The Mystery of the Alumbrados
Once again the word 'chew' has been substituted to circumvent Google censorship and shadow banning of this wesbite.
An interesting historical character to emerge from the gloom of the
Jesuits is Miguel de Molinos. As a youth he was educated by the Jesuits and
ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1652, joined the brotherhood of the School of
Christ. He was sent to Rome where he became very influential and soon developed
a powerful network of patrons including the exiled Queen of Sweden.
While in Rome he developed the ‘philosophy’ or perhaps more accurately,
the heresy for which he has become recorded in history: ‘Quietism’, the details
of which he thoroughly outlined in his book ‘The Spiritual Guide which
Disentangles the Soul’.
The key point of the book is Miguel’s advocacy for what he terms
‘contemplation’ over the ‘meditation’ of the Jesuits. Meditation in his terms
refers to the Jesuit techniques of visualising key scenes from the Bible,
specifically the Passion of Christ and also visualising hell itself as we have
just read in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignacio Loyola. The ostensible purpose
of Molino’s Spiritual Guide was to teach man a method of drawing closer and
knowing God by curtailing the activity of the mind and the personal will.
After a hitherto successful career in the church and Molinos’ doctrine
of Quietism having become broadly accepted and not then considered heretical, something
changed. Jesuits felt they needed to rebut the specific attacks made in the
book about their methods of ‘meditation’ and there was a lively back and forth
between Quietists and Jesuits as to which method was the best, whether the
‘meditation’ (which is more like a form of contemplation) of the Jesuits or
‘contemplation’ (which is really a form of meditation) of the Quietists. The
Inquisition took an interest and investigating in 1681 declared the Spiritual
Guide of Miguel de Molinos orthodox and compatible with the teachings of the
Church. However, in 1685 the tide turned against him and he was arrested under
instruction from French authorities and while many in Rome were sympathetic to
Molinos in 1687 he confessed his errors to the Inquisition and died after
spending nine years in prison. At his trial according to Britannica.com:
“Molinos defended sexual aberrations committed
by himself and his followers as sinless, purifying acts caused by the Devil. He
claimed they were passively allowed in order to deepen a quiet repose in God.”
Pope Innocent XI wrote of Molinos:
“….these doctrines were leading the faithful from true religion and from
the purity of Christian piety into terrible errors and every indecency.”
The Catholic Herald online summarises thus:
“In that same year, however, he
published his Spiritual Guide, which purported to lead the reader through the
various stages of the spiritual life to perfection in this world, whereby one
would remain perfectly passive before God as the highest state. Once there, a
person need not fear sins committed under the temptations of the Devil, but
should remain at peace, even after committing the vilest acts.”
This ‘doctrine’ if we can call it that,
ought to recall what we have seen of the Kabbalah and the idea of ‘holy sin’ or
sin even serving a useful purpose in making a person more righteous before God.
We even find this very dangerous idea had
crept into the theology of Pope Gregory I to whom Molinos
refers:
“That we may not make Poison of Physick, and Vices of
Vertues, by becoming vain by ‘em; God would have us make Vertues of Vices,
healing us by that very thing which would hurt us: So says St. Gregory.”
And Pope Gregory reaches this conclusion by some highly
Kabbalistic logic worthy of Simon Magus himself:
“I'd like to look inside the fortified bosom of grace
with how much God keeps us by the favor of mercy. Behold, he who exalts
himself about virtue returns through vice to humility. But he who is
extolled for his virtues, is wounded, not by the sword, but, so to speak, by
medicine. For what is virtue but medicine? and what is vice but
wound? Because, therefore, we treat the wound as a medicine, he makes the
medicine of the wound, so that we who are smitten by virtue may be cured by
vice.”
It is
all rather unfortunate because most of the early elements of the Spiritual
Guide and the core of Quietism is basically a form of Zen meditation which is
an extremely useful spiritual and psychological tool which can be used to
experience other states of being once the mental chatter of the brain has been
quietened, however this is not an idea original to Molinos and it is likely he
learned about it in his studies and decided to adopt it as a plausible cover
for his true aims which may have been deliberate subversion or at least, an
excessive enjoyment of physical pleasures. The Catholic Herald reports how:
“Cardinal
Benedetto Odescalchi and the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden became admirers
(although the Queen regarded Fr de Molinos’s huge appetite for food with
sceptical amusement).”
The
true origins of Molino’s ‘Quietism’, or at least those to emerge in the West,
are to be found in the works of a late 5th Century Greek philosopher
using the pseudonym of a 1st Century Greek convert to Christianity
by Saint Paul known as ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’. Pseudo-Dionysus
the Areopagite as
he is known was a philosopher
who apparently was both a Christian and conversely, a Neo-Platonist. He
expounded proto-Kabbalistic ideas which we can derive from the following from Corrigan
& Harrington (2014):
“According to pseudo-Dionysius, God is better
characterized and approached by negations than by affirmations.
All names and theological representations must be negated. According to
pseudo-Dionysius, when all names are negated, ‘divine silence, darkness, and
unknowing’ will follow.”
A PHD thesis by R. A. Agnew for the University of
Edinburgh comments on Pseudo-Dionysus linking his philosophy to the
‘Illuminati’:
“He, further, explains that Quietude and Silence are
necessary, since ‘only like can know like’; and ‘God is peace’ and ‘Repose’, ‘the
One all perfect source ...
of the Peace of all’; and He is Silence ‘the angels are, as it were, the
heralds of the Divine Silence’.
In silence then ‘let the intelligent soul transcend
intelligence and it forgets itself ... Closed, ... mute and silent ... and
sheltered, not only from exterior but also from interior impulses; he is made
God.’ This is deification, the principle of Eckhart, the doctrine of the Brethren
of the Free Spirit, and the teaching of the Illuminati.”
Agnew
in his PHD paper writes, citing Pseudo-Dionysius:
“We
find in Dionysius the doctrine of the three ways: the Purgative; the
Illuminative; and the Unitive. Through him this division has become the
standard for all later exponents of mysticism. To explain it, he writes Moses
was enjoined first to purify himself, then he saw the light from the smoking
mountain, and then the face of God. It is after the soul has been freed from
the world of sense that it enters the mysterious obscurity of holy ignorance
... to be lost in Him, who can neither be seen nor felt."
Molinos
writes, showing the debt he owes as does the mediaeval hermetic tradition which
had infiltrated the church, to the mysterious Greek philosopher in his
quasi-alchemistic references to a three-step path (one might say degrees) of
‘cleansing’ or ‘purgation’, ‘Illumination’ and finally ‘unity’.
“Because
if thou wilt serve God, and arrive at the sublime Region of Internal Peace;
thou must pass through that rugged Path of Temptation; put on that heavy Armor;
fight in that fierce and cruel War, and in that burning Furnace, polish, purge,
renew, and purifie thy self.
For
which reason St. Ignatius Loyola said very well in his Exercises, that in the
cleansing way, Corporal Penances were necessary, which in the illuminating way
ought to be moderated, and much more in the unitive.”
All
of this was of course probably very novel for the church of 17th Century
Europe: the introduction of what we might consider techniques of transcendental
meditation, and it is a pity that Molinos tarnished these valuable techniques (as
indeed to this day many Christians consider meditation of this kind to be
dangerous and a way for permitting ‘demonic’ influences). It could be that
Molinos having found the genuine peace of meditation, misinterpreted the reward
of having a still mind and extrapolated that it is necessary to surrender the
will as well, that is to abandon any objective frame of morality or reference
and surrender the mind. Either that or like so many people who achieve
notoriety, success and a throng of admirers, he wasn’t devoted enough to resist
the Earthy temptations such a position can present:
“You
must know, that this Annihilation to make it perfect in the Soul, must be in a
man’s own Judgment, in his Will, in his Works, Inclinations, Desires, Thoughts,
and in it Self: so that the Soul must find it self dead to its Will, Desire,
Endeavour, Understanding and Thought; willing, as if it did not will; desiring,
as if it did not desire; understanding, as if it did not understand; thinking,
as if it did not think, without inclining to any thing, embracing equally
Contempts and Honours, Benefits and Corrections. O what a happy Soul is that
which is thus dead and annihilated! It lives no longer in it self, because God
lives in it: And now it may most truly be said of it, that it is a renewed
Phenix; because ‘tis changed, spiritualized, transformed and deified.”
We
have a further ‘alchemistic’ reference, this time to the ‘Phenix’ which informs
me, as well as references to a spiritual guide, that Molinos was actually a
disciple or novice of some mentor figure who was guiding him through some
ongoing transformative, alchemical process. A process which has existed since
the earliest records of history and shrouded in mystery even until the present
day where this process has now taken on almost industrial proportions in terms
of its influence on many members of the public institutions, media and
political realm, but is still a complete mystery to the vast majority.
Unfortunately, there is perhaps something in the
character of Miguel de Molinos which allowed itself to justify his ceding
repeatedly to temptation by blaming the devil and refusing to take personal
responsibility. But there is much in his ‘Guide’ which suggests a background in
Kabbalah as there are too many obvious Kabbalistic elements which show
themselves partially submerged in his doctrine. We can also see how in recent
times Molinos has been upheld as some kind of prophet by certain hermetic
movements and Aleister Crowley wrote extensively in praise of him:
“In more remote times, the constituent originating
assemblies of the O.T.O. included such men as … Molinos” Liber LII Manifesto of
the O.T.O.
Crowley considered Miguel de Molinos to be one of his
‘Gnostic Saints’ as detailed in Liber XV and refers to the Spiritual Guide in
the following terms:
“That you may gain some insight into the nature of the
Great Work which lies beyond these elementary trifles, however, we should
mention that an intelligent person may gather more than a hint of its nature
from the following books, which are to be taken as serious and learned
contributions to the study of Nature, though not necessarily to be implicitly
relied upon.”
Indeed, Crowley’s reference to ‘crossing the abyss’ which
was a personal spiritual boast for him may have been inspired by the writing of
Molinos in his reference to mediation:
“By not speaking, not desiring, and not thinking, one
arrives at the true and perfect Mystical Silence, wherein God speaks with the
Soul, communicates himself to it, and in the Abyss of its own Depth, teaches it
the most perfect and exalted Wisdom.”
Molinos refers to the ability to better deal with anxiety
and worry, which might be termed ‘invisible enemies’:
“The strong Castle, that will make thee triumph over all
thine enemies, visible and invisible, and over all their snares and
tribulations, is within thine own Soul, because in it resides the Divine Aid
and Sovereign Succour. Retreat within it and all will be quiet, secure,
peaceable and calm. When thou seest thy self more sharply assaulted, retreat
into that region of Peace, where thou’lt find the Fortress. When thou are more
faint-hearted, betake thy self to this refuge of Prayer, the only Armor for
overcoming the enemy, and mitigating tribulation: thou ought not to be at a
distance from it in a Storm, to the end thou mayest, as another Noah,
experience tranquillity, security.”
It would seem to me that Molinos despite apparently fully
engaging in a kind of pure Zen meditation and breaking through the threshold of
darkness to the realm of mental bliss beyond, something seemed to have gone
wrong and at a certain point reading through the Spiritual Guide we find a very
different tone emerge, one which I myself cannot reconcile with my experience
of such meditation and can only assume that something went wrong somewhere with
Molinos, that either he was not able to master his will and became a prey to
some negative force which was able to take control of his mind. We notice a
corner being turned and suddenly, something appears to have gone wrong
somewhere with Molinos’ meditation because he starts to speak of pain and adverse
physiological effects.
“With new efforts thoul’t exercise thy self, but in
another manner than hitherto, giving thy consent to receive the secret and
divine operations, and to be polished, and purified by this Lord, which is the
only means whereby thou will become clean and purged from thine ignorance and
dissolutions. Know, however, that thou art to be plunged in a bitter sea of
sorrows, and of internal and external pains, which torment will pierce into the
most inward part of thy Soul and Body.”
It is possible that Molinos was unduly influenced by the
Alumbrado tradition of ‘ecstatic’ rites and believed that this was the way to
experience the divine and he refers in his book to a certain “Illuminated
Mother of Cantal” which is not traditional clerical terminology but more of the
mystical and occult. Perhaps he was part of this tradition or at least sought
out this experience, much to his cost I would say since whatever it was which
possessed him and gave him ‘pains’ and ‘torment’ also seemed to influence his
life and lead him to moral dissolution which was ultimately his undoing:
“Thou
wilt think verily, that thou art possessed by an evil Spirit; because the signs
of this interior exercise, and horrible tribulation, seem as bad as the
invasions of infernal Furies and Devils. Then take care to believe thy Guide
firmly, for thy true Happiness consists in thy obedience.”
“The
invisible enemies will pursue thee with scruples, lascivious suggestions, and
unclean thoughts, with incentives to impatience, pride, rage, cursing and
blaspheming the Name of God, his Sacraments, and holy Mysteries. Thou’lt find a
great lukewarmness, loathing, and wearisomness for the things of God; and
obscurity and darkness in thy understanding; a faintness, Confusion and narrowness
of heart; such a coldness and feebleness of the will to resist, that a straw
will appear to thee a beam. Thy desertion will be so great, that thou’lt think
there is no more a God for thee, and that thou are rendered incapable of
entertaining a good desire: so that thou’lt continue shut up betwixt two walls,
in constant streights and anguish, without any hopes of ever getting out of so
dreadful an oppression.”
And
the tenor of the book changes and now Molinos speaks of acquiring a spiritual
guide, one who will apparently think on your behalf and in whose judgment, one
should trust even above one’s own:
“Thou
shalt find thy self encompassed with troublesome scruples, griefs, anguish,
distress, martyrdoms, distrusts, forsakings of the Creatures, and troubles so
bitter, that thy afflictions shall seem past comfort, and thy torments
unconquerable. O blessed Soul! how happy wilt thou be, if thou dost but believe
thy Guide, and subject thy self to to him and obey him? Then wilt thou walk
safe by the secret and interiour way of the dark night, altho thou may’st seem
to thy self to live in Errour, and that thou art worse then ever; that thou
seest nothing in thy Soul, but abomination and signs of condemnation.”
And
Molinos now, with a dim awareness of his true condition, namely that of being
in the thrall of some kind of demonic control, yet this is still within his
‘system’ of Quietism and is a necessary part of some mystical process. I
suspect something in his earlier Jesuit training and the endless contemplation
of hell and his sins had evoked some spirit of the mind or of some other realm
which perhaps has been fully loosened with the quietening of the controlling
faculty of the mind and the will:
“Here
thou wilt see thy self forlorn and subject to Passions of impatience, anger,
rage, swearing, and disordered appetites, seeming to thy self the most
miserable Creature, the greatest Sinner in the World, the most abhorred of God,
deprived and stript of all Vertue, with a pain like that of Hell, seeing thy
self afflicted and desolate, to think that thou hast altogether lost God; this
will be thy cruel cutting and most bitter torment.”
We
also find a comment which may recall to experiences of Swedenborg and his being
assaulted by the voices of demonic spirits:
“…because
it would naturally be impossible, considering the force and violence wherewith
sometimes they attack, to resist one quarter of an hour.”
We
find a similar account in the story of the Catholic Saint Teressa whom Molinos
references and praises and calls ‘the great Doctoress, and Mystical Mistress.’
It also seems that she like Molinos was continually affected by ‘troublesome
thoughts’:
“There
is a necessity of suffering the trouble of a Troop of Thoughts, importune
Imaginations, and the impetuosities of natural Notions, not only, of the Soul
through the dryness and disunion it hath, but of the Body also, occasioned by
the want of submission to the Spirit, which it ought to have.”
She
also wrote, or rather her confessor who recorded her words wrote:
“Devotion
of Ecstasy, is where the consciousness of being in the body disappears. Sensory
faculties cease to operate. Memory and imagination also become absorbed in God,
as though intoxicated. Body and spirit dwell in the throes of exquisite pain,
alternating between a fearful fiery glow, in complete unconscious helplessness,
and periods of apparent strangulation.”
It
would be a good idea at this point to examine this Catholic saint, one of the
few women to have been sanctified and furthermore declared a ‘Doctor of the
faith’ by the Catholic church. Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in
Avila Spain in 1515. Her paternal grandfather was a Marrano, a Chew forced to
convert to Christianity under pain of expulsion. In a fine example of the
illusory nature of many of the Chews’ conversions to Christianity, her
grandfather apparently returned to the Chewish faith after ‘conversion’ and was
investigated by the Inquisition but later managed to reintegrate himself into
Christian life. Teresa’s father was a wool merchant and one of the richest men
in Avila and was knighted.
At 20
she entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation which had been built
on top of land which had been used as a Chewish burial ground. It was here that
she started to experience ‘spiritual ecstasy’ combined with debilitating
physical illness brought on by self-imposed physical mortification including
excessive fasting which was to lead to continual ill-health throughout her
life. Her fondness for self-flagellation was such that when she received Papal
sanction for her principles; she created a new constitution for her convent
which involved stricter rules and three lots of ceremonial flagellation every
week.
During
her illnesses she believed she had reached a ‘perfect union with God’ although
many at the time suggested these experiences could be the result of diabolical
rather than divine influence. She became convinced that Jesus Christ himself
had physically presented himself to her although he was invisible to others and
one vision in particular caused her further pain when an invisible seraph or
angel repeatedly stabbed her in the heart with a golden lance:
“I
saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a
little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and
to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out
also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so
great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this
excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it …”
Naturally
this has nothing to do with God or anything divine and quite rightly the
suspicions of some of her friends at the time seem well founded that there was
a diabolical origin to these visions and torments. It was even reported that
she experienced levitation and sometimes the other sisters at the convent had
to physically hold her down.
Another
female mystic later made ‘Doctor of the Catholic church’ was Saint Catherine of
Siena. She was an early Christian mystic who emerged long before the Alumbrados
and died a 100 years before the birth of proto-Alumbrado Maria de Santo
Domingo. From her we can also find a development of the work of Pseudo-Dionysius
and she may also have influenced the work of Molinos; in a letter to leader of
the Dominican order, Raymond de Capua, who acted as her mentor and confessor,
she wrote:
"Build
a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee."
However,
this ‘cell’ that Catherine created was a theatre of nonsense and delusions
where her mother was turned into the Virgin Mary, her father was Christ and her
brothers became the apostles.
Like
Saint Teresa she practised self-mortification and fasted to an extreme degree.
Her confessor ordered her to eat properly but in the final year of her life she
could no longer even eat or swallow water; whether this was psychosomatic and a
kind of self-induced mania is unknown but is probably likely. Shortly before
her death she suffered a stroke which paralysed her from the waist down and she
died at the pitiably young age of 33 years old. Here we have to wonder why a
woman could consider it useful to fast and abstain from food and even water to
the point at which she eventually becomes crippled and incapable of even
walking, then dies. There can be nothing inspired from God in any of this and I
find the cases of these women, (some of whom have been canonised and are
recognised as saints of the Catholic church) and those women who were
persecuted and imprisoned as Alumbrados to be one and the same and to be
inspired by a diabolical doctrine which is antagonistic to humanity and the
message and ministry of Jesus Christ.
Catherine
of Sienna was said to give away the clothing and food from her family without
asking their permission and she pointedly refused to eat with her family
claiming she preferred to eat in heaven with her ‘real family’. In her own
writings she also claimed that she was married to Jesus Christ as her mystic
husband and that she had received a ring made of the 8 day old boy Christ’s
foreskin, which of course, was invisible to other people, like Saint Teresa
whose physical Christ companion was also invisible to other people.
What
we are dealing with here are, at best, psychotic delusions or at worst
some
kind of genuine contact between a human who has chosen to deprive
himself of
psychic protection in order to make contact with what he or she thinks
is God,
but something which perhaps does not have their best wishes at heart.
Like
those first seen at the beginning of this book with Barbara O’Brien but
here we
can trace them to a specific Alumbrado root which in turn has its root
in the Chewish community and is likely an externalisation of the
community practising
the doctrines of the Kabbalah. It can be no coincidence that the
Kabbalah in
its final form also emerged from mediaeval Spain.
The
result of this pathway seems to hint at a loss of personal volition but more
pertinently, as Molinos records in a letter from “an illuminated Mother of
Cantal wrote to a Sister, and great Servant of God” who is following some kind
of Illuminati doctrine, provides some kind of demonic bridgehead which I would
claim is the purpose of the Jesuit movement and these mystical movements
arising from mediaeval Spain:
“To
this purpose I remember, that a few days since, God communicated to me an
Illumination, which made such an impression upon me, as if I had clearly seen
him; and this it is, That I should never look upon my self, but walk with eyes
shut, leaning on my Beloved, without striving to see nor know the way, by which
he guides me, neither fix my thoughts on any thing, nor yet beg Favours of him,
but as undone in my self, rest wholly and sincerely on him. Hitherto that
Illuminated and Mystical Mistress, whose Words do Credit Authorize our
Doctrine.”
But
what is that ‘doctrine’? What has been specifically recorded about the
Alumbrado’s by history? The inquisition found the Alumbrados had some strange
ideas which might conflict with what we today might imagine as a group of
free-thinkers and pleasure seekers, but there seems to be something stranger
and more complex at work. A strange kind of psychological journey which I hope
this volume has at least partially tried to illuminate. It seems, at least from
reports, that the sexual excesses of the Alumbrados and people like Miguel
Molinos and the Kabbalists in general, could be, if Miguel is to be believed, a
result of being wholly under the control of demonic impulsions. Naturally it
might seem like a bit of an easy cop-out to say ‘the devil told me to do it’ as
a way to evade responsibility, but the fact that we see the same trends occur
again and again: the lack of conscious physical control of the body resulting
in various kinds of hysteria and even attempts at levitation indicate that
there is something more than a person’s own will.
If
one has a difficult time accepting the reality of discarnate spirits, one could
say that subconscious psychological forces may have been unleashed as a result
of the rigours of the various self-mortifications and repeated morbid Jesuit
style visualisations of the horrors and terrors of hell, and that it is this
which may lead to the wanton licentious excesses which the church authorities
reported in connection with Alumbrado doctrines, doctrines which Molinos more
or less explicitly alluded to being a follower of.
The
book The Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1614: An Anthology of Sources, compiled and
translated by Lu Ann Homza is an invaluable resource for first-hand recorded
documentation about the Alumbrados. Naturally the information is that which was
recorded by the church authorities and the Inquisition during the court
processes against those Alumbrados suspected of heresy but there are many
witness statements which are brought to bear and feature the words of the
Alumbrados themselves.
All
in all it paints a strange picture of those involved in the Alumbrados, with
many apparent contradictions in the words of the defendants themselves and
paints a tragic picture of people who, for whatever reason, whether an
intention to subvert Spanish society and the church or from a genuine
experiment in free-thinking, regardless the end result is the same: a picture
of confused, disordered thinking, with some genuine wisdom which appears in
sharp relief to the blurry mental background with a certain sense of emotional
estrangement and likely mental impairment.
In
1525 the Inquisition published an edict on the numerated heresies of the
Alumbrados which had been elicited from Alumbrado members themselves with the
promise that “no punishment, public penance, or confiscation of goods would be
imposed upon them”. The most common response from the church authorities to
each proposition or heresy was a familiar refrain: “This proposition is
erroneous, false, heretical ….” and sometimes with more apt descriptions, in the
instance of proposition 46 “That the end of the world had to occur in twelve
years.” The church authorities were succinct: “This proposition is crazy.”
And
indeed, a lot of them are; it really is a poor reflection on your particular
brand of mysticism if you manage to make the Catholic Church look sensible.
Some
of the propositions are strange and hint at something almost anti-human; a list
of directions one would follow in order not to take pleasure from life or
possibly, propositions which had been arrived at as a result of a certain
psychological transformation which may indicate some kind of schizoid illness.
How else can one explain such items as proposition 31:
“That
he held it as a mortal sin if he read some book to console his soul.”
Or
proposition 36: “That a man sinned mortally every time he loved a son,
daughter, or other person, and did not love that person through God.”
Or
proposition 40: “Because a girl crossed the street, he said she had
sinned, because in that action she had fulfilled her will.”
Proposition
number 1 is fairly unambiguous and quite a statement of intent: “There is no Hell, and if they say there is,
it is to frighten us, just as they tell children, “Watch out for the bogeyman.”
It is
clear however that anyone believing such a thing in all its bald and unnuanced
simplicity would feel no compulsion to moderate their behaviour and attempt to
lead a good life nor any compunction about leading a bad one.
Such
a statement really calls into question the whole of creation itself to some
extent and that, if one is to believe there is a spiritual component to life
and that another state of higher reality exists, then one is hardly likely to
want to spend that in the company of the spirits of evil rogues looking to
continue committing atrocities against their fellow spirits for all eternity.
Clearly there must be some kind of spiritual filtering mechanism and a kind of
like-with-like which is one of the most natural and readily comprehendible
principles of reality, and such a mechanism would necessarily relegate those
with irredeemably malicious or evil inclinations to be with their own kind
where they can furnish and fashion their own mutually unpleasant spiritual
reality.
Proposition
6 reported that one of the Alumbrados:
“…was
sorry he had not sinned more; and knowing what God’s mercy was, he wished he
had sinned more in order to enjoy that mercy more. Because the greater the
sinner, the more God loves him.”
This
Kabbalistic thinking should be very familiar to us by now after reading through
this volume and indicated perhaps, the element of Kabbalistic Chewish ‘Oral
Tradition’ working into Spanish society through the current of those who had
only superficially converted to Christianity.
The
picture which emerges of the Alumbrados is that they believed themselves
infallible, since according to them: “God could not make a person more perfect
or more humble than he already was,” and also unrepentant of any wrong doings
since “They call those people who lament their sins ‘penance-addicts,’ ‘proprietors
of themselves,’ and ‘weepers.’
They
also believed that sex was a kind of holy sacrament: “married people were more
united to God while making love than if they had been praying.” And temptation
should be welcomed:
“They
did not have to renounce temptations and evil thoughts, but rather should
embrace them and take them as a burden, and walk onward with this cross.”
This
particular Alumbrado trap is the snare which caught Miguel Molinos and cemented
his reputation as a heretic and caused him to be sentenced to prison where he
died. It is likely that without the stain of personal immorality which cast the
whole of his life’s work into disrepute, his Spiritual Exercises and the
benefits of the kind of transcendental meditation could well have become part
of the liturgy of the Catholic Church and have developed into a useful way to
contact the divine principle for, in the words of Jesus: “…nor will they say,
‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”
But
pure nonsense cannot survive without the oxygen of truth and like all attempts
at subversion or deceptive stratagems, it is necessary to accompany the lies
with a bodyguard of truth and so this is why within the doctrines of the
Alumbrados we find some very reasonable and evident truths such as Maria de
Cazalla saying of the Catholic Church:
“I
believe that the Child Jesus is lost in the sophisms and arguments that you
pronounce.”
Or of
her “considering papal bulls, indulgences, and pardons to be a joke, and
believing they benefited no one and achieved nothing, said, ‘Look,
I’ve bought Christianity and am carrying it around, for one is not a
Christian unless you have these bulls; I’d rather throw the money into
something else.’”
She
was quite right of course, but even now we as a modern reader with a delicate
taste for nuance might detect that the mockery goes a little too far and we can
perhaps detect a veiled disdain not only for the Church but for Christianity
itself. But there is something more, some of Maria de Cazalla’s statements
betray something more than scepticism or irreverence:
“María
de Cazalla and others believed that there was no Mary Magdalene, nor a St. Anne
who married three times, nor were there three Marys; they thought the
whole thing was a joke. When she was told that the Church held such matters as
true, she replied that it was a joke, and some stupid people had so ordered
it….”
They
seem to indicate a claim to some other information or knowledge since it
is
unlikely that most church goers of the time would question such things,
but
what if someone were part of a tradition which had its own information
about
such things, quite outside of the Catholic Church. Again, the connection
to the Chewish community with its own extensive written historical
records and oral
traditions would fit this bill perfectly.
But
if the accounts of Maria de Cazalla can’t help but reveal a parallel knowledge-stream
they also show again a certain inhumanity, one would also say, sociopathic or
even borderline psychotic aspect of the Alumbrado tradition. What are we to
make of such statements, which even the dreaded Inquisition rightly described
as ‘horrific’:
“She
heard from Bishop Cazalla that María de Cazalla said she conceived her children
without carnal pleasure and did not love them as if they were her own, but
rather as if they were her neighbors’.
And
another similar reported statement from Maria de Cazalla:
“She
reprehended a certain lady who deeply loved her own children, calling that lady
a butcher of the flesh who had a piece of her heart in each child.”
And
after giving birth, instead of feelings of joy or such as might be normal this
report similarly evokes a singular anti-human perspective:
“Likewise,
when asked why people didn’t come to see her after she had given birth,
María de Cazalla said, ‘May God remove that disgrace from me,’ as if she
considered childbirth disgraceful.”
From
this we can create a psychological profile strongly suggestive of Maria de
Cazalla being in the population percentile suffering from a degree of
psychopathy since an inability to feel emotions and even being repelled by them
is a strong marker of such a disorder, also it was reported that “she felt no
carnal pleasure in sex,” a dissociative condition known as sexual anhedonia and
if we factor in this dissociative element we might not be far from the mark if
we consider that Maria de Cazalla may have been a schizophrenic.
It is
possible however that she was not always like this, reports indicate that
Cazalla was somehow ‘changed’ by conversing with other Alumbrados:
“Asked
how she knew that María de Cazalla held the opinions of
the Alumbrados, she said she knew because she saw María de Cazalla
converse in secret with Isabel de la Cruz and Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz. She saw
them confer night and day, and saw her altered in all her habits and
spiritual exercises, so much so that the needleworkers of Orche said María de
Cazalla was crazy.”
