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local
Catholic church; the service was better.
    When the priest stood up, he announced that all human beings are free, and that provided they lived in the spirit of the Lord, they could do what they liked. “We must become one with
God.” Then he took a young girl and led her to the altar. The two of them removed their clothes. Then the priest turned to the congregation and told them to do the same. “This is the
Virgin Mary and I am Jesus. Now do as we do.” The girl lay down on the altar, and the priest lay on top of her and, in full view of the congregation, commenced an act of intercourse. Then the
congregation each seized his dancing partner, and lay down on the floor.
    In the chaos that followed, the wife did not notice as her husband took hold of her hand and pulled off her wedding ring; she was totally absorbed in her partner. Realizing that no one was
paying any attention to him, the husband slipped away.
    When his wife returned home, he asked her angrily how she dared to give herself to another man, even in the name of religion. She indignantly denied everything, demanding whether, as the wife of
a wealthy merchant, he thought she would behave like a prostitute. But when the husband asked her what had happened to her wedding ring, she went pale. Then, as he held it out to her, she realized
that he had seen everything, and burst into tears.
    The wife was beaten until she bled, but she was more fortunate than the others, who were arrested by inquisitors and burnt at the stake.
    The story may or may not have happend, but such congregations actually existed. They came into existence soon after the year AD 1200, and soon spread across Europe. The
Free Spirit movement declared that God is within us all, and that therefore the Church is unnecessary – in fact, it is the Whore of Babylon. The great poets are as ‘holy’ as the
Bible. Sex must be an acceptable way of worshipping God, since it brings such a sense of divine illumination – in his book The Black Death , Johanne Nohls gives this account of
the Brethren:
    The bas reliefs . . . in French churches . . . represent erotic scenes. In the Cathedral of Alby a fresco even depicts sodomites engaged in sexual intercourse. Homosexuality was also well known in parts of Germany, as is proved by the trials of the Beghards and Beguins in the fourteenth century, particularly in the confessions of the brethren
     Johannes and Albert of Brünn, which are preserved in the Greifswald manuscript. From these it is evident that the Brethren of the Free Mind did not regard homosexuality as sinful. ‘And if one brother desires to commit sodomy with a male, he should do so without let or hindrance and without any feeling of sin, as otherwise he would not be a Brother of the Free
     Mind.’
    In a Munich manuscript, we read: “And when they go to confession and come together and he preaches to them, he takes the one who is the most beautiful among them and does to her all
according to his will, and they extinguish the light and fall one upon the other, a man upon a man, and a woman upon a woman, just as it comes about. Everyone must see with his own eyes how his
wife or daughter is abused by others, for they assert that no one can commit sin below his girdle. That is their belief.”
    Other curious doctrines, “such as that incest is permissible, even when practised on the altar, that no one has the right to refuse consent, that Christ risen from the dead had intercourse
with Magdalena, etc., all indicate the deterioration and confusion of moral ideas caused by the great plagues, particularly that of 1348.”
    In short, according to the Brethren of the Free Spirit, every man is his own messiah.
    Sex with a Stranger
    The Church did its best to stamp out these beliefs by sword and fire, but it still took three centuries. And even when the Free Spirits had been wiped out, the ideas continued
to exert influence. Around 1550, a man named Klaus Ludwig, who lived in