Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/47

 single ill-preserved pair of leaves, in which the Manichæan writer pours forth horrid blasphemies and vilely attacks those who call Mary’s Son (Bar Maryam) the Son of Adonay.

It may be worth while here to say just a word correcting a curious old-fashioned misapprehension which once prevailed in certain quarters concerning the Albigenses, an error of which we occasionally yet catch the echoes, as when Mrs. Grenside wrote that the Albigenses were “a sect of the 14th century which, owing to their secret doctrine, endured much ecclesiastical persecution.” The impression left, and it is one which was not altogether uncommon some seventy years ago, is that the Albigensian was a stern old Protestant father, Bible and sword in hand, who defended his hearth and home against the lawless brigands spurred on to attack him by priestly machinations. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The Albigensian was a Satanist, a worshipper of the powers of evil, and he would have found short shrift indeed, fire and the stake, in Puritan England under Cromwell, or in Calvinistic Scotland had his practices been even dimly guessed at by the Kirk. As Dr. Arendzen well says: “Albigensianism was not really a heresy against Christianity and the Catholic Church, it was a revolt against nature, a pestilential perversion of human instinct.”

Towards the end of the nineteenth century a Neo-Gnostic Church was formed by Fabre des Essarts, but that great pontiff Leo XIII promptly condemned it with fitting severity as a recrudescence of the old Albigensian heresy, complicated by the addition of new false and impious doctrines. It is said still to have a number of unhappy adherents. These Neo-Gnostics believe that the world is created by Satan, who is a powerful rival to the omnipotence of God. They also preach a dangerous communism, speciously masqued under some such titles as the “Brotherhood of Man” or the “Brotherhood of Nations.”

In 1900, after a letter from Joanny Bricaud, the patriarch of universal Gnosticism at Lyons, where, in 1913, he was residing at 8, rue Bugeaud, the Neo-Gnostics joined with the Valentinians, a union approved by their pseudo-Council of Toulouse in 1903. But some years later Dr. Fugairon of Lyons, who adopted the name of Sophronius, amalgamated