Although Irenaeus seems only to have heard rumours rather than first-hand knowledge of these practices, he may have been quite right about Marcus's leadership, for there was indeed an early Gnostic initiation known explicitly as `the Bridal Chamber', a form of sacred sex. But sex in any form appalled the early Christians - indeed, even modern Catholicism only just tolerates it even in marriage' - and the Carpocratians were renowned for their licentiousness and the use of female prophets who channelled their powers of clairvoyance and divine inspiration for the benefit of the cult. However, as Benjamin Walker writes:
The practice inevitably led to abuse. Marcus was accused of seducing many of his young female `prophets'. Irenaeus writes that by various suggestions he makes his deluded victim believe that she has the power of prophecy. Full of false pride, and excited by the expectation of using her gift, she ventures into oracular utterance. With pounding heart she articulates any ridiculous nonsense that enters her head. Henceforth, stimulated by vanity she audaciously considers herself a veritable sibyl.'
(Nothing is new under the sun: the above passage could have been written about the legion New Age channelling cults, often run by a quasi-spiritual male leader with a libidinous personal agenda.)
Once the prophetess was established and her vanity persuaded her to continue in her new role, Marcus made his move and seduced her - or so Irenaeus and other Church fathers claimed. Perhaps they were right and Marcus was simply helping himself to the traditional cult leader's perks, or perhaps there really was a serious ritual side to their coupling, as indeed seems to be the case from the words Marcus is supposed to have uttered, quoted by Irenaeus above.
Indeed, the founder of the group, Carpocrates of Alexandria (78-138 CE), had based what was essentially a pagan-Christian hybrid religion on the cult of Isis, absorbing the complex rites of initiation - complete with secret passwords and handshakes - and baptism as an important rite. And, incredible though it may seem to Christians, Carpocrates' practices may not have been too dissimilar to those of John the Baptist's following, as we will see...
Carpocrates travelled with a woman called Alexandria, with whom he had a son, Epiphanes ('Illustrious'), the author of the influential treatise On Justice. Dead by his late teens, Epiphanes was revered as a Gnostic `aeon' with his own temple and museum complex. Carpocratian beliefs were a mixture of the teachings of both father and son.
Apart from worshipping the great Egyptian gods (with especial emphasis on the ancient Trinity of Isis, Osiris and Horus), the cult also revered the famous Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Pythagoras, besides Jesus whom they saw as partly divine. To them, there was no miraculous Virgin birth and no immaculate conception of Mary herself: Christ had been born naturally. It was rumoured that the Carpocratians possessed a sketch made of Jesus on Pilate's orders, on which they based the statue they carried in sacred procession - becoming the first known Christians to venerate a cultic image of Christ.10
The cult scandalized the more ascetic Christians on almost every level: disbelieving in both the concepts of adultery and property - they had everything in common, including sexual partners - they also banned procreation. Clearly this prohibition was more theoretical than practical, as the very existence of the holy Epiphanes proved. However, sex of all sorts was deemed obligatory, and a way of honouring the gods, as semen was the divine life- force - an aspect of Luciferanism (by any other name) that was to assume various guises over the centuries. The inborn itch of sexual desire must be honoured: `By thus sinning, the divine light of God's grace was provided with a chance to operate, a fact that was eminently pleasing to God. Sin thus became a way of salvation.'' (However, interestingly, the Carpocratians were still conventional enough to think of sex as sinning.) After the group's lavish communal meal, the room would be plunged into darkness and an indiscriminate orgy followed: as Church Father, Clement, sniffed: `uniting as they desired and with whomsoever they desired'.'
The irrepressible Reverend Montague Summers thunders: `Carpocrates even went so far as to ... [make] the performance of every species of sin forbidden in the Old Testament a solemn duty, since this was the completest mode of showing defiance to the Evil Creator and Ruler of the World'3 (the Gnostics' Demiurge or Rex Mundi - or the Old Testament's Yahweh).
However, Summers is - perhaps wilfully - missing the point, although even if he had grasped it totally, he would still hardly have approved. As Tobias Churton writes matter-of-factly:
Sex might be used either allegorically or in fact as part of Gnostic ceremonies. Semen could be regarded as a sacramental substance, as an image for the logos spermatikos (the spermatic Word cast into the world) or pneumatic spark: the fugitive fragments of spirit, diffused in Nature. Fertility was seen as a metaphor for spiritual growth. (This was how some Christian Gnostics interpreted Christ's parable of the sower who sowed seed in barren earth.)'
Of course this would have seemed like an intellectual version of making a silk purse of a sow's ear to the Church Fathers. The Carpocratians and their apologists could dress it up as they wished, but they were still filthy heretical radicals who wallowed in sin.
The Carpocratians believed that the concepts of good and evil were invented by mankind, and that everyone must suffer or enjoy the whole gamut of human experience, including the loftiest and noblest and the most humiliating and sordid acts. Every individual would be reincarnated until they had finished the immense number of possible permutations of human life. A recording angel was assigned to each person and each act, and must be invoked consciously while performing them in order to ensure that a fair karmic record is kept.
However, by far the most significant aspect of the Carpocratian beliefs is that they claimed to possess a secret Gospel of Mark that preached sexual rites in the name of Jesus. Highly compromising references to this were what Professor Morton Smith found in the library at the Mar Saba monastery in 1958. Ironically in his denunciation of the Carpocratians, Clement had unwittingly preserved material that possessed the potential to undermine seriously the whole concept of Christianity - not to mention the image of an eternally chaste Christ.
Of course the first objection must concern the authenticity or otherwise of the copy of Clement's letter, which Smith found written on the end-papers of a book dating back to 1646 - a common practice at that time when volumes began to disintegrate with age.15 Understandably, in the case of such a potentially sensational discovery, there will always be suspicions that Smith was deceived, perhaps by the Mar Saba monks, or that a disaffected seventeenth-century copyist was merely enjoying a bit of grim heretical humour - or even that the professor himself perpetrated an outrageous hoax. However, paleographers have established from an analysis of the letter that it was indeed written by Clement, whose stylistic idiosyncracies are well known. And as Clive Prince and myself noted in our 1997 The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ:
There are also peculiarities in the extracts from the `Secret Gospel' quoted in the letter that make it probable that they are genuine. (For example, it describes Jesus as becoming angry. Of the canonical Gospels only Mark attributes normal human emotions to Jesus - the others excised such elements from their accounts, and it is hardly something that the Church Fathers such have Clement would have invented.) 16
Indeed, it is extremely unlikely that any conventional Christian could even have imagined what Clement claimed, for he stated that the Carpocratians' `filthy' sex rites came via Saint Mark from Mary Magdalene - and ultimately from Jesus himself. Predictably Clement - who was later canonized - huffs and puffs with outrage that the cult `polluted the spotless and holy words of scripture to accord with their blasphemous and carnal doctrine, and by doing so wandered from the narrow road into the abyss of darkness',' yet he also acknowledges that the alternative Gospel of Mark was authentic ... Therefore he tacitly agreed that originally Christianity did practise sexual rites, although they seem to have been reserved for an inner circle of high initiates.
Of course, the implications of this are truly momentous and provide a double blow to Christianity: not only was, and is, the whole idea of sex rituals abhorrent, but also it has always been believed that the religion is primarily open to anyone, with no secrets and hidden mysteries, but here there is evidence that there was such a thing as a sexually-initiated elite of adepts.
Certainly, Professor Smith himself believed, largely on the basis of this long-lost document, that Jesus may have headed a `libertine circle'. What prompted him to make such a remarkable statement is another passage from Clement's letter, a different version of the story of the raising of Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary of Bethany (also known as Mary Magdalene)' which puts quite a different complexion on the original Jesus movement. Found in the Gospel of John in the New Testament, it famously tells how Jesus received a message that his beloved friend Lazarus was grievously sick at his home in Bethany, a village only two miles from Jerusalem. But Jesus deliberately waited four days, by which time Lazarus was not only dead but stinking in his rock tomb. As soon as Jesus arrived on the scene, Mary fell at his feet, sobbing: `Lord, had you been here, my brother would not have died'' - which
