Europe's inner demons

And of course it is to those ancient tales that we must look for an explanation. After all, both the accusations of promiscuous orgies and the accusations of child-eating belong to a tradition dating back to the second century. The Fathers who first defended the Christians against these accusations also, by the very act of putting them in writing, perpetuated the accusations. Embedded in theological works which were preserved in monastic libraries and which moreover were frequently recopied, these tales must have been familiar to many monks. It was only to be expected that, when it came to discrediting some new religious out-group, monks would draw on this traditional stock of defamatory clichés. Moreover, it is known that by the fourteenth century certain chroniclers deliberately inserted such stories into their narratives in order to provide preachers with materials for their sermons against heresy.⁽⁵⁶⁾

More serious consideration has to be given to the idea that heretics worshipped the Devil. This charge cannot simply be derived from what pagan Romans said about the Christian minority in their midst. Did it, then, reflect what some group or sect of medieval heretics really believed or practised? Few people nowadays are likely to accept that demonic cats descended miraculously from on high⁽⁵⁷⁾ — but perhaps some reality lurks behind these fantasies, perhaps there really was a cult of Lucifer or Satan? Even so sceptical (and anticlerical) a historian as Henry Charles Lea thought so,⁽⁵⁸⁾

and today it is still widely assumed that such a cult must have existed.

Three arguments have been advanced in support of this view. It has been pointed out that some medieval sources describe a coherent and conceivable doctrine, which they attribute to a sect of “Luciferans”. It has been suggested that the Dualist religion, pushed to its logical conclusion, could very well lead to Devil-worship. And it has also been said that the intelligent, educated and devout men — including some popes — who accepted that a cult of Satan existed, would not have done so without solid evidence. These arguments have to be examined.

It is true that accounts of a Luciferan doctrine are to be found not only in the bull which Pope Gregory IX fulminated at the prompting of Conrad of Marburg in 1233,⁽⁵⁹⁾ but in half a dozen other German and Italian sources.⁽⁶⁰⁾

The Luciferan doctrine, it appears, taught that Lucifer and his demons were unjustly expelled from heaven, but will return there in the end, to resume their rightful places and to cast God, Michael and his angels into hell for all eternity. Meanwhile the Luciferans must serve their master by doing everything in their power to offend God; their reward will be everlasting blessedness with Lucifer. The accounts agree with one another and are not, on the face of it, implausible. But how reliable are they?

Internal evidence shows them to be wholly unreliable. Each one is accompanied by statements which are anything but plausible. In one case we hear of demons who vanish into thin air when the Luciferan rite is interrupted by the appearance of the Eucharist. Another source blithely states that in Austria, Bohemia and the neighbouring territories alone the worshippers of Lucifer number 80,000. Another — a confession attributed to a heretic called Lepzet, of Cologne — proclaims that the man himself, in his zeal to serve Lucifer and offend God, has committed more than thirty murders! Yet another speaks of a magic potion containing the excrement of a gigantic toad; while in the bull Vox in Rama both a demonic toad and a demonic cat receive kisses of homage. Moreover, most of the sources contain references to those promiscuous and incestuous orgies which we have just shown to be unreliable. But where a source contains untrustworthy or demonstrably false statements it should be treated with scepticism throughout; and that is the case with all the sources that tell of a Luciferan doctrine.

In any case, these accounts of a particular Luciferan doctrine are simply very belated additions to the traditional tales about a Devil-worshipping sect, which can be traced back some four centuries earlier; and it is the tales themselves that present the problem. Is it possible that a Devil-worshipping sect really did develop out of the Dualist religion?