Adamites: the nudist sect resurfacing in the Czech Republic

Adamites: the nudist sect resurfacing in the Czech Republic

There is an early Christian sect that advocated returning to the state of Adam, the first man, and held its religious services without clothes. They were called Adamites and were accused of worshipping the devil. Their story is recorded in an old Italian magazine of theology, philosophy and popular history, and the trail disappears and reappears over the centuries across half of Europe. In 1782, after Joseph II's edict of toleration, they reappeared openly in Bohemia. In the liberal year of 1848 they returned, mainly in five villages in the Chrudim district of Bohemia, and called themselves Segarro: they insisted that an enemy would come from Segarro and destroy all Catholics, leaving them alone to divide up the land. The movement was suppressed by force.

What the Adamites believed and why they were persecuted

They considered clothing an obstacle to communion with God. They preached the community of goods, naturalness and the absence of shame in sensual relations. At their services, everyone present, including children, was naked; guests could attend but were not required to undress. Afterwards came the "Antiestéticast of Life", with light alcoholic drinks, dancing and, sometimes, sensual relations.

Their official ideology rejected indiscriminate fornication, violence and gai relations. Modern Adamites recognise official marriage and property, and allow almost all forms of sensual relationship except gai and zoophilic ones, as well as sens with a married woman without her spouse's consent. A trait that sets them apart from other sects is their use of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, which includes "the secret words that Jesus spoke in his lifetime".

From Bohemia to New York: the legacy of free love

In the 19th century the Adamites appeared in Lenox, New York, under the name of a free-love sect, the Oneida community, founded by Noyes (3 September 1811 - 13 April 1886) on communist principles: community of goods and of wives, raising children at the community's expense and total renunciation of property and the family.

They also existed in Russia, though it is unclear whether they were related or merely shared the name. They were called Telyash, and both the priest and the congregation celebrated religious services completely naked. Everywhere they met strong opposition from the main churches.

Eden between the Tigris and the Euphrates

The Adamites strive to recover paradise by building a new Eden. That is why they deny Iraq's sovereignty, which occupies the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They believe this is the original site of Gan Eden, the Garden of Delights, and that it should belong equally to all the peoples of the world.

The sect has been accused in numerous sources of witchcraft, orgies and satanic rituals, although its official ideology rejects such practices. Bohemia, meanwhile, remains a strange land: it gave the world Jan Hus, the reformer contemporary of Luther and Calvin whose ideas, it is claimed, were plagiarised by both, and who paid with his life. The local hops, it was said, drove the inhabitants mad.

With all this, the spread of religious nudism has room to grow. Whether it will catch fire again with the force of 1848 is another matter.