Europe's inner demons

According to Augustine, in his Manichaean days a woman once complained to him that at a religious meeting where she was sitting alone with other women, “some of the elect came in; one of them put out the lamp, whereupon another, whom she could not recognize, made to embrace her, and would have forced her into sin if she had not screamed and so escaped. This happened on the night when the feast of the vigils is kept.”⁽⁶⁾ Augustine, while admitting that the offender was never traced, comments that such practices must have been very common. One may reasonably ask why, in that case, he himself never witnessed anything of the kind during all the years of his membership. In reality the Manichaean electi or perfecti were famed, even amongst their enemies, for their absolute chastity and rigorous asceticism; and there is no reason to think that this implausible story is anything but a watered-down version of those orgiastic fantasies which the pagan Romans had once woven around the Christian Agape.

Centuries later these tales of erotic debauches, infanticide and cannibalism were revived and applied to various religious outgroups in medieval Christendom. In the process they were integrated more and more firmly into the corpus of Christian demonology. In the eyes of pagan Greeks and Romans, people who indulged in promiscuous orgies and devoured children were enemies of society and of mankind. In the eyes of medieval Christians they were, in addition, enemies of God and servants of Satan; their fearsome deeds were inspired by Satan and his demons, and served their interests. As the centuries passed the powers of darkness loomed larger and larger in these tales, until they came to occupy the very centre of the stage. Erotic debauches, infanticide and cannibalism gradually took on a new meaning, as so many manifestations of a religious cult of Satan, so many expressions of Devil-worship. Finally the whole nocturnal orgy was imagined as taking place under the direct supervision of a demon, who presided in material form.

These transformations can be observed quite clearly if one traces, in chronological order, the accusations brought against certain dissident sects in eastern and western Christendom. We may start with the sect of Paulicians, which in the eighth century was flourishing in southeastern Armenia, outside the frontiers of the Empire and outside the control of the Armenian church. In 719 the head of that church, St John IV of Ojun (Yovhannes Ojneçi), known as the Philosopher, summoned a great synod which condemned these people as “sons of Satan”; and he himself produced a tract which shows quite clearly what was meant by that.⁽⁷⁾ The Paulicians, he complains, come together under cover of darkness, and at these hidden meetings they commit incest with their own mothers. If a child is born, they throw it from one to another until it dies; and he in whose hands it dies is promoted to the leadership of the sect. The blood of these infants is mixed with flour to make the Eucharist; and so these people surpass the gluttony of pigs who devour their own brood. In this way John of Ojun brought the two originally independent fantasies of the erotic orgy and the “Thyestean feast” into logical relationships with one another; thereby providing a model for later generations. But that was not all — he also described how the Paulicians worshipped the Devil, bowing low and foaming at the mouth. This idea too was to be absorbed into the traditional stereotype.

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: