Strange Sects: The Borborites

The first few centuries of Christianity were quite tumultuous. The new religion had to navigate through its final separation from Judaism, adapt to being a mostly Gentile religion and decide what that meant for what they did and believed, and cope with both Roman persecution and, later, being the state religion. There was no one statement of Christian belief, and no universal Bible, either – it took four centuries for the canon of the Bible to be set, and in the meantime there were far more books of the Old and New Testaments in use than we have in our Bibles today.

During the maelstrom of the early years, there were many varieties of Christian faith, and many different groups, some of which we only know about from the writings of the Church Fathers opposing them, while the teachings of others are lost to time. One of the more popular beliefs which was ultimately rejected by the church at large was Gnosticism, and it is one of the sub-groups within Gnosticism I want to talk about today – the Borborites.

The Borborites (also known as the Koddians, Phibionites, Barbalites, Secundians or Socratites) were a Gnostic sect mentioned from around 364AD until the 13th century. They were described as “the filthy ones”, “the ones who [must] eat separately” and were looked upon with considerable horror in the records we have of them. They were what we would now call a sex cult, something unusual in normative Christianity and in Gnosticism.

Gnosticism

To be a Gnostic is to be a “know-er” (gnosis means ‘wisdom’), and it forms a kind of mystery religion within Christianity. We have records of it from the earliest days of Christianity, and it still occurs today. There are various forms of the belief, but a common thread is that the material world – the world we see and hear and touch – is evil. The things around us, and our bodies themselves, are trapping that which is of God within us, the divine spark, and we can only be freed with the help of gnosis. The Gnostic worldview is highly dualistic, and just as the good God put this spark within mankind, so an evil god trapped that spark in flesh. The earth, and every material thing was created by an evil god – the demiurge – and, for Gnostics, the God of the Old Testament is that evil god.

Gnostic sects were often a mixture of Judaeo-Christian ideas and Platonic philosophy, and often held to complicated cosmologies involving a variety of beings emanating from the good God, including both the evil god and Christ. Many groups had interesting re-interpretations of biblical material, including revering Seth, son of Adam, as the bringer of knowledge.

While popular, Gnosticism went into a decline from the end of the Second Century to the Fourth Century. The argument that Gnosticism was a heresy won out in the mainstream church, and when the mainstream church gained power under Constantine, Gnosticism was persecuted, and all but disappeared, although one Gnostic religion (Mandaeism) has survived, and there were sporadic outbreaks of Gnostic, or Gnostic-like groups later on.

Our knowledge of some of the early Gnostic groups is quite limited. We often rely on the words of heresiologists for our information on them, information which is obviously quite biased. For some groups, we only know their names, though thanks to a fortuitous discovery of a cache of Gnostic documents at Nag Hammadi in 1945 we are much more knowledgeable than we were.

The Borborites

Epiphanius

We’re a little bit limited in the sources we have for the Borborite group, and many of our sources simply give their name in lists of heretics. We do have two important sources, however, the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis and the Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium of Theodoret. Theodoret gives us a bit of information about what the Borborites believed, while Epiphanius writes with horror of what they did, and also says that he heard of their beliefs from them, when they tried to recruit him in his youth.

Beliefs

The Borborites believed that there was an uncreated father of all, a god named Barbeloth, who had in turn created a number of beings, including Sabaoth, the being of evil who controls the world and who is the God of the Old Testament, and Christ, the perfect one. They believed that Christ was revealed by the Virgin Mary, but wasn’t born, and nor did he take on bodily flesh, because the flesh is evil. He simply put on the appearance of flesh, but wasn’t made man in any real sense. Christ came to give the knowledge (gnosis) that would enable humans to be released from this world, to rise beyond Sabaoth’s control and into the realm of Barbeloth.

In the Old Testament, Sabaoth (Tzevaot or צבאות) is usually translated “of armies” or “of hosts”, so when it’s used, we see the form “Lord of Hosts/Armies”. For Borborites, Sabaoth was the polar opposite of the good god Barbeloth, and a being who had trapped mankind and who had tricked them into worshipping him. They described him as bestial – he was a pig, which is why he forbade Jews to eat pork, and an ass, who struck Zacharias dead in the Temple when he accidentally saw his form. He made the Temple priests wear bells so that he would know they were coming, and could hide his true form from them. Let us say they weren’t too keen on him!

The group had a number of sacred scriptures, including the canonical Old and New Testaments (though they rejected the God of the OT, of course) as well as other texts including The Gospel of Perfection, The Gospel of Eve, The Apocalypse of Adam, The Gospel of Philip, The Greater Questions of Mary, The Lesser Questions of Mary, The Birth of Mary, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, The Three Steles of Seth and Noria – the name they gave to the wife of Noah.

Their beliefs would have led the mainstream Christian writers to condemn them, as they did with other Gnostics, but what truly horrified them were their religious practices.

Borborite Practices

Many Gnostics were highly ascetic, teaching celibacy, fasting and self-denial, as a consequence of their belief that the flesh was evil and a prison for the spirit. These ascetic Gnostics are more “normal”, in a way, but there was a libertine strand of the belief, one which the Borborites definitely represent.

The Borborites held parties with plentiful food and drink, and spent time pampering their bodies. They were also very keen indeed on sex, which is why the orthodox Christians like Epiphanius were horrified (the next part comes from his writings).

For the Borborites, menstrual blood and semen were both sacraments, and they were what they used when celebrating Communion. Their wives were held in common, and it rather sounds as though they went in for a lot of orgies. They didn’t want children, however, so the men practised coitus interruptus, withdrawing, and then ejaculating on their hands and those of their partner. The semen on their hands would be ceremonially offered up, and then eaten after being declared to be ‘the body of Christ’. Some of the men preferred not to have sex, and so would masturbate, again ejaculating onto their hands as “Communion”. Some of the more esteemed male members of the group would have sex with one another for the same result. When female Borborites were menstruating, their blood would be collected and shared around the group, who would consume it as “the blood of Christ”.

Coitus interruptus is not a failsafe method of preventing pregnancy, of course, and Epiphanius tells us that pregnancy did occasionally occur within the group. When it did, they had a way to “gather…the brother’s blunder up”, and that way was abortion. They would remove the foetus from the woman, cut it up, and mix spices, perfumes and honey with it, and then consume it, calling it the “perfect Passover”.

Sex was deeply important to their religion, and they had a story – in the Greater Questions of Mary, which is now lost – where Jesus took Mary Magdalene aside while they were on a mountain. He produced a woman from his side, and began to have sex with her. Like the Borborite men, he ejaculated into his hands, and ate it, telling Mary, “This we must do, that we may live.” Mary promptly fainted and was chastised for her doubt and weakness of faith.

It was less for their beliefs than for their practice of eating semen and menstrual blood (and particularly for using them as the elements in Communion) that the Borborites were condemned. Epiphanius tells us that, when he was young, some women from the group tried to entice him to join it. He read their books, and heard of their beliefs from them, and decided not to join, instead informing the local Bishops, who rooted the Borborites out from the Christian congregations and expelled them from the city.

Is it True?

There have been some questions over what we know about the Borborites. Most of our knowledge comes only from Epiphanius and he could, of course, be lying. The “religious baby-eating” charge is one that has been laid against lots of religions – it apparently being the worst the human mind can think of – and may just be a rumour from prejudice or fear.

That said, Epiphanius has no particular reason to make up the sexual elements of his tale, and they are confirmed in references to the group centuries later. We know from our own time that sex and religion go together quite often in cults, though I can’t say I like the idea of their “sacraments” myself.

So, one of the odder (and more distasteful) sects!

Inkyn de Worde

a trifle eccentric

Strange Sects: The Borborites

Gnosticism