Scourge same period we meet with the private use of the "discipline" by such saintly persons as King Louis IX of France and Elisabeth of Hungary. Semi-literal usages such as "the scourge of God" for Attila the Hun (i.e. "God's whip with which to punish the nations") led to metaphoric uses to mean a severe affliction, e.g. "the scourge of drug abuse". The scourge is described as one of the tools used in Wicca, primarily in the Gardnerian Tradition. The purpose of using the scourge is not to cause pain or to torture, but for purification purposes, particularly for Initiates. The
God as the devil was a scandal to the faithful [...] and [...] accounted for it by postulating [that Jehovah was] a secondary deity, a demiurgus, who was god, in a sense, but not the supreme God; he was just, rigidly just, he had his good qualities, but he was not the good god, who was Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ." The Church condemned his writings as heretical. John Arendzen (1909) in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) mentions that Eusebius accused Apelles, the 2nd-century AD Gnostic, of considering the Inspirer of Old-Testament prophecies to be not a god, but an evil angel. Hegemonius (4th