World Famous Cults and Fanatics (5 page)

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Eudo de Stella

Three centuries later, another messiah called Eon or Eudo de Stella was less lucky.
He gathered hordes of disciples in Brittany, and organized his followers into a Church with
archbishops and bishops.
Unlike Jesus of Nazareth, he had no hesitation in declaring that he was the son of God.
AD
1144 was a good year for a messiah to acquire followers,
for an appalling winter caused multitudes to starve.
Eon’s followers lived in the forest, and ravaged the countryside, living mainly by plunder.
But in 1148, he was finally taken prisoner by
soldiers of the Archbishop of Rouen, and imprisoned in a tower, where he was starved to death.
His followers refused to renounce him, and the “bishops” and “archbishops”
were burned alive in the now traditional Christian spirit.

Tanchelm

One of the most remarkable messiahs of the twelfth century, Tanchelm of Antwerp, was already dead by then.
He seems to have started his career as a monk, then become a diplomat
working for Count Robert of Flanders, trying to persuade the Pope to hand over some of Utrecht to Count Robert.
The Pope refused, and when Count Robert died, Tanchelm’s career as a diplomat
came to an end.
He became a wandering preacher, making his headquarters in Antwerp.

Tanchelm seems to have possessed what all messiahs possess: tremendous powers as a preacher and orator.
We also have to remember that a large part of his audience would be ignorant peasants who
had never heard a really good preacher.
As Tanchelm addressed them in the open fields, dressed as a monk, the audiences reacted like modern teenagers to a pop idol.
He denounced the Church for its
corruption, and told them that if the sacraments were administered by sinful priests, they would fail to work.
So many were convinced that the churches were soon empty.
And when Tanchelm told his
followers not to pay taxes to the church (called tithes), they were delighted to follow his advice.

Was Tanchelm a charlatan, or did he really believe he was a messiah?
He certainly felt that he had a right to live like a king.
He dressed magnificently, and was always surrounded by a large
retinue, including twelve men who were supposed to be the twelve disciples.
One day he announced that he would become betrothed to the Virgin Mary, and held a ceremony in which he and a sacred
statue were joined together in front of a vast crowd who offered their jewellery as an engagement present.

With so many followers, the Church could do nothing about him; he held Utrecht, Antwerp and large areas of the countryside.
Finally, about
AD
1115, he was killed –
like the messiah of Gevaudon – by treachery, being stabbed by a priest who had been allowed to approach him.
But his influence remained as powerful as ever, and it took another “miracle
worker”, Norbert of Xanten (who was regarded with favour by the Church) to finally “de-convert” his followers in Antwerp and restore power to the Church.

Rebellion, Mysticism and Sex

How did these “messiahs” become so powerful?
To begin with, all of them had the gift of preaching.
But it was more than that.
The Christian Church, which began as a
poor and persecuted organization whose leaders were thrown to the lions, suddenly became the official religion of Rome in
AD
313, under the Emperor Constantine.
As soon as
they gained power, the Christians began to behave far worse than their enemies, destroying pagan temples, burning heretics, and squabbling amongst themselves.
In effect, the Church became the
supreme dictator.
And the poor, ordered to go to church every Sunday, groaning under heavy taxes and forced to pay to have their sins forgiven, became increasingly disenchanted with their spiritual
masters.
But there was nothing they could do; the Church exerted the same iron grip as the Nazis in Germany or the Communists in Stalin’s Russia.

This is why rebel messiahs found an eager audience.
Like Jesus, they attacked the establishment and declared that the “law” was less important than the spirit.
Besides there had
always been a strong tradition of mysticism in the Church.
Mystics were men who had experienced moments of overwhelming joy and illumination in which they felt they had seen God.
The mystics taught
that every man has a divine spark, and that therefore, in a sense, every man is God – or contains a fragment of God.
They also believed that all Nature is an expression of God – in fact
some (called Pantheists) believed that Nature is God.
One of the greatest of the early mystics, Dionysius the Areopagite (around
AD
500) taught that God is a kind of
emptiness or darkness, and can only be reached by recognizing that God is not knowledge or power or eternity, or anything else that the mind can grasp.
God is beyond all words and ideas.

The Wife Who Lost her Ring

One popular story of the Middle Ages was about a rich merchant whose wife began to spend a great deal of time in church.
When her husband heard rumours that the church
consisted of believers in the Free Spirit, he decided to follow her one day.
Wearing a disguise, he walked behind her into an underground cavern where – to his surprise – the service
began with a dance, in which everyone chose his or her partner.
After that, the congregation ate food and drank wine.
The husband began to understand why his wife preferred this to the local
Catholic church; the service was better.

When the priest stood up, he announced that all human beings are free, and that provided they lived in the spirit of the Lord, they could do what they liked.
“We must become one with
God.”
Then he took a young girl and led her to the altar.
The two of them removed their clothes.
Then the priest turned to the congregation and told them to do the same.
“This is the
Virgin Mary and I am Jesus.
Now do as we do.”
The girl lay down on the altar, and the priest lay on top of her and, in full view of the congregation, commenced an act of intercourse.
Then the
congregation each seized his dancing partner, and lay down on the floor.

In the chaos that followed, the wife did not notice as her husband took hold of her hand and pulled off her wedding ring; she was totally absorbed in her partner.
Realizing that no one was
paying any attention to him, the husband slipped away.

When his wife returned home, he asked her angrily how she dared to give herself to another man, even in the name of religion.
She indignantly denied everything, demanding whether, as the wife of
a wealthy merchant, he thought she would behave like a prostitute.
But when the husband asked her what had happened to her wedding ring, she went pale.
Then, as he held it out to her, she realized
that he had seen everything, and burst into tears.

The wife was beaten until she bled, but she was more fortunate than the others, who were arrested by inquisitors and burnt at the stake.

The story may or may not have happend, but such congregations actually existed.
They came into existence soon after the year
AD
1200, and soon spread across Europe.
The
Free Spirit movement declared that God is within us all, and that therefore the Church is unnecessary – in fact, it is the Whore of Babylon.
The great poets are as ‘holy’ as the
Bible.
Sex
must
be an acceptable way of worshipping God, since it brings such a sense of divine illumination – in his book
The Black Death
, Johanne Nohls gives this account of
the Brethren:

In a Munich manuscript, we read: “And when they go to confession and come together and he preaches to them, he takes the one who is the most beautiful among them and does to her all
according to his will, and they extinguish the light and fall one upon the other, a man upon a man, and a woman upon a woman, just as it comes about.
Everyone must see with his own eyes how his
wife or daughter is abused by others, for they assert that no one can commit sin below his girdle.
That is their belief.”

Other curious doctrines, “such as that incest is permissible, even when practised on the altar, that no one has the right to refuse consent, that Christ risen from the dead had intercourse
with Magdalena, etc., all indicate the deterioration and confusion of moral ideas caused by the great plagues, particularly that of 1348.”

In short, according to the Brethren of the Free Spirit, every man is his own messiah.

Sex with a Stranger

The Church did its best to stamp out these beliefs by sword and fire, but it still took three centuries.
And even when the Free Spirits had been wiped out, the ideas continued
to exert influence.
Around 1550, a man named Klaus Ludwig, who lived in Mulhausen in Germany, formed a church in which members were initiated by having sex with a stranger.
Like so many messiahs,
Ludwig said he was Christ, the son of God, and that these things had been revealed to him.
The sacrament was another name for sex.
Man was bread and woman was wine, and when they made love, this
was Holy Communion.
Children born out such communion were holy.
And the members of his congregation could not be killed.
His sermons ended with the words “Be fruitful and multiply”, and
the congregation made haste to undress and do their best to obey.

Ludwig taught that sexual desire is the prompting of the Holy Spirit, so that if a man feels desire for any woman, he should regard it as a message from God.
If, of course, the woman happened to
be a member of Ludwig’s “Chriesterung” (or Bloodfriends), then it was her duty to help him obey the will of the Lord, even if she was another man’s wife.

Ludwig told the Bloodfriends to observe great secrecy and to behave like other people.
But no doubt some of his congregation were eager to make converts of husbands with attractive wives.
Like
the congregation in the medieval story, the Bloodfriends were found out and put on trial, although Ludwig himself escaped.
One member of the Council of Twelve Judges admitted that he had celebrated
Holy Communion with sixteen different women.
Three Bloodfriends were executed, and the others were re-converted to a more conventional form of Christianity.

Sabbatai Zevi

One of the most remarkable of all the “messiahs” was a Turkish Jew named Sabbatai Zevi (pronounced Shabtight Svy), who at one point seemed about to become one of
the most powerful kings in Europe.

Sabbatai was the son of a wealthy merchant of Smyrna (now Izmir) on the coast of Turkey.
Born in 1626, he was always of a deeply religious disposition; he spent hours in prayer, and at the age
of sixteen, decided to observe a permanent fast, which lasted for six years.
He permitted himself to be married to a girl whom his parents chose, but the marriage was never consummated, and she
divorced him.
The same thing happened to a second wife.
He was what would nowadays be called a manic depressive, experiencing periods of immense joy and elation, followed by days of suicidal
gloom.

In 1648, when Sabbatai was twenty-two a great tragedy occurred across the sea in Poland.
The fierce Cossacks of the Ukraine rose against the Polish landlords.
The Russians and Poles had
traditionally been enemies – in 1618 the Poles had even tried to put a Pole on the throne of Russia.
The Russians and the Poles both wanted the rich Ukraine.
A Cossack leader called Bogdan
Khmelnitsky invaded Poland and challenged the Polish army.
He also set out to destroy the Jews.

Poland’s Jews had been servants of the rich landlords whom the Cossacks hated, and they were massacred in vast numbers.
All the usual atrocities of massacre were committed – children
hacked to pieces in their mothers’ arms, pregnant women sliced open, old men disembowelled, girls raped before their husbands.
One girl who had been forcibly married to a Cossack chose a
cunning method of suicide: she told him that she had magic powers, and could not be harmed by a sword; if he didn’t believe her, he should try running his sword through her.
He did as she
asked, and killed her.