(2) Practices
"The Bogomils and the Cathars appear to differ from the earlier Marcionite and Manichaean dualists in their teachings on sexuality, at least for ordinary believers. Most of the older dualists called for the strictest asceticism - no meat or other animal foods, no wine, and no sexual activity. Marriage was opposed for several reasons. It is an attachment based on the body and its sexual appetites....In addition, marriage clearly promotes the bearing of children, which implies bringing new spiritual beings under the domination of fleshly bodies and so helping the cause of Evil....Because normal heterosexual intercourse is conducive to reproduction, it was discouraged, and various alternative forms of sexual activity encouraged in its place; the vulgar expression 'bugger' is a corruption of 'Bulgar', the name often given the Bogomils in the West because of their Balkan origin. Although these medieval Manichaeans did permit ordinary believers to live self-indulgent, licentious lives, it was expected that all Cathars would receive the ceremony of the consolamentum before death and thus die pure."
- Harold O.J. Brown, Heresies
"While the Cathars thought childbearing a great sin, they did not object to sexual motivations other than reproduction. Coupling the indifference placed on performance in the material world with the belief that all bodily sins would be erased by the consolamentum before death, Cathar society virtually destroyed any orthodox restrictions on sexual conduct. It is interesting to note that the population of Occitania grew rapidly during the years of the Cathar expansion."
- "Searching For A Cathar Feminism, 1100-1300"
"Ordinary believers did not receive the consolamentum until just before death, when it was plain that the end was near. This arrangement allowed ordinary believers to lead a fairly agreeable life, not too strict from the moral point of view, until the end approached. But once they were hereticated [the ordinary people's term for receiving the sacrament of the consolamentum], all was changed. Then they had to embark (at least in the late Catharism of the 1300s) on a state of endura or total and suicidal fasting. From that moment on there was no escape, physically, though they were sure to save their souls. They could touch neither women nor meat in the period until death intervened, either through natural causes or as a result of the endura."
- Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, The Promised Land of Error
"Fifteen or seventeen years ago, said Brune Pourcel (i.388), one dusk, at Easter, Guillaume Belot, Raymond Benet (the son of Guillaume Benet) and Rixende Julia, of Montaillou, brought Na Roqua to my house in a *bourras* [a rough piece of canvas]; she was gravely ill and had just been hereticated. And they said to me: 'Do not give her anything to eat or drink. You mustn't!'"
"That night, together with Rixende Julia and Alazai"s Pellissier, I sat up with Na Roqua. We kept on saying to her, 'Speak to us! Say something!' "
"But she would not open her lips. I wanted to give her some broth made of salt pork, but we could not get her to open her mouth. When we tried to do so in order to give her something to drink, she clenched her lips. She remained like this for two days and two nights. The third night, at dawn, she died. While she was dying, two night birds commonly called gavecas [owls] came on to the roof of my house. They hooted and when I heard them I said: 'The devils have come to carry off the late Na Roqua's soul!'"
- Brune Pourcel of Montaillou, as recorded in the Inquisition Register of Jacques Fournier
(Bishop of Pamiers in AriŠge in the Comte' de Foix from 1318 to 1325)
"The first heresy: marriage. There are indeed some among them to whom these words refer, who denounce and condemn marriage, and promise eternal damnation to those who remain in the married life until death."
"The second heresy: avoiding meat."
"The third heresy: the creation of flesh...that all flesh is made by the devil..."
"The fourth heresy: the baptism of children...They maintain that baptism can be of no value to the children who are baptized, because they cannot seek baptism of their own volition, and cannot make any profession of faith."
"The fifth heresy: baptism of water....Those who join their sect are rebaptized in a secret way, which they call baptism by fire and the Holy Spirit."
"The sixth heresy: the souls of the dead. They believe that at the hour of death the souls of the dead pass either to eternal happiness or to eternal damnation. They reject the view of the Church Universal that there are punishments in purgatory, in which the souls of certain of the elect are searched for the sins of which they were not fully cleansed by adequate penance in this life."
"The seventh heresy: contempt for the mass. They scorn and hold pointless masses celebrated in churches."
"The eighth heresy: the body and blood of the Lord. They believe that the body and blood of Christ cannot be made by our consecration, or received by us through communion."
"The ninth heresy: the humanity of the Savior. He [a former member] tells me that they are also in error about our Savior, believing that he was not truly born of the Virgin, and did not truly have human flesh, but a kind of simulated flesh; that he did not rise from the dead, but simulated death and resurrection."
"The tenth heresy: human souls. They say that human souls are apostate spirits which were expelled from heaven at the creation of the world; in human bodies they can come to deserve salvation through good works, but only if they belong to this sect."
- Eckbert of Sch”nau (1163)
"Catharism had two classes, or degrees. Laity were known as credents, or believers. They were not required to follow the rigid rules of abstinence reserved for the elect perfecti or bonhommes (good men), who formed the hierarchy of the Cathar church."
- Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects
"Whether Cathar or Catholic, every married woman could expect a fair amount of beating. As the man possessed the initiative in the courtship, he later on claimed the right to violence. The reaction to Guillemette Clergue's black eye is indicative of the sort of behavior expected from husbands. Through some accident or infection, Guillemette had a bad eye, and was travelling to find a cure. On the way, she encountered the perfectus Prades Tavernier, who assumed she had been beaten. Later, in her testimony to Jacques Fournier, Guillemette admitted to keeping her rapport with Tavernier a secret from her husband for fear of abuse, perhaps even death."
"Women could, however, be accepted among the perfecti; it is widely speculated that this was the main appeal of Catharism for women. The perfecti were the ministers of the Cathar faith, wandering in pairs throughthe countryside to be with the credentes. Women and men worked together to gain converts to the faith and maintaining devotion. To be a perfecta gave a woman a higher status than she could ever attain in the Catholic church."
- "Searching For A Cathar Feminism, 1100-1300"
"Anyone, man or woman, aspiring to join the perfecti faced a probationary period lasting at least two years. During that time, he or she gave up all worldly goods, lived communally with other perfecti, and abstained from partaking of meat and wine. To avoid temptations of the flesh, an initiate was denied all contact with the opposite sex and vowed never to sleep naked."
- Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects
"Through a ceremony called the consolamentum, the laying on of hands, a Cathar was inducted into the perfectus class. The ceremony not only eradicated any previous sins, but swore the Cathar to commit no more for the duration of their lives."
- "Searching For A Cathar Feminism, 1100-1300"
"They call the laying-on of hands the consolamentum, spiritual baptism, or baptisms of the Holy Spirit. Without it according to them, mortal sin cannot be forgiven, and the Holy Spirit cannot be conferred on anyone: it is given only by them, through the consolamentum. On this the Albaneses differ somewhat from the others. They way that the hand contributes nothing (since according to them it was created by the devil, as we shall see), and it is only the Lord's Prayer said by whoever performs the ceremony that is effective."
- Ranier Sacchoni (1250)"
The "much larger group, the credentes or the true believers, were subjected to no restrictions of their lifestyle. Any vocation could be followed. Unlike orthodox Christianity, Catharism imposed no restrictions on eating or drinking. Most significantly, the codes of sexual morality were lax. The only crucial obligations for a Cathar were to renounce all allegiance to the orthodox church, and to undergo the consolamentum before death."
- "Searching For A Cathar Feminism, 1100-1300"
In "Catholics, Heretics and Heresy, by Gilles C. H. Nullens...section 1.2, 'Introduction to the Cathar Religion', he mentions four surviving Cathar documents:
1. A Latin manuscript "The Book of the Two principles" kept in Florence is a translation made in 1260 from a work by the Cathar Jean de Lugio from Bergamo and written in 1230.
2. The Latin translation found in Prague in 1939 from an anonymous treaty written in Languedoc at the beginning of the 13th century. The author could be the Parfait Barthelemy of Carcassonne.
3. Latin Ritual of Florence
4. Occitan Ritual of Lyon"
- Dennis Stallings (private correspondence)
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The Albigensian Crusade
"The Roman clergy was corrupt and suffered by comparison with the Cathar 'parfaits' or 'perfected ones' who passed for Cathar clergy. Indeed, Saint Bernard, who traveled to Languedoc to preach against these heretics in 1145 A.D., was impressed by them: 'No sermons are more Christian than theirs, and their morals are pure.'"
- Michael Bradley, Holy Grail Across the Atlantic
"The Catholic church did what it could to combat the spreading Cathar heresy. At first, it tried to win Cathars back to the fold by dispatching teaching missions of Cistercian monks led by the head of the order, the future Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. The monks made few conversions, however, and the recalcitrance of the heretics dismayed Bernard, whose own efforts to reach them were met with boos and catcalls in the streets of Toulouse."
- Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects
"At the eleventh ecumenical council in the Lateran in 1179, Pope Alexander III pronounced the anathema on the Cathars and everyone who followed their teachings and defended them. All the faithful were called upon zealously to oppose this 'pest', and even take up arms against them. Whoever killed a Cathar was given an indulgence worth two years' penance and the protection of the Church as a Crusader."
- Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)
"On 5 August four men and a girl were taken outside the city [Cologne] and burned. The girl would have been saved by the sympathy of the people if she had been frightened by the fate of her companions and accepted better advice, but she tore herself from the grasp of those who were holding her, threw herself into the fire and was killed."
- Eckbert of Sch”nau (1163)
"Let men rise and come to our aid, and make themselves our rampart against these savage beasts. Arise, husbands, and fathers; arise, princes of nations and leaders of peoples. Drive off these vile animals, or put to flight at least the little foxes."
- Henry of Clairvaux
"... The Albigensian Crusade was essentially a crusade against Manichaeanism....In 1209 an army of some 30,000 knights and foot-soldiers from Northern Europe descended like a whirlwind on the Languedoc - the mountainous north-eastern foothills of the Pyrenees in what is now southern France. In the ensuing war the whole territory was ravaged, crops were destroyed, towns and cities were razed, a whole population was put to the sword. This extermination occurred on so vast, so terrible a scale that it may well constitute the first case of 'genocide' in modern European history. In the town of Beziers alone, for example, at least 15,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered wholesale - many of them in the sanctuary of the church itself.
- Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
The Knights Templar were also ordered by the pope to help crush the Cathars. "The knights readily complied, burning the French towns of Albi and Toulouse in 1209."
- Sebastian H. Lukasik, "Death of a Kingdom: The Battle of Hattin", Command Magazine, Issue 44, Aug. 1997
At at the siege of Be'ziers, 1209, when the military commander asked the pope's representative how he might distinguish heretics from true believers, the reply was:
"Kill them all. God will recognize His own."
- Papal legate Arnaud-Amalric
"Maybe the last 'pure ones', as they voluntarily gave themselves up to the besiegers outside their fortress of Monts‚gur on 12 March 1244 and walked to their death at the stake on the Champ des Cr‚mats, the 'field of the burned', found consolation in the words of their favorite letter of St John:"
- Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)
"Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you."
- 1 John 3:13
"It was under Innocent III [reigned from 1198-1216] - although not at his behest - that the infamous Fourth Crusade was diverted from the Holy Land to the capture and sack of Constantinople."
- Harold O.J. Brown, Heresies
"Christ, in who |
