The Free Spirit: Adamites and Luciferans
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Adamites And Luciferans
Adamites originally were early Gnostic Christians, possibly a type of Carpocratian, to judge by their similarities in beliefs. They practised in Spain from the fourth century to the fifth. S Augustine and S Epiphanius comment on their heresy. Medieval Adamites said they had returned to a stage of purity where sin is impossible by doing what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. Adamites called their church “Paradise”, and their worship was in the nude, like Adam and Eve. They were not subject to rules. Adamites refused to comply with the law. In particular, they rejected marriage. The common inference of Christians, and those observers influenced by Christian mores, is that the Adamites practised free love, and this is doubtless true in so far as they practised sexual activity at all. The point is that many did not, and especially those who were advancing towards the spiritual world. They knew there could be no sexual activity in heaven for immortal beings, and so the closer to heaven they were, the less need they had for sex.
William of Egmont described the ceremonies of “Beghards” observed by a man who dressed himself as a “Lollard” to escape attention! At a meeting in an underground place which the heretics called “Paradise” were two people who called themselves Jesus and his mother Mary. The leader gave a sermon in the nude in which he exhorted his listeners to discard their clothing. Then the lights were doused for the orgy. But in the Low Countries, where William lived, the words “Beghard” and “Lollard” were often used without relation to the heresy of the Free Spirit as terms of abuse for scoundrels or presumed hypocrites.
In the early fourteenth century, John of Viktring described heretical rites in which men and women, the Beghards and Béguines of Cologne, enacted naked masses at midnight in an underground hideaway which they named a temple in which participants rejoiced that they had returned to the state of Adam and Eve before the fall.
There Walter, “a priest of the devil”, said mass and delivered a sermon. Then the assembly put out the lights, chose partners, and feasted, danced, and fornicated. This, they said, was the state of paradise in which Adam and Eve lived before the fall. Their leader Walter called himself Christ and claimed that though condemned to be executed he would rise on the third day. He presented a beautiful young virgin as Mary, but taught that Christ was not born of a virgin, that God was neither born nor suffered, and that fasting was unnecessary.Lerner
The chroniclers called the promiscuous nudists Adamites and the devil-worshipers Luciferans. Were they Free Spirits? Denounced by the husband of one of the women, the leader, Walter of Cologne, though most cruelly tortured, refused to betray his associates. Eventually he and fifty of his followers were executed by burning and drowning. The Caputiati, set up in France in the 1180s wore white hoods, whence the name. They were to clear the land of brigands and were approved by the authorities. But, having done the task they were set up for, they demanded the Freedom of Adam and Eve, and became a revolutionary band of poor which had to be suppressed by force.
Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, was an unpopular man who had made powerful enemies at the French court. In 1308, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Louvre charged with falsely indicting people for heresy to extort money from them. Some accusations he made were that his victims had said normal baked bread was as good as consecrated bread, a tree trunk was a better confessor than a priest because it would not reveal the confession, to couple with a dog was a good as with a woman except that the dog might bite, and people going to Church were told they would be less foolish to go to a tavern. Only a huge money payment to the Bishop saved the victim. It shows the clergy had no scruples about making up cases of heresy, though perhaps few were so blatant about it. It means much of the denigration of Free Spiriters and other heretics by the Church has to be taken with a pinch of salt.
A German chronicler, Caesarius of Heisterbach, described how, in 1209, some theologians of the Sorbonne in Paris developed a “perverse understanding” instilled by the Devil. They were fourteen in all, two being experienced men in their sixties, all were clergymen and “learned”. The leader was called William Auriflex. They were described as followers of Amaury of Bene, whom Innocent III declared so heretical he was insane. Despite all this, it is doubtful that the Amalricians had anything directly to do with Amaury, other than having been in the same place. In 1215, Amalric’s bones were exhumed and reburied in an unconsecrated field.
These “Amalricians” were betrayed by an agent of the Bishop of Paris, Master Ralph, who joined them for some months to spy on them. In 1210, the Amalricians were arrested and tried.
The disciples of Amalric, in l2l0, claimed to be the church of the Holy Spirit, destined to succeed an outworn dispensation. Dolcino similarly held that the power of Christ had been made over to himself and his fellow sectaries, as the true heirs of the apostles.Ronald A Knox
Considering this was a belief supposed to have been derived by scholastic style musings, and not, we are assured, by conversion or previous convictions, only three recanted before the investigating synod (it being before the Inquisition had got underway) and the other eleven went unrepentent to the stake. In the Condemnation of the Amauricians, their Cathar beliefs are clear:
They denied the resurrection of bodies and said that there was no paradise or hell, one who possessed the knowledge of God… had paradise within himself, but one who was in mortal sin had hell within himself.
Amalric of Bena (Amaury de Bene) held that God was the formal principle of all things, and that everyone was as much God as was Christ—a Catharistic notion. Gnostics, which the Cathars were, distinguish matter and spirit. Matter is evil and spirit is good. A good God cannot make or do anything evil, so the universe and our Earth were made, not by God but by the Demiurge, a corrupt angel or lesser god. This explains evil in the world, something Christians who believe only in a perfectly good God cannot do convincingly. The perfect goodness of God also forbids him from incarnating on earth as a material being, which, being made of evil matter is intrinsically evil. If Jesus appeared on earth, he was purely spirit.
The humanity of people is the presence in them of an intrinsically good spirit, misled and tricked by Satan, but eager to return to God whence it came. Because matter is evil, the material world must be renounced, including the human body, but not its spiritual soul. The corporeal body entombs a good spirit. It has been misled by the Demiurge and has to learn this of its own experience. Once it has this Gnosis, it is ready to reunite with God. Sex is rejected as a temptation into worldliness by the Devil, as are all earthly pleasures, and because it leads to the creation of another physical body to be a prison for another of God’s spirits. Some concluded that because the material world is evil, it merited no respect at all, and all laws relating to it were invalid. So, “Do what thou wilt!” Amaurians allegedly indulged in sexual pleasures and crimes of all kinds:
They committed rapes and adulteries and other acts which gave pleasure to the body. And to the women with whom they sinned, and to the simple people whom they deceived, they promised that sins would not be punished.
Possibly such a phase was accepted as a stage of the soul’s Gnostic journey, but the pleasures and cruelties of the world palled and the soul realised it was meaningless, and moved on. It was essentially a personal journey in which others could only be guides. Unlike the belief of the established Church, the entombed soul could not be forced to do what it right. It had to learn it. Gnosis! Nor were earthly rituals any help. They were Satanic. But all accusations like these have to be treated with caution. The Church has never been any more honest in describing its opponents than modern warmongering politicians are. The Byzantine statesman and philosopher, Constantine Michael Psellos, writing around 1050 against the heretical sect of the Bogomils, said they performed wicked acts: orgies, infanticide, ritual blood-letting and cannibalism. These same perversions were used against Christians by Romans, and by established Christians against Jews, witches, and a variety of heretics. Psellos thought the cause of them as the coming End—Antichrist was at hand.
After Amalric’s death in 1207, his followers held that “all things are One, because whatever is, is God”. This sounds pantheistic, meaning they were not Cathars, who had a clear distinction between the world of the Devil and the world of God—the material and spiritual worlds. Yet the Cathars did believe that the souls of all living things were part of God. It was only God, not Satan who conferred life, so with the amendment that living things are meant, and even then not their material selves but their life-giving souls, then the Cathar and Amaurian ideas can be reconciled. If this is so, then the statement of one of the three leaders that “he could neither be consumed by fire nor tormented by torture, for, in so far as he was, he was God”, makes sense, and matches the convictions of the Cathar Perfects.
The Spirit of Freedom or the Free Spirit is attained when one is wholly transformed into God. This union is so complete that neither the Virgin Mary nor the Angels are able to distinguish between man and God. In it one is restored to one’s original state, before one flowed out of the Deity. One is illumined by that essential light, beside which all created light is darkness and obfuscation.
Amaurians, like Cathars, believed each of them was a Christ. They taught that sinners would not be punished, just as the Cathars taught. Life itself was punishment for not discovering or accepting the gnosis required to proceed to unity with God. Cathars were simply returned to life to continue the learning process. Cohn quotes the contemporary Abbot of S Victor against the Amaurians, in which he says they believed that God punishes no one for sin, and that they say they are God.
This expressed a Cathar view of those who were still trapped on earth, but they did expect to unite forever with God after death, once they had been consoled. Amaurians perhaps differed from Cathars and abutted with millennialism in thinking that, in the Age of Spirit, they would lead all mankind into Perfection—all, that is who survived the usual plagues, famines and earthquakes that God would use to kill off incorrigible sinners. As with other heresies, the Church of Rome was the instrument of Satan, the pope being Anti-Christ. Moreover, the French king took the role of warrior messiah—like Arthur, Caharlemagne and Frederick. He would receive twelve loaves and would preside over his convent of twelve councillors.
The chief stronghold of the Amaurians became Troyes in Champagne where an Amaurian knight was burnt in 1220. Troyes was a prosperous town on the trade route from Lyons and the south to Flanders, and had a thriving trade and industry in cloth.
