Lost Teachings of the Cathars, page 8
This may be seen as a denial of free will, but surely human beings have a choice whether to accept the evil spirit or not. These are sophisticated Gnostic ideas and quite far from folk belief, despite the mode of expression.
Among Cathar Believers the soul could be understood in very material terms, as the following story indicates. Two Believers rested by a river and one of them fell asleep. The one who remained awake saw a lizard come out of the other’s mouth and flit across the river via a plank to run in and out of an ass’s skull. It did this a couple of times but the Believer took away the plank, leaving the lizard stranded on the opposite bank of the river, and the sleeping Believer’s body thrashed around trying to wake up, but was unable to due to the lizard’s absence. Once the lizard was able to return the other Believer woke up and described a dream in which he had been in a great palace on the other side of the river but could not get back without the plank. The two Believers consulted a Perfect and they were told that though the soul always stays in the body of a living person the spirit or mind leaves the body at times, such as during sleep.6
Raymond de l’Aire, a peasant from Tignac, who seems not to have been a Cathar but an eccentric, believed that the soul was simply the blood, and when the blood left the body the soul died. He didn’t believe in a resurrection and denied that there was anything beyond this life. Heaven was when you were happy and hell was when you were sad, and God and the Virgin Mary referred to nothing other than this visible material world. Christ himself, he delighted in telling the Inquisitors, was produced by nothing other than ‘through fucking and shitting, rocking back and forth and fucking, in other words through the coitus of a man and a woman, just like all the rest of us’.7
For the Cathars the question of the soul was intimately connected with reincarnation. It is difficult to summarize such disparate material but the following picture might emerge: When Satan rebelled against the good God angels followed him to the Earth; these fallen angels were then imprisoned within material bodies. The fallen angel within each of us may be the soul, or a type of spirit. Since the angel is fallen, some Cathars thought of it as a demon. When someone experiences the consolamentum a spirit from the heavenly realm makes a connection so that the fallen spirit can re-ascend to heaven and the original state of heaven be restored. For the Cathars the question of the soul was intimately connected with reincarnation. We shall obtain a better understanding of Cathar reincarnation when we discuss that in a separate chapter.
Bible interpretation and parables
The Cathars read the Bible in the vernacular (Occitan), and in general rejected the Old Testament – or were at best ambivalent about it – because they generally considered it to be the work of Satan, particularly the first five books. Yet some Cathars did accept the 16 prophets – who it was acknowledged spoke because they were filled with the Holy Spirit8 – and others Psalms, ‘the five books of Solomon’, as Moneta of Cremona referred to them, and perhaps Job and Esdras.9
Because the material world was the creation of the devil, Cathars didn’t believe in physical miracles. In particular they rejected Catholic miracles associated with statues. Bélibaste said that he would perform miracles when he was in the other world, but not in this one.10 According to Cathars, miracles in the Bible therefore have a spiritual meaning, not an actual reality.
Likewise, much else in the gospels was not read literally. One prime example is the parable of the unjust steward, or dishonest Servant, in Matthew 18:23–35. The servant who owes 10,000 talents is interpreted as Satan. He and his wife and children are to be sold. His wife is named as Wisdom in this interpretation and the children are the other angels subject to him. This is a fascinating and isolated reference to wisdom personified as a feminine divine figure, also known as Sophia. Sophia was a key figure in the Gnostic myth. She was the last of the aeons that emanated from the true God and fell from the pleroma (the spiritual realm), giving birth to the demiurge Ialdabaoth, who went on to fashion the material world and create mankind.
What is especially intriguing about this Cathar interpretation is that it means that Wisdom fell from the heavenly realm at the same time as Satan and the angels. This would imply that Wisdom too is trapped in the material world and needs to return to the spiritual realm, as are the angels, and as is the case in the Gnostic myth. Where could a very specific idea like this have come from if not from the ancient Gnostics? The Church Fathers of the second and third centuries preserved many references to the fall of Sophia in their refutations of the Gnostics, but they were not known to the Catholic intellectuals who wrote their own polemics against the Cathars.11 Could the Cathars have inherited this idea – of Wisdom falling into the material world – directly from the ancient Gnostics, via surviving writings or an oral tradition? Or did both medieval Cathars and ancient Gnostics come to this conclusion independently? The Gnostic figure of Sophia/Wisdom may be traced back to the biblical genre of writings known as wisdom literature, in which Wisdom is first found as a female figure. Proverbs 8: 22–30 mentions that Wisdom was with God before the beginning of the Earth. Proverbs 7 contrasts Wisdom with the figure of a seductive foreign harlot; the latter woman may have suggested, to both the Cathars and Gnostics, a fallen Wisdom.12
In an interpretation of the parable of the good Samaritan, the man who went down to Jericho is Adam’s spirit. He is stripped of light by malign spirits, including the sun, moon and stars. The Samaritan who finds him is actually Christ. According to Moneta of Cremona, there existed specific allegorical interpretations of each stage of the story.
John of Lugio taught that the evil principle is referred to in the Bible by a wide range of names: as sinful qualities such as malice, avarice, vanity and fornication, and as broader categories like sin, hell, corruption and death.13 Each of these signifies an actual evil god or goddess; likewise, heathen idols represent evil gods. The hypostasizing of these as entities is again reminiscent of ancient Gnosticism, wherein archons may have names that denote undesirable qualities, and aeons can have names that denote admirable spiritual qualities or categories.
The pelican was much admired in medieval times, symbolizing Christ for both Catholics and Cathars. The bird was believed by Christians to use its own blood to feed its young, an act of self-sacrifice that provided an obvious symbol of the crucified saviour. The Cathar version of the story states:
‘There is a bird called the pelican: its feathers shine like the sun. And its vocation is to follow the sun. The pelican had some young. It left them in the nest, so as to be able to follow the sun more freely. During its absence, a wild beast got into the nest and tore off the nestlings’ claws, wings and beaks. After this had happened several times, the pelican decided to hide its radiance and to hide among its young so as to surprise and kill the beast when it came into its nest. And this the pelican did. And the little pelicans were delivered. In the same way Christ hid his radiance when he was incarnated within the Virgin Mary: thus he was able to take the bad God prisoner and shut him up in the darkness of Hell. And thus the bad God ceased to destroy the creatures of the good God.’14
Most of our records come from the Inquisition period when Catharism was already seriously in decline. There must have been many other creative interpretations of scripture at the height of Cathar activity. It is difficult to pretend that the Cathar reading of the Bible represents what was intended by its original authors, but isn’t that the case for most Bible interpretation?
Mary Magdalene
Many people in the English-speaking world will have first come across the Cathars in the bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau, the hilltop village deep in the heart of Cathar country, and the Prieuré de Sion is mostly beyond the scope of this book. Key to the overall theory set out in the book – that the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene survived through the assistance of a secret society that included luminaries such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton – are the presence of Mary Magdalene in the south of France and the alleged belief of the Cathars that Jesus and Mary were married, or that Mary was the concubine of Jesus.15
Our main historical source for the southern French legend of Mary coming to France is that medieval bestseller, The Golden Legend. Lest we should wish to swallow credulously the more attractive parts of The Golden Legend, we should remember that not only does it contain some very silly miracles, it also celebrates Peter of Verona, enthusiastic Inquisitor and Cathar traitor, who gave ‘neither rest nor quarter’ to the Italian Cathars.16
Jacobus de Voragine, who wrote The Golden Legend between 1259 and 1266, would himself eventually become a saint when he was beatified in 1816. Lynn Pickett makes a good point that The Golden Legend was written by a Dominican once the Inquisition had come to prominence and represents, if not an appropriation, then an approved Catholic version of the Mary Magdalene legends of the south of France.17 The Golden Legend account of Mary Magdalene’s life strings together as a unified narrative not only all the actual references to her in the New Testament but also stories such as that of the unnamed woman who was a sinner and washed Jesus’ feet and anointed him (Luke 7:36–50). Fourteen years after the resurrection Mary, along with her brother Lazarus (who clearly enjoyed a long life after being raised from the dead), their sister Martha, Martha’s maid Martilla, Maximinus (one of the 72 disciples) and Cedonius, the name given to the man who was blind from birth but was cured by Jesus, were put on board ship by ‘unbelievers’ without a pilot so that they would shipwreck and drown. Instead, thanks to the will of God, they reached Marseilles. There they sheltered in the portico of a shrine and when the pagan locals arrived to sacrifice to the idols she converted them to Christianity, the crowd particularly admiring her beauty and eloquence. There follows a tale in which the prince of the region (Provence) and his pregnant wife sail off to Rome to meet Peter to ask him whether the Magdalene was preaching the truth. The necessity for the prince to talk to Peter rather than accept the preaching of Mary hints at the Roman Catholic elevation of Peter above all other disciples of Jesus, and also of the misogyny that Peter is sometimes attributed with in Gnostic writings.
The prince’s wife and their newborn child both die in childbirth, but when they come back from the dead the prince forcibly converts the whole of his realm to Christianity. Mary goes into the wilderness for 30 years to live as a hermit, attended by angels and not requiring any earthly food. After this time she died, again surrounded by angels and emitting a sweet scent.18
Clearly most, if not all, of this is pious legend and provides a shaky basis on which to pin the hopes of the Prieuré de Sion. If there is any kernel of truth to the idea that Mary Magdalene went to the south of France – and the location itself is not entirely unfeasible as it was an attractive part of the Roman Empire in the 1st century and no backwater – it is buried beneath layers of folk legend and hagiography.
Yet The Golden Legend is not the only source that locates Mary Magdalene in the south of France. There are many cult centres in the area which display relics of the Magdalene or lay claim to her tomb.19 Thus we can be certain that Mary Magdalene was very much alive in the memory of Provence and Languedoc from a relatively early time. Ean Begg suggests that since the 5th century her tomb has been venerated at St Maximin, whose name is connected with the story of Mary Magdalene.20
Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay, the Cistercian monk who chronicled (and approved of) the Albigensian Crusade, preserved an account of the Cathar view of Mary Magdalene. He recounted that the Cathars believed Christ was born in the ‘terrestrial and visible Bethlehem’ and crucified in Jerusalem, but that this was an evil Christ who had Mary Magdalene as his concubine. This Mary Magdalene was also the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of John. According to this view there was another good Christ who was born and crucified in another ‘new and invisible land’.21
The good Christ was only in this world in spiritual form in the body of Paul. This was the ‘Christ within’. Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay probably misunderstands the intention here, which is intrinsic to the spirit–matter dualism of the Cathars: the heavenly Christ is to be found within. Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay refers to Mary again later when he comments how appropriate it was that Béziers was taken by the crusaders on the feast day of St Mary Magdalene and it was in the church of Mary Magdalene that the townsfolk had killed their lord, and then sheltered during the siege. Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay claims that 7,000 people sought sanctuary there and it was merely poetic justice that they should be butchered in her church on her feast day since they had claimed that she was the concubine of Jesus. There is an odd echo of the 2nd-century Valentinian Gnostic Gospel of Philip here, in which Mary is also arguably described as the concubine of Jesus. It is another of those odd resemblances that, though inconclusive, suggests that the Cathars had some sort of continuity with the ancient Gnostics or other ancient traditions.
The anti-heretical tract ‘An Exposure of the Waldensian and Albigensian Heresies,’22 which was only taught in secret meetings, also stated that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus. She was identified both with the Samaritan woman at the well and with the adulteress of whom Jesus told her accusers to cast the first stone. According to the tract’s author, she was the first to see the risen Jesus, and she saw him in three places (in the temple, at the well and in the garden), which suggests some unusual allegorical or metaphorical progression.
There is a third account, which also mentions these three events, 23 this time in the order of temple, garden and then well. As far as the anonymous author (who is a Catholic) is concerned, Mary was alone with Jesus in these three places, which shows that she must have been his wife.
In all three accounts the claims about Mary Magdalene are included with a story about the two wives of God. This suggests perhaps that the three authors, who were all Catholics, are using the same source, or maybe that the anti-heretical tract is the source for the other two. But the untitled third account has some fascinating variations and is the most radical of the stories. In addition to the information about Mary Magdalene it tells us that the Christ who was in this world was a pseudo-Christ with pseudoapostles. The true Christ was born of Joseph and Mary in a celestial Jerusalem, was betrayed by his brothers and suffered there.
The wives of God
The following variation on the origin of the Fall is quite fascinating. The good God had two wives, Collam and Hoolibam, on whom he begot sons and daughters. But the good God ‘had to do with’ (presumably had sex with) the wife of the malign God, who in revenge sent his son to the court of the good God. This son stole silver, gold, animal and humans souls and had them dispersed throughout his seven realms. Christ was sent on a mission into these seven realms of the malign God and therefore suffered seven times.
These two wives are intended to be Oholah and Oholibah, two sisters described in Ezekiel chapter 23, but the names have been corrupted in the manuscript versions of the Cathar account. In Ezekiel, Oholah represents Samaria and Oholibah Jerusalem. The sisters are described as two brides of God who have whored themselves. Clearly this is allegory, describing how the inhabitants of Samaria and Jerusalem are considered to have prostituted themselves with foreign gods. The passage in Ezekiel is a viciously misogynist attack, full of salacious detail: ‘She played the whore with all of them ft men had slept with her from her girlhood, fondling her virgin breasts ft she had been in love with their profligates, big-membered as donkeys, ejaculating as violently as stallions.’24This leaves no doubt that the two brides of God are not meant to be sympathetic aspects of the divine feminine. (One wonders how engorged Ezekiel’s own member was when he wrote this passage.)
The particular Cathars to whom the above story is attributed believed that if they died in good standing they would regain their wives, sons and property in the kingdom of God. Assuming the account is not completely garbled, it is interesting to see a version of Catharism in which marriage and family was respected to the extent that it would be resumed in heaven.
According to other Cathars, from Desenzano in Italy, it is Lucifer who seduces the wife of the good God and thus Christ is conceived. This is described as ‘the great secret’.25 The above accounts reveal that this good God of spirit, who does not inhabit the material world at all, has had sex with three different women: his own two brides and the wife of the evil God. This must be a kind of sex that has no physical aspect; if this is so it is possible that Jesus and Mary could have been lovers in the heavenly world without any physical relationship taking place in the evil material world. Yet when Christ was in this world he was said by the Cathars to have had no genuine physical body, so any relationship the Magdalene had with him would have been, by definition, non-physical. If Mary Magdalene was the wife of a good Christ, she must have been a sister-wife. The traditions may have been mangled in transition but perhaps a gleam of light shines through: in both the Italian and the Languedocian versions these revelations of divine feminine figures are secret. The doctrine about Mary Magdalene was taught only in ‘secret meetings’.26
Yuri Stoyanov sees parallels in Gnostic and Manichaean myth. Sethian Gnostics had the female figure of Barbelo, the Mother, who was the first entity to arise from the Invisible Father, and therefore the second element of their holy trinity. Manichaeans had a Mother of All, who emanated from the Father of Greatness as a response to an attack from the Prince of Darkness. Stoyanov also sees some structural similarities in the dualist kabbalistic writing of Rabbi Isaak ben Jacob-ha-Kohen, On the Left Emanation, in which there are good and evil male–female pairs such as Samael-Grand Matron Lilith and A-Lilith.27
In general it seems that the Cathars inherited their opinion of Mary Magdalene not from the Bogomils, to whom we can trace a number of Cathar traits, but from southern French traditions. The Perfect were celibate and marriage was considered a Catholic irrelevance. The subsequent difficulties involved in incorporating a wife or concubine of Jesus into the Cathar myth suggest that this was a concept that didn’t originate with the Cathars but was shoehorned in.
