Thus their fully initiated members, or “Perfect,” were sworn never to eat meat, eggs, milk, cheese or anything which was the result of sexual procreation. Fish was permitted because they thought that fish did not reproduce themselves by the coming together of the male and female! To eat any sort of food which came from a warm-blooded animal might be murder, for they believed in the transmigration of souls, and therefore such an animal might be the dwelling-place of a human soul. This, again, was perfectly logical; to be born again, after death, in another body was, according to this theology, a proper and necessary punishment for sin. All sexual acts which might possibly produce offspring were forbidden to the “Perfect”; they must purify themselves by fasts and elaborate ceremonies if they so much as touched a woman by accident. The propagation of human beings, with their sinful, material bodies, was clearly the worst of crimes. Hence the “Perfect” would sometimes tell a pregnant woman that she had a devil within her. Marriage was a perpetual state of sin; it was worse than adultery and fornication because the married felt no shame, and were, therefore, more likely to persist in cohabitation. It was even whispered that, just as sexual intercourse out of marriage was better than intercourse between married people because the married felt no shame, so, too, any unnatural form of intercourse from which children could not be conceived was better than natural cohabitation. Finally, the horrible and perfectly logical climax to all this was that suicide was the deed above all others most pleasing to God. It was one of the charges against the sect that their professed hatred for life and its pleasures was accompanied by promiscuous sexual orgies. Nor is there anything improbable in such accusations: they have been true of occasional heretical bodies from the earliest Christian times to Rasputin and certain contemporary Russian sects. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to prove that such sexual orgies were ever regularly practised or officially encouraged by the sect. The weight of testimony would rather seem to prove their extreme asceticism, out of which would naturally come occasional excesses of self-indulgence on the part of the “weaker brethren.”