Since their demise, many legends have circulated about the Cathars, usually centring around the so-called Cathar Treasure, which was said to have disappeared during the siege of Montsegur, and their relationship with the Troubadours and the Knights Templar. While much of this seems to be the result of the romanticisation of the faith by writers such as Napoleon Peyrat (1809—81) and Deodat Roche (1877—1978), such legends have actually been circulating since at least the 1320s,109 and deserve to be outlined below as they have played a crucial role in shaping the mystique surrounding the Cathars, which in turn has gone a long way in helping to retain the interest and imagination of the public, speculative historians, mystics and the not-so-reliable for generations.
The Cathars and the Holy Grail
Perhaps the most enduring myth about the Cathars is that they possessed the Holy Grail. Although, as will be noted below, nineteenth - and twentieth-century writers managed to get a great deal of mileage out of the Grail and are commonly assumed to have invented the Cathar/Grail
Myth, it in fact originated in the thirteenth century, while Catharism was still very much alive.
The Grail myths as we know them today originated in the city of Troyes, courtesy of the quill of Chretien de Troyes; his Conte del Graal, written around 1180, is the first Grail narrative.110 It concerns the attempts of King Arthur’s knights to attain the Grail, but, due to Chretien’s death, it breaks off before the Grail is attained. The story was picked up by Robert de Boron and then by the writer about whom most Grail myths circulate, Wolfram von Eschenbach. Wolfram’s greatest work is Parzival, which is most frequently read as an allegory of spiritual development, and betrays the influence of the east (Wolfram was thought to have gone on Crusade) and also of alchemy. However, he continued to write about the Grail in Titurel, and identifies the Grail castle as being in the Pyrenees. Moreover, he describes the lord of the grail castle as being called ‘Perilla’.When one recalls that not only was Montsegur in the Pyrenees, but its lord, Raymond Pereille, often signed his name in Latin, Perilla, do the alarm bells of speculation start ringing. Such a strange coincidence does not, of course, mean that Wolfram knew something that later writers did not, but his account complicates any attempt to repudiate the Grail/Cathar myth entirely. It at least suggests that the Grail myth has been a part of the Cathar story since the time of the Good Christians, and is not just the invention of later writers.
Wolfram’s grail, in Parzival, was said to be a stone, which recalls the Philosopher’s Stone in alchemy.
However, there have been alternative interpretations of the grail, from the chalice of tradition to, more controversially, the womb of Mary Magdalene, which was seen as the cup that caught Christ’s blood not on Calvary but after the wedding at Cana. One hypothesis holds that the Cathar treasure, which was smuggled out of Montsegur shortly before the surrender, was in fact the Grail, which was then either hidden in a nearby cave, or entrusted to the Knights Templar. (Montsegur’s sergeant, Imbert of Salles, however, told the Inquisition that the Cathar treasure was merely money and precious stones.'") The Magdalene hypothesis suggests that the Holy Grail, which is san graal in French, is, in fact, a misspelling of sang real, the holy blood, meaning the bloodline of Jesus and the Magdalene. This theory has most famously been explored in Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln’s classic The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. More recently, it has been the subject of Dan Brown’s global bestseller The Da Vinci Code. However, the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene does not originate with Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln: one of the Cathars’ inner teachings, which was only passed on to the Perfect, was that the Magdalene was Jesus’s wife.''2 This is puzzling, to say the least, as the Cathars despised marriage. Furthermore, it was not a belief inherited from the Bogomils. It is possible, in believing that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, that the Cathars were reflecting a popular Languedocian tradition, but we cannot be certain.
The Troubadours and the Knights Templar
The two groups with whom the Cathars are most often associated are the Troubadours and the Knights Templar, both of whom had a very strong presence in the Languedoc during the thirteenth century. The Troubadours were itinerant poets writing in Occitan who flourished between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. In Germany, they had fellow travellers in the shape of the Minnesingers, of whom Wolfram von Eschenbach was one. The Troubadours’ main themes were chivalry and courtly love, in which the virtues of a particular lady would be extolled by the poet. Sometimes these were literal love songs, often addressed to a woman who was unattainable, while other Troubadour poems and songs were in fact allegories of spiritual development, and betray an awareness of the Divine Feminine. Among the most celebrated Troubadours were Peter Vidal, William Figueira and Jaufre Rudel. In the Languedoc, they enjoyed the protection of the same families who protected the Cathars. At least one Troubadour, William de Durfort, was known to be a Cathar; no doubt there were others. The concept of the Divine Feminine suggests another link between the two movements: the Perfect, upon being consoled, were given the title of Theotokos, which means God-Bearer, an assignation usually associated with the Virgin Mary.
The Knights Templar were the most powerful military religious order of their day, and were major landowners in the Languedoc. While theories suggesting that the Cathar treasure — whatever its nature — was entrusted to the
Templars remain fanciful, there are a number of more definite links between the heretics and the soldier-monks. One of the Templars’ great Grand Masters, Bertrand de Blancfort, came from a Cathar family, and during the Albigensian Crusade, they welcomed fugitive Cathars into the order. In some Templar preceptories in the Languedoc, Cathars outnumbered Catholics. Furthermore, the Templars refused to participate in the Albigensian Crusade. There could have been a number of reasons for this. They had a great deal of support in the Languedoc, so any military intervention there would have been politically disastrous for the Order, and, towards the end of the de Montfort years, they were actively involved in the Fifth Crusade (1217—21), in which they played a decisive role. However, one cannot help but wonder if certain elements within the Temple remained sympathetic to the Cathars, a sympathy rendered all the more plausible by the fact that the Templars were themselves viciously suppressed between 1307 and 1312, on charges of heresy, blasphemy and sodomy — charges that had been formerly levelled against the Good Christians.113
Modern Cathars
The romanticisation of the Cathars began with the Languedocian writer Napoleon Peyrat. Despite being a priest himself, he was also a member of an anticlerical group known as the Priest Eaters, and launched numerous attacks on what he saw as the reactionary nature of the Catholic Church. To bolster his arguments, he invoked the
Name of the Cathars, whom he regarded as southern martyrs. His mammoth History of the Albigensians, published in the 1870s, took frequent liberties with the known facts in the name of mythologising the Cathars and denigrating the Church. Montsegur became a kind of Camelot, full of wonders that were still awaiting discovery, and Peyrat was convinced that the Cathar Treasure was a cache of sacred texts that was hidden in a cave at nearby Lombrives. Not only that, but a community of Cathars took shelter in the caves, and lived there until they were discovered by northern troops, who walled them up alive in the cave. In their anti-papal stance, the Cathars were forerunners of not just Protestantism but also foreshadowed the French Republic.
Peyrat’s mythologised, semi-fictional Cathars had a big impact on the likes of the Felibrige, a group of scholars who were keen to preserve works written in Occitan. Underneath this goal lay a separatist movement, who wanted to restore Languedocian independence and identity. Peyrat was regarded as something of a guru, and the group began to produce its own Cathar theories, which tended to view the Cathars as occult initiates who had inherited age-old wisdom from the east. The Cathar Treasure thus became a repository of ancient wisdom.
Deodat Roche, another southern self-styled Cathar expert, published a number of pro-Cathar works, including L’Eglise romane et les Cathares albigeois (1937) and Le Catharisme (1938). In 1948, he began publishing a magazine, Cahiers d’Etudes Cathares, and two years later, founded a group, the Societe du Souvenir et des Etudes Cathares. During the 1930s, he headed a loose-knit group that included the philosopher Simone Weil (1909—43) and the novelist Maurice Magre (1877—1941), both of whom wrote pro-Cathar polemics. Magre famously referred to the Perfect as ‘the Buddhists of the West’. A third figure who came into Roche’s orbit was the young German writer Otto Rahn (1904—39). In his first book, The Crusade Against the Grail (1933), Rahn interprets Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival as a thinly disguised account of the Albigensian Crusade. In this version of events, the Cathar Treasure is nothing less than the Holy Grail itself. In his next book, The Court of Lucifer (1937), Rahn compared the struggles of the Cathars against the Crusaders with the struggles of Hitler to establish the Thousand Year Reich, seeing the Cathars as good Aryans who opposed not just Rome but also Judaism. It comes as no surprise to learn that, by this time, Rahn was working for Himmler. Subsequently, myths have grown up around Rahn, who was seen as a Nazi Indiana Jones who actually found the Grail and took it back to Germany, where it was hidden in the Bavarian Alps shortly before the end of the war.
The psychiatrist Arthur Guirdham (1905—92) is probably the most prominent English neo-Cathar. In the 1960s, a certain Mrs Smith, one of his patients, began telling him about her previous life as a Cathar in thirteenth-century Languedoc. Initially sceptical, Guirdham began to investigate her claims, and wrote to Jean Duvernoy, one of Catharism’s leading historians. Much to Guirdham’s surprise, Duvernoy corroborated the details of Mrs Smith’s story. The resultant book, The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970), details Guirdham’s further discoveries, including the possibility that he himself was a reincarnated Cathar. The story was continued in We Are One Another (1974) and The Lake and the Castle (1976). Guirdham’s The Great Heresy (1977) is a brief history of the movement, and included in its later chapters revelations dictated to him by disembodied Cathars, covering such topics as the healing power of crystals, the aura, the emanatory powers of touch and the true nature of alchemy. The Perfect, according to Guirdham, were well-versed in such things during their earthly existence.
The Persecuting Society
The Cathars emerged at a time of profound change in Europe. The historian R. I. Moore has argued that western society formed its institutions through the persecution of heretics and others in the thirteenth century.114 Furthermore, definitions of heresy played a large part in shaping the concept of witchcraft, which greatly aided the persecution and execution of thousands of innocent people — predominantly women — during the Witch Craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is perhaps the Cathars’ quest for an authentic spirituality that makes their story still relevant. Their belief that they — and not the Church — were the real Christians calls to mind Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, in which Christ returns to earth, specifically Seville, during the height of the Spanish Inquisition. He is immediately arrested as a heretic, and questioned by the aged Grand Inquisitor. The old man prefers the safety and power that the Church offers him to Christ’s simple message. He tells Christ, ‘If anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. To-morrow I shall burn Thee.’ He waits for Christ to respond:
‘ “He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: ‘Go, and come no more... come not at all, never, never!’ And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away.” ’115
The Cathars’ claim to be part of an authentic apostolic tradition dating back to the time of Christ cannot be proved, it can only be inferred. The Catholic Church’s claim to descend from Peter is also historically unverifiable. Something that perhaps finds in the Cathars’ favour is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, only made public for the first time in 1991. The end of the Damascus Document — The Foundations of Righteousness: An Excommunication Text — appears to show the excommunication of Paul from the Christian community.116 If this were indeed the case, then it would automatically invalidate the Catholic Church’s claim to be God’s vicars on earth, as most of the major forms of organised Christianity are based on the teachings of Paul, not Christ. The Church obviously feels that publication of the text has not damaged its position, and in March 2000, Pope John Paul II issued an apology for the Crusades. Many felt that the statement did not go far enough in offering rapprochement to the Arab world. Needless to say, no mention was made of the Albigensian Crusade. It remains unlikely that the papacy will ever apologise.
It may be that the real Cathar treasure is to be found in their stress on simplicity, equality, non-violence, work and love. By not building churches, they necessarily brought divinity into the domestic sphere, suggesting that, for the Cathars, every moment of every day could be used to deepen one’s spiritual life. Maurice Magre’s belief that they were the Buddhists of Europe is not too far wide of the mark. Given that the Church — both the Catholic Church and the religious right in America — seems to be as conservative and exclusive as it ever was, the Cathars’ message is perhaps as relevant now as it was in the Languedoc of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The great American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick summed up the need for — and difficulties of practising — the Cathars’ kind of spirituality in his novel VALIS. The hero, tormented by the trivialities of the modern world, becomes a convert to Gnosticism (as was Dick himself). He is mocked by his friends for his attempts to live as a first-century Christian, but points out that the persecuting society — the Roman Empire in the novel — ‘never ended’. He feels that life as a Gnostic is the only solution, and near the end of the novel, concludes: ‘Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought. There is no other road to salvation _ Thus it is said that we are saved by the grace of God and not by good works, that all salvation belongs to Christ, who, I say, is a physician _ The physician has come to us a number of times under a number of names. But we are not yet healed.’117
World History
