War on "Heretics," Part II
Targeting ecstatic Christian dances, singing, handclapping
The Spanish Mystics
In the year 380, church authorities in Hispania called a council at Saragossa to suppress a group they called the Priscillianists. (It’s not clear what they called themselves.) This Christian community flourished in Hispania and Aquitania (Spain and southwestern France). Their religious practice involved ecstatic dance and songs, and spiritual retreats at home or in the mountains. They were ascetics who went barefoot and practiced vegetarianism, fasting, and celibacy. They studied apocryphal scriptures, and their religious leadership included women. [Ranke-Heinemann, 132]
According to Sulpicius Severus, the Priscillianists introduced the title ‘deaconess’ in the west.” [Alexandre, 437] The mixing of women and men during prayer was one of their customs that had been outlawed by the Council of Saragossa. [McKenna, 53] The Council of Nîmes condemned the group in 396, including “the women who preached, taught men, and exercised Levitic ministry.” [Wemple, 137-38]
Priscillian was a mystic seeking divine revelation, and an aristocrat who saw Christianity as liberatory. His community saw the soul as “part of the essence of the Deity,” according to Jerome. [Jerome, Letter 226] Like several other Christian groups, they sang an apocryphal hymn that Jesus was said to have taught his disciples on his last night, before going up to the Mount of Olives. [Augustine, Letter 237, to Ceretius]
I wish to save, and I wish to be saved
I wish to loose, and I wish to be loosed
I wish to adorn, and I wish to be adorned
I wish to bring forth, and I wish to be brought forth
I wish to sing, let all dance together
I wish to weep, all of you grieve
I am a Lamp for you who see me
I am a Door for you who knock...
Another version of this ecstatic hymn contains the line, “I will clap my hands; let all stamp.” [Backman, 15] These ceremonies have the savor of ethnic dances of older pagan vintage, the communal dancing, clapping and singing of Christians in North Africa, Cappadocia, and other places.
Priscillian's enemies accused him of mixing pagan practices into Christianity, and of being pagan, idolatrous, and a demon-worshipper. To round it off they attacked him as a heretic, a Manichaean and a witch. [Ardanez, 207-11] All these charges are denied in the eleven Tracts written by Priscillian or, more probably, by his comrade Instantius. (A single copy escaped the book-burnings that destroyed pagan and “heretical” texts in this era—including by their owners terrified of being hauled off to torture if imperial agents discovered them in a house search.)
The author of the Tracts bent over backwards to dissociate his community from pagans and heretics, by declaring that adoring idols was perverse and detestable: “we reject all the throng of demons and their guises...” He even wished for Manichaeans to “be pursued with the sword” and sent to hell. And he anathematized anyone who practiced magic: “May he be pursued with the sword, because it is written, ‘Do not allow witches to live’.” [Ardanez, 212-14; McKenna]
Thus the Priscillianist writer called down on pagans, heretics and witches the same persecution that his own community was now facing. Of course, it did not help. This kind of Christianity with celebratory devotional dances not under the control of bishops was not be tolerated by the church patriarchs. The repression that followed changed the course of Christianity in Hispania and neighboring southern Gaul.
The orthodox clergy got the emperor to call a synod at Bordeaux, which promptly stripped the Priscillianist bishop Instantius of his office and exiled him to a northern island. Priscillian refused to be tried by the bishops and appealed for a secular trial. He was taken to the imperial capital of Trier along with other prisoners: the presbyters Felicimus and Armenius, the poet Latronianus, a widow called the "wise Eucrocia," and several others, including a woman named Procula. [la savante Euchrocia in Hefèle II.1, 67; Procula in McNamara, 65] Bishop Martin of Tours, who opposed having a church case tried by the state, intervened, and convinced the emperor to promise that no blood would be shed. For his pains, the stoutly orthodox Martin got called a Manichaean.
Sorcery Trial of the Priscillianists
Prisicillian and his friends were tried twice, first before the prefect Evodius and again before the emperor. The main charge against them was witchcraft, based on a prohibition of “magical conventicles” in the Theodosian Code [4. 16. 7-8] and the much older Roman law against sorcery (maleficium) and poisoning (veneficium). The penalty for both was death.
Even the ecclesiastical historian Sulpicius Severus reported that Priscillian's enemies resorted to whatever lies and devices were necessary to destroy him. He further explained that the emperor Maximus went along with the trial because he needed money badly, in order to pay the army that had helped him to depose Gratian. The Manichaean charge enabled Maximus to legally confiscate property from the Priscillianists. [Ardañez, 211, n.8; 214, n.17] As a newly-enthroned usurper, Maximus needed the Church's support. The pact of rulers with the lord bishops would become a defining pattern in medieval Europe.
The court tortured Priscillian and his companions to obtain the desired “confessions.” [Sulpicius, Chronica 2. 51, in McKenna 55] They were convicted of maleficium (“harmful sorcery”), studying obscene doctrines, celebrating nocturnal gatherings with evil women, and praying while naked. [Ardanez, 211; McKenna, 54] The emperor had these six people burned at Trier in 385, in the first official state execution of Christians for heresy.
The narrow definition “official execution” is key, since imperial troops had killed many Donatist Christians in Tunisia. Technically, the Priscillianists were convicted on the grounds of sorcery—not heresy. The state confiscated the property of the condemned, another precedent for witch hunt procedural. Other Priscillianists fled for their lives into Gaul. Fragmentary evidence exists of further persecutions. Shortly after the burnings at Trier, a Priscillianist woman named Urbica was stoned at Bordeaux. [McNamara, 65]
The trial of these Spanish “heretics” marks an important shift, with far-reaching historical consequences. It used the mechanism of Roman laws against magic and secret conventicles to attack heterodox Christians. Historians have noted that the torture-trial of the Priscillianists, with its charges of night gatherings, obscene doctrines and nudity, resembles later witch trials. These same sexualized charges had been used over 500 years earlier, in the Roman repression of the Aventine Mysteries, which were led and primarily made up of women. The pagan Senate stomped down their ecstatic processions and dances with mass executions and exile of the “Bacchanals” in 186 bce. [See Dashu, "The First Mass Hunt" ]
The use of sorcery laws to attack Christian dissidents would be repeated again under the early Inquistion, when the papal bull Ad Extirpanda called on rulers to put heretics to the ban “as if they were sorcerers.” [Lea 1957: 431] This is a direct parallel to the persecution of the Priscillianists—and the reverse of the omnipresent modern claim that heresy was the model for witch persecutions. In fact, the sorcery charge (typically combined with sexual calumnies like those leveled against the Priscillianists) often served as the model for the early repression of heretics. It was first used against pagans, whose religions the clergy had redefined as “demonic” and as “devil-worship.”
A great outcry arose against these executions of the Priscilliantists, and not only from the members of this large religious communityin Hispania. The most eloquent protest that has survived was delivered by the pagan orator Pacatus Drepanius. Unlike all later commentators, he focused on the torture of Eucrocia, deploring the spilling of a woman's blood when she was only guilty of “an excessive piety.” He noted that the persecutors included bishops, who he called bandits that robbed their victims of their inheritance, while calumniating their honor and depriving them of their very lives.
Worse, after having heard the groans and tortures of these unfortunates... they approached the altars with their hands stained by contact with the death penalty and profaned with their bodies the ceremonies they had already profaned with their souls.” These prelates gratified themselves, wrote Pacatus, with “the goods of the wealthy for their greed, the execution of innocents for their cruelty, the deprecation of religion for their impiety. [Panegyrics 12. 29, in Ardanez, 214, n.17]
Even pope Siricus and Ambrose of Milan denounced the shedding of blood for heresy (a precedent far more dire than they could have imagined at the time, as the Inquisition was 750 years in the future). An infuriated Martin of Tours prevailed on the emperor to rescind his orders dispatching military tribunes to Spain to stamp out the heresy. (By that time, some Priscillianists had already been exiled and their property expropriated.) Several ringleaders of the persecution were relieved of their bishoprics. But this revulsion within the Church did not last. Fifty years later, pope Leo wrote of the case's handling with approval. The door had been opened for other persecutions.
In Hispania, people reacted strongly against the executions of people who were widely regarded as saints and martyrs. The Priscillianist movement became more popular than ever and its numbers grew. It became especially deep-rooted in Portugal and Galicia, regions distant from Roman rule, with a strong Celtic presence. Imperial authorities there spent the next two centuries attempting to suppress this religious movement. Even the Spanish bishops were divided; in the year 400 the orthodox faction forced six Priscillianists to abjure at Toledo, and they deposed four others for refusing to forswear their beliefs and community. An imperial edict of 407 ordered the Priscillianists to be stripped of civil rights, as had already been done to the pagans. [McKenna, 67]
In the early 400s ,the church-state repression was interrupted by Germanic invasions of Spain by the Vandals and Suevi. Priestly plans for all-out persecution did not get underway until 446-47, when pope Leo set up councils to wipe out the Priscillianists. The bishops issued anathemas against people who believed in non-canonical scriptures, in divination or astrology, or who said that Jesus did not exist before Mary, or who believed that eating animal flesh was evil. [Hefèle, II.1, 484-7]
These condemnations had little effect. The movement thrived for another century, only fading in the late 500s. By this late date, the name “Priscillianist” had become synonymous with “astrologer,” another persecuted group. [Flint, 94] [Besides the sources already named, I drew on LeClerc's commentary in Hefèle, II.1, 66-7; 476-87; Philip Hughes, A History of the Church, Vol II, Chapter 1, part V: www.netacc.net/~mafg/book/v2c1s5.htm; Butler's Lives of the Saints, and the Catholic Encyclopedia]
Early Christian Dancers
Two Gnostic scriptures survive that appear to be related to these early Spanish mystics. The first is a 4th century copy of the apocryphal Acts of Philip (discovered by François Bovon, paradoxically, in a monastery on the militantly all-male redoubt of Mt. Athos, where even female animals are forbidden). This book describes an egalitarian, vegetarian, and celibate community in Asia Minor:
Church leadership was democratic rather than hierarchic, and men and women served equally as priests. In fact, the manuscript describes Philip and the apostle Bartholomew traveling from town to town with Philip’s sister, a woman named Mariamne. [Gewertz, online]
It might be tempting to glimpse the ancient Christian tradition of Mariamne / Mariamma / Maria of Magdalene behind this figure, but this is a different, much later woman, from one of the ascetic Asiatic Christian movements in the 300s.
Devoted to ascetic practices, the group flourished in Asia Minor during the fourth century A.D. Members were to eat no meat, drink no wine, shun wealth, and abstain from sexual intercourse. Both sexes wore men's clothing made only from plant fibers. ...Within the community, women as well as men served at all levels. One list mentions "presbytides" (female elders or priestesses) alongside "presbyters" (male elders, or priests). Deaconesses are paired with deacons, as are virgins with eunuchs. [Desmond 2000]
Predictably, the orthodox priesthood frowned on these communities, being deeply hostile to female leadership of any kind. Around 343, the Council of Gangra anathematized them, and soon after, the Council of Laodicea "forbade the appointment of presbytides." [Desmond 2000] So we are looking at egalitarian Christian groups in both the eastern and western ends of the Mediterranean.
In the Acts of John, an early Christian apocryphal text dated to 150-200 CE), Jesus tells his disciples to hold hands and dance around him while he sings a hymn very like the one in Augustine’s “heretical” excerpt. [Backman, E. Louis. Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1952, p. 15. I've amended "complain," a translator's error, to "lament."]
Praise to thee, Logos! Praise to thee, Grace. Amen.
I will be saved and I shall save. Amen.
I will be delivered, and I shall deliver. Amen.
Grace dances in the round-dance.
I will play upon the flute, let all dance. Amen.
I will lament, let all lament. Amen. "
The unique Ogdoad sing praises with me. Amen.
The Twelve on high dance their ring-dance. Amen.
It is the duty of all to dance on high. Amen.
Who dances not, knows not what will happen. Amen.
This Acts of John also shows influences from Egyptian mysticism; the Ogdoad was a hellenized name for the primeval Eight Beings in Kemet. Egyptian Gnostics often referred to “the Eighth” as a realm of bliss attained by mystic adepts. The ringdance of the Twelve on high signifies the twelve constellations of the zodiac in Gnostic and Neoplatonic traditions. [Acts of Thomas, Hermas the Shepherd, in Backman, 17-18] The praises to Logos and Grace could be taken as invoking the divine in male and female forms, similar to Christian Gnostic pairing of Christos and Sophia. The last lines of this song—"who dances not, knows not what will happen"—indicate that the dance was seen as conferring divine inspiration and foreknowledge of events. Here's a different translation:
I would be washed, and I would wash. Amen.
Grace danceth. I would pipe; dance ye all. Amen.
I would mourn: lament ye all. Amen.
The number Eight (lit. one ogdoad) singeth praise with us. Amen.
The number Twelve danceth on high. Amen.
The Whole on high hath part in our dancing. Amen.
Whoso danceth not, knoweth not what cometh to pass. Amen. [Acts of John, online]
Two centuries later, the Priscillianists’ chant in Spain contains some of the same lines: “I would save, and I would be saved.” In fact, Augustine says that the Priscillians and Manichaeans derived their hymns from the Memoria Apostolorum:
I will free and I would be freed
I will heal and I would be healed
I will bring forth and I would be brought forth
I will sing; let all dance together
I will clap my hands; let all sing
I will adorn and I would be adorned. [Backman, 15]
E. Louis Backman documented in detail how the church patriarchs battled the deeply engrained custom of ritual dance, handclapping, singing, and drumming. They had to contend with scriptures that described David dancing before the Ark, or that even commanded, as in Ezekiel 6:11, that worshippers clap and stamp their feet. Backman brings out how the church patriarchs refer to mystic round-dances with the angels, then repeatedly insist that these are allegories, or what happens after death, not actual dances, whch most of them stoutly disapprove. Thus Clement of Alexandria and Epiphanius of Salamis say it is for the angels in heaven, not humans.
John Chrysostom writes that where there is a dance, there is also the devil, though ring dances under the control of a leader might be all right. Ambrose is ambivalent, admires the sacred dance, but is under pressure to abandon it; similarly Gregory of Nazianzus, forbids the ring dance in one place, but elsewhere prescribes it to be done for the martyrs. Ausgustine was outraged at the stamping dances Algerians did in the churches which he considered "shameless" and "insolent," and which he says the priests eventually put a stop to. [Backman 22-32]
That some Christians continued their ancient ethnic ceremonial practices is evidenced in the book On Heretics, by the Syrian bishop Theodoretos. He condemned the dances of Egyptian Gnostic Christians called Meletians: "In accordance with their doctrine they were so foolish as to wash the body every other day, to sing hymns to the accompaniment of hand-clapping and dancing, to rattle bells hung upon a peg, and so on." This clearly refers to the sistrum which, as Backman recognizes, "the priestesses of the goddess Isis rang during their temple dances," for millennia. says that hand clapping and dancing, quote, were a typical Christian usage during those centuries. [Backman, 34]
Theodoretos also refers to ecstatic healing dances of the Messalians, which he considers "madness." They "held out their fingers as if they were arrows to shoot at the demons." Here it must be kept in mind that the Christian scriptures are full of exorcisms for the purpose of healing, not only byYeshua, but also by his disciples as he instructed them to do. [Backman, 35] Not only that, but exorcism was a primary form of healing in Judaea at that time, as it had been in Mesopotamia for millennia.
The injuctions against religious dance only tightened as time went on. Caesarius, bishop of Arles in the early 500s, preached against dancing and singing at religious festivals, condemning people who dance and leap "before the churches of the saints, and although they come to church as Christians, they return as heathens, because these dances are a relic of pagan customs." [Backman, 35] More than that, they are a universal expression of human joy, community, reverence and spiritual exaltation.
Episcopal Diatribes Against Musical Instruments
Inspirational ceremonies in which Christians sang and danced all night were prominent in North Africa. Augustine relates his attempts to repress them, to ardent protests from his congregation. [MacMullen, 114-15] The dances did not survive the attacks of conservative bishops like Athanasius of Alexandria, who outlawed musical instruments and dance. He was especially keen to eliminate the sistrum and drum, which had been used in Kemetic ceremonies for over 3000 years; but the Ethiopian Orthodox church has preserved them up to this day.
The bishops didn’t like rhythmic handclapping either, most of them. [MacMullen, 104] In Syria, John Chrysostom condemned Christians who danced; he thought their joy was too wild. So did Caesarius of Arles, who disapproved of the Gauls’ leaping dances. [MacMillen 215 n. 3; 216 n. 9]
Many church patriarchs were hostile to congregations using musical instruments in their services, among them Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Jerome and Augustine. They saw any ecstatic element as pagan; but they had a problem: the Hebrew Bible refers often to religious praise songs with musical instruments. Psalm 150 explicitly calls for exaltation to the sound of lyre, harp, trumpet, pipes, strings, and cymbals. And David danced before the Ark "with all his might, wearing a priestly garment." [II Samuel 6:14]
The anti-music patriarchs tried to get around these sacral precedents by insisting that they were purely metaphorical. They disparaged musicians as being bestial, worthless, and low-class; even criminal and destructive:
Leave the pipe to the shepherd, the flute to the men who are in fear of gods and intent on their idol worshipping. Such musical instruments must be excluded from our wingless feasts, for they arc more suited for beasts and for the class of men that is least capable of reason than for [real, upper class] men. —Clement of Alexandria, 190 CE (The Instructor, p. 130)
Of useless arts there is harp playing, dancing, flute playing, of which, when the operation ceases, the result disappears with it. And, indeed, according to the word of the apostle, the result of these is destruction. [Basil, Commentary on Isaiah 5 www.christianheritageedinburgh.org.uk/2016/08/20/the-church-fathers-on-musical-instruments/ The unnamed author of this site states that “The majority of Church Fathers between AD 100 and 500 did not accept the use of musical instruments in church and the [orthodox] Christians worshipped God with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs in a chanting fashion.”]
The 3rd century Carthaginian bishop Cyprian forbade Christians to play musical instruments:
These things [instruments], even if they were not dedicated to idols, ought not to be approached and gazed upon by faithful Christians; because, even if they were not criminal, they are characterized by a worthlessness which is extreme, and which is little suited to believers. [Cyprian, De spectaculis. www.ewtn.com/library/PATRISTC/ANF5-22.TXT ]
These bishops broke away from the universal human heritage of ceremonial music and dance. In country after country, they fought to suppress the ancient and unbroken line of spiritual rejoicing. They won some battles, but it was a war they could not win. In the Greek Orthodox world, the dance continued. In western Europe, synods and sermons continued to fulminate for many centuries against the people's desire to dance in and around churches. This impulse sprang up again in the wake of the bubonic plague, where it was regarded as "possession." It would later resurge in the Americas among the Shakers, and in Diasporic African Ring-Shouts, in Calundus, and Santería.
The Pelagians
The Briton Pelagius came to Rome in the 380s. A Christian ascetic, he taught that sin was a choice, not an indelible part of human nature, and that people should strive to be perfected by divine grace. He did not believe that humanity was forever stained by the Fall of Adam and Eve, nor that the death of Jesus absolved anyone of wrongs they committed. He said that people were responsible for their own actions and did not need the priesthood as intermediaries to the divine.
The Pelagian Julian of Eclanum insisted that “God made nothing evil,” for which Augustine attacked him. [Pagels, 132] The Pelagians had a positive attitude toward sexuality as a natural part of creation—or rather, toward heterosexuality, since they condemned same-sex love. Pelagians argued that Paul did not stigmatize heterosexual relations, only homosexual ones. [Boswell, 161 n. 99]
Augustine fought bitterly against the Pelagian Christians, who opposed his idea of Original Sin. [Ranke-Heinemann, 75] Theirs was actually the majority position before this Augustinian innovation, in line with Origen, John Chrysostom, and Eastern Christians, especially in Syria. The pope excommunicated Pelagius and his first follower Celestius as heretics in 418. [Ranke-Heinemann, 86-7] Augustine’s doctrine prevailed, so successfully that few Pelagian writings have survived, except in polemics against them.
The Manichaeans
Another formidable rival to orthodox Christianity was the Manichaean branch of Gnosticism. Mani was a Chaldean (from what is now Iraq) who fused Mandæan Christianity with Zoroastrian dualism and currents of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. Like Zoroastrians, Mani taught that there was a good god and an evil one. The evil god had created or taken over the physical world, binding souls to matter through procreation. Manichaeans viewed childbearing as furthering the ends of this anti-god. By shunning meat and reproductive sex, believers sought to return to the divine light of spirit and ensure the eventual triumph of good over evil, spirit over “this abominable flesh.” [Lane Fox, 568] Eusebius called Mani a madman, barbarian, “demoniacal and insane,” his doctrines “like a deadly poison.” [Hist. Eccles. VII. 31.1]
The first Roman edict against the Manichaeans came in 287, under a pagan emperor, and reached its zenith under Diocletian in 303. [Holland-Smith, 27; 32] I won't go into all the complexities of this movement, but it spread deep into the western desert of Egypt, as far as the Dakhleh oasis (probably in flight from persecution), and across North Africa. The early Manichaean scriptures were in Syriac, but they easily adapted and produced texts in Greek and Coptic.
Manichaean belief in the evil god had the effect of intensifying Christian emphasis on the devil. The split between divine and demonic deepened as the church hierarchy anathematized heretics, Jews, and pagans. “The devil” proved to be a handy tool for dehumanizing these groups in the minds of orthodox Christians. They believed that this (unofficial) anti-god who led them into “error” and “false teaching.”
The struggle against the Manichaeans left deep marks in church doctrine. While the dualists said that reproductive sex was wrong, the Church hierarchy took the reverse position, insisting that reproduction was the only purpose of sex, and that making love for any other reason was sinful. As Clement of Alexandria put it, “to have sex for any purpose other than to produce children is to violate nature.” This notion became known as the “Alexandrian rule.” [Boswell, 147; 140] It would cause immense suffering over the centuries.
Augustine's Doctrine of Original Sin
Bishop Augustine of Hippo, one of the “Doctors of the Church,” came from an Algerian community of Manichaeans. His conversion to Catholicism in 386 CE did not free him from the dualistic worldview. Augustine was obsessed with the devil, casting natural forces into his realm and toppling the pagan world of spirits from its ancient religious base. In his eyes, natural powers were accursed, demonic, ruling over a sphere which god had allotted to the devil to punish humans for their sins.
Augustine reversed the Manichaean declaration that reproductive sex was bad. He insisted that only reproductive sex was good, and all other sex evil. In his youth he had lived as a libertine, freely indulging himself like other men of his class. He wrote that the scales fell from his eyes when he realized that the root of all evil lay in “evil lust, sexual desire and carnal longing.” The stain of sex—“original sin”—led to eternal death. Even babies who died without baptism were to be damned to eternal hell.
Augustine connected sexual intercourse with Original Sin, a concept he invented, and pleasure with perdition. (This idea was incorporated into Catholic doctrine, but not accepted in Greek Orthodoxy.) As Uta Ranke-Heinemann observed, Augustine “fused Christianity together with hatred of sex and pleasure into a systematic unity.” [Ranke-Heinemann, 75-8]
The core of the Augustinian legacy was a deep-seated disdain of women. Augustine believed that women were inferior beings, "of small intelligence," mired in the promptings of the inferior flesh," [De Genesi ad literam, 11.42] He preached that man represents spirit, and woman carnality. [Long, 154] Woman was not even a worthy companion, but a purely sexual creature necessary only for procreation. [Ranke-Heinemann, 55; 78-81; 88]
... the woman together with her own husband is the image of God, so that that whole substance may be one image; but when she is referred separately to her quality of help-meet, which regards the woman herself alone, then she is not the image of God; but as regards the man alone, he is the image of God as fully and completely as when the woman too is joined with him in one. [On the Trinity, 12.7.10]
Augustine thought that women were good only for bearing children and housework. He condemned any and all attempts at contraception. Women should obey their husbands, as set out in Christian marriage contracts. Male authority was total: “a woman has no right to dispose of her own body without male permission.” [Long, 158-9]
Augustine praised his mother for serving his father “as her master.” Monica herself told friends whose husbands beat them “that they should remember their condition and not defy their masters.” [Confessions, IX, 195] (So, of course, the church declared her a saint, too.) Augustine approved of a man having several wives, reasoning that “a slave never has several masters, but a master does have several slaves.” [Ranke-Heinemann, 96-7]
He behaved accordingly. Due to family pressure, he repudiated his concubine of twelve years, sent her back to Africa, and kept her son with him in Milan. Imagine the mother's pain at being discarded and separated from her child. This doctor of the church never spoke of the sexual exploitation of women, which he had himself practiced before his conversion. Adopting Christianity changed his religious beliefs, but not his misogyny, nor his heart.
Augustine leveled the blood libel at Manichaeans, claiming that they ate their babies in order to free them from the flesh. He also accused them of sprinkling flour under a copulating pair, making a batter with their sexual fluids, and baking a eucharist wafer to be eaten by the elect. [Russell, 125; 319 n. 32] He claimed that the Manichaen elders seduced women. [Allegro, 129-30] Other Christian writers charged that the Manichaeans drank menstrual blood to attain immortality. [Lane Fox, 591. Compare this with Epiphanius’ description of the “Barbelites” in Chapter 6.]
The Blood Libel Spreads to New Targets
The earliest instances of the blood libel had been leveled against Jews out of religious animus, by Apion in the 2nd century bce. (An account of this appears in Chapter III, which i’ll post later.) Romans used similar charges as a political weapon against Cataline after his failed attempt to overthrow the Roman state in 63 bce. They alleged that Catiline, “wishing to bind his accomplices in guilt by an oath, handed round among them, in goblets, the blood of a human body mixed with wine; and that when all, after an imprecation, had tasted of it, as is usual in sacred rites, he disclosed his design… in order that they might be the more closely attached to one another, by being mutually conscious of such an atrocity.” [Sallust, Catalina 22]
Other writers expand on this blood-drinking story, including Plutarch in his Life of Cicero. Two centuries later, Dio Cassius alleged that the blood came from a murdered child [Dio Cass. book 37, in notes on Sallust, above] And this is indicative of the direction of travel for these allegations.
Norman Cohn documented the spread of a fantasy of a clandestine sect devoted to abominable ceremonies, with claims that they posed a threat to the larger community. These stories generated fear and “the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil.” [Cohn, xiii] In the 2nd century, stories of horrific cannibalistic cremonies, often combined with orgies, began to coalesce around Christians, who were still a small minority.
Cohn explains the scriptural hooks that these accusations were hung on, especially verses about the eucharist in the writings of Paul and John. In I Corinthians 11: 23-25, Jesus gives bread to his disciples and instructs them, “Take, eat: this is my body”; and gives wine, calling it “the new testament of my blood.” In John 6:53, he says, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves.” [In Cohn, 8-9] It’s easy to see how pagans could take these verses as referring to cannibalism.
Cohn points to Pliny the Younger who, as Roman governer of Bithynia, questioned some ex-Christians in what is now northwest Türkiye. They said they did have ritual meals (the agape love feasts) but that they did not harm anyone. Few believed them. The Christian writer Tatian found it necessary to explain to pagans in 152, “There is no cannibalism among us.” His contemporary, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, accused Christians of infanticide, cannibalism, and incest. [Cohn, 2]
Around the year 150, Justin Martyr claimed that Jews had spread these lies against Christians—but said that the Marcionite heretics really were guilty of cannibalism, orgies and incest. His phrase “with the lights extinguished” would have a long and bloody history. Meanwhile, the blood libel against Jews was still circulating. An accusation by Damocritus (an otherwise unknown person of uncertain date) is quoted in the Suda quotes, a 10th century compilation of ancient texts: “Every seven years the Jews catch a stranger, whom they offer as a sacrifice, killing him by tearing his flesh into shreds.” [Gottlieb et al. ND]
The 11th century Byzantine monk Michael Psellos accused the (long-gone) Messalians of orgiastic practices, incest, and homosexuality. He claimed that they offered up to the devil children born from promiscuous rites—and ate them. A later monk Euthymios Zigabenos repeated these accusations, which also reappeared in early heretic trials at Orléans, France. [Russell 1972: 93]
In the late 2nd century, the Christian apologist Minucius Felix described the accusations being circulated, via one of his characters in the Octavius. He says that Christians worship a donkey’s head—a charge directly lifted from Apion’s smear against the Jews more than a century before—and worship the genitals of the presiding priest. He also alleges that Christians practiced child sacrifice in their supposed initiation ceremony:
a child, covered in dough to deceive the unwary, is set before the would-be novice. The novice stabs the child to death with invisible blows; indeed he himself deceived by the coating dough, thinks his stabs harmless. Then—it's horrible!—they hungrily drink the child's blood and compete with one another as they divide his limbs ; through this victim they are bound together; and the fact that they all share the knowledge of the crime pledges them all to silence.
Further, Christian feast days are described as “drunken orgies,” in which the lights are put out and people indulge in “shameless” and “unnameable” passions, even with blood relatives, or with people of the same sex. And the kicker is that “precisely the secrecy of this evil religion proves that all these things, or practically all, are true.” [Cohn, 1] All these accusations would resurface in medieval trials of heretics and witches.
Tertullian mocked these urban legends, showing that they had also spread to Carthage, and tells how a man was hired to carrying around a picture of a man in asses’ ears and hooves with the caption, “The god of the Christians, ass-begotten.” [Cohn, 2] This was a reworking against Greco-Egyptian slanders against Jews, claiming that they worshipped an ass. [In Chapter III.]
But Christians themselves began to make the same accusations against those they regarded as “heretics,” especially Gnostics. One of their earliest targets were the Carpocratians. Clement of Alexandria claimed that they held incestuous orgies, followed by Eusebius of Caesarea, who accused them of eating children and transmitting “the magic arts of Simon [Magus].” [IV. 5.9] Both Clement and Epiphanius of Salamis accused the New Prophecy Christians (“Montanists”) of sacrificing children; Jerome even claimed they put children’s blood in their bread. [Russell 1972: 91-92] Such was their animus against Christians with female leaders.
Others spread rumors that Gnostics aborted a fetus, pounded it with honey and pepper and herbs, and ate it. They capped this accusation with a slur against Jews: “Apparently they believe this to be the perfect Passover meal.” [Allegro, 123] The vicious charge of cannibalism was joined with wild stories about secret sexual orgies.
There’s one more piece, this time directed against pagans in the christianized empire. Around 400, Rufinus claims that “the priests of Saturn” in Alexandria killed “weak and despised infants in order to inspect their entrails for omens.” He also alleges that a priest named Tyrannus (oh, sure) tricked aristocratic men into giving up their wives to the god for him to have sex with them. Rufinus claims that the priest would hide in the god's hollow statue, from which his voice would emanate, “and suddenly all the lights went out.” The priest would then use the woman sexually, pretending to be the god. Eventually, went the story, some husband discovered the truth and had the priest tortured, extracting a “confession.” [Smith 1976: 173-74]
The motif of the lights suddenly being put out, followed by sexual license against all societal rules, would persist in medieval fantasies about what heretics and witches supposedly did in their gatherings.
Toxic legacies
Stepping forward in time, the toxic legacies surveyed here have carried along across history, through the medieval "Holy Roman Empire" (famously "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire"), and through successive European dynasties and the global colonizations of the Spanish and French and British empires. The idea that religion justifies murder, enslavement, robbery, and even genocide is still prevalent.
After the year 1000, the blood libel against Jews was revived and provoked countless pogroms and expulsions from cities, regions, and countries. The old defamatory myths about orgies at heretical conventicles were revived too, spreading with the revival of Roman law and, thereby, of judicial torture under the Inquisition. This persecutory channel converged with another accusation—stemming from the priesthood's denunciation of contraception and abortion as "homicide"—that witches killed babies.
Demonologist theologians crafted a new diabolist myth from the orgies-and-blood-atrocities menu, merging it with the episcopal demonization of folk deities and ceremonies, constantly fulminated through synods, conciliar canons, and sermons, during the early middle ages. They combined all this with the blood libel against witches, and applied to it the accusations of witches having sex with devils that came out of the torture chambers by the early 1400s.
European colonizers exported the toxic dogma of diabolism as a tool of colonization, to the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australasia, and Pasifika. They defined all Indigenous religions as "devil-worship," and used christianization as a pretext for land seizure, subjugation, and enslavement. They replicated the blood libel, once again, especially in Brazil and the Caribbean. Engravers who had never set food in these places avidly produced scenes of "savages" roasting human limbs and feasting on them.
In Europe, women lost more than the ancestral ethnic religions; we also lost recognized spheres of female leadership. The church imposed an all-male priesthood with far-reaching authority, though early medieval abbesses often went outside the lines drawn against women. But the sexual strictures went on tightening over the centuries, as the Gregorian "Reform" banned priestly marriage (dispossessing existing wives and children) and women were expelled from the double-monasteries (most of which became men-only), while pressure grew for female claustration (seclusion behind convent walls). So Christian women devised other means of going outside those lines, creating communities of Béguines and beatas outside of male supervision.
However, the male clergy soon challenged those moves, bringing the Inquisition to bear on the independent lay sisters, and burning some, like Margarète à Porète, at the stake. The Inquisition hunted women heretics, from Prous Boneta to the Guglielmites of Miland, and turned them over to "the secular arm" to be burned at the stake.
Most devastating of all were the witch hunts, beginning with royal laws from the 6th to the 10th century, and supplemented by episcopal trials and municipal witch-hunting laws, but blasting off with demonological trials by the Inquisition from the late 13th century on. They propagated torture-trials and spread diabolist mythology far and wide. The witch-hunting Terror flared first in the Alpine borderlands of western Europe, then moved east and north, eventually spreading as far as New England. That's beyond the scope of this book, but those events are rooted in the persecutory church-state authoritarianism that begins in the late Roman empire.
As forthe blood libel against Jews , it continued through the Middle Ages, triggering countless pogroms and expulsions. Boys who went missing were declared to have been victimized; the Catholic church declared one of them, Simon of Trent, to be a martyred saint (a claim only revoked in 1965). The Protestant Martin Luther propagated the blood libel in his On the Jews and their Lies (1543). The accusation triggered bloodshed into modern times, most notoriously in the Kishinev pogrom, and was a popular theme in the Nazi paper Der Stürmer.
In recent years, the blood libel has morphed into new forms, most notoriously in the Qanon conspiracy theory. It claims that a "deep state elite" ran a satanic child sex trafficking ring (most notoriously in the "pizzagate" accusations against Hillary Clinton) and that they also killed children in order to extract adenochrome from their blood in order to prolong youthful vigor. These stories gained wide and zealous followings on the far right, propagated by influencers such as Sean Hannity, Roseanne Barr, and fundamentalist ministers.