Lost Teachings of the Cathars, page 6
Our sources for the myth are somewhat disparate. The Cathars had no central scripture other than the New Testament and in particular the Gospel of John. We possess no literary version of the Cathar’s own myth itself. Instead we have oral versions of it, as recorded in Inquisition interrogations, and we have various recountings of it in the writings of Inquisitors and Catholic intellectuals who attacked the Cathars as mere heretics or provided lists of Cathar practices and doctrines so that they could be identified and persecuted. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie provides a good summary of its essential:
‘To begin with there was the Fall. The Devil succeeded in leading astray some of the spirits surrounding the good God in Heaven. They fell from Heaven and were imprisoned here below by their seducer in vestures of earth, bodies of flesh, shaped in the clay of oblivion. These fallen souls sped madly from one deceased body to another, one vesture of decay to another, a soul sometimes being incarnated first in animals and then in men; until, said Pierre Maury, it arrives in a body where it is saved, because then, being finally hereticated (the term the Inquisition used for the consolamentum), it is brought to a state of justice and truth. Then, when it leaves that last tunic, the soul in question returns to Heaven. But until they are hereticated, spirits are condemned to wander from tunic to tunic. Thus the metempsychosis of Catharism, by which fallen and suffering spirits wander over the earth, is the equivalent of the Purgatory of the Roman faith.’9
The most complete version of a myth used by the Cathars is The Secret Supper, which is also known as the Interrogations (or Questions of John.)10 In origin this is not Cathar but Bogomil, but we know for certain it was used by the Cathars.
The setting is a secret supper in the kingdom of heaven during which John, the apostle and evangelist, questions Jesus concerning the events that led to the current status of the world. The supper resembles the Lord’s Supper. John is leaning on the breast of Jesus, just as the beloved disciple, usually identified as John, did in the Gospel of John.11 John even begins the dialogue by asking Jesus who will betray him, making a connection between Judas and the story of the fall of Satan that follows.
This setting resembles that of writings such as the Apocryphon of John, associated with the Sethian Gnostics of antiquity (who saw Jesus as a revealer and teacher who was an avatar of Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve). Both The Secret Supper and these Gnostic writings use the format of dialogue between Jesus and John, or another disciple, as a way of bringing forth from Jesus a discourse on the origins of the material world and the need to return to the realm of heaven, which is primarily a world of spirit. It is possible that both the Gnostics and the Bogomils independently recognized the need for Jesus’ secret teaching to be given in a context different to the canonical gospels. The Gnostics cast this as post-resurrection dialogue, the Bogomils as a supper in heaven. It is also feasible that the Bogomils were drawing on earlier traditions or writings as inspiration, coming up with a tale of the origin of the world that shares few details directly with the Gnostic myth, but nevertheless accomplishes the same task and describes the original spiritual world, the fall into matter, and the possibilities of a return to spirit.
The Secret Supper begins with an appeal to the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This John is apostle and evangelist, and therefore the traditional author of the fourth gospel. Although Jesus and John are portrayed as having bodies in the heavenly world, both Bogomils and Cathars saw heaven as a realm of spirit. As with Sethian Gnostic writings, the Father is invisible.
John asks Jesus what the conditions were like in the splendour before Satan fell. Jesus replies with a long story. Initially Satan sat at the throne of the invisible Father, among the virtues (angels) of heaven. He was the regulator of all things, presiding over the others who attended on the Father and his power from heaven to hell. But even though Satan had such responsibility and power he wished to place his throne upon the clouds and be ‘like the most high’. Thus Satan is corrupted by his power.
The Father stands apart from everything. This is an important aspect of dualism, which can answer some difficult questions rather more easily than can other forms of Christianity. If God created or organized the world then God is responsible for the suffering in it. If God is omnipotent, why doesn’t he put an end to the whole situation? If he is omniscient, why doesn’t he know what Satan is planning? Mainstream monotheism has considerable difficulty with these questions and usually skirts around them rather than admit that God cannot be both omniscient and omnipotent. It is not for us to question God, we are told, it is not the business of humanity to question this, it is humanity itself that is to blame.12
Standard answers invariably involve passing the buck. Humanity fell from grace, was expelled from the Garden of Eden for its transgressions against the law of God. Why was Adam exiled? Because of Eve. Why did Eve sin? Because she was tempted by the serpent. Where did the serpent come from? The serpent was presumably created by God. The serpent is not explicitly identified with Satan in Genesis and it wasn’t until the beginning of Christianity that Satan was identified as the serpent.13
In developed Catholic theology, as with the Bogomils and many Cathars, Satan was a fallen angel. Who made the angels? God. Why would a good God create evil? There are only a certain number of answers to that question. The Neoplatonic answer is that evil is a result of distance from God. The most common Gnostic answer is that of moderate dualism, which may also be considered a kind of monism. Although God is ultimately the source of all, and was originally unique and unified and all that there was, God is not necessarily omnipotent nor omniscient. The absolute dualist answer is that there have always been two principles: that of good and that of evil. They have co-existed from the beginning (although true dualism doesn’t require a beginning; in fact, any mythological state of affairs prior to the existence of the forces of good and evil is likely not to be dualist itself).
The Secret Supper’s approach does not entirely answer this question satisfactorily. We might easily wonder how the Father could have generated, or allowed to exist, an angel who could go on to cause such harm. We might also wonder whether the Father is such a poor judge of character that he didn’t suspect that his steward would betray him. Yet The Secret Supper does a better job of absolving God from blame than most of orthodox, monotheistic Christian theology does. The invisible Father is purely spirit, and it is Satan who fashions the material world and all that is in it.
Satan descends through the heavens, past the angels who attend the portals of air and water, into the realm of air then the realm of water, in which two fish are yoked together. The water supports the earth, which is itself covered with water. Neither the Bogomils nor the Cathars are particularly known for their visual arts, but it is difficult to believe that vivid scenes like this were never depicted iconographically. At a lower level were the fires of Gehenna, below which Satan could go no further because of the strength of the flames. Each of these depths below heaven – the waters, the earth, the fire of hell – were pre-existent. Satan did not create these, but he desired to influence them.
Satan was punished by the removal of the Lord’s glory from him and he became like a man, his face like iron glowing in the fire.14 With his seven tails Satan drew down his angels and fell from heaven, cast down by the Father and losing his stewardship.
But Satan found no peace and told the Lord that he had sinned and would pay for his actions.15 So the Father took pity on him and allowed Satan to do whatever he wished with the material world until the seventh day, which is interpreted in human terms as the seven ages of the world.
Satan then told the angels of air and water, standing on the two fish, to separate two-thirds of the water from the Earth. Thus dry land appeared. Somehow this is also said to be at the command of the Father. Some bizarrely poetic details follow. Half of the throne of the angel of the air was taken to make the throne of Satan, while the throne of the angel of the water was split to form the sun and the moon. Precious gems were used to make fire, and from fire the stars, and from the stars Satan made other angels. He also made thunder, rain and snow.
Further aspects of creation proceeded more or less as per the account in Genesis, but with Satan as the creator, not the Father. The reason why The Secret Supper avoids using the word God is perhaps because the God of Genesis is, in the Bogomils’ view, Satan.
But the creation of mankind is fraught with difficulty. Satan created a body of clay modelled after his own humanoid form. He then compelled an angel of the second heaven to enter into a female clay body. Satan wished to have sex with this female-bodied angel but had to tempt her into it. He created a false paradise, told her not to eat its fruits, and made a serpent from his own spittle to hide in a bed of reeds. The devil entered the serpent, seduced Eve and copulated with her using his tail. Satan inflicted his lust or longing for Eve onto Adam and from then on Adam and Eve had intercourse and produced children.
Thus both Adam and Eve are clay bodies inhabited by angels, the angel Eve from a higher level than Adam. Paradise is formed especially to corrupt Eve and Adam, and Eve is to all intents and purposes raped by the serpent. The Secret Supper removes much of the blame put on Eve in Genesis.
What then ensues is a history of the world that follows the general storyline of the Old Testament. The early patriarchs are no longer pious if flawed figures but are instead servants of Satan. Enoch in particular, though he is an esteemed figure in post-biblical apocrypha, writes 76 books dictated to him by the devil. It is the devil, not God, who said, ‘I am God and there is no other God before me’.16 The sacrificial rites taught by Enoch prevent humanity from attaining salvation.
This is all exceedingly similar to Gnostic literature, in which biblical heroes may instead serve the demiurge. In the Nag Hammadi library (for example in the Hypostasis of the Archons, or Reality of the Rulers, and in On the Origin of the World) the ignorant demiurge Samael also declares himself the only God. The apocryphal Book of Enoch had not been rediscovered by that time but it is possible that the Bogomils knew of a copy.
According to The Secret Supper, the Torah law of Judaism was given to Moses by the devil, who also sent three pieces of wood to Moses to be preserved through the centuries to form the cross on which Jesus would be crucified. This idea that the wood for the cross originated in ancient times also appears in the 2nd-century Valentinian Gnostic Gospel of Philip. A similar legend was current in the south of France and may be found in multiple versions in The Golden Legend, compiled by Jacobus de Voragine in the 13th century. This true cross comes from seeds planted in the mouth of Adam’s corpse by his son Seth. The tree is cut down, made into a bridge by Solomon and eventually used for the cross of Jesus.17 The reference may be a dig at the medieval Catholic obsession with relics, pieces of ‘the true cross’ being among the most highly prized.
The Father decided to send Jesus to Earth and prepared the way by sending an angel, his mother Mary. Jesus descended and entered through her ear. In response Satan sent Elijah as John the Baptist to teach a false and ineffective baptism, in contrast to the baptism of fire and spirit as mentioned in the Gospel of John. Thus an entirely new light is cast on the baptism of Jesus himself. John the Baptist is present on behalf of the devil.
The effect of Jesus’ time on Earth is taken for granted and not described in the narrative, and after a few more questions and answers in heaven between Jesus and John the evangelist, the story proceeds to the day of judgment. Many of the details are taken from the Book of Revelation – also, of course, attributed to John (and often referred to as the Revelation of John or, as here, the Apocalypse of John). The devil and all sinners will be sent to hell and bound. The just will be led by Jesus in front of the throne of the invisible Father with the Son at his right hand. The final age is similar in many ways to Catholic ideas of the final judgment, with the important difference that the Father is invisible – so, despite the admittedly concrete imagery, all this happens in spirit and the bodies of clay are abandoned in the burning earth.
Because Satan is bound in hell at the end, perhaps he failed to make amends as he had promised to the Father. Although it is not explicitly stated, we might surmise that the Father had to send Jesus because Satan failed in his promise to make good. It is another twist in a tale that, despite its lack of literary quality, has many subtleties. Although the imagery is mostly quite in line with that of the Eastern and Western Churches, there are many similarities between The Secret Supper and ancient Gnosticism.
Another complete surviving Cathar text is The Book of the Two Principles, which consists of reasoned argument rather than the picturesque myth outlined in The Secret Supper. As the title of the text suggests, the author was an absolute dualist and was very probably John Lugio of Bergamo, an Italian Cathar. Divided into seven sections, The Book of the Two Principles addresses issues such as free will, absolute versus moderate dualism and the nature of the creation of the world.18 The writer reasons carefully, drawing heavily on scriptural quotations as proof texts.
The Vision of Isaiah is an ancient Christian text that goes back to the late 1st century or early 2nd; it was neither Cathar nor Bogomil, though it was used by both. By the end of the 3rd century it had been joined to two unrelated texts, The Martyrdom of Isaiah and The Testament of Hezekiah. The Vision of Isaiah describes an ascent vision through the firmament and the seven heavens given to the prophet Isaiah, the latter of which are populated by angels whose glory is greater in each subsequent heaven. The seventh heaven also contains the righteous who ‘stripped of fleshly robes, were in heavenly robes and standing in great glory’, which tied in easily with the Cathar understanding of the spirit of each person being a fallen angel who would eventually be restored to heaven. Earlier versions contained a brief description of the crucifixion, resurrection and harrowing of hell, which were understandably omitted from the Bogomil and Cathar versions. What really suited the dualism of the Cathars was the vision of the firmament, in which Satan and his powers were warring against the loyal followers of God.
The Vision of Isaiah even made its way into the oral tradition of the Cathars. At an interrogation by the Inquisition at Pamiers in 1321 a witness testified that a Cathar had told him that another Cathar had once wanted to know whether he was truly following the good faith and right way. As he prayed to understand this an angel appeared and granted him the successive levels of vision as described in The Vision of Isaiah. In a folktale twist the man discovered at the end of the vision that he had been away from reality for 32 years. It is possible that the Cathars practised, as have many mystics over the centuries, ascent visions as a spiritual discipline. That could explain the change of the recipient of the visions in the story from Isaiah to an unnamed Cathar.
Chapter 4
The Fall
of the Angels:
The Cathar Myth
We have seen that the Cathar myth was not just a static piece of scripture handed down from the Bogomils. It was a living and essential part of the lives of Cathars. In the fragments of retellings that survive in the Inquisition records, and in the refutations left by Inquisitors and other Catholic writers of the time, we can discern some of the variants of the basic myth and their implications. The myth was used in all contexts of Cathar life. The strictures and disciplines of the Perfects were not merely considered good practice in themselves, they were essential to the Cathars ongoing involvement in the cosmic drama.
The story of The Secret Supper, related in the previous chapter, gives an idea of the stages of the myth. Because of the myth’s complexity I will split it up into sections. I have more or less let the records speak for themselves, commenting only where necessary. The sources are almost entirely polemical writings and Inquisition accounts. As with all secret police, the Inquisitors were good bureaucrats and accurate recorders so the voice of the Cathars shines through.
The original nature of the universe
Absolute and moderate dualism: Catharism’s varieties of dualism were particularly accentuated in Italy, where Cathar churches in different regions were to some extent in contention with each other over the true nature of the universe. It is chiefly the very beginning of the myth, and to some extent the final apocalypse, that is affected by the different types of dualism.
The Cathars often appealed to John and, to a lesser extent, the other gospels in support of their doctrines. In the Gospel of John the ‘prince of this world’ (John 14:30) is mentioned and this refers to the devil, as does the statement that one cannot serve both God and Mammon (Matthew 6:24). Mammon was interpreted as the devil. The Cathars understood this as referring to the devil being the maker of this world. Other binary statements in the gospels were seen as endorsing dualism. Although the Old Testament was not favoured by the Cathars, it could still inform their understanding of the universe, even if their interpretation was radically at odds with the orthodox one. The Cathars quoted the New Testament text ‘A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit’ (Matthew 7:18) to show that evil cannot come from the good God.1
In conversation, Cathars often had a nicely colloquial view of their central myth:
‘On a certain day, while the Lord was preaching in the sky to his people, a messenger came to him from earth, saying that he would lose this world unless he sent someone at once, and the Lord immediately sent Lucibel to this world, and received him for a brother, and afterwards Lucibel wished to have a part of the Lower and Upper possessions, and the Lord did not wish it, and on this account there was a war for a long time ...
‘When God saw the poverty of his kingdom on account of the fall of the evil spirits, he asked those around him, “Does anyone wish to be my true son and that I be his father,” and when no one replied, Christ, who was the bailli of God replied, “I wish to be your son and I will go wherever you shall send me,” and then God, as [he were] his son, sent Christ to the world to preach the name of God, and thus Christ came.’2
