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The Adamites, or Adamians, were adherents of an early Christian sect (considered heretical by the Roman Catholic church) that flourished in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries, but knew later revivals.
Ancient History
The obscure sect, dating probably from the second century, professed to have regained Adam's primeval innocence. Various accounts are given of their origin. Some have thought them to have been an offshoot of the Carpocratian Gnostics, who professed a sensual mysticism and a complete emancipation from the moral law. Theodoret (Haer. Fab., I, 6) held this view of them, and identified them with the licentious sects whose practices are described by Clement of Alexandria. Others, on the contrary, consider them to have been misguided ascetics, who strove to extirpate carnal desires by a return to simpler manners, and by the abolition of marriage.
St. Epiphanius and St. Augustine mention the Adamites by name, and describe their practices. They called their church Paradise, claiming that its members were re-established in Adam and Eve's state of original innocency. Accordingly, they practiced "holy nudism", rejected the form of marriage as foreign to Eden, saying it would never have existed but for sin, lived in absolute lawlessness, holding that, whatever they did, their actions could be neither good nor bad and stripped themselves naked while engaged in common worship. They could not have been numerous.
Later legacy
Practices similar to those just described appeared in Europe several times in later ages. During the Middle Ages the doctrines of this obscure sect, which did not itself exist long, were revived: in the thirteenth century they in the Netherlands by the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit and the Taborites in Bohemia, and, in a grosser form, in the fourteenth by the Beghards in Germany. Everywhere they met with firm opposition from the mainstream churches. The Beghards became the Picards of Bohemia, who took possession of an island in the river Nezarka, and gave themselves up to a shameless communism avant la lettre. Ziska, the Hussite leader, nearly exterminated the sect in 1421 (cf. Höfler, Geschichtsquellen Böhmens, I, 414, 431); A brief revival of these doctrines took place in Bohemia after 1781, owing to the edict of toleration issued by Emperor Joseph II; were suppressedin 1849. The Austrian government suppressed the last remnants of these communistic Neo-Adamites in Bohemia by force in 1849. In the Modern Age some English Dissenters practiced the Adamite doctrine.
Arguably, modern nudism in Europe is the direct descendant of the Adamite sect.
See also
Sources and References
"Adamites"