Lost Teachings of the Cathars, page 25
Film
The Cathars have not been well-served by film treatments in the English–speaking world. The mini-series adaptation of Labyrinth was edited into a film. Despite the striking locations it felt a little flat in comparison to the book. The Cathars have featured in a number of documentaries, often on the back of Otto rahn, but the documentary output is dwarfed by those about the Templars.
Even France does not have many non-documentary films on the Cathars. La Fiancée des ténèbres (‘The Bride of Darkness’, 1945) is a notable exception, a classic French fantasy film that freely adapts the Cathar legends. In Carcassonne Sylvie, a young women, lives with M. Toulzac, a retired teacher and her adoptive father who is the last of the Cathar bishops. The plot is difficult to discern but neo-Cathar themes include Sylvie as a reincarnation of Esclarmonde, the discovery of an underground cathedral reminiscent of the neo-Cathar caves and the survival of the Cathars to the modern day.
The Secret Book (2006) concerns a quest for The Secret Book of the Bogomils, the search stretching from Bosnia through Dalmatia, northern Italy and finally the Languedoc. Attractively filmed, and starring notable screenwriter and actor Jean-Claude Carrière, with dialogue in French and Macedonian, it was the official Macedonian entry for Cannes that year. 2
Damsels in Distress is a 2012 college comedy written and directed by Whit Stillman in which a character who wants love ‘the Cathar Way’ is coyly asking for anal sex. In an interview Stillman claimed:
‘The thing is, that scene in the movie is absolutely true. There was a lovely woman in Spain, I knew her when she was already married with kids, but I heard that her first boyfriend when she was at university was a young professor who said he was a Cathar and talked her into all these things. There’s a website in the United States that investigated the actual attitudes of the Cathars, and they said this idea of the Cathars and anal sex is what their enemies said about them. But the thing is, there are people now who say they are Cathars and talk their girlfriends into this, so it doesn’t matter what the actual Cathars did and said.’3
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Malcolm Lambert concluded, in agreement with a French scholar J Guirard: ‘...the spiritual place of the Perfect lay not with the leaders and teachers of the Christian Church but rather with Eastern religious teachers, the bonzes and fakirs of Japan and India or the adepts of the Orphic mysteries.’4 To Lambert this was an indictment of the Cathars, whom he believed represented a ‘profound distortion of central Christian tradition’.5 For many seekers, including myself, the comment might rather produce awe and a kind of pride that, from time to time, Christianity has existed in forms that were enlightened, sincere and spiritual rather than only in the mainstream varieties that have been, by and large, authoritarian, stodgy, self-serving or narrow-minded, just to list the least heinous of Christianity’s sins.
* * *
Montségur was the most eagerly awaited site on our visit to the Languedoc and the most famous and infamous location in Cathar history. I was glad that the weather was cool and overcast given my difficulty with the heat and the steep climbs of the previous trip. As we approached Montségur via the windy roads, the rocky outcrop came into sight again and again as we twisted around the hairpin bends. The castle had held out against a crusader siege in 1244. When it looked as if the siege might at last have to be lifted, a group of Catholic soldiers from the northern French army climbed their way up at night and established a high–altitude foothold from which the castle could be attacked with siege engines. On 2 March the Montségurians sought terms for a surrender and were told that they would be treated equably, but that the Cathars would have to recant their faith and submit themselves to the Inquisition. The Perfects refused: 200 delivered themselves up, and 16 Believers, who had not taken on the strict conditions of the inner circle, took the initiation rite of the consolamentum and joined the Perfects in death by fire. It was a temporal catastrophe but a spiritual triumph.
At Montségur village the mountain loomed above us. We visited the small museum, typical of French regional museums. Exhibit cases held a variety of small objects: clasps, keys, buckles, all from the time of the Cathars. The most memorable item, reproduced on various postcards, posters and promotional material, was a nicely fashioned pair of scissors. Cathars often worked as weavers and tailors, a renowned heretic’s trade, and these were possibly Cathar scissors, perhaps used to cut out material for the black gowns worn by the Perfects. It is difficult to convey the intimacy of these scissors in that glass case.
Placards, mostly in French but with the occasional sentence or paragraph in English, described the course of the Albigensian War and the development of the siege. Large-scale reproductions included a manuscript page of the Cathar ritual and a leaf from a Cathar Bible, probably identical to the Catholic Bible (although the Cathars didn’t have a high opinion of the Old Testament), but translated into Occitan, the language of the South. Occitan refuses to die out and may be spoken by a million people, although these things are hard to estimate and the language remains in danger, with many parents not passing it on to their children.
The walk up to the castle was tough but it was not the hour–long slog I had somehow expected. The path was a mixture of mud and gravel, broad stone steps, wooden stays with eroded earth and irregular, embedded stones. I was wearing ordinary shoes with worn treads and my feet slipped occasionally, but I am cautious in these situations and no harm was done. My heart was beating fast, the sweat pouring down me, and we had to stop occasionally. I was glad the day was not hot even if the wind had a bite to it, giving me slight earache. I felt that the physical discomfort somehow atoned for my status as a tourist, with the mountain locations extracting an obligatory penance from even the most plastic traveller.
The castle – which was not identical to the structure the Cathars sheltered in, but had been rebuilt soon after – was simple in comparison to some of the other fortresses. I tried to imagine the Cathars living there. It was surely a harsh existence, assailed by blazing sun, biting wind or winter snow. The old lady in the ticket office, situated halfway up the mountain, was cheerful, enjoying practising her English and making jokes. She was there all seasons she said, and mimed having to poke a hole in the snow to see out of the booth in wintertime.
We climbed around to the side where the French forces established the foothold that broke the siege. It must have taken unimaginable determination and certitude for the Cathars to surrender themselves to the Inquisition. They preferred to be burnt to death than to recant their faith.
As we took the path down I felt that I followed in their footsteps and intentionally visualized them filing down the difficult path. I found it took a fair amount of imagination in these places to bring the Cathars back to life. I tried to visualize the black-cowled Perfects of both sexes negotiating, in pairs, the difficult trail to their doom. At the bottom of the hill was an elegantly constructed bonfire, perhaps representing that on which they were consumed. A monument commemorates them in Prat dels Cramats, or the Field of the Burnt Ones.6 In reality the Perfects were bound and then dragged roughly down the slope, their dignity denied to them. At that moment, was I re-creating the story for myself, somewhat in the manner of Antonin Gadal or Arthur Guirdham?
What was the treasure of Montségur? Surely any movement of physical treasure would be incidental? The Perfects needed money only to maintain themselves when they were unable to work because of the Inquisition, and to further Cathar undertakings such as assemblies, which would have required money for rooms, food, and so on. There is no indication that the Cathars had any talismanic object. Such an object would have been material and matter was of the devil, whether it was a holy grail or a turd.7
The possibility of sacred books remains a possibility. Yes, books were made of matter but the ideas held in them are immaterial and only truly come alive in human heads and hearts. It is entirely feasible that the Montségur Perfects would want to preserve The Secret Supper and whatever other writings are, in terms of this discussion, ironically lost to us.
Or were the Perfects who took out the treasure from Montségur just going off to deliver a consolamentum? Surely the Cathars would have considered this their greatest treasure, the rite that bestowed the spirit on the recipient? The laying on of hands that they believed had been transferred from Perfect to Perfect since the intangible Jesus himself. A transmission that was in danger of dying out if 200 Perfect were about to be exterminated.
Probably we will never know. For us the Cathars are perched somewhere between history and mystery. Let us hope that all the angels that fell from heaven are now restored to the realm of the Father, or at least cycling through successive incarnations until they can meet the Good Men and Good Women.
Notes
Introduction
1 Actually, as a curious 13-year-old interested in Alfred Douglas’s The Tarot (1974), I had read a few paragraphs about them in around 1979 or 1980.
2 Synchronicities tend to cluster around those who are interested in the Cathars: a friend of his who felt convinced she had been a Cathar in a previous life was upset at a tattoo of a cross on his arm, which she recognized (not necessarily correctly) as a Cathar cross.
3 Writers and historians have brilliantly related the sequence of sieges and battles that riddle the history of the Cathars. For example, Stephen O’Shea’s bestselling The Perfect Heresy is spellbinding and recommended to everyone; yet, despite its vivid quality and historical accuracy, the reader is left with little idea of what the Cathars really believed, what they did and, even more centrally, why. Although there are many books on the Cathars aimed at the general reader, few describe the beliefs of the Cathars to any great degree.
4 It is common for heterodox religious groups to be labelled with the names given them by their enemies. This is the case with the Cathars. Mark Gregory Pegg points out that the heretics in the Rhineland were called Cathars by Eckbert and this name was then applied in retrospect to the dualists of the Languedoc, Italy and elsewhere. But the Catholic writers contemporary to the events merely referred to Albigensian ‘heretics’ or Provencal ‘heretics’, a term that applies equally to the Waldensians on those lands. The ‘Cathars’ and their sympathizers merely refer to them as the ‘Good Christians’ or as the ‘Good Men’ and ‘Good Women’ and to ‘Believers’. But Pegg claims that even ‘Good Men’ was a term applied generally to people in the Languedoc by the 12th century. (The Lateran Council does specify ‘Cathars, Patarenes and Publicans’.)
5 Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay in Walter L Wakefield and Austin P Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (1969, 1991), p.237
6 P. D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe (1934), p.305. Ouspensky was inspired to write this passage after an experience of viewing the masses of humanity from the top of Notre Dame.
Chapter 1: The History of Crime
1 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 (1980), p.102
2 Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (1998), p.16–17
3 It is important to note here that these people are ‘heretics’ only by judgment of the Catholic Church. By their own lights such people had not broken away from the orthodoxy but instead had a true understanding of Christ and the world.
4 Karen Ralls, Knights Templar Encyclopedia (2007), p.73
5 Most scholars, including Lambert, believe this is impossible. If so, Eckbert got the information from St Augustine’s writings and either fabricated the feast or interpreted some other festival as being the Manichaean Bema.
6 It was also an important year for Kabbalistic Judaism: Sefer Bahir (‘Book of Brightness’), a foundational text, was first published in 1167 in Provence.
7 Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee(1947, 1961), p.158
8 Ladurie, Montaillou, p.121
9 Ralls, Knights Templar Encyclopedia, p.223. Although the term ‘troubadour’ is still part of our language, and a folk singer is as likely to be called a troubadour as a poet is, there are few books in English about them and just as few translations of their poems. Ezra Pound’s translations of Arnaut Daniel are a notable exception. The last troubadour was Guiraut Riquier, who died in 1294.
10 The only English translation of this long historical poem is titled ’The Song of the Cathar Wars’. The original Occitan title was ‘Canso de la crozada’, in French ‘Chanson de la croisade contre les albigeois’ and later ‘Chanson de la croisade albigeoise’.
11 Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitors Manual (2008) p.44
12 Peter of Castelnau would be a Catholic martyr, his corpse ‘found to be as whole and unimpaired as if it had been buried that very day. A marvellous perfume arose from his body and clothing’. (Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay, quoted in Barber, The Cathars, p.128.)
13 For the Albigensian Crusade I have used Sean Martin’s brief 2006 account as a skeleton, fleshing it out with and checking it against Aubrey Burl, Malcolm Lambert and Mark Gregory Pegg. I have also gone back to The Song of the Cathar Wars and The History of the Albigensian Crusade as original primary sources, mainly for colourful detail.
14 Aubrey Burl, God’s Heretics (2006), p.34
15 Sean Martin, The Knight’s Templar (2004), p.136
16 Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (2007), pp.135–136
17 Janet Shirley, The Song of the Cathar Wars (2011) p.11. Geomancy was a medieval divinatory practice and it is part of the modern Western esoteric tradition, included in the Golden Dawn curriculum, though it seems to be little practised by anyone today. The diviner makes random dots in sand or earth, paper or parchment, and then systematically interprets the resulting figures that can be made by joining the dots. See http://www.princeton.edu/fiezb/geomancy/geohome.html
18 Burl, God’s Heretics, p.39
19 Burl, God’s Heretics, pp.39–40. Burl points out that at least ten of these were involved in the textile industry, which backs up the claim that Cathars were often weavers.
20 This notorious quotation has its only source in the account of Caesarius of Heisterbach. Some scholars have doubted whether Arnold Amaury really said this, but it was written a mere ten years after the event. See Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War (2009), p.77
21 Burl, God’s Heretics, p.50
22 ‘Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful.’ Aubrey Burl, God’s Heretics, p.49, repeated ad infinitum by Mark Gregory Pegg, ≠A Most Holy War.
23 Martin, The Cathars (2006), p.90
24 Janet Shirley, The Song of the Cathar Wars p.176. There is no doubt that the second chronicler is Catholic because the anonymous author goes on to contrast Simon with Christ who gave his body and blood (to the disadvantage of Simon).
25 Pegg, A Most Holy War, pp.3–5
Chapter 2: Hammer of the Heretics
1 P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (1950), p.129
2 In the 20th century the German Otto Rahn, the Holy Grail enthusiast, was to be fascinated by Conrad.
3 Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitors Manual (2008), p.65
4 Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324, (1980), p.290
5 Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitors Manual, p.68
6 Made famous by Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s book.
7 Peter Valdès (Waldo) and the Waldensians initiated the trend of translation into the vernacular, specifically Occitan/Provencale, and the Cathars followed. Occitan Bibles would have been rare, but they existed, and a Cathar New Testament survives (with nothing specifically Cathar in the NT text, though it has the Cathar Ritual appended to it), known as the Nouveau Testament de Lyon. There must have been a fair number of copies of the Gospel of John, because they were essential for the consolamentum.
8 Ladurie, Montaillou, p.142 n. 3
9 Ladurie, Montaillou, p.141
10 Zoé Oldenbourg, Massacre at Montségur (1961, 1999), p.315
11 Ladurie, Montaillou, p.162
12 Anselm in Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (1969,1991), p.369
13 Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (1998), pp.169–170
14 Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitors Manual, p.65
15 Lambert, The Cathars, pp.171–174
Chapter 3: A Good God, an Evil God
1 Richard Smoley, The Dice Game of Shiva (2009) p.156
2 Curiously, a dualist viewpoint can be made to be more or less compatible with a scientific view. The laws of science could be considered only to affect the material world, of which the body and the brain are a part. Consciousness has not yet been explained by science and no deeper aspect of the human, corresponding to spirit, is acknowledged. Therefore a modern spirit–matter dualist would be able to accept the veracity of science without any trouble. It is simply the way the devil–created physical world works. Of course, science would have none of it, but a dualist could simply say that science applies only to matter.
3 A possible exception is Dvaita Vedanta, which is the dualist interpretation of the Vedas, as opposed to Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual interpretation of the Vedas. Occasionally one might come across a modern Gnostic who is a dualist – most are not genuinely so; some even deny that ancient Gnosticism was dualist.
4 Smoley, The Dice Game of Shiva, p.42
5 Mircea Eliade and Ioan P. Couliano, The HarperCollins Concise Guide to World Religions (2000), p.247
6 Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God (2000), pp.131–132
7 Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (1998), p.315
8 Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis (1992), pp.24–25
9 Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 (1980), p.325
10 Two copies of it are known: one is held in the National Library of Vienna. The other was published in print in the 17th century (a copy of which may be held in Paris?) but has since been destroyed. This version was found in Carcassone, where it had been seized by the Inquisition. It probably made its way to the Languedoc following the extensive contact between Cathars and Bogomils initiated by Nicetas. The story of Adam and Eve attributed to moderate dualist Cathars by Moneta is very like that of The Secret Supper. See Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans Heresies of the High Middle Ages (1969, 1991), pp.321–323
