The origins of Cathar dualism lay In the East where It can be traced back to the Christian Gnostics who flourished In the second and third centuries AD all round the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, In Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and perhaps also In Asia Minor and Greece. Gnosis Is Greek for knowledge, and the Gnostics believed that salvation lay In their understanding of the true nature of creation. They believed that there were two worlds, the material world of evil and decay that had been made by an evil demiurge, the enemy of man, and the world of light where the primal God resides.
One of the most prominent Gnostics was Valentinus, who flourished around AD 140 In Alexandria and Rome. He claimed to possess the true knowledge of how the world had been created and how evil had come Into being, a story that he Introduced to his followers In terms of a cosmic myth. He conceived of a primal God, the centre of a divine harmony, who sends out manifestations of himself In pairs of male and female. Each pair was Inferior to Its predecessor, and Sophia, the female of the thirtieth pair, was the least perfect of all. She showed her Imperfection not, like the angel Lucifer, by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him, so that she fell through love, and the universe is formed out of her agony and remorse. As she fell she bore a son, the Demiurge, who rules this world of sadness and confusion, yet is incapable of realising anything beyond it.
Mankind inhabits a catastrophe not of God’s making, but the Gnostics said they knew the secret of salvation. At the moment of the cosmic blunder, sparks of the divine light, like slivers of shattered glass, became embedded in a portion of humankind. These people were the elect, and the Gnostic aim was to lead them back to God. Cosmic redemption, however, and not just personal salvation was necessary because the whole of creation had been a mistake; it had nothing to do with God, who had never intended that there should be a universe, indeed never intended man. Creation was a defective work, and so man lived in a meaningless world or in the iron control of evil powers; in any case he was caught in the trap of the material world which was sundered from the spirit of God.
Valentinus taught his followers that they could free themselves by attempting to quell their desires and by practising sexual abstinence. For in the polarity of the male and the female was mirrored the division, the duality, of the universe, so that the Last Judgement and the world's redemption would come-as Jesus says in the Gnostic Gospel of the Egyptians-'when the two become one, and the male with the female, there being neither male nor female'. Other Gnostics than Valentinus also had their stories, and some, instead of practising abstinence, promoted sexual licence, though the purpose was the same: to join the male and the female in order to achieve the desired oneness of the world. The crucifixion and resurrection has no place in these Gnostic stories; instead the role of Jesus was to descend from the primal God and impart to his disciples the secret tradition of the gnosis.
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