An Overview of what the Adamites of Glencorse represent

The Adamites of Glencorse are a modern community inspired by the ideas traditionally associated with the medieval Adamites....

At their heart, they represent these Six Principles:

• Freedom: questioning unnecessary conventions and having the confidence to be yourself.
• Nature: reconnecting with the natural world and recognising that we are part of it, rather than separate from it.
• Simplicity: appreciating the things we really need: clean water, fresh air, hills, friendship and time outdoors.
• Equality: leaving status, wealth and social position behind. At the water's edge, everyone is simply another human being.
• Community: looking after one another and creating friendships based on shared experience rather than social standing.
• Joy: finding pleasure, friendship and a sense of wellbeing through outdoor activity, connection with nature and simply enjoying being alive.

These principles also carry responsibilities. We respect the reservoir and the wider environment, recognising that the hills, woodland, wildlife and water are something to cherish rather than merely use. We respect the privacy, dignity and personal boundaries of others, and recognise that nudity is never an invitation to unwanted attention. We believe that freedom includes the freedom to choose and that a community works best when everyone feels safe, welcome and respected.

The Adamites of Glencorse are a modern, informal community associated with Glencorse Reservoir Swimmers. They take inspiration from the historical idea of returning to a simpler, more natural state of humanity, but are neither a religion nor a recreation of any historical Adamite sect. There is no known historical evidence of an Adamite community at Glencorse or around St Catherine-in-the-Hopes. The connection is an idea inspired by the name and its historical associations, not a claim of historical descent.

The Adamites of North Africa — 2nd–3rd Century

In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, Christian writers in North Africa described an alleged sect who claimed to imitate Adam and Eve before the Fall — returning, at least symbolically, to the innocence of Paradise.

According to these accounts, they worshipped naked, believing that clothing represented the shame and separation that came after humanity's fall from innocence.

But there is an important qualification: we have no writings from the Adamites themselves. Almost everything we know comes from opponents who described groups they considered heretical.

Ancient writers variously connected the supposed Adamites with other controversial Christian groups, including the Carpocratians and followers of Prodicus. It is therefore possible that the name "Adamites" was sometimes being used by outsiders as a convenient label rather than referring to one clearly defined movement.

So, were there really Christian communities in North Africa worshipping naked?

Possibly — but the evidence is far less certain than the later stories might suggest.

What is fascinating is that the idea itself has a remarkably long history: people using Adam's innocence before the Fall as a justification for rejecting clothing and returning to a state of natural innocence.



The Adamites of Europe — 13th–14th Centuries

The name Adamite appears again in medieval Europe — although this time things become considerably more complicated.

During the 13th and 14th centuries, in parts of France, the Low Countries and Germany, various religious groups were accused of behaving like the legendary Adamites.

Among those sometimes associated with Adamite-like beliefs and behaviour were the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, as well as groups of Beghards.

The central idea attributed to some of these movements was the pursuit of a state of spiritual perfection in which ordinary rules no longer applied. Critics claimed that some members believed they had returned to the innocence of Adam before the Fall.

And this is where the stories of nudity begin to appear again.

Some medieval accusations described people worshipping or living together naked, supposedly to demonstrate that they had overcome shame and returned to humanity's original innocence.

But there is a major problem for historians:

Were these people actually practising religious nudity — or were their enemies accusing them of it?

Much of what survives about the supposed "Adamites" comes from inquisitors, church authorities and hostile writers, rather than from the people themselves. The label could therefore describe genuine beliefs and practices, but it could also be used to portray unconventional religious groups as immoral or heretical.

The Free Spirit movements themselves were diverse, and historians today are cautious about treating every accusation against them as fact.

Nevertheless, the recurring association is fascinating.

Across medieval Europe, the biblical story of Adam before the Fall continued to provide a powerful religious symbol: a humanity without shame, without the need for clothing, and supposedly free from the corruption of the world.

And once again, the idea of returning to Adam's innocence appears in European history.



The Adamites of Bohemia — c. 1409–1421

By the early 15th century, the name Adamite appears again — this time in Bohemia, during one of the most turbulent periods of religious history in Europe.

The so-called Bohemian Adamites, sometimes called Picards, emerged within the radical religious environment surrounding the Hussite movement and the community at Tábor.

They were accused by their opponents of taking the idea of returning to Adam's innocence before the Fall much further than other religious reformers.

According to contemporary accounts, some of these people rejected conventional clothing and worshipped naked. More sensational accusations claimed that they also rejected ordinary sexual morality, with stories of communal sexual activity and other religious excesses.

But there is an important problem with these accounts.

Much of the evidence comes from their enemies — particularly writers who wanted to portray them as heretics and immoral extremists. It is therefore difficult to establish exactly what the Bohemian Adamites actually believed and practised.

What does seem clear is that there really were radical religious groups operating around Tábor, and that the authorities regarded at least some of them as a serious threat.

Eventually the Adamites were violently suppressed by the Hussite leadership itself. In 1421, forces led by Jan Žižka attacked their community, and those who survived were executed.

So, for perhaps the first time in our journey through Adamite history, we have a group that appears in the historical record not simply as an ancient or medieval accusation, but as a distinct movement caught up in a documented religious revolution.

Their story is also a reminder of how difficult history can be.

Were they genuinely practising religious nudity and rejecting conventional morality?

Or were some of the more extraordinary stories exaggerated by their opponents?

We cannot answer every question with certainty.

But the name Adamites had now acquired a very particular meaning in European religious history: people accused of attempting to return to the condition of Adam before the Fall — naked, innocent and free from the conventions of ordinary society.



The Adamites of Amsterdam – 1535

This rather extraordinary engraving shows a group of naked religious radicals being pursued and arrested in the streets of Amsterdam.

They were involved in the turbulent Anabaptist movement of the 1530s. On 11 February 1535, a group of Anabaptists in Amsterdam reportedly burned their clothes and ran naked through the city, shouting warnings about the approaching end of the world. They were arrested and later executed.

They subsequently became associated with the name “Adamites”, although this is where the history becomes rather more complicated.

The image itself is not from 1535.

It was created around 1721–1723, nearly 200 years after the event, by the engraver François Morellon La Cave, after a drawing by Bernard Picart. It appeared in Picart and Jean-Frédéric Bernard's great illustrated work on the religions and religious customs of the world.

The Rijksmuseum describes the picture as Adamites d'Amsterdam and identifies the people depicted as Anabaptists walking naked across the Dam in February 1535.

And that is one of the interesting things about the history of the Adamites: there wasn't one continuous group called the Adamites stretching from ancient times to the present.

The name was repeatedly applied to different religious groups and individuals who were accused of rejecting conventional attitudes towards clothing, the naked body, sexuality or religious authority.



The Adamites of the Netherlands — c. 1580

By the late 16th century, the name Adamite appears once again in the religious controversies of Europe.

Around c. 1580 in the Netherlands, there were reports of an Anabaptist group associated with the name Adamites.

According to the accounts, their beliefs and practices included a particularly striking initiation ceremony: a new member was reportedly required to appear naked before the congregation.

The symbolism is familiar by now.

The biblical Adam before the Fall represented humanity in its original, innocent state — before shame, before sin and before the need for clothing.

For those accused of being Adamites, nakedness could therefore be portrayed as a return to that original condition.

But, as with so many earlier references to Adamites, there is a significant problem with the evidence.

These reports were generally produced in a period when religious authorities regarded radical Anabaptist groups as dangerous heretics. The people being described rarely left us their own accounts, meaning that we have to be extremely careful about accepting accusations at face value.

It is therefore safer to say that a group was reported as practising this ritual, rather than claiming that we can prove exactly what happened.

Nevertheless, the story is significant.



The Adamites of England — 1641–1650s

By the 1640s, the word Adamite had arrived in England.

The country was being transformed by the English Civil War and Revolution, and the breakdown of traditional religious and political authority created space for an extraordinary variety of radical ideas.

Among the pamphlets and reports of the period we begin to encounter references to “Adamites” — people portrayed as rejecting conventional religious and social rules and, in some accounts, embracing nakedness as part of their beliefs.

The biblical inspiration was the same one that had appeared repeatedly over the previous centuries:

Adam before the Fall — naked, innocent and without shame.

But there is an important distinction to make.

The surviving evidence does not necessarily describe one organised movement called the Adamites. The term could be used rather loosely by opponents to describe people they considered religious extremists.

As the 1640s progressed, similar accusations of sexual freedom, rejection of conventional morality and religious enthusiasm were made against other radical groups — particularly the Ranters.

Later, the name was also associated in some hostile accounts with the Quakers, although this should not be taken to mean that mainstream Quakers were Adamites or that Quakers generally practised religious nudity.

This was an age of extraordinary religious experimentation.

Parliament had challenged the authority of the Crown. Established religious structures were being questioned. New sects and independent congregations appeared. Pamphlets circulated rapidly, often making sensational claims about the beliefs and behaviour of rival groups.

In that atmosphere, “Adamite” became a powerful accusation.

To call someone an Adamite was not merely to suggest that they went without clothes. It could imply that they had rejected the established boundaries of religion, morality and society itself.



The Adamites of Austria — 1781–1849

By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the word Adamite was still appearing in European and British writing — but its meaning had begun to change.

The religious controversies of the 17th century had faded, yet the idea behind the name remained familiar.

An Adamite was increasingly understood as someone who sought to imitate Adam before the Fall: living in a state of natural innocence and, in some interpretations, rejecting clothing because the first humans were naked before they became ashamed of their bodies.

This period is important because it coincided with a much wider change in how Europeans thought about nature, the human body and social convention.

The Enlightenment had encouraged people to question inherited ideas. The Romantic movement looked towards the natural world and the supposed simplicity of earlier societies. At the same time, writers and philosophers increasingly discussed whether civilisation had made humanity better — or merely more constrained.

Nudity could therefore acquire a very different meaning.

It wasn't necessarily about sexual behaviour or religious heresy. For some writers, the unclothed human body could represent nature, innocence, simplicity and freedom from artificial social conventions.

The old biblical image of Adam was still there.

But the emphasis was beginning to shift:

from religious heresy → towards nature and the human condition.

This period also saw the emergence of ideas that would eventually contribute to the development of modern naturism and nudism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

It would be wrong, however, to claim that the people who later advocated social nudity were simply descendants of the historical Adamites. There is no straightforward continuous organisation stretching from the medieval Adamites to modern naturists.

What did survive was the idea.

For centuries, Adam had provided the ultimate example of a human being who was naked without shame.

By the 19th century, that ancient image could be interpreted in increasingly secular ways.

The question was no longer simply:

“Are these people heretics?”

It was becoming:

“Why should a human being be ashamed of being naked in the first place?”

That is a very different question — and one that would become increasingly important during the following century.



The Adamites of Glencorse — 2026

And so, after more than 1,500 years of appearances, accusations, religious controversies and historical misunderstandings, the Adamites arrive at Glencorse Reservoir.

Well… sort of.

In September 2026, the name Adamites has found an unexpected new home in the hills south of Edinburgh.

But unlike the groups described in historical accounts, the people swimming at Glencorse are not a religious sect and there is no claim of theological descent from the ancient Adamites.

The connection is much simpler.

For centuries, the word Adamite has been associated with the idea of returning to the condition of Adam before the Fall — naked, natural and without shame.

At Glencorse, swimmers choose to swim without a swimsuit.

There is no religious doctrine and no initiation ceremony.

The modern idea is simply that being naked in an appropriate outdoor setting does not have to be sexual or shameful.

And that brings the historical story full circle in a rather curious way.

The earliest alleged Adamites were accused of seeking Adam's innocence.

Medieval Adamites were accused of doing the same.

The Bohemian Adamites were accused of taking the idea to extremes.

The English Adamites appeared in the fevered pamphlet culture of the 1640s.

Later writers continued to use the name.

And now, in 2026, a group of Skinny Dippers at a reservoir in Scotland has found itself connected — however loosely — with that remarkably persistent historical idea.

There is, of course, one very important difference.

Nobody at Glencorse is claiming to have returned to the Garden of Eden.

They're just going swimming.

But perhaps there is something rather Adamite about standing beside cold Scottish water, taking off the clothes that society normally requires us to wear, and discovering that the human body is actually quite ordinary.

Holy Nudity: The Religious Meaning of the Unclothed Body

When nakedness becomes a religious statement

Nudity is usually understood in modern Western societies as a matter of privacy, sexuality, social convention or personal freedom. Yet across religious history the naked human body has sometimes acquired an entirely different significance.

To be naked can signify innocence, renunciation, humility, poverty, liberation, ascetic discipline or a return to an imagined primordial state. In some traditions the absence of clothing represents freedom from possessions; in others it represents freedom from shame. In still others it is a temporary ritual condition through which a person passes from one spiritual state into another.

This makes it difficult to speak of "holy nudism" as though it were a single religious practice. There is no universal theology of sacred nakedness. Rather, there is a recurring religious idea: that removing clothing can remove, symbolically or literally, something that clothing represents.

The unclothed body may therefore become a theological statement.

It can say:

• I possess nothing.
• I have nothing to hide.
• I have returned to innocence.
• I reject worldly status.
• I am equal to those around me.
• I have renounced ordinary society.
• I stand before the divine without adornment.
• I am attempting to overcome attachment to the body itself.

The remarkable thing is that the same physical act can therefore have almost opposite meanings in different traditions. One person may remove clothing to celebrate the body; another may do so because the body and all material possessions are ultimately irrelevant. One may regard nakedness as liberation, another as mortification, and another as a symbolic recreation of Paradise.

The history of sacred nudity is consequently less a history of "nudism" than a history of what human beings have believed clothing means.

Nakedness and the Garden of Eden

The most important Western religious association between nakedness and innocence comes from the opening chapters of Genesis.

Genesis 2:25 famously describes Adam and Eve as being naked and unashamed. Only after eating the forbidden fruit do they become conscious of their nakedness and attempt to cover themselves.

The theological possibilities contained within this short passage are enormous.

Nakedness precedes shame.

Clothing follows the Fall.

The relationship between the two therefore became an important subject for Christian thinkers. If clothing belongs to the postlapsarian condition, could the removal of clothing symbolise a return towards the condition that existed before sin?

Mainstream Christianity generally answered that question cautiously, and eventually negatively. Nakedness could be associated with innocence, but human beings remained inhabitants of a fallen world. Simply removing clothing could not reverse the Fall.

Yet the possibility of interpreting Christianity in precisely this way periodically reappeared.

This is the intellectual background against which the groups later known as the Adamites have to be understood.

The Adamites: nakedness and the recovery of Paradise

The Adamites occupy a curious and controversial position in Christian history.

Ancient Christian writers, particularly Epiphanius, Augustine and Theodoret, described groups whom they associated with the name Adamites or Adamiani. They were said to imitate Adam and Eve's primordial state, sometimes assembling naked and referring to their places of worship as "Paradise".

The traditional account is compelling because the symbolism is so straightforward.

Adam and Eve were naked in Eden.

Adam and Eve were innocent.

Christ restores humanity.

Therefore, the argument supposedly ran, Christians who have been spiritually restored by Christ can return to the innocence of Adam.

Clothing, on this interpretation, belongs to the world after the Fall. To remove it is not to become sexually provocative but to reject the theological consequences of the Fall.

This is an extraordinary inversion of the ordinary Christian understanding of nakedness.

The naked body becomes not evidence of sin but evidence of redemption.

The Adamite concept is sometimes summarised as "back to Eden", although that modern phrase should not be treated as a precise quotation from the ancient movement. What matters is the underlying theological structure: the possibility of recovering primordial innocence through Christ.

The ancient evidence, however, requires considerable caution.

Epiphanius himself appears to have relied on reports rather than direct personal observation, and later writers repeated or developed accounts of the group. Consequently, historians cannot simply treat every detail in the traditional description as established fact.

Indeed, the identification of the Adamites with other groups possessing apparently similar beliefs has long been disputed.

This matters because descriptions of heretical groups in antiquity often followed a recognisable pattern. Religious opponents were accused not merely of theological error but of overturning sexual morality, rejecting marriage, practising communal sexuality or engaging in secret nocturnal ceremonies.

Such accusations were rhetorically powerful.

They transformed an opponent from somebody who disagreed about theology into somebody who threatened the moral structure of society.

The modern historian therefore has to distinguish between what a hostile writer says a group believed, what the group demonstrably believed, and what its enemies wanted others to believe about it.

That distinction becomes particularly important with the medieval Adamites.

The medieval Adamites of Bohemia

The word "Adamite" appeared again in the religious upheavals of fifteenth-century Bohemia.

During the Hussite revolutionary period, a radical group associated with Tábor became known as the Adamites or Picards. Traditional accounts describe them as rejecting ordinary social and religious conventions, practising communal nudity and claiming to have returned to the condition of Adam before the Fall.

According to contemporary and later accounts, some of these people lived on an island in the Nežárka River. Their enemies accused them of sexual licence, communal marriage and other extreme practices.

The group was violently suppressed in 1421.

But here again, the historian must tread carefully.

Recent scholarship has examined the Adamites not simply as an eccentric group of medieval nudists but as a case study in the construction of heresy. A 2021 study by Czech historian Petr Čornej specifically examines the boundary between historical reality and the literary construction of the Adamites. The study notes that historians have debated for centuries whether accounts of ritual nudity and "free love" represented genuine practices or were substantially shaped by hostile polemic.

This is an important qualification.

The nakedness of the Bohemian Adamites is not necessarily fictitious. There is evidence that nudity formed part of the image and perhaps the practice of the movement. What remains much less certain is the full collection of sensational sexual allegations traditionally attached to them.

The distinction is significant because nakedness itself may have been enough to make the group appear sexually transgressive to medieval observers.

A society in which clothing was deeply connected with rank, gender, respectability and social order would naturally have found collective nakedness profoundly disturbing.

The naked body did not merely lack clothes.

It lacked the visible signs of social hierarchy.

Nakedness as the rejection of status

This brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of religious nudity.

Clothing does much more than cover the body.

It identifies us.

A medieval person's clothing could communicate wealth, occupation, social class, marital status, religious status and even political allegiance. The same remains true today, although modern societies tend to express these distinctions differently.

To remove clothing is therefore potentially to remove social distinctions.

The king and the peasant are physically alike.

The rich and the poor possess the same basic human form.

The priest and the layperson have the same body.

The educated and the illiterate are equally naked.

In this sense, ritual nakedness can become an extraordinary act of social levelling.

The religious ascetic takes this principle even further. If possessions create attachment, then possessions must be abandoned. If clothing is a possession, clothing too becomes something from which the ascetic must detach himself.

This brings us to India, where religious nakedness developed along very different philosophical lines.

Digambara Jainism: "clothed in the sky"

Perhaps the clearest example of religious nakedness as radical renunciation is found in Digambara Jainism.

The Sanskrit word Digambara is generally translated as "sky-clad".

The term is itself a theological statement.

The ascetic is not naked because clothing is fashionable, provocative or unnecessary in a mundane sense. He is "clothed in the sky" because he has abandoned material possessions to an extraordinary degree.

This belongs within the Jain principle of aparigraha — non-possession or non-attachment.

Jainism places enormous emphasis on liberation from the karmic consequences of attachment and action. The ascetic therefore seeks progressively to strip away the things that bind the individual to the material world.

Clothing becomes one of those things.

A Digambara monk does not merely decide that clothes are uncomfortable or unnecessary. His nakedness is part of an extensive discipline of renunciation.

This is an important distinction.

Digambara nudity is not primarily a celebration of the naked body. It is a rejection of possession.

The naked monk represents a person who has attempted to eliminate ownership to such an extent that even the ownership of clothing has disappeared.

This is why describing Digambara monks simply as "religious nudists" is misleading.

The modern word "nudist" normally describes a person or community for whom social nudity is an acceptable and often positive way of living. Digambara asceticism belongs to a radically different conceptual universe.

The monk is not saying:

"The human body should be seen as natural."

He is saying something closer to:

"I have renounced the material claims that ordinarily define the individual."

The distinction is fundamental.

Nudity, gender and the limits of renunciation

The Digambara tradition also demonstrates that sacred nakedness cannot be separated from questions of gender.

Digambara doctrine has historically maintained that complete liberation requires a degree of ascetic renunciation that women, within the traditional system, could not undertake in exactly the same manner as male ascetics. This became one of the major points of disagreement between Digambara and Śvetāmbara Jainism.

Śvetāmbara monks and nuns wear white clothing.

Digambara male ascetics are traditionally unclothed.

The difference is not simply one of dress. It represents competing interpretations of what constitutes complete renunciation and how liberation is achieved.

The question illustrates a broader point: religious nudity is never merely about nudity.

It is embedded within a much larger theology of body, possession, gender, purity, liberation and society.

Hindu asceticism: nakedness and the abandonment of ordinary identity

India provides other examples of religious nakedness, particularly among certain ascetic traditions.

The most visible are the Nāga sadhus, associated especially with Shaivism. Some appear publicly naked or nearly naked and may cover their bodies in sacred ash.

Here again, nakedness represents something considerably more complex than an attitude towards clothing.

The sadhu is an individual who has renounced ordinary worldly life.

Family, occupation, property, social position and conventional domestic existence are abandoned.

The naked ascetic therefore embodies an extreme rejection of ordinary social identity.

Sacred ash adds another dimension. Ash can evoke mortality, cremation and the transitory nature of physical existence. The ascetic's body is consequently presented not as an object of worldly adornment but as a reminder of impermanence.

This is quite different from the Adamite concept.

The Adamite seeks, at least in the traditional account, to recover the innocence of the beginning.

The ascetic may instead be demonstrating detachment from the entire material cycle.

One points towards Eden.

The other points towards liberation from attachment to the material world.

The outward appearance may be similar.

The theology is not.

Nakedness as ritual transformation

Sacred nakedness also appears in a less permanent form: the ritual stripping of clothing.

This is particularly significant in the history of Christian baptism.

Early Christian baptism was considerably more physically dramatic than the ceremony familiar to many modern Christians.

In a number of early Christian traditions, baptismal candidates stripped before entering the water. The Apostolic Tradition, traditionally associated with Hippolytus, describes candidates being stripped naked before baptism. Ambrose of Milan likewise describes baptismal candidates being stripped and anointed.

This nakedness had a very different meaning from the permanent nakedness associated with ascetic movements.

The candidate entered the water stripped.

The candidate emerged and was clothed again.

The symbolism therefore depended upon transition.

The old identity was removed.

The person entered the water.

The person emerged transformed.

The newly baptised was then clothed, frequently in a white garment.

The sequence can be understood as a ritual drama of death and rebirth.

Paul's language provides an obvious theological background. Christianity could speak of "putting off" the old self and "putting on" the new. The physical act of removing and replacing clothing gave this metaphor a powerful bodily expression.

The nakedness was therefore temporary but meaningful.

It represented the person between identities.

The naked body as a liminal body

Anthropologists have a useful concept for understanding this phenomenon: liminality.

A liminal person occupies a threshold.

They are no longer what they were, but they have not yet become what they will be.

Initiation rituals frequently create this condition.

A person leaves ordinary society.

They undergo a period of separation.

They experience a transformation.

They are then reintegrated into society with a new identity.

Nakedness is extraordinarily effective in creating this state because clothing is one of the principal ways by which ordinary social identity is communicated.

Remove the clothing and the initiate temporarily becomes difficult to classify.

This explains why ritual nakedness appears in traditions that have no historical connection with one another.

The body itself becomes the ritual object.

The individual is temporarily stripped not only of clothing but of the visible markers of their previous identity.

Nakedness and purity

There is another apparent paradox.

Modern Western culture often associates nakedness with sexual exposure. Many religious traditions have instead associated it with purity.

This makes sense once purity is understood not as physical cleanliness but as freedom from contamination, attachment or deceit.

Clothing can hide.

Nakedness can therefore symbolise transparency.

The person has nothing concealed.

This idea appears particularly strongly in religious narratives concerning innocence.

The innocent person has no reason to be ashamed.

The ascetic has nothing to possess.

The initiate has nothing to bring with them into the new life.

The corpse has nothing left to own.

These are different meanings, but they converge upon the same symbolic vocabulary.

Nakedness removes.

What remains is the person.

Nakedness and the problem of shame

The Adam and Eve story makes shame particularly important.

Before the Fall, the couple are naked without shame.

After the Fall, they become aware of their nakedness.

Christian theology subsequently had to negotiate a complicated relationship between the physical body and moral consciousness.

The body itself was not necessarily evil. Rather, the problem was that human desire, self-consciousness and mortality had become entangled with it.

This produced a curious tension within Christianity.

The naked body could represent innocence.

But nakedness could also become associated with temptation.

The same body could therefore be interpreted in two radically different ways depending upon the moral context.

This helps explain why Christian sacred nudity has generally appeared in highly controlled situations: baptism, martyrdom, ascetic literature, artistic representations of Adam and Eve, or marginal religious movements.

Nakedness was powerful precisely because it was ambiguous.

It could signify innocence.

It could signify vulnerability.

It could signify humiliation.

It could signify purity.

Or it could be interpreted as sexual temptation.

The religious significance therefore depended upon intention, context and interpretation.

The difference between sacred nudity and erotic nudity

One of the most persistent mistakes in discussing historical religious nudity is to assume that nudity automatically implies sexuality.

Historically, that simply does not follow.

A naked Jain monk is not understood by Jain theology as participating in an erotic display.

A naked baptismal candidate is not necessarily performing a sexual act.

An Adamite claiming to reproduce the condition of Eden is making a theological statement, whether or not later accounts of the group were accurate.

The crucial distinction is therefore not between "naked" and "clothed".

It is between what the nakedness is understood to mean.

The same physical state can have completely different social meanings.

A naked swimmer, a naked patient in hospital, a naked athlete changing clothes, a naked person alone in nature and a naked religious ascetic may all be physically unclothed. Their social meanings are nevertheless entirely different.

Religious history provides perhaps some of the most striking examples of this principle.

Sacred nudity and the rejection of the material world

The Christian Adamite and the Digambara Jain monk appear to begin from different theological premises, but they share an interesting structural similarity.

Both question the necessity of clothing.

But they do so for opposite reasons.

For the Adamite, clothing can be understood as a consequence of the Fall.

For the Digambara ascetic, clothing can be understood as a possession.

In the first case, nakedness looks backwards towards an original state.

In the second, it looks away from material attachment.

One seeks restoration.

The other seeks renunciation.

This distinction is important because it prevents the history of sacred nudity from being reduced to a simplistic claim that "religions have always regarded nudity as natural".

That is not what the evidence demonstrates.

Rather, religions have repeatedly discovered symbolic uses for the absence of clothing.

Paradise, poverty and liberation

Three great themes recur throughout the history of sacred nakedness:

1. Paradise

Nakedness can represent the primordial human condition before shame and sin.

This is the Adamite model.

2. Poverty

Nakedness can represent the abandonment of possessions.

This is particularly evident in Digambara Jainism.

3. Liberation

Nakedness can represent release from ordinary social identity and attachment.

This occurs in various ascetic traditions.

These themes sometimes overlap, but they should not be confused.

The naked person may be attempting to become more like Adam.

Or less attached to the material world.

Or free from social identity.

Or symbolically reborn.

Or all of these at once.

Was there really a tradition of "holy nudism"?

The answer depends upon what is meant by the term.

If "holy nudism" means a coherent religion whose central doctrine is that people should live naked, then the historical evidence does not support such a simple picture.

If it means the use of deliberate nakedness as a religious or philosophical practice, however, there is abundant evidence for the phenomenon.

It appears in:

• Jain asceticism;
• certain Hindu ascetic traditions;
• early Christian baptism;
• Christian interpretations of Adam and Eve;
• reports concerning the ancient Adamites;
• medieval groups labelled Adamites;
• various other ascetic and mystical traditions.

Yet these should not be collapsed into one tradition.

The common feature is not a particular doctrine about nudity.

It is the religious transformation of the meaning of the naked body.

The body as theology

Perhaps the deepest lesson of sacred nudity is that religions do not merely tell people what to believe.

They often tell people what to do with their bodies.

They kneel.

They fast.

They wash.

They cover their heads.

They cut their hair.

They wear particular garments.

They remove particular garments.

They mark their bodies.

They enter water.

They walk barefoot.

They sit in particular postures.

They withdraw from society.

The body becomes part of theology.

Sacred nudity is therefore best understood not as a peculiar fascination with being naked but as an especially radical form of embodied religion.

The unclothed body can communicate an idea more directly than words.

A sermon can say:

"I own nothing."

A naked ascetic can demonstrate it.

A priest can preach:

"Your former life has ended."

A baptismal candidate can enact the stripping away of the old identity.

A theologian can write about Edenic innocence.

A community can attempt to reproduce, however controversially, the nakedness attributed to Adam and Eve.

In each case, belief is transferred from the page to the body.

The enduring fascination of sacred nakedness

The idea has survived because it touches upon a surprisingly fundamental human question:

What remains when everything that society has placed upon us is removed?

Clothing is one layer.

Possessions are another.

Social status is another.

Occupation, wealth, reputation and identity can all be imagined as layers placed upon the individual.

Religious renunciation sometimes attempts to remove those layers.

At its most radical, the process leaves the human being with nothing but the body itself.

And then some traditions go further.

The Jain ascetic seeks detachment even from the body.

The Christian mystic seeks union with God.

The Adamite, at least according to the traditional account, seeks the innocence of humanity before the Fall.

Thus sacred nudity is ultimately not about nakedness.

It is about what nakedness is believed to reveal.

For some, it reveals innocence.

For others, poverty.

For others, equality.

For others, mortality.

For others, freedom.

And for others, the complete abandonment of worldly attachment.

The unclothed body is therefore capable of carrying an extraordinary amount of religious meaning.

It can be a symbol of the beginning of humanity, the end of worldly attachment, the threshold between two lives, or the aspiration towards a state in which the distinction between body, society and possession has finally ceased to matter.

That is why the history of sacred nakedness is much older and considerably more intellectually interesting than the modern term "nudism" might suggest.

It is not fundamentally a history of people who chose not to wear clothes.

It is a history of people who believed that removing clothes could mean something.

Were the Adamites the ancestors of modern naturism?

The apparent resemblance between the Adamites and modern naturism invites an obvious historical question: is there any meaningful connection between the two?

At first sight, the parallels are striking. Both challenge the assumption that the naked human body is necessarily shameful; both can associate nakedness with innocence; and both can regard clothing as a social convention rather than an inherent requirement of human dignity. The comparison becomes particularly tempting when the Adamite claim to have recovered the innocence of Eden is placed alongside the modern naturist emphasis upon the ordinary, non-sexual human body.

It would nevertheless be misleading to describe modern naturism as a direct continuation of Adamism.

There is no established historical chain running from the ancient groups described by Christian heresiologists, through the medieval Adamites, to the organised naturist movements that emerged in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evidence does not demonstrate a surviving Adamite tradition which passed secretly or continuously from one generation to another until it reappeared as modern naturism.

The relationship is therefore better understood as conceptual rather than genealogical.

A shared rejection of shame

The most obvious point of contact concerns shame.

The account of Adam and Eve in Genesis provides a particularly powerful religious explanation for the association between nakedness and shame. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve are naked and unashamed. Afterwards, they recognise their nakedness and attempt to conceal themselves.

For an Adamite, according to the traditional accounts, the significance of Christ was that humanity could be restored to the condition represented by Adam before the Fall. Nakedness could consequently become a sign of restored innocence rather than evidence of sin.

Modern naturism approaches the same phenomenon from an entirely different direction.

Rather than asking whether humanity can be restored to an original theological condition, naturism tends to question the social assumption that nakedness should automatically produce shame. The argument is essentially cultural rather than theological: people learn which parts of the body are considered private, in which circumstances nudity is acceptable, and what meanings are attached to being naked.

The conclusion can therefore look remarkably similar while the reasoning is completely different.

The Adamite says, in effect, that nakedness belongs to an innocent condition from which humanity fell.

The modern naturist may say that shame about ordinary human nudity is largely a product of social convention.

One is an argument about redemption.

The other is an argument about social conditioning.

From Eden to nature

There is another important parallel.

Adamism looks backwards towards an imagined primordial condition: humanity before the Fall.

Modern naturism has frequently looked towards "nature" rather than Eden.

This distinction is important.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century naturist movements developed within a wider European interest in natural living, physical culture, outdoor activity, health reform and a reaction against some aspects of industrialised society. Naturism therefore belongs to the intellectual history of modernity rather than simply representing the survival of a medieval religious idea.

Nevertheless, the symbolism of returning to nature has an obvious affinity with the symbolism of returning to Eden.

Both involve the removal of things regarded as artificial.

For the Adamite, the removal of clothing could symbolise the removal of a consequence of the Fall.

For the naturist, removing clothing can symbolise the removal of a social convention which has come to seem unnecessary.

The theological Garden of Eden and the modern ideal of "nature" are not equivalent concepts, but they can occupy surprisingly similar positions within their respective systems of thought.

Why the Adamites should not be called the first naturists

It is consequently tempting, but historically questionable, to describe the Adamites as "the world's first naturists".

The phrase makes for an attractive modern description, but it imports a modern category into a very different historical setting.

Modern naturism normally concerns the social acceptance of non-sexual nudity. It may involve swimming, sunbathing, walking, recreation, holidays or communal social activity. It generally does not require a particular theological belief.

The Adamites, by contrast, were understood as a religious movement whose nakedness had a specific theological meaning.

Their purpose was not simply to establish that people could socialise comfortably without clothes.

Their nakedness, insofar as the historical accounts can be trusted, was part of an argument about humanity's spiritual condition.

The distinction matters.

Calling the Adamites "naturists" is rather like calling a medieval monk a minimalist because he owned very few possessions. There is a superficial resemblance, but the underlying concepts belong to different intellectual worlds.

The Adamites were not anticipating modern naturist clubs.

They were attempting to resolve a theological problem.

Yet the comparison remains valuable

Rejecting a direct historical connection does not make the comparison pointless. On the contrary, it makes it more interesting.

The two traditions demonstrate how similar ideas can emerge independently from very different circumstances.

Both challenge the proposition that clothing and dignity are inseparable.

Both allow the possibility that a naked body can exist outside an erotic context.

Both can treat shame as something that is acquired rather than an inevitable response to the human body.

Both can regard clothing as something imposed upon an otherwise natural human condition.

But they arrive there by different routes.

The Adamite route is theological:

Fall → shame → redemption → recovered innocence.

The modern naturist route is more likely to be philosophical or social:

social convention → examination of convention → rejection of unnecessary shame → normalisation of nudity.

The resemblance is therefore one of ideas rather than ancestry.



A recurring human question

Perhaps the most useful way of placing Adamism alongside modern naturism is not to ask whether one descended from the other, but why the same question has repeatedly appeared in different periods of history:

Why should the naked human body be considered shameful?

The question has been answered in remarkably different ways.

Religious traditions have sometimes answered it through the concepts of sin, innocence, purity and renunciation.

Modern societies have approached it through ideas of privacy, sexuality, social convention, personal freedom and bodily autonomy.

The answers differ, but the question persists.

That is perhaps the most significant connection between the Adamites and modern naturism.

It is not that modern naturists are Adamites in disguise, nor that Adamism represents an ancient version of a modern naturist movement. Rather, both belong to a much longer history in which human beings have questioned the meanings imposed upon the unclothed body.

In that sense, the history of sacred nudity is not simply a history of religious eccentricity.

It is part of a much broader history of the relationship between the body, clothing, shame, innocence and society.

And that is why the Adamites remain an intriguing subject for anyone interested in the history of naturism: not because they can straightforwardly be claimed as its ancestors, but because they demonstrate that the idea of separating nakedness from shame and sexuality is considerably older than the modern naturist movement itself.

A proposal for the re-establishment of the Adamite tradition in the Pentland Hills

There are few places in Scotland better suited to the revival of an ancient religious and philosophical idea than Glencorse Reservoir.

The valley already possesses many of the ingredients one might reasonably expect to find at the heart of a radical spiritual movement: water, wilderness, hills, solitude, community and a long history of people seeking something beyond the conventions of ordinary society.

Most importantly, Glencorse Reservoir has already had its own religious tradition.

Long before the reservoir existed, the valley was home to St Catherine-in-the-Hopes, a medieval chapel whose foundations now lie beneath the waters of Glencorse Reservoir. The chapel is documented as early as the thirteenth century, and its burial ground continued in use until the eighteenth century.

So perhaps the time has come to put something back.

Not the old chapel.

Something rather more interesting.

The Adamites of Glencorse.

Who were the Adamites?

The name Adamites has been applied to a number of religious movements throughout history, but the most famous were the radical Bohemian Adamites of the early fifteenth century.

They emerged from the extraordinary religious upheaval surrounding the Hussite movement in Bohemia. The Adamites became associated with the more radical Taborites, but eventually separated from them, taking their rejection of established religious authority considerably further. By 1421 they had been expelled from Tábor and established themselves in a more isolated community.

They rejected conventional religious structures and sought, in various ways, to return to what they regarded as a more original state of human existence.

And this is where the Adamites acquired their name.

They looked backwards to Adam before the Fall — humanity before civilisation had accumulated its rules, hierarchies, possessions and social conventions.

Some accounts describe them as rejecting clothing and conventional marriage and practising communal living. However, historians have long warned that the most sensational accounts of Adamite behaviour came from their enemies and should be treated with considerable caution. One standard historical account explicitly describes the accusations concerning their sexual behaviour as highly suspicious.

That distinction matters.

The Adamite idea is considerably more interesting than the medieval caricature of a group of naked people behaving outrageously.

At its heart was a much more profound question:

What would human society look like if we stripped away the things that separate us from nature and from one another?

That is a question worth asking again.

Why Glencorse Reservoir?

The first reason is obvious.

Water.

The Adamites were associated with an isolated island community on the Nežárka in Bohemia. Their choice of an island was hardly accidental. Water creates separation from ordinary society while simultaneously providing food, transport, recreation and a powerful psychological boundary.

Glencorse Reservoir offers a rather Scottish equivalent.

A body of water surrounded by hills, woodland and open countryside, only a few miles from Edinburgh but sufficiently removed from the city to feel like another world.

And beneath that water is something even more intriguing.

A medieval chapel.

St Catherine's Chapel was a substantial little building, with surviving archaeological evidence suggesting internal dimensions of approximately 45 feet by 20 feet. When archaeologists visited the site in 1915, part of its rubble wall was still visible above the reservoir mud.

The chapel was dedicated to St Catherine and was historically known as St Katherine of the Hopes or St Catherine-in-the-Hopes.

The name itself is wonderfully appropriate.

A hope was a valley or hollow — a geographical feature rather than a reference to optimism. But there is something irresistibly poetic about establishing a modern community of "hope" in a valley whose medieval place-name has survived for centuries.

From St Catherine to Adam

There is also an interesting theological symmetry.

St Catherine represents the medieval Christian tradition that once occupied this landscape.

The Adamites, by contrast, have traditionally been associated with a much more radical questioning of religious and social convention.

The Adamites represented almost the opposite impulse: strip everything away and return to the beginning.

And Glencorse contains both histories.

The old chapel represented the organised medieval Church.

The Adamites, by contrast, questioned the authority and institutions of organised religion.

A new Adamite movement would therefore not need to pretend that the medieval chapel belonged to the Adamites.

It could acknowledge the much more interesting fact that both traditions once occupied the same landscape.

Indeed, the historical record tells us that the parish itself was once designated as belonging to St Catherine-in-the-Hopes.

Today the chapel has disappeared beneath the reservoir.

But perhaps its successor does not need to be a building.

Perhaps it could be a community.

The reservoir changed everything

There is another remarkable coincidence.

Glencorse Reservoir was constructed in the early nineteenth century as part of Edinburgh's developing water supply. The principal works date from around 1819–1824, with James Jardine responsible for the construction and Thomas Telford associated with the engineering design.

The creation of the reservoir transformed the landscape permanently.

The medieval chapel disappeared beneath the water.

The valley became a reservoir.

And Glencorse Reservoir became part of a much larger system — providing water to Edinburgh and, ultimately, becoming part of the modern infrastructure serving hundreds of thousands of people.

It is difficult to imagine a better place for a movement concerned with our relationship with nature.

Because the reservoir embodies a fundamental tension of modern civilisation:

we control nature in order to sustain civilisation, while simultaneously longing to escape from the civilisation we have created.

The Adamites would have had something to say about that.

The Heron

There is even a natural emblem waiting for us.

The heron.

Standing motionless beside the water, apparently contemplating the universe, the heron seems almost designed to be the patron animal of an Adamite community.

It is neither hurried nor impressed by civilisation.

It needs very little.

It lives by water.

It watches.

It waits.

And then, when the moment comes, it acts.

If the Adamites of Glencorse were looking for a symbol, they could do considerably worse.

There is precedent for Glencorse being a place of dissent

Glencorse Reservoir is hardly a landscape without a history of religious and political controversy.

The Pentland Hills witnessed the Battle of Rullion Green in 1666, when Covenanters rose against the government and were defeated.

The hills have therefore already provided a setting for people who believed that established authority had gone too far.

The Adamites would presumably have appreciated that.

Perhaps Glencorse Reservoir has always attracted people who think differently.

A movement for the modern age

There is, of course, one enormous difference between the original Adamites and the proposed modern movement.

Some of the historical groups described as Adamites sought to separate themselves from conventional religious and social life.

The Adamites of Glencorse should try to improve it.

They could become advocates for:

• access to nature;
• protection of the Pentland Hills;
• clean water;
• responsible outdoor recreation;
• mental wellbeing through connection with nature;
• community rather than isolation;
• simplicity rather than consumerism;
• equality rather than hierarchy;
• and a renewed appreciation of the landscape around Edinburgh.

That would be an entirely respectable twenty-first-century interpretation of an idea that is more than six centuries old.

Why now?

Because modern society has arguably reached precisely the point at which the Adamite question becomes interesting again.

We have more technology than any previous generation.

More information.

More possessions.

More communication.

More entertainment.

And yet people increasingly seek out exactly the things the Adamites supposedly valued:

silence, nature, community, simplicity and escape.

They go walking in the hills.

They wild swim.

They practise mindfulness.

They camp.

They turn off their phones.

They seek communities based upon shared experiences rather than shared social status.

Perhaps none of this is particularly new.

Perhaps we are simply rediscovering something that humanity has repeatedly attempted to rediscover throughout history.

The New Adamites of Glencorse

So perhaps the proposal is not quite as ridiculous as it first sounds.

The original Adamites appeared in an age of enormous religious and political upheaval.

They challenged established authority.

They rejected convention.

They sought a return to an imagined state of human innocence.

Their movement was eventually crushed by force in 1421.

Six centuries later, Glencorse Reservoir offers an opportunity to reinterpret rather than reproduce their experiment.

No violence.

No fanaticism.

No claim to possess the truth.

Just people gathering beside an ancient Scottish valley and asking a deceptively simple question:

What would happen if we became a little more like Adam, and a little less like the civilisation we have constructed around ourselves?

Perhaps we would discover that we need rather less than we thought.

Perhaps we would spend more time outside.

Perhaps we would know our neighbours.

Perhaps we would care more about the water.

Perhaps we would laugh more.

Perhaps we would swim.

And perhaps, six hundred years after the original Adamites were driven from their island in Bohemia, it is time to give them another home.

Welcome to the Adamites of Glencorse.

Freedom. Nature. Community.

The Glencorse interpretation

The really nice thing about the idea is that Adamites of Glencorse doesn't need to be a religion at all.

It's a philosophy — and perhaps a little bit of mischief.

The original Adamites looked to Adam before the Fall as an image of humanity before society had accumulated its rules and conventions. The Glencorse version takes that idea and translates it into something very Scottish and very modern:

Strip away the unnecessary. Return to nature. Treat everyone equally. Look after your community. Enjoy the water.

And there's a lovely historical resonance to it because Glencorse already has its own submerged medieval religious history in St Catherine-in-the-Hopes, beneath the reservoir.

So the Adamites of Glencorse can be thought of as a celebration of freedom, nature, equality, simplicity and community — with a healthy suspicion of taking ourselves too seriously.

Note: This is not a religious organisation, nor do we claim to be a continuation of the historical Adamite movements.