Fantastic Metropolis

After being ejected from Ohrmazd’s spiritual world, Ahriman lay in his realm of Darkness in lethargy, his fear of Righteous Man prolonging his passivity. After three millennia, however, Ahriman was finally restored to action by the “Accursed Whore.” Seen sometimes as the first woman, she was created by Ohrmazd but defected to the Destructive Spirit, by whom she was defiled and elevated as “the demon Whore queen of her brood.” Roused by her frenzy to demolish the dignity of the “Righteous Man” and the Bull, Ahriman rallied his demons and weapons and, rising up in the form of a serpent, burst into the visible world at the time of the vernal equinox.

—Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God

If one is reminded of the various gnostic tales of Sophia, either through her own offices or through the defilement of the Demiurge, or the tale of Satan mating with God’s celestial wife to create Jesus as told by the Desenzano sect of Catharism, then consider the possibility that even Crowley postulates both Male and Female aspects for the Creator as well as the Destroyer: “Now, for some reason or other best known to themselves, the translators of the Bible have carefully crowded out of existence and smothered up every reference to the fact that the Deity is both masculine and feminine. They have translated a feminine plural by a masculine singular in the case of the word Elohim. They have, however, left an inadvertent admission of their knowledge that it was plural in Genesis iv. 26: ‘And Elohim said: Let Us make man.’ Again, how could Adam be made in the image of Elohim, male and female, unless the Elohim were male and female also?” So, as we consider Yahweh, we can consider Asherah as the other part of the Elohim, and as we consider Ahriman and the Whore can we not consider Samael and Isheth Zenunim? Those gnostic tales of God seducing the other god’s wife, or of the Serpent seducing God’s are just admitting the crucial linkage, the reflection between Creator and Destroyer. The division is created by man, man divides, man separates, man creates and destroys, man is the bringer of complication, of permutation, man is the means of emanation. In essence, the entire cosmos and everything in it is the body and mind of the ultimate creator, the impersonal, mindless, all-in-one Zurvanite/AIN nothingness that is in of itself unvariated. It can only see itself by contraction, and in the process of contracting creates distinction and separation by means of us. We are the manifold hands of the blind idiot god experiencing itself subjectively, we are exactly half-way between the formless, shapeless void of the bottom-most qlippoth and the formless, shapeless void of the highest sphere of the sephiroth. If one is reminded of the blind nuclear chaos Azathoth in the void with Yog-Sothoth on one side and Nyarlathotep on the other… that Lovecraft sure could dream big, could he not?

So what of the Cathars, then, you ask? What of Innocent III and his quest to impose his will on Europe? What of Abelard dying by inches, desperate to find a means to bring his wisdom to bear on his faith? To partially answer that, we can look to Abelard’s contemporary Moses ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides. At the same time as the Cathars were living in Languedoc and the Sepher Bahir was being composed or transcribed in that same location, Maimonides was born in Cordoba and lived his life, traveling to Morocco, Jerusalem and finally Egypt. Maimonides argued, in his commentary on the Mishna, that “angels” are not what most people believe them to be. Instead, he argues, God never works outside the order of nature and “angels” are just metaphoric representations of the laws of nature or universal principles of operation and organization, similar to the Platonic “ideal form.” And since we know that the Neo-Platonic conception of the “ideal form” runs itself through the similar concept in Qabalism of archetypical forms that descend into existence and matter, we come to a possible conclusion. Angels are the thoughts of God, and demons are the thoughts of the other god, who is of course one and the same, the opposite pole on a sphere, the other side of the ring, the reflection whose existence makes it all possible. And that makes us the neurons of God, basically. Metaphorically, of course, but I don’t think Maimonides would mind.

One imagines Gerbert bringing the al-jabr, the reduction equations based on Restoration and Compensation of al-Khwarizmi, out of Muslim Spain, along with the Isma’ili notion of God as an emanating force and perhaps even the magical concept of all existence as number. This he encodes in his Book of the Astrolabe along the lines of the Kitab al-Hikma, concealing the knowledge as a metaphorical construct, the astrolabe being the mathematical reduction of the Creator back down to One or the conceptual reduction of many gods down to one, take your pick. From there, the information gets fragmented: the Vatican and its school of magic inherit Gerbert/Sylvester II’s work on the particular formulas and equations to address and even perhaps control “Angels,” which dwell in Atziluth as pure Platonic ideal forms of various natural forces, control of which leads to fortuitous manipulation of events such as seen by Innocent III and his excellently rigid lawyer’s mind… but one slip and you get the events of the late 1100s, with Jerusalem lost, several Popes dead in a year, and so on. The Cathars and Bogomils are influenced by Gerbert’s restoration of several lost classics and in contacting each other create the Perfects, seeking to manipulate the mind of the cosmos so as to allow them to opt out of the internal survey of the Godhead seeking to know itself: they wish to report back with their final observations. They also seek to eventually bring all of mankind back into the perfect light of Ain Sof Aur, to escape the half-qlippoth existence of matter with all its implied is not. Ultimately, the Cathars are attempting to reduce the divine equation down to One by rejection of all other possible sums. Abelard is inspired by the hidden secrets of the “Astrolabe,” not the mere item but the Platonic ideal of it, the application of reason to the heavens as suggested by Gerbert’s book. Each is, quite literally, trying to expose or even revise the face of God.

In part three, “The Menhir-Spearing God,” we’ll continue to explore the Cathar heresy, and its real and imagined ties to 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.

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 this year from Prime Books.