Again and again, over a period of many centuries, heretical sects were accused of holding promiscuous and incestuous orgies in the dark; of killing infants and devouring their remains; of worshipping the Devil. Is it conceivable that no sect ever did such things at all? In the past, historians have diverged over that question. But here the matter must be settled once and for all; for otherwise the whole argument of this book hangs in the air.
One of the charges can be dismissed without more ado. Normally, when heretics were tried and interrogated by inquisitors, transcripts of the proceedings were kept. Hundreds of these transcripts have survived, and they offer no evidence for the killing and eating of babies or children. Indeed, only one sect ever seems to have been formally charged with such offences — the Fraticelli “de opinione” at Fabriano and Rome; and as we have seen, the “evidence” produced even in that belated instance turns out to have been taken almost verbatim from polemical tracts and monastic chronicles, written centuries before. All the other accounts of child-eating derive from the same literary tradition. Weighed against the silence of the inquisitors, they have no authority whatever.
At first glance, the charge of holding promiscuous and incestuous orgies might seem to have rather more basis in real happenings. It is certain, for instance, that some of the heretical mystics known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit did claim to have attained a state of total oneness with God, in which all things were permitted to them; and it was widely believed at the time that they gave expression to this conviction by practising free love amongst themselves. There is also the case of the Dualist heretics known as Cathars. According to Catharist doctrine, all matter was evil, and human bodies were prisons from which human souls were struggling to escape; whence it followed that procreation was an abomination. Catholic polemics pointed out the logical consequences of such a view. If all procreation was utterly evil, no form of sexual intercourse was more reprehensible than any other; incest between mother and son was no worse than intercourse between man and wife. So long as no more souls were incarcerated in flesh, no harm was done; and to avoid that, abortion or even infanticide were legitimate.
However, on closer examination none of this really provides an explanation for the tales of promiscuous and incestuous orgies. There is no firm evidence that in practice Cathars ever drew libertine consequences from their hatred of the flesh.(53) Catharist morality was only meant to be followed by the elite of the sect, the perfecti; and in general even the Catholic clergy, while attacking Catharist doctrine, paid tribute to the chastity of these people.(54) Nor is there any reason to think that the Brethren of the Free Spirit indulged in collective orgies; if any of them did indeed practise free love, they did it in private. Indeed, of all the innumerable stories of nocturnal orgies only one, concerning an incident which is supposed to have taken place in Cologne in 1326, could possibly refer to the heretical mystics of the Free Spirit; and even that has now been shown to be mythical.†
Above all, there are the brute facts of chronology. Stories of heretics and their orgies were circulating in France already in the eleventh century — but there were no Cathars in the West before the middle of the twelfth century, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit are first heard of in the thirteenth. The beliefs and activities of these sectarians can no more account for the defamation of the Waldensians or the Fraticelli than the activities of the Carpocratians can account for the very similar tales told of the early Christians.(55)
And of course it is to those ancient tales that we must look for an explanation. After all, both the accusations of promiscuous orgies and the accusations of child-eating belong to a tradition dating back to the second century. The Fathers who first defended the Christians against these accusations also, by the very act of putting them in writing, perpetuated the accusations. Embedded in theological works which were preserved in monastic libraries and which moreover were frequently recopied, these tales must have been familiar to many monks. It was only to be expected that, when it came to discrediting some new religious out-group, monks would draw on this traditional stock of defamatory clichés. Moreover, it is known that by the fourteenth century certain chroniclers deliberately inserted such stories into their narratives in order to provide preachers with materials for their sermons against heresy.(56)
More serious consideration has to be given to the idea that heretics worshipped the Devil. This charge cannot simply be derived from what pagan Romans said about the Christian minority in their midst. Did it, then, reflect what some group or sect of medieval heretics really believed or practised? Few people nowadays are likely to accept that demonic cats descended miraculously from on high(57) — but perhaps some reality lurks behind these fantasies, perhaps there really was a cult of Lucifer or Satan? Even so sceptical (and anticlerical) a historian as Henry Charles Lea thought so,(58) and today it is still widely assumed that such a cult must have existed.
Three arguments have been advanced in support of this view. It has been pointed out that some medieval sources describe a coherent and conceivable doctrine, which they attribute to a sect of “Luciferans”. It has been suggested that the Dualist religion, pushed to its logical conclusion, could very well lead to Devil-worship. And it has also been said that the intelligent, educated and devout men — including some popes — who accepted that a cult of Satan existed, would not have done so without solid evidence. These arguments have to be examined.
It is true that accounts of a Luciferan doctrine are to be found not only in the bull which Pope Gregory IX fulminated at the prompting of Conrad of Marburg in 1233,(59) but in half a dozen other German and Italian sources.(60) The Luciferan doctrine, it appears, taught that Lucifer and his demons were unjustly expelled from heaven, but will return there in the end, to resume their rightful places and to cast God, Michael and his angels into hell for all eternity. Meanwhile the Luciferans must serve their master by doing everything in their power to offend God; their reward will be everlasting blessedness with Lucifer. The accounts agree with one another and are not, on the face of it, implausible. But how reliable are they?
Internal evidence shows them to be wholly unreliable. Each one is accompanied by statements which are anything but plausible. In one case we hear of demons who vanish into thin air when the Luciferan rite is interrupted by the appearance of the Eucharist. Another source blithely states that in Austria, Bohemia and the neighbouring territories alone the worshippers of Lucifer number 80,000. Another — a confession attributed to a heretic called Lepzet, of Cologne — proclaims that the man himself, in his zeal to serve Lucifer and offend God, has committed more than thirty murders! Yet another speaks of a magic potion containing the excrement of a gigantic toad; while in the bull Vox in Rama both a demonic toad and a demonic cat receive kisses of homage. Moreover, most of the sources contain references to those promiscuous and incestuous orgies which we have just shown to be unreliable. But where a source contains untrustworthy or demonstrably false statements it should be treated with scepticism throughout; and that is the case with all the sources that tell of a Luciferan doctrine.
†
On the Free Spirit see Robert E. Lerner,