In a later example from the East the role of Satan and his demons is more explicit. Around 1050 Michael Constantine Psellos, who was both a famous philosopher and a leading Byzantine statesman, wrote a Greek dialogue On the operation of the demons; and he included in it a couple of paragraphs about the sect of Bogomiles.* Psellos lived and wrote in Constantinople, and the Bogomiles were located in distant Thrace; so it is through the mouth of a visiting Thracian that Psellos offers his report. This is the “mystical sacrifice” which the Thracian claims to have witnessed, in person, at Easter time:
In the evening, when the candles are lit, at the time when we celebrate the redemptive Passion of Our Lord, they bring together, in a house appointed for the purpose, young girls whom they have initiated into their rites. Then they extinguish the candles, so that the light shall not be witness to their abominable deeds, and throw themselves lasciviously on the girls; each one on whomever first falls into his hands, no matter whether she be his sister, his daughter or his mother. For they think that they are doing something that greatly pleases the demons by transgressing God’s laws, which forbid marriage between blood relatives. When this rite has been completed, each goes home; and after waiting nine months, until the time has come for the unnatural children of such unnatural seed to be born, they come together again at the same place. Then, on the third day after the birth, they tear the miserable babies from their mothers’ arms. They cut their tender flesh all over with sharp knives and catch the stream of blood in basins. They throw the babies, still breathing and gasping, on to the fire, to be burned to ashes. After which, they mix the ashes with the blood in the basins and so make an abominable drink, with which they secretly pollute their food and drink; like those who mix poison with hippo-eras or other sweet drinks. Finally they partake together of these foodstuffs; and not they alone but others also, who know nothing of their hidden proceedings.(8)
The Thracian is clear about the purpose behind these rites. The souls of those who take part in them are purged of every trace of divine influence and become die homes of demons. This applies equally to those who participate unknowingly: by eating child’s flesh they too fall into the clutches of demons. And elsewhere in his tract Psellos puts the whole matter in an eschatological perspective. It is because the End is near that these fearful deeds are being done. The coming of Antichrist is at hand, and it must be ushered in by monstrous doctrines and unlawful practices. The deeds of Saturn and Thyestes and Tantalus, when they devoured their offspring; of Oedipus, when he mated with his mother; of Cinyras, when he mated with his daughters — all these abominations are being repeated now, as signs that the Last Days have come. In other words, they are manifestations of the final, desperate effort of the demonic hosts in their struggle against God.
Up to the eleventh century western Christendom had been far less troubled than eastern Christendom by movements of religious dissent. But by the time Psellos wrote his attack on the Bogomiles, the West too was becoming uneasily aware of the presence of heretics in its midst. The authorities, ecclesiastical and secular alike, reacted sharply to this unfamiliar situation: heretics were not only burned, they were defamed as well. The first execution took place at Orléans in 1022. And in connection with this same incident tales of incest and cannibalism were bandied about for the first time in western Europe; for the first time, that is, since the great execution of Christians by pagans, at Lyons, more than eight centuries before.
This heretical group consisted mostly of canons of the collegiate church of Orléans — learned and pious men, one of whom had even been the queen’s confessor. It also included some aristocratic laymen, and some nuns and other women. The tone was one of deep piety — the leaders not only preached but also lived an outstandingly holy and simple life, and that is what attracted the followers. And these people were not afraid to confess their beliefs; for they were convinced that the Holy Spirit would protect them, and in the end they went to the stake laughing. The evidence they gave, when interrogated in the presence of the king and queen and the bishops, can therefore be taken as absolutely reliable. It shows them to have rejected much that was accepted Christian doctrine: they did not believe that Christ was born of a virgin, or that he suffered for men, or that he rose from the dead. They were not persuaded of the supernatural efficacy of baptism, or of the Eucharist, or of praying to the saints. At the same time they were mystics. They believed that each of them had received the Holy Spirit, which now dwelt in their hearts and guided them in all their ways.
Their doctrine, then, was not very different from, or more sinister than, the doctrine which the Society of Friends was to profess many centuries later. But these sectarians also talked of a certain “heavenly food”, and this proved enough to set imaginations working. A contemporary chronicler, Adhémar de Chabannes, describes how these people had been deceived by an unlettered layman, who gave them the ashes of dead children to eat, and so bound them to his sect. Once they were initiated, the Devil would appear to them, sometimes as a Negro and sometimes as an angel of light. Each day he would supply them with heaps of money; in return, they would be required to deny Christ in their hearts, even while pretending publicly to be true followers of Christ. And the Devil would also instruct them to abandon themselves in secret to every kind of vice.(9)
A couple of generations later, around 1090, a monk of Chartres called Paul gave a more elaborate account of the matter. “They came together on certain nights at an appointed hour,” he writes, “each carrying a light. And they recited the names of the demons as in a litany; until suddenly they saw the Devil descend among them in the guise of some animal or other. As soon as this vision seemed to appear, the lights were at once extinguished….” After which the monk faithfully follows his precursors, and notably Adhémar de Chabannes and Psellos. And after covering the usual promiscuous and incestuous orgy, the burning of the babies, the concocting of the enslaving, diabolic potion, he concludes, “Let this be enough to warn Christians to be on their guard against this evil work. . ”(10)
A hundred years later it had become a commonplace that the Devil, or a subordinate demon, presided over the nocturnal orgies of heretics in the form of an animal, usually a cat. And this belonged not to the folklore of the illiterate majority, but, on the contrary, to the world-view of the intellectual elite; learned clerics who stood at the very centre of affairs were thoroughly convinced of it. The Englishman Walter Map, for instance, was not only an important ecclesiastic but, at various times, a judge and an officer of the court of Henry II. He was also a wit, whom the count of Champagne was happy to entertain at his court, when Map was travelling to Rome to attend an ecumenical council. Yet this highly educated, urbane and experienced man was capable of describing the meetings of heretics in terms so fantastic that one would think he was joking, if it were not obvious from the context that he is perfectly serious. In his book De nugis curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles) he reports what certain French heretics, who had abandoned their heresy and returned to the Catholic fold, were supposed to have said about their former practices. At night the sectarians would foregather in a house — Map calls it a “synagogue”—with all gates and doors and windows firmly shut. After a period of silent waiting, a black cat of monstrous size would suddenly come down into their midst by a rope. Thereupon the lights were extinguished, and the heretics, murmuring their hymns between closed teeth (presumably, so as not to attract the attention of outsiders), clustered around their master the cat. In the darkness they had to feel for the demonic animal; and as each found it, he would kiss it on whatever part of the anatomy seemed appropriate to his craving for self-abasement: feet, genitals, under the tail (just as the early Christians were said to worship the genitals of the presiding priest!). It was only after this performance, and stimulated by it, that the heretics would embark on the usual promiscuous orgy.(11)
*
He calls them “Messalians”;just as John of Ojun also refers to “Messalianism” in connection with the Paulicians. It is now established, however, that neither of the sects in question had anything to do with the sect of Messalians, or Euchites, which flourished in Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, Sinai and Egypt up to the seventh century. By the time of John of Ojun, and still more by the time of Psellos, “Messalian” was a mere term of abuse. See H.-Ch. Puech and A. Vaillant,