Europe's inner demons

This heretical group consisted mostly of canons of the collegiate church of Orléans — learned and pious men, one of whom had even been the queen’s confessor. It also included some aristocratic laymen, and some nuns and other women. The tone was one of deep piety — the leaders not only preached but also lived an outstandingly holy and simple life, and that is what attracted the followers. And these people were not afraid to confess their beliefs; for they were convinced that the Holy Spirit would protect them, and in the end they went to the stake laughing. The evidence they gave, when interrogated in the presence of the king and queen and the bishops, can therefore be taken as absolutely reliable. It shows them to have rejected much that was accepted Christian doctrine: they did not believe that Christ was born of a virgin, or that he suffered for men, or that he rose from the dead. They were not persuaded of the supernatural efficacy of baptism, or of the Eucharist, or of praying to the saints. At the same time they were mystics. They believed that each of them had received the Holy Spirit, which now dwelt in their hearts and guided them in all their ways.

Their doctrine, then, was not very different from, or more sinister than, the doctrine which the Society of Friends was to profess many centuries later. But these sectarians also talked of a certain “heavenly food”, and this proved enough to set imaginations working. A contemporary chronicler, Adhémar de Chabannes, describes how these people had been deceived by an unlettered layman, who gave them the ashes of dead children to eat, and so bound them to his sect. Once they were initiated, the Devil would appear to them, sometimes as a Negro and sometimes as an angel of light. Each day he would supply them with heaps of money; in return, they would be required to deny Christ in their hearts, even while pretending publicly to be true followers of Christ. And the Devil would also instruct them to abandon themselves in secret to every kind of vice.⁽⁹⁾

A couple of generations later, around 1090, a monk of Chartres called Paul gave a more elaborate account of the matter. “They came together on certain nights at an appointed hour,” he writes, “each carrying a light. And they recited the names of the demons as in a litany; until suddenly they saw the Devil descend among them in the guise of some animal or other. As soon as this vision seemed to appear, the lights were at once extinguished….” After which the monk faithfully follows his precursors, and notably Adhémar de Chabannes and Psellos. And after covering the usual promiscuous and incestuous orgy, the burning of the babies, the concocting of the enslaving, diabolic potion, he concludes, “Let this be enough to warn Christians to be on their guard against this evil work. . ”⁽¹⁰⁾

A hundred years later it had become a commonplace that the Devil, or a subordinate demon, presided over the nocturnal orgies of heretics in the form of an animal, usually a cat. And this belonged not to the folklore of the illiterate majority, but, on the contrary, to the world-view of the intellectual elite; learned clerics who stood at the very centre of affairs were thoroughly convinced of it. The Englishman Walter Map, for instance, was not only an important ecclesiastic but, at various times, a judge and an officer of the court of Henry II. He was also a wit, whom the count of Champagne was happy to entertain at his court, when Map was travelling to Rome to attend an ecumenical council. Yet this highly educated, urbane and experienced man was capable of describing the meetings of heretics in terms so fantastic that one would think he was joking, if it were not obvious from the context that he is perfectly serious. In his book De nugis curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles) he reports what certain French heretics, who had abandoned their heresy and returned to the Catholic fold, were supposed to have said about their former practices. At night the sectarians would foregather in a house — Map calls it a “synagogue”—with all gates and doors and windows firmly shut. After a period of silent waiting, a black cat of monstrous size would suddenly come down into their midst by a rope. Thereupon the lights were extinguished, and the heretics, murmuring their hymns between closed teeth (presumably, so as not to attract the attention of outsiders), clustered around their master the cat. In the darkness they had to feel for the demonic animal; and as each found it, he would kiss it on whatever part of the anatomy seemed appropriate to his craving for self-abasement: feet, genitals, under the tail (just as the early Christians were said to worship the genitals of the presiding priest!). It was only after this performance, and stimulated by it, that the heretics would embark on the usual promiscuous orgy.⁽¹¹⁾