Fantastic Metropolis

The daughter of a noble family in the Rhineland, Hildegard was enrolled early in the elite order of Benedictine monasticism. To her contemporaries, she was a Sibylline figure, a prophetess of the Apocalypse, and a woman whose enigmatic writings seemed lit by a fiery prescience.

—John F. Thornton and Katherine Washburn, Tongues of Angels, Tongues of Men

Therefore, O you My beloved children, avoid them with all devotion and with all the strength of your souls and bodies. For the ancient serpent feeds and clothes them by his arts, and they worship him as God and trust in his false deceptions. They are wicked murderers, killing those who join them in simplicity before they can turn back from their error; and they are wicked fornicators upon themselves, destroying their semen in an act of murder and offering it to the Devil. And they also invade My Church with their schisms in the fullness of vice; in their shameful plots they wickedly scoff at baptism, and the sacrament of My Son’s body and blood, and the other institutions of the Church.

—Hildegard of Bingen, Nosce Vias Domini

It’s fair to say that, of all their medieval critics, none was as strident in denunciation or as unceasing in condemnation of Catharism as Hildegard. And certainly, almost none could claim, as Hildegard did, to be speaking for God when doing so! Being a visionary certainly aided her there. It’s certainly unfair to dwell on Hildegard’s anti-Catharism; like Swedenborg and Blake after her, Hildegard crafted visions of Heaven and Hell that were shocking and revelatory for her time; her musical gifts were obvious and long-lasting (you can buy the music even today, recorded by many) and she even wrote about such diverse subjects as orgasms and biology. But fair or not, Hildegard’s influence was rooted in the visions she began having at a young age: it was because she was believed to be able to speak with authority on subjects such as what happened after death (especially in her Nosce Vias Domini, “Know the Ways of the Lord”) and how one could achieve salvation that she became a respected advisor of Europe’s powerful, and it was that power that allowed her relentless attack on Catharism to take root. Innocent II, Eugenius III, and eventually Innocent III (who would begin the Albigensian Crusade) were all influenced by her rhetoric, and it’s clear that before his death in 1153, Bernard of Clairvaux was deeply influenced by it as well. St. Bernard of Clairvaux is a somewhat paradoxical figure: he loved learning and thought, yet so loathed Peter Abelard and his brand of rational, Sic et non dialectical Christianity that he sought the man’s official condemnation and accomplished it in 1141; and he worked tirelessly to support the Second Crusade and the Knights Templar, yet in 1145, possibly due to his exposure to Hildegard’s visionary tracts or perhaps on his own accord, he began working against Catharism… it’s known that Bernard was the one to show Hildegard’s first visions to Pope Eugenius III, his own student, and this is how her Nosce Vias Domini was completed.

Hildegard was born into a world of constant conflict: in the south, Spain was a battleground between Christians and Muslims (and also a melting pot for Islamic, Jewish and Christian ideas, as well as older ones from the classical world—Al-’Andalus helped create a flowering of learning that would allow Gerbert of Aurillac to rediscover the astrolabe, construct a mechanical organ, and perhaps even design and build the oracular brass head that prophesied his ascension to the papacy ninety-nine years before Hildegard’s birth—Cardinal Benno would claim that Gerbert, as Sylvester II, was a sorcerer some ten years before Hildegard was born) where a man like Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar could serve on both sides of the conflict depending on the vagaries of personal honor and Christendom seemed perpetually threatened. The Pyrenees served to some degree as a barrier from Muslim incursion into Europe, as did the armed power of the French: as the largest and most powerful Catholic nation in Europe, France served then, as it had under Charlemagne, as a bulwark against the heresy of Mohammedanism. Similarly, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade in his famous Deus vult! sermon/speech three years before Hildegard was born, and the first Cistercian monastery was founded by St. Robert in the year of her birth. Apocalyptic fervor had been growing in Europe for a hundred years (the expectation of an apocalypse of some kind had only grown with every year that it had not happened since Sylvester II presided over the change of the millennium and promptly died thereafter, which may be what allowed charges of witchcraft and diabolism to be levied against a former pope less than eight years after his death) and was reaching a fever pitch by the time Hildegard began to preach. Indeed, Hildegard’s visionary writings and the impulse that led others to abandon what was by then extremely mainstream Christianity for the Catharist heresy seem as two tributaries of the same stream: a desire for the tension to break, the waiting to end and the next phase to begin… a need for something to happen.

But you see that a great multitude of people come, shining brightly; they forcefully tread the worm underfoot and severely torment it. This is to say that those who are born into human misery, but who constitute the faithful army of believers, hasten to attain their desire for Heaven by the faith of baptism and blessed virtues, which are beautiful adornments; and by their deeds they cast down the ancient seducer.

—Hildegard of Bingen, Nosce Vias Domini

The Ancient Seducer. We’ll come back to that. For now, let us consider the transition between centuries as the Church came to terms with the fact that not only had the world not ended, as many had expected it would (the Apostle Paul and St. Augustine had both believed that the world might well end in their lifetimes… Paul to the point that he believed that it was just as well to remain celibate and chaste and have no children, for they wouldn’t live very long anyway) but the Church itself, formerly an institution of prosecuted martyrs under tyrannical sorts like various Roman Emperors, had progressed to an arm of Imperial polity, survived the fall of the Western Empire and the concentration of Imperial power in the Byzantine Empire to the east, and by the time of Charlemagne it was clearly the case that Western Europe and Christendom considered themselves one and the same. No longer the underdog, the fisherman’s faith was now the living legacy of Rome, and while the average village priest might not seem a particularly awesome individual, the edifice of Catholicism itself was growing in temporal power as it spread and converted across Europe. By the time in 991 when the Archbishop of Rheims, the aforementioned Gerbert of Aurillac, had to swear “a solemn profession of faith in the sanctity of both the New and Old Testaments, in the legitimacy of marriage and of eating meat and the existence of an evil spirit per arbitrium, not by nature but by choice” the Church was a far different institution than the one the converted Saul of Tarsus helped create out of radical Judaism, and even from the young faith that won the heart of St. Augustine over his original Manichaeism. Augustine turned hard on his former faith, and even in the time of Hildegard his words were consulted by those concerned with heresy.

Augustine, for example, who remained an influential source for medieval Catholic theologians, attributed to his former Manichaean co-religionists sexual malpractices and even secret infanticide, but such claims appeared as early as Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 200) who declared that similar Roman accusations against the Christians were provoked by the depraved practices of heretical Gnostic groups like the Carpocratians. Irenaeus stated, moreover that the Carpocratians practiced magic, possessed love potions and conjured spirits and dream senders, whereas Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) accused them of libertinism and indiscriminate orgiastic love-feasts.

—Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God

When Christianity was new, it seethed against itself in an attempt to curry favor with the Roman power that still ruled much of Europe and Africa, while using the same slanders once employed against it to darken the name of its competitors: by the time Hildegard was born, the word “Manichaean” was synonymous throughout much of Europe with “devil-worshipper,” and Gnosticism was nearly forgotten and sneered at when it was recalled at all. But the fact was, by the turn of the tenth century Anno Domini, Christianity no longer had to curry favor from anyone: it was the established religious power, and in a position of authority in many nations at once… the Papacy had the enviable position of being a spiritual and temporal power at once, while also possessing an enviable extra-territorial nature, to the point where Churchmen were subject at times to Canon law over the law of the nation they resided in.

All this power, however, had its disadvantages. When a religion is young and expanding, it can be syncretic: it can absorb the rites of the cult of Brigit and create a St. Brigid, it can incorporate into itself the traditions of the Cynocephali in the form of St. Christopher. It spreads by virtue of its novelty as well: by being new, it can appeal to those who have found themselves disenfranchised by the cults and faiths they knew before. But by becoming the franchise, it falls to Catholicism to disenfranchise others. How is the faith expected to convert those who have grown up among it and thus feel familiar contempt for it? Furthermore, the faith’s growing popularity and its use by the Empire and later by lords and monarchs to justify their rule, to use it to prop up the social order causes those who study the religion more (especially as the central book of the faith is translated into languages that more can read, such as when Alfred of Wessex has the Bible translated into Old English) to begin to apprehend the difference between what they see the Church (and those lords and kings who claim divine support) actually doing and what the ideals are professed to be. As a result, by the late 900s, the clash between the Islamic invaders of Spain and their Christian rivals (and sometimes subjects) had at once reintroduced a good deal of lost scientific, astrological/astronomical and even cultural knowledge (allowing for the return of classical authors like Juvenal to the curriculum of Christian schools) and had introduced new religious ideas to a Europe that had begun to stagnate as well as grow disinclined to keep waiting for an apocalypse that didn’t seem to be on its way. When Urban II declared the First Crusade in 1095, he was doing so in part to alleviate social pressures in Europe: a century of military adventurism had seen the Normans extend feudalism over Saxon England and Moor-dominated Sicily and Italian Lombardy, and a whole host of second and third sons without much chance of a patrimony were itching for someplace to despoil and conquer. And let us not forget that not only was Spain still in Muslim hands, but the Seljuk were making themselves known for the first time in the Middle East, threatening even Constantinople and Jerusalem, leading Alexius Comnenus, Emperor of Constantinople, to make an urgent plea for assistance in the form of a letter to Urban II himself.

All very fine, save that the Crusade was a lot less successful than Urban might have hoped. Oh, it began very well indeed for Western Christendom. By July of 1099, while Hildegard was a child of less than a year old (and thus, two years away from her first vision) the Crusade had taken Jerusalem, led by (among others) Raymond of Toulouse of the Saint-Gilles family of Languedoc. Despite this initial success, a new Crusade was being proposed by the 1140s and Bernard of Clairvaux, who had taken his name from the monastery he’d founded on land donated by Count Hugh of Champagne (himself a prominent member of the order known at the time as “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ” and which would become known as the Knights Templar due in part to Bernard’s influence over the Council of Troyes and Pope Honorius II) was the point-man for promoting it, while at the same time for over forty years, men who had gone to fight in the Holy Land were returning to their homes, changed by the experience. One example of a changed man was the aforementioned Hugh of Champagne, who disavowed his wife on changes of infidelity, disinherited her son as a bastard, and passed control of Champagne to his nephew Theobald, dedicating himself to the Templar order founded by his own vassal Hugh of Payens. Another example of a man changed by the crusades would be Stephen of Blois, who took part in the expedition alongside Raymond of Toulouse and whose own son Stephen would contend with Matilda, wife of Geoffrey of Anjou and daughter of Henry I of England, for the throne left behind by William the Conqueror. (Interestingly, it was Hugh of Payens who helped bring the marriage of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda about while on a fundraising mission for the Templars in 1127, brokering it as part of a deal that married Fulk of Anjou, Geoffrey’s father, to Melisende, the daughter of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem. Fulk was an associate member of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ.) So busy was Bernard in this purpose that it is entirely possible that his mission (doubtless not approved of by the descendants of Raymond of Toulouse, he who breached the walls of Jerusalem) to Languedoc in 1145 to combat that Cathar heresy might not even have happened if he’d not been exposed to the blazing, anti-rational visionary fury of Hildegard’s writings.

Hildegard’s vivid writings of the violent loathing God, the eventual destruction of the serpent and the torments of Hell that awaited heretics held schismatics in, and were exactly in line with what Bernard himself had felt his entire life. They were not the hated rationalism of Abelard, who sought to use reason and logic to unlock the kingdom of Heaven: they were emotional appeals to a Christendom that was beginning to waver in its prosecution of the endless war for Jerusalem, that was tired of waiting for the apocalypse to come. But they come in the context of the young woman who first saw a vision in 1101 in her third year, who grew up sickly in the care of a reclusive Anchoress named Jutta, who became a Benedictine nun and eventually became superioress and head of the Abbey at Rupertsberg, near Bingen. Her visions were a lifelong force in her life: “Up to my fifteenth year I saw much, and related some of the things seen to others, who would inquire with astonishment, whence such things might come. I also wondered and during my sickness I asked one of my nurses whether she also saw similar things. When she answered no, a great fear befell me. Frequently, in my conversation, I would relate future things, which I saw as if present, but, noting the amazement of my listeners, I became more reticent.” Finally, after years of affliction, her inner voice finally commanded her to reveal her visions in 1141, just as Bernard finally defeated his great rival Abelard, and from there her fame and influence grew until the end of her life, when she even managed to get an interdiction that had been laid upon her convent due to the burial of an excommunicated man lifted before her death.

Ironically, considering her utter loathing of heretics, Hildegard was also an inspiration to the Protestant reformers like Luther and Zwingli, with her emphasis on condemnation for those of wealth and power who sought temporal gains over spiritual ones, and her scorn for those churchmen who used their offices in a corrupt manner. However, at the time of her preaching, the Cathars of Languedoc had existed quietly and peacefully in that locale for quite some time (it’s speculated that Catharist beliefs were a fusion of Isma’ili and Manichaean, perhaps even Zoroastrian ideas preserved in Islamic al-’Andalus and in the Bogomil heresy of Bulgaria brought back by Crusaders, who encountered it in their march across the Bosporus, perhaps fusing it with direct experience of the persecuted Parsis followers of Zoroastrianism in Antioch) and while it was spreading steadily in tolerant Languedoc, and even in Italy to some degree, it was far from a real threat to Christianity as Hildegard practiced it. “Her visionary language, her (occasional) displacement of devilry and wickedness onto the heretics and ordinary mortals who depart from her canonical view of Christianity at the time” is how Thornton and Washburn put it, but to me it resembles nothing so much as Augustine and Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria (who we all remember as the persecutor of Hypatia, the Neoplatonist philosopher, daughter of the chief librarian of the Library of said city, and possible master of the three-in-one incantation IAO) and how they reacted to the Carpocratian Gnostics.

Some Gnostic leaders—for instance, Carpocrates of Alexandria (c. A.D. 120)—apparently used incantations, drugs, and messages from spirits or daemons, but since much of this information has come down to us through Christian authors who were hostile to the Gnostics, it is not considered reliable. There seems to have been a genuine interest within Gnosticism to reconcile Christianity with contemporary philosophy and occult science, but on the whole the Gnostics were more concerned about understanding how the cosmic mechanisms worked than about switching them on and off.

—Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi

Well, right there we’ve got enough reason for Bernard to hate them, if the Cathars were anything like the Carpocratians. Being Gnostic in outlook, one expects the Carpocratians to hold similar views to those revealed to us in the Nag Hammadi texts, an outlook somewhat like that of the Apostle Mani and early Manichaeism as well. Before I turn you over to master Stoyanov for a quick and dirty overview of Gnosticism, I’ll try and do a roundup of the Manichaean worldview. The Apostle Mani was born in Babylon on or around April 14^th of the year 216. he was a distant relative of the Arsacid Dynasty, and his father was a member of a Baptist sect known as the Katharoi (and our ears perk up, do they not?), which claimed to be in possession of hidden knowledge inherited from Elchasai, who claimed he received his teachings from a giant angelic figure who identified himself as the Son of God and another, gigantic angelic figure who called herself the Holy Spirit. In still Zoroastrian Persia, Elchasai argued against the fire worship of the Parsis and towards following water instead, hence the baptist elements of the sect. Despite their particular quirks, the Elchasaites were, on the main, straightforwardly Judeo-Christian as one could be at that time, following the Sabbath and denouncing the Apostle Paul and his innovations as “Greek thinking” which did not follow the law of Moses. The Elchasaites also believed in seven elements to baptism, an invocation of heaven, water, the holy spirits, the angels of prayer, oil, salt and the earth. If this in any way reminds you of the seven Amesha Spentas of classical Zoroastrianism, or the seven angels who constantly precede the throne of God in post-Babylonian captivity Judaism, you’re on the ball. Anyway, I could sit here and talk about the resemblances between Elchasaite theology and Zoroastrianism all day, but that only gets us so far along the path to explaining Manichaean thought. Mani himself broke with the Elchasaites either because of their practice of worshipping two sisters descended from Elchasai as living gods, or over their obsession with the purification of the body via baptism.

Mani believed and taught a form of dualism that differed from Zoroatrianism in one key way, a way that would come to influence Gnosticism and which seems clearly influenced by “Greek thinking” itself, namely earlier Orphist thought. To Mani, all things physical, especially the body, were inherently corrupt and souls were the only pure elements, trapped in “the cage of fleshly existence” unless freed by knowledge of the truth of existence. Mani believed that his own divine essence, or twin (called the syzygus) was given direct knowledge of the mystery of existence from the Father himself. These secrets were called the mysteries of the Deep and the High, Light and Darkness, and of the coming together of Light and Darkness and the creation of the world. Mani believed that all life on earth was the unfolding between two contrary principles, that they had been separated and rejoined again and again, and that in the future they would be finally split asunder forever. This melding of Zoroastrian dualism with the war between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu (the war that led to the death of the holy bull, the release of Ativad, the clash between the stars and the planets) and the Orphic belief in the primacy of spirit over matter (definitely not true in original Zoroastrian thought, as matter was a full part of the Good Creation of Ahura Mazda) led Mani to declare himself as the ultimate manifestation of the fight against “Error” and the Apostle of Light. I could go into Mani’s role in the Sassanid Empire of the time and his possible encounter with Valerian while he was a captive, but it really isn’t important to understanding what Mani believed. Ultimately, Mani fused Marcionic thought with that of Zoroaster, and created a cosmos eternally at war with itself. All life is corrupt unless purified by the truth as given to Mani. And the Gnostics?

Conversely, the multifarious Gnostic schools did share, on the whole, an anti-cosmic dualism—the material world was negated as an imperfect and evil creation of an inferior demiurgic or clearly “Satanic” power and was opposed to the supernal spiritual world of the true but remote and unknown God. As with Orphic-Pythagorean religiosity, in Gnosticism the soul was seen as a stranger and an exile in the body, the souls of men were “precious pearls,” divine sparks from this spiritual realm and had descended into the wicked material world of the “howling darkness” to be imprisoned in material bodies and could be released only through the redeeming mediation of gnosis, a revelatory knowledge of the divine secrets.

—Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God

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.

According to the Desenzano story, Lucifer, who was the son of the evil god, ascended into heaven and discovered the celestial wife of the good God without her divine husband. Despite her initial resistance, she finally yielded to him when he promised that she would beget from him a son whom Lucifer would make a god in his kingdom and have him “worshipped like a god.” Falling on the authority of Revelation 11:15: “The Kingdom of this world is become our Lord’s,” the Desenzano teaching asserts that it was from this sexual union that Jesus was born and in this way that he was able to assume and bring his flesh down from heaven. This peculiar Christology, which is described as a “great secret,” remains docetic and angelic: Christ continues to be regarded as an angel incarnate and his Passion is seen as having occurred only in appearance, as he did not assume or ascend in actual human flesh but ascended in the flesh that he had brought from heaven, which itself was a product of Lucifer’s intercourse with the wife of the celestial God of good.

—Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God

Try and imagine, as a devout Catholic who sees visions you believe are vouchsafed by God, discovering that little chestnut. Christ as the son of Satan? Man, after you hear that one, that makes that whole “Jesus really faked his crucifixion and moved to France with Mary Magdalene” thing seem tame, huh? It seems likely that anyone who heard this particular nugget of Catharist Gnosticism (or the inverted one, that the whole mess was started by the God of good tearing off a piece of the evil god’s wife… oh, yeah, some Cathars believed that instead) would take it the wrong way. I should mention, probably, that around the same time that Hildegard was going into raving fits at the idea of schismatics and heretics, someone in Languedoc (home of the Cathars, everybody come visit) was publishing the first version of Sepher Bahir, the famous Kabbalistic text known for the opening quote from the Book of Job, “And now they do not see light, it is brilliant in the skies,” “Bahir” meaning “brilliant.” That’s correct, the self-same Cathars who drove Hildegard so insane with their weird cosmology of Satan screwing God’s wife to make Jesus (or God screwing Satan’s, however you like it) were swapping notes with the Provençal school of Kabbalism.

So Hildegard, herself possibly visited by the gnosis vouchsafed by Pistis Sophia, is not able to bear the Cathar heresy and its teaching that Jesus is in fact the son of Satan, or that God in fact created Jesus through working His influence on the wife of some evil demiurge. Ultimately, through her own strong Manichaean tendencies, she makes the same error as the Apostle Mani himself, identifying flesh and matter with evil and spirit with good. It’s a bit ironic that Mani, who devoted himself to opposing Error, should make so fundamental a mistake himself. His decision to include Orphism, “Greek thoughts,” into the original cosmology of the Katharoi ended up promulgating itself in later Catharism, which attempted to understand the original lesson of dualism through the lens of qualitative judgment insisted on by Mani’s infection of Orphism into Zoroastrian thought. The Sepher Bahir gets it closer to being right, I suspect, and I think if Hildegard could have gotten past her own revulsion (and the influence of the anti-rational Bernard of Clairvaux, for she herself was quite exquisitely rational when she wrote her books on physics, as an example) and perhaps studied the work of Peter Abelard (whose Sic et non was very definitely influenced by the work of ol’ Rambam himself, Moses Ben Maimon or Maimonides), then she may have happened upon a greater truth. The Ophites come close, with their serpent locked between states of existence, like a collapsing wave… So let us explore a possible answer that leaves both Hildegard and the Cathars, paradoxically, speaking to the same God.

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles; Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I mentioned before the similarity between Hildegard’s visions and those of Emanuel Swedenborg advisedly. One reason was Swedenborg’s own insistence that Christ never became a man, similar to that of the Cathars, as it helps provide the first link between Hildegard and them outside of their joint insistence on the corruptions of the flesh and the falsity of a Satanic figure pretending to be God. Secondly, because even Swedenborg ultimately turned out to be unable to truly understand or codify his visions in a unique manner, turning to the theology of his birth to attempt to understand them. Hildegard had no Abelard to encourage her to turn her great rational intellect towards understanding what she saw, instead she had Bernard and others trained by him (including Eugenius III) to encourage her to ignore reason for emotional impact, to strip her experiences of their subtleties. Meanwhile, the Cathars themselves found their ascetic approach to religion appealing to many (many noble families in Languedoc took up Catharism… not so much the radical, “Satan fathered Jesus” form but the less radical “Jesus descended from heaven to bring us gnosis and free us from the cage of flesh created by a mad demiurge who believes himself to be the one true God” form) picking up bits and pieces from the Kabbalah and attempting to make them fit their Christian-derived Gnosticism. Neither was prepared to even go as far as the Essenes or Zoroastrians had, much less so far as Blake, who even transcended Swedenborg in his understanding.

Let us try and reason this, then, using both the Kabbalah and Zurvanite Zoroastrianism as our guide, and perhaps a reference or two to the ancient Hebrew pair of Yahweh and Asherah, his wife.

It begins with either Zurvan, the null state, existing before space and time and outside them both, or with Ain, the true nothingness that is neither good nor evil, neither light nor shadow. Zurvan/Ain do not actually exist, because all either could ever be seen as is the potential for existence… much as in Kabbalism one ascends from Assiyah, this world, the world where things happen up the tree of life, climbing up the spheres again and again to move across all ten sephiroth until one enters the world of Yetzirah, where all things are formative and distinct and can happen, and then up the tree still further until one reaches the conceptual plane of Briah, where the idea of distinct existence begins to be possible, finally leading to Atziluth, the realm of the Archetypical, where thought and reality, essence and the limitless light of creation are not distinct from one another. Beyond that is Adam Kadmon itself, the Shi’ur Komah which is the palimpsest and the plan for all creation. But beyond all of that, beyond even the abyss hanging in the heart of the tree between the sephiroth where the ego of the observer must ‘die’, there is the truth. Zurvan is a collapsing wavefront, and he can be either Ahura Mazdha or Ahriman, there is no separation between them. Ain contracts itself down into a single point, moving from Ain (nothingness) to Ain Sof (boundlessness), moving from the emptiness of all possible potential to the bursting fullness of all possible potential about to be expressed. This moment of tzimtzum, or contraction, is what allows the entirety of the sephirothic tree to come into being. It illuminates the divine plan, it creates the levels of discrete reality from Adam Kadmon where all is one, all things that exist and the light that illuminates them is joined, the essence and that which carries it indistinguishable, and the descent from Atziluth to Assiyah is the creation of actuality from potential, where things move from being possible to being conceived of to being distinguishable and understood and finally to being real. Yet in this process, the limitless light of Ain Sof Aur, that which makes all of this happen, creates a paradox in allowing distinctness to exist. In order for things to be, they also have to have an infinite amount of not being. As the conceptual lightning flash descends, there is always a loss… everything that exists in Assiyah is something, and therefore is not anything else, unlike in the higher realm of Adam Kadmon where everything is everything.

In Kabbalism, all the not being is literally referred to as shadow, the shadows cast by the limitless light. Without the shadows, there would be no distinction between concepts, and therefore no existence at all… and this would make a mockery of the primal state of Zurvan/Ain, for all things that are possible must be able to exist, and in order for them to exist, they must be separate from one another, and in order for them to be separate from each other they must be capable of not being each other, and therefore it must be possible not to be something, which leads us inexorably to the conclusion that it must be possible not to be. In order for Zurvan to create the cosmos, to make the Wise Lord Ahura Mazdha, to create at all, he must be capable of destruction… indeed, the act of creation requires that destruction happen. If there are no shadows then there is nothing but light, and light alone is nothing at all. Ahriman is necessary. The Qlippoth, the cracked shells, the garbage disposal of existence is where everything that isn’t goes, and therefore is just as much a bed of possibility as is its opposite. After all, things that aren’t do come into being, and where were they before? Where the things that don’t exist wait. (Yes, I realize this suggests the morphic cosmos of implication and explication created by Bohm and Sheldrake, but a line mentioning that connection seems enough to me, considering that they’re easy enough to find.) It is in the decision to find the created, discrete entities of existence to be evil or corrupt merely because they possess more of that qlippothic not being that they are distinct and physical, and therefore less potential and more actual than the higher planes of existence where the error creeps in. Furthermore, as Blake suggests, ultimately the distinctness is a lie.

Ultimately, Hildegard served to help Catholicism smash heresy by using the heresy’s own tools of visionary experience and vivid cosmology against them, ironically breeding the very Reformation centuries later that she intended to avoid in her time. This is partly because she could not bear to cross da’ath and return from the abyss, could not surrender her sense of self and realize that her self is a lie, that there is in everything that exists all other things that exist, that all her visions were of a piece with the manifold metaphors of Gnosticism/Manichaean thought, attempting to understand the dual impulses of a single entity that is all possibility at once. Blake called himself a polytheist and a Christian and saw no contradiction because, as he suggested in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a truly omnipotent, omniscient God must by necessity be capable of anything, understand anything, and so the dualistic cosmology is a sucker’s game, be it the starved and crippled limited dualism of Christianity with all the cards stacked in the favor of the Good God Yahweh who strangely exists without the Asherah of ancient inscriptions, the Syriac mother goddess found attributed as the wife of Yahweh. This feminine principle is so glaringly absent that many of those who came after felt the need to restore it, whether using the image of a young virgin girl born without sin or by a more direct subsuming of “the Holy Spirit” into a feminine role. But ultimately, in a true omnipotence, just as Light and Darkness are both potential states that can be expressed as separate, even contradictory principles, so can Male and Female: the true Godhead is neither, of course. So we gain a Yahweh and an Asherah, or an Ahriman and a Whore, and each mates with the other’s chosen, in effect mating with the other for there is no separation between them, in order to bring about all creation. Blake’s plaintive cry of “All religions are one” resonates with us here, for in it we hear the mournful truth of the soul crossing the abyss and realizing that itself is a lie… the cosmic twin, the syzygy of Mani is in fact the Chaos of the cosmos entire, all at once, trying to rush in and embrace its divided soul. Urizen with his calipers and Orc with his burning zeal for freedom were just another way to express the essential division that is, itself, the lie, the error. Why else should opposition be true friendship? “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

In rejecting, or never understanding, this vision of a unified God above all and who is all things, the God hinted at in the Book of Job and suggested by the Bahir, both Hildegard and the Cathars were set on a course of collision and conflict. Ultimately, Hildegard’s vision triumphed for a time, before it sowed the seeds of its own destruction, the enshrinement of Canonical Christianity toppled by those inspired by her, the Champion of same; still, without Hildegard’s fire, the dark might have closed in on Catholic Christendom a good deal faster.

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In part two, “Katharoi,” we’ll pick up all the threads left hanging in these pages: the crusaders scattered to the breadth of Europe, the Templars and the Cathars and the fires of the Albigensian Crusade, and see how they connect to the Lollards, the Plantagenets, Henry Bollingbroke, Sigismund of Hungary, the Maid of Orleans, the butcher Marechal de Retz, and the deeply religious son of a prized member of the Order of the Dragon.

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Discuss this and other heresies at Matthew Rossi’s message board.

Matthew Rossi is the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003). He has work forthcoming in Peter Crowther’s Postscripts magazine, and a new collection of essays, titled Bottled Demons, will be out next summer from Prime Books.