Bogomil teaching held that the visible world was not the work of the good God but of his elder son, Satanael, a rebel angel who fashioned matter, trapped human souls within flesh, and set himself up as ruler of the earth. Because matter itself was corrupt, Bogomils refused the sacraments the wider Church had built upon it, no water baptism, no Eucharist, no veneration of the cross as an instrument of Satanael's own creation, and no church buildings, icons or relics. In their place stood a simple discipline centred on the Lord's Prayer, recited many times daily, and on a spiritual baptism conferred by the laying-on of hands, which alone was held to confer the Holy Spirit on the recipient.
The movement divided its members into two ranks. Ordinary believers, the majority, kept an outward conformity to Bulgarian or Byzantine society while attending secret instruction and living otherwise ordinary lives. Above them stood an ascetic elite bound to strict fasting, poverty, celibacy or continence, and the renunciation of meat and wine; only they were held fit to lay on hands, hear confession and interpret scripture for the rest. This same architecture, an ordinary membership beneath a small consecrated elite, reappears structurally almost unchanged in the credentes and perfecti of the Cathars two centuries later and a continent away, one of the clearest single threads historians follow from Bulgaria to Languedoc.