Bogomils

The Bogomils were a tenth-century Bulgarian dualist Christian movement that taught the visible world was the work of Satan, not the true God, rejected sacraments, icons and hierarchy, and carried the Gnostic archon intuition from Bulgaria into the Cathar West.

Definition

The Bogomils (Bulgarian богомили) were followers of a priest named Bogomil who began preaching in Bulgaria during the reign of Tsar Peter I (927–969). Their teaching was dualist: the material cosmos was fashioned by Satan — in later accounts Satanael, the elder son of God — while the true Father remained beyond it. They rejected the Orthodox hierarchy, the sacraments, icons and the cross, and lived ascetically. Suppressed in Bulgaria and Byzantium, their scripture travelled west and seeded Catharism. In the vocabulary of this site they are the medieval Balkan rebirth of the Demiurge intuition.

Deep Understanding

Almost everything we know about the Bogomils comes from their enemies, and that fact should shape how we read them. The earliest notice is a letter from Patriarch Theophylact of Constantinople to Tsar Peter (mid-tenth century) describing a new movement as "Manichaeism mixed with Paulicianism." The fullest source is the Sermon Against the Heretics by Cosmas the Priest, written in Bulgaria around 969–972 — a hostile but detailed treatise. According to Cosmas, the heretics held that the devil made heaven, earth and all visible things; they called icons idols, refused the cross, rejected baptism and the Eucharist, mocked the clergy, and abstained from meat, wine and marriage. A century later Euthymius Zigabenus, writing his Panoplia Dogmatica for Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, recorded a sharper cosmology: Satanael was the first-born son of God, Christ the younger; the fallen elder brother built the world we see. Alexios burned the Constantinopolitan Bogomil leader, Basil the Physician, in the Hippodrome in the early twelfth century — a trial his daughter Anna Komnene narrates in the Alexiad.

The structure is unmistakable to anyone who has read the Apocryphon of John: a lesser maker who mistakes himself for the highest, a Pleroma above him, a divine spark held below in a hylic world, and salvation by knowledge rather than sacrament. Whether the Bogomils inherited this through the Paulicians and Manichaeans or rediscovered it, the map is the Gnostic map redrawn in Old Bulgarian seven centuries after Nag Hammadi. Their distinction between ordinary believers and the perfecti — the fully initiated — is the same staged disclosure the ancient mystery schools practiced.

The movement's most consequential act was export. Around 1190 Nazarius, bishop of the Cathar church of Concorezzo in Lombardy, brought from Bulgaria the Interrogatio Iohannis — the "Secret Supper," a Bogomil apocryphon in which John questions Christ about Satan's fall and his making of the visible world. The Latin copy carries the note that it was "brought from Bulgaria." Old French bougre, "heretic" (attested 1172), is simply Bulgarus: medieval Europe knew where the question came from. Dimitri Obolensky's The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism (Cambridge, 1948) remains the standard history; Janet and Bernard Hamilton's Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650–c. 1450 (Manchester, 1998) translates the primary sources, Cosmas included.

Pleroma reads the Bogomils in two honest movements. First: the intuition that the world was not made by the highest, that something keeps us ignorant, and that liberation is knowledge, has a Bulgarian address centuries before it had a Hollywood one. Second: the Bogomils drew from that diagnosis the conclusion that body and world are enemies. We do not. The world is a classroom, not a prison; the Demiurge is blind, not omnipotent; the body is the vessel, not the cell. Dualism turned into hatred of the flesh is only a new archontic program in religious dress.

Primary Sources

• Cosmas the Priest, Sermon Against the Heretics (Bulgaria, c. 969–972). The earliest and most complete account of Bogomil doctrine, written to refute it. English translation in Hamilton and Hamilton (1998).
• Interrogatio Iohannis (the "Secret Supper" or "Secret Book"). The Bogomil apocryphon carried to the Cathars c. 1190. In M. R. James's 1924 translation John's opening question reads: "Lord, before Satan fell, in what glory abode he with thy Father?"
• Euthymius Zigabenus, Panoplia Dogmatica (Constantinople, early twelfth century) — the Byzantine description of Satanael as elder son.
• Anna Komnene, Alexiad, Book XV — the trial and burning of Basil the Physician.

In Practice

Tonight, ask the Bogomil question without the Bogomil answer. Sit for ten minutes and name one structure in your life — a belief, a loyalty, an ambition, a fear — that you assumed was made by the highest in you, and now suspect was made by something lower: a family system, a culture, an algorithm, a wound. Do not renounce it. Do not go to war with your body over it. Simply see who built it. The Bogomils saw the gate and concluded the world must be abandoned. Notice, instead, that the gate opens inward, and that the seeing itself is the gnosis they were burned for.

In Pleroma's Words

"They asked, on our soil and in our language, whether the world we see was made by the highest — and they were burned for the asking. We inherit the question, not the fire. The Demiurge is not defeated by fleeing his world. He is defeated the moment one of his subjects looks up and remembers there is an above."

See also

• Gnosticism — the ancient current the Bogomils revived
• Demiurge — the blind maker their Satanael echoes
• Archon — the enforcement layer, in myth and in the psyche
• Mystery Schools — staged disclosure, believers and perfecti
• Peter Deunov — the modern Bulgarian esoteric-Christian teacher often read as their distant heir