World Famous Cults and Fanatics Read online

  ***

  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:

  The bas reliefs . . . in French churches . . . represent erotic scenes. In the Cathedral of Alby a fresco even depicts sodomites engaged in sexual intercourse. Homosexuality was also well known in parts of Germany, as is proved by the trials of the Beghards and Beguins in the fourteenth century, particularly in the confessions of the brethren Johannes and Albert of Brünn, which are preserved in the Greifswald manuscript. From these it is evident that the Brethren of the Free Mind did not regard homosexuality as sinful. ‘And if one brother desires to commit sodomy with a male, he should do so without let or hindrance and without any feeling of sin, as otherwise he would not be a Brother of the Free Mind.’

  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 be
lief.”

  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.

  A hundred thousand Jews died in this seventeenth-century holocaust. Thousands of others fled the country, and many went to Turkey, where there were already wealthy Jewish communities.

  When Sabbatai Zevi heard about these massacres he was appalled. Overwhelmed by a desperate desire to do something for his people, he suddenly became convinced he was the Messiah who would lead them back to the Holy Land. And he began his mission by doing something that horrified his orthodox fellow Jews – he stood up in the synagogue and pronounced the name of Jehovah (or Jahweh), which Jews regard as too sacred to speak. (Instead they called it Adonai.)

  Like all messiahs, he soon collected a small band of followers who believed every word he said. His fellow orthodox Jews found this menacing, and banished him when he was twenty-five. In the Turkish town of Salonika (now Thessaloniki, and a part of Greece) he gained even more converts. But even his followers were often puzzled by his strange behaviour. On one occasion he went around carrying a basket of fish, explaining that it represented the Age of Pisces, when Jews would be released from bondage. And on another occasion he shocked the rabbis by inviting them to a feast, then taking a Scroll of the Law in his arms as if it were a woman, and carrying it to a marriage canopy that he had set up; this symbolic marriage of the Messiah and the Law shocked the orthodox so much that he was expelled from Salonika.

  At the age of thirty-six, surrounded by disciples (who supported him in style) he moved to Jerusalem. There he was seen by a young man who was to become his John the Baptist or St Paul, the son of a Jewish scholar named Nathan Ashkenazi, who was deeply impressed when he saw Sabbatai in the street, but was too young and shy to approach him. It was at this time that Sabbatai found himself a bride, a Polish girl named Sarah, who had escaped the pogrom, become a courtesan (or high-class tart), and developed a strange conviction that she was destined to be the bride of the Messiah. The story has it that Sabbatai heard about the beautiful courtesan and sent twelve of his disciples to Leghorn, in Italy, to bring her to him. They were married in March 1664.

  In the following year, Sabbatai finally met Nathan, who was now twenty-two (Sabbatai was nearly forty), and allowed himself to be convinced that it was time to announce to the whole world – and not merely to his disciples – that he was the Messiah.

  The news spread throughout Palestine. But when Sabbatai rode seven times around the city of Jerusalem, then went to present himself to the rabbis as their new master, he met with violent hostility, and another order of banishment. Sabbatai now decided to return to the city of his birth, Smyrna. Meanwhile, his St Paul was writing letters to Jewish communities all over Europe announcing that the Messiah had come. These letters were read aloud in synagogues, and thousands of Jews were suddenly filled with hope that the Day of Judgement had at last arrived. In Amsterdam, another Jewish centre, crowds danced in the streets. In London, Samuel Pepys recorded that Jews were placing ten to one bets that Sabbatai would soon be acknowledged as the King of the World.

  Not all Jews shared this enthusiasm; the orthodox were appalled, for the doctrines preached by Sabbatai were horribly similar to those preached by the Brethren of the Free Spirit. “The forbidden” was now allowed, which included incest and promiscuity. The Sabbataians (as they were called) shocked their neighbours by walking around naked at a time when nakedness was regarded as a sin. In the Jewish religion, as in Mohammedanism, women were kept strictly apart. Sabbatai told them they were men’s equals and should mix freely with their fellow worshippers. Divorce or infidelity was no reason for a woman to be excluded from full participation in religious rites. Was not the Messiah himself married to a woman who admitted to having been a whore?

  Not that Sabbatai’s followers were inclined to sexual self-indulgence. They took pride in mortifying the flesh, scourging and starving themselves, rolling naked in the snow, even burying themselves in the earth so only their heads stuck out. It was a frenzy of religious ecstasy, all based on the belief that the Millennium was about to arrive.

  Now Sabbatai made the mistake that was to dismay all his followers and bring an abrupt end to his career. He decided to go to Constantinople, the Turkish capital, a journey of fourteen days by sea. When the news reached Constantinople, i
t caused the same wild scenes of rejoicing that had been seen in other European capitals. There was a general feeling that the Day of Judgement was at hand, and that Sabbatai’s arrival would finally restore the Jews to the glory they had enjoyed under King David.

  The Sultan, the young Mehmet IV, was understandably alarmed. Enemies of Sabbatai informed his Grand Vizier, Ahmed Koprulu, that the Messiah was a charlatan who wanted the Sultan’s throne. If Sabbatai had heard about this, he might have felt complimented. The people of Constantinople were prepared to welcome him as the people of Jerusalem had welcomed Jesus Christ, and the secular authorities thought he wanted to become king. History was repeating itself. His reply, of course, would be: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

  But the parallel with Jesus should also have warned him that he would soon be under arrest. In fact, the boat had only just docked – after a painful journey of thirty-six days – when Mehmet’s soldiers came on board and carried him off to jail.

  He was luckier than his messianic predecessor. Wealthy followers greased enough palms to make sure he was not put to death. Instead, he was installed in the castle of Abydos, in Gallipoli, and allowed to continue to live in style, with a succession of distinguished visitors. Unfortunately, one of these was a paranoid old man named Nehemiah ha-Kolen, a Polish scholar who wanted to argue with Sabbatai about the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical system. He was determined to prove Sabbatai an impostor, or at least, compel him to acknowledge himself, Nehemiah, as an equal. Sabbatai stood up for himself, and probably allowed Nehemiah to see that he regarded him as a bilious and envious old neurotic. Nehemiah hastened away to denounce him to the Sultan as a revolutionary who had admitted that he hoped to usurp the throne. In September 1666, Sabbatai was brought before Sultan Mehmet, and ordered to convert to Islam or die on the spot. Faced with his supreme opportunity for martyrdom, Sabbatai behaved as unpredictably as ever. He promptly removed his Jewish skullcap and accepted a turban instead. He also accepted a new name: Azis Mehmet Effendi. His wife converted too, becoming known as Fatima Radini. The Sultan then granted him a comfortable sinecure as keeper of the palace gates, which carried a generous pension.