Lost Teachings of the Cathars, page 18
There is evidence for watermarks from 1282 onwards. Paper was made by dipping moulding trays made of wire with wooden frames, known as moulds, into a vat of paper pulp. The watermark is formed by wire patterns on the bottom of the mould and has nothing to do with the application of water to paper. The sheet of paper is then pressed and dried and the watermark is visible when put up to the light.
The watermarks themselves are a wide range of emblems and insignia, many of which stayed in use for centuries, including the marks of the bull’s head, the fleur-de-lys and the jester’s head, after which foolscap paper was named. Paterini, an Italian name for the Cathars (the Patarines referred to earlier) developed from pates, meaning ‘linen’, it is argued.
Bayley claimed that the watermarks expressed Cathar concerns and the fact that they were transmitted by papermakers down the centuries – as they undoubtedly were – shows that Cathar beliefs were sustained despite the success of the Inquisition and spread throughout western Europe, influencing the emergence of the Renaissance. Therefore the Cathars could be said to be the cause of the Renaissance itself. Bayley summed up his thesis at the beginning of The Lost Language of Symbolism:
‘1. From their first appearance in 1282, until the latter half of the eighteenth century, the curious designs inserted into paper in the form of water-marks constitute a coherent and unbroken chain of emblems.
2. That these emblems are thought-fossils or thought-crystals, in which lie enshrined the aspirations and traditions of the numerous mystic and puritanic sects by which Europe was overrun in the Middle Ages.
3. Hence that these paper-marks are historical documents of high importance, throwing light, not only on the evolution of European thought, but also upon many obscure problems of the past.
4. Water-marks denote that paper-making was an art introduced into Europe, and fostered there by the pre-Reformation Protestant sects known in France as the Albigeois and Vaudois, and in Italy as the Cathari or Patarini.
5. That these heresies, though nominally stamped out by the Papacy, existed secretly for several centuries subsequent to their disappearance from the sight of history.
6. The embellishments used by printers in the Middle Ages are emblems similar to those used by paper-makers, and explicable by a similar code of interpretation.
7. The awakening known as the Renaissance was the direct result of an influence deliberately and traditionally exercised by papermakers, printers, cobblers, and other artisans.
8. The nursing mother of the Renaissance, and consequently of the Reformation, was not, as hitherto assumed, Italy, but the Provencal district of France.’
While appealing, Bayley’s argument has several problems with it. Firstly, the watermark emblems have little specific relationship to Cathar doctrine or imagery – and as there are only a few examples of Cathar art there is no indication that they, unlike many medieval movements, employed symbols extensively. This was a time in which illiteracy was still widespread, and shops and inns were referred to by the pictures on the signs outside them rather than by reading words. There is scarcely a single example of a watermark that resembles anything specifically Cathar. Next, Bayley plundered the entire history of watermarks from the 13th to the 17th centuries to illustrate his claims. Since he believed that there was a direct continuity from the Cathars to papermakers all over Europe for several centuries, it can be claimed that every watermarked piece of paper produced in Europe during that time was influenced by the Cathars. Bayle’s watermarks include vines, anchors, scales, hands, crowns, keys, unicorns, stags, boars, fish, sheep, pelicans and other birds, knots, horns, bells, suns, crosses, five- and six-sided stars, and composite symbols. They are beautiful symbols but they are found in heraldry and on pub signs too, and are typical of the Middle Ages.
Bayley was working from 19th-century writings on the Cathars, including Schmidt ’s Histoire des Cathares. Schmidt claimed that the Cathars used secret hand signals, hence the significance of the hand watermarks.8 Secret passwords were certainly known to have been a feature of post-crusade Catharism under the shadow of the Inquisition, and hand gestures may or may not have been part of this, but that is a far cry from every watermarked illustration of a hand being a reference to this.
Schmidt believed, though no contemporary scholar does, that the Albigensians had their own pope. It was, however, a concern of some contemporaneous Catholics, who believed that there was a heretical pope, perhaps somewhere in the east. Bayley found a 15th-century watermark of a pope and concluded that this ‘answers, I think, the question finally in the affirmative’.9 But, we might ask, is the pope a Catholic? Surely the pope found in watermarks is an ordinary Catholic one and not a hypothetical Cathar equivalent. He gives us example after example of commonplace objects, such as swords, that are interpreted as being uniquely Cathar. The swords, he tells us, are symbols of persecution, not mere weapons. The bull’s head represents the yoked ox as a symbol of patience and what, Bayley proposed, could be more patient than a suffering Cathar?
Bayley included the usual list of suspects in connection with the Cathars: troubadours, the grail and kabbalah, and he stops just short of insisting that Hindu imagery is present. Bayley identified the Albigensians with the Brethren of the Common Life, the Lollards, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Homines Intelligentiae, the Franciscans, the Friends of God and the Waldenses.10 Unfortunately, I have had trouble even finding any mention of papermaking or watermarks among reputable scholars of Catharism: all of the popular books and websites that mention papermaking in connection with the Cathars are drawing on Bayley’s hypothesis. Papermaking was certainly prevalent in the south of France but this does not mean that it was especially associated with Cathars.11
But there are a couple of exceptions that may keep our hopes alive. Or so I thought. In fact, Runciman writes in The Medieval Manichee, 'For the paper-makers of southern France were of the class most given over to the heresy, and the symbols that they introduced to be the regular watermarks for many centuries to come have a likeness too close to be accidental to the symbols on Gnostic amulets.’12 But Runciman was writing in the 1950s and may have known Bayley’s work. It is a fascinating idea but rather like arguing that mathematicians are Christian because the plus sign resembles a cross. Margaret Starbird inadvertently shows that the symbols function as a Rorschach test by commenting, ‘I believe that Bayley was mistaken in interpreting the heresy found in these watermarks as purely mystical. In many cases, the emblems are political as well as doctrinal, and the heresy to which many of them allude is the Grail.’13
The obscure Cagots
The author Graham Robb describes a people known as Cagots who were known to have existed since 1000 CE, mainly in the southwest of France, though also in Brittany and other areas. Known by a variety of similar names in different parts of the country, including capots in the Languedoc, and cacous in Brittany, they were a pariah caste, considered to be a different race from the rest of the French. They had to enter churches by a separate porch, sit apart on separate benches, and even receive the Eucharist on the end of a stick. They were limited to carpentry and ropemaking as trades for the men, midwifery for the women. All sorts of odd physical qualities were attributed to them: they were said to lack earlobes or have unevenlength ears, have webbed hands and feet, peculiarly coloured eyes, and to bleed from the navel on Good Friday.
The Cagots are of interest because of the speculation about their origins: ‘A group of Cagots who sent a petition to Pope Lén X in the 16th century [1514] claimed to be the descendants of Cathar heretics who were exterminated in the Albigensian crusades in the 13th century. But the Cagots predate the Cathars and there is no sign that their religion is unorthodox.’14 This is the single piece of evidence that links the Cagots with the Cathars, but it is intriguing. Oppressed minorities do not usually appeal to the pope by telling him they are descendants of the Church’s worst enemies! The Cagots do not seem to have been a distinct ethnic group at all, though they were forced to marry only within their own communities; nor did they have their own language, but instead spoke the dialects of the region they lived in. Their only genuine characteristics seem to have been that they intermarried with known Cagot families, living either as communities or in isolation.
This raises the possibility that people of varying origins were categorized as Cagots. Among the ideas in circulation are suggestions the Cagots were the descendants of lepers who returned from the crusades, Roman soldiers sent to spas in Gaul or of Saracens; or that, since they were carpenters and as many Cagot communities lay on pilgrim routes, they were the remnants of an itinerant carpenters’ guild who became settled people.
Yet why would a group of people who were loathed and oppressed, yet attended church, claim that they were descended from massacred heretics unless there was some truth to the story? In addition to their thoroughly inferior social status, they would also be claiming a link to heresy, which would hardly have encouraged the pope to help them. There may be some germ of truth in that particular group of Cagots being descended from the Cathars, or in outcast Cathars being accommodated into a Cagot community, with some of their traditions surviving for a while, at least as a notion of having Cathar ancestors. The mystery is not likely to be cleared up soon.15
There has been speculation that, in England, the Augustinian order of Bonshommes, or Boni Homines, at Ashridge Priory, Hertfordshire, and Edington, Wiltshire, was Cathar.16 However, the connection is tenuous – after all, ‘good men’ is hardly a unique appellation and the evidence for this is circumstantial and the conclusion contested. The monastery at Ashridge was founded in 1283 by Edmund, Earl of Cornwall. The monastery at Edington was established in 1352 by Edward, the Black Prince, whose mother was a daughter of Raymond VI of Toulouse. Vanished murals in the college cloisters and in a nearby cottage (discovered in 1953, so perhaps still in existence) are alleged to portray the Cathar side sympathetically, but I have been unable to check this.17 The link to Raymond VI of Toulouse, that pivotal figure in the Albigensian Crusade, is fascinating. Yet here also it may be coincidence as the French and English nobility were intimately connected. For example, Simon de Montfort was Earl of Leicester.
The arcane Tarot
A particular interpretation of the Tarot similarly supplies an indirect argument for the survival of the Cathars. The Marseilles Tarot, one of the oldest surviving Tarots, has some geographical continuity with the Cathars. Northern Italy was a centre of the early development of the Tarot and there were Cathars in the same region. However, evidence for the Tarot goes back only to around 1440, after the death of Bélibaste, the last Perfect in the Languedoc, and after any historical evidence of the Italian Cathars. Thus if the Tarot provides convincing evidence that it was invented by the Cathars, or contains prominent Cathar imagery, it would imply the survival of the Cathars or at least their ideas.
In his 1947 book The Medieval Manichee the scholar Steven Runciman was already seeing dualism in the Tarot, and he suggested that it might display Cathar or Gnostic influence. The Devil card is one of many features of the Tarot that does not fit in easily with Catholic theology or concerns.18 Certainly cards like the Pope and, even more so, the Popess are difficult to imagine as the products of anything like an orthodox Catholic mind. Alfred Douglas, in his popular book The Tarot, suggested that the Major Arcana contains Cathar imagery.19 More recently, Robert Swiryn has produced a full-blown Cathar interpretation of the Tarot.20 Swiryn sees the Tarot – or at least the Marseilles Tarot – as having originated as a memorial to the specific teachings and tragic history of the Cathars of southern France. He recognizes that, at the earliest, the Marseilles Tarot is a good 200 years after the fall of the Cathars and admits that there are problems with the Tarot containing survivals of Catharism, but he suggests that the teachings and memories of the Cathars may have survived underground for this length of time.
Swiryn draws on what might seem like incidental detail in the images: for example, the two figures kneeling before the pontiff in card V, the Pope, are seen as the papal legates, who travelled in pairs. The pope is taken to be Innocent III and the two legates the Cistercian brothers, Rainer and Guy, who went to the Languedoc to oppose the heresy – or as the Inquisitors sent to Toulouse, or as Ralph of Fontfroide and Peter of Castelnau. (The latter’s murder, when he was returning to Rome, sparked off the Albigensian Crusade.) Swiryn comes up with other possibilities, which is intellectually honest but diminishes the possibility of any definitive identification. There are simply too many possibilities for each card to make the case convincing.
Not every card is interpreted historically. For example, the Wheel of Fortune is seen as teaching the Cathar doctrine of transmigration. He sees a chi-rho monogram in the spokes of the wheel in the particular versions of the card in the Marseilles Tarot. The Hanged Man was a medieval symbol of a traitor, hence the card could depict any number of traitors or turncoats who joined the crusaders – and there are a good many to select from. The Tower could represent Montségur as Swiryn believes, but it could equally represent any number of towers destroyed in the Languedoc in the course of the Albigensian Crusade – or indeed any tower that was destroyed in siege warfare. There is little intrinsically implausible about the Tarot being influenced, at least in part, by Catharism. But there is nothing definite either, and the Tarot could have been influenced by any of the esoteric currents that were so influential in the early Renaissance – including Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, too.
A coded manuscript
Yet another historical enigma has been linked to the Cathars. The Voynich manuscript contains mysterious images and a unique script that has never been decoded. Discovered in an Italian monastery in 1912 by Wilfred Voynich, an antiquarian book specialist, the manuscript features unknown plants and cavorting nymphs decorating strange alchemical instruments, along with zodiacal diagrams and much more.21
Dr Leo Levitov, a medical doctor and amateur cryptologist, investigated the manuscript. Most researchers have attempted to treat the script as a code which, if cracked, will reveal the encoded meaning in a known language, probably European. Having had no luck with this approach (like the many experts and amateurs who have investigated the manuscript), Levitov decided to treat the script as if it represented an unknown language rather than a cipher. Somehow or other he came up with sound values for each letter which, when transcribed, produced what he said was ‘Cathari’, a ‘polyglot oral tongue’ with very little regular grammar but vocabulary from all the regions and countries in which the Cathars had lived. Therefore it was a kind of pidgin spoken by the Cathars to transcend language barriers. He understood many of the words to refer to sickness and death in their original languages and from this he concluded that the Voynich manuscript was a record of the endura rite. The naked nymphs who were bathing throughout the illustrations of the manuscript were actually undergoing the endura and slashing their wrists so they could bleed to death after receiving the consolamentum. The various plants, Levitov decided, were all connected with the goddess Isis, as were many of the astrological cosmological diagrams.
The manuscript had been taken to England by fleeing Cathars in 1163. Thus the manuscript was taken from the Languedoc four years before the St Felix conference and long before the Albigensian Crusade. Once in England, it subsequently passed through the hands of Renaissance mage Dr John Dee.
Experts, willing to give anything a chance when it comes to Voynich, assessed Levitov’s claims about the language and the alphabet and found that it was impossible to interpret Levitov‘s transcriptions as any sort of language. The association with Isis does, however, suggest some knowledge of Gadal’s neo-Catharism. The Voynich manuscript has received increased media and academic attention in the last decade. Some of the plants have been identified and some of the script, perhaps, interpreted. Let us hope that more of it is decoded and that, if the mystery is ever solved, the answer is something interesting and worthwhile! If it turned out to be some medieval herbal text – which are interesting enough in their own right but of which we possess hundreds of manuscripts ‘ it would be unlikely to hold the fascination of an undeciphered Voynich manuscript. Perhaps some puzzles are best left unsolved.
A mysterious painter and surviving heresy
Lynda Harris has provided a book-length argument that Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch was a Cathar.22
Bosch was from the awkwardly named Dutch town of ‘Hertogenbosch (more conveniently known as Den Bosch, hence the last name by which he is popularly known.) He was born somewhere between 1450 and 1560 and died in 1516. His authentic surviving works are dated from 1500 onwards and there have been a number of wrong attributions.
The crazed and tiny figures of Bosch are open to all sorts of interpretations. I remember a Bosch painting being used to illustrate a mental health awareness campaign on the London Underground. Many art historians have seen Bosch‘s imagery as bizarre but not heretical. Attempts have been made to frame him as an astrologer or alchemist; although symbols from both disciplines appear in his work, they were part of the atmosphere of Renaissance intellectual life. It has also been argued that Bosch was a member of the Brethren of the Free Spirit.
Harris believes that Bosch and his family must have been Cathars. She states that Bosch was a dualist, without giving much evidence to convince us. Although it is never clearly stated, her definition of a Cathar proves to be quite loose. She is convinced that the Cathars were genuinely Manichaeans, as their enemies in the Catholic Church stated. One result of this identification of Cathars as Manichaeans is that Harris can then use all Cathar, Bogomil and Manichaean texts and art to compare to Bosch’s work, thus increasing the likelihood of some image in Bosch’s paintings matching an image from the texts. Thus a similar situation to the work of Bayley and Swirin emerges: general symbols that were in use throughout the culture of the time get interpreted as being specifically Cathar. Harris consistently refers to Bogomils as Cathars.
