booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

CHAPTER IV
THREE CENTURIES OF OCCULTISM
IT has been shown in the foregoing chapters that from very early times occult sects had existed for two
purposes-esoteric and political. Whilst the Manicheans, the early Ismailis, the Bogomils, and the Luciferians
had concerned themselves mainly with religious or esoteric doctrines, the later Ismailis, the Fatimites,
the Karmathites, and Templars had combined secrecy and occult rites with the political aim of domination.
We shall find this double tradition running through all the secret society movement up to the present day.
The Dualist doctrines attributed to the Templars were not, however, confined to this Order in Europe,
but had been, as we have seen, those professed by the Bogomils and also by the Cathari, who spread westwards
from Bulgaria and Bosnia to France. It was owing to their sojourn in Bulgaria that the Cathari gained
the popular nickname of " Bulgars " or " Bougres," signifying those addicted to unnatural vice. One section
of the Cathari in the South of France became known after 1180 as the Albigenses, thus called from the town
of Albi, although their headquarters were really in Toulouse. Christians only in name, they adhered in
secret to the Gnostic and Manichean doctrines of the earlier Cathari, which they would appear to have combined
with Johannism, since, like this Eastern sect, they claimed to possess their own Gospel of St. John.(1)
Although not strictly a secret society, the Albigenses were divided after the secret society system into
initiates and semi-initiates. The former, few in number, known as the Perfecti, led in appearance an austere
life, refraining from meat and professing abhorrence of oaths or of lying. The mystery in which they enveloped
themselves won for them the adoring reverence of the Credentes, who formed the great majority of the
sect and gave themselves up to every vice, to usury, brigandage, and perjury, and whilst describing marriage
as prostitution, condoning incest and all forms of licence.(2) The Credentes, who were probably not fully
initiated into the Dualist doctrines of their superiors, looked to them for salvation through the laying-on of
hands according to the system of the Manicheans.
It was amongst the nobles of Languedoc that the Albigenses found their principal support. This " Juda
of France," as it has been called, was peopled by a medley of mixed races, Iberian, Gallic, Roman, and
Semitic.(3) The nobles, very different from the " ignorant and pious chivalry of the North," had lost all respect
for their traditions. " There were few who in going back did not encounter some Saracen or Jewish
grandmother in their genealogy."(4) Moreover, many had brought back to Europe the laxity of morals they
had contracted during the Crusades. The Comte de Comminges practised polygamy, and, according to ecclesiastical
chronicles, Raymond VI, Comte de Toulouse, one of the most ardent of the Albigense Credentes,
had his harem.(5) The Albigensian movement has been falsely represented as a protest merely against the
tyranny of the Church of Rome; in reality it was a rising against the fundamental doctrines of Christianitymore
than this, against all principles of religion and morality. For whilst some of the sect openly declared
that the Jewish law was preferable to that of the Christians,(6) to others the God of the Old Testament was
as abhorrent as the " false Christ " who suffered at Golgotha; the old hatred of the Gnostics and Manicheans
for the demiurgus lived again in these rebels against the social order. Forerunners of the seventeenth century
Libertines and eighteenth-century Illuminati, the Albigense nobles, under the pretext of fighting the
priesthood, strove to throw off all the restraints the Church imposed.
Inevitably the disorders that took place throughout the South of France led to reprisals, and the Albigenses
were suppressed with all the cruelty of the age-a fact which has afforded historians the opportunity to
exalt them as noble martyrs, victims of ecclesiastical despotism. But again, as in the case of the Templars,
the fact that they were persecuted does not prove them innocent of the crimes laid to their charge.
Satanism
At the beginning of the fourteenth century another development of Dualism, far more horrible than the
Manichean heresy of the Albigenses, began to make itself felt. This was the cult of Satanism, or black magic.
The subject is one that must be approached with extreme caution, owing to the fact that on one hand
much that has been written about it is the result of medival superstition, which sees in every departure from
the Roman Catholic Faith the direct intervention of the Evil One, whilst on the other hand the conspiracy of
history, which denies in toto the existence of the Occult Power, discredits all revelations on this question,
from whatever source they emanate, as the outcome of hysterical imagination.(7) This is rendered all the
easier since the subject by its amazing extravagance lends itself to ridicule.
It is, however, idle to deny that the cult of evil has alway existed; the invocation of the powers of darkness
was practised in the earliest days of the human race and, after the Christian era, found its expression, as
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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