THE WORLD'S WANDERERS

They spend their time doing nothing and sleeping.

TIMOTHY
On the Messalians

From the fourth century onward, the history of Gnosticism changes its locale, its
nature, and its meaning. It is no longer written in the cities but, as in its
beginnings, all along the highroads of the Orient. After leaving Egypt and
dispersing throughout Mesopotamia, Armenia, Cappadocia, Greece, Bulgaria,
and later Bosnia, Gnosticism takes on very different forms from those which we
have seen hitherto. It is as if, by a sort of cyclical return to their earliest
aspirations, the Gnostics flee the cities to take up their wanderings once more
along the roads, on the plains, and in the mountains. With only a few rare
exceptions, it is there that we shall henceforth discover the new Gnostic
communities-communities whose way of life, principles, and techniques (ascetic
or licentious) retain their autonomy and their strangeness, and whose excesses
and insubordination will once again bring down upon their heads the
thunderbolts and excommunications of the Christians. Simultaneous with this
return to the earlier wandering life, this nomadic existence without hearth or
home, this rejection of towns and all permanent settlements, is another
significant fact: the doctrine itself loses its coherence, or at the very least its
systematic character, the mythology becomes etiolated and the written Gnostic
works rarer. Nevertheless, these groups were numerous and active and I would
like to dwell on one of them, the most spectacular, known as the Messalian sect.
Their real name-by which I mean the name they called themselves-was the
Euchites, meaning the Praying Men (`Messalians' is the Syrian translation). Their
beliefs recall the fundamental Gnostic themes regarding a lower world of
darkness and a higher world of light, but they are orientated in a somewhat
unusual direction, calling upon mystical effusion rather than the demands of
reason.
For the Euchites this world was the devil's handiwork, and everything-matter,
flesh, the human soul-was impregnated with diabolical substance. So much so
that the devil was physically and psychically present in each man, bound
consubstantially to his soul. Similarly, the history of the