Fantastic Metropolis

To the Gnostics, who Mani borrowed from and in turn influenced, Christ was the bearer of gnosis itself who descended from Heaven to reveal the truth and defeat the demiurge who had created the imperfect and evil world we all live in. In many Gnostic cosmologies, the demiurge created reality by the rape of Sophia, or wisdom itself, the last descending emanation from the spiritual world (in a clear lifting of Kabbalistic doctrines) or via Sophia’s own desire to create life without the permission of the spirit. If you’ve read the Nag Hammadi books you’ll recognize the demiurge as Yaldabaoth, who became actual after the material world had (shades of Ahriman, trapped in the Good Creation of Ormazd) and who merely organized it, claiming to be the One True God and in so doing usurping the power of the ten spirits who stood above him (again, a clear lifting of the ten sephiroth from Kabbalism) which led to Sophia’s designation of Yaldabaoth as the Son of Chaos, as Samael the blind god, and promised him that he would eventually fall down to his mother, the impenetrable abyss. In another version, this one propagated by the Ophite sect, the Father of All, the Son of Man, and the Holy Spirit joined together to create Christ, and in the process of creating Christ, the divine power overflowed to the left side of the Holy Spirit and she gave birth a being known as the Left, the Man-Woman of Sophia, and Man-Woman gave birth to Yaldabaoth, who fathered his own son in turn, and then five others who formed, along with Yaldabaoth, what was known as the higher hebdomad. Meanwhile, the self-originating principle of power itself, the serpent (hence the name Ophite) created the seven planets (and again we refer to Ahriman and his seven planets making war against Ormazd and his constellations) as the lower hebdomad, the opposition to humanity. The Ophites claimed that the serpent was Michael and Samael at the same time, “fused into the positive and negative aspects of a single state of existence.”

As we’ve seen, the Cathars share a name with the Elchasaite sect that the Apostle Mani once belonged to, the Pure Ones. We’ve also seen that the Manichean and Gnostic roots of Catharism, as entered through the Bogomil heresy (the one that postulated that God had two sons, Satanael and Jesus Christ, in a near-mirror of Zurvanite Zoroastrianism, with Zurvan the uncaring maker of all things, Ormazd as the Good God and Ahriman as the Corruptor) would have been shocking and novel to many in Western Europe, a heresy that promised a massive shift in the cosmology that was till that time believed. Manichaean-like belief that the flesh is corrupt managed to enter Christianity through the attitudes of the Apostle Paul and St. Augustine (a former Manichaean himself, if one who was fully willing to accuse his former faith of devil worship) and indeed, as we’ve seen, the idea of the devil as a failed or pretending God, a serpent who declares himself King of the World and who misleads his followers into error is very Manichaean, and it is exactly the belief Hildegard herself held about the Cathars. In a way, the preaching of Hildegard borrows on the ancient Christian tendency to attribute the failings laid at their own feet to some other sect, only now without the need to prostrate themselves before anyone, simply a matter of saying, religiously speaking, “We’re not the corrupt, misled ones following a false god, you are.” By means of her visions, much like those Swedenborg would have centuries later, Hildegard could snatch the mantle of knowledge-bearer away from the Gnostic Cathars, in essence making of the Canonical form of Christianity she defended a mystery cult all its own, one that painted the Cathars as dupes of the demiurge attempting to pervert the true victory of God and Christ.

But was it all just a turf war? Because it stands to reason that if Hildegard knew the depths of Cathar doctrine, whether through her visions or from direct reporting from her ally Bernard (who we remember went to Languedoc itself to attempt to halt the spread of the heresy following her initial preaching in 1141), she might well have had no choice but to react violently, as contrary as it was to the doctrine she’d grown accustomed to as a Christian.