Taborites and the Bohemian Adamites

Taborite generals JAN ŽIŽKA and PROKOP THE GREAT. The Adamite splinter was led by a man called MOSES or ADAM, whose followers named him Adam-Moses and treated him as God's son on earth.

Taborites: the imminent return of Christ, expected in February 1420, and the destruction of all sinners by the elect — a militarised apocalypse. THE ADAMITE SPLINTER — AND EVERY DESCRIPTION OF IT COMES FROM ITS ENEMIES. What the hostile chronicler LAURENCE OF BŘEZOVÁ reports is that they held themselves returned to the state of Eden, threw off their clothes on the grounds that clothing was adopted only because of the sin of the first parents, abolished marriage in favour of free coupling — a woman who conceived being said to have conceived of the Holy Spirit — and declared the killing of the unregenerate a sacred duty.

THIS FILE PREVIOUSLY PRINTED ALL OF THAT AS PLAIN FACT. IT SHOULD NOT HAVE. Scholars have argued for centuries over whether the Adamites really practised ritual nudism and free love, OR WHETHER THE CHARGES WERE SLANDER designed to discredit the Pikarti — whose actual offence was DOCTRINAL: they DENIED THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE SACRAMENT OF THE ALTAR and rejected the priest's prerogative. THE DECISIVE POINT IS WHAT THE BEST-PLACED CONTEMPORARIES DID NOT SAY. The leading Hussite thinkers JAKOUBEK OF STŘÍBRO and especially the well-informed PETR CHELČICKÝ DESCRIBE NO RITUAL NUDISM AND NO SEXUAL EXTRAVAGANCE — they report free sexual relations together with the blasphemy against the sacrament. The most lurid charge is missing from the two men in the best position to know it. Scholarship describes the accusations against their moral character as suspicious in the highest degree.

Jan Hus, burned 6 July 1415, whose execution triggered everything; Jan Želivský; Jan Žižka; Prokop the Great; Martin Húska (Loquis), executed 1421; the Adamite leader Adam-Moses.

Adamites exterminated by fellow Hussites; Taborites destroyed at Lipany.

Hundreds killed in Adamite raids; 40–50 Adamites burned; thousands at Lipany

THE TABORITE HALF OF THIS ENTRY IS SOLID; THE ADAMITE HALF IS THE PROBLEM. Read as written by the chroniclers, it is the first clear early-modern instance of the full pattern — failed apocalyptic date, sexual reorganisation around the leader, violence against outsiders, annihilation. BUT THE ADAMITE ACCOUNT MAY BE LARGELY POLEMICAL, and this entry is a SIXTH INSTANCE of the mechanism set out in Appendix D: a group destroyed, its own voice gone, and the surviving description written by the men who burned it. NOTE THE PARTICULAR SHAPE OF IT HERE. The prosecutable heresy was sacramental — denying the real presence — which is dry and hard to rouse anyone against. THE SEXUAL AND NUDIST CHARGES ARE WHAT MADE IT MOB-READY. That is the 'stranger and filthier' half of the Appendix D pattern caught in the act, with the two best-informed contemporaries declining to repeat it. ONE SURVIVOR WAS SPARED FROM THE BURNING TO DESCRIBE THE SECT; a description obtained that way is not testimony in any useful sense.