Lost Teachings of the Cathars, page 5
Cathars were in a constant state of fear and apprehension, comparable to that of Jews leading up to and during the Second World War. On entering an unfamiliar house in Inquisition times, a Perfect would ask the innocuous question, ‘Is there a crooked stick here,’ testing for an affirmative reply to see if another Cathar was present. Another code phrase was, ‘Bessa trona! Can we do anything for our betterment.’12
The following is one not the most bloody nor the most dramatic examples, but is instead poignant and tragic in its quietness. Arnaude de Lamothe, a female Perfect in the years leading up to the siege of Montségur, hid with her sister in an underground tunnel in a forest. Believers brought food for her at their own risk. Her sister died from the damp and a young girl was sent to be a companion to Arnaude, who as a Perfect should never live by herself. Arnaude lasted until 1243, the year of the siege, when she was captured. After a long period of isolation in the wilderness, she gave a full confession to the Inquisition. It is not known whether she survived.13
Many Perfects simply found they were confirmed in their beliefs that the material world was fashioned by Satan and that the Church of Rome was his Church. ‘How can the fire that burns the houses of the poor and holy be created by God? How can the God who sends suffering to good men be good himself?’ one Cathar Perfect asked of the Inquisitor who was questioning him.14
The Inquisition developed their practices into an art: interview all suspects, cross-reference, pursue those who seem guilty, interview again, then demand conversion or death. The technique was applied in city after city, town after town, hamlet after hamlet, throughout continental western Europe, its victims ranging from aristocrat to village idiot. As an institution the Inquisition would survive for another 600 years and in retrospect some events of the 13th and 14th centuries would seem like crude parlour games compared to the ferocity that would lie ahead. And yet the Inquisition couldn’t quite eradicate the dedicated Cathar survivors by itself: it would require a return to the old technique of the siege that had worked so well in the Albigensian Crusade to dig out the roots at Montségur.
When we look back at the Middle Ages, we may well find ourselves judging which aspects of the period were good and which bad. Perhaps it is more that we reach out to what is appealing or sympathetic and reject or judge what it unsympathetic or unappealing. This, of course, depends on our point of view. Where a rationalist might find the discovery of Occam’s Razor to be the summation of the high Middle Ages, a Catholic might see Thomas Aquinas and the Gothic cathedrals as the peak; a traditionally minded Englishman might find his sympathies expressed in Chaucer, Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, whereas an Italian might see merit in Dante and Petrarch and certain aspects of the power of the papacy.
And those who, like me, are fascinated by esotericism or by alternative history will look sympathetically at the Cathars, the Knights Templar, the troubadours and subjects like the Holy Grail, alchemy and the kabbalists, alongside some of the more mainstream, yet profound and sometimes mysterious, aspects of the high medieval such as the Gothic cathedrals, Dante and St Francis. In fact we may do this to such an extent that everything that we like in the Middle Ages appears to be lined up in battle against the Catholic Church. It’s an understandable conclusion, given the corruption of so much of the Church from top to bottom at various times. The Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition are the only justifications we need to array esoteric streams of medievalism against the Church of Rome, the ‘Church of Satan’.
The subtitle of Otto Rahn’s Crusade Against the Grail offers a nice summary of the attitude: ‘The Struggle Between the Cathars, the Templars, and the Church of Rome.’ Such narratives have a deep appeal. Certainly I feel the power of an underground esoteric stream surfacing in various locales at various times, at some times a babbling brook, at others a roaring frothing river. Yet we should try to tease esoteric meaning out of the web of history, rather than stamping a neat grid over complex, chaotic, organic patterns. From these patterns some surprising connections and coincidences can be seen.
Francis of Assisi
Francis of Assisi (1181 or 1182–1226) is another saint who, far more than Bernard, has his attractive aspects. In 1210, just after the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade, Francis caught the attention of Pope Innocent III who, after making him wash, gave his papal approval to Francis’s newly developed Rule for mendicant disciples, or friars, and pressed Francis into the service of the Church. There is no specific mention of Cathars in Francis’s writings, yet there was a bishopric in the Val de Spoleta and Cathars were known in nearby Assisi.
The Rule of the Franciscans emphasizes that those who will not say the Office (the daily prayer recitations) or who veer from the true faith should be sent to the Cardinal Protector. All Christians should go to confession and communion, visit churches often and show reverence to priests. These and other instructions can be seen as anti-Cathar measures.
In one anecdote Francis accepts a meal of capon from a family he is visiting and when a beggar, called a ‘son of Belial’ and therefore a Cathar (or at least a heretic), interrupts them by knocking at the door, Francis gives him a piece of the capon on bread. The beggar then tries to exhibit it to the townspeople, to show them that Francis is eating meat, but the meat has miraculously turned into fish, which was acceptable both to Cathars and Catholics on fast days. In another story a ‘Manichaean’ asks Francis how he can accept the sacrament from a priest in Lombardy who kept a mistress. Francis responded by kissing the priest’s hands and saying that even if the priest was impure the sacrament he administered and the church in which he gave them were holy. In these anti-heretic stories, the Cathars are nit-picking and po-faced. Yet the points made by the beggar and the ‘Manichaean’ are good ones. If your religion holds that priests should be celibate and that meat should not be eaten at certain times perhaps the members should actually observe these restrictions, or change the rules, or leave that Church. The anecdotes give the impression of Francis being tolerant and forgiving of human imperfection, but no one in authority was forgiving if an ordinary peasant didn’t want to go to church or wanted to hold his or her own beliefs. And if someone was a heretic who wouldn’t recant, they would receive the unforgiving flames of the fire.15
Chapter 3
A Good God,
an Evil God: Dualism
Dualism is a word loaded with a variety of meanings, few of which are popular among spiritual-seekers today. Strictly speaking, it simply refers to any philosophical or religious system with two terms, usually in opposition. In philosophy, dualism is the belief in the existence of two substances, matter and mind. Famously it was Descartes who established mind–body dualism as the foundation for much of the modern Western worldview. His mind–body dualism allowed consciousness and the mind to be largely ignored during the early – and highly successful – development of mechanistic science. Today, Cartesian dualism is still a philosophical option but the great problem with it is the complete separation of body and mind – and thus the question of how mind can have any influence on body at all. In contemporary science, consciousness is perhaps more often seen as an emergent property of life, or at least as being dependent on the brain.
Thus, for thinkers of many stripes, the word dualism may evoke the worst excesses of mechanistic science. The movement towards holism, where everything is seen as part of a connected whole, has treated any dualism as belonging to hidebound and stagnant 19th- and 20th-century approaches to the universe and existence. Then there is the phenomenon of non-dualism. True dualism being negated is that of the individual soul or atman, or of the individual and the universe. This dualism is in fact illusory and, according to the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta (or the modern Western forms of it), once the illusion of individualism is dissolved we can experience our birthrights, the experience of oneness, the non-dual. Richard Smoley has argued convincingly that, ‘We see a dual perspective even in the purest forms of non-dualism. God is both wholly Self and wholly other. To put it more comprehensively still, God is the ultimate source out of which this duality of self and other arises.’1
In many forms of Gnosticism – derived from the Greek word gnosis or ‘knowledge’ and characterized by a belief that the world is the product of a flawed creator – something that resembles Cartesian dualism may appear to be present, but the dualism is spirit–matter rather than mind–matter, and the difference is crucial. Moreover, Gnosticism has what in philosophy would be called an ontological dualism. Ontology refers to the nature of existence itself. The duality of spirit–matter is not merely a subjective perception or an illusion, it is intrinsic to the nature of the universe and of existence. This was clearly the case for the Cathars, who saw the good God and the heavenly realm as being of spirit only, and matter as something that was entirely separate, intrinsically at odds with spirit and the base fabric of a fallen realm ruled and fashioned by the devil.
Another dualism is that of good–evil, which are opposed and mutually exclusive. In Catharism the good God is opposed to the evil God, who is also known, as he is in other forms of Christianity, as the devil or Satan or Lucifer. A further dualism is between light and dark, and this was the core dualism of the Manichaeans, who saw both humanity and the Earth as being a mixture of light and darkness: the result of the kingdom of darkness warring against the kingdom of light. The purpose of humanity, or at least of the Manichaean Elect, was to liberate the light from the darkness, both in the world and in themselves. Light and darkness are not very prominent in Catharism.2
Although these dualisms can be seen as distinct approaches they are often lined up together. Good is equated with spirit and light, whereas evil is equated with matter and darkness. For the Cathars the good God was spirit, not matter, and the evil God was the devil who ruled over matter and formed or created our Earthly world.
Absolute dualism and moderate dualism
Historically, there are two distinct structures of ontological dualism apart from the pairs of good–evil, spirit–matter and light–darkness, though there are many subsets and variations. These are termed absolute dualism and moderate, or mitigated (sometimes expressed as monarchical), dualism. Curiously we see both in Cathar teaching, the disagreements between the two forms of dualism producing a tension and vitality that kept the teachings fresh and innovative.
Absolute dualism regards good and evil (or spirit and matter, light and darkness) as eternally co-existing. Moderate dualism sees evil, matter or darkness as something that was not there at the beginning but emerged as the result of rebellion, ignorance or cosmic disaster. This distinction doesn’t affect every aspect of a dualist worldview. Regardless of whether the devil was a fallen angel or a co-eternal power, Cathars could agree that the world was created by an evil God, that the good God had little or no part in the formation of the world, that Jesus didn’t have an ordinary Earthly body, that souls have to go through many lives on this Earth until they can meet the Good Christians and receive the consolamentum, and many other doctrines.
Religions or sects hardly ever call themselves dualist.3 The term is almost always either a classification of religious systems by scholars or a term of abuse by religious enemies. The term was first used in Latin in 1700 by Thomas Hardy (not the well-known novelist and poet) to describe religions based on two opposing forces.4 Although the term dualism was not in use at the time of the Cathars, Catholic polemicists did refer to ‘the two principles’ as one of Catharism’s distinguishing characteristics.
Dualist Christians didn’t call their own enemies misguided monotheists, nor did they think that their opponents worshipped the wrong number of gods. Only one god had any importance for the Cathars: the good God. Monotheists didn’t merely worship a single god, they worshipped the wrong god, they worshipped the devil, believing him to be the true god, and were ignorant of the good or true God of spirit. Perhaps it is time for a brief history of dualism.
Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism and Manichaeism
The most significant example of a non-Christian dualist religion is Zoroastrianism, which began somewhere between 1200 and 500 bc and continues to the present day as a living religion.5 Zoroastrianism presented an absolute dualism of good and evil in which the good and evil spirits were co-existent from the beginning and went to war with each other. The early date of Zoroastrianism, which easily precedes Christianity, and its widespread dissemination in the Middle East has led scholars to see Zoroastrianism as a direct or indirect influence on dualist Christian belief.
We know that it was an influence on Mani, the founder of the Manichaean religion in the 3rd century ce. Mani’s dualism was that of light and darkness. The kingdoms of light and darkness existed from the beginning but the kingdom of darkness encroached on the kingdom of light. According to Mani and the Manichaeans, the outcome of the war is that we are now living in a world in which the light is admixed with the darkness. The whole purpose of the Earth and mankind is to liberate the light and it was the Manichaean Elect who principally facilitated this. The Cathars themselves were called Manichaeans by their opponents, because of their dualism, and we will encounter the Manichaeans again when we look at the origins of the Cathars.
Before Mani there had been the Gnostics. For a long time it was fashionable to believe there had been a Zoroastrian, or ‘Iranian’, influence on ancient Gnosticism, but with the discovery and publication of the Nag Hammadi library (the collection of ancient Gnostic writings unearthed in Egypt in 1945) this seems unlikely. What might be perceived as Zoroastrian influence on late Gnostic texts like Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu, might have come about indirectly via contact with Manichaeism. Ancient Gnosticism was a widespread and varied phenomenon with little or nothing that can really be claimed as normative. There are examples of absolute dualism in some Gnostic writings, but in the main ancient Gnostic dualism was moderate; it may be thought of as dualism within monism. In Gnosticism, dualism is the current state of humanity and the universe. We live in the material world caused by the fall of Sophia, and fashioned by her son Ialdabaoth, the demiurge. Plato conceived the demiurge (‘craftsman’) as a divine intermediary between God and the created world, but in the hands of the Gnostics he became an ignorant or malevolent figure. The opposition that exists in the universe as we know it is thus between the body or matter, ruled by the demiurge, and spirit which derives from the true God in the spiritual realm of the pleroma. The true God is defined in apophatic terms by what we do not know about him: He is illimitable, unknowable, unboundable, invisible, and so on.
The Manichaeans can be seen as successors to the Gnostics, influencing and absorbing later Gnostic groups, but by the late first millennium Manichaeism was very much in decline in its western extent. Yet forms of Christian dualism crop up again and again with the Paulicians, who were in Armenia and what is modern-day Turkey; as we shall see later on, they may form a link between the Gnostics and Cathars via the Manichaeans and the Bogomils. Intriguingly, there are hints of an existing pagan dualism in the Balkans, home of the Bogomils, which involved a creation myth with two demiurges and a giant fish.6
Dualism isn’t merely something that crops up, as many Christian intellectuals might have it, like a sort of cancer cell that spreads until it is cut out of the body of the Church, only to redevelop at a later date. Despite this very real trail, or web, of dualism in the Middle East and Europe, it may be considered just one of a limited range of logical possibilities to explain, in religious terms, the underlying structure of the world. One scholar introduced an edition of the Bogomil–Cathar text The secret Supper with the story of a creation myth involving a good and an evil God only to follow it up by revealing that this was actually a 20th-century legend from the Ivory Coast.7 Likewise, anthropologists have treated Native American myths in which the primordial being has a Trickster counterpart who spoils his plans from the very beginning as dualist.8 Of course, dualism may also be explained as a genuine representation of reality. This is certainly how the Cathars saw it, and at least one modern Cathar, Arthur Guirdham, was convinced of the same.
At its root dualism is often an attempt to address the issue of theodicy, the explanation of the existence of evil. If God is good, why is the world evil, so full of pain, suffering and imperfection? The dualist answer is that God is good indeed, but there is another God who is evil. Monotheistic answers usually put the blame on humanity, yet acknowledge that humanity somehow succumbed to an evil influence. The further implications of the existence of this evil force are usually ignored or fudged.
It’s easy for us to see dualism as mere quibbling over the unknowable or as distortions of the true Christian teaching. But to new Cathar Believers it must have been a revelation: there are two gods, and the one who created this world is the devil. The Church that worships him is the Synagogue of Satan, which is the Roman Catholic Church. Of course! That explains the antics of the local priest, the rapacious bishops and the general tyranny of the Church.
The Secret Supper
The dualism of the Cathars was expressed intellectually through myth and in practice by their ascetic attitude towards the body, through the celibacy and vegetarianism of the Perfect. Gnostic myth is characterized by theme and variation, allowing for adaptation and creativity in mythmaking, or mythopoesis, refining and reshaping the story and its details according to ongoing revelation and the development of understanding.
The Cathar myth in particular was not something that was carved in stone or crystallized in scripture. It was told and retold by the wandering dark-robed Perfects and acquired the properties of a true myth: one that is passed by word of mouth, which explains the situation of mankind in the world and that acts as a well from which can be drawn pails of refreshing wisdom to quench the thirsty. The well of Cathar myth could be dipped into to explain the atrocities of the Albigensian Crusade, the corruption of the Church of Rome or to give comfort to a dying Cathar Believer.
