IQ4: GUGLIELMA AND DOLCINO. the self-mortification of a youth of Parma, called Gherardo Sega- relli, found abundant imitators. Of low extraction, uncultured and stupid, he had vainly applied for admission into the Franciscan Order. Denied this, he passed his days vacantly musing in the Franciscan church. The beatitude of ecstatic abstraction, carried to the point of the annihilation of consciousness, has not been con- fined to the Tapas and Samadhi of the Brahman and Buddhist. The monks of Mt. Athos, known as Umbilicani from their pious contemplation of their navels, knew it well, and Jacopone da Todi shows that its dangerous raptures were familiar to the zealots of the time.* Segarelli, however, was not so lost to external im- pressions but that he remarked in the scriptural pictures which adorned the walls the representations of the apostles in the habits which art has assigned to them. The conception grew upon him that the apostolic life and vestment would form the ideal religious existence, superior even to that of the Franciscans which had been denied to him. As a preliminary, he sold his little property ; then, mounting the tribune in the Piazza, he scattered the proceeds among the idlers sunning themselves there, who forthwith gambled it away with ample floods of blasphemy. Imitating literally the career of Christ, he had himself circumcised ; then, enveloped in swaddling clothes, he was rocked in a cradle and suckled by a woman. His apprenticeship thus completed, he embarked on the career of an apostle, letting hair and beard grow, enveloped in a white mantle, with the Franciscan cord around his waist, and san- dals on his feet. Thus accoutred he wandered through the streets of Parma crying at intervals " Penitenzagite" which was his igno- rant rendering of " Penitentiam agite /" — the customary call to repentance, f For a while he had no imitators. In search of disciples he wan- dered to the neighboring village of Collechio, where, standing at the roadside, he shouted " Enter my vineyard I" The passers-bv who knew his crazy ways paid no attention to him, but strangers took his call to be an invitation to help themselves from the
- "0 glorioso stare Annichilarsi bene
In nihil quietato ! Nod e potere humano Lo' intelletto posato Anzi e virtu divina !" E Faffetto dormire ! t Salimbene, pp. 112-13. (Coinba, La Riforma in Italia, I. 310.)
