6: for the "End and the Beginning Again", full version

Antisystems in Ethnogenesis; People dedicated to destruction.

Life-negating systems often proliferate like parasites; these negative attitudes towards everything living was the slogan for a powerful heretical movement that swept through the Balkans, most of Asia Minor, Northern Italy, Southern France, and led to incalculable victims. Let’s look at the four major world philosophies of the time.

The sphere of thought in ethnogenesis

Having familiarized ourselves with the first two phases of ethnogenesis, the rise and the overheating, we can draw a preliminary but important conclusion. In the ascent phase a stereotype of not only behavior, but also of world perception and world thinking, which is original for each case, is formed and crystallized in the Acmatic phase - what we call a "cultural type". Of course, here, too, we cannot do without Passionarity, because in order to develop a new, unlike anything else system of views and attitudes, huge expenditures of passionate energy are needed, perhaps no less than for the wars of liberation and conquest.

And if we have touched upon the question of mutual influence of culture (creation of human hands) and ethnogenesis (nature phenomenon), it makes sense to dwell upon this question in detail. I must say that culture is not a subject but an instrument of research for the ethnologist, and an extremely necessary instrument. After all, culture is just something that we can study; it is something that lies on the surface.

A very strong influence on culture is the moment of time, the moment of memory - genetic memory, traditional memory, the memory of old cultures.  That is the presence in the new culture of rudiments, which were for the newly created cultural system substrates, initial elements. This thesis sounds rather vague when you formulate it in the abstract, but now we'll move on to concrete examples and we'll see that it's real.

The fact that we pay so much attention to the ages of the ethnos, that is, to the phases of ethnogenesis, allows us to investigate ancient cultures whose initial phases are not covered by the sources and are practically unknown to historians. But the Acmatic phases are usually well covered, and since we know that the Acmatic phase takes place about a hundred and fifty years after the beginning of the manifest ascent, we can conclude that the passive impulse occurred within 300 years, taking into account the incubation period before the Acmatic phase was recorded.

There are four known cultures in the ancient world dating back to the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. The Acmatic phases of the ethnic groups that created these cultures have been well studied. The habitats of these ethnoses are located along the 30th parallel and cover Greece, Northern Persia, India, and Middle China. Apparently, there was a passional push in this band somewhere around the turn of the ninth IX to eighth VIII centuries B.C. No one really knows what was going on in these countries at that time. There are speculations, fragments of information and legends. And as for the VI-V centuries B.C., we already know a lot. If we look at four different regions: Hellas with its Ionian regions; Iran with Midia and the neighboring region of Bactria; Bengal, which is a little further south than Iran, but still admissible; and Central China, we find that at the same time, in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, there were four great, well-studied cultures here.

These are classical Greece, with its classical philosophy; the Achaemenid monarchy, with its new cultural achievement, Mazdaism, antagonistic to dualism; in India, the Buddha and his preaching; in China, within tolerance, the Confucius and Lao-tzu. All four regions have one thing in common: they all have philosophical systems which are so witty, so logical, so fascinating, that their influence still reaches us, in one way or another. All the authors are also well known. They receive enormous attention. They are studied, they are argued with. But how different they are from each other!

Hellas

When ancient Hellenes were interested in problems of the universe, existence and man's place in it, they paid attention first of all to nature. These were natural philosophers interested in how the world works. Thales of Miletus, the first of the Greek sages, believed that water is the source of all life and that "everything is full of demons", so the world is not a cosmic fabric but living beings that interact with one another. A witty system, fascinating: the Earth is a living organism, so are the rocks, the cliffs, the seas, the mountains, the valleys; everything is animated, but not like ours which we simply do not recognize. His younger contemporary, Anaximander, declared that everything was based on apeiron, an infinity; Anaxagoras, also their contemporary, suggested that everything was based on ether, a very thin gas.

Heraclitus went one step further. He suggested that there are no things at all - it is all a deception of the senses, a deception of vision, in fact there are only processes: "No one can enter twice into the same stream. And no one touches a mortal essence twice." This is perhaps close to our modern dialectical approach, although another thesis of Heraclitus, logically derived from the previous one, is perceived nowadays without sympathy: "War is the father and king of all living things; war has made some men gods, others mortal, and others slaves. Indeed, if the world is a living process, it is natural that the clash and intersection of the currents of life should be revealed as a struggle, a war. So, from his, Heraclitus', point of view, this conclusion is logical.

Pythagoras who lived in the west, in Crotona in southern Italy, developed a different concept of the universe. Pythagoras assumed that number, an abstraction, was the basis of the world. However different these teachings are, what is important is that for all the Greeks, the desire to know what is the world around us? It never occurred to them that one could be interested in something else.

Iran and Turan

Unlike the Greeks, the Persians were little interested in natural philosophy, they were interested in other things - where are friends and where are enemies, what is good and what is evil, is enmity eternal?  Here Zerdusht (I pronounce it in New Persian; Old Persian would be Zarathushtra), a native of the city of Balkh (this is in the very east of Iran), declared that it is not a matter of figuring out what the world consists of--that everyone sees for himself: there are rivers, mountains, forests, deserts, cattle, brave soldiers; the matter is the difference between day and night--light and darkness. He encapsulated this in a remarkable philosophical concept that became the basis for many kinds of dualism.

According to ancient Aryan beliefs, held by Persians, Hindus, Hellenes, Scandinavians, Slavs and all the ancient Aryans, there were three divine generations, three epochs of cosmic evolution.

The first generation was Uranus, that is, the Cosmos, a stable space filled with things. In the age of Uranus, everything was in perfect order; no one was moving anywhere, for there was no time, there was no movement.

Movement came to replace this age in the "age of Saturn," or Chronos, that is, when time appeared. Saturn, as we know, mutilated his father Uranus, imprisoned him, and began to rampage, changing everything. The world became a whirling kaleidoscope in which nothing lasts long; then monstrous mutable forms began to appear - giants.

The Greeks considered giants something utterly repulsive, and so did the Hindus, but Zerdusht decided that those whom the Hindus called "asuras" and the Greeks called "giants" or "titans" were the Ameshaspenta, the best helpers of the Bright Deity. And there he stopped.

It was a revolution in worldview. After all, the Greeks, for example, also believed in giants, but they worshipped a third element personified as Zeus, that is, a god (Zeus and Deus are the same thing; the "z" in "e" goes). Zeus' power was in electricity - lightning. Zeus defeated Saturn, imprisoned him in some cave, and brought order. He established the power of the Olympian gods, who have been at war with the giants ever since, as the giants keep attacking them.

The exact same mythologem exists in India, where Dev is also respected (Dev, Deus are the same thing). The gods are at war with the asuras, and the asuras strive to defeat the gods, but are defeated all the time, but, defeated, they immediately reorganize and attack the gods again, and so on, endlessly. It is important to note here that both Hellenes and ancient Hindus stood on the side of the gods, and Zerdusht proposed to side with the giants and, consequently, to consider the gods as devils, although in Persian they are called the same: "Dev" - in Old Persian and "Div" - in New Persian. Thus, the god became the devil; the Div, as everyone knows it now, is simply a devil.

So, in the fifth century B.C., Zerdusht managed to defeat his opponents. He persuaded Xerxes to issue an "anti-devil inscription" and forbid the veneration of devils in his state. An exception was made only for two former gods: for the beautiful Anahita (the Persians really liked her, so they allowed to worship her - she was the goddess of love and fertility) and for Mitra.

About Mitra it is necessary to tell especially. Mithra was considered the brother of Uranus (Varuna in Indian, that is, the Cosmos). Mithra is also a cosmic deity. The sun is only the eye of Mithra, but Mithra had a narrow purpose. Since war in ancient times was a constant occupation, occasionally interrupted by periods of peace, peace was sealed by an oath. In times of war, deception and disinformation of all kinds by the enemy was considered permissible - that was what war was all about,

Do not be a sucker - but the oath had to be safeguarded, and since peace had been made, then, excuse me, no one could be deceived or killed. And since oaths were occasionally broken even in those days, Mitra was given a narrow specialization - to guard oaths and punish oath-breakers, that is, he fought against traitors. And this case was very relevant for those times, and for later times too, so the cult of Mitra survived even after the reforms of Zerdusht. It was very important to have the guarantee of a peaceful existence, confirmed by the treaty, and to know that the treaty would be respected. Mitra required no special worship; he was "for the faithful and the infidels”. He guarded any oaths, punished any oath-breakers. Zerdusht also based his new worldview on dualism, the struggle between light and darkness, between the light Ormuzd and the dark Ahriman. But Ormuzd was only the god of the Persians, who were admitted to the mysteries of the worship of fire, the sun, and all kinds of light; all others, including almost all of our Asians and Parthians, were considered Ahrimanic. And while the Iranians' sacred animal was the dog, the Turanians worshipped snakes.

And Mithra was "for everyone." Although Mithraism was also a strictly dualistic system and only in this sense similar to Zoroastrianism.

Tibet

The Mithraic system spread throughout Tibet, Mongolia, Eastern Siberia, and all of Central Asia. The enemy of Mithra (his other name was God White Light) was the demon Long Arms - the Persian texts have not preserved the name of this demon, it is a Tibetan name.  The demon Long Arms, the leader of a whole horde of demons, is a deception. Deception is something unnatural that does not and should not exist in the world. Animals do not deceive each other. They boldly kill, they hunt each other, they eat each other, but they do not betray or deceive anyone. They do not abuse trust. Deception is something that comes through a person, that is the evil that Mitra fights against.

Thus, we see a second system of dualism spreading outside of Iran. In Iran, Zoroastrianism prevailed; outside Iran, a religion that worshipped the White Light God, which survived in Tibet until the twentieth century under the name of the Bon religion. The last Bon people fled Tibet in 1949, first to India, then to Norway, and now even settled in Switzerland. It seemed hot for them in India: they were used to where the mountains are. Since they were intellectuals, it was hard for them to work as movers, they began to publish and sell their Bon ancient books to Tibetologists. They existed on this, albeit sparingly. And the Western Tibetologists bought these books and exchanged them for our Soviet editions. This is how the concept of Bon became known in Soviet literature.

As we can see the agenda and the questioning in the Iranian-Turanian and Hellenic worlds were diametrically opposed. They were interested in different things.

India

Let us now return to India and see what the Hindus were interested in at the time. It turns out that the Hindus cared very little about how the world worked and who their friends and enemies (light versus darkness) were. They were resigned to the fact that some enemies would come and kill them anyway; they no longer knew how to resist. So, they were only interested in how to save their souls and provide them with a decent incarnation after their inevitable near-death experience. They believed in the re-souling of souls; they believed that the soul of a good man after death would incarnate in a human body, and that if he was a sinner, his soul would incarnate in the body of a crocodile, which was certainly less pleasant, or in the body of an asur, or a dev - that was better, and if in the body of an air (birit) demon or an underground demon, that was quite bad. So, the question is what measures to take to ensure that you are reborn in a human body? Does it make sense?

At this time there were yogis, brahmins, ascetic hermits, and a brilliant boy, the son of a princely (kshatriya) Shakya family, was very interested in all this. His name was Siddarta, or Shidarta. He bypassed all the sage teachers, was not satisfied with their teachings and created his own. His teachings were extremely simple in the beginning and became incredibly complex after two thousand years.

His teaching was that human beings have urges that cause suffering in their discontent, and that suffering leads to death, to new incarnations and new sufferings. Therefore, in order to avoid suffering you must not wish for anything; then you will avoid both suffering and death. He rolled up his legs and sat down under a palm tree and started to wish for nothing. But it turned out to be devilishly difficult. They say that he finally succeeded, and then he began to teach others how to do it, and performed twelve miracles, because the demon Mara (not the demon of the Long Arms, but the demon Mara, Maya, that is illusion) sent all kinds of monsters on him, like a mad elephant, a whore, an immediate entry into nirvana with a denial of propovedi, etc. But he coped with this and became a "Buddha", i.e. perfect!

It was much more difficult for him to cope with his closest disciples. One of them, Devadatta, having assimilated the teachings, decided to do more. He introduced, along with renunciation of desires, strict asceticism. The Buddha himself believed that man should not suffer in any way for salvation, that is, he should have enough to eat, and he had a bowl where he would put rice or vegetables dressed with lean butter. He ate one such bowl a day; if with lean butter, and a good one at that, it was really enough. The Buddha forbade touching gold, silver and women, for these are temptations that inflame desire.

And Devadatta said: "No, we can also hunger," and that was a temptation; it was no longer worthwhile. Though you can endure hunger, why? It entails suffering! Asceticism is absolutely contrary to the idea of the Buddha. And so, the community of Buddha was split during his lifetime, but many still listened to what he had to say. The ladies of nobility invited him in out of curiosity. "All right, don't touch," they said, "but at least tell us something too. They gave him contributions to the congregation. He didn't touch anything himself, but his disciples would take it and use it for good.

Buddha taught many, so he left quite a large memory, but not a single written text - it was not published during his lifetime. All this ended sadly for him, because although he had constructed his system in an entirely logical and seemingly unmistakable way and had apparently not fallen into any temptations, nevertheless, fate had prepared for him a temptation from which he could not resist: compassion.   While he was sitting under a palm tree and enjoying the respect of all Bengal, a neighboring tribe attacked the Shakya principality and slaughtered all his relatives. He was informed of this. And the octogenarian, the most respected man in India, went with his stick through the garden where he had played as a child, through the palace where he had been brought up, and everywhere lay his relatives, his servants, his friends, destroyed.  Everything was drenched in blood. He passed by all this, but he could not remain indifferent and entered nirvana.

What is nirvana? Nirvana is a concept that is impossible in the West because of the logical law of the excluded third. We have three laws of logic: the law of identity, the law of contradiction and the law of the excluded third, the basic law. According to the latter law, there is nothing that can be both "a" and not "a"- e.g., any given thing either exists or does not exist, no third is given. So, nirvana excludes this law. Nirvana means both existence and non-existence. The Hindus have their own logic. But according to the Buddhist teaching Buddha did not die, he just changed his place of being, his modus vivendi, from samsara, the eternally moving world, he went to nirvana and he is living there now. That means he knows nothing, sees nothing, he hears nothing, wants nothing. He is in eternal rest.

He is not happy and he is not unhappy, because happiness and unhappiness are relative concepts, and there is nothing relative about nirvana. In general, it is the same whether he is there or not, only his teaching and his memory are preserved. Then his teaching was reconstructed from memory, three centuries later. This was transmitted by word of mouth, finally written down and this is the first text called "Tripitaka", three baskets of text, that is three baskets of memoirs.

I have read the memoirs that were written about my late mother, and I can appreciate how the memoirists lie. I think Buddha is no exception. They lied about him too, but nevertheless the three baskets of memoirs are the primary source, dating back to the third century B.C. The Buddha himself died in the fifth century BC, which is about two hundred and fifty years before these memoirs were published. It is a fact that Buddhism spread widely in India. As we can see, there the very formulation of questions, goals, objectives-all were quite different from both the Persian and Hellenic lines of cultural development.

To say that the Buddha was a religious man or an anti-religious man is not possible, although he certainly acknowledged that there are devas - gods. Everyone understands this, but he did not recommend praying to them, because they are beings, though not eternal, but long-lived and quite powerful. And why should they pray?

One day an old woman asked him, "Master, I am accustomed to pray to Indra, can I achieve salvation in this way?" He said, "Yes, grandmother, pray to Indra, by that way you will also come to salvation." So, he didn't really care. And when he was asked how the world works, he would answer with a question with the question, "What color is the hair of a child of an unborn woman?" He was told, "Teacher, don't ask nonsense; if she has not given birth, then there is no child, no hair, and no color. - "So," he says, "and there is no world, so why are you asking nonsense? What you think is a deception of the senses." - "And what is there?" What he was answering here I cannot tell you, nor does anyone know, but it was subsequently discovered, according to the writings of later Buddhists, that there is a stream of dharma.

Dharma is a word with 47 meanings, but in this case, you have to prefer one of them, one of the nuances. Dharma is a quantum of regularity. It is not a material atom. It is not a planetary idea, no. There are causal relations in the world that are quantized. In what way? I cannot explain, I report that it is so in the doctrine. The quantum of a pattern is called a dharma.

Also "dharma" means "law." And so, the dharmas collide, sometimes form skandas, and the skandas, in combination of several skandas, form the human soul, and this soul can either reach nirvana or not, because if it has sinned much, it falls apart into its constituent parts and loses its individuality. The soul's individuality is the combination of the skands. If there is no combination then there is no soul. The soul of a man who has sinned crumbles, like Per Gunt who has been told his soul will be melted down because he had behaved very meanly.

So, it's important to achieve perfection and perfection can only be achieved through human existence, because the devas can't achieve perfection - they're good as they are, they live long lives and that's why they don't evolve. Perfection is impossible for the asuras who are too busy preparing for war with the gods and after another defeat they prepare again, so there's no time for them to improve.

Animals? They are unintelligent and do not know that it is necessary to strive for perfection. The Preta or Birithes, demons living on the brink of hell are hungry all the time and are portrayed as having a big head and a small mouth the diameter of a pin, a thin neck, a huge belly, tiny legs and arms. This demon cannot, of course, feed its belly through such a small mouth, so it starves, and if it sucks on something nourishing, the blood of its victims for example, it gushes out in fire, and is therefore very discontented. But even this is nothing, and in the dungeons of hell there are tamu. About those nothing can be said, except that they are very bad, even worse than birits, and if they suffer so, what way could those improve?

Only a human being can improve. The meaning of life is to perfect oneself through a series of rebirths, to become a saint and finally enter nirvana - a very difficult goal to achieve. But if a Hellenist, or a Persian, or you and I were offered to go to nirvana so that there we would want nothing, do nothing, be unable to do anything, help anyone, and not even hear a request for help at all... so we probably wouldn't wish for such a majestic end. And the Hindus liked it for some reason. But the Chinese didn't.

China

The Chinese created two doctrines quite unlike the three I have listed. China in the eighth and seventh centuries BC was divided into a large number of states, it is impossible to say exactly which ones, because in each century or even decade will be a different division. All the time they were at war, ruthlessly destroying each other, seeking to seize the lands and wealth of their neighbors. And they did not try to subdue the people, no, they killed them and repopulated the liberated lands with their descendants. This outrage went on from the 8th to the 3rd century B.C., and even the expression was "kill the town", i.e. to kill everyone, including children, and then repopulate the country with their children.

Chinese women bore children every year. So, each woman gave birth to 15-20 children. There were not many diseases either, and the intensive reproduction unwittingly stimulated the mass extermination of the neighbors.

But it was still difficult to live in such a nightmare, and therefore the ideas to get out of such a permanent total fratricidal war were discussed. And in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, two ideologues emerged. One was Kun Tzu, who came to be called Confucius (Fu - an expression of respect for him). The other was his younger contemporary Lao Tzu, who had been a librarian to a prince and then left for the desert.

Confucius said that a lot of bad things are done around here. But that's because people are uneducated, they need to be educated. You have to educate, you have to teach people to have a sense of duty, and then they will behave decently. Confucius introduced three categories of duty: the highest duty, toward one's relatives; the second duty, lower in rank, toward the community; the third, even lower, toward the state, that is, the interests of relatives should be placed above the interests of both the community and the state.

For example, it is said that an old man was stealing either sheep or donkeys, and his son denounced him. So, Confucius condemned him for it, he said: "Of course, it is not good that the old man was stealing from his neighbors, from his community, but the son should have persuaded the old man to return the stolen goods and stop doing it altogether, but you cannot denounce your father." And if the community suffered from some prince or van, then the interests of the community had to be guided first.

His main task was to teach the Wangs how to behave, how to observe ceremonials and customs, how to rule the state and how to repel foreigners, who were very numerous, and who also did not give life to Chinese. How this was perceived by the Wangs (the middle between king and prince) is understandable. Every man, especially a superior, cannot stand to be taught, and so Confucius had to run from one prince to another all the time. But he ran with his disciples, left his writings everywhere, scattering them around China in great numbers, and created a school. Confucianism existed until the mid-20th century, when Mao forbade it. 

But Lao Tzu took a very different path; he believed that all human attitudes were rubbish, that it was necessary to imitate nature. One must go to a mountain (and there were many mountains there, all of them forested, and the climate warm - no snow falls south of the Qin-ling range at all) and live there, imitating the animals and free birds, to study the laws of the universe. One should try to understand how the weather changes and how to make it rain when necessary (magic); one should understand how the future shifts to the past, that is, learn to guess; one should study the human body to be able to cure it; one should observe how plants grow and study animals, that is, Lao-tzu fervently recommended to study natural sciences. And he imagined the world as a "Tao." The Tao is that which exists and that which does not exist. Frankly speaking, for a long time, no matter how much I read all the literature, I could not understand what Tao was. But when I started communicating with the Chinese, I understood something (they explained it to me, and I felt it in my gut). Tao is a universe with a diameter of infinity, which shrinks to a point, then expands again. And all beings and all people through a series of rebirths, according to the Taoist system, exist, and then disappear, and then, with a new expansion, arise again. This pulsating Universe is the Tao. I can't explain it any clearer.

And Confucius is very clear. When someone asked him if there was a god or immortality he said, "That doesn't matter, that's not important, that's not what you should be thinking about, that's not what you should be doing. "And how is the world and nature arranged?" - "Also unimportant, it is important to know how to behave in a given life.

The Third Parameter – Energy

So, four centers of cultural creativity in the band of one passionary impulse gave not only different solutions but also different statements of questions. I cannot explain this solely by the influence of the landscape and natural needs. It would probably have done the Chinese no harm to provide a rigorous proof of Pythagoras' theorem, even though they already knew how to make right angles on the ground and built quadrangular buildings. Whether they did it the same way as Pythagoras or another way was not really important, the main thing was that they could do it. They had no use for mathematical generalizations, just as Heraclitus had no use for the doctrine of fire and eternal rebirth.

The Greeks, on the other hand, were completely indifferent to the problems of ethics. They would have found it impertinent if someone had suddenly taken it upon themselves to teach them how to behave toward their parents, their city, and their great state. They would have said, "We know this ourselves, we have enough laws, please go away, citizen, don't interfere with our thinking about the universe.

What makes this difference? The thing is that the process of creating an ethnos or super-ethnos is influenced by space and time, and not in a mystical sense, but in a very real sense. Space is environment: landscape and ethnic environment. The landscape environment influences the forms of economy and the way of life of a given ethnos; it determines its possibilities and prospects. The ethnic environment - ties with neighbors, friendly or hostile - has a very strong influence on the nature of the created culture.

The only thing we know about time is that it is irreversible. Time is the phase of ethnogenesis and the ethnic environment, determining the options of ethnic contacts with it. Moreover, the level of scientific and technological progress peculiar to a given epoch also has its influence within the factor of time, allowing the borrowing of already existing technical achievements while creating a new cultural tradition.

But besides time and space there is a third component - energy. In the energy aspect, ethnogenesis is the source of culture. Why is that? I'll explain. Ethnogenesis is driven by passionarity. It is this energy - passionarity - that is wasted in the process of ethnogenesis. It is spent in the creation of cultural values and political activity: managing the state and writing books, sculpting and territorial expansion, synthesizing new ideological concepts and building cities. All such labor requires efforts beyond those necessary to ensure humanity's normal existence in balance with nature, and thus without the passionarity of its bearers, who invest their surplus energy in the cultural and political development of their system, no culture and no politics would exist. There would be no brave warriors, no knowledge-hungry scholars, no religious fanatics, no courageous travelers. And no ethnos would have evolved beyond the homeostasis in which hard-working commoners lived in complete contentment with themselves and their surroundings. Fortunately, this is not the case, and we can hope that for our lifetime there will be enough of both the joys and troubles of ethnogenesis and culture. 

However, all energy has two poles, and passionate energy (biochemical energy) is no exception. Bipolarity affects ethnogenesis by the fact that behavioral dominance can be directed toward complicating systems, i.e., creating them, or simplifying them.

This bipolarity is clearly visible not so much in zoology as in the history of mankind and its culture. This is because we know the history of culture in much more detail than we know the history of the origin and disappearance of species.  In addition, in history we can apply absolute chronology, while in zoology chronology is relative, that is, the zoologist knows what was earlier, what was later, but cannot say exactly how much.

To determine the dominant direction, one needs a very sensitive device, and such is the history of worldviews and philosophical teachings, whose positive value we have already mentioned. But along with them there are life-negative systems, which we have the right to call negative. It would seem that such suicidal ideas cannot have an impact on healthy collectives, large populations and well-coordinated ethnoses. However, they can and they do. This occurs when the collision of ethnoses with different complementarity forcibly binds them into one chimerical unity, which is always unstable.

It is in the areas where ethnicities clash, where behavioral stereotypes are unacceptable to both sides, that everyday life loses its daily obligatory purposefulness and people begin to rush around in search of the meaning of life, which they never find. This is where philosophical concepts that deny the goodness of human life and death, that is, dialectical development, come in. The antipode of materialist dialectics is the anti-system, that is, a simplifying system. The limit of simplification is the vacuum.  We will now turn to examples that illustrate this point.

Example:

In the Mediterranean world at the beginning of our era, when thought was liberated from the superstitions that crumbled like husks when the Hellenic, Judaic and Persian worldviews came into contact, people expressed themselves in no uncertain terms. In the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D..   These concepts crystallized into the following systems: Gnosticism, Talmudic Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. All of them deserve a special description, which we will leave for later, in order not to divert our attention from the main point: the principle of bipolarity. This principle has survived, already formulated in the twentieth century by two poets who held two opposing positions regarding the biosphere. Since what we need here is not the history of the problem, but a grasp of the principle of classification, let us restrict ourselves to two illustrative examples.

The first position is world-negation.

Lodeinikov listened.

There was a vague rustle of a thousand deaths over the garden.

Nature turned to hell,

Was doing its own thing Without a care in the world.

The beetle ate the grass, the bird pecked the beetle,

The ferret drank the brains from the bird's head,

And the faces of the creatures of the night, skewed in fear.

Of the creatures of the night looked out of the grass.

So, this is the harmony of nature!

So, there they are, the voices of the night!

On the abysses of anguish our waters shine,

On the abysses of sorrow, the forests rise.

Nature's eternal crush

that has united death and being...

But thought was powerless to Unite her two mysteries.

Н. Zabolotsky

In these beautiful poems, like the focus of a telescope lens, the views of the Gnostics, Manicheans, Albigensians, Carmats, Mahayanists - in short, all who regarded matter as evil, and the world as a place for suffering.

The second position is world-affirmation.

Since the creation of the world a hundred times

Dying ashes have changed:

This rock roared once,

This ivy soared in the clouds.

Killing and resurrecting,

To swell the universal soul –

This is the earth's holy will,

Incomprehensible to itself.

Н. Gumilev

There is only one similarity between these two positions: irrationality of the relationship between a person (human or animal) and the biosphere. All the rest is diametrically opposite, like in the Middle Ages and, apparently, before our era.

The first position strives to replace discrete systems (biocenosis) with rigid ones ("And I dream of the iron shaft of the turbine") that, according to the logic of development, will turn living matter into cosmic matter; cosmic matter will decompose to molecules during thermal reaction, molecules will decay to atoms, real particles will be separated from atoms that will turn into virtual ones upon annihilation. The limit of such development is vacuum. And vice versa, as systems become more complex, where life and death go hand in hand, diversity emerges, which is immediately transferred to the psychological realm, creating art, poetry, science. But, of course, "all sorrows, joys and deliriums" have to be repaid by "the irreparable destruction of the latter."

So, ethnic history has three parameters:

1. The correlation of each ethnos with its hosting and feeding landscape, and the loss of this correlation is irreparable: both the landscape and the culture of the ethnos are simplified, or rather, distorted.

2. The outbreak and subsequent loss of passionarity; ethnogenesis as an entropic energy process.

3. Separation from the ethnos of individual persons and consortia (sects), changing the stereotype of behavior and attitude to the natural environment to the opposite. The ideal changes its sign.

Only in this, the last parameter, a decisive role is played by the free will of man, which provides him with the right to choose, but also subject to moral and legal evaluation: if someone is willing to become a criminal and a villain, condemnation of him is appropriate.

These three formulas encapsulate all the theory that ethnology needs to explain why the history of peoples and states does not follow a straightforward path of progress, but in zigzags and frequent breaks to nowhere. And why, against a backdrop so tragic, ethnoses exist and enjoy life.

Invisible Threads. The Origins of Gnosticism

No one lives alone, even if he really wants to. Invisible threads connect countries whose inhabitants have never seen each other. And no matter what you call these ties: cultural, economic, political, military... They disrupt the flow of ethnogenesis, create the zigzags of history, produce chimeras and give rise to the ghosts of systems, that is to say, anti-systems. So, let's pay attention to them, so that our understanding of the central theme of the study is neither one-sided nor incomplete.

The ideological influences of another ethnicity on unprepared neophytes act like viral infections, drugs, and mass alcoholism. What is seen as a reversible and insignificant deviation from the norm in one's homeland destroys entire ethnic groups unprepared to resist the alluring and intoxicating ideas of others. Gnosticism as a logic of life-rejection was one of these.

There are times when it is easy for people to live, but very distasteful. Such was the decline of the Roman Empire, but with the birth of Byzantium there was purpose and interest in life. As has already been said, the Byzantine super-ethnos was hatched from the egg of the Christian community, the social frame of which was the church organization. But in this egg lurked a second germ, so-called Gnosticism.  The word "Gnosticism" defines the currents of Christian thought that were not accepted by the church, which triumphed a few centuries later. This phenomenon has its own prehistory.

Alexander the Great, after conquering Persia and its provinces (Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt), decided that he would create a single grand ethnos out of Hellenes and Orientals. To this end he even married off several hundred of his Macedonian officers to the orphaned daughters of Persian nobles who had died in the war. Of course, no new ethnos emerged: an ethnos - a phenomenon of nature - cannot be created by decree. As a social system, his empire split; as an ethnic conglomerate, it became a chimera. The newcomers and natives lived in the same cities, engaged in the same trades and commerce, entertained themselves in the same taverns, but were stubbornly alien to one another.

Thus, in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, ruled by the descendants of one of the Macedonian commanders, the Ptolemies, 50% of the population was Greek, 40% were Jews, and 10% were all others, including the Egyptians.

This was the first time the Greco-Roman world was exposed to the text of the Bible. Ptolemy, King of Egypt, saw that his philosophers could not challenge the Jewish rabbis. The philosophers came to Ptolemy and said "We can't argue with them because we don't know what they are arguing; we refute one of their arguments and they say "that's not what you're arguing" and present another. We have to know exactly what it says, then we'll argue. He said, "All right, I'll do it for you.

One night in Alexandria, 72 rabbis were arrested. The king came out to them when they were brought in and said a short speech: "Now each of you will be given a copy of the Bible, enough parchment and writing utensils, and you will be placed in solitary cells. Please translate into Greek. My philologists will check, and if there are discrepancies, I will not judge who is right and who is wrong, but I will hang you all, recruit new ones, and get the translation. But he did not have to put anyone else in jail; he got the transfer. The rabbis were let go home, and so the Septuagint Bible, the Bible of Seventy Interpreters, the Greek translation, came into being.

How did the Greeks read it, and clutched their heads: how did the Book of Genesis create the world? God created the whole world, creatures and animals, then the man Adam; and then Eve out of his rib, and forbade them to eat apples from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And the serpent seduced Eve, and Eve seduced Adam.

They ate apples from the forbidden tree and found out where good and evil were, and thus incurred the wrath of God, who deprived them of paradise. The Greeks reacted in this way: "The most important thing for us is knowledge, and the Hebrew god forbade it to us; here is the serpent - good, this one helped us," and they began to honor the serpent and condemn the very one who created the world, whom they called the "craftsman" - Demiurge. This, the Greeks decided, was a bad, evil demon and the serpent was good. The representatives of this current of theological thought were called Ophites, from the Greek word for "office" - "serpent".

According to this logico-ethical system, divine light and his wisdom are at the base of the world, and the evil and talentless demon Yaldavaoth, whom the Jews call Yahweh, created Adam and Eve. But he wanted them to remain ignorant, not understanding the difference between Good and Evil. It was only with the help of the generous serpent, the messenger of Divine Wisdom, that people threw off the yoke of ignorance of the essence of the divine beginning.  

Yaldavaoth avenges their deliverance and wrestles with the serpent, the symbol of knowledge and freedom. He sends a flood (a symbol of base emotions), but Wisdom, having "showered the light" on Noah and his kind, saves them. Yaldavaoth then manages to subdue a group of people by making a treaty with Abraham and giving his descendants the law through Moses. He calls himself One God, but he lies; he is really just a minor fire demon through whom some of the Hebrew prophets spoke. Others spoke on behalf of other demons who were not so evil. Yaldavaoth wanted to destroy Christ, but was only able to arrange the execution of the man Jesus, who then rose again and was united with the divine Christ.

The Worshippers of "Wholeness."

In the second century, more refined and highly sophisticated systems were advanced by the Antiochian Sathornilus, Basilides of Alexandria, and his compatriot Valentinus, who moved to Rome. The Gnostics of Alexandria saw God as the supreme being enclosed in himself and the source of all being. From him, like the rays of the sun, the minor divine beings, the aeons, emerged. The more distant the aeons were from their source, the weaker they became. All of them together were called "Pleroma," or "fullness" of all things. Along with the Pleroma there is a coarse lifeless matter that has no actual existence, but only the appearance of it. It is called "emptiness”. The world arose from the juxtaposition and mingling of these two elements, Pleroma and matter. The faintest of the Aeons has fallen into matter and animates it, thus creating the visible world. The opposition between the divine and material caused evil in humans and demons.

Aeon, because of whom the world arose, the Gnostics called Demiurge, that is, the craftsman, and equated it with God of the Old Testament. They believed that he made the world shoddily, that he would be glad to free the spirit from the bonds of matter, but that he could not do it. There was also the hypothesis that he spitefully resisted the help that the higher Aeons could give him.

The supreme Deity constantly cares for the victims of the Demiurge - the human souls. It seeks to maintain in them the thought of their high origin and to strengthen them in their struggle with matter. For this purpose, it has from time to time communicated to those who are able, the prophets and philosophers, new spiritual elements, and has finally sent to earth the first Aeon in a primordial body. This Aeon united in baptism with the man Jesus, and showed the people the way back to Pleroma. Angered by this, the Demiurge, or in other opinions, Satan, drove Jesus to crucifixion. The heavenly Christ left the man Jesus on the cross and returned to the Supreme Being. Salvation of the soul is liberation from matter through struggle with it.  (The Gnostics)

There was also the Antiochian school, where Saturnil, also a very venerable man, taught.  He said: No, “both matter and spirit are primordial”, they have always been, it’s just that matter has taken a part of the spirit and holds it; of course, one must break free, matter is bad and spirit is good, but matter, generally speaking, also exists along with spirit". Out of this Sathornil school came the teachings of the Persian prophet Mani.

Worshippers of the "Light." Manichaeism

In Iran the situation was somewhat different. The bellicose Parthians from the Kopet Dagh joined forces with the steppe Sakis and drove the Macedonians out of Iran. Their kings bravely defended their land against the Macedonians and the Romans, but they too submitted to the charms of Hellenic culture. In their capital, Ctesiphon, Euripides' tragedies were staged, Plato's philosophical dialogues were played, and Aristotle was translated into Persian. And accordingly, in this chimerical entity, the Parthian state, Gnosticism flourished.

In 224 A.D. the prince of the house of Sassan, Artashir Papagan, expelled the Parthians from the "Holy Land of Iran" and restored the teachings of Zarathushtra. But only Persians were allowed to participate in the Zoroastrian cult, while the population of Mesopotamia accepted either Christianity or Gnosticism. In Mesopotamia, on the borderline of the two worlds - Hellenic and Persian - a very talented painter, calligrapher and writer named Mani was born. In search of wisdom, he even traveled to India and, upon his return, preached a new teaching, which later played a huge role in the development of culture, history and even ethnogenesis.

Gnostics became dreamers, God-seekers, almost visionaries, striving, like the ancient philosophers, to invent a coherent and consistent concept of the universe, including good and evil. Gnosticism was not a knowledge of the world, but a poetry of notions, in which the aversion to reality took a central place. The Gnostic systems were absolutely fascinating, beautiful, logical, unexpected. But they had nothing to do with scientific thought, they did not explain anything and did not think it necessary to explain anything, with one exception: the teachings of Manichaeus and his followers. The Manicheans explained to the people what evil was.

Mani preached this idea: before, light and darkness were separated and the darkness was continuous, but not the same - there were clouds of condensed darkness and rarefied darkness, and they moved in disorder, in this Brownian motion, and one day by chance they came to the border of light and tried to invade it.

Against them came the "first man", the first man, by whom we must mean Ormuzd, who began to fight and prevent the clouds of darkness from entering the abode of light. The clouds attacked the first man, clothed him with themselves, tore his light body into pieces, and the particles of light tormented this body; this is the world - a mixture of darkness and light. We must get these particles to be liberated, for which Christ came first, and then he, Mani the Comforter, and here he teaches what must be done.

Yes, indeed, one must behave very ascetically, not eat or kill animals with warm blood (frogs and snakes are allowed), eat vegetable food, abstain from all kinds of carnal entertainment, because if one marries, it naturally heals your body and it keeps your soul stronger. But orgies were allowed, so that it was not known who was with whom, because it disturbed the body and helped the soul to free itself. It's a logical system. Suicide doesn't help, because there is a transmigration of souls from body to body, and if you kill yourself you have to start all over again. That's why you have to achieve the true death - to lose the taste for life.

Mani died tragically, executed at the instigation of the Zoroastrian priesthood, but his teaching has spread throughout the Ecumenical lands, from China to Toulouse, and has met with considerable hostility because it reflects such antagonism to living nature, to the family, and to the creative history of ethnic groups as the products of evil. Even the Marcheonites could not be compared with the Manichaeans.

Marcion and the Marcionites

Most of the Gnostics did not seek to spread their doctrine, for they considered it too difficult for the perception of ignorant people, and their concepts went out with them. But in the middle of the second century the Christian thinker Marcion, drawing on the Apostle Paul's speech in Athens on "the unknown God," developed the Gnostic concept to such an extent that it became accessible to the broad masses of Christians.

Marcion came from Asia Minor. He was very learned. He was first a merchant, then engaged in philology and wrote a great treatise on the Old and New Testament in which he proved very expertly that God of the Old Testament and God of the New Testament are different gods and that, consequently, a Christian cannot worship the Old Testament. Since the worship of the God of the Old Testament had become commonplace, most of the Church did not accept it, but the Church was divided into two parts, the Marcionites and the Marcionites' opponents. In the second century the Marcionites won, but in the third century the dualists were defeated by the supporters of monism.

Marcion was declared a follower of Satan, and his teachings were not recognized. The Church relegated him, and his book was cautiously silenced, the worst thing that could happen to a scholar. It was simply considered unseemly to speak on the subject. (Only one German scholar, Dollinger, who compiled Markion's arguments from various texts proving that God of the New Testament and God of the Old Testament are different gods, opposing one another as good and evil, has recovered Markion's system of proof.) Yet the teachings of Marcion did not disappear. Through hundreds of transmissions, it survived in his homeland of Asia Minor, and in the ninth century it’s transformed, but still recognizable, it became the confession of the Pavlicians (after the Apostle Paul), who fought against Byzantine Orthodoxy, even allying with the Muslims.

The Pauline Christians cannot be considered Christians. Notwithstanding their acceptance of the Gospel, the Pavlicians denounced the cross as a symbol of damnation, because Christ was crucified on it, they rejected icons and rites, denied the sacraments of Baptism and Communion, and considered all material things to be evil. Consistently, they fought actively against church and state, their fellow believers and their subjects, and made it their business to sell captive young men and women to the Arabs. At the same time, there were many racially-minded priests and monks, as well as professional military men. Even their spiritual leaders could not keep these sectarians from committing atrocities. Life took its toll, even if the slogan of the struggle was denial of life. And one should not blame Marcion, the philologist who showed the fundamental difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, for these murders. The ideological basis of the anti-system could have been based on another concept, as we shall now show.

Pavlikianism was defeated by military force in 872, after which the captured Pavlikians were not executed, but placed on the border with Bulgaria to serve as border guards.   Thus, the mixed Manichean-Markionite doctrine penetrated into the Balkan Slavs and gave birth to Bogomilism, a version of dualism very different from the Manichean prototype, which became entrenched in Macedonia in the same years.

Instead of the eternal opposition between light and darkness, the Bogomilians taught that the head of the angels created by God, Satania, rose up out of pride and was cast into the waters, for as yet there was no dry land. Satanil created the dry land and men, but could not animate them, for which he turned to God, promising to become obedient. God blew a soul into men, and then Satanil blew him off and made Cain. God responded by burping Jesus, a disembodied spirit, to guide the angels, also incorporeal. Jesus went into one ear of Mary, came out through the other, and took on human form while remaining ghostly. The angels of Sataniael twisted him, took from him the suffix "il", in which lurked a power, of course, mystical, and drove him into hell. Now he is not Sataniel, but Satan. And Jesus, returned to the womb of the Father, having left the material world created by Sataniel. The conclusion of the concept was simple: beat the Byzantines!

As can be seen from the description, there were more differences of opinion among the Manicheans, Markeonites, Bohemians, and Provençal Cathars than among the Catholics and Orthodox. The dualists, however, had a single organization of 16 churches closely connected to each other. Their similarity was stronger than their differences, even though denial was the basis of it. Denial was their strength, but it was also their weakness; denial helped them win, but it did not let them really win.

Cathars

Western Europe, somewhat later than the Near East, experienced all the consequences of the mechanical mixing of ethnic groups. A genuine chimera was formed in the Languedoc, taking over Toulouse to the west and Northern Italy to the east. The trouble was that the Great Caravan Road, which started in China and traversed the vast untamed steppes, reached as far as Lyons, rich in foodstuffs, then majestic Toulouse, and ended in Muslim Spain, in Cordoba. And international trade has always been about a diversity of people and ideas that do not mesh with one another. But in the body of such a chimera, life-negating systems often proliferate like parasites; we have already seen examples of this.

The dualistic teaching of the Cathars came to Languedoc from the Balkan Peninsula, where the familiar Peacchians, Theomachists and Manicheans mixed together. The Cathars were called Albigensians by the French, for one of their centers was the city of Albi.

The common belief that the fervent religiosity of the Middle Ages gave rise to Catholic fanaticism, which ignited the fires of the first Inquisition, is quite mistaken. By the end of the eleventh century, the spiritual and secular societies of Europe were in a state of complete moral decline. Many priests were illiterate; prelates were appointed through kinship; theological thought was crushed by literal interpretations of the Bible that matched the ignorant theologians; and spiritual life was shackled by the cloistered monks who insisted on replacing free thinking with good morals. In that era, all vigorous natures were either mystics or debauchees. And there were more passionate people in France than were needed for daily life. So, they tried to ship them off to Palestine to free the Tomb of the Lord from Muslims, hoping they would not come back.

But not everyone went to the East. Many sought clues to existence without leaving their hometowns, because Eastern wisdom flowed to the West. It answered the most painful question in theology: God, who created the world, is good, so where did evil and Satan come from?

The Catholicized legend of the rebellion of an angel possessed by pride did not satisfy inquiring minds. God is omniscient and omnipotent!  So, he must have foreseen this rebellion and crushed it. If he did not, he is to blame for the consequences, and consequently the source of the evil. Logical, but absurd. So, something is wrong. The Manicheans of the East had this to say: "Evil is eternal”. It is matter enlivened by the spirit, but enveloping it within itself. The evil of the world is the torment of the spirit in the tenets of matter. Consequently, all material things are the source of evil. And if so, then the evil is anything, including temples and icons, crosses and bodies of people. And all this is subject to destruction.

In what did the Cathars (Albigensians) and all the Gnostics-Manichaeans see their task? They believed that it is necessary to escape from this terrible world. To do this, it is not enough to die, because the death of the body leads to a new incarnation of the soul - to a new suffering. You have to get out of the chain of reincarnations, and to do that you don't have to kill the body - you have to kill the soul. How? By killing all one's desires.

Asceticism, total asceticism! Eating only Lenten foods, but they had good olive oil, so it was quite tasty. Fish could be eaten, frogs could be eaten, the French ate frogs. Then, of course, no family, no marriage.   It is necessary to exhaust the flesh to such an extent that the soul no longer wants to stay in this world, then at the moment of death it will soar to the Light God. But the flesh can be exhausted in two ways - either by asceticism or by violent debauchery. In debauchery it is also exhausted, and so from time to time the Albigensians organized night orgies, necessarily in the dark, so that no one would know who was with whom in debauchery. This was a prerequisite, because if one fell in love with someone, it was already an attachment, an attachment to what? - To the world of the flesh: she loves him, or he beats her, that's it! They cannot become perfect and withdraw from the world. But if it is just to exhaust the flesh in a brothel, that's fine.

According to the teachings of the Albigensians, any act of exhaustion of the flesh leading to an aversion to life is useful in itself, but without marriage and child-rearing, because children, a beloved wife, and a good husband are all parts of this world, and therefore the temptation of the devil, which must be avoided.  Morality was naturally abolished. For if matter is evil, then any extermination is good, be it murder, lying, betrayal... all is irrelevant. In relation to the objects of the material world, everything was permitted.

But here the medieval Christian immediately asked the question: what about Christ, who was also human? He healed the sick, approved of fun so much that he turned water into wine at Cana of Galilee, protected women, that is, was not against living material life?

There were two answers to this: explicitly for converts and implicitly for initiates. It was explicitly explained that "Christ had a heavenly, ethereal body when he entered into Mary. He came out of her as alien to matter as he had been before.... He had no need of anything earthly, and if he apparently ate and drank, he did so for men, so as not to be suspected by Satan, who was seeking an opportunity to destroy the Deliverer."

But for the "faithful" (as members of the congregation were called).

Another explanation was offered: "Christ was a demon creation; he came into the world to deceive the people and prevent their salvation. The real one didn't come, but lived in a special world, the 'Heavenly Jerusalem’.

That's enough detail. There can be no doubt that Manichaean Albigoyism is not heresy, but simply anti-Christianity; and that it is further from Christianity than Islam or even theistic Buddhism. However, if we turn from theology to cultural history, the conclusion is different. God and the devil were preserved in the Manichean conception, but swapped places. That is why the new confession was such a tremendous success in the twelfth century. The concept itself was exotic, but the details were familiar, and the replacement of the plus by the minus was easy for the perception of the God-seekers.

Consequently, any protest, any rejection of reality, very unattractive indeed, could find expression in the change of the sign. Moreover, any Manichean teaching broke up into a multitude of directions, worldviews, outlooks and degrees of concentration, aided equally by the passionarity of the converts, which allowed them not to fear the fire, and the justification of lies, with which they not only saved themselves, but also dealt irresistible, devastating blows to their opponents.

Of course, not everyone in Western Europe understood the complex dogma of Manichaeism, and many did not aspire to do so. It was enough for them to realize that Satan was not their enemy, but their lord and helper in the crimes they were trying to commit. It was a doctrine practiced secretly by Henry IV, an enemy of Pope Gregory VII. The simple-minded Richard the Lionhearted declared openly that all members of the Plantagenet house came from the devil and would return to the devil. With this declaration he justified all the crimes and treachery he had committed; at least he thought so himself.

And yet this doctrine, which abolished conscience, was professed in the twelfth century not only by kings, but also by priests, weavers, knights, peasants, paupers, learned lawyers and illiterate wandering monks, most of whom were unaware of the meaning of their mindsets. These latter easily passed from one camp to another, because they were not required to formally renounce the tenets of their faith.

The main part of this mindset, the Cathar community, had a strict discipline, a three-degree hierarchy, and did not compromise in any way. The preaching of the "perfect" in France and even in Italy so electrified the masses that at times even the pope was afraid to leave the fortified castle, lest in the city streets he be insulted by an agitated mob, among whom were also knights, especially since the feudal lords refused to subdue it. 

There may be a misconception that Catholics were better, more honest, kinder, more noble than Cathars (Albigensians). It is just as wrong as the other way around. People are still themselves, no matter what ethical doctrines are preached to them. And why is the concept that absolution can be bought with money donated for a crusade better than a call to fight the material world?

Catholic teaching was just as logical, only with a different dominant theme: Catholics asserted that the world must be preserved and that life as such must not be suppressed. And in the name of this, they killed a great deal. A paradox, you would think? No, not a paradox. For life to be sustained, according to the dialectic of nature, death is as necessary as life, because after death comes restoration.

And the Albigensians, in denying and destroying life, did a very tricky thing: they refused to kill all living beings with warm blood (so it was very easy to find out who was an Albigoy and who was not an Albigoy: they killed a hen, and if he refused, they dragged him to the fire). You will say that the Albigensians are better than the Catholics. They are so humane that they would not kill a chicken. But if chickens were not slaughtered and eaten, they would not be bred at all, and chickens would disappear as a species.

Only through the alternation of life and death are biospheric processes maintained; the Albigensians understood this, they strove for complete and final death, without rebirth.

And imagine if all people had followed the teachings of the Albigensians: life would have ceased in one generation! This is why, wherever the followers of the anti-system took power, they rejected the anti-systemic principles. Without officially rejecting them, they turned the country that they seized into a mere feudal state.

Zindiks (Ismailis)

Very close to the two already described super-ethnoses, on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, was the third super-ethnos, also known by its confessional features, the Muslim. It emerged at the beginning of the seventh century and, therefore, was younger than the Byzantine and older than the Romano-Germanic. But its life was so strenuous that it aged it prematurely.

The tremendous victories of the Arabs in the east and west extended the borders of the Caliphate to the Pamirs and the Pyrenees. Many tribes and peoples were incorporated into the Caliphate and converted to Islam. Thus, a Muslim super-ethnos was created. The negative antisystem here had original forms, but it had the same destructive function. Whereas the Provençal Cathars and the Bulgarian Bogomils were imported, the Arabs, who conquered Syria and Iran, received as their subjects the Mazdakites of Azerbaijan, the fire-worshippers of Khorasan, the Buddhists of Central Asia, the Manicheans of Mesopotamia, and the Gnostics of Syria.

All these teachings, very different from one another, had the same hatred for the Muslim opponents and for the faith of Islam. Repeated uprisings broke out, ruthlessly suppressed by the Caliphs, until a new consortium, a religious organization, set out to fight against religion. It absorbed many ancient traditions and created a new one, original and indestructible, for it shook the Muslim world.

Muslim law, the Sharia, allowed Christians and Jews to practice their religions in peace for an extra tax. Idolaters were subject to conversion to Islam, which was also tolerable. But Zindiks (from the Persian word zend, "sense," which is the equivalent of the Greek gnosis, "knowledge"), the representatives of nihilistic teachings, faced a painful death. Hence, the Zindians were Gnostics, but in the Arab era this name was given a new connotation: "sorcerers”.

An entire Inquisition was instituted against them, the head of which bore the title "executioner of the Zindiks". Naturally, under such conditions, free thought was buried in the underground, and emerged from it transformed beyond recognition in the second half of the ninth century. His name was Abdullah ibn Maymun, a Persian from Media, an eye doctor by profession, who died in 874 (875).

The dogma and principles of the new doctrine can only be described, but not formulated, for its basic principle was falsehood. The proponents of the new doctrine even called themselves differently in different places: the most famous names in Persia were Ishmaelites, in Arabia - Karmati. Their goal was the same: to destroy Islam at all costs, as the Cathars tried to destroy Christianity.

The visible side of the doctrine was simple: the outrages of this world will be remedied by the Mahdi, that is, the savior of humanity and the restorer of justice. This sermon almost always resonated with the masses of the people, especially in hard times. And the ninth century was very cruel.   The rebellions and defections of the Emirs, the tribal uprisings in the periphery and the slave-tribes in the heart, the chaos of the hired troops and the arbitrariness of the administration, the defeats in the wars with Byzantium, and the increasing fanaticism of the mullahs, all this befell the peasants and the urban poor, including educated but impoverished Persians and Syrians. The fuel was piled high; one had to be able to put a torch to it.

Free propaganda of all ideas was not feasible in the Caliphate. So, the emissaries of the doctrine pretended to be Muslims. They interpreted the Koran's texts, arousing doubts in their interlocutors and hinting that they knew something, but that the true law had been forgotten and that was the reason for all the disasters, but that if it were restored... But then he, as if he had realized it, became silent, which of course aroused everyone’s curiosity. The interlocutor, extremely interested in the preacher, again referring to the Koran, takes from him an oath of silence, and then, as a test of the proselyte's goodwill, a sum of money, according to the means, for the common cause.

Then comes the training of the convert. The world in which we live is a bad one, because here all kinds of Qadis, Emirs, Mullahs and Caliphs and their army oppress and abuse the poor people, who, however, have a way out: if they achieve perfection through participation in their community, they will go to the anti-world, where the opposite is true - there they themselves will oppress the Qadis, Emirs, etc. This seemingly uncomplicated system has found many adherents. While the world we live in here was considered bad by so many, the anti-world was naturally seen as good.

The Karmati, or as they were called in the East, the Ishmaelites, had to lie to everyone: with a Shiite he would be a Shiite, with a Sunni a Sunni, with a Jew a Jew, with a Christian a Christian, with a pagan a pagan, but only had to remember that they were secretly subordinated to their pir, the elder. All Muslims are enemies against whom lies, treachery, murder and violence are permitted. And one who has entered the "path," even in the first degree, there is no return except death.

The community that professed and preached this terrible doctrine, which was undeniably mystical and at the same time anti-religious, very quickly gained a firm foothold in various areas of the disintegrating Caliphate.

They had no clergy, but the hierarchy was very strict. Each community had its own leaders, to whom they obeyed absolutely unquestioningly. They went to death, absolutely unshaken, because for the martyrdom they were guaranteed a place in the anti-world, where there is eternal bliss. And to make them believe that the anti-world really existed, that it was not a hoax, they were given to smoke hashish-the most ordinary drug-and they saw it! Their visions were so colorful that they were worth dying for.

And as soon as the blue star Zuhra (planet Venus) appeared in the sky against the fading sunset, the Ismailis would penetrate and kill to kill, themselves invisible. Night, the symbol of mystery, was their element. They made deals in secret, they befriended the Templars in secret, joined their brotherhood in secret and kept the motives of their deeds a secret when they were tortured to death.

The greatest success was achieved by the Bahraini Carman community, which ravaged Mecca in 929. They massacred the pilgrims and stole the Black Stone of Kaaba, which was not returned until 951; and by their devastating raids they destroyed Syria and Iraq and even Multan in India, where they massacred the population and destroyed a magnificent work of art, the Temple of Aditya.

Equally important was the conversion to Ishmaelism of some of the Berbers of Atlas. These warlike tribes used the preaching of pseudo-Islam to deal with the Arab conquerors. The leader of the rebels, Ubeidullah, was crowned caliph in 907, establishing the Fatimid dynasty, the descendants of the Prophet's daughter and Ali. His descendants succeeded in conquering Egypt.

"The Elder of the Mountain.”

The Ismailis also tried to establish themselves in Iran and Central Asia, but ran into opposition from the Turks, first Mahmud Ghaznavi and then the Seljuk sultans. Despite their defeats, the Ismailis held out in Iran and Syria at the end of the twelfth century. The ambitious Hasan Sabbah, an official of the Seljuk Sultan Melik Shah's chancellery, who was expelled for his intrigues, became an Ismaili imam. In 1090 he succeeded in capturing the mountain stronghold of Alamut in Deilem and was called the "elder of the mountain", and later the Ishmaelites acquired a dozen fortresses in the mountains of Lebanon and Antilwan.

But the fortresses were not the main support of these fanatics. Most of the subjects of the "elder of the mountain" lived in towns and villages, posing as Muslims or Christians.  The 12th-century poet Usama ibn-Munqyz in his "Book of Edification" relates that, during the siege of his castle, his mother led her daughter onto a balcony above a precipice in order to push her into an abyss, in order to prevent her capture by the Ismailis. Attempts to destroy this order were always unsuccessful, for every wazir or emir inconvenient to the Ismaelites was held up by the irresistible dagger of an apparent assassin who sacrificed his life at the behest of his elder.

Hassan Sabbah felt no shortage of sincere followers. So, in 1092 the wazir Nizam al-Mulk was killed by the dagger of a fidayeen. So, in Ispahan, a false-blind beggar, asking to be led home, lured Muslims into an ambush, where the gullible goody-goody was killed. But these were trifles. Hassan found a way to break not the social system, but the ethnic system. He directed his assassins at the most talented and energetic emirs, whose place was naturally taken by less capable, if not talentless, dullards and narcissists. And these latter, occupying the lowest positions, promoted the Ismaili cause, for they knew that the dagger of the fidayeen would open for them the way to the top of power. Such purposeful genocide for 50 years turned the Seljuk Sultanate into a haphazard cluster of small but predatory principalities devouring each other like spiders in a jar.

The presence of a powerful Ismaili anti-system turned the struggle between Christianity and Islam into a three-way war. The Ishmaelites were everyone's enemy but, like everyone else, they needed friends and sought them everywhere they could, even among Christians. The Byzantine Orthodox were no match for the Ismaelites; the Greeks had been so badly burned by their acquiescence to the Pavlikians who started a rebellion in the ninth century that they preferred to deal with the Seljuks in the twelfth century, from whom prisoners could be bought or exchanged with ease.

The Crusaders, on the other hand, lost their original religious impulse in half a century and succumbed to the allure of the luxury and luxury of the East. From a grandiose clash between the "Christian" and "Muslim" worlds, the war became a series of feudal skirmishes common to every country of its time. The Ismailis kept their castles in order to take advantage of the turmoil and sold the services of their fidayeen to feudal lords who wanted to get rid of one or the other of their rivals. The murders generated income for the sect.

Negative Worldview

And now let us stop the caravan of our attention in order to reflect on the descriptions already made. As it was easy to see, the three great super-ethnic systems were accompanied by anti-systems, or rather one anti-system, just as the shadows of different people differ from each other not in their inner filling, which shadows do not have at all, but only in their contours.

As we have shown, the Provençal Cathars, the Bulgarian Bohomils, the Asian Pavlicians, the Arabian Carmats, the Berber and Iranian Ismailis, while having many ethnographic and dogmatic differences, had one thing in common: aversion to reality, that is, metaphysical nihilism. This characteristic has been so striking to all scholars that they are tempted to see it as a manifestation of the class struggle, which certainly took place during the heyday of feudalism. But this alluring oversimplification meets with insurmountable difficulties when it comes to the facts.

What was the behavior of the heretics themselves? Of course, they killed the feudal lords, but they were just as ruthless in massacring the peasants, seizing their possessions and selling their wives and children into slavery. The social composition of the Manichean and Ishmaelite communities was extremely variegated. They included racial priests, poor artisans and rich merchants, peasants and vagabonds - adventurers, and finally, professional warriors, i.e., feudal lords, without whom a long and successful war was impossible in those days. The army had to have people who knew how to build soldiers in battle order, strengthen the castle, and organize a siege. In the 10th-13th centuries, only feudal lords could do it.

When Ishmaelites managed to win and conquer the country, for example Egypt, they did not change the social system at all. The Ismaili chiefs simply took the place of the Sunni emirs and also collected taxes from the fellahs and duties from merchants. They became feudal lords and carried out religious persecution no worse than the Sunnis. In 1210. The "elders of the mountain" in Alamut burned "heretical" (in their opinion) books. The Fatimid Caliph Hakim ordered Christians to wear crosses on their clothes and Jews to wear bells; Muslims were allowed to trade in the bazaar only at night and dogs found in the streets were ordered to be killed. 

Even the Carmats of Bahrain, who established a republic seemingly free of feudal institutions, combined social equality of their community members with state slavery. As orientalist E. A. Belyaev noted in his book Muslim Sectarianism, "The tense struggle waged by the Karmati against the Caliphate and Sunni Islam took on the character and form of a sectarian movement from the very beginning. The Carmaks, being impatient fanatics, directed their weapons not only against the Sunni Caliphate and its rulers, but also against all those who did not accept their teachings and were not part of their organization ... The attacks of Karmati armed units on urban and rural civilians were accompanied by killings, looting and violence ... Survivors were taken prisoner, enslaved, and sold in their busy markets along with other booty.

Naturally, this stereotype of behavior alienated large segments of peasants, townspeople and even Bedouins, who were always ready to plunder under any sign, but thought it unnecessary to kill women and children.

What kind of "class struggle" is that?

But could it be that all this is the slander of the enemies of "free thought" against the freethinkers who condemned the rulers for their arbitrariness and the clergy for their ignorance? Suppose so, but why then did these "slanderers" not object to criticism of their orders? The negative side of heretical teachings was not disputed, and the positive side was spoken of unanimously by the French and the Persians, the Greeks and the Chinese, and clearly without collusion.

But let us hear the other side, the famous poet and ideologist of Ismailism, Nasir-i-Khosrow.

The thinker believed that "if it is obligatory for us to kill snakes according to the consent of people, then it is obligatory for us to kill infidels according to the order of God Almighty, and the infidel is more serpent than serpent...".

The supreme goal of his faith is for men to comprehend intimate knowledge and attain "angelic likeness”. The means of achievement is the establishment of the Fatimid power, which he thinks of as follows:

When we learn that the descendants of Fatma have occupied Mecca;

We shall feel fever in our bodies and joy in our hearts.

The armies of God dressed in white shall arrive;

God's vengeance on the black horde, I hope, is at hand.

Let the sun of the prophet's clan wave his saber,

So, that Abbas's ruthless descendants may die out,

So, that the earth may become white and red like a blasphemy,

And the true faith's praise reaches Baghdad.

The abode of the prophet is his golden words,

And only the heir has the right to the kingdom.

And if in the west the sun has risen don't fear

From the darkness of the dungeons lift your head up.

Translation by L. N. Gumilev

The poem is unambiguous. It is a call for religious war without any social program. Consequently, the Ishmaelite movement was not a class movement, nor were the Cathars, Bogomils, and Peacchians a class movement. The latter three movements differed from Ismailism only in that they did not achieve the political successes after which their degeneration into feudal states would have been inevitable.

The Limitations of Denial

How should we view the above from the perspective of geography? It would seem to be a phantasmagoria, but what does geography have to do with it? Very much so! The worldview of the Albians, the Manicheans, the Peacchians in Byzantium, the Ishmaelites, and others is a system of negative ecology. Far from loving the world, the Manicheans did not want to keep it; on the contrary, they wanted to destroy all living things and all that is beautiful. Instead of loving the world and people, they cultivated disgust and hatred. All life and the biosphere should have been destroyed wherever this system prevailed. But fortunately, the Manicheans had limited options: they could not win the victory to the end, they could not realize their whole idea in principle.

Indeed, if the Manicheans had achieved total victory, they would have had to give up the destruction of flesh and matter in order to maintain it; that is, to transgress the very principle for which they sought victory. By committing this betrayal of themselves, they would have had to establish a system of relationship with their neighbors and with the landscapes in which they lived, the same feudal order that was natural to the technological and cultural level of the time. Consequently, they would have ceased to be themselves and would have become their own opposite. But this was ruled out by the irreversibility of evolution. By taking the position of cursing life and accepting as canon a hatred of the world, one cannot exclude one's own body.

So, the Manicheans first destroyed their own bodies and left no offspring, so that was the end of it. The complete destruction of the biosphere did not take place in those places where the Manicheans were victorious. Nevertheless, this negative attitude towards everything living was the slogan for a powerful heretical movement that swept through the Balkans, most of Asia Minor, Northern Italy, Southern France, and led to incalculable victims.

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