The Nomadic Alternative – Page 215

the "crude in spirit" - THEM - and the "subtle in spirit" - US.

And like all secret societies they veiled their activities with a curtain of mumbo-jumbo, comprehensible only to the initiate - "unbelievable subtle words", wrote a chronicler of the time.

The souls of the "subtle in spirit" spiralled up to God while the body still lived, and enjoyed the radiance of heaven which orthodox theology allowed only after it was dead. In his Pursuit of the Millennium, Professor Norman Cohn has assembled a most com-plete range of contemporary texts to illustrate this process. One adept, Marguerite Porete, said that the soul passed through seven stages before its final release; the early stages consist of penances and mortifications which induce a state of masochistic passivity.

Finally the soul passes through a 'dark cloud' phase before emerging into the light. The path to ecstasy thus squashed all the processes of life into a short span in its attempt to recreate an Edenic - or Infantile - Paradise.

Once the omnipotent soul was 'liquified in eternity', the body could do no wrong. The detached soul had rejoined God up-there, and the two combined as a sort of celestial puppet master to direct the activities of the body down-here. By doing exactly as it pleased, the body merely received and obeyed messages from above. But omni-science breeds omnipotence, and total self-knowledge coincides with the terminal point of reason. Once the Brethren had convinced them-selves of their equality with God, it remained for them to believe they were higher than God. Christ and the Virgin had led active lives on the earth, and on the death of the body had ascended to heaven. The Brethren had renounced the active life as beneath them, had taken to the higher life of contemplation, and had made it to heaven before death. Were they not more perfect? Were they not in themselves co-authors of the universe?

And the omnipotent turned omnivorous. Secure in the knowledge of his soul's residence above, the adept was born again, and in his second incarnation was free of the consequences of Original Sin - free to latch onto anything and anyone he found attractive. The