An Age of Persecution
The Paulicians and Bogomili
"The sect's ancestry can be traced back to the third and fourth centuries. Cathar communities arose in Italy, France, the Iberian peninsula and even n the East, a development which took place against the background of the terrible persecution of Christians in 249 and 250 under Decius. After the death of the Emperor in 251, a dispute ensued among the Roman congregations. One strict group refused to accept those who had denied their faith during the persecution, and made the Presbyter Novatian counter-Pope against Cornelius, who was supported by Cyprian. They argued that the Church did not have a 'power of attorney' to forgive sins. They called themselves Cathars, the pure ones, and developed theological ideas which represented an extraordinary danger for the orthodoxy; they contested the power and authority of priests to forgive sins, which gave them a hold over the people." Instead the Cathars "relied totally on the power of the Holy Spirit, which works from the inmost being of each individual."
- Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)
"It was this essentially spiritual insistence on purity, in relation to a world totally evil and diabolical, which gave rise retrospectively to a probably false etymology of the word Cathar, which has been said to derive from a Greek word meaning 'pure'. In fact 'Cathar' comes from a German word the meaning of which has nothing to do with purity."
- Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Montaillou,, The Promised Land of Error
"The Cathars disappeared as an organized sect in Europe quite suddenly in the first half of the fifth century. But in the East the Novatian Cathars continued, supported by the apocalyptic sect of the Montanists. In those turbulent times, when Augustine could count twenty-eight heresies, and Gnosticism and Manichaeism were fully developed as churches, the Cathars went underground."
- Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)
"The Armenian Gregorian Church has through the centuries suffered cruel persecution and several attempts at systematic extermination. It also had to contend with dangerous heresies, particularly that of the Paulicians, or Tondrakites. These Paulicians, who feature prominently in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, were medieval successors of the early Christian Gnostics, and of the Manichaeans. The Paulicians, whose teachings were much attacked and distorted by their enemies, apparently held that St Paul was the only true Apostle, rejected the Old Testament, and claimed that the world was created by a spirit at war with the God of the New Testament. They had strong iconoclastic tendencies, smashing images and even crosses whenever they could."
- Burney and Lang, The Peoples of the Hills
"Although the problem of the Paulicians has not been settled with any precision, the general opinion of historians is that it orginated as a mixture of Manicheism and Marchionism in the province of Armenia, then part of Byzantium, at the end of the 7th century, and it was linked to the name of of a certain Constantine. It was because this teaching strove to renew the old form of Christianity on the basic of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle that its supporters called themselves the Paulicians. The Byzantine Tsar Constantine V Copronymus (741-775) moved some of these Paulicians from Armenia to Thrace, then again in 778 another group was settled in the same region by Tsar Leo IV Hazarski (775-780). Paulist propaganda swiftly began to spread from Thrace over the Balkans, primarily among the neighboring countries, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece."
- Dragan Tashkovski, Bogomilism in Macedonia (Macedonian Review Editions, 1975)
"From AD 830, the Armenian branch of the Paulician movement was centered on a village called Tondrak, hence the name Tondrakites. They attacked the feudal privileges of the Armenian barons, who united with the clergy in persecuting and suppressing them. The Tondrakites are hailed by modern Soviet historians as ancestors of present-day Communism; a tract purporting to be their manual of doctrine was published in 1898, under the title The Key of Truth. The Paulicians are also important for their influence on the development of Bogomilism in the Balkans, where there were important Armenian colonies, particularly in Bulgaria."
- Burney and Lang, The Peoples of the Hills
In the ninth century in Armenia, "it was in the marginal and mountainous regions of those parts that Gnostics and other heretics of various persuasions had taken refuge from those edicts of the emperors of Constantinople which had made heresy a capital crime. Among these outlaws were the so-called Paulicians, a sometimes warlike sect of an apparently mixed 'Manichean'-gnostic origin but whose beliefs may have served better to dissociate themselves from the political control of the emperors. In 872 a military victory was won over the Paulicians and some of them were deported to the Balkans."
"In the tenth century we first hear of the Bogomil Church in Bulgaria. Bogomil is Bulgarian for 'beloved of God' [or is derived from the prayer 'God have mercy!'] and it may be that their founder took this name. Among their beliefs was that characteristically gnostic one which held that the Father of Jesus Christ was not the creator of the world."
- Tobias Churton, The Gnostics
"The essence of Mani's message surfaced again in the teachings of a tenth-century Bulgarian priest named Bogomil. He also believed that all natural things were evil and filthy. They were the work of the devil, whom Bogomil claimed to be the elder son of God and the brother of Christ."
- Cosmic Duality
"The Bogomil movement appears to have begun as a radical dualism, teaching two eternal principles, evil and good, like Persian Zoroastrianism; later it was modified into a less radical form, which looked on the dualism it saw in the world as the result of the rebellion of the one God's eldest son, Sataneal."
- Harold O.J. Brown, Heresies
Besides Satanael, God the incorporeal Father had another son, Jesus or [the Archangel] Michael. "Satanael formed man of earth, but his life came from the Father. Jesus took the semblance of a body, to combat and conquer Satanael."
- John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions
"...Bogomili held that the works of Satanael, were absolutely distinct from the spiritual universe of God. The manifestation of Christ on earth and is Crucifixion were seen by Bogomil as mere illusions. The Bulgarian's followers...taught that the Virgin Mary had not actually given birth to Christ but that he had entered her body through her right ear and then issued forth again as a phantom. Even the cross on which Christ had been killed was to be reviled, according to the Bogomils, because it had been made by Satanael.
"Marriage and procreation, which could lead only to the production of yet more matter, were abhorred within this view, along with meat, wine, churches, and any form of church hierarchy. The Bogomils rejected the sacrament of baptism and denied the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The only set way for devout followers to express their faith was by reciting the Lord's Prayer at regular intervals night and day."
- Cosmic Duality
"During the early twelfth century, Bogomil missionaries began the journey up the Danube to the west, possibly as a result of the persecution of Bogomils in Constantinople. What remains a mystery is whether these Bulgarian missionaries were, in fact, the direct founders of Catharism in the Languedoc [from langue d'oc, the Occitan language which, along with Latin, was used in Cathar rituals]."
- Tobias Churton, The Gnostics
"Probably under the influence of Bogomil and Cathar heretical tendencies toward dualism, apocryphal books of Christian legends (such as The Wood of the Cross, Gospel of Nicodemus, How Christ Became a Priest, Adam and Eve, and Interrogatio Iohannis) circulated in both eastern and western Europe. They usually stressed the role of Satan as co-creator of the world or as a being whose fall is responsible for the evil world that exists. The devil plays a major role in legend, and his activity usually exhausts the creative energies of the good God, who falls into passivity."
- Encyclopaedia Britannica
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The Cathars
(1) Beliefs
"Manichaeans appeared in Aquitaine, leading the people astray. They denied baptism, the cross, and all sound doctrine. They did not eat meat, as though they were monks, and pretended to be celibate, but among themselves they enjoyed every indulgence. They were messengers of Antichrist, and caused many to wander from the faith."
- Adh‚mar of Chabannes (c. 1018)
The Cathars "never refer to Mani, the prophet of the Manichees and although they shared certain characteristics of Manichaeism, the heretics themselves thought of themselves not as representatives of a new revelation, as the Manichees did, but as true or good Christians. Their chief source of doctrine was the New Testament, holding particular attention to The Gospel of John and the other three gospels. The word 'Cathar' comes the Greek word katharos meaning 'unpolluted'..."
- Tobias Churton, The Gnostics
The Cathars "called themselves Christians, based their teaching on the parts of the Bible that they recognized, notably the Gospels and the Acts, clothed much of their doctrine in Christian garb, and increasingly as time went on, some historians now argue, drew closer to Christianity in their attitudes and assumptions. But they differed from Christians at a fundamental point: they believed not in one God but in two....All their life and teaching was derived from one premise of overwhelming importance, that creation was a dual process: there was a kingdom of good which was immaterial, and a kingdom of evil - the material world - into which their souls had fallen or been led captive, and to which belonged their bodies, the prisons of the evil god. In every material body a soul was immured, and salvation consisted of escape from the flesh. The procreation of the flesh, therefore, and the consumption of its products, meat, milk, eggs, were the perpetuation of the kingdom of evil, to be avoided by those who aspired to good."
- R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy
"The Cathars believed in reincarnation and repudiated the tenet of eternal damnation for sinners. A soul was obliged to live many lifetimes in a human body until it achieved salvation. If earthly bodies were evil, as the Cathars taught, then God could not become incarnate in a man. Therefore, according to the Cathars, the Christian Christ was not God, only an emissary of God; he became a man in appearance only. To the Cathars, the sacraments that the Catholic church claimed to confer divine grace through material elements such as water, bread and wine were inherently blasphemous. Marriage was also condemned, as it led to the production of children and so entrapped more spiritual souls in evil, material bodies."
- "Searching For A Cathar Feminism, 1100-1300"
The Cathars "rejected baptism, the cross as a symbol, individual confession, and all religious ornamentation. Church services were simple and could be held anywhere. They consisted of a gospel reading, a brief sermon, a benediction, and the Lord's Prayer. The Cathars' back-to-basics approach to the liturgy anticipated the simplicity of some of the later Protestant sects."
- Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects
"And he [Satan] imagined in order to make man for his service, and took the lime of the earth and made man in his resemblance. And he ordered the angel of the second heaven to enter in the body of lime; and he took another part and made another body in the form of woman, and he ordered the angel of the first heaven to enter therein. The angels cried exceedingly on seeing themselves covered in distinct forms by this mortal envelopment.:
- The Cathar Les Questions de Jean
"The author of the work goes on to recount how Sathanas made Paradise for the purpose of making the 'man' and 'woman' sin. He accomplished his malicious purpose and so further held the angelic souls in bondage. The rite of consolamentum, the 'enspiriting' of the Cathar effectively released the soul from the grip of the devil's material bondage and united it with the spirit of God, the Holy spirit, which until the rite exists, as it were, in a dormant state attending the delivery made possible by the love of Christ. The perfectus could now, in all truth call God 'Father'."
- Gerard Zucherro, Rosamonda
"Souls could only find release from this wandering transmigration if they came to dwell in the body of a Catharically 'perfect one' or 'good Christian'."
- Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)
"They think that the devil went to heaven with his angels, fought a battle against the Archangel Michael and the angels of the good god, and carried off a third of his subjects. Then he imprisoned them in human bodies and in animals, changing them from one body to another until they should all be led back to heaven. Hence they call all these subjects of God as they see them, 'the People of God', 'Souls', 'Sheep of Israel', and many other such names."
"They claim that the Son of God did not really assume human nature from the Blessed Virgin, who was an angel, but only the appearance of it. They say that he did not truly eat or drink, suffer or die, and was not buried or resurrected: all of this was only in appearance, for we read in Luke, 'being [as it was supposed] the son of Joseph'. They interpret all Christ's miracles in the same way.
They say that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all the ancient fathers and also John the Baptist were enemies of God and servants of the devil. The devil is the author of the whole of the Old Testament, except for the books of Job, the Psalms, Solomon, Wisdom, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and twelve of the prophets, some of which they way were written in Heaven - that is, before the fall of Jerusalem, which they think was Heaven.
"They teach that this world will never come to an end, that the Last Judgment has already been made, and will not be made again, and that hell, eternal fire and eternal punishment are in this world and nowhere else."
- Raineir Sacchoni (1250)
"...One important Cathar symbol was the dove. It represented for them then, as it does for us today, the idea of 'peace' or, more accurately the more subtle concept of 'grace', that state of being in God's love. After the first crusades, when the European Cathars in the entourage of Godfroi de Bouillon established some contact with the Sufi mystics of Islam, the symbolism of the dove sometimes became linked inconographically with the Islamic mystical idea of baraka, with also means ' grace' and with the idea that a person can be a 'vessel of grace'....In some instance, the Cathar dove flying with its wing outstretched was rendered in an artistic motif very similar to the stylized ship meaning baraka [bark] in Sufi calligraphy, with the feathers of the dove and the oars of the vessel alike representing the flight and freedom of the soul."
- Michael Bradley, Holy Grail Across the Atlantic
"In the Old Testament account of the Creation, the spirit of God hovers like a bird above the primeval sea, wafting with its wing-beat the breath of God into the slime from which the world was made (Genesis 1:2). So Pliny speaks of 'that famous breath (spiritus) that generates the universe by fluctuating to and fro as in a kind of womb.' It is much the same imagery that portrays the Holy Spirit fluttering down on the head of Jesus at his baptism (Matthew 3:16), making him, too, a 'Bar-jona', 'Son of a Dove'."
- John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
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