Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [184]
“How revolting, honey and pepper!” Diotallevi said.
“So those are the Massalians, also known as Stratiotics and Phibionites, or Barbelites, who are made up of Nasseans and Phemionites. But for other fathers of the church, the Barbelites were latter-day Gnostics, therefore dualists, who worshiped the Great Mother Barbelo, and their initiates in turn called the Borborites Hylics, or Children of Matter, as distinct from the Psychics, who were already a step up, and the Pneumatics, who were the truly elect, the Rotary Club of the whole business. But maybe the Stratiotics were only the Hylics of the Mithraists.”
“Sounds a bit confused,” Belbo said.
“Naturally. None of these people left records. The only things we know about them come to us from the gossip of their enemies. But no matter. I’m just trying to show you what a mess the Middle East was at the time. And to set the stage for the Paulicians. These are the followers of a certain Paul, joined by some iconoclasts expelled from Albania. From the eighth century on, the Paulicians grow rapidly, the sect becomes a community, the community a force, a political power, and the emperors of Byzantium, beginning to get worried, send the imperial armies against them. The Paulicians extend as far as the confines of the Arab world; they spread toward the Euphrates, and northward as far as the Black Sea. They establish colonies more or less everywhere, and we find them as late as the seventeenth century, when they are converted by the Jesuits, and some communities still exist today in the Balkans or thereabouts. Now, what do the Paulicians believe in? In God, One and Three, except that the Demiurge defiantly created the world, with the unfortunate results visible to all. The Paulicians reject the Old Testament, refuse the sacraments, despise the Cross, and don’t honor the Virgin, because Christ was incarnated directly in heaven and passed through Mary as through a pipe. The Bogo-mils, who are partly derived from them, say that Christ went in one ear of Mary and came out the other, without her even noticing. The Paulicians are also accused of worshiping the sun and the Devil and of mixing children’s blood in their bread and the Eucharistic wine.”
“Like everybody else.”
“Those were the days when, for a heretic, going to Mass was a torment. Might as well become Moslem. Anyway, that’s the sort of people they were. And I’m telling you about them because, when the dualist heretics spread through Italy and Provence, they are called—to indicate that they’re like the Paulicians—Popelicans, Publicans, Populicans, who gallice etiam dicuntur ab aliquis popelicant!”
“So there they are.”
“Yes, finally. The Paulicians continue into the ninth century, driving the Byzantine emperors crazy until Emperor Basil vows that if he gets his hands on their leader, Chrysocheir, who invaded the church of Saint John of God at Ephesus and watered his horse at the holy-water fonts...”
“A familiar nasty habit,” Belbo said.
“...he’ll shoot three arrows into his head. He sends the imperial army after Chrysocheir; they capture him, cut off his head, send it to the emperor, who places it on a table—or a trumeau, on a little porphyry column—and shoots three arrows, wham wham wham, into it, probably an arrow for each eye and the third for the mouth.”
“Nice folks,” Diotallevi said.
“They didn’t do it to be mean,” Belbo said. “It was a question of faith. Go on, Casaubon: our Diotallevi doesn’t understand theological fine points.”
“To conclude: the Crusaders encounter the Paulicians. They come upon them near Antioch in the course of the First Crusade, where the heretics are fighting alongside the Arabs, and they encounter them also at the siege of Constantinople, where the Paulician community of Philippopolis tries to hand the city over to the Bulgarian tsar Yoannitsa to spite the French, as Villehar-douin tells us. Here’s the connection with the Templars