The Shadow Religion

Matriarchy versus Patriarchy (2)

I wrote about the medieval gnostic Cathars in Sláine as I relate in Kiss My Axe! Sláine The Warped Warrior: The Secret History. And also in Pageturners in the chapter, ‘A Castle in Canada’. In both I was drawing on my strange, real-life adventures in France where I encountered the Cathars.

My guide to Cathar Country

But I’d actually come across some modern-day Cathars before.

When I was twelve.

To supplement those vague memories of my youth, and my strange encounter with Cathars as an adult, I read everything I could find on the gnostics. Because I really knew absolutely nothing about them.

But the more I researched them, the less I liked them.

The gnostics I read about were not the followers of the original matriarchal Sophia the Goddess, but rather of the patriarchal Demiurge.

Aka Jehovah, Yahweh or Lucifer.

The early Christians were gnostics – provably for at least the first one hundred years of Christianity. Probably up to 400 AD. Then, as the religion became more rigid and dogma-based (at least to the public), to the Christian congregations, they seemed to have gone underground with their knowledge and mysteries only available to a privileged, secret inner circle.

It became a Shadow Religion.

That’s how it operates today.

It’s worth describing one of those early Christian gnostic sects, which has many admirable characteristics. That is surely down to Sofia.

Women could be leading members. It was non-hierarchical, and was not based on age and experience.

So a teenage boy could be a bishop!

I love that. The Church Elders – predictably – hated it. The only qualification for a new member was that they had to bring new gnosis, new knowledge, to add to the existing canon. Because the essence of true Gnosticism is that we have the answers within us. We do not need the Abrahamic books to tell us what to do.

We already know.

You can see why that particular form of Christianity didn’t last long. Women leaders of the Church! Teenage bishops! New ideas! It was anathema to the Elders. I’d love to run it past the Princes of the Church today and see their scowling reaction or desperate, glassy faux smile at the ‘excesses’ of the past.

But this constantly changing Shadow Religion explains why there are a myriad of names for gnostics. The Cathars (Pure Ones), for instance, are also referred to as the Albigensians (Albi in Southern France), the Manicheans (after the Mesopotamian prophet Mani, and the Bogomils (Bulgarian meaning ‘Beloved of God’).

Gnosticism goes back long before Christianity. It may be part of an ancient Babylonian religion and it was certainly around in pre-Christian ancient Greece.

In the first century of Christianity, there could have been as many as fifty gnostic Christian cults. All with differing beliefs, many pagan-based and including Greek Gods.

It was never the unified religion the Christian Church would have you believe

There were and still are endless gnostic permutations, replicating like a constantly changing virus, but finally retreating into the shadows as the ‘one true Catholic Church’ established itself over its numerous rivals. These rivals are never mentioned in schools or churches, of course. They’re sometimes hard to find in books and academia, even.

And indeed the Catholic Church’s persecution, execution and destruction of other matriarchal pagan rivals is barely known. But their inquisitions began this early.

This was the Church’s first war on women, long before the medieval Burning Times I feature in Sha.

Why do we know so little about them? The reason is obvious. The powers-that-be do not want us to know about them because it would threaten today’s religions which are still secretly controlled by the Shadow Religion through the inner circles.

I described the eccentric, often foul behaviour of these gnostics in an introduction to the Sláine Cathar story. They’re usually sex and drug-related and an early account of them was given by John Allegro in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. An esteemed scholar commissioned to translate the Dead Sea Scrolls, his career was destroyed by the academic establishment for daring to tell the truth. Allegro’s view on sex and drugs and the Christian Church is heavily challenged. He appears to have made fundamental errors in some of his work. But he has his defenders, such as Professor Ruck, a renowned expert on ancient hallucinogens. And his harsh critics such as leading Bible scholars. Bear in mind these Bible scholars, when they begin their training, have to sign an article of faith and belief in Christianity.

Allegro had this to say, which I don’t think has ever been faulted:

The sect of Gnostics provides one of the major keys to unravelling the mystery of how the mushroom-worshipping Christians became the Church of later times. The Gnostics were groups of ascetics, scorning the lusts of the flesh entirely, and convinced that they possessed a secret and mysterious knowledge denied to lesser mortals, vouchsafed to them by revelation from God. They claimed to be connected to their Saviour-god and the earliest Christians by a secret tradition, and to possess certain mystic writings which only they could interpret. The ultimate object of their faith was an individual salvation, the assurance of a blessed destiny for each soul after death. They possessed many such formulae as “abracadabra”, and having pride of place above all their secret knowledge were the names of the demons. Only when each soul knew such names and could thus control their power, could repeat the holy formulae and display the right symbol, and were anointed (i.e. “christened”) with a holy oil, could he find his way to the seventh heaven, the kingdom of light. Thus, a principal feature of Gnosticism was the transmission to one another in strictest secrecy doctrines about the being, nature, names, and symbols of the Seven Demons or Angels who would otherwise bar their way to achieving the ultimate goal […] However, many of its ideas survived in mystic circles at least into the fourth and fifth centuries. What became “orthodox” Christianity waged a war with Gnosticism which it finally won, and the books of the “heresy” were systematically destroyed. Most of what we know about the sect comes from the writings of its ecclesiastical opponents.

And here’s an excerpt of what the Gnostics were actually like. From:

https://www.pantheism.net/paul/history/gnostic.htm by Paul Harrison:

The Gospel of Thomas was found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt among a cache of other Gnostic documents. It plainly rejects the world, the flesh and woman. It probably originated in Syria in the second century AD, and may have been used by the Manicheans. The Gospel of Thomas tells us that the world and the body are corpses. The real kingdom is of light, present inside dark matter.

The Gospel of Eve is known only from one or two short quotations from the great heretic-hunter Epiphanius (310/20 - 402), bishop of Salamis. He tells us that it was used by certain Gnostic sects with lurid and bizarre beliefs and sexual practices.

Epiphanius' testimony carries weight, because he admits that he himself fell in among them. He reports that they shared their women in common. They celebrated sexual orgies in which partners were swapped. Coitus interruptus was the normal practice. Semen was collected and offered to the Lord as the body of Christ, before being consumed. The Gnostics also consumed women's menstrual blood.

The theology behind the lechery was anything but world-affirming. It varied from one sub-sect to another. In outline the material world was ruled by an evil "archon" or intermediate deity. The bodily flesh belonged to this archon, and would not be raised up.

The power of the soul was found in semen and menses. But allowing semen to beget children in this world would play into the hands of the evil archon. So if by accident a woman fell pregnant, the sect would abort the foetus. They would pound it in a mortar, mix it with honey and spices, and eat it.

The beautiful women in the sect used to set themselves out as bait to recruit new followers. Some formed a male elite called Levites, who did not have sex with women but only with each other.

Jesus himself, they said, was the first teacher of these practices. He took Mary (probably Magdalene) to a mountain, took a woman out of his side and had sex with her, then drank his own sperm saying: "Thus we ought to do, that we may live." The sect even claimed that when Jesus at the Last Supper spoke of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he was referring to this practice.

Poor Epiphanius prayed to God, resisted the women, and freed himself from the sect. He then reported them to the bishops, who drove eighty of them from the city

Here’s the pro-Christian response by Bart Ehrman:

I’ve thought about this one for over thirty years. What I concluded about twenty-nine years ago is what I still think now: these kinds of charges were commonly leveled in the Roman world against whomever you didn’t like and suspected and there is very little any evidence that they were ever true. Almost always they are just slanders. It is worth noting that very similar charges were leveled by pagans against Christians, pagans against Jews, pagans against each other, Christians against pagans, Christians against … Christians!

I didn’t find that remotely convincing. Did you?

What I can tell you, with rather more scholarship than ‘It’s just lies. Lies. Lies’ is:

Every form of what we call Satanism is gnostic right through to the present day.

Every black mass in history is a gnostic black mass and I have the sources to confirm it.

You might wonder why I would bother to research it. It’s because I had skin in the game – from the age of twelve. We’ll get to that later.

But first, back to my later encounter with the Gnostic Cathars of Southern France.

The Crusaders massacred the Cathars of Occitania, with its beautiful, fairy tale castles. Carcassone. Beziers. Toulouse. These Cathars are usually portrayed in positive, New Age terms. And as tragic mystics. Not true. Sorry. When I checked the original sources, which were hard to find, they did do all the things the Crusaders accused them of. Both sides were equally vile.

Gnosticism is ultimately an anti-life death religion.

Hence the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate, which is widely recognised as a successor to gnostic Catharism and has even been referred to as Cathars.

But this battle between matriarchy and patriarchy gets a little more complex now. In simplistic terms, the Gnostic Goddess Sophia fought back. The patriarchy didn’t have it all their own way.

Because the internal gnosis of Sophia (known as the Muse in Ancient Greece) arises spontaneously within us all in every age.

And so it did in the 17^th century with the Ranters.

I wrote briefly about them in Defoe. This admirable working-class movement supposedly attempted to reach a higher state of consciousness by smoking tobacco (regular baccy?) and constantly swearing (ranting).

To quote Wikipedia:

They were regarded as heretical by the established Church and seem to have been regarded by the government as a threat to social order. The quote "...the bishops, Charles and the Lords have had their turn, overturn, so your turn shall be next...",^[2] published in a Ranter pamphlet, no doubt caused some concern in the halls of power. The Ranters denied the authority of churches, of Scripture, of the current ministry and of services, instead calling on men to listen to the divine within them.

So now we come to my experience of the Cathars as a boy.

As a curious and semi-feral twelve-year-old kid, I was at huge risk of falling foul of predators, so I probably had more ‘Perils of Patrick’ before the age of sixteen than many people have in a lifetime. Certainly enough material to draw on for stories for decades.

So that can’t be bad. As I say constantly in Pageturners, we should write what we know about. And I found a way, through comics, to turn lead into gold.

So I absolutely insist on no sympathy and I repudiate all such well-meaning sentiments because it risks putting me in the category of victim rather than survivor. Without going down an esoteric rabbit hole, what happened was meant to be, so I have no complaints.

It was meant to be so I could challenge these evil bastards, and, subsequently, other exponents of the patriarchy.

The gnostics I got involved with in my home town Ipswich, when I was twelve, called themselves Cathars, which means ‘Pure Ones’. They were influenced by Aleister Crowley, who devised a Gnostic mass. And by fellow occultist and Cathar revivalist Papus. Also by the fairly obscure drug beat culture of the 1950s and pre-Beatles 1960s.

Yet these Cathars were strongly middle-class with powerful and wealthy connections in the town and it was no coincidence that a masonic club was – and is – literally across the road from them.

Freemasonry and Gnosticism are intertwined. They are just two of numerous manifestations of the Shadow Religion.

The Cathars operated out of a prestigious, dark, Tudor antique shop – once known as the Old Curiosity Shop (named after the famous book by Dickens) – looking out on the public library. An avid reader, easily reading a book a day, and known as ‘Reader’ by other kids on my council estate, I’d be at that library every morning, actually waiting for the doors to open, which is a bit sad. In pre-internet days, libraries were well-known as places for predators to look for vulnerable kids.

There were three reasons why I got involved with the Cathars.

Firstly, because I had ‘vulnerable’ written right across my forehead. How many kids are at a library before nine o’clock in the morning, waiting for it to open?

Secondly, because money was involved and I was desperate, like so many vulnerable children. When I say desperate, I’m referring to physical hunger. If my mentally-ill widowed mother was away with the fairies, which happened from time to time, then there was literally nothing to eat in our house.

Thirdly, because I genuinely thought I could outsmart them.

Yes, that does rather confirm I was twelve years old!

Children’s fiction was full of kids outwitting villains and I completely identified with these intrepid young heroes. Think back to that age and how confident we all were. Well, I certainly was.

One of the predators – the manager – chatted to me outside the library. He gave me six pence and I thought – ‘But I didn’t have to do anything’. Then he bought me tea and marmite on toast in the Mikado corner cafe next to the library. I already knew he was a wrong ‘un, because I had observed he wore suede shoes. These ‘brothel creepers’ were not seen as respectable in the era I grew up in. Everyone who was respectable (e.g. middle class) wore ubiquitous Dunn and co. Harris Tweed jackets, cavalry twill trousers and brown brogues. Very squeaky.

And I thought to myself: ‘I know what your game is, I know what you want, but I’ll get the better of you.’ I thought this because I had already encountered Dunn and co. Catholic predators. So I’d been in this situation before. Quite a few times, in fact. Over several years. Hence why I had ‘vulnerable’ written across my forehead.

So any lion would have spotted me as potential prey at that watering hole, aka the Mikado corner cafe.

But I figured I knew the Cathars’ modus operandi and how to defeat them.

I don’t remember how. The twelve year old has chosen not to share his ‘cunning plan’ with me, but I know he had one.

And so I entered the lion’s den, aka The Old Curiosity Shop.

Next Week: Adrift in Ipswich