Blind Spot: The Terrible within the Small; or, The Fabrication of the Learned Elders of Zion and the Forgery of Their Protocols

December 26, 2017 by Nathaniel Lloyd

In this short companion piece to my previous post on the Blood Libel, it turns out I have a bit more to say about that topic, for unbeknownst to me while I wrote that piece, the ancient accusation that Jews engaged in ritual murder was actually in the news. For any who doubt that these grossly absurd and malicious myths could possibly be given any credence in the modern era, consider the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church, in conjunction with Vladimir Putin’s regime, have just revived the blood libel in the form of a claim that in 1918, Tsar Nicholas II and the rest of the Romanov family—including little Anastasia, despite persistent rumors—were not just executed but were ritually murdered. While they may not have named Jews as the ritual murderers, Russia’s long history of dubiously associating Jews with Bolshevism makes the subtext of the accusation clear, and Jewish organizations in Russia and abroad have expressed not only concern but outrage.

That the blood libel would rise again in Russia, of all places, is sadly not surprising, for Russia has a long history of brutally oppressing the Jews. Jews had been forbidden to enter Russia since the 15th century, but after 1772 and the first partition of Poland, they came under Russian rule regardless. Fearing the competition of Jewish merchants, Jews were restricted to living only in certain border territories, later called the Pale of Settlement. Tsars consistently struggled with the question of how to deal with this foreign element in their kingdom. Some made attempts to integrate them, such as Tsar Nicholas I, who did so by imposing forced conscription, requiring all Jews to serve 25 years in his armies on the assumption that this would acculturate them nicely. Nevertheless, Russian Jews preserved their cultural heritage and thus their “otherness.” By the 1860s, fears of Jewish plots began to arise, and by the 1880s, we see the first of the Russian pogroms, usually around Easter, when the story of Jews murdering Christ inevitably stirred ire and likely rekindled the blood accusation as well. Moreover, Jews who had built any measure of affluence for themselves despite the restrictions placed on them appear to have inspired envy and hostility among poor Russians, who invariably incited these targeted riots by starting brawls. After the pogroms of the 1880s, the Russian state increased its systemic repression of the Jews, limiting their economic privileges, restricting their further settlement, blocking their admission to higher education and eventually expelling them from Moscow. Russian Jews responded with a further diaspora, fleeing for friendlier lands, and among those who stayed, many joined the Zionist movement, justifiably yearning for a homeland all their own, while others became radicalized, swelling the ranks of revolutionary movements, which of course only exacerbated mischievous lies that all Jews conspired together to overthrow the Russian monarchy, or perhaps on an even grander scale, to conquer the world. This is the story of one such conspiracy theory and the documentary evidence supposed by many—even today, despite all evidence to the contrary—to prove it true, the story of what has proven to be a tenacious historical blind spot for many. Thank you for listening to The Terrible within the Small; or, The Fabrication of the Learned Elders of Zion and the Forgery of Their Protocols.

1905 map showing percentage of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, via Wikimedia Commons

Conspiracy theories claiming that all Jews worked together internationally to advance some nefarious agenda were not new. As I mentioned at the end of my episode on the Blood Libel, the idea was present in medieval Norwich in Thomas of Monmouth’s claim that the converted Jew Theobald had revealed to him a great council of Jewish royalty and leaders who convened in France to decide which country would host their annual ritual murder. And in 1348, the very same year that the Black Plague appeared, so did accusations that the disease had been spread by Jews poisoning wells as a means to destroy Christians. However, the 19th century saw a transformation of the conspiracy theories about the Jews. Rather than depicting them merely as anti-Christians, they began to be seen as a secret cabal hell-bent on world domination. Now this was a role traditionally played by Templar Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati in transnational conspiracy theories, but after the Revolution of 1848, in which Jews were active, these conspiracies to overthrow the status quo and supplant it with something different, and therefore frightening, began to be blamed on Jews as well as Freemasons. In the 1860s, a number of books appeared that promulgated these myths. Posing as an English aristocrat, Hermann Goedsche published a novel called Biarritz in 1868 in which he has a cabal of powerful Jews meeting secretly in a Prague cemetery to discuss their vast scheme to subvert the governments and religions of the world to their eventual gain. This scene, it turns out, was baldly plagiarized from an Alexandre Dumas novel depicting Cagliostro meeting with the Illuminati to discuss the Affair of the Necklace, but it clearly indicates the kind of intrigue attributed to Jews in those years.

In Russia the next year, we see Iakov Brafman’s Book of the Kahal, published in Minsk, that set forth the claims that following the much maligned Talmud, Russian Jews had learned to hate Russia’s culture and people and were actively conspiring to topple the Orthodox Church. Then the religious enmities and the lust for secular power attributed to the Jews finally came together in one especially vitriolic accusation. One Sergei Nilus published a book in 1903 entitled The Great within the Small. Due to his role in the bringing forth of a monstrous and seemingly immortal conspiracy, Nilus has to posterity become a much mythologized character, a monk and a séance-leading mystic—which considering the preoccupation with occultism and spiritualism at the tsar’s court would not itself be absurd if it were accurate. In truth, Nilus was from a noble family and had practiced law for a time, but after retiring, he became enamored of the apocalyptic strain of the Orthodox faith, and eventually established his own brand of visionary religion. He gained some fame for himself when, in the first edition of The Great within the Small, he claimed to find and translate the writings of a famous Russian saint. However, it is in the second edition of The Great within the Small, which bore the subtitle The Advent of the Antichrist and the Approaching Rule of the Devil on Earth, that his anti-Semitic conspiracy theory takes clearer shape. In it, he outright asserts the existence of a worldwide Judeo-Masonic conspiracy not only to overthrow Christian states and establish their own global dominion but also to raise up a Jewish world leader, a tyrant who would be the Antichrist. And as proof of their machinations, he offered as an appendix another document that had somewhat mysteriously come into his possession: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting among the masterminds of a vast Jewish conspiracy. In brief, the Protocols reveal that Jews the world over have been colluding a long time to depose all monarchs, overthrow all governments, and corrupt all religions. Commanding the absolute loyalty of all Jews and marshalling the secret forces of the Freemasons and other secret societies, they bring about their goals by inciting populist revolutions and advancing liberalism, which leads invariably to socialism, and thence to communism before finally descending into anarchy and the complete destruction of civilization.

Nilus offered little help in the way of determining the origin of this manuscript, offering a variety of contradictory stories. First, he asserted that a friend in the Okhrana, or Russian secret police, took it from a whole book of protocols found in a Zionist stronghold in France. In a later edition, he clarified that they had been stolen by the wife or lover of a Masonic leader in Alsace from his iron chest. Then in the 1917 edition, Nilus further explains that these were essentially the minutes of the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897, but of course, that was not a secret meeting, but rather a very public one, and the Protocols were certainly not items on the agenda there. As the story progressed, then, Nilus adjusted his story to assert that the Protocols had been stolen from the home of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Regardless of which of these stories Nilus actually believed, if any, we do know that the document had been in circulation before he got his hands on it, as it was published in part by a Russian newspaper in 1903, to little notice. Such was certainly not the case after the publication of Nilus’s The Great within the Small. There is reason to think that Tsar Nicholas II himself was swayed by the Protocols. Previous to their advent, he had shown some inclination to give in to liberalism and modernization, for in 1905, with the October Manifesto, he limited his powers and established a parliament and a constitution, but afterward, he thwarted it by constantly dissolving it and enacted a broad program of anti-Jewish propaganda in conjunction with the Orthodox Church. Pogroms in that year, as the Protocols became widely read, ran rampant, claiming the lives of 3,000 Jews. Most of these pogroms were incited by the state itself through its provocateurs, the Black Hundreds, a proto-fascist group that stirred the rumor that the revolution was a Jewish conspiracy to overthrow the tsar. And after the Bolsheviks had seized control and executed the Romanov family in 1918, a new edition of the Protocols was widely distributed among the tsarist counterrevolutionary White Army. It was essentially their bible, proof that those they fought were pawns of evil Jews hell-bent on the overthrow of the world. White Army soldiers went so far as to read the Protocols aloud to any illiterates who needed indoctrination, and during the course of the next couple years, they massacred somewhere around 120,000 Jews.

It was after all of this carnage, and after White Army emissaries had distributed the Protocols abroad at the Versailles Peace Conference, thereby commencing the long history of the Protocols’ publication outside of Russia, that voices of reason began to cast doubt on the document. In May of 1920, Dr. J. Stanjek published an analysis of the text of the Protocols that proved it was plagiarized in part directly from Hermann Goedsche’s Biarritz, who, if you recall, had himself plagiarized Dumas, making the Protocols essentially a plagiarism of a plagiarism. And shrewdly, Stanjek also predicted that other portions of the text were likely plagiarized from a French source, as they seemed a direct criticism of Napoleon III. However, this exposé was not enough to halt the spread of the Protocols, which continued to terrify and convince such memorable personages as Henry Ford in America and Winston Churchill in England.

Then, sure enough, in 1921, a foreign correspondent for the Times of London stationed in Constantinople was approached by a former operative of the Okhrana in exile with a copy of a French book published in the 1860s. This book, Dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell by Maurice Joly, was a thinly veiled satire of the policies and schemes of Napoleon III, and as Stanjek predicted, proved to be the source for most of the rest of the Protocols, indicating that the destructive little pamphlet was just a patchwork, a palimpsest of previous works, all fiction, that originally had nothing to do with the Jews.

As scholars have since theorized, reactionary conservative members of Tsar Nicholas II’s court with connections to the Okhrana secret police—Pyotr Rachkovsky, head of the secret police, has been named—likely conceived of the Protocols as a means of turning the Tsar against the liberal influences in his court. Thus they turned to their propagandists in France, and some have identified the forger Mathieu Golovinski as a likely candidate for the Protocols’ plagiarism. Golovinski started his career manufacturing evidence for the state police and continued with the Orthodox Church’s Holy Synod, producing fake news articles for that organization’s propaganda campaign against modernization, liberalism, socialism, and, of course, what many already saw as Jewish influence on Russian society. And later in his career, while in exile in Paris, writing false stories to be planted in the foreign press, it is theorized that Rachkovsky or some conservative member of the Tsar’s court, or perhaps one of their representatives in the Okhrana, tasked him with creating a document that would appear to be proof of a Jewish plot to modernize and liberalize Russia to terrible ends, all for the sole purpose of scaring the Tsar into a firmer and more conservative rule.

With the exposure of the Protocols as nothing more than a plagiarized forgery as early as 1920, one would think that the distribution and influence of the document would cease, but on the contrary, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion has become one of the most widely translated and distributed texts in the world. In Germany, Joseph Goebbels saw it as a useful tool of propaganda, and Adolph Hitler, seeming to genuinely believe it, used it extensively as the basis for his whole worldview during his rise to power, thus eventually providing a pretext for the Holocaust. Even after a Swiss court declared the Protocols false in 1935 and the U.S. Congress declared them fraudulent in 1964, they continued to be brought forth. The Ku Klux Klan, unsurprisingly, continued to distribute the document, and in 1968, an Islamic organization in Beirut published hundreds of thousands of copies in multiple languages. New editions appeared in Egypt and France in 1972, in India in 1974, in America in 1977, and in England in 1978. The late 80s saw its publication in Japan and as part of the charter of Hamas. The early 1990s saw the Protocols pop up in Mexico and Turkey and again, coming full circle, being published once more in Russia. And in the 2000s, they appeared in print in Lebanon and on Arab television in the form of a serial adaptation. And it is still touted and given credence today by white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups as well as by conspiracy theorists like David Icke. It seems that, for the powers of intolerance and fear, the Jews are simply too tempting a target of scapegoating, for not even empirical evidence and plain logic can dissuade the believers in ant-Semitic conspiracy. When it is pointed out to them that the Protocols have long been known to be a plagiarized forgery, these hateful believers reverse the logical conclusion and claim that, clearly, the Jews must have then taken their plans from this forgery, plagiarizing this plagiarism of a plagiarism. Why? Because it confirms their fear and resentment of Jews and therefore must be true. When the truths we’ve managed to find in the past are ignored by those who purposely wear blinders, then it comes as no surprise that blind spots such as these threaten to send us back to the Dark Ages.

Images from various editions of the Protocols, via University of California, Santa Barbara

My principal sources for this episode were A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Binjamin W. Segel and the graphic history The Plot by Will Eisner, which I highly recommend and which you can find a link to on the website’s reading list.

Bloody Libel; or, the Slaughter and Sacralization of Young William of Norwich

December 12, 2017 by Nathaniel Lloyd

This installment, the first in a while because of a hiatus I was forced to take (thank you for your patience!) represents a continuation of sorts from my two-part Halloween special on accusations of devil worship through history, for if you recall, I noted that some of the accusations leveled against supposed Satanists—that of the desecration of Christian symbols and the ritual murder of children—would have been dreadfully familiar to Jews of the Middle Ages.

Jews in Christian Europe of the Middle Ages may have been the perfect target for vilification. They were perceived as holding themselves apart from almost every community in which they settled; they were the literal “other” with their distinct garb—which in later years was imposed on them by papal order—and their supposedly recognizable physical characteristics, which were often, in rumors, inflated out of cruelty or fear to include a bad smell and diabolical facial features. Their depiction in the New Testament and in Catholic traditions as the betrayers and murderers of Christ—a narrative revived every Easter—certainly singled them out for persecution and massacre during the Crusades, when some crusaders believed that killing a Jew absolved them of all sins. And when the only alternative was forced conversion, many Jewish communities made the horrific decision to commit collective suicide in order to maintain their faith and dignity.

Considering the long history of Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism, which stretches much further back than the Crusades, it is sadly unsurprising when one hears the outlandish justifications that have been trotted out at different times to rationalize atrocities committed against them: for example, the patently absurd accusation that they connived to desecrate the host. This ridiculous myth held that Jews so hated Jesus Christ that they conspired to steal consecrated host wafers from churches in order to do them physical harm by stabbing them. This, of course, was their way of murdering Jesus again, because according to the doctrine of transubstantiation, the host wafers were the literal body of Christ. A moment’s logic is enough to dismiss this, since its premise relies on the notion that the Jews themselves actually believed these arcane and ludicrous Catholic doctrines.

Medieval depiction of host desecration, via Wikipedia

But other myths propagated to justify the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages, while still patently preposterous, are too dark to laugh off. I refer, of course, to the persistent myth that Jews engaged in ritual murder, the so-called “blood libel.” This accusation was comparable to the rumor that they desecrated the host as from its very origins it appears as an accusation of ritually recreating Christ’s crucifixion, often through the sacrifice of a Christian child. Various motivations were offered to explain these imagined crimes, some far more foolish than others. Vaguely, it was usually asserted that their religion demanded it—a claim that few of their accusers or persecutors would have challenged, as they rarely knew much of anything about Jewish customs. A more specific and more bizarre claim eventually emerged that the Jews required Christian blood to make their matzo, the unleavened bread they had to eat at Passover. This, again, is certainly reminiscent of the accusations widely made against heretics and perceived devil worshippers in the Middle Ages, that they baked their sacrifices into wafers for the unholy communion of their black masses. But undoubtedly the most outrageous and bizarre motivations attributed to the Jews for their alleged crimes were physical rather than religious. Playing on the perception of Jews as the utterly different other, whose rites of circumcision set even their sexual organs apart, it was suggested that the Jewish male menstruated and had to replenish his blood through the sacrifice and consumption of others. And since this hemorrhagic curse was part and parcel with the blood curse, because Jews accepted the responsibility for Christ’s death from Pontius Pilate, it was said that they must specifically consume the blood of a Christian.

This collection of myths, which drove persecution and pogroms throughout the Middle Ages and afterward and is even today, unbelievable as it may seem, hauled out of mothballs by gullible and vitriolic anti-Semites, must have begun somewhere. That is the focus of this, Episode 14: Bloody Libel, or the Slaughter and Sacralization of Young William of Norwich.

Many have looked to antiquity for the origins of the blood libel. Some point to the Hellenistic age, when Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes sacked the temple in Jerusalem, defiling it by sacrificing a pig on its altar and erecting in its place an altar to Jupiter. In a seasonal aside, Antiochus Epiphanes’s aggressive persecution of the Jews in ancient Judea, outlawing the practice of their faith, forbidding circumcision and selling thousands of families into bondage, eventually led to the Maccabaean revolt and the re-consecration of the Temple, an event which, along with the legend of its attendant miracle of long-burning oil, represents the basis of the Jewish holiday, Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, which as I understand it starts the day I plan to release this episode, Wednesday, December 12.

Well, according to one later account by Greek historian Posidonius (poe-see-though-nius), when Antiochus Epiphanes took the Temple in 168 BCE, he found a Greek captive there who claimed that the Jews ritually cannibalized a Greek every seven years. Needless to say, the account can neither be confirmed nor trusted, considering the gross anti-Judaism rampant among Greeks of the era, as especially demonstrated in the bitterly anti-Semitic emperor himself, and even if the story were true, in that a Greek prisoner made the claim, it would remain problematic, for considering the source, you’d have to assume the man fabricated the tale to please the emperor. Regardless of its plausibility, the tale issued forth and persisted in a few other texts, but scholar Gavin Langmuir, in his influential work on the origins of the blood libel, makes a compelling argument that not only does this tale bear little resemblance to the blood libel as it later emerged in medieval Europe, but also that books containing this obscure anecdote were few and far between, such that the myth likely did not spring from this font.

Antiochus Epiphanes spoils Jerusalem, a 1690 engraving by Wilhelm Goeree, via Seder Olam Revisited

In similar fashion, Langmuir dismisses another possible origin of the myth from Syria during the First Persian Empire, where intoxicated Jews at Inmestar, according to a Christian historian writing at some historical distance, supposedly tied a Christian boy to a cross in mockery of Christ, accidentally or purposely killing him in the process. As Langmuir shows, this incident was not widely recorded in texts that would have been available in medieval Norwich, England, where it is generally accepted that the first accusations of ritual murder appeared in the mid-1100s, and so could not have been their inspiration.

Other scholars continue to quibble, suggesting that the accusations made in Norwich were not made up out of whole cloth, that their inspiration can be found in the First Crusades, when Christian soldiers were shocked by the Jews’ willingness to kill not only themselves but also to sacrifice their wives and their very children rather than submit to forced conversion. Nevertheless, it appears that the incident I will now relate was the very first appearance of the blood libel, and that it emerged all at once and almost wholly formed—a notion that is deeply disturbing, for it seems somehow easier to comprehend that such an evil appeared gradually, built upon slowly throughout the ages, rather than materializing so abruptly, a sudden monster.

To understand the origins of the blood libel in Norwich, one must first consider the cultural and political context of medieval England after the Norman Conquest. Following the invasion and occupation of England by William the Conqueror, many Anglo-Saxons fled the country, and those who stayed faced something of an identity crisis. The conquest remade the country, not only physically, with structures being demolished in order to raise castles and cathedrals, but also culturally and racially, installing a new class of elites that spoke a language foreign to most. Situated near the North Sea on the River Wensum and therefore easily accessible for trade with Normandy, Norwich benefited from this change greatly. A new castle was raised, as well as a Cathedral, and a great influx of Norman merchants created a thriving burgh there. The affluence of this burgh, which had swelled to a population exceeding 10,000 and become one of the largest cities in England, drew a small community of Jews as well, plying their customary trade of money lending and injecting money into the economy through their commerce with local artisans. This was a city divided by race as well as language, for the Jews kept mainly to areas where the French-speaking Normans had settled, and there were those of Anglo-Scandinavian descent who had little contact with them and, as we shall see, held them in low regard.

It is important here to note that everything we know about what happened in Norwich the week of Easter 1144 we take from a decidedly biased and dubious source, the Life and Passion of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich, by Thomas of Monmouth, about whom I will have plenty to say as the story progresses. Suffice to say now that Thomas arrived in Norwich years later, and he composed his book on the events of 1144 later still. Moreover, his bias is evident to even the most credulous reader, for as can be gleaned from the title alone, Thomas was campaigning to have William of Norwich, who in that fateful year turned up dead, canonized as a saint. Nevertheless, we may deduce from Thomas’s record, considering his words as well as his omissions, what is likely to be fact and what embellishment, as Gavin Langmuir so shrewdly explores in his work. Here I will recount the “facts” in outline before laying out the legend in its entirety as Thomas of Monmouth wrote it.

At the broken heart of this story is a boy of twelve years, an English child who bore the Norman name of William. Although he did not live at home but rather with a local man named Wulward, his family lived nearby: his mother, Elviva, and his aunt, Leviva. There were many connections with the church in his family—his grandfather was a priest; his aunt Leviva’s husband, Godwin Sturt, was a priest as well; his cousin, Leviva’s son, was a deacon; and his own brother would later become a monk—but William had taken up a trade, apprenticing himself to a skinner at eight years old. During the course of his work, he had some contact with the local Jewry. However, during Lent in 1144, the man Wulward with whom he lived and his uncle Godwin Sturt both told him not to have any more interaction with the Jews in the burgh—and here we see one of the first hints of his family’s opinion of Jews.

On March 20th that same year, a mysterious man approached William. He was the archbishop’s cook, he said, and he had some work for William. This stranger went with William to his mother’s home to ask her permission to take William to the archbishop’s kitchen, and Elviva assented after taking a little money for herself from this cook. Now after the fact and years later, when Thomas of Monmouth went about playing detective and piecing together a narrative for his Life and Passion Saint William, Elviva would say that she was suspicious of this man, and William’s aunt Leviva would make further claims of having encountered the supposed cook herself before William’s disappearance, but there is reason to doubt these claims, so I shall impart them later, as we examine Thomas’s version of events. For now, it must only be known that William vanished after supposedly going to work for the archbishop.

On Good Friday, the boy’s body was stumbled upon in Thorpe Wood, a dense and brushy forest across the river Wensum east of the city. A nun by the name of Legarda found the corpse on her return from visiting a house of lepers. William wore only his jacket and shoes. Legarda would later claim that a preternatural beam of light led her to the body’s location, and that as she watched ravens attempting to feast on his remains, she saw that his flesh was impenetrable to their claws and their beaks. Thus the tales of miracles associated with the dead child commenced, but it is certainly strange that she then went on her way rejoicing at the sight and never told anyone of the poor child’s demise or the miracle until later. Thereafter, a forester named Sprowston happened upon the body, and his observations seem keener. The boy’s head had been shaved, and there appeared to be wounds on his scalp. Perhaps the oddest detail was that some strange device had been placed in his mouth—this, it turned out upon closer inspection, was a wooden teasel. A comb- or brush-like device traditionally used on cloth to raise its nap, it was clearly a torture device, having been forced with its tines into William’s mouth.

Detail of a mural depicting a Jew kidnapping a child, via the BBC

This was a disturbing discovery, but strangely, Sprowston went back to town. He must have told others of the body, for there are reports of curiosity seekers visiting the body over Easter weekend, like a medieval Stand By Me, but he did not return himself until Monday, whereupon he buried the boy where he lay. However, at least one visitor to the corpse seems to have recognized William and informed his family, for the next day, his uncle, Godwin Sturt, arrived to the designated spot in Thorpe Wood with his cousin and brother, disinterred the corpse, identified it as William, and reburied it in the same place. Godwin went back to tell his wife, Leviva, the sad news, and Leviva responded, seemingly apropos of nothing, by sharing a nightmare she’d recently had, one that betrays an alarming fear of Jews. In her dream, Jews surrounded her in the marketplace, clubbed her, and tore her leg off, stealing away with her limb. Why would she suddenly share her dream when told this news? Because apparently she had told him of the dream already, and as she reminded him, he had interpreted it to mean that the Jews would cause her to lose someone she loved. When Leviva and her husband shared this news with William’s mother, it seems likely they also shared their thoughts on Leviva’s supposedly prophetic dream, for Elviva promptly went about shouting that the Jews had murdered her boy.

As I mentioned in my caveat at the beginning, all of this is gleaned from Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Passion of Saint William and therefore dubious, but if it were true, it only goes to show the malicious prejudice of this family, jumping to this conclusion on no further evidence than the interpretation of a nightmare. And indeed it seems clear that Thomas of Monmouth was not entirely putting words in their mouths, for not long after the discovery, Godwin Sturt publicly accused the Jews of William’s murder, standing before the Bishop’s synod and citing some vague and ridiculous evidence. He pointed to the dream as a premonition, and he suggested that this man who posed as the archbishop’s cook in order to kidnap William was so cunning that he must have been a Jew. He also spoke of Jewish religious practices vaguely and made unclear references to the wounds on William, but he never made the outright assertions that the Jews had crucified William as part of a profane ritual recreating Christ’s murder. That would all come later, and indeed, it may be that Thomas of Monmouth put those ambiguous and vaguely corroborative statements into his mouth in an effort to confirm the outrageous claims he would make.

The church called upon the Norwich Jews three times to come and answer the charges, but the Jews—certainly no strangers to persecution and wary of Catholic judgment—sought the counsel of the king’s representative, the sheriff, who advised them against submitting to ecclesiastical authority and ended up offering them shelter in the castle until the outcry subsided. Of course, afterwards, it would be claimed that the Jews bribed the sheriff for his protection, an accusation that simultaneously painted the Jews as guilty and the law that protected them as corrupt.

Norwich Castle, via University of South Florida

A full month after the body’s discovery, the Bishop ordered that the boy’s body be disinterred a second time and buried a third time in the cemetery at the cathedral, where according to Thomas, monks washed the corpse and examined it further. It appeared the body had been badly burned, as if by boiling water. Moreover, as Thomas records it, these monks found indications that the boy had suffered a crucifixion similar to Christ’s, as they saw a wound on his side as well as wounds on his hands and feet that might have corresponded to being nailed to a cross. Additionally, they identified the cuts on his scalp as being from thorns and even claimed to have found pieces of the thorns still in the wounds. Of course, by the time Thomas wrote about this, he was entirely devoted to establishing a cult in William’s honor and sacralizing him as not only a saint but a genuine martyr, and this puts the entire medical examination into doubt, especially considering the boy’s corpse had been exposed to carrion for days and decomposing in the ground for a full month by the time they examined it. And even if Thomas’s account is accurate in this regard, the monks of the priory themselves may have made these claims upon examining the body for the very same reasons, for it seems the Bishop didn’t order the body moved to the cathedral until after a Prior from an abbey far away south in Sussex approached him after the synod at which Sturt had accused the Jews and offered to take the boy’s body away to his monastery, where he would build upon the legend of the boy’s death and turn him into a holy relic. So it seems even before Thomas of Monmouth arrived on the scene and began pushing for the child’s canonization, the bishops and monks of the Norwich Cathedral saw an opportunity to turn the poor murdered child into a venerated figure, something that could elevate their cathedral into a destination for pilgrimage. And sure enough, after William was moved from the woods to the monk’s cemetery, some few reports of miracles began to appear.

What else we know about the events prior to Thomas arriving and insinuating himself into the affair, and again this comes to us through Thomas’s eventual writings as well, is that two years later, around 1146, a prominent Jewish moneylender named Eleazar was murdered in Norwich by the squires of a knight who was indebted to him. According to the legend as composed by Thomas years afterward, some in the church again brought up the case, suggesting that no Christian should have to answer murder charges made by the Jews until they answered for William’s murder. Thus when Thomas arrived at the Norwich cathedral priory circa 1149, there seems to already have been a nascent movement afoot to see William canonized—at least one miracle was supposed to have been reported around that time and related to Thomas, of a virgin who, stalked by an incubus, received instruction in a vision to carry candles to William’s grave and, having done so, claimed to have been delivered from her tormentor. And the supposed manner of William’s death was part and parcel with the growing legend of his martyrdom and surely also found its way through rumormongering to Thomas. Not only was there still a thriving belief in some circles that one or more Jews had killed the boy, but there was also a handy prime suspect in the Jewish community leader, Eleazar, who having been murdered himself could no longer answer any accusations made against him. Considering these circumstances and the fact that having the relics of a bona fide saint would not only improve the station of a cathedral but could also immortalize a monk like Thomas in folklore and religious literature, it’s clear Thomas may have seen an opportunity to serve whatever ambition a Benedictine monk like him might have had. Irrespective of his motivations, however, which might very well have sprung from genuine credulity and faith, Thomas almost immediately set about recording, and likely encouraging, whatever reports of miracles he could find, some of which consisted of visions describing William, crowned and attired in white, at the very feet of God Himself.

Saint William of Norwich, portrayed in all his glory, via Wikimedia Commons

Like a quintessential English detective, Thomas also went about piecing together the “facts” of the murder, interviewing witnesses and sniffing out leads. Although years had passed, Thomas somewhat dubiously uncovered a variety of new evidence in the form of eyewitness testimony of a suspiciously damning nature. For example, although she had never made the claim before, even though it certainly would have helped to prove the accusations against the Jews, William’s aunt Leviva told Thomas that the mysterious “cook” with whom William had last been seen had come with William to visit her as well, the day after paying her sister Elviva for the privilege of obtaining William’s labor, and according to her, she was so suspicious of him that she sent her young daughter to shadow them and asserted that the little girl returned to report that they’d gone into the house of a Jew.

Then, another damning report happened to fall into Thomas’s lap. Another man of the cloth, one who had been actively sharing with Thomas tales of supposed miracles associated with William’s grave, dropped quite a bombshell. He claimed to have taken the deathbed confession of one Aelward Ded, in which Ded described seeing two Jews on horseback in Thorpe Wood on the Friday before Easter 1144, recognizing one of them as the prominent moneylender Eleazar who would be murdered a couple years later. According to the supposed confession, Ded approached them because one of them carried a suspicious looking sack over the neck of his horse, which Ded touched and realized contained a body. As the tale went, the Jews fled and later bribed the sheriff to intimidate Ded into keeping what he’d seen a secret, which astonishingly he had until the day of his death.

And if all these testimonies weren’t enough to seal it, Thomas next found a Christian maidservant who had worked for Eleazar during the Easter of 1144. She reportedly took Thomas to Eleazar’s house, into which Leviva’s daughter claimed to have seen William disappear, and showed him further physical evidence of the crime. She claimed that during the week leading up to Easter, she had been called on to bring her master Eleazar boiling water, and she described peeping with one eye through a hole to see a boy child fastened to a post. Of course, like the other witnesses Thomas reports interviewing, this servant also had never told a soul for the lame reason of worrying about losing her job and being afraid of the Jews—who remember represented an extremely small portion of the population in the overwhelmingly Christian burgh. But it didn’t matter because Thomas could then claim to have seen hard evidence of the boy’s manner of death, which he had all along rather bizarrely insisted was a recreation of the crucifixion. He says he saw the holes where William was nailed to the post, but since either the wounds recorded by the monks who’d examined William’s body or the marks on the post did not seem to indicate the traditional form of a crucifixion, he was careful to explain in his manuscript that the Jews had only nailed his left hand and foot to the post and merely bound the other limbs in place. Why? Well, to avoid the appearance that the boy had been crucified, of course. Never mind that scalding him with boiling water and forcing a barbed wooden teasel into his mouth also looked nothing like crucifixion; those flourishes must also have been performed just to throw savvy investigators like Thomas of Monmouth off the trail.

Painting depicting the murder of William of Norwich, via Wikimedia Commons

The biggest piece of “evidence” Thomas produced seems to have only been offered in Book 2 of his manuscript in order to answer those who doubted his outrageous theory. In the first book he had several times referred to converted Jews who had confided in him that sacrificing a Christian in imitation of Christ’s crucifixion was a vital Jewish tradition, but in Book 2, he revealed that it had just been one former Jew to tell him this, one Theobald of Cambridge who had become a Christian monk when he’d heard of William’s posthumous miracles. Theobald painted the picture of a vast Jewish conspiracy to ritually murder a Christian. This they did annually in accordance with their ancient scriptures, which told them that they must shed Christian blood “in scorn and contempt of Christ,” whose crucifixion had caused them to be scattered in foreign lands, and that if they did not, they would never return to their homeland and be free. Theobald spoke very specifically about how the chiefs among the Jews gathered at Narbonne, where the royal seed resided, and drew lots to determine which country among all those in which the Jews resided would be the setting for that year’s sacrifice, after which the Jews of that country’s largest city would draw lots to determine the town or city where the ritual murder would take place. And in 1144, according to Theobald, Norwich had been chosen, and all the Jews knew and accepted it.

Now this is manifest nonsense. Scholars Jewish and Gentile alike have pored over every foundational work of Judaism, and there exists no such edict. Actually, this claim mirrors in some ways the fears of the Talmud that would appear during the next century, which based on incomplete and erroneous understandings of that collection of writings claimed that it was an anti-Christian work encouraging violence against followers of Christ. But this was a hundred years before that. And there appears to be no historical precedent for such an accusation unless one goes all the way almost 1300 years back to that Greek prisoner in the Temple with his claim that the Jews engaged in a ritual sacrifice every seven years—a claim that as I explained earlier scholars doubt Thomas of Monmouth had ever heard of! Therefore, that would make Thomas himself the origin of this very specific and despicable accusation…or the converted Jew Theobald, if such a man existed. And there is reason to believe he may have, for it turns out that there was indeed a King of the Jews at Narbonne, as Theobald had supposedly told Thomas. There exists a legend of a scholar from Babylon named Machir, who settled in Narbonne, France, with the blessing of Charlemagne to establish himself there as King of the Jews. And it is true that descendants in the Machir family enjoyed the title of “nasi” or prince. Scholars including Joseph Jacobs in 1897 and the aforementioned Gavin Langmuir have argued that Theobald must have been real, for it seems unlikely that Thomas of Monmouth would have had such knowledge of the Jewish community at Narbonne.

So, the question is, who was the true source of this blood libel? Was this notion that Jews had committed a ritual recreation of the crucifix already present among the people of Norwich, among whom there certainly were those prejudiced against Jews, as evidenced in some of the statements made by William’s family? Was it just a one-of-a-kind rumor that sprang from the fact that the murder had occurred at Easter, when the story of Christ’s crucifixion was ubiquitous? Or had it been an imaginative invention of Thomas as he wrote his manuscript in order to paint William as Christ-like in his martyrdom? And more particularly, where had the concept that Jews were compelled annually to engage in such ritual murder originated? If Theobald was real, was he led by Thomas to make such a claim? Had Thomas coaxed this lie out of him to fit a narrative he was already composing? Or conversely, was this Theobald, about whom historians know nothing else, the true author of the lie? Did he pour this poison in Thomas’s ear, causing Thomas to then force all the rest of his evidence, whether real, embellished or contrived, to conform to this implausible theory? And if so, if it is possible that the blood libel was essentially started by a Jewish man, what was his motivation to start this lie that would spread like fire and burn many of his brethren?

As with all blind spots in our history, we may never know the truth in all its particulars. But we do know that this incident seems to be the birth of this great lie, which lived on in various forms for centuries. Within a couple decades it had spread to France, and soon more dead boys were suggested to have been victims of Jewish ritual murder. However, the first time the libel resulted in the shedding of innocent Jewish blood was back in England, in Lincoln, an affair recorded by Chaucer. In 1255, an 8-year-old boy named Hugh who had gone missing was found dead on land owned by a Jew, who on the promise that his life would be spared, accused other Jews of assembling on his land to ritually kill the lad. Henry III executed this man despite the promise of sparing him and sent 91 other Jews to London for trial, putting 19 to death. On and on the blood libel spread, resulting in miscarriages of justice and massacres. The rest of the 13th century saw incidents in numerous Germanic towns and cities, and in the 15th and 16th centuries, the lie resurfaced, with accusations spreading as far as Spain and Hungary. Even after the Age of Reason, we see the Damascus Affair and the Tisza-Eszlár Affair in the mid- and late-19th century, respectively, and the Polna and Kolnitz Affairs at the dawn of the 20th century. Even after thorough debunking and condemnation by monarchs and popes alike, this dark and destructive myth lay dormant and then stirred again, over and over, to corrupt the minds of those who were blind to its history. And tragically, it would not be the only such myth to inspire distrust and persecution of the Jews, for embryonic in this accusation was one of vast, international conspiracy, a further lie that would rear its foul head in manifold ways.

I relied on several scholarly articles for this episode that I cannot easily link to, so here’s my bibliography, in MLA style because that’s what I’m accustomed to using. :)

Cohen, Jeffrey J. “The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich.” Speculum, vol. 79, no. 1, 2004, pp.

26–65. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20462793.

Langmuir, Gavin I. “Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder.” Speculum, vol. 59, no. 4,

1984, pp. 820–846. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2846698.

McCulloh, John M. “Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the

Early Dissemination of the Myth.” Speculum, vol. 72, no. 3, 1997, pp. 698–740. JSTOR,

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3040759.

Rubin, Miri. "Making a Martyr: William of Norwich and the Jews." History Today, vol. 60, no. 6,

June 2010, p. 48. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=f5h&AN=51447114&site=ehost-live.

The Specter of Devil Worship, Part Two

October 31, 2017 by Nathaniel Lloyd

In this installment, we’ll be discussing a subject that requires an examination of the details of alleged violent crimes against children. Reader be warned.

Welcome to part two and the conclusion of our Halloween edition of Historical Blindness. When we left off, we had just examined the accusations of black sabbaths performed by witches and warlocks and considered the evidence that witchcraft as the worship of the devil was only a mad construction of the Catholic Church and its Inquisition, growing out of previous allegations made to demonize heretics. Our final thought pondered whether any of these accusations had ever been grounded in fact.

Indeed, there appear to have been some accused of witchcraft who genuinely had been practicing sorcery, or at least attempting to do so. However, where there was genuine interest in magic and its practice (insofar as magic can actually be practiced), it was not of a Satanic aspect. At this time, Arabic texts on performing magic, and specifically summoning and controlling spirits, were being translated and found a readership in the West, but far from Satanic, these grimoires originated in pagan traditions and were simply adapted by Christians seeking to try their hand at magic. And even then, rather than being performed in deference to or worship of the devil, these magical ceremonies were usually meant to summon and bind a demon to serve one’s own purposes, usually to further some ambition through the control of others or to increase one’s wealth through some alchemical miracle. Take, for example, the story of Gilles de Rais, a French nobleman and war hero compatriot of Joan of Arc who during the Inquisition’s witch craze was executed for horrific crimes as well as for evoking and having discourse with the Devil.

Born into an established French family, Gilles de Rais inherited his title of Baron of Rais, as well as great wealth and extensive property. He was a brilliant young man, with a classical education in music, science, and Latin. After two betrothals that failed due to his fiancées suddenly dying, he was married by the age of 16, and by 25 he served with distinction as the Marshal of France. He was a Christian hero, serving alongside the Maid of Orleans in bringing aid to that city and marching on both Reims and Paris, though after he died in infamy, some have tried to expunge him from French history. This may be understandable when one considers the charges for which Gilles de Rais was executed.

Portrait of Gille de Rais, via Wikimedia Commons

After the glory days of Gilles de Rais’s military career, he became profligate with his wealth, employing far too many servants, raising his own standing military forces with funds out of his own pocket, and staging expensive dramatic productions. Before long, he had squandered his fortune and sought the help of alchemists to renew it. Along with the promise of transmuting base metals into gold, however, alchemists at the time were recognized as necromancers as well by the Catholic Church, casting spells and summoning demons in order to receive their favors. Gilles de Rais, therefore, began to seek more than just regaining his wealth in his pursuit of the alchemists’ philosopher’s stone. Having seen for himself in the person of Joan of Arc how supernatural power might be wielded by those in whom it is invested, he was led to believe that perhaps the alchemists he employed could endow him with powers of a god. After some failed attempts at summoning demons, it is said that eventually his alchemists succeeded in summoning the Devil himself, and in a contract Gilles de Rais signed in his own blood, he accepted a deal with the fiend. He would receive three rewards: science, power and wealth. In return, he need not surrender his soul. Instead, he needed only to burn five children and give their hearts to Satan.

And it would seem that Gilles de Rais took to his task with relish, or that perhaps he had already indulged in the horrific pastime of child murder. Whether innocent or already guilty of such crimes before his alchemical and diabolical quest, the evidence recorded after his eventual arrest suggests that between 1432 and 1440, he murdered more than 800 children, immolating them, amputating their limbs, severing their heads, scooping out their eyes and digging the hearts out of their chests as offerings to the Devil. These children were kidnapped and delivered to him by hired abductors, who later testified to their involvement. And as his various estates and castles fell into the hands of other family members, he enlisted other hirelings to help him hide his crimes by destroying the remains of children hidden there, a task which they also would testify to completing on his behalf. And finally, Gilles de Rais himself would confess to his crimes, offering from his own mouth the estimation that he murdered and sacrificed approximately 120 little boys every year for seven long and horrifying years.

Here, certainly, it would seem, we have evidence of human sacrifice to the Devil confirmed by the findings of a court. However, let us look more closely and with an open mind. Just as before many hangers-on were only too happy to help him squander his money, as he sought help in replenishing his coffers through alchemy, there was no shortage of confidence men posing as alchemists seeking to further relieve him of the last few coins he had. And if indeed he had not engaged in child murder before his alchemical pursuits, a notion supported by the further alleged detail that he always sought to save his own soul by praying to God for forgiveness both during and after his crimes, then surely the various alchemists who encouraged him to offer these sacrifices and convinced him they were necessary were the ones truly at fault, or at least they should share the blame for these heinous crimes, if they actually occurred.

Depiction of de Rais about his murderous sorcery, via Wikimedia Commons

And if these murders actually did occur, were they indeed made as offerings to Satan? If Gilles de Rais were actually a serial murderer, as some have claimed, perhaps driven by some sexual compulsion as indicated by the victimology of always targeting young boys, does this necessarily equate to devil worship? And if, instead, he only murdered these children in order to complete these arcane rituals, were they actually Satanic? As previously established, grimoires disseminating the traditions of alchemy and ceremonies for summoning demonic beings were not inherently Satanic in the sense that they derived from pagan traditions. And even a cursory examination of the ceremonies supposedly performed with Gilles de Rais shows that there was a lack of Satanic trappings. They involved circles drawn on the floor, not black candles and upside down crosses. While some accusations were made against him of performing Black Masses, these have proven unsubstantiated.

And as for the rest of the allegations, these too appear to lack credibility when examined closely. Gilles de Rais was tried by the Inquisition, and it has been pointed out that although he had squandered much of his wealth, he still retained a massive estate in the form of castles and other physical assets that the Church and his accusers were only too happy to seize upon their forfeiture. Indeed, Gilles de Rais confessed to his crimes… but not at first. Rather, he denied them and only admitted them after three days of torture. And while we do have the testimony of his accomplices, it is also possible that they were tortured themselves, as the Inquisitors were known to torture even witnesses! For anything resembling reliable evidence, then, we must look to the physical evidence, which also is lacking here. There is no unassailable record of investigators or other officials finding bodies, but rather only witness testimony of the destruction of said corpses, which testimony may have been coerced in order to explain why there was no evidence of bodies! Even reports of missing children during that period don’t offer any corroboration, as they don’t come near the number of murders alleged and can easily be explained without resorting to blaming a Satan-worshipping nobleman and his kidnapping ring.

Therefore, yet again, accusations of human sacrifice and Devil worship break down before reasonable examination. One begins to doubt, then, that there was ever any truth to these Satanic Panics. There is, however, more to come, and indeed, the next entry in our history of Devil worship should give one pause.

In 1678, French occultism showed its pale and horrible underbelly to the light in a scandal that has been called the Chambre Ardent Affair and the Affair of the Poisons. And here at the heart of what is otherwise a murder scandal, we finally find what appears to have been a verified case of ceremonies involving the offering of children for the conjuring of demonic forces. It all started when a lawyer at a dinner party overheard a high society fortune-teller bragging about providing “inheritance powder” to people in high places, this being a euphemism for poison. As poisoning was suspected of being rampant among noblemen and their wives, the lawyer reported the incident, and police investigated, uncovering a network of fortune-tellers whose real business was selling poison and performing abortions. As the investigation drew on, however, it would uncover more than abortion and the abetment of murder and would indeed touch far too close for the comfort of King Louis XIV. Thus he drew a veil of secrecy over the whole affair, choosing to prosecute the case in a Chambre Ardent, or Burning Chamber, called such because it was entirely closed off to the light of day and lit by torches, and perhaps also because, historically, such courts had been reserved for trying heretics, and their interiors had occasionally been lit by other kinds of burnings.

As the investigation unfolded, witnesses implicated further conspirators in the Affair of the Poisons, who in turn accused other and the layers of this criminal organization were peeled back. Eventually, officials came to the heart of the matter. At the center of this network was Catherine Monvoisin, better known as La Voisin, who was known to burn the fetuses she aborted in a secret furnace beneath her house. Moreover, it came forth that she had raised an unusual pavilion on the grounds of her house as a kind of chapel. In this unhallowed place, she arranged for profane rituals to take place, hiring an old priest named Abbé Guibourg to perform them. These rituals were evocations, conjuring demons and offering sacrifice to them in return for favors. The investigation came reached all the way to the king when his mistress, Madame de Montespan, was implicated as having availed herself of these ceremonies in an effort to keep the king’s affections.

Portrait of La Voisin, via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the Burning Chamber, in a reversal of ordinary procedures, the priest Abbé Guibourg gave his confession to a secular authority, and what he revealed struck everyone with horror. Abbé Guibourg said his twisted version of a mass on the belly of a nude woman, treating her as an altar. At the appointed time of the mass, a baby was presented to him, whose blood he shed by cutting its innocent throat. This child’s blood he poured into a chalice, calling to the demonic entities Astaroth and Asmodee to accept this sacrifice in exchange for meeting his demand, which was that Madame Montespan, present there with only a veil over her head and bosom, would continue to enjoy the amity of the king and that he would deny her nothing.

After the baby, thus drained of its blood, was taken away, its viscera and heart were carried back to the dark priest, who then ground them up for Montespan to consume as well as to slip secretly to the king. Her demand were written as follows:

…I demand the love of the King…and that the Queen shall be sterile, and the King shall leave her bed and her table for me, that I shall obtain all that I ask for me and my parents…that I shall be called to the counsels of the King, and to know what happens there…and that the Queen shall be repudiated, that I shall be able to marry the King.

The King’s mistress was never tried for her participation in these terrible rituals, but Abbé Guibourg was imprisoned for the rest of his life, along with a great many others who were involved in the Affair of the Poisons, while others were put to death, including La Voison, the woman at the head of this Satanic network, who was burned at the stake. source:

Although torture was, again, a factor in the proceedings of this Burning Chamber, the fact that the awful details of these terrible rituals were corroborated by multiple witnesses tends to lend Guibourg’s testimony credence. However, it should be noted that the babies described as being sacrificed were already dead. Providing illegal abortion services to women across Paris, La Voisin had a plentiful supply of fetuses at her disposal, so it appears that, rather than live sacrifices to dark powers, these were something more like grisly props in a disgusting theatrical production. Perhaps this is cold comfort, but again we see the specter of true devil worship becoming more and more ethereal with closer examination.

For example, the story appears at first glance to be a confirmed and proven instance of devil worship, or at least of diabolical deal-making, but consider the demons to which the priest appealed: Asmodee and Astaroth. They appear to be appropriate entities for the occasion, the former being thought to inspire lust and lechery in men and the latter known to grant friendships with great lords, but follow their history farther back and we find these figures do not even originate from Christian or even Hebrew traditions but rather from other religions, such as Zoroastrianism, and both appear to be derived from Astarte or Ishtar, a fertility goddess of Phoenician and Persian mythology. The idea that some unscrupulous priest would pretend to hold such a ceremony, drawing from centuries of lore made available in grimoire literature and thereafter promulgated by the Catholic Church and its Inquisitors, who spread everywhere the idea of such rituals existing, certainly doesn’t stretch the imagination, especially when one remembers that Abbé Guibourg was accepting payment for performing these rituals, which despite the horrendous element of using aborted fetuses as props, seem rather ridiculous in this light.

La Voison and Abbé Guibourg's Black Mass performed on Madame de Montespan, via Wikimedia Commons

Guibourg’s rituals would themselves help to mold the legend, thus perpetuating the cycle, with myth inspiring real practice that went on to fuel the myth, as thereafter reports of Black Masses, rituals parodying and profaning the Catholic Mass, most of them reflecting elements of Guibourg’s rituals with nude women as altars and the sacrifice and consumption of babies, proliferated in 18th and 19th century Europe.

One group accused of engaging in such ceremonies were the Hell-Fire Clubs of 18th century London, who have been said to hold full-fledged Satanic rituals, with black candles and inverted crucifixes, orgies in which forbidden sex of all kinds—even incest—was indulged, and, familiarly, the conjuration of the devil himself in the form of a goat or a cat. History shows, however, that the Hell-Fire Club was little more than a drinking club and themed society like the Freemasons originally formed to liven up otherwise boring and prudish Sundays with some carousing. The group took its inspiration from Rabelais’s satirical work Gargantua and the fictional monks at Thelème, whose motto was “Do what thou wilt,” a philosophy that would later influence occultists in the 20th century, who in their own turn would be called Satanists and even embrace the label, foremost of these being Aleister Crowley, but we may leave that colorful figure for another episode. It is enough here to say that The Hell-Fire Club has been rather inaccurately remembered and unfairly maligned. In reality, nothing more nefarious went on there than might be expected to occur inside the windowless rooms of your local Masonic temple.

But indeed, what might go on within those secretive enclaves? Much has been made of a nebulous and secret connection between the Masonic fraternity and the Knights Templar, suggesting that the latter actually survived their extermination by hiding among the ranks of the former and incorporating their traditions and rituals into those of the Freemasons. So then, of course, if the Templars were secretly Satanists, might not the Masons who received them and protected them be devil worshippers as well? In the 19th century, an era that saw much anti-Masonic sentiment, there arose evidence that, indeed, the Satanic Masonic conspiracy was real and more widespread than any might have imagined.

In 1885, a writer best known by the pen name Léo Taxil, who had previously been a major critic of the Catholic Church, gave up his secular crusade against them and converted to the faith very publicly. Now firmly on the Church’s side, he began to aim his pen and his sharp words at the enemies of the Pope, foremost of which was the Masonic fraternity, which Pope Leo XIII had condemned for its religious tolerance. During the course of Taxil’s crusade against Freemasonry, he claimed to have uncovered a secret Gnostic tradition, suggesting that the Masons worshiped the devil, Lucifer, as the true and misunderstood god of light, and despised Adonai, the god of the bible, as a false and cruel deity. He revealed in his writings that for many years, the original Baphomet idol of the Knights Templar had resided at the Masonic Temple in Charleston, South Carolina, the seat of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, where the Grand Master of its Supreme Council, Albert Pike—a military figure of the Mexican-American War as well as the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, whose statue stands today in Washington, D.C.—was inspired to establish a secret Luciferian branch of Masonry there call the Reformed Palladium. The Palladists, unknown to much of the rank and file of everyday Masons, performed grotesque Luciferian rituals, which included sexual debauchery, for unlike most of Freemasonry, the Palladian Rite secretly initiated women into its ranks.

Masonic devil worship, as alleged by Léo Taxil, complete with Templar costumes and Baphomet idol, via Freemason Information

Soon it was not Taxil alone alleging these things, as in an 1891 pamphlet, one Adolphe Ricoux published what he claimed were the theological writings of Albert Pike himself , explicating the notion that there were two gods, Adonai and Lucifer, and the Palladist Freemasons were rightly to be called Luciferians, as Satanists accepted the theology of Christianity but chose to worship evil instead of good while Luciferians rejected the entire paradigm, claiming it to be lies spread by Adonai, god of evil and darkness.

Perhaps the most frightening exposé of Palladian Freemasonry’s devil worship came the next year, when a huge serial publication called The Devil in the 19th Century was printed and disseminated. In it, one Dr. Bataille told the extraordinary story of his infiltration of the evil Palladists.

Serving as a ship’s surgeon aboard the steamboat Anadyr in 1880, Dr. Bataille had occasion to befired an Italian silk merchant named Gaëtano Carbuccia healthy and ribald atheist who during the course of his journeys appeared to transform before Bataille’s eyes into a forlorn and feeble old man. Investigating, Bataille coaxed from Carbuccia his story of becoming involved in the Palladian Rite of Freemasonry, where during one ceremony, he witnessed a séance at the altar of Baphomet over the skulls of fallen missionaries at which the shining figure of Lucifer appeared in corporeal form. Believing himself damned for his participation, he had lost all hope in redemption.

Obsessed with this story, Dr. Bataille embarked on a journey of his own that would lead him around the world and into the very heart of a palpable darkness. In Naples, he bought his way into the Masonic brotherhood, and he began his infiltration in what today is called Sri Lanka, where having insinuated himself among the Palladists there, he was taken to a hut to give his medical opinion on a bedridden woman, whom he assured them was wasted away to near death, if she was not dead already. Promptly, then, the woman suddenly rose, crawled to an altar beneath the figure of Baphomet, and allowed herself to be burned alive by the chanting devil worshipers.

Thereafter, having still not learned enough of these Palladists and their horrors, Bataille went to India, to a French colonial settlement, where once again penetrating the inner circle of Luciferian activity there, he visited a temple where worshipers surrounding Baphomet’s statue had allowed themselves to waste away until they were rotting, like living corpses supplicating themselves before the idol, their flesh ulcerating and gangrenous, faces eaten by rats. One of them tried to call out to Beelzebub, but each time he tried to speak, his eye, which hung out of its socket, fell into his mouth. When no devil was conjured, a woman was brought out and cheerfully burned her arm in hot coals. This also not successfully evoking Lucifer, they moved on to a gruesome sacrifice of a goat, and then to cutting the throat of one of the putrefying supplicants as a human sacrifice. All of the rituals failed in their object of conjuring the devil, but they succeeded in leaving Dr. Bataille sick for days.

Cover illustration of "The Devil in the XIX Century," via Wikimedia Commons

Eventually, the doctor arrived at Calcutta, where he was conducted to a mountain atop which seven temples had been built. In each of these temples, he saw countless horrors, such as baptism into a pit of writhing venomous snakes, the sacrifice of numerous animals, the spontaneous levitation and disappearance of devil worshipers, and a final ceremony in a charnel house where participants made their incantations while lying in the cold embrace of decomposing corpses.

The good doctor continued on his dark journey of initiation into Palladism, going next to Singapore, then China, and finally to the Great City of Lucifer, the Rome of Satan, Charleston, South Carolina. During the course of his infiltration, Dr. Bataille came to learn of two women who represented a struggle for the heart of Palladism. One was Sophia Walder, chief of the female order, and the other was a newcomer, Diana Vaughan. Sophia was said to keep a serpent familiar and to wield great supernatural power, having the ability of substitution, to be able to transform herself at will into other, often well-known figures. Diana also was known to levitate and bilocate, or be in more than one place at a time, and on some occasions when the demon Asmodeus was successfully conjured, he made it clear that he favored Diana and would eventually take her as his wife. The rift between these two women split the Reformed Palladium, until, like Leo Taxil himself, Diana Vaughan saw the error of her ways and converted to Catholicism. In an effort to make amends for her Satanic activity, she began to publish a serialized exposé of her own entitled Memoirs of an Ex-Palladist.

The wealth of testimony being published by Léo Taxil and others caused a resurgent Satanic Panic and Anti-Masonic movement at the end of the 19th century, such that Taxil even had an audience with and support from Pope Leo XIII. After Diana Vaughan’s conversion and the publication of her memoirs had begun, many in the press demanded to interview her, and in 1897, Léo Taxil arranged a press conference at the Geographical Society, promising that Diana Vaughan would finally present herself to the public. At the appointed time, Taxil spoke to the gathered crowd… and explained that he had perpetrated one of the greatest hoaxes in modern history. Not only was Diana Vaughan an invention of his, but so was Dr. Bataille and Adolphe Ricoux and all of the awful details about the Reformed Palladium, which he had fabricated. Even his conversion to Catholicism had been part of the hoax, which was all calculated to make a fool of the Pope and the Catholic Church. Calling it a “joyous obfuscation,” he predicted that it would be met with “a universal roar of laughter.” “Palladism,” he said, “my most beautiful creation, never existed except on paper and in thousands of minds! It will never return!”

Léo Taxil, looking rather pleased with himself, via MasonicDictionary.com

But of course it did, though perhaps not under the same name. Not even a hundred year later, the Satanic Panic in America had people believing again in secret cemetery conclaves and far-reaching diabolical conspiracies. This is the nature of historical blindness. When blind spots persist in our past, and when we turn a blind eye to the lessons to be learned there, we fall into the most foolish of patterns and repeat some of the most shameful passages in history. To quote a writer who himself was considered a Satanist, “The Devil’s best trick is to convince us that he does not exist.” On the contrary, considering the death and suffering that resulted from accusations of witchcraft and devil worship throughout history, it would seem his greatest victory was in convincing the world that he did exist.

The Specter of Devil Worship, Part One

October 23, 2017 by Nathaniel Lloyd

In this installment, we’ll be discussing a subject that requires an examination of the details of alleged violent crimes against children. Reader be warned.

For this Halloween edition of Historical Blindness, we’ll be exploring a horror trope that that has been popular in Hollywood ever since the 1968 Roman Polanski classic, Rosemary’s Baby. We’ll be looking at Satanism and the historical basis for the widespread belief that there exists a vast conspiracy of devil worshipers who engage in profane and horrifying ceremonies at the behest of their dark lord. Of course, many today still remember the moral crisis of the 1980s, the so-called Satanic Panic, in which allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse proliferated. Although the consensus today is that such prevalent secret rituals likely never happened and were instead simply the imaginings of troubled minds encouraged by the suggestions of irresponsible psychologists and law enforcement professionals, there yet remain many people, especially among evangelical Christians, who firmly believe that such Satanic conspiracies exist to this day and stretch much further back in history than the ’80s. The question at hand, then, is the truth of this proposition. What is the history of Satanism, and how accurate are the allegations regarding its rituals and practices? Indeed, has it ever truly existed as represented in popular culture? Thank you for joining us for part one of our in-depth investigation into The Specter of Devil Worship.

What the Satanic Panic was seems apparent enough simply from its apt name, a moral panic over Satanism. But without some understanding of this phenomenon’s dimensions—its prevalence and most telling characteristics—one cannot begin to appreciate the extraordinary features of this moral panic, which was much more than mere urban legend and gossip among conservative busybodies. This panic involved accusations of widespread physical abuse of children, ritualized in occult ceremonies, with implications of massive conspiracy and organized murder. Some might separate the Satanic Panic from the Child Abuse Panic, differentiating between cases alleging only the abuse of children and those that claimed Satanic rituals were a major component, but in truth most cases of the former kind, like the McMartin Preschool case, usually ended up transforming into cases of the latter kind as further allegations came out. These accusations, were made by the children themselves, more often than not, during poorly conducted interviews and therapy sessions involving hypnosis, recovered memories and a great deal of suggestion and leading questions, and were met with astonishing credulity, encouraged by community organizations such as Believe the Children. Those accused of child abuse and the somehow even more nefarious Satanic Ritual Abuse, or SRA, in some cases are even still serving time for crimes alleged during this roundly discredited phenomenon. This panic, at its height, became institutionalized and systemic, with entire wings law enforcement devoted to rooting it out according to established best practices, with actual specializations cultivated among psychologists who consulted on such cases and with concrete legislation enacted to make it easier for children to make accusations without having to face those they accused or testify in open court.

The leading psychiatrist in this field was one Lawrence Pazder. It was he who codified the concept of Satanic Ritual Abuse, and he was the most prominent consultant to law enforcement in cases where it was suspected. Pazder derived his authority on the subject from the fact that he had treated a woman named Michelle who claimed to have experienced Satanic Ritual Abuse in perhaps the first and certainly the most distressing such case. Pazder published a book on the topic in 1980, titled Michelle Remembers, thereby kicking off the Satanic Panic.

A photo of Michelle Smith taken by Pazder during a session, via National Post

Michelle first came to Dr. Pazder’s office in 1976, referred to his psychiatric care by her physician after having suffered a miscarriage. After losing her child, she had continued to hemorrhage without any apparent physical reason, causing her doctor to suspect her troubles were psychogenic. A pretty, dark-haired 27-year-old woman, she lay on Pazder’s couch and spoke to the doctor about her dreams, disturbing dreams about spiders coming out from under skin, a nightmare that Pazder viewed as symbolic of some deep horror she held inside. After some months of therapy, his suspicions were confirmed when a deep well of emotion suddenly burst during a session and Michelle screamed uncontrollably for almost half an hour before reverting to a childlike state. Then, over the course of many sessions, she recovered vivid memories of being abused by groups of people wearing black, holding black candles, in rooms draped with black cloth. In these ceremonial sessions, she was sometimes violated by having foreign objects, “colored sticks,” forced into her, and once she was given an enema so that her abusers could more easily compel her to defecate on a Bible and a crucifix. During these rituals, she was also confronted with death in horrifying ways, watching participants tear living cats apart with their teeth, seeing dismembered corpses stitched together and galvanized into twitching by electrical shock, being forced to lie in a coffin with a decaying corpse. And most sickening were her claims of the cultists’ use of dead babies. They were known to cut them in half over her and to rub their severed body parts on her. During one climactic ceremony, they placed Michelle inside a hollow statue, naked. Inside the statue with her were live snakes and parts of dead babies, which she was made to force through an opening, to their vile delight, pushing them out of the statue’s mouth.

Certainly an appalling story, but was it true? Some particulars actually defy belief. Beyond dramatic mystical flourishes like the appearance of such supernatural beings as Satan, mantled in flame, and Mary, clothed in light, there are unusual elements of her recollections that bear the quality of dream or nightmare: items appearing out of nowhere, giant spiders and bats like images on Halloween decorations, and impossible occurrences such as snakes actually emerging from Michelle’s own body. And what were Dr. Lawrence Pazder’s reasons for believing them? Simply that he felt their truth.

After the book’s publication, it became a sensation, and within three years, allegations of SRA were widespread and the Satanic Panic was in full swing, with specials on major primetime news magazine and talk shows helping to spread the fear like a virus. But in 1989, voices of reason began to emerge when an FBI agent published a book critical of law enforcement’s handling of such cases, and in 1990, The Mail on Sunday out of London published an investigative piece that helped to finally debunk Michelle Remembers. The article profiled Michelle, telling of her life since the book, how she had married Dr. Pazder and made a career with him on the lecture circuit. Then it tracked down her father, who had quite a bit to say about the veracity of her story. In the book, Pazder says she claimed that her mother introduced her into the Satanic cult ceremonies and took part herself as a dazed and passive, perhaps drugged, participant. Michelle’s father, however, insisted that her mother was kind and gracious churchgoing woman whose memory her daughter has forever befouled. He offered some insight into some of Michelle’s recovered memories, pointing to the actual, far tamer incidents that may have inspired them, and thereby painted a clear picture of a mentally ill woman taken advantage of by an irresponsible mental health professional that saw a variety of opportunities in her lurid imaginings.

Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, via Getty Images

So today the Satanic Panic is dismissed by empirical and reasonable thinkers as a tissue of lies and paranoia. But of course, the 1980s was not the first time anyone had ever heard of Satanism. Had it ever been real? Had evil people ever sacrificed babies at the altar of the fallen angel Lucifer? In order to consider this question, one must study a great swathe of history, all the way back to the Middle Ages, when the specter of Devil Worship first appeared in earnest.

To understand the history of accusations of devil worship, we must go all the way back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church saw a number reform movements started that the church proper considered heretical. These were Gnostic sects, which held that there were two gods, one of the old testament and one of the new, and that all flesh was evil, which in some cases led to extreme asceticism and in others to carnal excess. Gnostic traditions had long been the enemy of Catholicism, with the church having legislated against them almost a thousand years earlier at the Council of Nicea. A Gnostic sect of the Middle Ages sprang up in Orléans, where it is said some ascetic clergy that encouraged vegetarianism and celibacy also developed some divergent doctrinal ideas. Before long, the Catholic Church spread the further accusation that this sect engaged in orgies while the very devil looked on, and that they murdered the children born of these unions, burned them and used their ashes to turn others into heretics. Here we have one of the first descriptions of what might later be termed a Black Mass, complete with a profanation of the Eucharist by the baking of dead children into the bread. Historians, however, view these allegations as dubious, for such accusations had been around a long time before this, directed first at Jews in the form of the Blood Libel, and then later at early Christians themselves by the Romans.

As the Middle Ages went darkly on, further Gnostic sects appeared, many of these also in France, a place that would see a great many Satanic Panics of its own throughout history. In the 13th century, the Gnostic traditions resurged in the form of Catharism. These too were devout ascetics who had the audacity to espouse dualist beliefs and criticize the Church of Rome, which in response launched military crusades to extirpate them, and when that failed, established a system of Inquisition by which suspected heretics could be tortured and burned at the stake. Perhaps to assuage the guilt Inquisitors felt at persecuting what seemed to be fervently religious people, certain legends sprang up around the Cathars. While previously it had been understood that their traditions were of the devil in that, being heretical, they surely pleased the adversary of God, eventually these notions became quite literal, with rumors of actual devil worship. It was said that the devil approached them in various forms, such as that of a horrible toad. Then he came to them as a cat to be worshipped, which they obliged by kissing the cat’s anus, a practice, some said, that inspired the name Cathar. After this, in line with previous allegations, it was said they had orgiastic sex and ate any children that issued from these sexual encounters. The Medieval Inquisition seemed to find heretics everywhere, and this may be easier to fathom when one considers that the church forced those condemned as heretics to forfeit all their property not only to their Inquisitors, but also as a kind of reward to those who had accused them. And while many of these accused heretics admitted their devil worship to their Inquisitors, these confessions were extracted by torture and therefore dubious in the extreme.

The devil directing Cathars to kiss a cat's anus, via Cathar.info

The Inquisition did not disappear with the Cathars, either. In the early 14th century, the King of France, Philip the Fair, accused a very prominent religious-military order called the Knights Templar. This order had been established after the First Crusade to provide protection to Christians making pilgrimage to the Holy Land and was approved as an official order by the Catholic Church itself. Nevertheless, the Inquisition responded to King Philip’s accusations with alacrity, and the confessions that emerged from the Templars’ trial painted the picture of a truly diabolical society. There were, of course the traditional charges leveled against heretics, that of dishonoring the cross and engaging in licentious sex, which as a fraternal organization, was alleged to be sodomy. They were even accused of worshiping a cat like the Cathars! But it is another accusation of idolatry which has proven the most long-lived and damning. The Knights Templar were accused of worshiping an idol in the form of a head that was named Baphomet at their trial, and ever since, this has become an alternate name for the devil, alongside Satan, Lucifer and Beelzebub. But what was this Baphomet, really? Based on some descriptions of it as a bearded head, it has been suggested that it was as innocent as an image of Christ, and variously, based on a similarity between name, it has been identified with Mohammed. But the idol was also described as being many-headed or having multiple faces, which might suggest a depiction of the Trinity or the dualism of Gnostic thought. However, the fact is there doesn’t appear to even be any proof that this image, whatever it was, had even been venerated by the Templars, for any number of relics representing a variety of traditions may have been discovered in the temple of this order, perhaps acquired during the Crusade and kept as curiosities, or perhaps deposited there by someone else. It was, indeed, common practice for the Knights Templar to store and protect the valuable property of merchants and noblemen alike, and they had become a kind of medieval bank, a fact that many historians suggest is the true reason for the accusations Philip the Fair made against them. The king was in dire financial straits, a fact that had precipitated riots that had driven him to take refuge with the Templars themselves! By leveling accusations against the wealthy Templars, accusations he knew they would confess to under torture, Philip essentially arranged the redistribution of their wealth to himself and the church. And his gambit succeeded; though most of the Templars thereafter recanted their confessions, they were burned at the stake regardless.

Knights Templar being burned at the stake, via istorianasveta.eu

Already one detects a pattern, one that should be familiar to even the lay student of history: that of the “witch hunt.” And in the 15th century, we have the European witch craze itself, during which the Inquisition asserted that women, frequently midwives, actually flew by night astride their enchanted broomsticks to sabbats whereat they engaged in promiscuous sex with each other as well as with demons, eating the children that issued from these unholy unions, of course, and performing heinous magic to do mischief against the god-fearing, destroying their crops and sickening their children. There was, indeed, almost no misfortune that could not be blamed on the evil doings of local woman. In order to give a clearer picture of the devil worship and Satanic rituals alleged of these witches, let us consider the following description of a sabbat as it was first recorded in the Compendium Maleficarum, an Italian witch-hunting manual published 121 years after the scene it details:

In 1594, a young woman from Aquitane is reported to have stood trial before the Parliament of Bordeaux. Described as appearing intelligent, she confessed, without being subjected to any torture, to her corruption by a particular man, who had led her to a field and drawn a circle upon the ground with while reading aloud from a black book. After this ritual, a great, black goat, with a black candle burning between its horns, appeared in the company of two women and another man, this one wearing the vestments of a priest. The goat spoke, inquiring about her, and her corrupter answered, saying she had been brought there to become one of the goat’s subjects. Approving, the goat demanded they all make their veneration: making the sign of the cross with the wrong hand and approaching to lift the goat’s tail and kiss its anus. The next time she was taken to the field, a tress of her hair was cut and presented to the goat as a sign that she was his bride, whereupon the goat led her to the woods and violated her painfully. She was struck with horror at the sensation of the goat’s semen, which was ice cold.

The girl from Aquitane described numerous subsequent rituals in the field, some of which appeared to be a profane reenactment, or mockery, of the Mass, the first recorded description, in fact, of the Black Mass. In this ceremony, their corrupted priest raised a slice of turnip dyed black in place of the Eucharistic Host, and offered a chalice filled with water rather than wine. In place of Holy Water, each was anointed with the diabolical goat’s urine, and the rite concluded with every witch reporting on the spells, curses and poisons they had used against unsuspecting innocents.

A dark and disgusting rite, if it were true, but of course if one were to believe such a tale despite the incredible detail of the talking goat with the icy seed and the uncanny similarity of the ritual with that of Cathars accused of kissing a different animal’s rear end, one has to confront the problem of how and why such accusations were made and spread, and how such confessions were extracted. Almost invariably, this was by means of torture. Now in this instance, we have the claim that the confessor was not subjected to torture, but regardless, when torture was so liberally resorted to as a means of drawing out what Inquisitors wanted to hear, it was no less a factor when only a threat. This girl of Aquitane may have given the Inquisitors the tale of an awful sabbat that they expected just to avoid torment. In this way, torture, whether it be applied or merely threatened, corrupts all testimony.

Witches kiss the posterior of a goat-headed devil at their sabbat, via Medievalists.net

But these days, with Western culture’s modern fascination with the witch craze, the reasonable judgments of historians have prevailed upon public imagination, such that most now accept witch hunts for what they were. We understand that these so-called witches were midwives and innocent old women caught in webs of lies and accusations made by townsfolk looking for scapegoats as well as by other accused looking to save their own skins, literally. On some occasions, as well, we see that herbal healers were seen as brewers of potions and casters of spells and curses, the witch at the cauldron, as it were, when in reality they were little more than mixers of ointments and makers of poultices. There is evidence as well that these herbalists dabbled in the use of hallucinogenic drugs, derived from herbs such as hemlock, nightshade and mandrake. These were likely to cause illness when ingested orally, but could be safely taken by applying it to the mucous membranes of the female genitals. Their applicator of choice? A broomstick, greased with their hallucinogenic ointment. This they would straddle naked, and in their minds, they soared beyond the clouds. Thus some witches, confessing to their nightly flights on broomsticks, may have been telling the truth as they understood it, but they appear to have been guilty only of substance abuse rather than of devil worship.

Here, at the height of the witch craze and the Medieval Inquisition, we shall end part one of our examination of the Specter of Devil Worship. Already we can discern a pattern of false accusations and pious outrage resulting in the spread of rumors of diabolical rituals and the veneration of evil. Can it be that the entire phenomenon never existed? Is it possible that purposeful distortion of the truth, in combination with innocent credulity, has led to the perpetuation of a vast legend throughout history? Or were there cases of actual devil worship and genuine demonic sorcery?

Join us on Halloween for Part Two, in which we’ll dive even deeper into the history of devil worship.

Jubal Early's Lost Cause

October 10, 2017 by Nathaniel Lloyd

Welcome to a very special episode installment of Historical Blindness. It has been a full calendar year since I started this project. At the time, we were in the full throes of an awful presidential election year, and although I had envisioned this blog as a study of history’s weaknesses by telling the stories of mysteries we still can’t solve and false history that misleads us to a misunderstanding of the past, I chose to make my first post overtly political, looking at a demagogue who stirred up anti-immigrant sentiment because I felt and still feel strongly about any politician that rises to power by fomenting violence and dividing us.

Now, a year later, and I’m starting to see the term "historical blindness" thrown around quite a bit in the news. Ever since the sad events at Charlottesville, and more specifically since Donald Trump’s equivocation over who was at fault for the violence that took place, when he painted both sides as equivalent and defended the sentiment that Confederate monuments should not be toppled, suggesting that Robert E. Lee was as important a figure as George Washington, or at least that the two were equally immoral in condoning and engaging in slavery--or in Lee’s case, defending it through military insurrection--I have been getting Google alerts for a variety of articles in which the term I thought I coined for the title of this blog keeps showing up to describe this distortion or purposeful misunderstanding the past.

Therefore, yet again, a year in and almost a year since that fateful presidential election, and I feel I must address a very hot button issue. To any readers and friends from the South, if you feel affronted by this subject matter or the assertions I make, I implore you to read with an open mind, to check for yourself the sources I’ll provide on the website’s reading list, and, true to the purpose of this podcast, to question received history. Indeed, our topic falls squarely within the purview of this project's theme, for the very notion that Robert E. Lee should be lionized as an equal to our founding fathers is part and parcel with a distorted view of the Confederacy that has been touted ever since the end of the Civil War and which led to these monuments being erected in the first place. The veneration of Robert E. Lee, however, was only one aspect of this false narrative, which can be traced back to one man, a commander of Confederate troops and thereafter a fugitive and a “historian,” though I use the word loosely and with irony. This false historian, through his assiduous misrepresentation of the facts, almost single-handedly succeeded in changing the way many would think about the character and motivation of the South, even in the North, and in modern day, among the lay public as well as historiographers. This is the story the man who proved that history is not always written by the victors. Thank you for keeping an open mind as I relate the story of Jubal Early’s Lost Cause.

Confederate Pictorial Envelope, 1861, via Civil Discourse

Odds are that at different times in your life, you’ve heard two competing narratives about the reasons for the secession of the South and the subsequent Civil War. Maybe you’ve heard that it was all over slavery; that’s clear enough for any child to understand. And perhaps, in a history class or in some intent conversation with a confident friend, you learned that this was an oversimplification, and that it was really about question of state’s rights versus the sovereignty of the federal government. Well that certainly does make the struggle of the Confederacy seem more justified, then, and maybe even downright noble, doesn’t it? And it’s a great perspective to take when you want to seem smarter than others in the room, telling them that they’re oversimplifying a more complicated matter and villainizing the rebels. But what if it really was just that simple? What if Southern states did only secede in a bid to preserve an economy predicated on a system of human bondage that it saw as being under attack by the North? Indeed, the first states to secede did so in direct response to the election of an abolitionist president in Abraham Lincoln, and any who doubt that the perpetuation of slavery was the central impetus for secession would do well to examine secessionist pamphlets then in circulation, such as one titled “The Doom of Slavery in the Union: Its Safety Out of It.” Those who argue that most Southerners did not own slaves and therefore wouldn’t have fought for the institution discount the motivation of ambition, as even poor subsistence farmers had plans of eventually running large plantations with slave labor, a fact clearly appealed to in another secessionist pamphlet, “The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder,” which bore the subtitles, “The Right of Peaceful Secession” and “Slavery in the Bible.” To those who might point to another secessionist pamphlet, “The South Alone Should Govern the South,” as proof that state sovereignty was at least an aspect of their argument, it would behoove them to read on to that publication’s subtitle as well, which reads, “And African Slavery Should Be Controlled by Those Only Who Are Friendly to It.” Indeed, one only has to look at the verbiage present in the first Ordinance of Secession, ratified by South Carolina, where all these pamphlets were published. In their “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” delegates cite “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery,” in particular decrying interference with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. The second state to secede, Mississippi, stated their reasons even more flatly: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” And in their “declaration of the causes which impel the state of Texas to secede from the federal union,” delegates from that state gave one of the most racist and awful rationales for secession: “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”

Therefore, it seems apparent that indeed Southern states attempted to dissolve the Union and met the United States armed forces in open military rebellion for the essential reason that they wished to preserve the institution of slavery. So then where did this notion come from that it wasn’t about slavery at all? How did this narrative of the nobility of the Southern cause emerge? Where did the idea that they were simply fighting for freedom against an oppressive central government originate? The truth is that this take on the Confederacy really only came out after the fact, and maybe this is understandable. People have a tendency to view the past through rose-tinted lenses and with hindsight find ways to justify even the most reprehensible behavior. So perhaps this conception of Southern motivation developed naturally among many Southerners during Reconstruction and just happened to find its way into mainstream historical thought. But the truth is that we actually can trace the creation of this myth, which stands as only one among a chain of lies and misrepresentations, perpetrated by one man before being disseminated by others, in order to recast the past in a light favorable to the South and thereby tell a different story to future generations

Jubal Early in Confederate military garb, via Wikimedia Commons

Jubal Anderson Early was something of a curmudgeon and an elitist. The son of a slaveholding Virginia family, it appears he may not have owned any slaves himself, but with ideas about the glory of the Southern past and the aristocratic gentility of prominent Southern families, he was known to doggedly support the rule of the landed slaveholding class. As a Whig, he was something of an outsider among Virginia Democrats, and indeed he found himself standing in opposition to secession, but when he could not stand against the rising tide of history, he exchanged party politics for devotion to the Southern and Confederate cause. As a veteran of the late Seminole Wars in Florida as well as the Mexican-American War, he offered his “own head on the block as a willing victim for the good of the Commonwealth,” becoming an important lieutenant of Robert E. Lee and commanding troops in numerous battles.

His subordinates and peers knew Early as a cantankerous and quarrelsome old cuss, earning himself the nickname “Bad Old Man.” He had ever been an outsider and contrarian, living as a bachelor, yet fathering children with a 16-year-old girl and, flouting all societal customs, giving his name to his bastard issue. He has been called “startlingly profane,” and is credited with wielding an “acid tongue” when criticizing his underlings and fellow commanders. And yet, for someone so outspoken and critical of others, his record of military command is spotty at best. At the First Battle of Mannassas, he proved himself as a brigadier by routing Union Forces, but at the inconclusive Battle of Williamsburg, he lost many men and sustained an injury himself that took him out of commission for a while. After his recovery, he earned distinction over the course of several battles and received promotion to major-general but thereafter failed to distinguish himself as a commander and contributed to the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. During the second Shenandoah Valley campaign, Early led a successful invasion of Maryland, but pulled up short of the capital, failing to make the decisive push into Washington that many believe he might have. Finally, after Early’s loss of three battles in a row and his utter defeat Waynesboro, General Lee relieved him of his command, but he did so with such tact, treating him with such respect, that he retained Early’s highest esteem and undying loyalty.

After the war, Jubal Early remained an unreconstructed rebel, and he fled to Cuba disguised as a farmer, rather than remain to endure the yoke of Yankee governance. Afterward, while living in Mexico, Early received a letter from Robert E. Lee that indicated the general wanted to write about the war and needed whatever relevant documents Early might have kept, for he believed it important to “transmit, if possible, the truth to posterity, and do justice to our brave Soldiers.” While Jubal Early had already been collecting his own thoughts about the late conflict and formulating his decidedly skewed perspective, which he expressed in letters during that time, this request from Lee proved to be the impetus he needed to begin his compositions in earnest. Within a few short months, Jubal Early had drafted a memoir in which can be seen the beginnings of his Lost Cause ideology. He continued to write while in Mexico, and thereafter in Canada, and by 1869 he had returned to Virginia, where he joined the Southern Historical Society. This organization he essentially transformed into an organ for propaganda, publishing 52 volumes of papers over a decade, laying out his Lost Cause mythology. This ambitious undertaking, an effort “to construct the archives in which shall be collected…memoirs to serve for future history,” was largely successful at influencing historians over the next century.

Fugitive Jubal Early in disguise as a farmer, via Wikimedia Commons

This Myth of the Lost Cause that Jubal Early and his collaborators promulgated comprised a few principal notions. One of these I’ve already discussed—the claim that states didn’t secede to preserve slavery but rather to preserve states’ rights in the face of federal tyranny. Another is not even worth considering seriously: the claim that slavery was an overall benevolent institution, in which slaves were treated kindly and fairly and protected from the cruelties of life outside of bondage. This lie can be countered with even a cursory reading of any slave narrative, all of which unfailingly enumerate the many cruelties and evils of the institution. Moreover, this is the same lie traditionally fed to the slaves themselves to scare them out of attempts at escaping to freedom.

The rest of the tenets of the Lost Cause also promote a conception of the Confederacy as noble rebels rather than as traitors fighting to maintain their racist system of human subjugation, and these contribute directly to the continued reverence for Confederate leaders we see today, for they paint Confederate commanders and soldiers as underdog heroes. They claim that not only was it a Lost Cause, but it was also a hopeless cause, as Southerners were desperately outnumbered by Union forces yet fought and gave their lives regardless, depicting them as true martyrs. The myth goes that Confederate forces only won as many battles as they did because Robert E. Lee was one of the most brilliant tacticians in history. And not only were Robert E. Lee and his soldiers the underdog heroes of the Civil War, but also Union general Ulysses S. Grant was nothing more than a clumsy butcher who only succeeded against the Confederacy through the waging of “total war,” using his superior numbers to slaughter them in a most ungentlemanly way.

Some of these claims I won’t even bother to address. Firstly, the idea that the Union was only able to defeat the Confederacy through brute force and unprecedented tactics seems to contradict the notion that the war was unwinnable for the South. It seems like they’re saying, “There’s no way we could’ve won,” then turning around and saying, “You only won by not fighting fair!” And Jubal Early himself should not have been decrying the tactics of his enemy, as he relied on some morally questionable strategies himself. For example, in Maryland, when the residents of a certain town didn’t greet him happily and offer support and reinforcements, he threatened to burn their town to the ground unless they paid a ransom of $200,000, which today would be about $3 million.

The truth is that many historians today believe that the South, while certainly outnumbered, could very well have won the war, or at least achieved a stalemate. They might have successfully sought international support, but instead they failed in foreign diplomacy. And they might have increased their military forces through the emancipation and enlistment of their own slaves, but they remained steadfastly devoted to maintaining the institution of slavery—because, of course, that was their principal reason for fighting—and so they lost.

We must, however, examine the idolization of Robert E. Lee, for it is so relevant today in our discussion of Confederate monuments. President Trump, in his egregious reaction to the events at Charlottesville, suggested an equivalence between George Washington and Robert E. Lee and told press that they were “changing history.” This is not only a distortion, it’s a reversal of the truth. Confederate monuments venerate not the man Robert E. Lee, but rather the myth that Jubal Early and his Southern Historical Society erected in his place. In their estimation, Lee was a not only a noble gentleman and a scholar but also an unparalleled military mind that could do no wrong. At times, praise of Lee bordered on religious, as if Early and his accomplices were trying to deify him in memory. But one fact remained to trouble their depiction of Lee: the fact that he lost the important battle of Gettysburg. This Early explained by offering a scapegoat. Perfect and godlike general that Lee was, there was no way he could be at fault for the loss, so Early blamed his lieutenants, and one in particular, James Longstreet, who he claimed refused to carry out Lee’s orders and thereby lost the battle for the South. This resulted, as some historians have phrased it, in “a historiographical puzzle, involving a total ‘rewriting’ of the Gettysburg saga by former Confederates.” In truth, however, James Longstreet seems to have been unjustly maligned. Lee alone can be held responsible for the command decisions as well as the conduct of those he commanded at Gettysburg, and there is historiography that argues convincingly that Longstreet actually provided wise counsel that Lee ignored. If one were going to spread the blame around to underlings, then Jubal Early himself would need to shoulder some of it, as would others.

This statement of Trump’s was not the first time that Washington and Lee have been compared, either. One needs look no further than Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA, to see the two figures honored together. And this was the case in 1890, when during a grand parade in Richmond, VA, in which pictures of Washington and Lee had been hung side by side, a huge statue of Robert E. Lee was hauled through the streets of Richmond by people rather than draft animals, after the manner in which George Washington’s statue had been hauled through the same streets more than thirty years earlier, It was an impressive affair that celebrated the Lost Cause view of the war, with Jubal Early parading on horseback and speechifying, and the pariah James Longstreet was present as well, though not nearly so welcome. Events such as these, arranged and promoted by Jubal Early and his Historical Society as well as other veterans and those sympathetic to the Lost Cause view of the war, strengthened for posterity the myth of the nobility of the Confederate cause and ensured the magnification of Lee as a figure to be revered alongside the founding fathers.

The unveiling of the statue in Rochmond, via the Library of Virginia

About four years later, Jubal Early died falling down some stairs, but the propaganda machine he had set in motion continued to move and build momentum. When other veterans of the Civil War began to die off, an organization called the United Daughters of the Confederacy launched a campaign that would see a great number of Confederate monuments built during the early 1900s, not coincidentally just during the formalization of Jim Crow segregation laws, in a clear effort to whitewash the past and to establish a dominant culture of white supremacy. And then again, a backlash against the passage of the Civil Rights Act saw yet more of these monuments to a false history erected.

This is quintessential historical blindness, a false and indeed purposely distorted narrative that has been systematically disseminated in an effort to control the public’s perceptions of a region’s shameful past. The apologists of Dixieland have for more than a 150 years refused to face historical truth, instead relying on lies and misdirection, imploring anyone who does attempt to scrutinize their history to, as the song says, “look away, look away, look away.”

I relied on a couple of fantastic books as sources for this episode, including a collection of essays entitled The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History and a book similarly titled the Myth of the Lost Cause by Edward H. Bonekemper III. Find links to these books on Amazon through our Episode Reading List