Lost Teachings of the Cathars, page 7
With its intimation of the Albigensian Crusade, the poignant passage ‘on this account there was a war for a long time’ shows that the realities of this world were linked with the realities of the spiritual realm.
The nature of the elements – fire, air, water, earth – and of the celestial bodies, which between them had defined the structure of the cosmos for centuries, was fiercely debated by Cathar intellectuals. Some absolute dualists believed that although the devil created the elements and the celestial bodies, the good God created his own four elements, and the sun, moon and stars, but these are not the physical elements and celestial bodies that we see, rather they exist in the invisible spiritual realm. This is reminiscent of Plato’s world of ideas, in which objects and beings in our world are but imperfect shadows of ideal forms. In the absolute dualist view the material world is evil and opposed to the ideal world; evil and the triumph of evil in the world is not the fault of the good God. It may even be that evil is more powerful than good. Moderate dualists saw things differently; Moneta of Cremona knew of moderate dualists who believed that God brought matter into existence from nothing, the devil then divided existence into four elements and gave things their specific forms; the devil was a maker (or a crafter) not a creator.
The Cathars of the Languedoc changed over time from moderate to absolute dualists. Perhaps this transition was caused by a conviction that evil never will disappear from the universe: it certainly didn’t disappear from the Languedoc.
How the devil and his angels fell
Peter Autier told a charming story about the devil:
‘In the beginning the celestial Father had made all the spirits and souls in heaven [but then] the devil came to the gate of Paradise, wishing to enter there, but he was not able to, remaining at the gate for a thousand years; then he fraudulently entered paradise and, when he was there, persuaded the spirits and souls made by the celestial Father that it was not good for them, since they were subject to the celestial Father, but if they wished to follow him and go to his world, he could give them possessions, namely fields, vineyards, gold and silver, wives, and other good things of the visible world.’3
Bonacursus, a Cathar turncoat, gave up what information he could on the Cathars’ teachings in Milan sometime between 1176 and 1190. The mixture of the colloquial and the profound in the following is typical. For nine days and nine nights souls fell from heaven through a hole until God put his foot over it and told the remaining angels that if they left ‘they would have neither rest nor pause’. The angels who had fallen would be readmitted to heaven, though it would be the spirits incarnated within the great and the good, such as bishops, who would have a harder time returning rather than those within simple men and women.
After the spirits had fallen, one of them asked the devil about returning to heaven, but the devil replied that none of them would be able to because he had built a tunic – the body – that would prevent them from escaping. But in a recognizably Gnostic twist the devil couldn’t get the body to move without the help of God, and God in return wanted the devil to acknowledge that the souls were his. Thus souls go from body to body until they encounter the Good Christians.4
According to Alain of Lille, other Cathars believed that: ‘When in Genesis it is written that darkness was on the face of the deep this meant that the world began in darkness, and so the creator of the world was the principle of darkness, the devil.’5
The Cathar heaven was not a material place but existed in pure spirit. Yet in the process of describing it in concrete terms that could be understood by simple people, it acquired physical characteristsics. Jacques Autier, of the family that was instrumental in the final Cathar revival, adapted the Cathar myth as he addressed shepherds: ‘Satan entered into the Kingdom of the Father, and told the Spirits of that Kingdom that he, the Devil, owned a much better Paradise ...“Spirits, I will bring you into my world”, said Satan, “and I shall give you oxen, cows, riches and a wife for company, and you will have your own ostals [homes], and you will have children ... and you will rejoice more for a child, when you have one, than for all the rest which you enjoy here in Paradise.”’6
Creation of mankind and what happens to Adam and Eve
The Cathars often used inverse exegesis: deeds and words attributed to patriarchs such as Adam, Isaac and Jacob were considered to derive from demons. From this perspective, it was the devil, not God, who spoke to Moses from the burning bush; all of Moses’ miracles, including the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, were the devil’s work, as were miracles in general; some of the words of the prophets might have come from the spirit of God, others from demons. King David was a murderer and adulterer; Elijah was carried off in a chariot driven by the devil; the angel sent to Zechariah, father of John the Baptist (in Luke 1:11-23), was an angel of the devil – that is a demon. They took literally the statement that John the Baptist was lesser than any in the kingdom (in Matthew 11:11) because they read in the Gospel of John that the Baptist had doubted Jesus.
The devil made Adam from dust and imprisoned an angel of light within him. The devil made Eve, had sex with her, and thus Cain was born. When Adam found out he went on to beget Abel. As in the biblical account, Cain killed Abel. Dogs are born of Cain’s blood, which is why they are so faithful to humans – a charming but odd detail.7
The myth can be seen re-enacted in the heavens. The devil is the sun and Eve the moon. Each month they commit adultery as the couple. Demons are stars.8 According to other sources, the sun was made from Adam’s crown.9
The daughters of Eve coupled with demons and bore giants. These giants learned from their demon fathers that the devil created everything. The devil didn’t want this known, rather he wanted all living creatures to believe that God had created this world, so he caused a flood to destroy the giants and persuaded Noah, who didn’t know this secret, to go in the ark. This reversal of the importance of the ark is, again, very Gnostic. In Nag Hammadi writings such as the Revelation of Noah and the Nature of the Rulers, it is the demiurge who causes Noah to build the ark so that control may be maintained over humanity.
The spirit of each human is an apostate angel infused into the body to do penance. According to Alain of Lille there are no spirits in heaven because they all fell with Lucifer. This is a fascinating and bleakly poetic idea, that heaven is empty or mostly empty until the angels are returned there one by one as Good Christians die at the end of their final incarnations.10
John of Lugia, an Italian Cathar, believed that the true God caused the flood, the fall of Jerusalem and other disasters in the history of mankind, but that He was provoked into it by the devil. He also believed that Christ really had a body, and many other details are different in his interpretation.11
Nature of Christ
Italian Cathars believed that Mary was born of woman alone, not man, a curious shifting of the virgin birth that makes Mary herself the result of an immaculate conception! Christ had no living physical body and did not eat or drink. The thief who was on the left-hand side of Christ when he was crucified is in hell. There is no general resurrection of the flesh, and neither was there for Jesus as his body was not flesh.12
According to some Italian Cathars the Virgin Mary was a heavenly being with a heavenly body, soul and spirit. Christ went into her womb in his heavenly body, soul and spirit too, then was born from Mary, taking nothing from her. His heavenly body needed no food or drink. He suffered and died in this heavenly body but without sorrow. After the crucifixion his soul and spirit returned and he rose from the dead in his heavenly body. But some moderate dualists believed that Jesus’ body was constituted from Mary’s.13
It is not easy to form a consistent and logical composite picture from these various statements. Somehow Christ’s body was immaterial yet could be crucified. It may be that Bonacursus has misunderstood aspects of these beliefs. The main importance of the notion that Christ had no material body is that there is therefore no resurrection of the flesh.
Apocalypse
For the Cathars the ‘apocalypse’ meant the inevitable return of the fallen angels to heaven and the mending of the damage done. The use of the Apocalypse of John (the Book of Revelation) by Italian Cathars is particularly intriguing, a text that Christians have looked to since the early centuries of the Common Era as a prophecy of things to come. Today it is interpreted by evangelists and conspiracy theorists to refer to events current or in the near future. Who is the Antichrist, or the beast 666? Hitler, Aleister Crowley and Saddam Hussein have each been candidates, as well as, believe it or not, Barack Obama. Are the strange creatures and cataclysms described in the Apocalypse of John planes loaded with nuclear warheads, AIDS, or biological warfare? The possibilities of identifying the intense and violent symbolism of the book with modern disasters and human warfare are endless. On the other hand scholars look to the times in which the Apocalypse of John was written to try and determine whether ‘666’ referred to Nero or another Caesar. The Cathars uniquely treated the Apocalypse of John as a mythic description of what had already happened. The war in heaven was the war that had caused the fall of the angels into the material world that Lucifer had fashioned. The Apocalypse of John was thus simply another variation on the Cathar myth.
The battle between Michael and the dragon has already happened in quite a literal sense. When Satan was expelled from heaven by Michael he imprisoned in physical bodies the souls of the angels that fell with him. These souls are the third part of the stars described in Revelation 12:4, which are swept down to Earth by the tail of the dragon. Because these souls followed Satan they are now demons, thus each human has a demon within who has to do penance on this Earth. The penance begins once the consolamentum is given and each fallen soul receives its own spirit when a person is consoled. On the last day the soul and spirit will return to the heavenly court to claim the heavenly bodies that remain there.
The modern reader may wonder what the appeal of the Cathar view was. It is important to realize that, for the most part, Europeans of the time did not have a multiplicity of faiths or philosophies available to them. Peasants could retain some pagan elements in their lives, as the testimonies from Montaillou show, but these were in the context of folklore and folk magic. All other faith options were varieties of Christianity. Judaism didn’t accept converts, and Islam was very much Other. In the Catholic worldview the same God who was transcendent spirit had created this world. He sent his Son, Christ, to die for our sins and rise again and found His Church. The pope was His pontiff on Earth. This might have been all well and good if the Church lived up to its promise, but the visible face of the Church was one of corruption. There was little room for people in civilized life to create an alternative, and the great Catholic figures of the age such as St Francis and Dante (1265–1321) had to exercise great care in toeing the line and backing the Church lest they be condemned as heretics. Catharism was unique as the only notable alternative to Catholicism in western Europe in the High Middle Ages.
Among the peasants of Montaillou dualism could be boiled down into a simpler essence. Grazide Lizier was a young peasant girl in the village. She explained to Inquisitor Jacques Fournier, the future Pope Benedict XII (1334–1342), that the physical things that were useful to mankind, such as sheep and cattle, horses and fruits, were created by the good God, whereas the wolves, flies, lizards and other harmful creatures, were not made by him. Another peasant extended the list to include heaven, Earth and the four elements; the evil God made only devils and poisonous beasts.14 All Cathars believed that the devil produces bad weather.15
It might seem that although Catharism was appropriate as a rebellious response to an excessively powerful and substantially corrupt Church, it did not have what it takes to become a stable and longlasting religion. Yet Languedoc society worked perfectly well when Catharism was at its peak. It is true, however, that if everyone had suddenly become Perfects, there would have been no births and the Cathars would have died out. Yet not everyone was destined to become, or was worthy of being, a Perfect. The postponed, or secondary, salvation granted to Believers integrated them not only spiritually and mythically but also socially with the Perfects. Manichaeism had a similar system, with even more rigorous restrictions placed on the behaviour of what were known as the Elect, yet that faith endured for centuries and spread to many different countries.
Chapter 5
The Soul, the Spirit
and Mary Magdalene:
Other Cathar Beliefs
The Cathar myth had a great many repercussions in terms of how the Cathars thought about the classic mysteries of existence. Do humans have souls and are they immortal? What happens after death? Where were our souls before birth? How should people live? How should the Bible be understood and what is the truth about Jesus? This chapter covers Cathar beliefs about the soul, the way they interpreted the Bible and what they believed about Mary Magdalene, which is one of the most intriguing yet misunderstood features of Cathar tradition.
The soul
Throughout the world, at all times and in all cultures, there is some concept of a soul. In some traditions the soul is closely allied to the body, in others it is something transcendent. In many cultures it is believed that human beings may have more than one soul, reflecting the different aspects of the human being, which may include the rational intellect, the animal, the life force, the spark of divinity, the ego, the dreaming self, and so on. One of the most adaptable versions is the Gnostic belief (or one variety of it) in which human beings consist of body, soul and spirit. The body is of course material and the spirit is a spark of the heavenly immaterial world, but the soul is an intermediary that is bound to the body in its natural state but able to ascend and enter into a marriage with the spirit.
Although the Cathars did not completely hold this view, they too saw humans as consisting of body, soul and spirit. They also distinguished between types of spirit. The difference between soul and spirit in Catharism is difficult to grasp, and the terms were fluid. The Cathars themselves must have found it so for there are variations in their understanding, especially among the Italian Cathars.
Soul is the vaguer term, because despite there being different types of spirits they seem fairly clearly defined. Soul is used particularly with reincarnation. The spirit seems definitely to have come from heaven, the spiritual realm, but the type of spirit depended on its role and origin. The Holy Spirit comprised all of the unfallen guardian spirits or angels that remained in heaven and steadfastly refused to fall with Satan – which is why that spirit is considered holy. The Spirit Paraclete was the consoling spirit referred to in the Gospel of John; it would unite with and protect the fallen soul once the consolamentum had been given. There are many Spirit Paracletes, presumably as many as there are souls, but the Perfect Spirit of Catharism is a unique entity and is roughly equivalent to the Holy Spirit as mentioned in the Trinity. Even the angels desire to look on the beauty of the Perfect Spirit.1 Thus a spirit is an entity of the spiritual world, more or less synonymous with an angel.
The future resurrection is to be understood in terms of spiritual bodies and a kind of inner man, according to the Inquisitor Bernard Gui in his Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (‘The Conduct of the Inquisition of Heretical Depravity’). The Cathars did not believe in a bodily resurrection. The inner man is reminiscent of concepts in the letters of the apostle Paul.
Some absolute dualists believed that in heaven people consisted of body, soul and spirit, but this was a body that was somehow different to the material body, presumably in the same way that Christ’s body was not a physical body. These absolute dualist Italian Cathars, of whom Tetricus is cited as a proponent, also believed that the soul was in the body in our world but that the spirit was not. Each soul was created by the good God but had its own spirit who was its guardian and custodian.2 It was only after the resurrection of Christ that the Holy Spirit was granted to people on Earth.3
If only more of this fascinating system was preserved. Although we may attempt to reconstruct Cathar anthropology from the remaining fragments, and interpret the Cathars’ usage of soul and spirit according to our own experiences and other systems, we cannot be certain what was intended without the experience of actual Cathar initiation and the Cathar lifestyle.
Thus we have a situation rather like that of the Valentinian Gnostics: the aim is to achieve the union of soul and spirit so that the part that fell with the devil may be returned to heaven and the loss of the Fall may be restored. It was the angels who fell, therefore human beings may be considered to have an angel within them waiting to be united with the missing spiritual part. A Cathar teacher named Lanfranc de Vaure taught that not all the souls that fell ended up in bodies. Some souls fallen from heaven are ‘cleansed in the fiery ether’: their punishment will be more intense but they will be saved sooner than those who are embodied. This is referred to in the Gospel of John 10:16: ‘And other sheep have I that are not of this fold.’4
William Bélibaste, the last Cathar Perfect, explained:
‘When a man steals away someone else’s possessions or commits evil, that man is none other than an evil spirit which enters into him: this spirit makes him commit sins and makes him abandon the good life for the wicked. Everything is full of souls. All the air is full of good and evil spirits. Except when a spirit has been dwelling in the body of a dead person who when he was alive was just and good, the spirit which has just escaped from a dead body is always anxious to be reincarnated. For the evil spirits in the air burn that spirit when it is among them; so they force it to enter into some body of flesh, whether of man or of beast; because as long as a human spirit is at rest in a body of flesh, the evil spirits in the air cannot burn it or torment it.’5
