The induction of ecstasy by physical means and the substitution of somnambulism for sanctity—these were the invariable tendency of those Cainite sects which perpetuated the Black Magic of India. The Church could do no less than condemn them energetically, and it did not swerve from its mission; it is only regrettable that the good grain of science often suffered when the spade was driven and the flame kindled in fields overgrown by tares.
Enemies of generation and the family, the false Gnostics sought to insure sterility by increasing debauch; their pretence was to spiritualise matter, but actually they materialised spirit, and this in the most repulsive manner. Their theology abounds in the copulation of Eons and in voluptuous embraces.[140] Like the Brahmans, they worshipped death under the symbol of the lingam; their creation was an infinite onanism and their redemption an eternal abortion.
Looking to escape from the hierarchy by the help of miracle—as if miracle apart from the hierarchy proved anything but disorder or rascality, the Gnostics, from the days of Simon Magus, were great workers of prodigies. Substituting the impure rites of Black Magic for the established worship, they caused blood to appear instead of the Eucharistic wine and substituted cannibal communions for the peaceful and pure supper of the Heavenly Lamb.[141] The arch-heretic Marcos, a disciple of Valentinus, said Mass with two chalices; he poured wine into the smaller and on pronouncing a magical formula the larger vessel was filled with a liquor like blood, which swelled up seething. He was not a priest, and he sought to prove in this manner that God had invested him by a miraculous ordination.[142] He incited all his disciples to perform the same marvel in his presence. It was women more especially whose success was parallel to his own, but when they passed subsequently into convulsions and ravishment, Marcos breathed upon them, communicating his own mania, so that they covenanted to forget for his sake, and for that of religion, not only all prudence but all decency.
Such intervention of woman in the priesthood was always the dream of false Gnostics, for in so equalising the sexes they introduced anarchy into the family and raised a stumbling-block in the path of society. Maternity is the true priesthood of women; modesty is the ritual of the fireside and the religion thereto belonging. This the Gnostics failed to understand, or they understood it too well rather, and in misguiding the sacred instincts of the mother they cast down the barrier which stood between them and complete liberty for their desires.[143]
The sorry candour of lewdness was not, however, a gift possessed by all. On the contrary, the Montanists, among other Gnostics, exaggerated morality in order to make it impracticable. Montanus himself, whose acrid doctrines inveigled the paradoxical and extremist genius of Tertullian, was given over, with Priscilla and Maximilla, his prophetesses, or—as we should now say—his somnambulists, to all the boundless licentiousness of frenzy and ecstasy. The natural penalty of such excesses was not wanting to their authors; they ended in raving madness and suicide.
The doctrine of the Marcosians was a profound and materialised Kabalah; they dreamed that God had created everything by means of the letters of the alphabet; that these letters were as so many divine emanations, having the power of generating beings; that words were all-powerful and worked wonders virtually, as also in literal reality.[144] All this is true in a certain sense, but not in that of the Marcosian heresy. The heretics in question supplemented actualities by hallucinations and believed that they went invisible because they were transported mentally where they wished in the somnambulistic state. In the case of false mystics, life and dream are frequently so confused together that the predominant dream-state invades and submerges reality: it is then uttermost rule of folly. The natural function of imagination is to evoke images and forms, but in a condition of abnormal exaltation it can also exteriorise forms, as proved by the phenomena of monstrous pregnancies and a host of analogous facts which official science would do more wisely to study rather than deny stubbornly. Of such are the disorderly creations which religion brands justly under the name of diabolical miracles and of such were those of Simon, the Menandrians and Marcos.
In our own days a false Gnostic named Vintras, at present a refugee in London, causes blood to appear in empty chalices and on sacrilegious hosts. The unhappy being then passes into ecstasies, after the manner of Marcos, prophesies the downfall of the hierarchy and the coming triumph of a pretended priesthood, given up to unrestricted intercourse and unbridled love.[145]
After the protean pantheism of the Gnostics came the dualism of Marcos, formulating as religious dogma the false initiation prevalent among the pseudo-Magi of Persia. The personification of evil produced a God in competition with God Himself, a King of darkness as well as a King of Light, and there is referable to this period that pernicious doctrine of the ubiquity and sovereignty of Satan against which we register our most energetic protest. We make no pretence in this place of denying or affirming the tradition concerning the fall of angels, deferring herein, as in all that concerns faith, to the supreme and infallible decisions of the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church. But assuming that the fallen angels had a leader prior to that apostasy, the event in question could not do otherwise than precipitate them into total anarchy, tempered only by the inflexible justice of God. Separated from that Divinity which is the source of all power, and more guilty by far than the others, the prince of angels in rebellion could be nothing but the last and most impotent of all outcasts.
But if there be a force in Nature which attracts those who forget God towards sin and death, such force is no other than the Astral Light, and we do not decline to recognise it as an instrument in subservience to fallen spirits. We shall recur to this subject, prepared with a complete explanation, so that it may be intelligible in all its bearings and all its orthodoxy.[146] The revelation of a great secret of occultism thus effected will make evident the danger of evocations, all curious experiences, abuses of magnetism, table-turning and whatever connects with wonders and hallucinations.
Arius had prepared the way for Manicheanism by his hybrid creation of a Son of God distinct from God Himself. It was equivalent to the hypothesis of dualism in Deity, inequality in the Absolute, inferiority in Supreme Power, the possibility of conflict between the Father and the Son, and even its necessity. These considerations, and the disparity between the terms of the divine syllogism, make inevitable the rejection of the notion. Is there any question whether the Divine Word can be good or evil—can be either God or the devil? But this was the great dilemma involved by the addition of a diphthong to the Greek word [Greek: omousios], by which it was changed to [Greek: omoiousios]. In declaring the Son consubstantial with the Father, the Council of Nicæa saved the world, though the truth can be realised only by those who know that principles in reality constitute the equilibrium of the universe.