In the smoky, beer-stained alehouses of 1640s London, a strange kind of holiness was brewing. While the Puritans were busy scrubbing the world clean of joy, the Ranters were busy finding God in the bottom of a pewter mug. They were the ultimate spiritual anarchists, a loose collection of radicals who believed that because God was in everything—the clouds, the dirt, the swear words, and the tobacco smoke—nothing could truly be sinful. For a Ranter, to curse was to praise, and to feast was to pray.
But the Ranters were not a historical accident. They were a recurring fever dream in the mind of humanity. To find their truest kin, one must travel back three hundred years and several hundred miles to the Rhine Valley and the bustling cities of the Low Countries, where the Brethren of the Free Spirit once walked the earth.
The Heresy of the “I”
The Brethren of the Free Spirit were the medieval ancestors of the Ranters, haunting the 13th and 14th centuries with a doctrine that terrified the Catholic Church. Much like the Ranters, they didn’t just believe in God; they believed they were God.
Their core philosophy was “Autotheism.” They argued that a soul, through intense contemplation, could become so “annihilated” in the divine that the distinction between the Creator and the Created simply evaporated. Once a person reached this state of “Free Spirit,” they were, in their own eyes, incapable of sin.
The parallels are striking. A Ranter like Abiezer Coppe would claim that “sin and transgression are finished,” while a follower of the Free Spirit would argue that for the “perfected” man, things like the Ten Commandments were merely suggestions for the spiritually immature. If God is moving your hand, can that hand commit a crime? If God is speaking through your mouth, can the words be profane?
The Paradise of the Present
Both groups shared a radical, almost dangerous, “nowness.” The Ranters rejected the idea of a distant Heaven or a subterranean Hell. Hell, they argued, was merely a state of mind—the torment of being separated from the realisation of one’s own divinity. Heaven was the present moment, fully realised.
Similarly, the Brethren of the Free Spirit practiced a form of “mystical libertinism.” To them, the world was not a fallen place to be escaped, but a playground of the divine. There are accounts (often written by their enemies, it must be noted) of the Brethren engaging in “Adamite” practices—walking naked to represent a return to the innocence of Eden before the fall.
This mirrors the Ranter tendency toward public theatre. Ranters were known to strip in the streets or engage in “holy smoking” while preachers screamed about damnation. Both groups used the body as a canvas for their theology. They didn’t want to save their souls; they wanted to liberate them from the very concept of “salvation.”
The Social Dynamite
What made both the Ranters and the Brethren of the Free Spirit so dangerous wasn’t just their theology; it was their politics.
In the 17th century, the Ranters were a nightmare for the new English Commonwealth because they levelled the playing field. If God is in the beggar as much as the King, why should the beggar bow? The Ranters were the spiritual wing of a social revolution, an ecstatic rejection of the burgeoning capitalist and class structures.
The Brethren of the Free Spirit emerged during a time of immense social upheaval in the Middle Ages—the rise of the merchant class and the shifting power of the Church. By claiming direct, unmediated access to God, they bypassed the priest, the tithe, and the confession. They were a spiritual “do-it-yourself” movement that threatened the monopoly of the Vatican.
The Eternal Rant
Both movements were eventually crushed. The Brethren were hunted by the Inquisition, their leaders burned at the stake (most notably the mystic Marguerite Porete and her book The Mirror of Simple Souls). The Ranters were silenced by the Blasphemy Act of 1650, their leaders imprisoned or forced into recantation, eventually absorbed into the more quietist and respectable Quakers.
Yet, the ghost of the Ranter lives on. You see it in the “Crazy Wisdom” of certain Eastern traditions, like the Aghori of India, who break every social taboo to prove that God is in the “unclean.” You see it in the counter-cultures of the 1960s, where the search for a “higher consciousness” often looked a lot like a Ranter meeting: music, substances, and the dismantling of traditional morality.
The Ranters and the Brethren of the Free Spirit remind us that there has always been a pocket of the human soul that refuses to be governed. They represent the extreme, jagged edge of the search for freedom—the belief that if we could only see the world as it truly is, we would find that the prison bars of “good” and “evil” were never there to begin with.
To the Ranter, and to the Free Spirit, the universe is not a courtroom where we are being judged. It is a tavern where God is buying the next round.
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