World Famous Cults and Fanatics by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online

Mulhausen in Germany, formed a church in which members were initiated by having sex with a stranger. Like so many messiahs,
Ludwig said he was Christ, the son of God, and that these things had been revealed to him. The sacrament was another name for sex. Man was bread and woman was wine, and when they made love, this
was Holy Communion. Children born out such communion were holy. And the members of his congregation could not be killed. His sermons ended with the words “Be fruitful and multiply”, and
the congregation made haste to undress and do their best to obey.
    Ludwig taught that sexual desire is the prompting of the Holy Spirit, so that if a man feels desire for any woman, he should regard it as a message from God. If, of course, the woman happened to
be a member of Ludwig’s “Chriesterung” (or Bloodfriends), then it was her duty to help him obey the will of the Lord, even if she was another man’s wife.
    Ludwig told the Bloodfriends to observe great secrecy and to behave like other people. But no doubt some of his congregation were eager to make converts of husbands with attractive wives. Like
the congregation in the medieval story, the Bloodfriends were found out and put on trial, although Ludwig himself escaped. One member of the Council of Twelve Judges admitted that he had celebrated
Holy Communion with sixteen different women. Three Bloodfriends were executed, and the others were re-converted to a more conventional form of Christianity.
    Sabbatai Zevi
    One of the most remarkable of all the “messiahs” was a Turkish Jew named Sabbatai Zevi (pronounced Shabtight Svy), who at one point seemed about to become one of
the most powerful kings in Europe.
    Sabbatai was the son of a wealthy merchant of Smyrna (now Izmir) on the coast of Turkey. Born in 1626, he was always of a deeply religious disposition; he spent hours in prayer, and at the age
of sixteen, decided to observe a permanent fast, which lasted for six years. He permitted himself to be married to a girl whom his parents chose, but the marriage was never consummated, and she
divorced him. The same thing happened to a second wife. He was what would nowadays be called a manic depressive, experiencing periods of immense joy and elation, followed by days of suicidal
gloom.
    In 1648, when Sabbatai was twenty-two a great tragedy occurred across the sea in Poland. The fierce Cossacks of the Ukraine rose against the Polish landlords. The Russians and Poles had
traditionally been enemies – in 1618 the Poles had even tried to put a Pole on the throne of Russia. The Russians and the Poles both wanted the rich Ukraine. A Cossack leader called Bogdan
Khmelnitsky invaded Poland and challenged the Polish army. He also set out to destroy the Jews.
    Poland’s Jews had been servants of the rich landlords whom the Cossacks hated, and they were massacred in vast numbers. All the usual atrocities of massacre were committed – children
hacked to pieces in their mothers’ arms, pregnant women sliced open, old men disembowelled, girls raped before their husbands. One girl who had been forcibly married to a Cossack chose a
cunning method of suicide: she told him that she had magic powers, and could not be harmed by a sword; if he didn’t believe her, he should try running his sword through her. He did as she
asked, and killed her.
    A hundred thousand Jews died in this seventeenth-century holocaust. Thousands of others fled the country, and many went to Turkey, where there were already wealthy Jewish communities.
    When Sabbatai Zevi heard about these massacres he was appalled. Overwhelmed by a desperate desire to do something for his people, he suddenly became convinced he was the Messiah who would lead
them back to the Holy Land. And he began his mission by doing something that horrified his orthodox fellow Jews – he stood up in the synagogue and pronounced the name of Jehovah (or Jahweh),
which Jews regard as too sacred to speak. (Instead they called