The Cult Dossier · No. 019 · Occult / Esoteric / Satanic
Brethren of the Free Spirit
—
c.1200 – 15th c. · Rhineland, Low Countries, Bohemia, northern Italy
II. MEDIEVAL — HERESY, DUALISM AND THE MILLENNIUM
Fully religious — antinomian mystical heresy
Who led it
Diffuse; no organisation. Associated names: MARGUERITE PORETE, burned in Paris 1310 for The Mirror of Simple Souls; the Bohemian preacher NICHOLAS OF BASEL; the Homines Intelligentiae of Brussels under Giles Cantor.
What it worshipped and taught
The soul can become so united with God in this life that it becomes God, incapable of sin, and therefore no longer bound by any moral law or church authority. Hostile sources allege that this licensed theft and sexual freedom; scholars (notably Robert Lerner, 1972) argue the organised heresy was largely an inquisitorial construction projected onto scattered mystics.
Who was in it
Marguerite Porete; Meister Eckhart, posthumously condemned in 1329 partly by association; Pope Clement V; the Council of Vienne.
How it ended, or where it stands
Suppressed by Inquisition; probably never existed as a single organised body.
The dead
Unknown; individual executions
Of note
An important cautionary case: much of what is confidently described as a medieval cult exists only in the imagination of the men who wrote the trial records.
Its timeline
- 1 JUNE 1310 Marguerite Porete burned at the PLACE DE GRÈVE in Paris, COPIES OF HER BOOK BURNED ALONGSIDE HER. She had refused to withdraw The Mirror of Simple Souls from circulation, refused to recant, and refused to answer her inquisitors at all through a lengthy trial. THE PRECISE DISTINCTION, WHICH THIS FILE PREVIOUSLY OVERSTATED: she was THE FIRST PERSON BURNED AS A RELAPSED HERETIC BY THE PARIS INQUISITION — not, as an earlier version said, the first execution for mystical heresy in France.
- 1310–1946 THE BOOK OUTLIVED THE VERDICT. The Mirror of Simple Souls kept circulating after her death WITHOUT HER NAME ON IT, was copied and translated, and was read for centuries as a respected work of Christian mysticism. IT WAS NOT REATTACHED TO ITS AUTHOR UNTIL THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. The church burned the woman and then, not knowing it, preserved her book.
- 1311–1312 Council of Vienne issues the decrees Ad nostrum and Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, defining the Free Spirit heresy in eight articles and effectively inventing it as a category.
- 1411 The Homines Intelligentiae suppressed at Brussels.