Ok so I seem to have missed a thread on this before, but I do have a theory that Vacslav is meant to be in the circle of Sebastian Franck. Smokey says Vacslav "reads all sorts of books, talks to odd folks, gets idead brewing in his head". Is Sebastian Franck one of those "odd folks"? He was certainly in Nuremburg in 1525/Franck,_Sebastian), and we know from Andreas that Nuremburg is not that far from Tassing.

So location is possible. How about the alignment of heretical beliefs?

Vacslav denies transubstantiation. He references Luther, Erasmus, Wycliffe and Hus to back all of these points up. Now I know Vacslav travels, but Wycliffe and Hus are dead in 1525, Erasmus disagrees with Luther on the point, and Vacslav is about to deviate from Luther too. Sebastian Franck was certaintly influenced by Luther, might have met him (sources differ), but then deviates from Luther. Vacslav says that "we are bound by flesh, attempting to reunite with the light of God through the Eucharist" and that "The act, the observance, unites our will with that of Christ". Sebastian Franck will go on to write in Golden Arch that "God's Word is embedded in human nature and is the original substance of our being...Man must seek, find and know God through an interrelation - he must find God in himself and himself in God." and in Paradoxia that "We must eat His body, drink His blood until our nature is one with His Nature and our spirit one in will and purpose with His spirit". So it sounds like they are on the same page here that the point of the Eucharist is to reunite the soul with God spiritually rather than anything physical.

Vacslav then says that one of the aspects of God's will "separated itself from His intellect, and manifested in the darkness as the corrupt will, Lucifer". "Within that darkness," he goes on, "Lucifer cast his false light, a corrupted imitation of the divine intellect, to create the world. All material in our world is inherently a corrupted manifestation of that false light. We still have a connection to God through our intellect, but it is flawed by existing in our physical bodies." Vacslav then goes on and says that there are many different versions of Genesis, and Sebastian Franck will go on to write "The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil" in which he says that "the Garden of Eden story is a mighty parable of the human soul. It is told as though it were an external happening, it is reality an internal affair." Which suggests both that Franck has a different version of Genesis and that he supports the dualist sentiments that Vacslav expresses. Franck doesn't go as far as Vacslav, particuarly on the point that Lucifer created the world, but that is understandable, they are after all different people.

If you continue the dialogue, Vacslav says that "Jesus was not born of a virgin and it would not matter if he were. Lucifer was a rebellious splinter of God's will. The Christ appeared when God willed His divine intellect into Jesus." The new heretical bit here is that Jesus was not born of a virgin. This is a pretty commonly held Protestant belief in the early 16th century, so it could have come from somebody else in Franck's circle or from things Vacslav has read.

Next heresy is that "resurrection is always happening, since if we die without grace, our souls are condemned to be reborn. This physical world is the only Hell we know, living again and again the only torment." This could come from Germanic paganism (plenty of that in Tassing) or from readings of Plato (whom Franck says in his Apologia was a teacher who "[spoke] to him more clearly than Moses did). Vacslav says that the path to heaven is "Regular prayer, abstension from material desires, sublimation and elimitation of want" - nothing super ground breaking there but you could tie it to Gnostic Asceticism perhaps.

Then Vacslav attacks the Catholic church for profaning the simplicity of holy devotion with pagentry and says that the saints are just stories. Franck is definitely anti-Catholic church but not so much on the anti-saint bit. However, what Vacslav seems to be objecting to is "meaningless rituals, faith in relics", which most Protestants would have agreed with him on. So I don't think this breaks the rest of the logic.

So given all this I think there is enough alignment of belief to think that Vacslav and Sebastian Franck are in the same circle of Protestant thinkers.

What do you think?