Читать книгу Martyrs and Mystics - Ed Glinert - Страница 6

The capital has been host to all the major disputes and upheavals in the nation’s religious past. Here the shifts and schisms that have changed the history of England have been played out: from the break with Rome in the 1530s to the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s, and from the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.

Here too a myriad of sects and cults have taken shape – the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Peculiar People of Plumstead – driven by a succession of mavericks and mystics, as colourful as they were obscure. There was Thomas Tany, who in 1654 claimed to be Theauraujohn, High Priest of the Jews, about to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem with himself in charge. And John Robins, a mid-seventeenth-century mystic from Moorfields, who failed in his plan to take nearly 150,000 followers to the Holy Land, feeding them solely on dry bread, raw vegetables and water. In 1814, more farcically, there was Joanna Southcott, who claimed she would give birth to Shiloh, the biblical child who, according to the Book of Revelation, was to ‘rule all the nations with a rod of iron’.

Such drama continues to take place in the capital. As recently as 1985 the world’s press gathered at a Brick Lane curry house to meet the Lord Maitreya (or Christ, the Imam Mahdi or Krishna according to the different religions), who may or may not have appeared – depending as always on one’s faith. In 2008, when a member of the congregation at St Mary’s church, Putney, disrupted the service shouting out his views on the controversy over gay clergy, he was simply another manifestation of the ageold unsolvable conundrum of what to do when one’s own views differ from those of the next person.