Part 4 Talisman ...The Sword and the Fire ...The Sacred Cities

Talisman

by Graham Hancock

&

Robert Bauval

Chapter 7 

The Sword and the Fire 

‘It was not until the formation of the Holy Office [of the Inquisition] that the world was presented with the spectacle of an organization prepared to kill, starve, and dispossess those who had deviated a hair’s breadth from its own theological preoccupations. No other major religion has ever produced such an organization. There are secular organizations which have acted with equal ferocity and efficiency, but, unlike the Inquisition, they did not last for seven centuries.’ (Arthur Guirdham, The Great Heresy) 1

The crusading army rested three days in the meadows around the reeking corpse of Béziers, then marched off to besiege the great city of Carcassonne – which surrendered two weeks later without putting up a fight. A condition of the surrender was that this time the inhabitants would not be slaughtered; instead all their property was confiscated and they were expelled from Carcassonne, penniless and homeless, never to return. 

In August 1209 Simon de Montfort officially took command of the army, and of a new title, Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne. 2 But by mid-September the vast majority of the forces at his disposal had packed their bags and gone home. This was a routine and predictable desertion since the indulgences and remission of sins that the Pope bestowed on Crusaders required them to put in a minimum of forty days on campaign. The surrender of Carcassonne was accomplished just within the forty days, but after that, in the minds of most of the volunteers, the campaign was over. 

With a small band of dedicated knights de Montfort hung on in what was now the heart of very hostile territory over the winter. Then in 1210 – and yearly thereafter – the Pope preached another Crusade and the ranks of the army swelled once more. 3 

A macabre highlight of the 1210 campaign was the capture of the fortress of Bram after three days of stiff resistance. Because they had put up a fight, the surviving members of the garrison, numbering over 100, suffered a terrible punishment. On de Montfort’s orders their eyes were put out. Then their noses and upper lips were crudely hacked off. One man was left one eye, not out of charity but so that he could lead the stumbling, blinded, mutilated soldiers to Cabaret, the Crusaders’ next target, as a very particular message for the defenders there. 4 

At Béziers, because the city’s entire population, heretic and Catholic alike, had been indiscriminately massacred, there could be no mass burning of heretics. Although de Montfort had personally supervised the immolation of a small group of Cathar perfecti at Castres in 1209, 5 it was therefore not until the 1210 campaign that the opportunity came his way to burn a large number of heretics at once – a sight, according to the pro-Catholic chronicler Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, that all the Crusaders experienced with feelings of ‘intense joy’. 6 

The opportunity was provided by the fortress city of Minerve, where it was known that many Cathar Perfect – both men and women – had taken refuge. De Montfort laid siege to the stronghold in June 1210 and forced its surrender some weeks later after cutting off its water supply and deploying his war catapults and stone-guns to bombard it mercilessly. As had been the case at the surrender of Carcassonne, there was no massacre; but this time the Cathar Perfect sheltering in Minerve were identified and singled out. Their choice was either to recant or die. Initially none recanted, and one of the Perfect explained to a Catholic priest: ‘Neither death nor life can tear us from the faith to which we are joined.’ 7 On 22 July 1210, the exact anniversary of the sack of Béziers (and again, significantly, the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene) 8 Vaux-de-Cernay reports that a huge fire was prepared. While it blazed and roared the prisoners were brought out before it and: 

more than one hundred and forty of these heretical perfecti were flung thereon at one time. To tell the truth, there was no need for our men to drag them thither; for they remained obdurate in their wickedness, and with great gaiety of heart cast themselves into the fire. Three women, however, were spared; being brought down from the stake… and reconciled with the Holy Roman Church. 9 

What stands out from the next year’s campaign – 1211 – is the fate of an even larger group of Perfect. On 3 May 1211, after a lengthy siege, the Crusaders breached the walls of Lavaur and poured through, seizing the city. Amongst the captives were more than 400 perfecti, both men and women, who were burned on a gigantic bonfire. 10 Though not Cathars, the eighty knights who had commanded the garrison were hanged for protecting them. Guiraude, the Lady of Lavaur, was also brutalized then murdered. This highranking Occitan noblewoman was a Cathar credens, much loved in the city, of whom it was said: ‘Never did a living soul leave her roof without having eaten well first.’ 11 De Montfort handed her over to a band of mercenaries, who dragged her through the streets, heaping indignities upon her, before throwing her down a well and killing her with stones. 12 

A month later de Montfort burnt sixty more Cathar perfecti at Casses. 13 

In 1213 King Peter II of Aragon, famous for having recently won a great victory against the Moors in Spain, intervened against the Crusaders. Some of the hard-pressed Occitan noblemen who were protecting the Cathars were his relatives, and there was a large population of Cathars in Aragon itself. Peter brought hope, a splendid force of 2000 battle-hardened knights and 50,000 infantry into the equation – more than enough to change the course of the war. But it was not to be. Though he was heavily outnumbered, de Montfort attacked Peter at Muret and, through brilliant, ruthless generalship, succeeded in killing him in battle. 14 At the sight of this terrible and totally unexpected catastrophe the Aragonese and Occitan forces hesitated, then began to retreat. The retreat turned to panic and then to a rout with de Montfort’s knights in hot pursuit. Thousands were cut down, drowned in a nearby river, or crushed as they fled. 15 

It took the Occitan nobles three years to lick their wounds and gather their strength before they were ready to take on de Montfort again. Nonetheless, by 1216 the Count of Toulouse had succeeded in raising an army and, for the first time, began to inflict serious reverses on the Crusaders. Using his favoured strategy – if in doubt attack – de Montfort tried to take the initiative by besieging Toulouse. The city fought back ferociously and – refusing to be put on the psychological defensive – routinely sent out armed sorties to attack de Montfort in his own camp. 

The siege dragged on for many months and the defenders’ sorties grew ever more daring. On the morning of 25 June 1218, while repelling one of these raids, de Montfort was killed outright by a projectile from a stone-gun mounted on the walls of Toulouse and said to have been fired by a crew of women and young girls. 16 The Chanson de la Croisade describes his death: 

A stone flew straight to its proper mark, and smote Count Simon upon his helm of steel, in such wise that his eyeballs, brains, teeth, skull and jawbone all flew into pieces, and he fell down upon the ground stark dead, blackened and bloody. 17 

The Darkest Hour Before the Falsest Dawn 

With de Montfort thus felled like a pole-axed ox his son Amaury took charge and abandoned the failed siege within a month. In 1219, however, he was back in action, leading yet another Crusade. This time he was joined by Prince Louis of France, out to do his crusading duty and bringing with him ‘20 bishops, 30 Counts, 600 knights and 10,000 archers’. 18 The two armies met in front of the unfortunate city of Marmande, which Amaury had already besieged, and launched a joint attack, overwhelming its defences. 

Then another of those demonic interludes of the Crusades took place – when the Catholic troops, urged on by their bishops, fell upon the fleeing citizens in the narrow streets of the city. From the Chanson comes this harrowing description of what they did at Marmande: 

They hurried into the town, waving sharp swords, and it was now that the massacre and fearful butchery began. Men and women, barons, ladies, babes in arms, were all stripped and despoiled and put to the sword. The ground was littered with blood, brains, fragments of flesh, limbless trunks, hacked-off arms and legs, bodies ripped up or stove in, livers and hearts that had been chopped to pieces or ground into mash. It was as though they had rained down from the sky. The whole place ran with blood – streets, fields, river bank. Neither man, nor woman, young or old survived; not a single person escaped…19 

Did the Catholic forces serve the God of Evil, as the Cathars claimed? 

We cannot say whether a ‘God’ of any sort was behind the butchery at Béziers and Marmande, the mass burnings and martyrdom of the perfecti and the ruin of Occitania. But since the Albigensian Crusades were launched and maintained exclusively on the Pope’s initiative, we can say, without equivocation, that the Catholic Church was directly responsible for all these evil things, and that it was acting in the name of its God. 

Soon after Marmande, their forty days of crusading up, their sins forgiven and their indulgences earned, Prince Louis and his French soldiers went home. Amaury de Montfort and his much diminished army were left to continue the campaign, but it soon became obvious that they were not capable of winning it alone. Part of the problem was generalship: though a competent soldier, Amaury was a man of greatly inferior calibre to his warrior father. But equally important was a renewed spirit of national resistance in Occitania, where the people and nobles now began a determined fightback against the occupying forces. 

Under the leadership of the Count of Toulouse, huge territories were recaptured, and by the time of his death in August 1222 the war of liberation seemed unstoppable. The advances continued under his son and in January 1224 the young Count of Toulouse and the Count of Foix – the other main leader of the Occitanian resistance – signed a peace treaty with Amaury de Montfort that secured the withdrawal of the bulk of crusading forces. 20 

But doom still overshadowed Occitania and its citizens of all religious persuasions who had protected the Cathars so bravely, and died so uncomplainingly on their behalf, through the fifteen years of horror from 1209 to 1224. It is a quite remarkable fact of these dreadful wars that the Cathars never once seem to have been blamed by their non-Cathar countrymen for the catastrophe that all were now plunged in together. And it is remarkable, too, although Cathar credentes did join the resistance, that there is not a single example in all the extensive records of the Albigensian Crusades of Cathar perfecti ever participating in any way in violence. Despite enormous provocation – literally to the death – they seem to have adhered with almost superhuman consistency to their principles of absolute pacifism and non-resistance. 21 

Nor is it that they were simply suicidal and wanted to die – something that they have frequently and quite wrongly been accused of. Despite their negative view of material life, the Cathars were utterly opposed to suicide and believed that each of us, so far as possible, should live out the natural term of our soul’s imprisonment. Accordingly the perfecti disguised themselves, abandoned the wearing of their characteristic black robes, went on the run, sheltered where they could in safe-houses, caves or forests, and used any and every form of evasion short of actually fighting back. As Zoé Oldenbourg observes: 

It is easy to see how, to that hard-pressed society, such hunted, indomitable pacifists must have appeared as the only true fathers in religion and sources of spiritual consolation, the one genuine moral authority which men could obey. 22 

The Pope Hires the French to Finish the Job 

The treaty of January 1224 was the falsest of dawns. Only a month after he had signed it Amaury de Montfort divested himself of his inherited title to the vast swathe of Occitania that his father had won during his glory years. All these lands that the de Montforts had stolen from their rightful Occitanian owners were now officially handed over by Amaury to a man much better equipped to consolidate the spectacular land-grab for ever – the King of France. 23 

Previously, under King Philip Augustus, the French monarchy had resisted direct involvement in the Albigensian Crusades – despite many strident demands from the Papacy for French intervention. Although Philip had not objected to the participation of his son Louis, as well as some of his barons and lesser nobles, he had made a clear policy decision to stay out of it himself. But when the old king died on 14 July 1223, it was Louis who succeeded to the throne 24 – the same Prince Louis who had ordered the despicable massacre at Marmande in 1219. 

Now crowned Louis VIII, and with legal title to much of Occitania handed to him on a plate by Amaury de Montfort, he was ready for a return visit. This time what he had in mind was full-scale annexation under the disguise of a Crusade. Even so, he drove a hard bargain with Pope Honorius III (Innocent III’s successor) who, conveniently, had begun to urge him to mount a new Crusade into Occitania from the moment he had ascended to the throne. So desperate was Honorius to smash the Cathars once and for all that he made an unprecedented agreement with Louis. In return for subduing Occitania, the Crown would be rewarded to the measure of one-tenth of all French Church revenues for five years. 25 

In the spring of 1226, almost two years after he had received the title deeds to Occitania from Amaury de Montfort, Louis VIII set out on his bogus ‘Crusade’ of annexation. So overwhelming was the force he led that he received the surrender of several great cities, including Carcassonne and Narbonne, without even having to fight. His first and last major setback occurred on 8 November 1226, when he was suddenly taken ill and died. 26 

But still the campaign went on. Louis had been married to Blanche of Castile, a hard-hearted and determined woman with vast ambitions for their twelve-year-old son (also Louis – the future ‘Saint-King’ Louis IX), to whom she was now regent. On her orders the French army remained in Occitania, gradually wearing down the resistance – once again represented mainly by the Counts of Toulouse and Foix. In 1228 and 1229 the French adopted a scorched-earth policy, unleashing a terror campaign on the countryside, burning farms and villages throughout Occitania, destroying crops, driving the inhabitants out as refugees. By 1229 the will of the people to resist further after years of exhausting conflict had been utterly destroyed and the counts sued for peace. 27 

It was a crushing peace that included a public scourging in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris of the Count of Toulouse on 12 April 1229. 28 And although it marked the official end of the Albigensian Crusades, it robbed Occitania of its independence for ever, putting a huge area of this once free land under French control – effectively as an occupied state – and leading to its full annexation into the Kingdom of France within a century. 

One of the provisions of the treaty allowed the count to retain nominal title to some of his hereditary domains around Toulouse but also obliged him to go into exile for five years, this exile to start no later than June 1230. In order to reduce even further his time amongst his own subjects, and thus his potential as a focus of rebellion, he was detained in Paris as a house prisoner in the Louvre palace for six months after signing the treaty. By the time he reached Toulouse in November 1229 he found that the city’s massive defensive walls had been pulled down to ensure that it would never again become a centre of pro-Cathar and anti-French resistance. 29 

Pieces of Silver 

Despite the mass holocausts of perfecti, and increasingly focused persecution, Catharism continued throughout the 1220s to be a vibrant religion that had an important place in the life of Occitania and that still attracted large numbers of believers. There is evidence from the first half of the decade, when it seemed that the curse of the Crusades had been lifted, of fairly active reorganization and restructuring of the Cathar Church. The jurisdictional boundaries of bishoprics were re-established, and in 1225 the Cathars even felt confident enough to establish a new bishopric – that of Razes. 30 Although many perfecti had been lost to the stake, it has been calculated that several hundred, both male and female, were still active in Occitania in 1225. 31 So clearly, while the Albigensian Crusades had done much damage and taken many lives, they had not yet succeeded in their primary goal of eradicating the heresy of Catharism. 

Military activities had of course occupied centre stage during the Crusades, but an element of heresy-hunting had followed every campaign since 1209. In July 1214, for example, at the height of Simon de Montfort’s successes, we find Foulques, the hated Catholic Bishop of Toulouse, appointing a certain. ‘Brother Dominic and his companions… to extirpate heresy and eliminate vice, and promote the teachings of the Faith… as preachers in our diocese’. 32 This ‘Brother Dominic’ was Father Dominic Guzman, the Spanish monk who was to establish the famous Dominican monastic order in the Toulouse area on 11 February 1218. 33 Early on in the Albigensian Crusades, when Arnald-Amalric was still Papal Legate, Dominic had been invested with Inquisitorial powers. Until his death in 1221 he deployed these powers mercilessly and his systematic programme of persecutions and investigations in Occitania laid the groundwork that would lead to the formal establishment of the much-feared Papal Inquisition in 1233. 34 

The reverses suffered by the Crusaders after Simon de Montfort’s death in 1218 had been a set-back to the heresy-hunters too. But all this changed when the French renewed the Crusades in 1226 and, under the devout guidance of Blanche of Castile, made it clear that they supported the strongest action against heretics. Soon afterwards Peter Isarn, the Cathar Bishop of Carcassonne, and Gérard de la Mothe, a Cathar deacon from La Bessède, were burned at the stake. 35 

The peace treaty that Count Raymond of Toulouse went to France to sign, and endured a public scourging for on 12 April 1229, introduced draconian procedures for the hunting down of heresy. 36 In the following years the gradual expansion of the use of these procedures, always backed up by ‘the secular arm’ – i.e., the French occupation forces – meant that the Church came to exercise unlimited power over the life and liberty of the people of Occitania. As a signatory to the treaty Count Raymond was even obliged to persecute heretics himself – the same heretics whom he and his father had fought so hard to protect for the past twenty years. He was to order his own bailiffs to hunt them down on the much-reduced lands that the treaty had left nominally under his control, and he was to assist in hunting them down on the far larger lands that had been ceded to the French Crown: 

We will purge these lands of heretics and of the stench of heresy and we will also aid the purgation of the lands which the Lord King shall hold… In order better and more easily to unmask them [the heretics], we promise to pay two marks of silver for the next two years and, after that, one mark to every person who causes a heretic to be arrested, on condition that the heretic is condemned as such by the bishop of the place, or by a competent authority. 37 

As well as paying blood money to informers, Raymond was also required to pay large sums directly to the Church – 10,000 marks, supposedly to repair damage done to its property by heretics, 4000 marks to the monasteries, and a further 4000 marks to support fourteen masters of Catholic theology at the University of Toulouse. 38 The idea, comments medieval historian Malcolm Barber, was to fill the land ‘with bastions of orthodoxy where heretics could find no comfort or protection’. 39 

Informer Culture 

At the same time the heat was turned up on individual Cathars at all levels with a whole raft of new statutes. These forty-five cold-hearted, methodical, pettifogging, bureaucratic decrees made the suppression of heresy obligatory under common law. A few examples will give us a glimpse of just how far the Church was prepared to go in invading and taking control of people’s everyday lives and drawing them into inhumanities: 

In every parish throughout the land the Catholic bishops were to nominate a priest and two or three trusted laypersons ‘of unblemished reputation, who shall take an oath to search out, loyally and assiduously, such heretics as may be resident in the said parish’. The job of these state-sponsored vigilantes required them to ‘make a close inspection of all suspect houses, their chambers and cellarage, and likewise all concealed hiding places, the which to be demolished’. They were to arrest not only heretics but also anyone who had helped heretics in any way. 

A person who had permitted a heretic to stay on his land was to confess to this crime forthwith, ‘else on conviction he will forfeit his lands in perpetuity, and be liable to personal punishment’. 

Persons whose lands were used by heretics without their knowledge or agreement were subject to the same penalties. 

The house in which a heretic is discovered shall be razed to the ground, and the land on which it stands confiscated. 

If the resident bailiff of a locality suspected to be a haunt of heretics does not hunt the said heretics down zealously, he shall lose his position without compensation. 

All persons may search out heretics on their neighbours’ land. 

Heretics who had abjured Catharism and returned to the Church were to wear ‘two crosses on their outer garment, one on the right and other on the left side, and of a different colour from the garment itself’.

In every parish all males over fourteen years of age and all females over twelve were required to swear an oath before their bishop, renewable every two years thereafter, that they would be loyal Catholics, abjure heresy, help to hunt down heretics and inform on any heretics known to them. In the process the name of every person dwelling in every parish was to be recorded and those who failed to take the oath were to be treated as suspected heretics. 

Every person of either sex on the parish lists (again aged over fourteen in the case of males and over twelve in the case of females) was to be compelled to confess to their parish priest at least three times a year and to take Communion at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. ‘Priests are to seek out any who fail to attend Holy Communion, and who thereby incur suspicion of heretical beliefs.’ 

Lay persons were forbidden to possess any of the Books of the Old and New Testament ‘with the exception of the Psalter, the Breviary, and the Book of Hours of the Blessed Virgin; and it is rigorously forbidden to possess even these in the vernacular tongue’. 

‘Any person denounced by public opinion, and whose ill reputation is known to the Bishop, shall properly be called a heretic.’ 40 

And so the statutes droned on, releasing into the free air of Occitania the horrible odour of a Nazi-style informer culture and, as Zoé Oldenbourg observes, setting up ‘a system of virtual police control over the entire population’. 41 

We use the word Nazi advisedly here. A decade and a half earlier, in 1215 at its Fourth Lateran Council, the Catholic Church had already anticipated the Warsaw Ghetto by more than 700 years when it compelled the Jews of Europe to stitch a prominent yellow circle on to their clothing. 42 Now, following the 1229 treaty, we see the same treatment – albeit with the different symbol of the two crosses – applied to reconciled heretics. Considered a ‘symbol of shame’, the two crosses came routinely to be coloured yellow as specified in a later statute which also gave the exact dimensions of the crosses and more information on how they were to be worn. All reconciled heretics, states the relevant law: 

shall carry from now on and forever two yellow crosses on all their clothes except their shirts, and one arm shall be two palms [8 inches] long while the other transversal arm shall be a palm and a half [6 inches] long, and each shall be 3 digits [2.25 inches] wide, with one to be worn in front of the chest, and the other between the shoulders. 43 

Required under severe and possibly fatal penalty not to ‘move about either inside or outside’ their homes without wearing the crosses, reconciled heretics were moreover obliged to ‘redo or renew the crosses if they are torn or destroyed by age’. 44 

The Dominican Flying Squad 

One gets a sense of the kind of cold, calculating minds that must have been at work behind the dreaming-up and enforcement of such regulations – regulations that were designed to sever the bonds of warmth and trust that link human beings one to another. The clear objective was to create an atmosphere of suspicion, blame and jeopardy, and to whip up a frenzy of denouncements by capitalizing on people’s fears of loss of property – and far worse.

The following years saw many heretics seized and killed. On one occasion, for example, shortly after he had taken office as Bishop of Toulouse in 1231, Raymond de Fauga was able to gloat over the mass burning of nineteen high-ranking Cathar perfecti who had been betrayed, ambushed and captured at one of their meetings. 45 De Fauga was a Dominican, the monastic order established by the late Saint Dominic with the explicit purpose of attacking heresy. Since 1215 these austere and zealous monks had occupied three houses near Toulouse’s Narbonne Gate. In 1230, in recognition of their growing importance, they moved to a new site beside the Saracen Wall. 46 By 1234 there were more than forty of them in Toulouse alone and they had established missions in many other parts of Europe as well. 47 

Tremendous recognition, prestige and power had begun to come their way when Pope Gregory IX had succeeded Honorius III in 1227. Gregory was unhappy with the system so far established in Europe for the suppression of heresy. Though primarily under the control of the bishops, other figures with overlapping responsibilities were also frequently involved. The result was chaos and inefficiency at a time when attention was beginning to be focused on the supposed ‘danger’ posed by Cathar communities in Germany, France and northern Italy, as well as the continuing survival of Catharism in Occitania. With the linked Bogomil heresy still looking very strong further east, the paranoid tendencies of the Catholic Church went into overdrive and there was a widespread conviction that enemies were hiding themselves everywhere. 

The benefit in this for the Dominicans was that in 1231 Gregory appointed them as his own personal ‘flying Inquisition’, superior to the bishops and independent of them, to discover, arrest, interrogate and condemn German Cathars. In 1233, seeing the success of their work in Germany, Gregory also asked them to do the same job in France and in Occitania. 48 Success bred success, triumph followed triumph, and soon the Dominicans, aided to some extent by Franciscans and local prelates, had been appointed as the official Papal Inquisition, overriding all other authorities in any matter concerning heresy. 49 

The term ‘Inquisition’ had long been used for the process of extracting confessions from heretics, and ‘Inquisitions’ – interrogations and mass trials of suspected heretics – were periodically held by the bishops. But this was the first time in the history of the Church that officials had been appointed whose only function was to conduct Inquisitions, who were officially titled ‘Inquisitors’, and who were responsible directly and exclusively to the Pope. 50 

You Never Expect the Spanish Inquisition 

When we began this research we did not know ourselves that the famed (but misnamed) ‘Spanish Inquisition’ (subject of a memorable Monty Python sketch) had first been established in April 1233 by Pope Gregory IX. Nor did we know that the original and explicit purpose of the Inquisition was to root out and destroy the Cathar heresy. Building on the repressive structures that had already been firmly laid down in Occitania, the Dominican Inquisitors were empowered after 1233 to use virtually any measure they wished to extract confessions and to crush the Cathar faith. They began at once to institute a reign of terror – true and awful terror from which no one was safe. 

A chilling example is provided by the behaviour of Raymond de Fauga, the Dominican prior whom Pope Gregory IX had appointed as Bishop of Toulouse in 1231. A few years later, on 4 August 1235 (by chance the first official feast day for the recently canonized Saint Dominic) de Fauga held Mass at the order’s convent in Toulouse and then made his way to the refectory to take dinner with the other monks. While he was washing his hands an informer was admitted, bringing him a titbit of hot news from his spy network. In a nearby house an elderly Cathar lady lay in a fever and close to death. She was a grande dame of a good family and had been visited shortly before by a fugitive perfectus who had given her the consolamentum and then slipped away. 51 

Annoyingly, it was too late to catch the perfectus. But the old woman wasn’t going anywhere! Joyfully seizing the opportunity to bring another sinner to justice, de Fauga and his fellow Dominicans, dressed only in monks’ habits, left their dinner and hurried at once to the house pinpointed by the informer. It was very close, in the Rue de l’Olmet Sec, and turned out to belong to a certain Peitivin Brosier, who had long been suspected as a Cathar sympathizer. 52 The dying woman was his mother-in-law, and as the Dominicans brushed past Brosier into her sick room it seems he only had time to warn her that ‘the Lord Bishop’ was coming. In her fevered state she unfortunately did not understand that he meant the Catholic Bishop of Toulouse and mistook de Fauga for a Cathar bishop. 53 

A horrifying scene then unfolded as the Dominican took advantage of the frail old lady’s confusion, spoke to her in familiar dualistic terms ‘about contempt for the world and earthly things’ 54 and began to question her concerning her faith. Having no reason to suspect that she had fallen into the hands of a skilled and unscrupulous impostor, she innocently revealed all her Cathar beliefs and confirmed the extent of her attachment to them. De Fauga, whose cynicism was bottomless, even carried the charade so far as to urge her to remain steadfast in these beliefs, admonishing her firmly: ‘the fear of death should not make you confess aught else than that which you hold firmly in your whole heart’. 55 

The old woman’s honest reply, as one would expect from a dying credens who had been recently consoled, was that she would certainly not lie about her beliefs, and thus obliterate the benefits of the consolamentum she had received, when there was so little of her life left to her. 56 For de Fauga, who had everything he needed, this was the perfect moment to reveal his true identity. Looming over her bed he pronounced her a heretic and ordered her to recant and embrace the Catholic faith.

The old lady was by now fully awake to her predicament and, like many a brave Cathar before her, refused to recant. De Fauga and the other Dominicans insisted that she must. The badgering went on for some time in front of a growing number of witnesses who had crowded in from the neighbourhood, all keen to see how this was going to end. Finally, since his victim ‘persevered with increasing stubbornness in her heretical alliance’, 57 de Fauga decided to ‘relax her to the secular arm’ – the Church’s usual euphemism for having local civil authorities do the dirty work of executing a heretic. 58 In this case, to speed things up, a magistrate had already been called and now legally sentenced the dying woman to death! 59 

Runners were despatched to prepare a huge fire at the public execution ground, a place called Pré du Comte (the Count’s Meadow), and word of the spectacle was sent out all over Toulouse, attracting a large crowd. For the old woman it must have seemed a vision straight from hell, exactly what her beloved Cathar Church had always told her this world was anyway. Since she was quite unable to walk, the Dominicans had ordered her to be tied to her bed. She had then been carried out of her son-in-law’s house, bed and all, and brought to this place. Now, after refusing one more chance to recant, she was thrown into the raging flames and burned alive. 

‘This done,’ concludes William Pelhisson, one of the witnesses to these events and himself a Dominican Inquisitor who entirely approved of de Fauga’s actions, 60 ‘The Bishop, together with the monks and their attendants, returned to the refectory and giving thanks to God and the Blessed Dominic, ate with rejoicing what had been prepared for them.’ 61 

One wonders what happened to the old woman’s son-in-law, Peitivin Brosier. All we know from Pelhisson’s cheerful account is that he was arrested. 62 Under the rules of the Inquisition in force at the time it is unlikely that he would have survived his subsequent – inevitable – interrogation without recanting the Cathar faith, accepting Catholicism fully and informing on his friends. Even then he would have remained a prisoner in close confinement for the rest of his life. All other members of his family, as well as all his known associates and all members of his wife’s family and all their known associates, would have been interrogated and their statements cross referenced to detect any inconsistencies that might expose other heretics amongst them. 

And, of course, since he’d sheltered his mother-in-law – a proven heretic – it goes without saying that his house in the Rue de l’Olmet Sec would have been razed to the ground. 

That was just the way the Inquisition worked. 

Paradox 

When William Pelhisson concluded his congratulatory report of the trapping and brutal murder of a helpless old lady, he modestly expressed the view that such a great achievement should not be credited to the Dominicans alone: ‘God performed these works… to the glory and praise of His name… to the exaltation of the faith and to the discomfiture of the heretics.’ 63 [talk about delusion d.c ]

Reading these sentiments, we find ourselves – not for the first time – overtaken by the sense of a really weird ‘disconnection’ between the words and the deeds of Catholic holy men like Pelhisson. He was part of a Christian gang that had just done the most awful thing – something really psychotic and unbelievably cruel – to a fellow human being. But instead of being ashamed of such wickedness, he was proud of it and felt that it glorified his God! Nowhere in the New Testament is it possible to find justification for such behaviour, so which God did he think he was talking about? 

Once again the sense of disconnection goes away if we look at the whole scene from a Cathar perspective. Then the vile deeds of the Dominicans make perfect sense. Of course they acted as they did. Of course they took delight in the pain and suffering of the old lady. Theirs was the Church of the God of Evil. What else would you expect of them? 

We’re only half serious… Who’s to say that there’s even such an entity as ‘God’ at all, let alone Good and Evil Gods? Since there will never be any certainty on such matters this side of the grave, all we can do is weigh up the competing theories and compare them with the behaviour of the participants. When we do that it is clear that Cathar theology provides an internally consistent explanation for why the Catholic Church burned people at the stake and butchered the populations of whole cities. No such internally consistent explanation is forthcoming from Catholic theology; on the contrary the massacres and the many acts of prolonged, deliberate cruelty that the Catholic Church was responsible for represent a profound and inexplicable paradox when set against the teachings of Christ. 

Making Hell on Earth 

Every year from 1233 onwards, this impossible paradox of gentle Christ and brutal Church was repeatedly reinforced by the Inquisition. The first two official Inquisitors in Occitania, Peter Seila and William Arnald, both of whom were recruited from amongst the Dominicans of Toulouse, were appointed by Pope Gregory IX in late 1233. 64 Like all natural bureaucracies with high-level backing the Inquisition grew unrestrainedly. By the end of the decade numerous different teams of Inquisitors like Seila and Arnald were at work throughout Occitania interrogating, cross-referencing, condemning and burning. From the beginning they were a law unto themselves, independent both of the bishops and the civil authorities, with unlimited authority to act against heretics. 

Their standard methodology was deliberately intimidating, designed to spread terror in any community they descended upon and to ‘drive a wedge into the façade of community solidarity, so that the loyalties and fears which had held it together could be undermined’. 65 Task forces, typically led by one or two Inquisitors supported by an attendant band of soldiers, clerks and magistrates, roamed the land going from village to village, town to town, city to city. The idea was that each unit should be self-sufficient as detective, gaoler, judge, jury and executioner, identifying suspected heretics and ‘processing’ them from freedom either to repentance or the stake in as short a time as possible. 

Methods of operation were constantly refined in response to the latest evasions and escape plans of the heretics, although by the 1240s large parts of the procedure had been standardized and written up by the Dominicans in a series of detailed technical manuals. From these we learn that in each parish the Inquisition would begin with a public meeting which the entire local community would be required to attend. Once everyone was assembled, the Inquisitor would appear and address them with a general sermon condemning the Cathar heresy. Then notice was served on all males over fourteen and all females over twelve (‘or younger if perchance they shall have been guilty of an offence’) 66 to appear individually before the Inquisitor over the coming days. If no previous Inquisition had visited the parish, an announcement would be made granting: 

indulgence from imprisonment to all from that place who have not been cited by name or who have not yet earned the indulgence, if within a specified time, they come voluntarily as penitents to tell the exact and full truth about themselves and about others. 67 

In other words, those who preemptively informed on themselves or others, and were willing to recant their heresy, would earn exemption from punishment, perhaps even escape punishment altogether. By contrast those who knew something – anything – and decided to keep quiet about it were taking an immense risk that their neighbours or friends might inform on them. If that were to happen they would be judged to have misled the Inquisition – an offence for which extreme penalties applied. 68 In such circumstances, notes the historian Malcolm Barber: 

The temptation to denounce others was almost overwhelming, if only for defensive reasons… In a community that had had frequent contact with heretics… nobody was likely to be innocent in the eyes of the Church, and therefore anybody could have been written into the Inquisitors’ copious records. 69 

The atmosphere of mutual suspicion was increased – together with the likelihood of denunciations – by the way that all the parishioners were then interrogated, one by one, with no opportunity for the others waiting in line to hear what was being said by their neighbours. Again and again these in camera interviews proved to have an unnerving effect, demoralizing communities all across Occitania, turning their attention inwards on themselves in a most negative manner and weakening their will to cooperate in a fightback. 70 

Indeed, the Inquisition’s sweeping powers had set aside at a stroke all the ancient legal safeguards that had formerly protected individual rights in medieval society. An example was the right for the accused to be represented while undergoing interrogation. Theoretically even the Inquisition had to abide by this. In practice, however, no accused heretic was ever represented as he stood before the Inquisitors. This was because any lawyer foolish enough to defend an accused heretic would immediately have been suspected and accused of heresy himself. Once that happened (accusation was enough; he didn’t have to be found guilty) his arguments would have become inadmissible and he would have stood in immediate jeopardy of his own life. 71 

The idea of undergoing the full process of interrogation by the Inquisition would have been a terrifying prospect whether one were a heretic or not. Questioning was inexorable and, on top of an array of psychological techniques, it’s known that the Inquisitors routinely used torture to extract confessions long before the Pope gave his official blessing for them to do so in 1252. 72 Between the torture and interrogation sessions, the accused would be confined in deeply uncomfortable conditions intended to undermine his will further. Cells of the ‘little-ease’ variety – in which the prisoner had room neither to sit, stand up or lie down – are reported to have been particularly favoured by the Inquisitors. Other devices included keeping cells knee-deep in water, or permanently dark, starving prisoners, and shackling them hand and foot in heavy chains. 

In the most recalcitrant cases such interrogations could continue over periods of months or even years. 73 However, once a confession had been extracted and a judgement made, the chances in law of reversing it were about zero – even if the judgement were manifestly faulty. Since appeals were not allowed, the Inquisitors literally held the powers of life and death in their hands, without any checks or balances. 74 They were amongst their enemies and could do what they liked to them. The consequence was that many Cathars were burned at the stake, many who recanted on pain of death nevertheless remained imprisoned for life, and countless numbers of those who may not even have been Cathars themselves but who had at one time or another spoken to a Cathar, or had some other such trivial contact with the heresy, were exiled from their homeland for years, fulfilling arduous pilgrimages imposed on them by the Inquisition. 75 

Burning the Living and the Dead 

Seila and Arnald, the first two Inquisitors, were the prototypes of a ruthless breed who would continue to rend the enemies of Catholicism for another six centuries. Soon after taking office they were able to arrange a spectacular demonstration of the efficient spy network already at their disposal when they succeeded in trapping and arresting Vigoros de Baconia, one of the leading Cathar perfecti in Toulouse. He was summarily tried, condemned and burned alive. 76 

During the two years from 1233 to 1235 the two Inquisitors initiated what has been described as a ‘veritable reign of terror’, first in Toulouse and then far and wide throughout Occitania. 77 Burnings of individuals and small groups became commonplace and on a number of occasions there were larger catches to be had. In 1234, for example, on their very first visit to Moissac, Seila and Arnald presided over the mass burning of 210 Cathar perfecti who they had condemned as ‘contumacious heretics’. 78 

Keeping a record as ever, the faithful Dominican commentator William Pelhisson tells us that with this splendid auto da fé ‘great fear was aroused among the heretics and their believers in that land’. 79 More fear was on the way the following year, 1235, when a General Inquisition was held in Toulouse on Good Friday. Voluntary mass confessions occurred as people rushed to implicate themselves and others before someone else did. Threatened with execution, one Cathar sympathizer avoided the stake by taking the city magistrate and the Inquisitors to a place where ten perfecti were in hiding: three managed to escape; the other seven were burned. 80 

During 1234 and 1235 large numbers of new Inquisitors had been appointed from amongst the Dominicans but even so had proved insufficient to the task of interrogation, filing and cross-referencing that the cult of mass confessions had now generated. Franciscans and parish priests were therefore conscripted to help. 81 Adding to the overall burden was the matter of the paperwork from earlier investigations of heresy by the episcopal and other authorities. Undertaken before the Inquisition had been formed, and going back as far as 1209, these investigations had produced information, tip-offs and denunciations which the years of war had made it hard to follow up. Now the Inquisition was determined to make good the deficit. 

On examination of the older records, and the full cross-referencing of all statements, it became clear that many who had formerly been exonerated as good Catholics had in fact been heretics all along. Those still living were arrested and burned alive. But the remains of those who had already died during the intervening years were not forgotten! Wherever they had been buried they would be assiduously sought out and exhumed so that they too could be burned. 82 Sometimes whole piles of mouldering disarticulated skeletons would be brought in at once, paraded through the streets and then burned in a heap. 83 

Such severely demented behaviour (shall we call it necropyria?) would require urgent psychiatric restraint today. In Occitania in the 1230s and 1240s it was lauded by the Church, but naturally caused much anger amongst the relatives of the deceased who were publicly shamed in this way. A particular source of resentment was that the property of posthumously condemned heretics was subject to confiscation, just as it would be if the heretic were still alive, which had the effect of impoverishing his descendants. 84 Inevitably the civilian population began to hate the Inquisitors. In one case, in the city of Albi, an Inquisitor named Arnald Cathala was beaten up and nearly killed by an angry mob after he went personally to exhume the corpse of an old woman, recently revealed as a heretic, who had passed away some years before. 85 

Even by the late 1230s and early 1240s, despite being the focus of a concerted, well-funded, well-staffed Church operation to wipe them out to the last man, there were still sufficient numbers of Cathar perfecti in circulation – and able with local support to evade the Inquisitors – to keep the heresy alive. Evidence of this astonishing persistence in the face of extreme adversity comes from the sheer number of penances still being imposed on convicted heretics. Over just two and a half months in 1241–2 Peter Seila (the reader will recall him as the first Inquisitor to be appointed in 1233) imposed penances on 732 heretics in nine different locations. 86

The Fall of Montségur 

One amongst several reasons for the longevity of Catharism in Occitania was that the heretics were able to hold on to their major fortress of Montségur for many years after the French occupation of 1229. It provided a place of refuge to which perfecti could flee to rest and recuperate after risky missions in the occupied territories and its symbolic importance as a symbol of hope and resistance was vast. Its walls were high, believed impregnable, and it stood on top of a remote and inaccessible rocky crag. 

In May 1242 two of the most loathed Inquisitors, the Dominican William Arnald (again one of the original appointees back in 1233) and the Franciscan Stephen of Saint Thibéry, arrived in the little town of Avignonet with their hit-squad of enforcers. They had been on the road for seven months conducting General Inquisitions across most of the region from Lavaur in the north to Fanjeaux in the south and spreading the usual tidal wave of terror wherever they went. Now it was Avignonet’s turn. 87 

Except on this occasion it wasn’t. The local bailiff, Raymond of Alfaro, was a Cathar sympathizer and immediately sent word by fast teams of riders to Montségur, 70 kilometres to the south. There the lord of the castle, one Peter Roger of Mirepoix, decided to take action. On the night of 28 May 1242 he arrived at Avignonet with a group of heavily armed knights, who massacred the entire Inquisitorial team of ten. Later one of the assassins, William Golarion, explained that they had mounted the attack so that ‘the affair of the Inquisition could be extinguished and the whole land would be free, and there would not be another Inquisition’. 88 

Talk about wishful thinking! Far from extinguishing the Inquisition, Avignonet proved to be the catalyst that led to Montségur being placed under siege by the forces of the French King – now the young Louis IX (who, as one might expect of a future Catholic saint, prosecuted heretics mercilessly). The siege began in May 1243 and ended, after ten months of violent assaults and bombardments, with the surrender of Montségur, in March 1244. 

Rather more than 200 Cathar perfecti had taken refuge there, including Bertrand Marty, who had the rank of bishop. Eyewitness reports tell us that on 17 March 1244 they were all ‘brutally dragged forth from the fortress of Montségur’. 89 Further down the slope, on a level area, a large rectangular enclosure defined by a wooden palisade had been filled up with firewood, straw and pitch. Now, without ceremony, soldiers set light to the piled firewood and the wretched heretics were thrown in a mass inside the palisade. ‘There,’ as one commentator of the period assures us, ‘they experienced the fire of Hell’. 90 

The Last Cathars 

Montségur was a catastrophe, but still it did not mark the end of Catharism. Through the remainder of the 1240s the struggle between Inquisition and heretics went on and there were many more executions. In 1245–6, for example, the Inquisition of Toulouse had to deal with cases involving more than 600 villages and towns. 91 In one of these villages for which more detailed records are available, Mas Saintes-Puelles (to the west of Castelnaudary), we know that a staggering total of 420 suspected heretics, roughly two-thirds of the population, were interrogated by Inquisitors Bernard of Caux and John of St Pierre. This information has come down to us in two of the Inquisition’s original registers detailing the interrogations of more than 5,500 different people from 104 different places. It is known that there were originally ten registers. 92 

Gripped in the cold, dead hand of such a powerful, vindictive, and impressively well-organized bureaucracy, the Cathar heresy began to falter and then slowly to die. By the 1250s the Inquisitor Rainier Sacconi was able to estimate with satisfaction that there were not more than 200 perfecti left in all of Occitania 93 – too small a number, reckons historian Joseph Strayer, ‘to preserve the structure of the Cathar Church’. 94 As a result, though the heresy was to persist into the next century, it had been so reduced by the Inquisition that it no longer represented a danger to Catholicism. 95 

The last upsurge was focused around the highlands of the county of Foix – an old centre of the resistance. Here in 1299 a perfectus named Pierre Autier, together with a small group of followers, began to evangelize amongst the rugged farmers and shepherds of the region. For a few brief years he enjoyed great success and even set in motion something of a revival, but he never really stood a chance. Soon the Inquisitors were after him – big names like Bernard Gui, Geoffrey d’Ablis and Jacques Fournier. In 1309, with utter inevitability, Autier was caught. We know that he then underwent ten months of interrogation by the Inquisitors, who finally burned him alive in 1310. 

One more prominent perfectus remained to be executed, a certain William Belibaste. Finding the going too hot in Occitania, he had become a refugee in a small Cathar community across the border in Spain. There he was reached by an agent provocateur from the Inquisition who worked himself into his confidence and eventually tricked him into making a short return visit to Occitania. When he did so in the spring of 1321 he was captured, thrown into irons, tried and condemned. In the autumn of 1321 he was burned at the stake. 96 

He was the last of the estimated 5000 Cathar Perfect who were formally burned alive in the name of the Christian God during the 112 years following the start of the Albigensian Crusades in 1209. 97 He was also the last Cathar known to history. [ No, they were burned alive in the name of the Catholic god, not the God of Jesus Christ dc]

A Quiet, Natural Death? 

Probably the heresy did survive for a few more years in some remote pockets of Occitania to be rooted out by Inquisitions too small to have been reported by anyone. But the apocalypse at Montségur in 1244, the long downhill journey thereafter, and the demise of Autier and Belibaste in 1310 and 1321, really did mark the end of it. 

Numerous Cathars fled Occitania. As well as nearby parts of Spain, where Belibaste would have done well to stay, another favoured refuge close to home was amongst their co-religionists in northern Italy. But the Inquisitors were at work there too. In November 1276 all members of the Cathar community of Sirmione were arrested. And in February 1278 ‘about 200’ were rounded up and burned in Verona – the headquarters in exile of the Toulousain Cathar Church. 98 

Longer term it seemed like the only secure refuge was in the ancient Byzantine Empire, where the Bogomils, the mother Church of Catharism, remained relatively strong during much of the fourteenth century. As late as 1325, four years after Belibaste had perished at the stake, we find Pope John XXI complaining to the leader of Bosnia about the heretics who were fleeing to his country and taking shelter there. 99 

Indeed, although lands in the Byzantine Empire did not strictly speaking come under the jurisdiction of the Pope in Rome, but of the Patriarchate in Constantinople, there had been constant Papal interference in this part of the world since the early thirteenth century – round about the same time that the Albigensian Crusades began in the west. 100 For example, Pope Gregory IX, who created the Inquisition in 1233 to smash the Cathars, deposed the Catholic Bishop to Bosnia at around the same time for failing to take action against the Bogomils and replaced him, significantly, with a Dominican. Gregory also declared a Crusade against Bosnia to root out heresy there. The Crusade, which continued until 1240, was willingly led by the Duke of Croatia. ‘In practice,’ notes Bernard Hamilton, ‘this was a Hungarian war against Bosnia that was given Crusade status.’ 101 On another occasion, in 1238, the Pope incited his ally King Bela IV of Hungary to mount a Crusade against Bulgaria as well. Any possibility that this might go ahead, however, was stopped by the Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241–2. 102 

By the fourteenth century the Ottoman Turks were on the move, eating up and incorporating into their Islamic state many areas of the former Byzantine Empire. They conquered Bulgaria in 1393 and thereafter Bogomilism was never heard of again in that land; indeed the last surviving report of Bulgarian Bogomilism comes to us from no later than 1370. 103 It lasted longer in Bosnia but was finally wiped out there after the invasion of Sultan Mehmed II (called ‘the Conqueror’) in 1463. 104 By the end of the fifteenth century the population of Bosnia was almost entirely Muslim. 105 ‘After a major expenditure of effort on refutation and, above all, police work,’ says Malcolm Lambert, ‘the Cathars were finally put down by the Western Church; by contrast Byzantine Bogomilism died a quiet natural death…’ 106 

Though the Inquisition never reached the wild lands of Bulgaria and Bosnia, its brutal success in Occitania, and the growing numbers of Cathars fleeing east to tell of horrors they had witnessed, must have been profoundly discouraging for the whole Bogomil movement. This perhaps explains the loss in energy that becomes apparent in Bogomilism from the early fourteenth century onwards – after which, though still thriving in the east, it seems to have abandoned all sense of its world mission. The Muslims brought about its final demise, but even without their role the Catholic and Orthodox Churches had by then become so vigilant concerning heresy that there would have been no second chance for the Bogomil faith to evangelize and gain converts in the Christian world. 

After Occitania was lost, all was lost. The millennial opportunity had come, and been seized, and then snatched away. An ancient Gnostic religion offering a starkly alternative vision of Christianity had mysteriously reappeared after centuries in darkness, flourished mightily at first and made a bid for universality, only to fail utterly in the end… 

Or had it? 

Renaissance 

In the summer of 1460, shortly before the last embers of the Bogomil faith were stamped out by Sultan Mehmed II’s invasion of Bosnia, a Tuscan monk named Leonardo da Pistoia rode unobtrusively into Florence on a donkey. Attached to his side was a bundle of cloth in which a small collection of books had been packed. 

Leonardo, who had travelled a long way, took his precious cargo directly to the Doge of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici. 

An intellectual nuclear bomb was about to explode.

Part 2

The Sacred Cities 

Chapter 8 

The Other Secret Religion 

‘As the embodiment of the Italian Renaissance, the Medici were enormously rich and through their wealth and character ruled Florence, controlled the Papacy, and influenced the policies of an entire continent.’ 

(Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: 

Its Rise and Fall, Morrow Quill, New York, 1980) 

‘For want of a better term, I shall call it “astral magic”…’ 

(Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and 

the Hermetic Tradition, University 

of Chicago Press, Chicago 

and London, 1991, p. 60) 

In the summer of 1460, shortly before the last embers of the Bogomil faith were stamped out by Sultan Mehmed II’s invasion of Bosnia, a Tuscan monk named Leonardo da Pistoia rode into Florence on a donkey. He had been away for several months on a dangerous mission to Macedonia for his learned and immensely wealthy master, Cosimo de’ Medici, the Doge of Florence, who employed him to procure rare and ancient writings. Already a vast library of extraordinary scrolls, codices and books had been built up. Yet Leonardo knew that Cosimo would remain dissatisfied until he had in his hands certain very specific and once widely circulated books suppressed by the Church and lost to the world for close to 1000 years. Cosimo was convinced that these books must still exist somewhere – and had ordered Leonardo to seek them out and buy them no matter what the cost. 

Now at last, after returning many times to Florence with lesser prizes, Leonardo took great pride in the fact that he had found the ancient books that his master sought. They were books of knowledge, purported to have come down from Thoth, the wisdom god of the Egyptians, who had been known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus. And though neither Leonardo nor Cosimo were aware of this, these highly mysterious ‘Hermetic’ texts had been compiled in Alexandria during the first three centuries of the Christian era, i.e., at the same time and in the same place as the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts. The link between the two collections becomes even stronger when we realize that a fragment of one of the ‘Hermetic’ texts that Leonardo had purchased – a document known as the Asclepius – was also reproduced amongst the Gnostic codices buried at Nag Hammadi in the late fourth century and not recovered until 1945. 1 

The Body is a Tomb 

No one can dispute that the Roman Catholic Church has a long track record of vigorous opposition to all forms of knowledge, scripture, inquiry, wisdom and religious self-expression that do not accord with its own views. The reader will recall that it was mobs of Christians, aroused by Theophilus, the Catholic Archbishop of Alexandria, who sacked the Serapeum in Alexandria in AD 391. They killed all the ‘pagans’ and Gnostics who had taken shelter inside it and razed to the ground the wonderful library that had been arranged around its cloisters together with its entire irreplaceable collection of ancient books and scrolls. We saw in Chapter 5 that this atrocity was just one amongst many in the ruthless suppression of Gnosticism and paganism by the Catholic Church, and its generally very efficient destruction of their texts and traditions. 

A different expression of this same antagonism to knowledge outside the narrow band accepted by orthodoxy was the closure in AD 529 by the Christian Emperor Justinian of Plato’s revered Academy in Athens. 2 Originally established by Plato himself in the 380s BC on a site a mile outside Athens that was already held sacred, the Academy enjoyed more than 900 years of continuous existence until Justinian and Christian bigotry shut it down for spreading ‘pagan’ ideas. 

Today we do not know exactly what was taught at the Academy. However, Plato’s own copious surviving writings have led the majority of scholars to infer that the original syllabus was designed to produce a select few wise philosophers, deeply knowledgeable in mathematics (including the theory of harmonics and astronomy), dialectics, natural science and political theory 3 who would ‘leave the Academy for politics, not as power seekers themselves but to legislate or advise those in power’. 4 

It is known that the great Christian Gnostic teacher Valentinus, an Egyptian, studied Platonic philosophy at Alexandria in the early second century AD, 5 so it is perhaps not surprising to find the Catholic apologist Hippolytus (AD 170–236) accusing the Gnostics of being ‘disciples of Plato’ and following the Platonic system in making ‘arithmetical science the fundamental principle of their doctrine’. 6 For our purposes it is also interesting that Plato seems to have been the first to use the term ‘demiurge’ – Greek for ‘public craftsman’ – to describe the Creator of the material world. In exactly the manner later copied by the Gnostics he meant to imply that the Creator was a subordinate power, not the true God, 7 and that the material world was a corrupt, imperfect copy of the ideal world. 8 Tim Freke and Peter Gandy point out that Plato also frequently liked to quote a common phrase of the pagan mystery religions of his period – that phrase being soma sema, ‘the body is a tomb’: ‘Gnostic initiates also understood that those who identified with the incarnate physical self were spiritually dead and needed to be reborn into eternal Life…’ 9 

It is beyond the scope of this book to present a full exposition of the similarities – and the differences – between Platonism and Gnosticism. The point we wish to make is simply that the suppression of Plato’s Academy in AD 529 was part of a much wider attack on the pursuit of knowledge that also included the virtual destruction of Christian Gnosticism – until, we propose, it resurfaced in Bulgaria in the tenth century as Bogomilism. During the intervening centuries book-burning was deemed an act of piety by the Church and the persecution of scholars who ventured outside strict ecclesiastical boundaries was deemed an act of righteousness and a service to God. 

The Enraged Enforcement of 

an Unearned Spiritual Monopoly 

It is with good reason that historians refer to the period between the fifth and the tenth centuries AD as the Dark Ages. But things were to get much darker before European culture was to see any lasting glimmers of light. We’ve documented aspects of the astonishing ‘mini-Renaissance’ that accompanied the sudden upsurge of Catharism in Occitania in the twelfth century. And we’ve documented the reaction of the Church – the Albigensian Crusades that laid waste the cultural development of the region, a century of terrorism and mayhem, the holocaust of 5000 Cathar Perfect, and, last but not least, the Inquisition. 

It should be obvious to the reader by now that Cathars and Catholics had very different attitudes to the uses and control of knowledge, and that these attitudes were rooted in their very different underlying philosophies. 

For the Cathars, inheritors of the Gnostic tradition, the predicament of humanity was ignorance; it was knowledge, therefore, that would provide the only sure route of escape. And since they believed that the greatest store of relevant knowledge was contained in the New Testament – the fundamental document of Christianity – they felt strongly that every Cathar should be able to read it in his or her own language.

Accordingly the Cathars of Occitania had the New Testament translated from Latin, in which it had hitherto been locked away from the masses, into the vernacular langue d’oc, and large numbers of copies, laboriously prepared by hand, were put into circulation. The demand for a cheap convenient material on which such copies could be made led them to become the pioneers of paper-making in Europe, establishing numerous apprenticeships in the new trade 10 and contributing greatly to the subsequent spread of this liberating technology. 

In parallel, Cathar children were taught to read and study the New Testament from an early age, thus gaining the gift of literacy that was so rare in general in Europe in that period. Rare, too, was the fact that both sexes were taught equally, not just the males as was often the norm elsewhere. 11 The result was that educated, literate, freethinking women became a feature of Cathar communities during the short period that the heresy flourished. 

In this, as in many other respects, the behaviour of the Cathars can only be described as enlightened – no other word will do – while their campaign to provide accessible vernacular editions of the New Testament was clearly an initiative far ahead of its time. By contrast the reader will recall from Chapter 7 that the Catholic Church and the Inquisition strictly forbade lay persons to possess the New Testament ‘with the exception of the Psalter, the Breviary, and the Book of Hours of the Blessed Virgin’. Moreover, even these limited selections were permitted only in Latin whilst translations into the ‘vernacular tongue’ were ‘rigorously forbidden’. 12 [ gee I wonder why, not really, two words... keep control dc]

It seems ironic that the so-called ‘heretics’ were the ones doing everything they could to spread knowledge of the New Testament while the ‘true Church’ was doing everything it could to limit and control such knowledge. But to understand this behaviour we need only remind ourselves of the basic philosophy of Catholicism – which utterly opposes any personal quest for knowledge and instead teaches blind faith and absolute mindless trust in the infallibility of Papal dogma. It was this doctrine that snuffed out the brilliant light of scientific and spiritual inquiry that had flourished around the great libraries of Alexandria during the last three centuries BC and the first three centuries AD. 

It was this doctrine that plunged the world into the Dark Ages by suppressing not only Gnostic inquiry but also the vast bulk of ‘pagan’ classical knowledge. And it was this same doctrine of blind faith and unquestioning obedience – still top of the Catholic agenda 1000 years later – that led directly to the gross moral errors of the Albigensian Crusades and the Inquisition in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and to yet more suppression of books and knowledge, more burning of heretics, more terror and stupidity. 

By the fifteenth century, though the persecution of individual heretics was far from over, European society was exhausted and sickened by all this mad violence, censorship and bigotry. By then, too, with the complete destruction of the Cathar threat well behind it, the vigilance of the Church itself had inevitably begun to slacken. Not quite certain what sort of backlash they might ultimately incur – but willing to take the risk – certain open-minded scholars took advantage of the lull to begin a quest for ancient manuscripts. Their frank hope was that by rediscovering the lost wisdom of the past they might better guide the world towards its unknown future. 

One such scholar was Cosimo de’ Medici, who employed the monk Leonardo da Pistoia as his bookfinder. Now riding into Florence on the back of the little donkey that had carried him all the way from Macedonia, Leonardo anxiously fumbled in the bundle strapped at his side and felt once again the reassuring outline and weight of the miraculous, wonderful books that he was bringing to his master. 

A Philosopher with Fire-power 

The origin of the House of Medici is obscure, but ‘Medici’ means literally ‘medical doctors’, so a background amongst physicians and apothecaries is thought likely. Further back the family’s ancestry may have included a humble charcoal burner who had moved into Florence from the nearby district of Mugello. But an apocryphal origin added much colour to their name. Legend had it that the family had been founded in the fifth century by a brave knight who came to Mugello and helpfully killed a fearsome giant who had been plaguing the local population. As a reward he was allowed to add to his shield eight red balls, one for each of the dents from the giant’s attack. These red balls, others have suggested, either represented apothecaries’ pills or coins of the famous banking family that the Medici would later become. 

Since 1239 the Medici had been official Gonfaloniere of Florence (standard bearers and custodians of the city banner). By 1389, the year Cosimo was born, the family was already prominent and rich due to the banking activities of Cosimo’s father, Giovanni. He had apparently benefited greatly from his personal friendship with Pope John XXIII, Baldassare Cossa, who later, in 1414, was to be accused of heresy, simony, tyranny, the murder of his predecessor Pope Alexander V and the seduction of no less than 200 girls and ladies of Bologna! 13 

Named after saint Cosmas, on whose feast day – 27 September – he had been born, Cosimo was educated at the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where he learned French, German and Latin and a spatter of Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. In his teens he attended the lectures and lessons of one of the most prominent scholars in Florence, Roberto de Rossi, also a member of an old and rich Florentine family. Through the influence of Rossi the young Cosimo acquired and developed a lasting respect and love for classical works, particularly Plato, and an insatiable interest in man’s role and purpose on earth. In short, he was a philosopher in the ancient mould who, as it would turn out, would acquire the sort of fire-power that few lovers of wisdom ever enjoy. 

Through political machinations and more especially through his influence on the Papacy (he had befriended the popes and practically ran the finances of the Vatican), Cosimo was able to add greatly to the already enormous wealth of the House of Medici. His influence grew accordingly and he was soon the de facto ruler of Florence, a position that he was to maintain for the rest of his life. In 1458, just two years before the lost texts of the Hermetica were delivered to him, Cosimo was described as ‘master of the country’ by Pope Pius II: ‘Political questions are settled in his house. The man he chooses holds office… He it is who decides peace and war and controls the laws… He is king in everything but name.’ 14 

The Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini went even further when he said that Cosimo ‘had a reputation such as probably no private citizen has ever enjoyed from the fall of Rome to our own day’. 15 

All the Learning of Constantinople 

and a New Platonic Academy 

In 1438 Cosimo came up with a brilliant idea that, in a curious and indirect way, was to change the course of Western scholarship. For centuries, as the reader will recall, the Catholic Church, headed by the Pope in Rome, had been in conflict over doctrinal issues with the Eastern Orthodox Church, headed by the Patriarch in Constantinople. This great religious ‘West versus East’ schism reached a crisis point in the 1430s, when Constantinople was beginning to be seriously threatened by the Muslim Ottoman Turks. 

Since the dramatic fall of Egypt and Alexandria to the Muslims in AD 642, the ‘Eastern’ Empire of Rome, which extended from Turkey through to Egypt, had been slowly gnawed away by the Muslim forces. By 1438, all that remained in Christian hands was its capital, Constantinople, called the ‘Second Rome’. In the famous words of Mehmed II, the Ottoman Sultan who would eventually capture the city in 1452 after a siege of six weeks, it was just ‘a monstrous head without a body’. 

In 1438 John Paleologus, the Eastern Roman Emperor, whose seat was Constantinople, appealed to the Pope in the name of all Christianity for military help to save the last bastion of Christendom in the East from falling into the hands of the Muslims. In response, Pope Eugenius IV decided to call for a Great Council to meet somewhere in Italy. Cosimo de’ Medici, seeing the enormous prestige such a council would bring, especially if it achieved a reconciliation between the Eastern and Western churches, was determined that the venue should be his own city. Through his friendship with the Pope, and by offering to cover all expenses plus a generous loan to the Vatican, Cosimo had his way, and in the winter of 1439, after a night of storms and torrential rains, the Eastern Emperor, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch and the Pope all made their triumphal entries into Florence. 

Months of deliberations and ecumenical debates followed until at last, in July 1439, the Great Council reached a compromise that brought the two churches together again. Predictably their reunification was short-lived; indeed the Eastern delegates barely had time to return to Constantinople before repudiating the feeble agreement. But there was an unexpected upside. Florence, all of Italy, and in due course the rest of Western Europe as well, were to benefit incalculably from the exciting intellectual stimulant provided by the large retinue of Byzantine-Greek scholars who had accompanied the Eastern Emperor to the Council. These scholars were amongst the prime catalysts in the remarkable Renaissance of classical history, art and philosophy that was soon to follow and they added new force to the already keen and burning interest of Cosimo de’ Medici in Plato’s works. The great Byzantine scholar Bessarion, who had accompanied the Eastern Emperor to Italy, was persuaded to remain behind, as well as his colleague Gemistos Plethon, a leading authority on Plato. 16 

After attending lectures by Plethon, Cosimo had another inspiration. He would use some of his immense wealth to establish a Platonic Academy in Florence, modelled on Plato’s original. Plethon’s departure, and Cosimo’s involvement with other issues, delayed the project for several years. Nonetheless, the idea of the Academy did finally come to maturity. Its first home was the Villa Montevecchio in Florence and Cosimo appointed his adopted son, the brilliant scholar Marsilio Ficino, as its first director. Ficino had, in fact, been groomed for such a task by Cosimo over the years after he had noted the young man’s keen enthusiasm for Plato’s works, and it was Cosimo who had generously paid for Ficino’s education and for his special studies in Greek and Latin. 

Cosimo had for many years been an avid collector of rare and important books and made some valuable additional acquisitions from the Byzantine-Greek scholars who had attended the 1439 Council. His library, regarded as the most extensive collection of classical and religious works in Europe, formed the nucleus of the Medici Academy and was to serve eventually as a model for the Vatican’s own library. Until 1460, however, the ultimate prize – the fabled works of Hermes Trismegistus – had eluded him as well as all other collectors in Europe. 

Travel-stained and weary, the monk Leonardo da Pistoia now calmly directed his little donkey into the Villa Careggi, the sumptuous residence of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence. He was admitted at once and delivered the bundle that he had carried so far directly to Cosimo himself. 

Older than Moses, Greater than Plato 

It was well known to European scholars of the Renaissance that the great Greek philosopher Plato, and before him Solon and Pythagoras, had visited the land of Egypt and there had allegedly learned the wisdom of the Egyptian sages. Plato, it was said, had special respect for the Egyptians – who he referred to as a ‘race of philosophers’. 17 In his Timaeus, famous for containing the earliest surviving direct references to Atlantis, he recounted a story that had supposedly been told by Solon, the celebrated Athenian statesman and poet, after the latter had visited Egypt circa 600 BC. There, at Sais in the Delta area, Egyptian priests at the temple of Neith apparently recognized Solon’s wisdom and agreed to discuss with him issues related to the origin of the world. After listening to Solon expounding some of the Greek myths, however, one of the priests interrupted him and exclaimed: 

O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are all like children, and there is no such thing as an old [wise] Greek… You are all young in mind… you have no belief rooted in ancient tradition and no knowledge hoary with age…18 

Solon apparently was told by the Egyptian priests that deluges and fire had periodically ravaged the earth, causing civilizations to collapse and disappear. However, because of the disposition of the Nile valley, Egypt had miraculously been spared and all her ancient temples and sanctuaries had survived. In them and them alone was preserved a complete memory of the great events of the distant past and of deeds previously accomplished by mankind. They even contained a record of the origins of the world and knowledge of that golden age when mortals had fraternized with the gods.

Classical writers who had visited or lived in Egypt, such as Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus and Proclus Diadochos, likewise extolled the immensely old wisdom of the Egyptian priests, and especially their revered knowledge of the heavens and the motion of the stars. Many deemed Egypt a sacred land, a land in which the gods had once dwelt and taught men the divine and sacred science, and where the secrets of immortality had been revealed to those who were fully worthy. 19 However, this wonderful and pristine Egyptian science had thus far remained out of the reach of Renaissance scholars such as Cosimo de’ Medici because it was written in the mysterious and impenetrable hieroglyphic language which no one any more could understand. Ancient and holy Egypt had fallen into a deep coma from which, it seemed, it might never again awake. 

One can therefore imagine the intellectual shockwave that passed through the learned circles of Florence in 1460 when Cosimo de’ Medici excitedly announced that he had in his possession a collection, translated by some unknown hand into Greek, of the fabled lost books of Hermes Trismegistus. The late Dame Frances Yates, a world authority on the Renaissance, puts the scale of the discovery into context: 

From… early Christian writers, more about Hermes Trismegistus could be learned, particularly from Clement of Alexandria, who, in his striking description of the procession of the Egyptian priests, says that the singer at the head of the procession carried two books of music and hymns by Hermes; the horoscopus carried four books by Hermes on the stars. In the course of this description Clement states that there are forty-two books by Hermes Trismegistus, thirty-six of which contained the whole of the philosophy of the Egyptians, the other six being on medicine. It is very improbable that Clement knew any of the Hermetica which have come down to us, but the Renaissance reader believed that he had in the Corpus Hermeticum and the Asclepius precious survivors of that great sacred library of which Clement speaks. 20 

Cosimo and his contemporaries believed that the ‘divine’ Plato had himself been taught philosophy by the priests of Egypt. It was the desire to regain contact with the source of that philosophy that mostly fired the imagination of Cosimo de’ Medici and led him to action. 

Drop Plato, Translate Hermes Instead 

When the Hermetic texts reached Cosimo, it so happened that his adopted son, Marsilio Ficino, was busy translating the works of Plato from Greek into more accessible Latin. Cosimo ordered the young man to drop Plato at once and to concentrate all his efforts full-time on the translation of the Hermetica (as the collection that Leonardo da Pistoia had brought back from Macedonia is now known). 

Ficino, then twenty-seven years old, had already acquired a reputation as a fine scholar, theologian and linguist – especially in Greek and Latin. Born in 1433, he was the natural son of a Florentine physician, the latter a close friend of Cosimo de’ Medici. Cosimo adopted Ficino after the death of his father, and encouraged him to pursue his passion for Plato’s works. 

Roman Catholicism had a long history of disapproval of Platonic philosophy going back before the closure of the original Academy in 529. By the 1400s, however, Plato was beginning to find supporters again within the Church – and Ficino was one of these. He therefore set out very deliberately to apply his intellect to an integration of Plato’s philosophy with Roman Catholic teachings. He would also try to do the same, as we shall see, with the philosophy found in the books of the ‘Egyptian sage’ Hermes Trismegistus. But what was amazing was that the man who was to be the head of Cosimo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy should have been ordered to put aside Plato and to focus instead on the translation of the books of Hermes. As Frances Yates comments: 

It is an extraordinary situation. There are the complete works of Plato, waiting, and they must wait whilst Ficino quickly translates Hermes, probably because Cosimo wants to read him before he dies. What a testimony this is to the mysterious reputation of [Hermes] the Thrice Great One! 21 

Within a year Ficino managed to complete a Latin translation of the fourteen books or ‘tracts’ of the Hermetica. In 1473, ten years after finishing this work, Ficino was ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church and eventually became a high official at the Cathedral of Florence. It is widely accepted by scholars that his translations of the Greek classics and, especially, the works of Plato, were part of the impetus behind the Italian Renaissance. But what is less appreciated is the huge, indeed revolutionary, effect that Ficino’s translation of the Hermetica was also to have on Western culture and on the Catholic Church itself. 

The Full Corpus 

Ficino had given his translation the title of Pimander, the name of the mysterious ‘universal mind’ that supposedly had revealed to Hermes Trismegistus the divine wisdom imparted in the Hermetica. 

Although the printing press had just been invented fifteen years before, 22 the publication of Pimander was a huge success. It had first circulated in handwritten copies but eventually was printed in 1471 in Treviso (apparently without permission from Ficino) under the title Pimander or the Power and Wisdom of God. This was somewhat misleading since the term Pimander, which is derived from the original Greek Poimadres – itself derived from Peime-n-Re, meaning the ‘knowledge of Re [or Ra]’, the Egyptian sun-god – only appears briefly in the opening part of the book. None of the other tracts in the Hermetica mentions Pimander at all. 

Be that as it may the Treviso edition was so successful that it prompted another publisher at Ferrera to bring out a rival edition in 1472, again without Ficino’s permission. By 1543, the same year that Copernicus’s famous Revolutions was first published in Nuremberg, there were over fifty separate editions of the Hermetica circulating in Europe! 

When Ficino had translated the texts back in 1463, he had not included a tract called the Logos Teleios, the Perfect Discourse, better known as the Asclepius. This was because the latter (a fragment of which, the reader will recall, was also found amongst the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts) had already been translated into Latin from a Greek original some time in late antiquity and had been circulating among European scholars since medieval times. We shall come back to the Asclepius in due course but, in brief for now, this book purports to explain the magical religion of the Egyptians and, more importantly, the mysterious talismanic skills that they supposedly deployed to draw down the powers of the stars into statues and other objects. 23 It was this type of magic that was to impress Ficino deeply and to influence his many followers. 

The Asclepius was printed for the first time in 1469 with the complete works of Apuleius, only two years before the first printed edition of Ficino’s Pimander. It thus quickly became customary to attach the Asclepius to the Hermetica, the whole forming one major corpus generally known as the ‘philosophical’ Hermetica or Corpus Hermeticum. There is also a further booklet known as the Definitions of Asclepius that is sometimes added to this corpus. 

According to French scholar Jean-Pierre Mahe, Professor of Humanities at the Sorbonne in Paris, the Definitions of Asclepius was rediscovered in 1484, that is, two decades after the rediscovery of the Hermetica, in a far more dramatic and flamboyant manner than the Ruritanian spectacle of a monk riding his little donkey into Florence. Apparently a certain signore Ludovico Lazzarelli, in an obscure tract titled The Letter of Enoch, narrated how his master, Don Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio, had helped him to find these lost writings of Hermes Trismegistus (also called Mercurio by the Italians). On Palm Sunday in April of the year 1484, Giovanni Mercurio, then exactly thirty-three years old, that is, the supposed age of Christ at his crucifixion, rode into Rome on a black stallion guided by two servants, and made his way towards the Vatican. Dressed in black and wearing a golden belt and purple shoes, Giovanni Mercurio had placed on his head a crown of thorns, and upon his brow was fixed a silver plaque in the form of a lunar crescent on which were written these words: 

This is my son Pimander, whom I personally chose. From early childhood he has grown to sublime heights, and I have empowered him with all my compliance to cast away demons and to install my truth and my justice upon all nations. Be warned not to oppose him! Heed his words and obey him with fear and reverence. These are the words of the Lord of all the sanctuaries of the world, Jesus Christ. 24 

Giovanni Mercurio then pulled a heap of leaflets out of his saddlebag and threw them all around. The crowds gathered; some thought him mad, others thought that he was making some strange vow, but the majority hailed him as a prophet. At the Vatican, the Swiss Guard, baffled by this strange scene, stood aside and let him pass. In the cathedral Giovanni Mercurio announced that he was the reincarnated Pimander. He spent the next few days talking to the crowds then returned to his hometown in Bologna, where he was widely acclaimed by women and children. Not surprisingly, he was soon arrested by the Inquisition for blasphemy and threatened with the stake. In 1486, however, he was released under the protection of the then King of France, Charles VIII. 

Almost every aspect of this whole strange episode underlines the incredible religious impact that the Hermetica had on the collective mind of the Renaissance and, even more curious, the way that Hermes/Mercurio Trismegistus was being attached to the Christian faith. 

A repercussion of Giovanni Mercurio’s strange but short career as a ‘prophet’ of Hermes Trismegistus was that the poet and astrologer Lodovico Lazzarelli, who had been an eyewitness to Giovanni’s cavalcade into Rome on that Palm Sunday back in 1484, also succumbed to the Hermetic spell, and adopted the mystical name of ‘Enoch’ (another alleged incarnation of Hermes). 25 Lazzarelli became Giovanni’s most ardent disciple and, according to him, here is how the Definitions of Asclepius were found: 

It was by chance, while scrutinizing relentlessly the old books of those who inspired me, and while over a cup full of the most suave nectar which, I do not doubt, had flowed from the huge crater[bowl] of Hermes Trismegistus, by which I mean a small book in Greek having the title of the Definitions of Asclepius. As soon as I read it, its conciseness and the mysterious authenticity of its wisdom enchanted me and filled me with admiration. 26 

Lazzarelli made it his task to translate the Definitions of Asclepius immediately into Latin, but it was only after his death in 1507 that this book was eventually printed – alongside the work of the French Neoplatonist and occultist Symphorien Champier, in his Book of the Quadruple Life. Now, at last, the full works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were in the hands of Western scholars, and something quite extraordinary was about to happen… 

Veiling Hermes in the Church (1) 

In the mind of Marsilio Ficino, Hermes Trismegistus was a historical person who had lived in ancient Egypt and had actually been the author of the Hermetica. This view was shared by all the Renaissance humanists and philosophers – notably the great Christian Hermetic Cabalist Pico della Mirandola – who, like Ficino, were totally seduced by the Hermetica. As Professor Jean-Pierre Mahe explains: 

According to Marsilio Ficino, [Hermes] Trismegistus [Hermes Thrice-Great] had merited his surname by becoming at the same time the greatest of philosophers, the greatest of priests and the greatest of kings… And his successors were Orpheus, Aglaophamus, Pythagoras and Philolaus, the teacher of Plato… Thus, the works of Trismegistus were the true source of ancient wisdom. Not only the divine Plato, but also the legendary Pythagoras and even the inspired poets such as Orpheus, perpetuated the same Egyptian doctrine: all bouncing the echo, as it were, of a single and same ancient theology, the prisca theologia…27 

Concerned, however, not to undermine the authority of the Bible and awaken the Inquisition, the early Hermetic scholars accepted that Hermes Trismegistus came after Moses. This play-it-safe idea had originated with St Augustine, the Manichean ‘hearer’ who converted to Catholicism and became one of the great Doctors of the Church (see Chapter 4). Augustine accepted that Hermes Trismegistus lived long before the Greek philosophers, but insisted that he 

came after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and even Moses. Because Moses was born in the time of Atlas, brother of Prometheus, who was a great astronomer… he was the grandfather of the older Mercury [Hermes], himself the grandfather of [Hermes] Trismegistus. 28 

But some did not agree with this chronology. Lazzarelli, who had translated the Definitions of Asclepius and utterly believed in Hermes Trismegistus’ older origin, argued: 

It was not at the times of Moses that Trismegistus had lived, but long before, as one can easily ascertain from the works of Diodorus of Sicily. The latter reported, in his chronology of the kings of Egypt, it was first gods that ruled then human brings. Hence it is evident that Mercury (Hermes) Trismegistus lived in the times of the gods… whereas Moses lived at an epoch where the Bible and many other ancient writings known in Egypt clearly state when ruled pharaohs. 29 

If you visit the famous Cathedral of Siena located between Rome and Florence, you will find that the entire floor, which dates back to 1488, is paved with exquisite marble designs depicting religious and mythological scenes. One of these scenes shows the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus handing a book to an oriental figure standing in a respectful manner bowing slightly. Written upon the book in Latin are the words ‘Suscipite O Licteras Et Lege Egiptii’, meaning ‘Take up thy letters and laws O Egyptians’, and the bowing figure, according to Frances Yates, was ‘perhaps intended to be Moses’. 30 What seems to support this amazing identification is the plaque under the feet of the figures which states: ‘Hermes Mercurius contemporaneous of Moses’, implying, says Yates: 

a supplication from the lawgiver of the Hebrews (if the suppliant figure is Moses) to the lawgiver of the Egyptians to revive Egyptian piety and morality… The representation of Hermes Trismegistus in this Christian edifice, so prominently displayed near its entrance and giving him so lofty a spiritual position, is not an isolated phenomenon but a symbol of how the Italian Renaissance regarded him and a prophecy of what was to be his extraordinary career throughout Europe in the sixteenth century and well on into the seventeenth century…31 

Veiling Hermes in the Church (2) 

The ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, and by extension the writings attributed to him, were indeed due for a glittering Renaissance career. In 1544, for example, when the French humanist Adrien Turnebous (better known simply as Turnebus) published in Paris the first edition of the original Greek text of the Hermetica accompanied by Ficino’s translation in Latin, the theologian Petrus Paulus Vergerius had this to say in the preface: 

Hermes Trismegistus was an Egyptian by race… He flourished before the time of pharaoh, as many of the chronographi think. Some, among whom is Cicero, suppose that he is the person whom the Egyptians call Thoth… He must have lived, therefore, before pharaoh, and consequently, before Moses also… He wrote at the time many books of mystical philosophy and theology. Among these writings, there are two of special importance: the one is called Asclepius, and the other, Poimandres. 32 

After Turnebus’s publication came the work of François Foix de Candalle, the Bishop of Aire, better known as ‘Flussas’, who published a new edition of the Hermetica. Flussas was even more enthusiastic than his predecessors, and dedicated the work to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II (reigned 1564–76), informing him that Hermes Trismegistus had attained to a knowledge of divine things which he first wrote in Egyptian, then in Greek, surpassing that ‘which was revealed to the Hebrew prophets, and equalling that of the Apostles and Evangelists’: 

What more is made known to us by those who were instructed by our Saviour himself? And yet this man [Hermes] was anterior in time not only to the disciples of our Lord, but also to all the prophets and teachers of our law, and, as the ancients say, to Moses himself. 33 

In 1591 came the Italian Neoplatonist scholar Francesco Patrizzi, who was also to publish an edition of the Hermetica in his work Nova de Universis Philosophica. Patrizzi not only saw Hermes Trismegistus as the source of all wisdom, but in the preface of his book, which is addressed to Pope Gregory XIV, Patrizzi actually urged the Pope to order that the Hermetica should be taught to everyone, even to the Jesuits, because it could somehow serve as a ‘conversion’ tool for the Catholic Church: 

I hope that you and your successors will adopt this new restored religious philosophy and cause it to be studied everywhere… I would have you then, Holy Father, and all future Popes, give orders that some of the books which I have named shall be continually taught everywhere, as I have taught them in the last fourteen years at Ferrara. You will thus make all able men in Italy, Spain and France friendly to the Church; and perhaps even the German protestants will follow their example, and return to the Catholic faith. It is much easier to win them back in this way than to compel them by ecclesiastical censures or by secular arms. You should cause this doctrine to be taught in the schools of the Jesuits, who are doing such good work. If you do this, great glory will await you among men of future times. And I beg you to accept me as a helper in this undertaking. 34 

The ‘doctrine’ that Patrizzi was referring to is the same that Plato had once taught and which, at least according to Patrizzi, had been originally developed and transmitted to man in ancient Egypt by Hermes Trismegistus. Patrizzi believed that it was passed on to Plato during his stay in Egypt and then passed by Plato himself to his pupil Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander the Great. 35 Amazingly, Patrizzi seems to be asking the Pope to canonize the Hermetica and other related writings which, he believed, contained a pristine doctrine, a Prisca Theologia, rooted in ancient Egypt. Yet, seen in the context of his times, Patrizzi’s seemingly heretical request to the Pope is not as far-fetched as it at first appears. In fact there had been one Pope at least who took such ideas very seriously indeed… 

Pico, Hermetic Magic and the Cabala 

One of the most brilliant minds of the Renaissance belonged to a young Florentine scholar named Pico della Mirandola. The scion of a noble family of Modena, Pico was much influenced by the ideas of Marsilio Ficino on Hermetism and, more especially, Hermetic magic, which Pico not only completely accepted, but would propagate with even more fervour and enthusiasm. 

Whilst wholeheartedly sharing Ficino’s view that Hermes Trimegistus was a ‘gentile’ prophet of Christianity, Pico went further. What he saw in the Hermetica was a form of mystical teaching and ‘natural magic’ which he also associated with the Jewish Cabala. The reader will recall from Chapter 2 that this was a system of mysticism rooted in esoteric Judaic traditions that had received its most extensive elaboration and development amongst the Jewish communities of coastal Occitania during the twelfth century. Now, more than 300 years later, Pico felt with all his heart that these two types of Cabalistic magic, Jewish and ‘Egyptian’, needed to be merged and used for the benefit of the Christian Church. 

According to Frances Yates, ‘the marrying together of Hermetism and Cabalism’ was an invention of Pico della Mirandola, who also ‘united the Hermetic and Cabalistic type of magic’ to create a powerful intellectual brew loosely termed the Christian Hermetic-Cabala, which was to have far-reaching consequences amongst Renaissance theologians, reaching even as far as the Vatican itself. 36 

And although magic, in the medieval sense, was abhorred and virtually outlawed by the Church, Pico successfully argued that what the Church had in mind concerned the diabolical ‘modern’ type of magic which, he agreed, was detestable. What he was advocating, he explained, was something quite other – the beautiful, ancient and innocent magia naturalis, i.e., the natural magic of the wise Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. This was seen by many, not just Pico, as a form of ‘sympathetic magic’, which could establish a benevolent link between heaven and earth. In short, what Pico had in mind was that ‘Egyptian’ form of talismanic magic as found in the Hermetica and, more especially, in the Asclepius. 37 But unlike Ficino, Pico believed that this ‘Egyptian’ magic must be ‘supplemented’ by ‘practical Cabala’, i.e., Cabalistic magic. And precisely this, says Yates, is the intellectual contribution to Renaissance magic that Pico was to develop with amazing success. 38 

Cabala, in fact, literally means ‘tradition’, namely that special Jewish mystical tradition that was supposedly handed by God to Moses in the sacred Hebrew language and which, according to Cabalists, conveys mystical and magical meaning encoded in the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Hebrew letters and the words they form are viewed by Cabalists in very much the same way as the statues and objects of the Egyptians were most likely viewed by their devotees – that is to say as talismans charged with magical and mystical meaning that can be released through a form of ‘magic’. Thus, according to Pico, both the Hermetic-Egyptian and Cabalistic-Hebrew magical systems – which supposedly had emanated, respectively, from the Egyptian law-giver Hermes Trismegistus and the Jewish law-giver Moses – complement one another. The next step, surely, was to merge them? And since both these ancient sages received their wisdom from God and were thus ‘prophets’ of Christianity, then, in Pico’s logic, the now merged Hermetic-Cabalistic magic rightfully belonged to the Christian Church! 

It is not within the scope of this book to review and elaborate on the complex ‘science’ of Cabala, nor is it possible to enlarge and give details on how Pico proposed to merge this system with the Hermetic magic of the Asclepius or, indeed, incorporate it within the Catholic religion. Briefly, however, Pico essentially saw his Christian Hermetic-Cabala as the means through which the ‘truth’ of the Trinity could be proved and confirmed to the people. Or, as Pico himself was to put it, his Christian Hermetic-Cabala was the means of ‘confirming the Christian religion from the foundations of Hebrew wisdom’. 39 

It also did not take much imagination for the Church to see that Pico’s clever variant of the ancient Jewish mystical tradition could serve as a ‘conversion tool’ to bring Jews into the Catholic faith. One example of such a simple but devastatingly effective ‘tool’ was Pico’s very forceful argument that the name of Jesus, Iesu in Hebrew, if interpreted through Cabalistic principles and methodologies, could be proved to mean ‘God’, the ‘Son of God’ and also the spirit or ‘wisdom of God’, i.e., the Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 40 In short, Pico proposed to win the Jews over using their own mystical game. And indeed, with such seemingly simple but convincing manipulation of Hebrew words using ‘Christian Hermetic-Cabala’, it seems that many Jews living in Italy were persuaded that ‘Christian truths’ were locked within their own religious scriptures and thus felt compelled to convert to the Catholic Faith. 41 

Not surprisingly, Pico’s bold but unwise claim ‘that there is no science that gives us more assurance of Christ’s divinity than magic and the Cabala’ was bound to attract the sombre attention of the Papal Inquisition, whose henchmen missed the point of Pico’s ‘good intention’ and promptly accused him of heresy. 42 Matters got progressively worse between Pico and the Church, and he had to take refuge in France and seek the protection of Charles VIII. He eventually returned to Italy bearing letters from the King of France, and soon found himself under the protection of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the powerful Medici ruler of Florence from 1469 to 1492. In the tradition of his grandfather Cosimo, Lorenzo gave the fugitive political support and interceded on his behalf with the Pope. 43 Pico spent his last years in Florence, where he died in 1494, at the youthful age of thirty-one.

Perhaps it should be mentioned that, coincidentally, Pico had been born in the same year that Marsilio Ficino had completed the first Latin translation of the Hermetica. These propitious coincidences seem to have been part of Pico’s life. The year before his death, Pope Innocent VIII, who had condemned Pico for heresy, was succeeded by the infamous Pope Alexander VI who, unlike his predecessor, was rather open, indeed even sympathetic, towards magic, Kabbalah and Hermeticism. In June 1493 Alexander VI gave his absolution to Pico della Mirandola, revoked the charges against him, and even wrote him a personal letter in which he describes Pico as a ‘faithful son of the Church’ inspired by a ‘divina largitas.’ 44 

Suddenly and, for a brief moment, there was a crack in the doors of the Vatican. Through it, quietly but surely like a thief in the night, the wisdom and magic of the ‘Egyptian sage’, Hermes Trismegistus, slipped quickly inside… 

The Borgias, Orgies in the Vatican, 

Isis and Osiris on the Ceiling 

Pope Alexander VI’s family name was Rodrigo Borgia. Born in the former Cathar stronghold of Aragon in north-eastern Spain, he came from an immensely wealthy, powerful and ultimately notorious family. His uncle, the Bishop of Valencia (later to become Pope Calixtus III), had supervised his education in Bologna in Italy and later made him a cardinal of the Roman Church. Through bribery and intrigue he thereafter succeeded in amassing a huge personal fortune. Father of an unknown number of illegitimate children, he also had four legitimized children from a Roman noblewoman, Vanozza Cantanei. These included the twisted Cesare Borgia and the beautiful Lucrezia Borgia, whose names would come to epitomize intrigue and foul play. 

In spite of his licentious reputation – and somewhat amazingly, all things considered – Rodrigo was elected Pope in 1492 and adopted the name of Alexander VI. He immediately began to manipulate and control the Vatican through bribery and by appointing members of his own family in key positions. Cesare Borgia, his celebrated evil son, was promoted to cardinal while still in his teens, along with another young man of the Borgia clan, Alessandro Farnese, the future Pope Paul III. The latter was the brother of the Pope’s favourite mistress, Giulia la Bella (from whom the Pope had at least one illegitimate child). There are contemporary accounts of wild orgies at the Vatican, and historians have even traced at least two assassinations by poisoning directly related to Pope Alexander VI. Indeed, so corrupt and evil was the papacy of Alexander VI that after his death, even the Vatican itself could not avoid condemning him as the worst of the so called ‘Bad Popes’ – a polite understatement to describe the huge damage to the reputation of the Catholic Church done by the Borgias. 

There is another, yet more bizarre story about Alexander VI which, we think, might explain his interest and even sympathy for Christian Hermetic-Cabala and the ‘Egyptian’ magia naturalis of Hermes Trismegistus which Pico had so fervently expounded… 

A Dominican abbot called Giovanni Nanni – also known as Annius or Ennius – was a renowned historian who also acted as the personal secretary to Alexander VI. 45 In his better-known work concerning the chronology of man from the Deluge to the fall of Troy, Nanni advanced an extraordinary theory that the Borgia family of Pope Alexander VI were descendants of the Egyptian god Osiris, also known in Nanni’s days as the ‘father of the Egyptian Hercules’. 46 Using such classical authorities as Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus and others – as well as the ‘authority’ of certain ancient texts which he himself had forged – Nanni presented an astoundingly convincing theory that the ‘wisdom of the Egyptians’, that is, the Hermetic wisdom, had been transferred directly to the Italian people by Osiris when he had roamed the world in ancient times on a great civilizing mission. 47 According to the Danish scholar Erik Iversen, Nanni then ‘provided a heroic genealogy for his papal patron by demonstrating that the Borgia family descended directly from the Egyptian Hercules, the son of Osiris, and that the bull on the family crest was, in fact, the Osirian Apis’. 48 

The Pope must have taken such ideas very seriously indeed, for he promptly commissioned the renowned Renaissance painter Pinturicchio to decorate the ceiling of the Borgia apartments at the Vatican with scenes of Hermes Trismegistus along with the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Osirian Apis bull – i.e., Serapis, the composite Graeco-Egyptian deity of ancient Alexandria. One such scene is clearly an allegory of the Hermetic ‘natural’ or ‘astral’ magic found in the Asclepius, where Hermes Trismegistus stands under a huge skyglobe with a large star dangling over his head, and is surrounded by various wise-looking men or sages, probably representing the classical philosophers, who are standing in reverence around him as if receiving his teaching. 49 

This strange episode of Nanni and the Borgia pope is, of course, somewhat farcical and has nothing or little to do with the erudite and scholarly approach that Ficino, Pico and other savants applied to the Hermetic writings. Nonetheless, it stands as evidence of how deep the Hermetic influence had penetrated in those Renaissance days in Italy and the rest of Europe. More importantly, it testifies to the strange lure that its mysterious Hermetic-Cabalistic-talismanic ‘magic’ had on those seeking the divine secrets through the rediscovered ancient wisdom believed to be incorporated in the writings of the ‘Egyptian’ Hermes Trismegistus. 

The Mystery of the Picatrix and the Star-people 

Although it can be said with absolute certainty that Ficino developed his own brand of talismanic and ‘natural magic’ from his readings of the Asclepius, some scholars, such as Frances Yates for example, also think that he was much influenced by another Hermetic book on magic entitled Picatrix 50 – a book that is not normally associated with the canon of the Corpus Hermeticum, although versions of it had been circulating in Europe since at least the thirteenth century. Indeed, a copy of the Picatrix was found in Pico della Mirandola’s private library, and it is also almost certain that Ficino and others of his group possessed copies or, at the very least, knew where to find such copies. 51 

The Picatrix was first translated into Latin from an Arabic version, now lost, which is believed to have been written in the twelfth century in Spain, although some scholars think that it might have been originally composed in Egypt in the mid-eleventh century. In the Arabic version this book bore the title Ghayat Al Hakim, which means ‘The Aim of the Sage’ (also sometimes translated as ‘The Goal of the Wise’) and no one really knows why Italian Renaissance scholars named it Picatrix. 52 

With its source said to be 224 ancient manuscripts on Hermeticism, astrology, magic, Kabbalah and alchemy, the Picatrix is considered one of the most complete works on ancient talismanic magic in existence. There are, today, various European translations available: in German by the scholar Helmut Ritter in 1933; in Spanish by Marcelino Villegas in 1982; in Latin in 1986 by the American scholar David Pingree of Brown University; and in Italian by Davide Arecco and Stefano Zuffi, also in 1986. A partial English translation was published in 2002 by Hashem Attallah, and we understand that David Pingree has been working on an English translation in recent years. 53 

Pingree published an extensive article on the Picatrix in the Journal of the Warburg Institute in 1981, and there are some very useful commentaries on it, supported by extensive quotations, in Frances Yates’s book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, published in 1964, on which we have mostly based our investigation. Yates, who studied the German and Latin versions of the Picatrix, concluded that this work must be associated with the Hermetic tradition, since not only is much reference to Hermes Trismegistus made in it but also it almost certainly draws from the ideologies of the Sabeans – Arabs of Harran (a location in the south-east of modern Turkey) who had adopted the Hermetica as their own ‘religion’ in the ninth century AD and who also practised the talismanic magic of the Asclepius. 54 

The Sabeans venerated the moon-god Sin, and they are known to have been avid stargazers and astrologers. An interesting theory of how they got their name has been put forward by Selim Hassan, an Egyptologist who worked at the Giza pyramids in Egypt in the 1930s. 55 Hassan proposed that the name Sabeans, which is Saba’ia in Arabic, may have come from the ancient Egyptian word Saba’a, which means ‘star’. Apparently the Sabeans of Harran had performed yearly pilgrimages to the Giza pyramids from time immemorial until at least as late as the eleventh century AD. At the pyramids they are known to have conducted astronomical observations and rituals which may have been remnants from the old astral religion of ancient Egypt. Hassan believed that the Sabeans had recognized the Giza pyramids as monuments dedicated to the stars, which probably inspired them to take the name Saba’ia, i.e., the ‘star-people.’ 56 

There is, however, another possible explanation. When the Hermetic and Gnostic sects were persecuted in Egypt by the Roman Church, some initiates may have fled to Harran carrying with them copies of the Hermetic and Gnostic writings. Harran, with its moon worship cult – in Egypt, Thoth-Hermes was also a moon-god – as well as star-worship and astral magic, would have been an obvious place for the Hermetists and Gnostics seeking refuge and protection from the Roman and Christian persecutions. At any rate, whatever the true origins of the Sabeans, it seems clear that their astral and talismanic magic was passed on to Arab scholars in Spain and Occitania, and that much of it survived in books such as the Picatrix. It is not within the scope of this investigation to pass into review the whole content of the Picatrix, but suffice to say here that it served as a sort of practical manual for talismanic magic or, to be more specific, it provided a step-by-step explanation of how to make talismans by pulling into them the power of the spiritual and astral world. 

Perhaps an example may be useful here. Imagine two identical AA batteries, the sort we use every day to power electronic equipment such as portable cassette or CD players, penlights, cameras and the like. One of the batteries, however, is fully charged while the other is empty. The charged battery has the potential to release energy to power music, light and so forth; the other is simply an inert object that produces nothing. In a similar way any object can be charged with intellectual, spiritual or emotional energy, just like the battery can be charged with electrical energy. In short, a talisman can be created. Imagine a young man who takes his lover to a restaurant dinner by candlelight and, at the appropriate moment, after having made a full declaration of love, pulls out a small box with a diamond ring in it and offers it as a token of his love. Whatever the reaction, that ring is henceforth not just a ring; it is a talisman. 

Today we use the words ‘sentimental value’, but an ancient Egyptian or Sabean or, if you prefer, a Hermetic thinker, would use the words ‘talismanic value’. We all have our talismans: rings, necklaces, bracelets, amulets, crystals and so forth. And we generally would be quite disturbed should they get lost or stolen. Many cutting edge researchers have long accepted that ancient Egyptian art, statuary, obelisks, pyramids and even whole cities were meant to act as powerful talismans. It is also recognized that the subliminal effect of such talismans can be increased manifold by adding a variety of sensual stimuli other than mere visuals. Carefully chosen music, for example, will almost certainly enhance the experience, as well as perfumes, incense and lighting conditions. We all know how vastly different it is to visit a cathedral with a noisy group of tourists and again alone when a choir is singing hymns in soft candlelight with the smoke of incense filling the air. 

It should be noted also that such talismanic environments do not necessarily have to be artificial. The natural environment can, and often does, act as a ‘temple’. Just think of a Scotsman after years of absence returning to his beloved Highlands, or a Berber returning to the desert after a long spree in a city, and you will get the idea. This, in part, is what Ficino and Pico called natural magic. 

But it is the perfect combination of an artificial ‘temple’ with a natural ‘temple’ that can act as the most inspiring and effective ‘temple-talisman’ of all. Think of the palace of Versailles in France, the Taj Mahal in India, Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Think of a city like Paris in the spring, or Rome in the summer, or Washington, DC in the fall and you begin to understand the principle here. 

All this may sound like some hocus-pocus pseudoscience in our present climate of intense empirical, rational and analytical thinking. But irrespective of what we may think of talismanic magic or so called ‘sacred science’, the fact remains that we are complex creatures and we have evolved over billions of years under the subtle influence of nature. Our senses act as finely tuned receivers that enable us to understand nature and the cosmos around us intuitively. Such abilities are quite simply natural magic and in ancient times were skilfully amplified by enhancing and capturing the multiple aspects of nature within well-defined symbols and talismans. We would go so far as to say that the ancient Egyptian priests were the true masters of this arcane magic and that an Egyptian temple was not really a temple at all so much as a powerful talisman meant to influence events in the macrocosm. Enter an Egyptian temple and you enter a model of the universe as perceived by the inner human mind. A temple was not merely a place of worship, but an environment that you had to integrate with – its ambience, its harmonic proportions, its carefully chosen images, its symbols, its magical texts and its talismanic statuary, all of which were charged with archetypal values, cosmic principles and natural ideals. And yet in the Picatrix we are presented with something far more ambitious than a sacred talismanic temple. We are presented with no less than an esoteric manual for the transformation of great cities, and even perhaps the whole world, into talismans… 

Temple of the World 

In the Hermetic text known as the Asclepius there is a call sent to a future generation of ‘wise men’ to bring about the full restoration and restitution of the true religion of the world 57 – that is, the magical talismanic religion which was once practised in the sacred land of Egypt. This call is highly reminiscent of the mysterious ‘Organization’ spoken of in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts, which date from approximately the same period and which even include a fragment of the Asclepius. As the reader will recall from Chapter 5, the texts leave us with the impression that this ‘Organization’ was some sort of Gnostic secret society and that its objective was also the restoration of a ‘true religion’ – in its case Gnosis. 

Let’s look at the relevant passages of soaring prose in the Asclepius, in which Hermes Trismegistus laments and prophesies to his favourite pupil Asclepius the forthcoming and inevitable destruction of Egypt and its ancient and most revered religion: 

Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven or, to be more precise, that everything governed and moved in heaven came down to Egypt and was transferred there? If truth were told, our land is the temple of the whole world. And yet, since it befits the wise to know all things in advance, of this you must not remain ignorant: a time will come when it will appear that the Egyptians paid respect to divinity with faithful mind and painstaking reverence – to no purpose. All their holy worship will be disappointed and perish without effect, for divinity will return from earth to heaven, and Egypt will be abandoned. The land that was the seat of reverence will be widowed by the powers and left destitute of their presence. When foreigners occupy the land and territory, not only reverence will fall into neglect but, even harder, a prohibition under penalty prescribed by law – so-called – will be enacted against reverence, fidelity and divine worship. Then this most holy land, seat of shrines and temples, will be filled completely with tombs and corpses. 

O Egypt, Egypt, of your reverent deeds only stories will survive, and they will be incredible to your children! Only words cut in stone will survive to tell your faithful works, and the Scythian or Indian or some such neighbour barbarian will dwell in Egypt. For divinity goes back to heaven, and all the people will die, deserted, as Egypt will be widowed and deserted by god and human. I call to you, most holy river, and I tell your future: a torrent of blood will fill you to the banks, and you will burst over them; not only blood will pollute your divine waters, it will also make them break out everywhere, and the number of the entombed will be much greater than the living. Whoever survives will be recognized as Egyptian only by his language; in his actions he will seem a foreigner. 

Asclepius, why do you weep? Egypt herself will be persuaded to deeds much wickeder than these, and she will be steeped in evils far worse. A land once holy, most loving of divinity, by reason of her reverence the only land on earth where the gods settled, she who taught holiness and fidelity, will be an example of utter unbelief. In their weariness the people of that time will find the world nothing to wonder at or worship. This all – a good thing that never had nor has nor will have its better – will be endangered. People will find it oppressive and scorn it. They will not cherish this entire world, a work of God beyond compare, a glorious construction, a bounty composed of images in multiform variety, a mechanism for God’s will ungrudgingly supporting his work, a unity of everything that can be honoured, praised and finally loved by those who see it, a multiform taken as a single thing. They will prefer shadow to light, and they will find death more expedient than life. No one will look up to heaven. The reverent will be thought mad, the irreverent wise; the lunatic will be thought brave, and the scoundrel will be taken for a decent person. Soul and teachings about soul (that the soul began immortal or else expected to attain immortality) as I revealed them to you will be considered not simply laughable but even illusory. But – believe me – whoever dedicates himself to reverence of mind will find himself facing a capital penalty. They will establish new laws, new justice. Nothing holy, nothing reverent nor worthy of heaven or heavenly beings will be heard or believed in the mind. How mournful when the gods withdraw from mankind! Only the baleful angels remain to mingle with humans, seizing wretches and driving them to every outrageous crime – war, looting, trickery and all that is contrary to the soul…58 

This superb piece of early Hermetic writing very much appears to anticipate the plight of the Egyptians under the Roman occupation of Egypt and, most intriguingly, it also seems to foretell the collapse of the Egyptian religion that was engineered after Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Since the Asclepius is dated to no later than the third century AD and, more intriguing, since the decree of the very Christian Emperor Theodosius outlawing ‘paganism’ was not to be issued until 391 BC, then the eerie premonitions of the unknown author of this ominous tract are, to say the least, extraordinary. Yet this is not all. For the Lament goes on to promise hope for the future in words that resonate like a temple bell: 

When all this comes to pass, Asclepius, then the master and father, the god whose power is primary, governor of the first good, will look on this conduct… and in an act of will – which is god’s benevolence – he will take his stand against vices and the perversion in everything, righting wrong, washing away malice… then he will restore to the world its beauty of old so that the world itself will again seem deserving of worship and wonder, and with constant benedictions and proclamations of praise the people of that time will honour the god who makes and restores so great a work. And this will be the geniture of the world: a reformation of all good things, and a restitution most holy and most reverent of nature itself…59 

Restoration, reformation and restitution to the ways and beauty of old… 

But a ‘restoration, reformation and restitution’ by whom? How… and when? 

As the text continues it becomes clear that part of the plan – if it is a plan – includes the building or rebuilding of a magical talismanic city along certain well-defined astronomical and symbolic principles: 

The gods who exercised their dominion over the earth will be restored one day and installed in a city at the extreme limit of Egypt, a city which will be founded towards the setting sun, and into which will hasten, by land and sea, the whole race of mortal men…60 

According to Frances Yates, the above passage presents us with the image of an enchanted utopia, a sort of ancient Egyptian version of Camelot, created by the manipulation of astral magic by adept priests who, as she says, were conversant in ‘astronomy, mathematics, music, metaphysics, and indeed practically everything for the introduction of the spiritus (astral power) into talismans’. And all this was achieved, notes Yates, by making ‘images of stars inscribed on the correct materials, at the right times, in the right frame of mind and so on’. 61 As for the magical city itself, Yates thinks that it ‘might thus be seen both as the ideal Egyptian society before its fall and as the ideal pattern of its future and universal restoration’. 62 

There is, too, another eerie passage in the Asclepius, where Hermes Trismegistus again addresses his pupil and gives us a tantalizing glimpse of how the ancient Egyptians saw their sacred land as a model or ‘image’ of the heavenly landscape and a parallel world of the gods: 

Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven? Or, to be more precise, that everything governed and moved in heaven came down to Egypt and was transferred there? If truth were told, our land is the temple of the whole world…63 

In a Hermetic tract known as the Kore Kosmou, the ‘Virgin of the World’ – i.e., Isis, the Egyptian goddess, the consort of Osiris – makes the following revelation to their son Horus: 

The earth lies in the middle of the universe, stretched on her back as a human might lie facing toward heaven… Her head lies toward the south… her right shoulder toward the east, and her left shoulder toward the west; her feet lie beneath the Great Bear [north]… But the right holy land of our ancestors [i.e., Egypt] lies in the middle of the earth; and the middle of the human body is the sanctuary of the heart, and the heart is the headquarters of the soul; and that, my son, is the reason why men of this land… are more intelligent [wise]. It could not be otherwise, seeing they are born and bred upon Earth’s heart. 64 

In the above we have an actual geographical scheme which is based on some form of astral magic, where Egypt is said to be at the very centre of the world, right at the crossing of some prime meridian. It is interesting to note that the Great Bear constellation is mentioned in this scheme, for it is well known that ancient Egyptian temples were ritualistically aligned to the Great Bear constellation, i.e., Ursa Major, in a ceremony known as ‘the stretching of the cord’. It can now be better understood why in the Asclepius the whole of Egypt is said to be a ‘temple’ or, more specifically, that Egypt is ‘the temple of the world’. Was this what the ancients meant when they called Egypt ‘the land of the gods’? Was it, quite literally, a sacred land fashioned in the image of the cosmos?

The City of Adocentyn 

Part IV of the Picatrix seems to elaborate on this theme. Here Hermes Trismegistus is presented as the founder of a magical solar city that, we are told, was designed around astrological ideas and that contained fantastic talismanic statues and other such wonders. The secret knowledge of this magical city of Hermes, claims the unknown author of Picatrix, was passed down the ages by the Chaldean magi who were adepts in the science of talismanic magic: 

There are among the Chaldeans very perfect masters of this art and they affirm that Hermes was the first who constructed images by means of which he knew how to regulate the Nile against the motion of the moon. This man also built a temple to the sun, and he knew how to hide himself from all so that no one could see him, although he was within it. It was he, too, who in the east of Egypt constructed a city 12 miles long within which he constructed a castle which had four gates in each of its four parts. On the eastern gate he placed the form of an eagle [Horus?]; on the western gate, the form of a bull [Apis?]; on the southern gate the form of a lion [Sphinx?]; and on the northern gate he constructed the form of a dog [Anubis?]. Into these images he introduced spirits which spoke with voices, nor could anyone enter the gates of the city without permission. There he planted trees, in the midst of which was a great tree which bore the fruits of all generation [immortality?]. On the summit of the castle he caused to be raised a tower thirty cubits high on the top of which he ordered to be placed a light-house, the colours of which changed every day until the seventh day after which it returned to the first colour, and so the city was illuminated with these colours. Near the city there was abundance of waters in which dwelt many kinds of fish. Around the circumference of the city he placed engraved images and ordered them in such manner that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous and withdrawn from all wickedness and harm. The name of the city was Adocentyn…65 

Dame Frances Yates’s commentary is most helpful: 

Passed through the vivid imagination of the Arabs of Harran, we seem to have here something that reminds us of the hieratic religious magic described in the Asclepius. Here are the man-made gods, statues of the animal- and bird-shaped gods of Egypt, which Hermes Trismegistus has animated by introducing spirits into them so that they speak with voices and guard the gates of this magical utopia. The colours of the planets flash from the central tower, and these images around the circumference of the City, are they perhaps images of the signs of the zodiac and the decans [constellations] which Hermes has known how to arrange so that only good celestial influences are allowed into the City? The lawgiver of the Egyptians [Hermes] is giving laws which must perforce be obeyed, for he constrains the inhabitants of the City to be virtuous, and keeps them healthy and wise, by his powerful manipulation of astral magic… One might say that this City shows us Hermes Mercurius [Trismegistus] in his triple role of Egyptian priest and god-maker, of philosopher-magician, and of king and lawgiver… The pious admirer of those two ‘divine’ books by the most ancient Hermes – the Pimander and the Asclepius – must surely have been struck by this vivid description of a City in which, as in Plato’s ideal Republic, the wise philosopher is the ruler, and rules most forcibly by means of the priestly Egyptian magic such as described in the Asclepius…66 

In the original Arabic version of the Picatrix the name of the magical Hermetic city is not given exactly as Adocentyn but as Al Ashmunein. This turns out to be a real location in Middle Egypt. It stands on the banks of the Nile, where there is an abundance of vegetation, fish and fauna, and would indeed have been a paradisiacal spot in antiquity. It was the main cult centre of Thoth/Hermes in Greek and Roman times 67 and a famous temple dedicated to Thoth once stood here. 68 For this reason the Greeks called it Hermopolis, i.e., the city of Hermes. Its original Egyptian name was Kmun, meaning ‘eight’, apparently in honour of a group of eight gods, the ogdoad, who represented the world before creation. 69 

We cannot be sure that it was Kmun/Hermopolis/Al Ashmunein that was envisaged by the writers of the Picatrix when they summoned up their vision of the magical, talismanic city of Hermes Trismegistus. The problem is that Adocentyn, as they described it, bears no resemblance to any real region in Egypt – although certainly this was a land in which many ‘temples to the sun’ existed, the most famous being Heliopolis in the north and Luxor-Karnak in the south. The term Ashmunein in the original text of the Picatrix could also be a corruption of Ain Shams, meaning the ‘Eye of the Sun’, a name still used by Egyptians today to denote the region of Heliopolis. 

But what really interests us about the talismanic city of the Picatrix is not so much its very plausible connection to real sacred cities of ancient Egypt. Far more important, in our view, has been its role as an archetype or template for cities to be built or rebuilt in the future, including the capitals of Britain, Italy, France and the United States. We will demonstrate in later chapters that in each of these cases prominent monuments, works of architecture, and sometimes the street plans of whole districts, appear have been harnessed to a secret Hermetic scheme. 

If we are right then we have come across the traces of an organization that has hitherto sustained its existence and purpose undetected for hundreds of years while carrying out immense projects of occult urban planning – all of them ‘hidden’ in full public view. To understand why anyone might have been motivated to do such an audacious thing we must first explore the Hermetic religion that lies behind the cosmic city of Adocentyn.

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