In opening this lecture I would like to resolve any ambiguities arising from the fact that several people called Augustine have been canonised by the Christian church; thus there is more than one Saint Augustine.

If that name is mentioned in conversation to someone who was educated in the British school system there is often a presumption that it is Saint Augustine of Canterbury, said to have founded the Christian church in southern England, who is being spoken of. That individual, who died in 604 or 605 CE, is the fellow who is reputed, on having been told that some comely young slaves in a market were 'Angles', to have declared "Non Angli sed Angeloi"- (Not Angles but Angels). He was subsequently chosen in 596 AD by Pope Gregory I to lead a mission to England, those people's country of origin.

Up to the present day the eccentric meanderings or many English country roads are attributed to that Saint Augustine, or, more precisely, to his cow. A greasy trucker's folktale has it that the English countryside in the 6th century was notoriously boggy, and that in his peripatetic wanderings while converting the populus, the Saint was wont to drive a cow in front of him testing for firm ground. In subsequent times the faithful devotedly followed in the Saint's footsteps, with the paths eventually becoming upgraded into metalled roads. Thus it is that particularly sinuous stretches of English highway are said to have been laid out by Saint Augustine's cow. By a similar process, Saint Patrick's cow is held responsible for the notoriously twisty roads in Ireland, and, doubtless, other countries might make equivalent attributions of archaic infrastructural development.

The Saint Augustine who is the subject of this paper lived almost two centuries earlier than the aforementioned Father of English Highway Planning, and is much the better known of the two in Christian scholastic circles outside the UK. Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 CE in Numidia - the Roman provincial name for that part of North Africa corresponding to present day Algeria. He was Bishop of Hippo (the modern day Mediterranean port of Annaba) from 396 until his death in 430 CE, and is still regared as the major theologian of the early Western Church. His best known writings are the 'Confessions' and 'The City of God', which date from the period of his episcopate.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND CULTURAL BACKDROP

The time of Augustine's birth was, comparatively speaking, a period of religious tolerance in the Roman Empire. Although the Council of Nicaea some three decades earlier had established the ascendancy of the authoritarian Pauline branch of Christianity, and although the Emperor Constantine had been baptised on his deathbed in 337, the church had not yet become established as the official religion throughout the empire. Paganism was still very much alive, and, in North Africa particularly, it had become fused with the Gnostic tradition which, in turn, had become heavily imbued with the dualism of heretical Manichacanism.

Augustine's childhood home reflected the situation in the wider empire in that his father was a Pagan while his mother was a devout Christian. We are treated to a few details of the Saint's early life in the 'Confessions'. That volume makes tedious reading; it is addressed throughout to the Christian God, and the style suggests that much of it might have been written by the author on his knees in an attitude of abject self-humiliation. In a retrospective outpouring in which he seems to seek to illustrate the sinful character of human infancy he reveals pangs of guilt about his emergence from between his mother's legs, and a fixation about female breasts and "fountains of milk" which would probably qualify him as a candidate for remedial Freudian analysis.

His intellectual promise as a young lad led his parents to arrange for his education in Carthage, on the coast near modern day Tunis about 150 miles east of his home town of Tageste (Souk-Arras). The residential establishment where he was sent might have been the model for the more restrictive type of private educational environment of which a few still exist in the British Isles today; a single sex regime with emphasis on classics and the rod. He emerged exhibiting the sort of homophobia which, in the words of a recent letter to 'Chaos International' #10, "may be a compensatory mechanism indicating some childhood trauma of the unsavoury sort associated with boys' schools". He seems also to have fallen in with a peer group of whom his pious mother would scarcely have approved, and, in his late teens, to have thrown himself wholeheartedly into the fleshpot excesses of pagan Carthage.

"I committed fornication ...." Augustine confesses, "and all around me thus fornicating there echoed 'Well done! Well done!'" He continues "Behold with what companions I walked in the streets of Babylon [sic], and wallowed in the mire thereof, as if in a bed of spices and precious ointments".

A picture of 4th century Carthage emerges which might have an echo in modern Amsterdam, in Hamburg, or even Bangkok: "Then in the theatres I rejoined with lovers when they wickedly enjoyed one another".

At the conclusion of his schooling he lived among a group of licentious subversives known as the 'Eversores' (Latin: - overturners). This bunch of reprobates may well have been the local Carthaginian anarchists, though they appear to have inclined more towards a "Do what thou Wilt" philosophical stance than to have been actively engaged in any kind of direct action against the Roman state, which had exercised suzerainity over the area since the Punic Wars in Hannibal's time some five centuries earlier.

From age 19 to 28 Augustine was a freelance teacher of Rhetoric in Carthage, and that occupation involved him in competing for prizes in public debates. Such competitions seem to have had some of the flavour of a modern day Chess championship, or even of Cricket as played in the Trobriand Islands, in that contestants could engage the services of sorcerors to improve their chances of success. In the 'Confessions' Augustine assures the Christian God that he rejected all approaches from persons who claimed to be able to help out in this way.

He appears to have been impressed by one Faustus, a Bishop of the Manichees in Carthage; it should be made clear that this is not the Faustus who became known as a Pelagian Heretic born in Britain circa 400 CE, nor either of the German 16th century occultists of the same name of whom the better remembered mortgaged his soul to Mephistopheles in Marlowe's cautionary tale. Faustus of Carthage was something of a mathematician, and Augustine records that he was able to predict eclipses of both the Sun and Moon many years in advance with impressive accuracy, down to the very day when the event would occur.

Augustine's disenchantment with traditional paganism seems to have been engendered on his realisation that there were serious flaws in the practise of Astrology. He cites an example of the simultaneous birth of a 'well-born' acquaintance, Firminius, and of a slave child in a nearby household, who should therefore have identical horoscopes, and he goes on to catalogue radical differences in these individual's life experiences. He concludes that natal Astrology is bunkum, expressing himself in terms which find a resonance some sixteen centuries later in the writings of the Pope of Chaos.

The objectivity of the Manichaeans with regard to celestial movements and the Gnostic emphasis on the importance of personal experience seem to have appealed to Augustine, perhaps not least because therein lay a philosophical standpoint which seemed to reconcile the disparate belief systems of his parents. When he travelled to Rome and then on to Milan to take up a Professorship in Rhetoric he had already advanced through some grades in the heretical Manichaean heirarchy. In Milan he met Ambrosius, later canonised as Saint Ambrose, who was the initiator of the ideas that provided the model for the church/state symbiosis which was the basis for the following thousand years of European history and the accompanying intellectual tyranny.

Ambrosius seems to have convinced Augustine that there was little future in the heretical purity of Manichaeanism, and baptised him into the Roman Church in 386 at the age of 32, to the obvious delight of his mother. Augustine's conversion may have been pragmatic to some degree, as there is no account of any 'blinding light on the road to Damascus'; there is however an anecdote of his having been cured of a toothache "when it had come to such a height that I could not speak" (an obvious handicap for a Professor of Rhetoric). This condition was purportedly relieved as a result of a group of friends praying for him to the Christian God, whereupon he became convinced and accepted baptism.

From that point forward Augustine turned his considerable intellectual talents to the philosophical demolition of his previous beliefs. He made such an effective job of it that Christian fundamentalists and theologians still draw heavily on his work to this day; although his most famous aphorism is, perhaps, the brief prayer "Give me chastity and continency, only not yet."

The main thrust of the argument which Augustine develops against paganism in his work 'The City of God' is that it doesn't work. He gives pages of examples of pagan practises failing to save cities (e.g. Rome, Troy) from disaster, and he selectively contrasts lucky escapes by Christians. He was, of course, arguing from a slightly advantageous position in that he had some millennia of pagan history from which to draw examples, whereas Christianity was a comparatively recent phenomenon. The Crusades, and the Inquisitions were yet to happen, and the Reformation, in the wake of which Christians started inflicting major disasters on each other, was a thousand years away.

Where Augustine scores well is in pointing up the inconsistencies of Roman paganism. He points out that both positive and negative aspects of virtually every area of human, civic and celestial activity have associated deities, and he highlights the elements of overkill which appear to be present in having to perform rituals both to encourage beneficent entities as well as to propitiate the malefic ones.

Chaoticians may be interested to note that in relation to the near permanent civic and political strife in Rome and the Empire, Augustine points to a serious imbalance, in that Concordia had a well appointed temple, while Discordia (Eris) was virtually ignored in the pantheon and was thus able to roll Golden Apples hither and thither stirring up conflict with impunity.

Extensive reference is made in 'The City of God' to the work of Marcus Tarentius Varro (c. 116 - 27 BC); he seems today to be more thought of as a political satirist and authority on agricultural practise, rather than as a pagan theologian. One senses perhaps that Augustine is actually drawing more material from the practises of his own 'mis-spent youth' than he likes to admit directly, and that his backing much of the pagan theory onto Varro may be a useful rhetorical device, tending to decouple him from an earlier lifestyle and spectrum of observances from which he obviously derived considerable enjoyment and companionship.

There is a brief reference in the 'Confessions' to some early writings of Augustine dating from his Pagan/Manichaean/Gnostic period as a teacher in Carthage, though nothing from that era appears to be listed in standard bibliographies. On the basis of the sort of activities he appears to have been involved in, one may suppose that the ecclesiastical authorities might have some interest in suppressing any such early works, or, at the least, in holding them under seal. So if Saint Augustine actually committed anything positive to permanent record on the subject of Sex Magic, the best place to look would probably be the innermost recesses of the Vatican Library - one wonders if the keys which are prominent in the papal insignia represent those of the Kingdom of Heaven or those of the repositories of prohibited ancient literature!

"SAUCY SAINT IN CARTHAGE DEVIL-SEX ROMPS" - SIN WORLD EXCLUSIVE

In 'The City of God' Augustine gives several eyewitness accounts of what he describes as "vile and licentious" rituals, purportedly demanded by the pagan deities in exchange for protection and/or favours; unlike so many reporters in our own times, he does not indicate at any point that he "made his excuses and left".

Here outlined for us are festive games in honour of the virgin 'Coelestia' and of the 'Mother of the Gods' (Berecynthia/Rhea/Cybele) - this festivity was called 'Tables'. We learn about the 'Fugalia', held on 24th February to celebrate the banishment of the Roman Kings at the inauguration of the Republic in 509 BC.

Augustine is particularly authoritative on local Carthaginian practices whose origins will be examined in due course. He writes at length of Coelestis, as if she were a major player in the Roman pagan pantheon, rather than a local speciality imported with the original settlers from Phoenicia. She was more usually called 'Tanit', and, while the virginity may have been a Punic variant on the theme, the attendance by "a grand display of harlots" at her observances was straight from the Temples of Ashtaroth, Ishtar, and Astarte - A Babalon from Babylon indeed, but, miraculously, now 'virgo intacta'.

The Carthaginians certainly seem to have taken her observances seriously. As Augustine says. "We were plainly shown what was pleasing to the virgin deity ... this licentiousness - which, if practised in one's home, could only be done there in secret - was practised as a public lesson in the temple." Augustine seems to have pushed and shoved with the rest of the assembly to get a better view.

He describes newly-wed brides being encouraged to enthrone themselves on the grotesquely enlarged male parts of another local deity, and 'stately matrons' garlanding a similar image with flowers and caresses; it is not clear whether, in the latter case, the object of devotion was actually attached to a live manifestation of the entity, or simply a giant dildo.

Augustine also discusses aspects of the Cult of the 'Mother of the Gods' which led to her male attendants being emasculated. Such individuals were known as 'Galli' and they seem to have populated Carthage in some numbers; indeed Augustine records having encountered representatives seeking alms on the very day on which he was writing.

It might be possible to dismiss these accounts as propagandist's fantasies of the sort which are promulgated nowadays by Christian fundamentalists concerning occult activities, but some supportive evidence that such spectacles were indeed extant for Augustine to enjoy in late 4th century Carthage may be gleaned from a contextual examination of the history of the city.

A CRASH COURSE IN CARTHAGINIAN HISTORY

The Romans used to call the Carthaginians 'Poeni', and the etymology of that word is an indication of the origin of the city as a Phoenician colony. The earliest settlement was circa 800 BC and its purpose was to provide a safe anchorage along the maritime trading route to the western Mediterranean. There were other similar settlements on Sicily and Sardinia, and also on the Iberian mainland. One of the most important was the now lost city of Tartessus, which was to the south west of modern Seville in the swampy area near the present mouth of the Guadalquivir River.

Carthage grew on trade and by 500 BC it is estimated to have been the richest city on earth. It issued large quantities of gold coinage, and was able to defend its interests with well paid mercenary armies. The source of the wealth was in raw materials, gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, and in cheap manufactured goods. The Taiwan of the Socratic age!

After Phoenicia itself (centred around modern city of Tyre, Lebanon) was subsumed in the expanding Persian Empire in the 6th Century BC, Carthage was able to develop as an independent state, and effectively controlled all trade in the Western Mediterranean, as well as establishing supply routes from the Atlantic coasts of Africa and Europe as far north as Brittany. There is, it appears, little firm evidence to suggest that Carthaginians or Phoenicians ever traded directly with the British Isles, as is sometimes surmised. Cornish and Irish raw materials got to the Mediterranean, but mostly by way of intermediaries in Gaul and Tartessus.

Early Carthaginian culture was fervently religious. The two principal deities were Tanit, the Ashtaroth derivative discussed above, and 'Baal Hammon', an avatar of the Phoenician Sun God, but one who also absorbed some of the progenitor qualities of Cronus/Saturn, along with some of his mythological attributes (parental emasculation, baby-eating, etc). There seems little doubt that practices took place which would be considered barbaric today, including child sacrifice, probably of first-born males; there is no evidence, however, to suggest that these particular rites survived beyond the sacking of Carthage by the Roman legions under Scipio Africanus in 146 BC.

The area fell under Roman domination after a series of three Punic Wars which started following a dispute about territories in Sicily in 264 BC. The most celebrated military adventure was the march on Rome by the Carthaginian general Hannibal (transl: 'Beloved of Baal') who led an army through Spain and over the Alps to attack Italy from the North with some success. The defeats of the legions at Lake Trasimene in 217 and Cannac in 216 BC represented the most serious threat to Rome during the pre-Christian era. It is interesting to speculate that but for the perfidious brutality of Scipio Africanus, western civilisation might have developed under the tutelage of an Empire State which sanctioned child sacrifice, rather than one which nailed people up on crosses. Whether we would have been any better off is debatable, in my view.

Throughout the imperial phase of Roman history, Carthage was the principal source of exotic animals for the empire's circuses. It is well known that the Carthaginian armies used elephants - they were the battle tanks of the day. It is said though that they could be as much of a liability as an asset, performing, as they did, according to their own stochastic paradigm on occasion, and turning about at a vital moment to stomp on those who were urging them forward - the press releases of the day must have been replete with casualty lists where the cause of death is posted as "intercepting a friendly trampling".

For almost two centuries after the sack of Carthage, the Romans developed the agricultural potential of North Africa, to the point where it was thought of as the 'breadbasket' of the empire. Finally, and presumably with the ceremonial curse laid on the site by Scipio Africanus receding into dim memory, the emperor Augustus refounded Carthage itself. The area became a focus of migration both for middle-class Romans and for veterans of the legions, who were often rewarded for long or valiant service with a grant of land, or even a feudal overlordship.

In the early decades and centuries of the Christian Era a largely Gnostic, and later Manichacan, blend of the new faith spread rapidly through North Africa, though apparently without the excesses of missionary zeal which characterised the slower spread of the dominant Pauline Christianity on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. Eventually, in the wake of Diocletian's persecution, which lasted intermittently for a decade in the period up to 313 CE, there occurred one of the most fundamental schisms to have divided the church in its entire history, that of the Donatists. The events which sparked the split came to a focus in Carthage, and while there seems little doubt that the young Augustine might have been aware that something was going on (much as might a young Catholic or Protestant in Derry or Belfast) there seems to be nothing in his writings to indicate which faction his pious mother belonged. If she had taken the orthodox position, one feels sure Augustine would have made a rhetoreticians meal out of it.

The schism arose when two Bishops were appointed in Carthage, one, Majorinus, was the choice of a faction who had remained defiant during Diocletian's persecution, and who had lost a number of members to unpleasant martyrdom; the other Bishop, Caecilian, was appointed by a faction who had compromised with the Emperor's edicts, surrendered their works of scripture, and in so doing betrayed their faith to a pragmatic acceptance of state control. Majorinus died soon afterwards, and was succeeded by Donatus, whose name was adopted by the rebel faction.

The Donatists claimed the legitimate apostolic succession; while the Caecilians had the support of the Roman State. Both Bishops excommunicated each other and, unsurprisingly, their respective followers, and Donatism was declared a heresy, along with Gnosticism, Manichaeanism, and Pelagianism, whose adherents, if anything, were even more purist than those of Donatus. By the time an Imperial Commission summoned a conference in Carthage in 411 to sort the whole thing out, Roman Christianity was the official state religion, and the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Augustine was Bishop of Hippo, the adjacent Roman see to Carthage; it thus fell to him to suppress the "heresies", and, with his mother 'twanging a harp' by this time, he seems to have discharged his duties with some ruthlessness.

In its early stages, the Donatist schism was less one of doctrine than of heirarchial legitimacy. A similar schism can be pointed to in the split between Grand Orient Masonry and the United Grand Lodge of England following the exile of the Jacobite monarchy from the English throne. In these cases it is my view that the moral high ground is held by the Donatists and the Grand Orient respectively, since they survived with honour intact, while the other parties sacrificed their integrity for the sake of political expediency.

It would be easy to dismiss the events surrounding the Donatist Schism as shadowy happenings in a time and place far removed from our own, but I would submit that they remain important to this day, and, moreover that certain interests have had every reason to hope that they should continue to moulder in obscuruity. The first point is that the bonding between state and church, which survives in the constitutional Establishment of the Church of England dates from the time in 380 when Christianity was established in Rome. The second point is that the precedent of the use of state power to enforce a belief system dates from the suppression of the Donatists; that precedent inspired the inquisitions, the witch-hunts, and a systematic campaign of obliteration of native cultures throughout the world; and, even today, that precedent provides the basis whereby the forces of the state can be empowered to conduct dawn raids to kidnap children of supposed occult practitioners on some basis of their being in some purported moral danger.

The State established and the Roman brands of Christianity effectively abdicated any stance of morality at that time and have never managed to provide any justification for their treachery towards the Donatists which was not enforced by physical duress. Augustine was ultimately responsible for this surrender of philosophical argument to force of arms.

A CLOSET THELEMITE ??

One of Augustine's more famous sayings - according to Encyclopaedia Britannica - is "Love, and do what thou wilt". It seems that he used this familiar aphorism to defend compulsion "in the service of charity"; which must be one of the more eccentric interpretations of the Thelemite axiom - much on a par with saying that "Everything is Permissible" applies only to the spellings of the words which make up the sentence itself.

In practise though Augustine seems to have lived pretty much according to his dictum, and there can be little doubt that he knew what he enjoyed personally when it came to pagan ritual. I have already examined the extent of his first hand knowledge of local Carthaginian practices, but 'The City of God' extends his review to cover paganism more generally. Much of the Roman material is referenced to Varro, but in certain categories of mainland ceremonial Augustine seems again to be providing material based on personal experience. I refer specifically to Rites of Liber and Libera.

In the Roman pantheon Liber represents the fertility principle embodied in male seed, and he is also a patron of the vine, thus combining important aspects of Pan and of Bacchus/Dionysus in a single entity. Libera is the female counterpart, combining abandoned sensuality with poise and balance. Festivals of Liber and Libera used to go on for a month at a time, and, Augustine assures us, were licentious in character.

The cults of Liber and Libera originated in Rome among the Plebian (as opposed to Patrician) classes sometime before 450 BC, and were centred on the Aventine Hill, outside the original city boundary. They appear to have spread throughout the empire, having been popular among the legionnaires, and were particularly concentrated in those provinces where a morally casual attitude was dominant, such as Carthage.

It seems that a technique was used whereby Liber or Libera provided a channel for manifestation or oracular pronouncement by pretty well any other diety in the pantheon. This is nothing more or less than what we might now describe as Illumination through Erotognosis. There is some suggestion that these workings took place in the course of the Coelestis/Tanit festivals in Carthage, and they may have been the channel by which the various pagan deities demanded the various "vile and licentious" forfeits in exchange for favours bestowed.

Approached in a wholehearted way there is no reason why such techniques should not be highly effective, and it is therefore a bit of a puzzle that Augustine seems so categoric that pagan magic did not work. It is possible that, by the time he was writing, the whole observance had declined to a point where it was little more than a hedonistic indulgence, or simply that he was never privy to the serious stuff which went on behind closed doors. He makes that claim several times, but with some disingenuousness, in my view.

CONCLUSION

There is also, perhaps, a frisson of disingenuousness in the title of this paper. I wished to emphasise Augustine's pivotal role in the events surrounding the compact between church and state in the latter days of the Roman Empire. At the same time Augustine's writings on the erotic ritual practices of his day provide an interesting additional dimension to any assessment of his personality, and are generally overlooked by his apologists. But what of his major thesis, which might be summed up as 'Paganism doesn't work, but Christianity does'.

He confines himself for the most part to a pagan paradigm where supplicant devotees perform acts of worship prescribed by the entity or deity; where there are references to more interactive observances, he is very scant on detail, and he is quite silent on the issue of human operators using discorporeal entities under their own willed control. It is from this restricted perspective that many present day Christians seem to derive their conceptions of what paganism/occultism is about.

In a recent discussion with a Christian fundamentalist, I noted that he seemed quite incapable of perceiving that there were other ways of treating with entities than simply "worshipping" them. This restricted view seems ultimately to derive from Augustine, yet as anyone who has worked with entities is well aware, simply doing what they say from an unquestioning standpoint is a sure recipe for being led into self-delusion. An essential tenet of Christianity though is that "God" knows best and that, whatever happens, one must accept "God's Will"; nowhere in the paradigm does the notion exist that one might be master of one's own universe and/or that one can tell "God", or whatever one chooses to call the subject discorporeal entity, what to do. In Augustine's paradigm one can only ask favours of the diety, Pagan or Christian, while endeavouring to conduct oneself in some fashion which is deemed to make one's requests more likely to be fulfilled.

In that sense Augustine takes the devotionist model of "worship" which the Christians favour and projects it back onto those aspects of paganism with which he was familiar. This is to imply that identical principles are involved, but that the Christian God is more likely to effect whatever modification of objective reality is requested (or prayed for) by the worshipper. An escape clause is built in, in that if what is requested does not happen, then it is the worshipper's fault for having been too "sinful". Since "sin" is defined to include most of the primary motivations of human nature, the loop closes into an irrefutable hypothesis, and a very cleverly constructed one at that. Admitting a paradigm where individuals could tell discorporeal entities, on whatever level, what to do, and/or constrain them to do it, would completely defeat the possibilities for social control inherent in the Christian model, and it is for that reason, in my view, that Augustine omits such direct references in his discussion of paganism. Moreover, it is consistent with the ruthless suppression of Gnosticism and Manichaeanism which permitted a more active role to their adherents, as well as allowing for evolution of the belief system by accretion of directly revealed material.

Augustine above all brought his rhetorical talents to bear on those who asked awkward questions. His favourite response to those who asked what the Christian God was doing before he created the universe was "Preparing the fires of Hell for people like you who seek to pry into his mysteries!"