Abstract

With more than a little encouragement from the Church, the populace came to regard the Cathars not as Devil-shunners but as Devil-worshippers…

P Stanford, The Devil

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002

Prehistory of the Inquisition

While the Roman empire was not Christian, Christian teachers advocated complete religious liberty for themselves within it. The civil law of Pagan Rome had nothing to do with the punishment of opinions, as long as they were not subversive. Christians were seen as illegal and subversive, so the Christian Church sought freedom of conscience, insisting that religion ought to be promoted only by instruction and persuasion (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Lactantius). But as soon as Christianity became the authorized religion of the state, the Roman republican idea that the state should punish religiones novas et illicitas was vigorously revived. Soon after Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman empire the persecution of people for religious opinions began.

When Paganism became an offence against the state, those who remained attached to it were persecuted, and embraced Christianity to protect themselves. The conversion of the Pagans to Christianity was less than a half-conversion. The clergy were satisfied by people professing Christianity without conviction. If they then formed sects to practise Paganism in secret covens, the church classed them among the Christian heresies. Zealous ecclesiastical writers and the canons of the Church councils betray practices among Christians that they thoroughly dispproved of as being un-Christian. Thomas Wright, The Worship Of The Generative Powers: During The Middle Ages Of Western Europe (1865), seems to mean heresy was gnostic when he says:

It was a mixture of the licence of the vulgar Paganism of antiquity with the wild doctrines of the later eastern philosophers.

The Church hardly interfered with popular Pagan festivals or secret societies. They were not heresies, and the Church let them alone, except periodically to issue warnings and penances against certain superstitious practices. Heresy was different, especially after the eleventh century. Alarm was great. Gnosticism and Manichæism, dualist heresies, were the most persecuted.

In the case of heretics like Alexander and Hymeneus in the Pauline corpus, exclusion from the communion of the Church (excommunication—“exclusion from God and so delivery to Satan”) was sufficient punishment. Exclusion from the Church was thought to have been far worse for the original Christians, the Essenes, than just death. It meant everlasting death. S Cyprian of Carthage agreed, saying religion “being now spiritual, its sanctions take on the same character, and excommunication replaces the death of the body”. Tertullian also thought the acceptance of religion was a matter of free will, not of compulsion.

It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions. One man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion—to which free-will and not force should lead us—the sacrificial victims even being required of a willing mind.

Tertullian, Ad Scapulam 2

The notion was that the sacrificial lamb went willingly. In 308, Lactantius wrote:

Religion being a matter of the will, it cannot be forced on anyone. In this matter it is better to employ words than blows. Of what use is cruelty? What has the rack to do with piety? Surely there is no connexion between truth and violence, between justice and cruelty… It is true that nothing is so important as religion, and one must defend it at any cost… It is true that it must be protected, but by dying for it, not by killing others, by long-suffering, not by violence, by faith, not by crime. If you attempt to defend religion with bloodshed and torture, what you do is not defense, but desecration and insult. For nothing is so intrinsically a matter of free will as religion.

Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5

About the same time, S John Chrysostom (Homilies 46:1) was saying, “to put an heretic to death is to introduce upon earth a crime beyond atonement”. There is no disputing, then, that leading Christians knew full well the teachings of their religion, and it was not that dissenters should be murdered by a special judiciary.

When Constantine ensured the Christian triumph, bishops happily agreed with Lactantius, the first concern of imperial authority was to defend religion at any cost—but they forgot to read on. So they issued regular penal edicts against heretics. In 57 years, 68 acts were passed. By this legislation, all heretics were subject to exile, confiscation of property, or death. Before Constantine, the Church could excommunicate—exclude anyone from its salvific practices—notionally condemning the soul to eternal death—the second death—but later, worse still, condemning it to eternal torture in boiling sulphur. That ought to have been the ultimate sanction, and so it was when applied to the superstitious medieval rulers, or to the ruler and his subjects en masse, as the interdict. But after Constantine, the Church had actual power of life and death, and notwithstanding its notionally far worse sanction of eternal death or torture, it found an excellent reason to kill people instead. It was to save their soul!

Here is Christian truth at its best! People could be killed eternally and suffer nothing worse than superstitious anxiety, and people could be saved for eternal life by killing them as cruelly as possible. This is the nature of Christian hypocrisy and double-talk, which has never ceased until this day. No matter how absurd the falsehood, Christians have the monopoly on truth. It has always allowed them to lie, torture and murder with a clear conscience, absolutely convinced they are right. Could anything be more satanic? Yet the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, taught that if God denied truth, prefer truth and deny God.

Theodosius the Great, in 380, soon after his baptism, issued, with his co-emperors, according to Schaff’s Nicene and Post-Nicene Christianity, the following edict:

We, the three emperors, will that our subjects steadfastly adhere to the religion which was taught by S Peter to the Romans… let us believe in the one Godhead of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, of equal majesty in the Holy Trinity. We order that the adherents of this faith be called Catholic Christians. We brand all the senseless followers of the other religions with the infamous name of heretics, and forbid their conventicles assuming the name of churches. Beside the condemnation of divine justice, they must expect the heavy penalties which our authority, guided by heavenly wisdom, shall think proper to inflict.

Within five years of Theodosius’s pronouncement in 380 AD, Maximus, the emperor in the West, in response to the appeal of the Spanish bishops, ordered the death for heresy and sorcery of Priscillian, a bishop of Avila in Spain. Priscillian, a good and wise man, and seven disciples were tortured and decapitated at Trier (Trèves) beginning a sixteen century long Christian bonfire of humanity. The followers of Priscillian revered their teacher and formed a sect which survived for a long time although its members were excommunicated by the Church. Only sixty-two years later, when the heresy seemed to be reviving, in 447, Leo I the Great (440-461 AD), not only justified the act and praised the condemnation of Priscillian, but declared that if the followers of a heresy so damnable were allowed to live, human and divine law would end. The Priscillian heresy was destroyed by Christian butchery by the seventh century. The Arian heresy had been adopted by the barbarians, but astute political bargaining induced the Arian Teutonic princes to adopt the Trinity and compel their people to do the same.

Christianity ceased to be a religion and became the neo-con party of the rich European clergy and nobility. Any opponent was a bed-fellow of Satan. S Jerome (340-420 AD) said the apostasy of the Devil’s allies from the religion of the true God meant they relinquished life itself, then, relying on Deuteronomy 13:5-11, he advocated capital punishment for heretics. Piety and zeal for God could not be cruelty, he had decided. Temporal punishment was the most genuine mercy, in that it might save the victim from eternal perdition. When S Jerome was annoyed by Vigilantius forbidding the adoration of relics, he was astonished his bishop had not murdered his body for the good of his soul. He meant it. This was the attitude of the inquisitors and is still the attitude of at least some Christians today.

The Church could influence the monarch and procure from him edicts condemning heretics to exile, deportation, to the mines, and even to death. Usually instructed by the church, the state punished and penalized all dissident opinions. A law of 407, aimed at Donatists, puts heretics on the same legal level as traitors to the emperor. It meant that the punishment for heresy, from then on, would be death by being burnt alive! Christianity was now imposed by force upon a reluctant Europe.

The Age of Ignorance commenced with the Christian system.

Thomas Paine

Although Western Europeans were robbed of their schools and detained for centuries in the densest ignorance, they repeatedly rebelled in large numbers against the corrupt priestcraft and the absurd Catholic Christian religion. Only by the use of murderous force on a huge scale did the Church keep its authority. The clergy thought that, if God had put into their hands these powers, they were to be used, not neglected. Yet, they did not execute the laws, and remained innocent—unstained with human blood. Only perverted minds could think this way, but the Christian churches are full of such people.

Christian leaders became mafia godfathers devoid of the faintest idea of principles, as Gibbon put it, administrators of a protection racket as their business, operated to keep them in political power by the manipulation of people’s fears and superstitions. With minor exceptions, they had no interest in public welfare, no interest in science or objective scholarship, no interest in music, literature, drama, art or architecture, no interest in health or cleanliness, no interest in anything except their own indulgence. And so it remained for 700 years. 700 years! Whatever religious inspiration they had decayed into a self-serving and self-righteous smugness that could not be challenged. Europe was under an iron heel of totalitarianism calling itself Christianity. But all the while, people with the same sense of martyrdom as the Essenes suffered patiently under the feet of society—the Puritans—the Cathars.

The Christian Church survived for 700 years through the Dark Ages, through the illiteracy and ignorance of the people. Those who could read, read Latin. The only literature was devotional literature and laws, and all were written in Latin. No one spoke Latin any more, and the intention of the Church was to keep religion as a divine mystery. Since no one could read the bible, the Church could do what it liked with no fear of contradiction.

Yet, even as late as 1162, pope Alexander III could say:

It is better to pardon the guilty than to take the lives of the innocent.

Popes were soon to think very differently. Alexander III himself used the title Inquisitor for the first time at the council of Tours (in 1163 AD). In the Lateran Council of 1179, he urged the use of force against them. To princes he gave the right to imprison offenders and, appealing to their greed, to confiscate their property. To all who would “take up arms” against them, he promised two years’ remission of penance and even greater privileges.

Pope after Pope angrily urged the secular powers to persecute them. The synod of Verona (in 1184 AD) cursed all heretics, and ordered them to be handed over to the secular authorities for capital punishment. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216 AD) required all bishops to assist in the discovery and prosecution of unbelievers or be deposed. He instigated the fourth crusade (1202-1204) and exterminated the Albigenses. He instituted the order of Dominicans, the force of the Inquisition, at the suggestion of Castilian Dominic and the Bishop of Toulouse. With the Inquisition, civil courts and national assemblies decreed that whatever penalties were imposed by the Inquisition should be imposed by the state, deserving the infliction of civil penalties, fines, imprisonment, torture and death. The Church allied with the state to torture men out of opinions different from her own.

Heresies

The Romans had not been bothered about blasphemy per se and did not understand heresy in the way the Church did—all religions were heresies. In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul is an heretic for being a Nazarene! Romans were concerned that gods might be angered, and might not be discriminating in their responses, which were usually natural disasters like plagues, famines and floods. The Christians, whose God was love, took the same attitude but were far more zealous and neurotic about it. Plagues, floods and famines were punishments by God for heresy and blasphemy, and when anything like them happened, some poor innocent would be scapegoated for the inconvenience. Disease and famine were, of course, more prevalent than they need have been from the Church’s obsession with ignorance and filth as virtues desired by God.

It all conspired to turn people’s venom against luckless people thought to have been inviting divine trouble—heretics. Any misfortune led an ignorant and superstitious people to suspect their neighbours of heresy and accusations would begin to fly. Christian mobs pursued poor suspects, tortured them into confessing and then punished them in the way God preferred by burning them at the stake. Heretics were hounded without mercy for almost a millennium before the Church decided to regulate the practice. Mob law preceded the law of the Church, but they were Christian mobs. The Church cannot escape responsibility this way.

There was a widespread expectation of the end of the world in the millennial year 1000 AD, as propesied in Revelation. The tenth century was the low-water of mediaeval civilization, and people looked forward to the expected judgement. They were disappointed. Nothing happened, and the vileness of the times went on unchanged.

Only Christians regarded Rome as the center of light in Europe after it ceased to be Pagan, and not many of those. At the end of the Middle Ages, during the Renaissance, Rome briefly flowered in art because for a while it adopted Pagan values once more. By the millennium, enlightenment was returning to Europe along paths from the east, along the valley of the Danube from Byzantium and Bulgaria, entering Christian Europe via southern Germany and the Alps. Another was along north Africa via the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain with the Moors, entering Christian Europe by the Pyrenees and the south of France. Lastly, there were sea routes into Europe from the east mainly through the Italian trading cities like Venice and Genoa, and also Marseilles.

For, during the darkest age of Christendom, a brilliant and tolerant Moslem civilization flourished in Spain, north Africa and the near east—the Moors. Its culture had crossed the Pyrenees to enlighten the barbarian Christians of Europe, and it threatened Byzantium, the remnant of the Roman empire hanging on in decadence. They also occupied Sicily and acted as mercenary soldiers for the Italian princes. The only scholar of the tenth century, Gerbert, Pope Silvester II (999-1003), belonged to the south of France and learned his science in Moorish Spain. The Cordoban Moors had influence in the south of France and even occupied it briefly. With them might have come a gentle variety of Christianity, later categorized as witchcraft.

Starting about 1100 AD, educated people were beginning to read the bible for themselves, and some wanted to translate it into the language of the common people. But as Catholic doctrines were not all in line with scripture, readers might doubt or dispute them. Popes “wanted to see the power of the Church, which was their own power, dominating men’s lives”:

It was just because many of them doubted secretly the entire soundness of their vast and elaborate doctrinal fabric that they would brook no discussion of it. They were intolerant of doubts and questions, not because they were sure of their faith, but because they were not.

H G Wells, Crux Ansata

The way to stop it was to stop people from reading the bible. The Church forbade it. It was the solution the Catholic Church took for hundreds of years. Catholic Christians were forbidden to possess their own bible in any language, including Latin! The laity were forbidden to argue with Jews because they could read and therefore cite the scriptures that Christians were forbidden to read, even if they could read Latin. S Louis (1214-1270) advised any Christian challenged to a theological discussion by a Jew “to thrust his sword into the Jew’s belly as far as it would go”!

That anyone wanted to read the bible, was proof of heresy to the Catholic Church. No one would want to do it unless they disbelieved the doctors of the Church. Men and women were burned at the stake for reading the bible, even in Latin. William Tyndale was burned as a heretic because he translated the bible into English. People were burned as heretics for owning or reading his translation. The invention of printing with the Protestant Reformation stopped the suppression of the bible. That is why it can be read today, not because of any liberality in the Church.

The history of the medieval sects is told mainly by the Catholic Church, so it is not easy to get a proper picture of them. There is little literature from these sects until about 1400, but they claimed to be much older. Protestants have argued that the established Church from Constantine and pope Sylvester I gained the first temporal possession for the papacy, and so began the system of a rich, powerful and worldly church, with Rome for its capital. They changed the earlier single essentially Essenic basis of Christianity, making it into a syncretized religion taking in aspects of the other popular religions of the time, like the Mithraic mysteries. Not surprisingly, there were traditional Christians who did not approve of the secularized church. Preferring the older, Essenic, apostolic religion of simplicity, honesty and poverty, they maintained it against Roman Catholicism, always persecuted, but able to survive mainly because they were never considered any real threat to the establishment.

For the great new religion of the empire, the Ebionite-like or Nazarene-like Christians would have seemed merely a nuisance but they persisted and were among the earliest declared heretics, but it now begins to seem that there was a good number of Catholics who retained the Essene lifestyle while otherwise conforming. Canon 8 of the Nicene Council of 325 concerned “those who call themselves Cathari”. Canon 19 concerns “the Paulianists”. From time to time they were reinforced by people from the east. While the Latin world was so brutalized it stopped thinking, a heresy had rooted deeply in the wilds of Asia Minor, fringing the Armenian district of the Byzantine Empire. It was Paulicianism, apparently a mixture of Gnostic, Persian and primitive Christian ideas.

In the seventh century, the dualist sect called the Paulicians provoked ecclesiastical hatred by demanding freedom of thought and ecclesiastical reform. As Popelicans, they began to cause alarm in France at the beginning of the eleventh century, in the reign of king Robert, when they established themselves in the diocese of Orleans. A council held against them in 1022 condemned thirteen to be burnt. Their name did not last but their influence did. What is interesting is that a chronicler, called Adhemar de Charbannes, accused these heretics of meeting the Devil each day in the form of a black man who handed out bags of money.

Paulicianism is identifiable as an evangelical Church from the 400s. Asia Minor or Anatolia was where Paul had first preached his gospel, and they called themselves Paulicians, either after the missionary himself or a later successor called Paul—Paul of Samosata is suggested in The Chronicon of Georgius Monarchus about 840. The Paulicians themselves apparently thought they had been founded by Constantine of Mananoli, a place on the western bank of the Euphrates. He based his teachings on the gospels and on the epistles of Paul, and nothing else except perhaps the ten commandments. He took the Pauline name of Silvanus and went about creating churches. Any dualistic religion was called Manichæism by the Medieval Christians, and all of the anti-sacerdotal sects were, but a follower of Paul of Samosata was Archelaus of Syria who strongly opposed Mani. His followers were the Pauliani rejected by the Catholic Church at Niceaa, when they were required to be rebaptized.

The Armenian patriarch John IV (c 728) tells of Narses an earlier predecessor who had confronted the sect but to no effect. They were still active after he had died about 554. Photius includes them in his Historia Manichæorum, and, about the same time, Petrus Siculus visited them at their independent state and fortress of Tephrike. Photius and Petrus Siculus show the Paulicians as being perpetually in conflict with the Byzantine Church. One Christian empress of the ninth century slaughtered a hundred thousand of these people, but an emperor of the tenth century still had to transport two hundred thousand of them to the desolate frontier of his empire, as a buttress against the Bulgars, and to try to suppress the heresy. The Paulicians soon converted the Bulgars! The crusaders found them everywhere in Syria and Palestine, and many came into western Europe after the crusades under the suggestive names of Publicani and Sadducaea. (Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford and a well known courtier of Henry II, wrote in De Nugi Curialium (On Courtiers’ Trifles, 1180) of the Publicani, the Cathars of Germany.) Most oddly, they are never mentioned by Armenian writers for the 500 years from 1200, but then they suddenly start being mentioned again in just the places they were in before! In 1828, the had a book of ancient sacraments called The Key of Truth.

The Cathars have been called “the debris of an early Christianity”, a somewhat pejorative description. They seem most likely to have been early Christianity preserved beyond the bounds of Rome into the middle ages.

From the earliest days of the Church, a parallel dualist tendency—pitting God against Satan as two equal and opposite forces—had existed alongside the official orthodoxy of monist Christianity.

P Stanford, The Devil

Paulicianism was a primitive Christianity much like that of the apostles and with a lifestyle and outlook matching the ancient Essenes. When the Paulicians spread their gospel peacefully among the Bulgars, Europe was confronted with a new heresy, the Bogomils (Theophiloi), “Lovers of God” or “Friends of God”. The Bogomils, an earnest and ascetic sect, threatened to win over the entire nation and even the whole of Europe, by proselytizing. A religion like this is noted in Bulgaria about 862 when the Roman and Orthodox churches were in competition for the converting Bulgars. The open discussions of relative merits allowed the primitive Paulician Christians to make their point too, and it seems that large numbers of Bulgars preferred it to its big brothers.

The Bogomils, following Jesus’s instructions to his apostles, sent out missionaries amongst the Slavs, and followed the routes of commerce into central Europe. From the beginning of the eleventh century, people of this dualist religion appeared everywhere—usually on the gibbet. The Church had began using its historical holy weapons of persuasion—persecution, torture and murder. The Albigensians, of the south of France, who were drowned in their own blood by the “greatest” of the popes, Innocent III, were inspired by the Bogomils, and like them were described by Catholics as Manichæan. They were known as Patarenes in Italy, as Publicans in France and Belgium, and by other names in other countries. Their numbers were prodigious in the century chosen as “the great Catholic century”—the thirteenth century. Dante tells us how prevalent heresy, even radical skepticism, was in Italy in his day. Europe was on its way to deserting Roman Christianity, but the Church invented its most savage weapon—the Inquisition.

These heretics retained some of the Essene names for themselves, notably the Perfect Ones—Cathari—although Professor Anne Brenon in Les Cathares: Pauvres du Christ ou Apôtres de Satan? thinks they never called themselves anything other than “Christian” or “Apostle”, and the use of “Cathar”, was a sarcasm of derision. If true, the derision plainly had its basis in the fact that they did consider themselves Perfect Ones, even if they did not use the name themselves, out of humility. The authors of the Community Rule call themselves the men of Perfect Holiness who are trying to build a House of Perfection. The idea comes from the Jewish scriptures and is strongly repeated in the gospel.

• Thou shalt be perfect with Yehouah thy God.
  Deuteronomy 18:13
  
  
• Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the Ebionim, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.
  Matthew 19:21

The name of Cathari was applied to these sects that looked for all the world like Essenes displaced by a millennium in time. The meaning of Puritan, the name adopted for themselves by the Protestant sects, means the Pure Ones, and that is the meaning of the Greek katharoi, or Cathars. Cathars were artisans and traders and gathered in the large towns with the rise of the burghers. They were therefore associated with the rise of capitalism.

In the west, they called these Cathari Manichæans. Proof the Cathari were Manichæans is lacking. In particular, the Catharans did not admire Mani. If they were real Manichees then they were not Christians, and although for apologists for Christianity, what is a heresy and what is not seems entirely flexible, heresy is supposed to be a deviation from Christian orthodoxy. The nineteenth century authority, C Schmidt, denied that Catharism was Manichæism. He thought it was an independent dualism that spread into Europe from Anatolia via the Slav lands. Jean-Claude Dupuis a modern Catholic apologist, states frankly:

Catharism is not properly called a Christian heresy—it is rather more another religion.

If their views are true, then Schmidt and Dupuis have demolished the legal basis of the Medieval Inquisition. Canon 751 says heresy applies only to people who have been baptized as Christians. Manichæism could not have been described as a Christian heresy. Yet, these so-called Manichæan sects were described as heresies of Christianity by the contemporary Catholics, and the sectaries themselves. They were therefore not Manichæism, but were a dualistic form of Christianity. From what we know of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes were themselves dualistic, and so the Cathars might easily have been a Christian sect that retained much more of the original Essenism than worldly Catholicism did.

Dualism came from Persian Zoroastrianism, a religion that impacted on our history in the sixth century BC when Cyrus the Persian conquered the known civilized world. Persians believed in two supreme principles, created equal, one who made good, and one who made evil. Humanity had to choose between helping the one or the other in every detail of life and Nature, and by thoughts, words, and deeds. In dualistic systems described in the middle ages as Manichæism, there were these two great creative powers, but the evil principle was the creator of matter, darkness, the flesh and the Lie or sin, while the real God, was purely spiritual and in deadly conflict with him. At the end of time, the Good God would destroy the material world and judge everyone.

This idea was an enticing explanation of the origin and power of evil, and removed from God, the good spirit, the responsibility for matter and flesh. It was more reasonable than Christianity, rejecting the Old Testament and all its moral crudity, regarding Christ as a wonderful spirit but not God, and scorning priests and sacraments. Christendom’s consecrated immorality of its priests, monks and nuns, the heresy loathed.

Lying was the worst sin in Zoroastrianism. In Christianity, it is the highest virtue, so long as it is lying for Christianity.

In every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Jesus is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.

S Paul. Philippians 1:18

If through my lies God´s truth abounds to His glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner?

S Paul, Romans 3:7

Ebionites disdained Paul as a fraud. Like Zoroastrians, Cathars often would not answer direct questions rather than risk telling a lie. Lying was their worst sin. The trials of Jesus suggest he had the same principle. Like Essenes, Cathars would not swear on oath, because to do so implied that otherwise they were not telling the truth. Invoking God in an oath was to involve the spiritual supreme being in the evil of the material world, and that was unforgiveable. Nor would they swear fealty because such a vow could then conflict with their greater commitment to their religion.

Dualism is an enticing explanation of theodicy, the origin and power of evil, and removed from God, the good spirit, the responsibility for it. Incipient in Christianity is the idea that matter and flesh are evils, but since they are God’s own creation, it is not clear why. Catharism was more reasonable than Christianity, rejecting much of the Old Testament and its moral crudity, regarding Christ as a wonderful angel but not God, and scorning priests and sacraments. Cathar aims and its rationalistic method made it appealing to the populace. Its anti-ecclesiasticalism was a nucleus for much political and ecclesiastical discontent.

The degree of equality of the two principles seemed to separate some of these medieval sects. Some said they were absolutely equal, as they almost are in Zoroastrianism, the only difference being that the good principle, having foresight knows it will be victorious at the eschaton. In the so-called mitigated form of dualism, the good principle alone was eternal and supreme. The wicked principle is then merely a creature—a disobedient angel of the absolute God. This latter is the Jewish version accepted by modern Christianity, whereas the former is the original Zoroastrian version. Only the Zoroastrian version avoids the problem of theodicy. The mitigated version loses this advantage merely to have a monotheistic absolute God in theory, even if in practice He is plainly not absolute. The Bogomili preferred the Jewish adaptation and the Albigenses the Zoroastrian form. The institutions of both were the same.

H C Lea and the historian H A L Fisher put emphasis on the Kushti girdle in the form of a sacred cord that the Cathar Perfects wore in Zoroastrian fashion. Concerning it, Lea writes:

The use of which by both Zends and Brahmans shows that its origin is to be traced to the prehistoric period anterior to the separation of those branches of the Aryan family.

This hardly supports the belief that the cord shows Catharism is Manichæan. It is indeed the sort of custom that would spread easily with derivatives of Zoroastrianism, and it is found among the Jews:

Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue: And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of Yehouah, and do them, and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring: That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God.

Numbers 15:38-40

Jews call these fringes “tzitzit”. It is actually four long strands drawn through holes in the corners of a square scarf. The two ends are tied by a double knot. The longest half, called “shammash” is then wound seven, eight, eleven and thirteen times round the other seven halves of the four threads. After each set of windings the pieces are again double knotted.

This habit of wearing a cord or thread to show piety undoubtedly comes from the dualist Zoroastrian religion, and possibly before that from the Aryans, which might be why the Brahmins have the same habit, although conceivably they could have got it from Avestan missionaries at the time of the Persian empire which extended into India. If Jews had this habit, Jewish Christians, from whom the Paulicians and then the Cathars evolved will also have had it. There are curious legends of a girdle of Christ, and a girdle of Mary, the mother of Christ, this latter bestowed on Doubting Thomas. Nothing therefore stands in the way of the hypothesis that the first Christians wore a Kushti thread, but that early on the gentile or Catholic Church dispensed with the habit. Or perhaps they did not. It evolved into the scapular.

In the eleventh century, the Popes and bishops of Christendom were still more interested in wine and women than the souls of their flocks. Bouts of morality kept breaking out, however, to disturb their pleasuring. In 1012 AD, several “Manichaeans” were prosecuted in Germany. In 1017, thirteen canons and priests of the diocese of Orleans were convicted of Manichaeism and burned alive. In 1022, cases were recorded at Liege, in 1030, in Italy and Germany, in 1043, near Chalons in France, in 1052, again in Germany. In the early part of the twelfth century some “Poor Men of Christ” were burned in Germany.

By the middle of the twelfth century, Europe was seething and bubbling with heresy. Their numbers were prodigious in “the great Catholic century”—the thirteenth century. Dante tells us how prevalent heresy, even radical skepticism, was in Italy in his day. Europe was on its way to deserting Roman Christianity, but the Church invented its most savage weapon—the Inquisition.

The name of the more important heretical sect, the Cathars, is the Greek word (“katharoi”) for “the Pure Ones”, or “Puritans”. They regarded the Church as a corrupt institution, scorned its sacraments, ritual and hierarchy, despised its dissolute monks and nuns, and tried to get back to the pure teaching of Christ—voluntary poverty, strict chastity, brotherly love, and ascetic life.

The Beguines and Beghards, said to have been founded by a Belgian priest in the thirteenth century, spread a network of ascetic communities, more like the ancient Essenes and Therapeutae than the Christian monks all over Europe. They were severely persecuted, though their only heresy was that they did as the gospel Christ bade them do.

Substantially the same were the Waldensians, the followers of Peter Waldo, also of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They called themselves the “Poor in Spirit”, and literally obeyed every word of Christ, and so they were branded as heretics and burned in batches, sixty at one time being committed to the flames in Germany in 1211 AD, and some being burned in Spain even earlier.

The famous Flagellants of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fairly come under the same heading. The world and Church were so corrupt that they expected a speedy end of them, and they did penance for their sins and those of others. The Fratricelli, a detachment from the Franciscan Order whom the clerical corruption drove into heresy, belong to the same period, and were fiercely persecuted.

More important were the Lollards, the followers of John Wyclif in England, and the Hussites of Bohemia. Wyclif’s heresy—he was at first supported by his university and the nobles—was really a return to primitive Christianity—Essenism—and it took such root in England that in the middle of the fourteenth century one-tenth of the nation, some historians estimate, were Lollards. It paid the typical penalty of being true to Christ.

Meantime, as the king of Bohemia married an English princess, the Lollard ideas passed to that country, then one of the most enlightened in Europe, and, by the preaching of John Hus, a large part of the nation embraced and developed them. The Hussites scorned the corrupt priests, monks, and nuns, attacked clerical celibacy, confession, the eucharist, and the ritual. Two hundred years of war and savage persecution were needed to suppress them. At one time, most of the nobles of Bohemia were Hussites.

Paulician Beliefs

In the middle of the eighth century, the emperor Constantine Copronymus settled Armenian Paulicians—noted heretics persecuted by the Greek Church with fire and sword—in Thracia. In the tenth century, the emperor John Tzimisces (969-976), himself of Armenian origin, transported 200,000 Armenian Paulicians to Europe and settled them in the neighbourhood of Philippopolis, which henceforth became the centre of the heresy. Settled along the Balkans as a kind of bulwark against the invading Bulgars, the Armenians soon fraternized with the invaders, whom they converted to their own views. Even a prince of the Bulgarians adopted their teaching. The empress Theodora killed, drowned or hanged 100,000.

The details of the beliefs of the Paulicians and Bogomils are obscure, the sources mainly being their enemies. The Paulicians, Bogomils, Albigensians and so on were slandered by the orthodox, who said these heretics declared “God is a tyrant”. What were the Paulicians’ real beliefs? They derived their ideas from the Persian religion via the Essenes. The Zoroastrians had believed that the evil principle had created evil to pollute the good creation, and this idea evolved into a belief that the evil principle had created matter which was the evil that polluted the good creation of the spirit.

These Essene inspired sects certainly seemed to continue with the attitude of the original Essenes—a rebellion against sacerdotalism and authority—and consequently the authorities regarded them all as subversive, just as Pagan Romans had the Christians before Constantine made them respectable. It is because the popes saw Catharism as subversive that they determined to eliminate it at all costs. They took to the same methods as they claimed the Pagans used against them, but with a resolve to make it work. Here is a summary of Paulician ideas.

• Critics call them Manichæans but they hated Mani! They considered him as an anathema, so they were obviously not Manichæans at all. They were dualists with a heavenly father who ruled the world to come. The ruler of this world, though was a wicked lesser god. Angels were the good inhabitants of God’s good world.
• The virgin was an allegory of the heavenly Jerusalem. That was where Christ had come from. So, there was no actual virgin birth.
• The Eucharist was not the body and blood of Christ because material things are the creation of the wicked god, and Christ is a spiritual creature.
• They had no respect for the cross which was cursed rather than holy. They annoyed traditional Christians by breaking crosses when they saw them.
• They repudiated Peter for denying Christ but otherwise treat all the apostles as having an equal role in building Christianity.
• Peter heard the ruler of this material world say, “This is my beloved son”.
• They considered themselves as the true Catholic church, believing that the whole of humanity would be saved by the grace of God, but they did not build churches and used the Greek word, proseuxai, usually translated as synagogue, for the places where they met—not a specific building. The word “Church” only applied to the whole body of believers.
• They had a baptism only at the age of 30, like Jesus, but it was not a sacrament. They considered it “mere bath water”, denying it any magic purifying effect. In other words it was simply a symbolic outward purification meant to accompany the inner purification that commitment to Cathar belief was. Infant baptism they rejected as impure and unscriptural. Trapped souls had to chose baptism for themselves.
• They permitted outward conformity to the dominant Church, holding that Christ would forgive it, in view of persecution.
• They rejected the orders of the Church and had only two or three grades of clergy, and scorned priestly vestments.
• Their canon was the gospel (John) and the Apostle (Paul’s main epistles).

Much of this looks genuinely early, and traceable to Essene beliefs before Christianity. The last looks almost Marcionite, except that Marcion’s gospel was Luke, not John. Perhaps, though, Marcion got his ideas from the Paulicians. Marcion came from Asia Minor, but spread his ideas in Rome, and feedback from Rome to Anatolia looks less likely.

Paulician Christology was that Christ was an angel sent by God to earth out of his love of humanity. He gave him the honorific title, “Son”, warning him of his coming suffering and crucifixion. The good angel agreed to these sufferings and even death, knowing he would be resurrected. He undertook his tasks dutifully, and was taken again into heaven where God gave him the additional title “Christ” for obedience. This makes “Christ” equal to the Greek for “good”, “chrestos”, the name given to good slaves, rather than the supposed translation of the Hebrew, “messiah”. This ties in with a title of Cathar priests which was “Good Men”.

Bogomil Beliefs

The Goddess Heresy. A Eisenhoit 1580. The donkey skin head dress with its ears seems to denote her as a Cathar “Hearer” as well as simple or stubborn like a donkey, but she also has a bull’s head and a dragon’s head, and all three of her heads face left—the sinister side. She is bare breasted, is pierced through the heart by an arrow, holds a large and a small bag in her left hand, has a frog or even a phallus between her left index finger and middle finger, crosses her middle and wedding finger, wears a girdle with what seem to be rosary beads hanging down, and has a neck of bricks, perhaps meaning she is “stiff necked”.

What we know of the Bogomils comes from S Kozma (Cosmas) in the tenth century (c 970 AD) writing Against the Heretics and Euthymius Zygademus in the twelfth century. Certain heretical sects in Russia carried on their tradition. Bogomil is a translation into Slavonic of “Massaliani”, the Syrian name of the sect corresponding to the Greek Euchites. Bogomils and Massaliani are equated in thirteenth century Slavonic documents. Another name was Pavlikeni (Paulicians). The Cathars and Patarenes, the Waldenses, the Anabaptists, and, in Russia, the Strigolniki, Molokani and Dukhobortsi, have all been identified with the Bogomils or connected with them. The teaching of the heretical sects in fourteenth century Russia, related with the Bogomils, show they denied the divine birth of Christ, the Trinity, and the validity of sacraments and ceremonies. Carp Strigolnik, who in the fourteenth century preached this doctrine in Novgorod, explained that S Paul had taught that simple minded men should instruct one another, so they elected their teachers from among themselves to be their spiritual guides, and had no special priests.

The founder of the Bogomils was supposed to have been one Bogumil, a “Manichæan” of the time of the Bulgarian emperor, Peter (927-968). The Slavonic sources say the sect was founded by one Bogumil or Jeremiah, that he was a Manichæan, and had six apostles, all with Slavonic names. It is transparent Slavic mythologizing, unless Bogomil took his name from the sect, rather than the reverse. If the founder was Jeremiah, the notion might take the religion back to the Essenes who were fond of Jeremiah because he spoke of putting the covenant in men’s hearts. Bogomils liked to use the Zoroastrian expression “good thoughts, good words, good deeds”.

Bulgarian Tsar Boril’s arranged a synod in 1211 AD directed against the Bogomils. The document which came out of it, Boril’s Synodicon, replaced the original Greek anathemas against them, in the synodal resolution ending iconoclasm in 843 AD, by sixteen updated articles. The original of the Synodicon consisted of 24 articles against the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire, who had been active for the previous century, as well as Arianism, Manichaeism, Nestorianism, Neoplatonism and the Armenian heresy—meaning Paulicianism.

Boril calls the Bogomils “our very sly enemy”, describing them as “Manichaeans” founded by Bogomil, the priest. They considered the nativity and the crucifixion were illusions. Boril speaks of “their nocturnal gatherings and mysteries”. Their holy day was 24 June, the birthday of John the Baptist (really the midsummer solstice), when they plucked fruit and told fortunes, and then in the night performed “certain foul mysteries similar to Hellenic ritual”. Despite this, article 47 said they reviled John the Baptist because he was from Satan, as was baptism with water, indicating that they did not revere Satan at all. Their only prayer was the Pater Noster.

They believed Satan was “the creator of the visible world”, and Adam and Eve, and was “the master of rain, hail and of everything that crawls out of the ground”. They rejected Moses the Godseer, Elijah the Tishbite, the holy prophets, the patriarchs, and their sacred writings incongruously as creatures and creations of Satan, and for that reason they rejected the Old Testament. The conception of children in a woman’s womb was Satan’s work, the Devil dweliing alongside the child in the womb until the child was born. Nor did baptism drive him off, but only prayer and fasting. The heretics rejected the buildings of the church, and all singing in them. They rejected and reviled the liturgy and the whole episcopal organization, saying that they were the Devil’s inventions. Equally they reviled the holy communion, and rejected veneration of the “life-giving cross”, and the holy and sacred icons. So said Boril.

The doctrine was spread far and wide by peripatetic mendicant preachers. The religion spread along the mountain chains of central Europe, starting from the Balkans and continuing along the Carpathian Mountains, the Alps and the Pyrenees. In 1004, Bogomil beliefs were being taught in Russia by a man called Adrian. Leontie, bishop of Kiev imprisoned him. In 1125, the Church in the south of Russia had to combat another heresiarch named Dmitri. The Church in Bulgaria also tried to extirpate Bogomilism. When Innocent III called for the attack on the Albigenses, he tried to persuade the eastern churches to do the same against the Bogomils, so he clearly saw a connexion. They had spread to Serbia but Stephen Nemanya, king of Serbia expelled them, and they sought refuge in Bosnia. At the end of the twelfth century, Kulin, the civil ruler of Bosnia (1168-1204) embraced the heresy, and 10,000 of his subjects converted.

Some went to Italy, where they were called Patarenes, “Rag-pickers”. A street in Milan was called Via Patari. It was the rag market, and the industrious Cathars collected waste rags to make paper and to weave shoddy fabrics—both weaving and papermaking were crafts they were associated with. They influenced Gregory VII in his attempts at reforming the Church. Later popes thought it a better policy to get rid of its critics.

In the fifteenth century, the Bosnian king, Thomas, was converted to the Catholic Faith, but the severe edicts which he issued against his former coreligionists were powerless against the faith. The Cathari, 40,000 in number, left Bosnia and passed into Herzegovina (1446). The Patarenes were persecuted for centuries by the Hungarian emperors until the Moslem Turks put a stop to it in the second half of the fifteenth century. The Bogomils opted then to convert to the gentler religion of Islam. That is why modern Bosnians are Moslems. Once they were Bogomils, called by the fifteenth century Turks, Christians!

Bogomils denied the divine birth of Christ and the Trinity, and denounced the use of sacraments and vestments. Marriage was not a sacrament. The miracles of Jesus were not real but spiritual events. Christ was the Son of God only through grace like other prophets, and the bread and wine of the eucharist were not transformed into flesh and blood. The last judgment would be executed by God and not by Jesus. The images and the cross were idols and the worship of saints and relics idolatry.

They chose their teachers from their own number to guide them, and had no paid priests or built churches, but met in private homes like the first Christians. Prayers were to be said in private houses. The Church was a human church of the interior spirituality of its members. Only adults should be baptised, and neither water nor oil mattered but asceticism and prayer did. Each member could obtain the perfection of Christ and become a Christ. Ordination was by the “elect” of the congregation who had reached the perfection of Christ, and were called literally Christs and Perfects.

Their cosmogony was interesting because it is close to what one would deduce the Essenes believed from the Dead Sea Scrolls. They taught God had two sons, Satanael and Michael. The suffix “-el” showed they were sons of God. The older son rebelled and became the evil spirit. He then made the lower heavens and the earth and tried to make humanity. He could not give him life, though, and had to get God to do it, perhaps by a trick. Adam thus received the breath or spiritus of life, which invested him with a potentially good soul, but was coerced into a covenant in which he was allowed to till the soil in the wicked world as a slave to Satanael.

Then God sent his younger son, Michael, into the form of a man called Jesus “elected” by God to be the Saviour, after baptism in the Jordan. Michael appeared as a dove and Jesus became Christ, with the power to break Adam’s covenant, in the form of a clay tablet (hierographon), with Satanael. Thus the evil spirit was vanquished and lost his “-el”, and his equal power, becoming Satan, no longer a son of God but a fallen angel. Even so, with the power that remained, he plotted to have Jesus Christ crucified to begin the whole evil religion of Christianity with its gaudy and meretricious grand objects and churches, vestments and raiments, icons and images, sacraments and ceremonies, and monks and priests to impress simple humans as if God was an earthly king. This world being the work of Satan, the perfect must eschew any and every excess of its pleasure. They held the “Lord´s Prayer” in high respect, as the most potent weapon against Satan, and had a number of conjurations against “evil spirits”.

Each community had its own twelve “apostles”, and women could be raised to the rank of “elect”. The Bogomils wore garments like mendicant friars and were renowned as missionaries, travelling far and wide to propagate their doctrines. Healing the sick and conjuring the evil spirit, they travelled the world and spread their apocryphal literature along with some of the books of the Old Testament, deeply influencing the religious spirit of the nations, and preparing them for the Reformation.

They sowed the seeds of a rich religious popular literature in the east as well as in the west. The Historiated Bible, the Letter from Heaven, the Wanderings through Heaven and Hell, the numerous Adam and Cross legends, the religious poems of the “Kalfliki perehozhie” and other similar productions owe their dissemination to a large extent to the activity of the Bogomils of Bulgaria, and their successors in other lands. The Ritual in Slavonic written by the Bosnian Radoslavov, and published by the South Slavonic Academy at Agram, shows great resemblance to the Cathar ritual published by Cunitz, 1853.

Albigensian Beliefs

In the west, the word Cathar means the Albigensians. The name Albigenses was given to the Catharist heretics of Languedoc from 1181 when it was used by the chronicler Geoffrey de Vigeois. The Albigensians take their name from Albi, an important town in one of those southern provinces of France which were to that country what southern California is to the United States. In these southern provinces, the brilliant example of the Spanish Moors was known best. Before the end of the eleventh century the heresy of the Bogomils was imported into them by missionaries from Bulgaria or Bosnia. The name of Bulgarians (“Bougres”) was often applied to the Albigenses, who communicated with the Bogomil sectaries of Thrace. They resemble, in their dualism, the Bogomils, and still more the Paulicians. A few Albigensian works are still extant:

• Rituel Cathare de Lyon, Editor, Cunitz (Jena, 1852)
• Nouveau Testament en Provençal, Editor, Cledat (Paris, 1887)
• Debat d’Yzarn et de Sicart de Figueiras, Editor Meyer (1880).

In the Albigeois district, the majority of the population went over to the new religion. St Bernard of Clairvaux, the most famous preacher of the time, campaigned there in 1147 AD. He made no impression. The Papacy was alarmed! These Cathari numbered at least hundreds of thousands in France alone.

Cathars had two castes, the Perfecti or Parfaits and Credentes or Croyants. The Perfecti, women no less than men, were effectively the professionals or priests, and the others the lay brothers and sisters. They were people of high character. They held high moral standards and upheld scripture against the divines of the Churches with their commitment to matters of pleasure and politics. They were adored by the faithful, who were taught to prostrate themselves before them whenever they asked for their prayers, because the Holy Spirit already dwelt in them. None but them had received into their hearts the spirit of God´s Son, which cries “Abba, Father”. They alone were adopted sons, and so able to use the Lord´s Prayer, which begins, “Our Father, which art in heaven”. The Perfect alone knew God and could address him in this prayer, the only one they used in their ceremonies. The believers could invoke a living saint, and ask them to pray for them.

The division of Cathars into Perfecti and Credentes is similar to the Manichæan distinction between Electi and Auditores. But Josephus says the Essenes had two classes, the celibate class and the married class, exactly matching these later sects, especially as the celibate Essenes called themselves the Elect or the Chosen, and also considered themselves the Perfectly Holy ones or Saints. The supposed rejection of marriage of the Cathars is well known only to mean the Parfaits, the Credentes marrying as a contract or bond, but not as a holy sacrament. Moreover, the Parfaits were not allowed to so much as touch a Croyant of the opposite sex. The Essenes, were not allowed to touch anyone of a lesser rank, because of their ideas about cleanliness.

The Cathari claimed that their doctrine was the true Christianity. They were the followers of the early Christian Church. A Cathar Ritual, written in the Provençal language and preserved in a thirteenth century MS in Lyons, writes the Abbé Guiraud, no too favourable a witness:

Recall those of the primitive church with a truth and precision the more striking the nearer we go back to the apostolic age.

The medieval inquisitor saw in them an aping of the rites of the Catholic church, but they were really:

Archaeological vestiges (survivals) of the primitive Christian liturgy. In the bosom of medieval society they were the last witness to a state of things that the regular development of Catholic cult had amplified and modified. They resemble the erratic blocks which lost amid alien soils recall, where we find them, the geological conditions of earlier ages. This being so, it is of the deepest interest to study the Cathar cult, since through its rites we can get a glimpse of those of the primitive church, about which want of documents leaves us too often in the dark.

Abbé Guiraud

The central Cathar rite was consolamentum, or baptism with spirit and fire. The spirit received was the Paraclete derived from God and sent by Christ, who said, “The Father is greater than I”. Cathars knew of no Trinity. Redemption flowed from the evangelical teachings not the death on the cross, which was a devilish trick. They had three ranks of Perfects, not that they were better than each other or paid differently (they were not paid at all) but apparently merely on precedence—majorales (bishops), presbyters and deacons.

The true world is spiritual, eternal and heavenly. This material world is the antithesis of the world eternal, of the inward person renewed day by day, of Christ’s peace and kingdom which are not of this world. For Cathars, Satan was the God of this world, the visible, temporal and material world, and, as Yehouah, inspired the malevolent parts of the Old Testament. He is the lord of the physical person which is decaying, of the flesh which corrupts and makes people captives to desire and sin, of the body of death. Humanity is made of the two principles, the outcome of a primal war in heaven, when the rebellious angels were driven off and were imprisoned in terrestrial bodies, created for them by the adversary. But their celestial bodies, purely spirit (akin to the fravashis of Zoroastrianism), were left behind in heaven. Humans are the fallen angels themselves imprisoned in their bodies, and the aim of life is to realise it and reverse the fall, uniting the soul in the spirit.

Raynaldus, who told us the Perfects wore a black robe, said the Cathars believed human souls are those of angelic spirits who, being cast down from heaven by the apostacy of pride, left their glorified bodies in the air. After successively inhabiting seven earthly bodies, having at length fulfilled their penance, these souls return to those deserted glorified bodies.

The human soul came from the good principle, but their bodies came from the bad. Imprisoned in the garment of flesh, burdened with its sin, souls long to be clothed with their habits left in heaven. They are “buildings from God, houses not made with hands, tunics eternal”, to which the human soul aspires, and eventually returns. Death is no liberation. So long as they are at home in the body, they are absent from God, but would rather be with God. God’s spiritual world is the antithesis of this material one, so, souls had to free themselves from the material by a spiritual purification, which often required several incarnations. A person has to become a new Adam, like Christ, receive the gift of the spirit and become a Paraclete. If they do not, they are reborn in the flesh until they learn.

They were universalists in that they believed in the ultimate salvation of all humanity. Since this world is the world of the Devil, we actually live in hell! There is only one way to go, and that is into the spirit, which is why everyone must be saved eventually. The myth of the descent of Christ into hell, was the story of his descending from heaven to earth as god’s redeemer of humanity. The Church had imbued the whole of Europe with an unhealthy obsession with hell fire. Many people had become convinced that only through the Church could they avoid an eternal roasting. It gave immense power to those who wielded the magic cups and rituals of Christianity, and, particularly, could withhold them in excommunication and interdict, to put terror into princes and nations respectively. Catharism removed this powerful weapon from Catholicism. Since the Cathar believed they lived in hell and the Catholic Church was one of Satan’s instruments, they knew they had nothing worse to fear. That is why they died so nobly, and why the Church was determined to make them suffer as much as it could while it could.

Interestingly, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) of Florence was disliked by the Italian Catholics, failing in his ambitions in politics through the opposition of the Catholics of pope Boniface VIII. Moreover, the art of the troubadours of the Cathar country of Languedoc was the inspiration for his famous Comedie. The view presented is that the resurrected Christ would have when descending through the levels to get to the Devil in his abode. In it, in the frigid desolation of an ice-palace, Dante’s Devil is a giant weeping uncontrollably, partly frozen in the ice at the center of the world—the lowest level of hell. Dante describes the residence of the sovereign of hell as surrounded by a thick fog, so as to make it necessary for the poet to be led by the hand of his guide. The various levels and categories of sin simply show the material world as it is. The Devil at its center is shown as the god of the material existence, and God is nowhere to be seen in this because he is raised on high, a long way away, in a spiritual level quite different from all this. It is the Cathar cosmogony that is illustrated. Man can rise to God, but weighed down by earthly attractions, he will simply sink lower into the eternal ice. That this ice hell can be traced back to gnosticism would show the direct link of gnosticism with Iranian religion and mythology.

The Catholics were in a sense right in saying that Satan was the Cathar God because he was the God of this world, in their cosmogony, but they did not worship him. That is the Catholic propaganda and calumny which led to the idea of Satanism, and that witches worshipped Satan. Cathars disdained the false and perfidious God of the Catholics who created a thousand men to save a single one, while damning all the rest. For them, this was Satanic!

The resurrection of the body cannot take place, because flesh is material and so evil. For the Cathars, those who die unreconciled to God through Christ are reincarnated either as an animal or as a human—the wicked soul will seek any refuge it can. Lea states that the early Christians had the idea of transmigration to allow for injustice. So, there is nothing that could not be explained in Catharism as the continuation of primitive Christianity into the middle ages. In that time, the Christianity of the state which the emperors called Catholic, changed a great deal, and it seems unlikely that the primitive form did not itself change to some degree, but it seems closer to the beliefs of the Essenes than Catholicism, and is the reason why the modern Christians do not want to see Christianity in Essenism.

In Catharism, Christ was a life giving spirit and the boni homines (bonhommes) or good men, the Cathar Parfaits, were his ambassadors. They are instituted with the spiritual baptism by fire instituted by Christ. It was utterly different from the baptism by water which belonged only to the fleeting material world. Cathars were those who had been “consoled” by this gift of the Paraclete.

The Cathar scheme of salvation was essentially the same as the Paulician one. For them too, Jesus is Christ and Son of God by grace and faithful obedience. The fully intiated caste, the Parfaits, received the holy ghost becoming Christs just as Christ did at his baptism. Photius and Petrus Siculus confirm this. The Parfaits are presbyters who have been “consoled” and become a Paraclete in the flesh. Catholic critics said they were “self-conferred priests” and “calling themselves Christs”. The Cathar Perfects or Elect were each of them considered as Christs being filled with the holy spirit, and the ordinary Cathar “hearers” were ready to worship them as Christs. The Parfaits were Christs and they presented themselves in the form of a cross. Here is something in common with the Celtic saints who were regarded in the same way, the Christ in them being considered worthy of veneration. Adumnan, in his “Life of S Columba”, describes how “a humble man worshipped Christ in the holy man”.

They would stand in prayer with their arms outstretched in the form of a cross while the audience of “croyants” adored the Christ in them. They supposedly laid flat before them, but it is more likely they bowed with their head to the ground in Islamic style. It was precisely because the Cathars regarded Christ to be physically with them in the form of their holy caste of Perfects that they rejected images of Christ on the cross and symbols like the cross itself. Particularly, they hated the idea that Roman priests had that Christ was somehow confined in the cross, and could be taken around and shaken on to believers like a condiment.

The main rite, the consolamentum, was baptism with the spirit of the Paraclete or Comforter brought from God by Christ. This baptism of the spirit removed original sin, righted the effects of the Fall, prepared the soul for the return to heaven, and restored immortality. To be one of the consoled was already to be an angel, waiting temporarily in the flesh for its return to heaven, and the beatific vision of Christ. It is plain to see why these people faced death as heretics, and witches burnt to death with such composure.

The three year probation called “abstinence” which led up to it is the primitive catechumenate with its scrutinies. The prostrations of the credens before the Perfect were in their manner and import identical with the prostrations of the catechumen before the exorcist. We find the same custom in the Celtic church of S Columba. At the third scrutiny, the early catechumen passed a last examination in the gospels, creed and Lord´s Prayer, so after their year of abstinence the credentes receives creed and prayer. The litany with which the elder “handed on” this prayer is preserved, and the Abbé Guiraud remarks that it could easily be believed to be of Catholic origin, it is so Christian in tone! He remarks also that an inquisitor might have used it quite as well as a heretic.

All of those aspiring to the rank of Perfect are called Peter, as in the corresponding Armenian rite. He explains from scripture the indwelling of the spirit in the Perfect, and his adoption as a son by God—his adoption as the son of God. The Lord’s prayer is repeated by the postulant after the elder, who explains it verse by verse. Then comes the renunciation when the postulant reounces the church of the persecutors, the cross, earthly baptism, and the rest. Spiritual baptism is the laying on of hands while the gospel was pressed against the head of the Peter. Various passages are read and the Perfect is given the right to bind and loose. The Perfect agrees to adhere strictly to the ten commandments and the sermon on the mount. The Perfect replies:

I have this will and determination. Pray God for me that he will give me strength.

The second century Roman confiteor (“I confess”) follows:

Perfect postulant: For all the sins I have committed, in word or thought or deed, I come for pardon to God and to the Church and to you all.

Christian congregation: By God and by us and by the Church may they be pardoned thee and we pray God that He pardon you them.

Then comes the act of consolation. The presiding Perfect takes the gospel from a white cloth where it has been during the ceremony, and places it against the postulants’s head, while the other Good Men present place their hands on his head. Simple prayers are repeated several times, then they say:

Holy Father, welcome thy servant in thy justice, and send upon him thy grace and thy Holy Spirit.

Then they repeat the earlier prayers again ending with the Lord’s prayer and a quotation from the beginning of John. This Believer is now Perfect. The Perfect Ones present give the new one the kiss of peace and the rite ends.

The rite had been started by Christ and had been passed on by the bonhommes. It was the equivalent of the apostolic succession in Catholicism. The consolamentum could only be given by somebody who had received from another “good Christian” or a “Parfait”. It contrasted with the Catholic interpretation which was that the magical succession could be passed even through the hands of someone wicked. The Perfects were the Elect, the only ones properly able to use the Lord’s prayer which begins, “Our Father”, as adopted “sons” through the consolamentum. The Cathar church was organised into dioceses, whose bishops presided over the elder and younger sons, deacons, male perfecti and female perfectae, their priesthood. The believers prayed through the Perfects who were considered as saints—they were perfectly holy. Bernard of Clairvaux said that they lived basically good, even if heretical, lives.

Parfaits always travelled in pairs just as Jesus instructed the apostles to do, probably following Essene practice. The reasons were that a younger “son” would travel with an experienced one as an apprentice, and learn at the feet of the master, but also the two could preach more effectively together, and they could help each other to overcome any temptations that came their way. The Waldenses also travelled in pairs.

Like the Essenes a thousand years before, they were successful healers and doctors, with herbs and stones. The Cathars did not believe in a Last Judgement, believing instead that this material world would end only when the last of the angelic souls had been released from it, a marked difference from Zoroastrianism and conventional Christianity.

The life of a Perfect was so hard and so fraught with danger, once the persecution started by the Catholics, that most people left the consolamentum until their deathbed act. The Catholic deathbed sacrament of “extreme unction” was introduced to compete with the death-bed consolamentum of the Catharists.

The Parfaits were strictly chaste once they had received the consolamentum, so they had to leave their wife and family. A male Perfect could not lay his hand on a woman without incurring penance of a three day fast. They rejected all sexual concourse because it pandered to the physical pleasure of the material body and that was under the law of Satan. The sin of Adam and Eve had been coitus. Angels had no need of sexuality because they were immortal. In the kingdom of God, there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Parfaits were notional angels already, and could not compromise their provisional angelic status for worldly enjoyment.

The Perfect must also leave his father and mother, and his children. The family must be sacrificed to the divine kinship. He that loveth father or mother more than Christ is not worthy of him, nor he that loveth more his son or daughter. The teaching of Jesus was that those who had repented should take the most secure precautions against transgressing afterwards and losing their saved status, even going so far as to say that the repentant person should pluck out an eye rather than allow it to induce sinful thoughts.

Like Catholic priests and nuns they considered themselves married to their Church. Anything in the Gospel and the Apostle that seemed to approve of marriage was considered a reference to Christ and the Church, which makes sense as a Christian adaptation of the marriage of God to Israel, that it had been for the Essenes. The Christian Church had become the new Israel, and God had acted through Christ.

Paulicians did not have a rite of marriage and Cathars also repudiated it. Marriage and procreation were forbidden to the Parfaits because one must not collaborate in the work of Satan, who sought to imprison souls in their bodies. But, the Cathar religion placed no rules for ordinary Croyants to live by. Ordinary Cathar souls had to find their own path to purity, and rules did not help—experience did. The Catholic hierarchy aimed to control every Catholic’s salvation, to control them, and it was largely done by setting rules which could invite penances, guilt and fear. Living a blameless life was no good to the priests, who wanted a handle on the believer through the confession. Indeed, those who lived blameless lives were leaving themselves open to an accusation of heresy. Catholics brought before the inquisitors defended themselves by showing the turpitude of their lives.

Cathar Croyants were taught about the battle between good and evil, and were expected to join on the side of good, following the example of the Bonhommes, the living Christs on earth. The reincarnation of imperfect souls meant that the Cathars knew and accepted that procreation was necessary. Creatures had to be born into the world to provide residences for the imperfect souls to find their salvation from wickedness. Therefore Credentes had no vow of chastity, and could marry, though it was not encouraged. Cathars named their children on the eighth day, the day of circumcision of a Jewish boy.

Charles Molinier, an early twentieth century French historian, says Catholic and Catharist teaching on marriage are identical, but N A Weber, in the CE denies it. For the Cathari, no salvation was possible without previous renunciation of marriage, but, he argues, although the Catholic priest is forbidden to marry, married couples can enjoy eternal happiness in the married state. This might be the Catholic interpretation, but no one who can read Mark’s gospel can accept it. Answering Sadducees, Jesus plainly says that marriage does not exist in heaven. People go individually to heaven and there become sexless angels.

The Cathar Eucharist was a benediction of bread. The bread was blessed, but no one thought it was the body of Christ. Men and women approach a table and standing are conducted in “Our father”. The one who is ranked first among them takes the bread and says:

Thanks be to the God of our Jesus Christ. May the Spirit be with us all.

The bread was broken and distributed among them. They kept three Lents in the year, and fasted Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when they only took bread and water. The novitiate, like the Essene novitiate was for three years, and they were on a permanent fast of bread and water. They included wine in the humble repast at easter, and on some other occasions fish. Only fish was allowed of flesh because fish were not considered to indulge in sexual procreation. Cheese, eggs and milk all have plain sexual connotations and were absolutely forbidden. Besides that, they had the same idea as the Pythagoreans, since they accepted metempsychosis—any animal might be the home of a human soul. The Perfects were not allowed to kill anything. They followed the gospel of John, and the chief Perfect had a foot washing ceremony matching that which occurs only in that gospel.

A curious practice they had was to starve themselves to death when they felt the end of their life had come, after they had taken the consolamentum. This world was wicked, and once they had taken the consolamentum, elderly Cathars could see no point in prolonging life in it. The world of the spirit was assured, if they were sincere, and so then was immortality. They went into a final fast called the endura. Catholic propagandists made a great deal of this.

The Parfaits were forbidden to kill any animal and so would not fight or resist capture. If ill or tired of life through age they would fast to death in the endura, but they never did this to escape being burnt alive or tortured. They were determined to laugh at the Devil through whatever pain he could inflict, because they were certain that in death they had salvation. They were already angels. One inquisitor, in the thirteenth century, had estimated that there were originally 4000 Parfaits among the Cathars, a curious echo of the number quoted for the numbers of Essenes and Pharisees in Judaea at the time of Christ, and the number fed by the eucharistic mass feeding in the gospels. Most of these were burned at the stake rather that deny their faith. Only 14 Parfaits lived a century later.

Peter de Bruys founded a sect called the Petrobrusians who rejected infant baptism, the need for consecrated churches, ceremonies, transubstantiation, crosses and masses for the dead. He was an ascetic who overthrew altars and burnt crosses, and rebaptised his followers. The cross was the instrument of Christ’s death and so he destroyed them whenever he found them. It all identifies him as a Cathar. An angry crowd burnt him at the stake, setting a precedent adopted by the Church and the secular authorities for half a millennium. The incident suggests that there were many people who were not Cathars in the early twelfth century, or were upset by Cathar militancy.

Tanchelmus preached Cathar beliefs as far away as Utrecht in Holland. He denied the authority of the Roman Church, declared its sacraments were useless, and invalid when applied by immoral people. Whatever affected the body did not affect the soul, so that sexual pecadilloes were unimportant to salvation. He was killed in 1115.

Another was Henri de Lausanne whose followers were called Henricians. He too disapproved of the administration of the sacraments by the corrupt priesthood of the Church. Only poor honest priests could offer them validly. The priesthood had the opposite inclinations—wealth and graft. S Bernard of Clairvaux had him arrested.

Arnold of Brescia in Italy, a friend of Abelard, was also sentenced for heresy at Sens—in 1140, after being pursued by S Bernard of Clairvaux. Arnold believed in the spiritual virtue of poverty and living a pure life, and thought no priests should own property or have power in this fleeting world. The pope, Eugene III, granted him absolution. In 1145, he entered Rome which had been seized by the Romans who rejected the temporal power of the pope, had expelled him, and proclaimed a republic. Arnold denounced the Roman clergy, particularly the Curia. Otto of Freising wrote that the essence of Arnold’s preaching was:

Clerks who have estates, bishops who hold fiefs, monks who possess property, cannot be saved.

The “Patarins” remained in power for ten years before Hadrian IV, the only English pope, put the city under interdict, and the senate came to heel forcing Arnold to flee. This again shows how effective a weapon the interdict and excommunication was against princes and rulers. The German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, had Arnold arrested and delivered to Rome where Hadrian IV hanged him as a rebel, and burnt his body, in 1155. His followers joined the Waldenses.

Abelard also sounded Cathar in declaring that God had forgiven sin, out of his grace even before he sent Christ. God gave His forgiveness freely, and because of it, those who came to realise it automatically came to love God. Christ was sent as the example of what men should be. They respond to his perfect example by becoming conscious of their sin, and respond in love to be new people. Bernard of Clairvaux, considered a model Catholic, and sent to convert the Cathars, thought Abelard was heterodox and subversive. Bernard had him convicted of heresy at Sens. Abelard was excommunicated, and sought refuge in the famous monastery at Cluny where he was eventually reconciled with Bernard before he died in 1142. Even as late as this, the Church was not too neurotic about heresy.

Malcolm Lambert believes (Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation) heresy is short-lived, and smaller movements such as Petrobrusians and Speronists were successfully strangled almost at birth, but, though the Cathars, Paulicians, Beguines, and the Spiritual Franciscans were also suppressed into extinction, several larger sects like the Waldensians, Hussites, Lollards, Unitas Fratrum, and the Utraquists survived until the Reformation. Lambert thinks that once the Church had set its policy against them, it was remiss not to have extinguished them, although it would have been better to have responded. Extinction could not be success, one might imagine, but Lambert counts heretics as successful when they succeed in changing the Church or getting “toleration for their opinions and practices”. One could say, on one or other of these criteria, the heresies have today succeeded.

The question remains what caused them to keep re-emerging, in essence the same, even though many did not last. These minor heresies are artificially classified as different sub-species by their small differences, rather than classifying them into a species or even a genus, as they actually were. Lambert gives his own clue to this in that he discerns a “submerged reasoning piety, the beliefs of laymen who had their own devotional life” and had their “doubts about individual points of doctrine”. It was one of the most “underestimated forces in medieval Church history”. He is correct! Here is the genus of heresy—nothing less than the subterranean Primitive Christian Gnostic tradition that constantly sprouted new offshoots, even as the Church was burning away the root.

Lambert adds more in that “the intellectual appeal of the heretical leaders in the twelfth century is very limited” and that Wyclif wrote to stress “the guidance of the Holy Spirit on those of good life, but not necessarily of much learning, who seek to understand”. The plain implication here is that there was indeed a grass roots, non-intellectual piety that was different from the teachings of the established Church, and necessitated the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. When he states that “instruction was not adequate to guard the faithful against deviations of belief”, he admits that the vicars of Christ had neglected their duties to the grass roots, and that had they been educated in the changes that the established Church had wrought since the Donation of Constantine, they would not have “slipped into” or become “tainted” by heresy.

An educated piety could never be heretical because the heresies would have been educated out of the pious. Lambert thought it tragic that the Church was incapable of welcoming and cultivating these “unlearned” demands of lay piety, showing that he has no idea of the gravity of the Church’s neglect, and the source of the lay piety, he admires. He thinks it is an innate piety given by God’s grace, when it was the true (or a truer) religion of the original Christians.

The tragedy had been that so much enthusiasm had already slipped away, condemned to the twilight world of the sects.

No Christians ever stop to wonder whether the true Church of God might be that which is closer to the principles expounded by His son. If that is so, the heretics were true, and the established Church was grossly perverted. That is what the Cathar heretics thought, and that is also what their descendents, the Puritans, thought.

Further Reading

• More on the Millennium, when Christ failed to return, and notions of heresy began to take hold in the West
• More on the persecution of heretics
• More on documents pertaining to heresy
• More on the Inquisition

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