” (peace of God) with their bitterest enemies. In vain the kings, clothed with crowns and scepters, said the most despairing prayers along with the choir boys—it was all for nothing.

If God would not help, then Satan must! The people began to make fun of God. They trampled the consecrated host, his body, into the dirt and dung, spit on his holiest symbols. Satan began to reap his harvest. For a long time he had mockingly and scornfully whispered to the despairing, “Behold how good your God is! Don’t you see that he has damned you already and wants nothing more to do with you?”

“If we are all damned, then there is no help for us. Alas! We might as well give ourselves entirely over to Satan. Christ shed his blood for the salvation of mankind. Heh! Salvation? What kind of salvation is this, where people have to eat each other, where the earth burns under our feet like a red hot iron and pestilence causes the flesh to fall from our bones?

Scorn, threefold scorn on this salvation! We spit on the salvation that is supposed to come after this earthly Hell. This future salvation is only a lie like everything else. What about the promises of salvation here on earth? Look, the church, Christ’s holy bride, has become a whore that sells herself with the most frightful haggling.”

---

[1] Translator’s note: This section refers to the writing of monk historian Ralph Glaber who documented these times and the mass hysteria that surrounded the turn of the millennium. Here is an excerpt taken from the medieval sourcebook online. One must consider that due to volcanic eruptions at the time many parts of the world were plunged into a miniature ice age. Perhaps these were the end of days foretold in the book of Revelations and Christ has ruled the new Christianized earth for the last one thousand years. Perhaps his time has come and gone.

Medieval Sourcebook:
Ralph Glaber: On the First Millenium

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/glaber-1000.html

For, in the seventh year before that date, Mount Vesuvius (which is also called Vulcan’s Caldron) gaped far more often than his wont and belched forth a multitude of vast stones mingled with sulphurous flames which fell even to a distance of three miles around; and thus by the stench of his breath he began to make all the surrounding province uninhabitable. . . It befell meanwhile that almost all the cities of Italy and Gaul were ravaged by flames of fire, and that the greater part even of the city of Rome was devoured by a conflagration. During which fire, the flames caught the beams of St Peter’s church, beginning to-creep under the bronze tiles and lick the carpenters’ work. When this became known to the whole multitude that stood by, then, finding no possible device for averting this disaster, they turned with one accord and, crying with a terrible voice, hastened to the Confession;

[Coulton note: The part of the choir in which the celebrant makes his confession before saying mass. See Dom Martene, De Antiquis Ecclesiae Ritibus, lib. i, c. iv, art. 2, ad fin. At St Peter’s of Rome, this is the space eastward of the Saint’s tomb]

even the Chief of the Apostles, crying upon him with curses that, if he watched not over his own, nor showed himself a very present defender of his church, many throughout the world would fall away from their profession of faith. Whereupon the devouring flames straightway left those beams of pine and, died away. . . At this same time a horrible plague raged among men, namely a hidden fire which, upon whatsoever limb it toned, consumed it and severed it from the body.

[Coulton note: this is St Anthony’s fire, one of the curses of the Middle Ages, which modem medicine has traced to poisons generated in corrupt rye-bread.]

Many were consumed even in the space of a single night by these devouring flames. . . Moreover, about the same time, a most mighty famine raged for five years throughout the Roman world, so that no region could be heard of which was not hunger stricken for lack of bread, and many of the people were starved to death. In those days also, in many regions, the terrible famine compelled men to make their food not only of unclean beasts and creeping things, but even of men’s, women’s, and children’s flesh, without regard even of kindred; for so fierce waxed this hunger that grown-up sons devoured their mothers, and mothers, forgetting their maternal love ate their babes.

[Coulton note: The chronicler then goes on to speak of two heresies which arose in France and Italy, of the piety of King Robert of France, etc., etc.]

Read Full Post »

Sins Were Everywhere

But the strongest death rage was the hatred that was directed against Satan—as magician and Satan—as healer.

“Be poor in spirit and meek. Be obedient, be a follower, don’t think!”

 That was the highest law of religion for the imbecile masses. But the magician was proud despite all laws. He rose into the air against the law of gravity and did not sink in the water. If you wanted you could throw him into the fire and he would come out healthy. The magician was too proud to be a follower. If he wanted to he could even become as good of a god as Christ.

“Christ is not able to do any more than I can; through virtue I also can become divine,” said Theodorus of Mopsuesta.

The magician despised poverty of spirit, broke open all things secret and unraveled all mysteries. He determined the successor to the Emperor and knew the fates of all the nations from the stars. The magician was the same thing that Christ himself was, a defiant criminal of all the laws, a knowledgeable seer. He was a god, but much prouder than Christ.

Christ made his teachings available to the plebeians, formed his ancient band of conspirators out of child-like farmers and servants. The magician planted his teachings in only the proudest and strongest of souls.

The Christian wrath, the hatred of the plebian and the poor in spirit, the devotees of the law and those that could not do anything other than “follow” was directed against these defiant titans.

The law of Constantine had already placed heavy penalties upon the practice of magic. Now one law followed another and each new one was more severe than the last until under Emperor Valens all the philosophers were driven out. Even the brilliant Iamblichus took poison after being imprisoned. Having a book of philosophy was enough to put your life at risk. In order to avoid this fate all the folk gathered their books together and burned them.

This was the beginning of the terrible martyrdom of the proud children of Satan, against which the Christian persecutions of Nero seemed like a charming game.

During this time the magicians became priests and assembled the pagans around them. The old ways became the practice of magic. The symbols and their meanings were lost. No one knew what the signs or symbols meant anymore, but the magician helped them. He conferred mystical meanings upon them which by and by through the power of suggestion began to exert enormous influence. The words that no one knew anymore became a powerful means of helping the magician establish a rapport between his Master and his soul.

The church perceived that it could not accomplish its goal with punishment and torture. It used its ability to imitate, only to imitate, and grasped onto “the magical link”, the “choc en retour”, that plays such a large role in magic. Incantations and magical signs became replaced with Holy Water and the sign of the cross. Magical evocations were thwarted through the Mass and Holy Water was used to drive out Satan. The magician might conjure up a thunder storm in the name of Satan, but Christ could disperse it with the cross.

Still, the longer the battle went on, the more the church had to yield. It became forced to absorb the pagan cults into itself. The bacchanalia at the festivals of Ceres Libera were combined with the processions of the festival of St. Mary and celebrated with greater exuberance than ever before. Up until the 13^th century the people and the priests celebrated lascivious and orgiastic festivals together such as the festival of the ass and the festival of fools (fatuorum).

Remnants of the phallus cults crept into the church. The capitals of the columns thronged with obscene figures. A favorite subject depicted in churches was Noah and how he slept with his daughters. But the images were especially about Hell! God, how magnificent!

The non-imaginative brains of the church fathers and doctors that were so airy, naïve and spacey had no need to exert themselves when they could plagiarize. Hades made the greatest impression on the good Eusabius. Well, even the demon himself could have a good revelation now and then, but it was simply astounding how much the pagans knew about Hell.  Rabanus Maurus in his description of Hell did not once forget to mention the rivers Phlegeton, Cocytos and Styx and throughout the entire Middle Ages the boat of Charon was seen as the boat of the devil.

 

*****

 

The demon was everywhere! Satan triumphed over Christ, first as a means to frighten people in order to solidify the dominion of Christ. He became an almighty Lord which the world feared and sought to appease. You scarcely dared to breathe because it might let the evil spirit into your body.

In the fourth century the horrible Messalinian sect appeared. They believed the devil was trying to possess them and were constantly seen beating themselves, screaming, spitting and twisting themselves in horrible convolutions in attempts to ward off the evil one whose name was “Legion”.

Satan multiplied himself a thousand fold. He became a theologian, went into the desert wastes and tortured the Holy fathers with awkward questions. He sowed thousands of doubts and thoughts into their souls. He went into the cloisters and inflamed the troubled brains of the monks with lewd images. He visited the pious women by night, took away their wills and understanding, forced them into shameful lewdness. He entered into the brains of thousands and thousands of believers and made them scream out the most confused curses and blasphemies.

The church was scarcely able to defend itself from Satan any more. Exorcism took an increasingly important role in the liturgy. No mass was ever celebrated with more pomp than that of the exorcism. You scarcely dared to partake in any religious ceremony without first exorcising every single corner of the church. Yes, under the reign of Sirtus they even exorcised an Egyptian obelisk before it was allowed to be set up in Rome.

But no matter how furiously the church battled the stronger Satan became. Possession took the upper hand. Satan scorned God through the bellowing voices of the possessed. He performed miracles in front of crowds of believers. He told the priests their secret sins. He prophesied things that really came true. He raised the bodies of the possessed up into the air and then smashed them back down onto the ground without them suffering the smallest amount of pain.

The Church grasped at dubious means. In the assumption that every strong human passion predisposed one to possession by the devil they forbid even the simplest expression of emotion. Every passion had a demon. If passion was killed the demon would be killed as well.

The world despaired. How could they protect themselves against Satan and his temptations? How could anyone protect themselves against the eternal stream of lewd hallucinations that rose up by the hour, the thousands of scorning, laughing voices that Satan raised against God? And even thought was a sin! The virgin, who without even knowing, allowed young boys to lust after her, “sinned”, had already lost her virginity according to the proclamation of St. Cyprian. The woman that was beautiful sinned without knowing it, when through her beauty she became the scythe with which Satan mowed his harvest. (Anselmus) The monk, whom the demon stole away from the cross, sinned when he didn’t have enough strength to resist. The husband sinned because he had more interest in begetting children than in the love of God. The nun that washed herself more than twice a month sinned.

Sins—Sins were everywhere. Eternal damnation was everywhere. With one thought, one wrong deed man lost the right to paradise and succumbed to Satan. Once one succumbed they would be refused salvation. The Saints themselves admitted that many devils ignored exorcism and didn’t fear it at all.

 

*****

Read Full Post »