Cathars The Pure Ones Albigensian Tradition Gnostics — Dark ChamberZ Temple of Knowledge

Cathars

The Pure Ones

Albigensian Tradition Gnostics

“You cannot please both God and the world at the same time. They are utterly opposed to each other in their thoughts, their desires, and their actions.” Saint John Vianney

Cathars

Source: https://www.worldhistory.org/Cathars/

The Cathars (also known as Cathari from the Greek Katharoi for “pure ones”) were a dualist medieval religious sect of Southern France which flourished in the 12th century CE and challenged the authority of the Catholic Church. They were also known as Albigensians for the town of Albi, which was a strong Cathar center of belief. Cathar priests lived simply, had no possessions, imposed no taxes or penalties, and regarded men and women as equals; aspects of the faith which appealed to many at the time disillusioned with the Church.

Cathar beliefs ultimately derived from the Persian religion of Manichaeism but directly from another earlier religious sect from Bulgaria known as the Bogomils who blended Manichaeism with Christianity. Cathars believed that Satan had tricked a number of angels into falling from heaven and then encased them in bodies. The purpose of life was to renounce the pleasures and enticements of the world and, through repeated incarnations, make one's way back to heaven. To this end, the Cathars observed a strict hierarchy:

Perfecti – those who had renounced the world, the priests and bishops
Credentes – believers who still interacted with the world but worked toward renunciation
Sympathizers – non-believers who aided and supported Cathar communities

Cathars rejected the teachings of the Catholic Church as immoral and most of the books of the Bible as inspired by Satan. They criticized the Church heavily for the hypocrisy, greed, and lechery of its clergy, and the Church's acquisition of land and wealth. Not surprisingly, the Cathars were condemned as heretical by the Catholic Church and massacred in the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229 CE) which also devastated the towns, cities, and culture of southern France.

Origins & Beliefs

Almost everything known about the Cathars comes from confessions of “heretics” taken by Catholic clergy during the inquisition which followed the Albigensian Crusade. The belief structure can easily be traced back to Manichaeism which traveled via the Silk Road from the Byzantine Empire and the Middle East to Europe where it became entwined, under certain circumstances, with Christian belief and symbolism.

The orthodox view of the Catholic Church was that there was one God with three aspects – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – but this orthodoxy was not part of the vision of early Christianity and was not generally accepted until after the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE (convened by Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome) ruled in favor of it. Even then, the Nicaean interpretation of Christianity vied with others for centuries. The so-called heretical movements of the Middle Ages such as the Bogomils, the Cathars, and the Waldensians were simply the latest challenges to the Church, but they were significant because they were the first to set themselves up as a legitimate alternative to Catholicism in any form.

Cathar beliefs included:

Recognition of the feminine principle in the divine – God was both male and female. The female aspect of God was Sophia, “wisdom”). This belief encouraged equality of the sexes in Cathar communities.
Metempsychosis (Reincarnation) – a soul would be continually reborn until it renounced the world completely and escaped incarnation.
Cosmic Duality – the existence of two powerful deities in the universe, one good and one evil, who were in a constant state of war. The purpose of life was to serve the good by serving others and escape from the cycle of rebirth and death to return home to God.
Vegetarianism - though eating fish was allowed to credentes and sympathizers.
Celibacy for perfecti – celibacy was also encouraged generally since it was thought that every person born was just another poor soul trapped by the devil in a body. Marriage overall was discouraged.
The dignity of manual labor – the Cathars all worked, priests as well as laypeople, many as weavers.
Suicide (known as the ritual of endura) as a rational and dignified response under certain conditions.

Earlier heresies such as Arianism, while still condemned, at least adhered to the same essential dogma of the Church; the Cathars rejected and repudiated every aspect of the Church, including most of the books of the Bible. Scholar Malcolm Barber notes:

“They believed that the devil was the author of the Old Testament except these books: Job, the Psalms, the books of Solomon [Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon], The Book of Jesus son of Sirach [better known as the Book of Ecclesiasticus], of Isaiah, Ezekiel, David, and of the twelve prophets.”

The Book of Two Principles

The only books of the New Testament they accepted were the gospels, completely rejecting the epistles of Paul and the others, with a special emphasis on the Gospel According to John. Their central religious text was The Book of Two Principles, passages of which would be read by one of the perfecti to a congregation and interpreted for them by another member of the group. The Book of Two Principles related, among other aspects of the faith, the dualist nature of life and how humans, once divine spirits of light, came to be bound in corruptible mortal flesh.

The story goes that the devil came to the gates of heaven and requested entry but was denied. He waited outside the gate for a thousand years, watching for a chance to slip in, and one day he saw his opportunity and took it. Once inside, he gathered an audience of divine spirits around him and told them they were losing out by continuing to love and serve God who never gave them anything. They were little more than slaves, he said, since God owned everything they thought they had. If they would follow him, however, and leave heaven, he could provide them with all kinds of pleasure such as lovely vineyards and rich fields, beautiful women and handsome men, wonderful riches, and the best wine.

Many souls were seduced and for nine days and nine nights they fell through the hole in heaven the devil had created. God allowed this for those who wished to leave but other souls were falling through the hole and so God sealed it. After the souls had fallen, they found themselves in the devil's realm without any of the good things he had promised and, remembering the joys of heaven, they repented and asked the devil if they could return. The devil replied that they could not because he had fashioned for them bodies which would bind them to earth and cause them to forget all about heaven.

The devil made the bodies easily enough but could not manage to attach the souls to them so they would think, feel, and move; vexed by this, he asked God for help. God understood that the souls who had fallen would have to work their way back to his grace and that they could do so through struggling with these bodies so he made a deal with the devil: the devil could do as he liked with the bodies, but the souls which animated them belonged to God. The devil consented, and humans were created.

Trapped in these bodies, the soul would live, die, and be reborn in another as long as that soul remained attached to the body and the pleasures which the devil had promised it back in heaven. Once the soul renounced the body and all its temptations, it would be freed to return to God and resume its former state. The whole purpose of human existence was this struggle against the devil (known as Rex Mundi, “the king of this world”) and the prison of the flesh.

Cathars and Cathar Beliefs in the Languedoc

Source: https://www.cathar.info/cathar_beliefs.htm#tenets

Like the earliest Christians, Cathars recognized no priesthood. They did however distinguish between ordinary believers (Credentes) and a smaller, inner circle of leaders initiated in secret knowledge, known at the time as boni homines, Bonneshommes or "Goodmen" , now generally referred to as the Elect or as Parfaits. Cathars had a Church hierarchy and a number of rites and ceremonies. They believed in reincarnation, and in heaven, but not in hell as it is now normally conceived by mainstream Christians.

The Cathar view was that their theology was older than that of the Roman Church and that the Roman Church had corrupted its own scripture, invented new doctrine and abandoned the beliefs and practices of the Early Church. The Catholic view, of course was exactly the opposite, they imagined Catharism to be a badly distorted version of Catholicism. In addition to accusing the Cathars of faulty theology, they imagined a range abominable practices which would have been amusing except that, converted into propaganda, they led to the death of countless thousands through the Cathar Crusades and the Inquisition.

The Roman Church seemed to have successfully extirpated Cathars and Cathar beliefs by the early fourteenth century, but the truth is more complicated. For one thing, modern historians have shown that many Catholic claims were false, while they have vindicated many Cathar claims; and there is a case that the Cathar legacy is more influential today than has been at any time over the last seven hundred years.

Cathars were Dualists. That is, they believed in two universal principles, a good God and a bad God, much like the Jehovah and Satan of mainstream Christianity. As Dualists, they belonged to a tradition that was already ancient in the days of Jesus. (The revered Magi in the nativity story were Zoroastrians - Persian Dualists). Dualism came, and still comes, in many flavours. Even the Cathar variety came in more than one flavour, but the principal one was this: The Good God was the god of all immaterial things (such as light and souls). The bad God was the god of all material things, including the world and everything in it. He had contrived to capture souls and imprison them in human bodies through the process of conception. As Cathars put it, we are all divine sparks, even angels, imprisoned in tunics of flesh.

According to later Cathar ideas, when we die the powers of the air throng around and persecute the newly released soul, which flees into the first lodging of clay that it finds. This "lodging of clay" might be human or animal. The soul would therefore be condemned to a cycle of rebirth, trapped in another physical body. By leading a good enough life human beings or rather their souls could win freedom from imprisonment and return to heaven, the immaterial realm of the good god. For members of the Elect, those who had undertaken the Consolamentum, death was no more than taking off a dirty tunic.

The realm of the Good God, heaven, was filled with light. Some Cathars regarded the stars as divine sparks, or souls, or angels, in heaven. The realm of the bad god was the material world in which we serve out our earthly terms. Satan had entrapped these divine sparks and created humankind as their prison. Thus there was a part of the Good God trapped in all men and women, longing to rejoin its Maker. The Bad God filled humankind with temptations to frustrate souls from ever making that reunion. They could be tortured by disease, famine and other travails, including man's own inhumanity to his fellow man. Yet the Bad God had no power over the soul - a divine spark of the Good God. His remit was confined to material things. Any hell that existed was here on this material earth. To confound the Bad God it was necessary to abstain from all earthly temptations and to strengthen the inner spirit by prayer. It was an argument that seemed to provide a rational explanation for all the misfortunes of the world.

Dualist ideas had a long history, stretching back well into pre-Christian times. All of the essentials were known to the Greek philosophers. Plato held that the soul yearns to fly home on the wings of love to the world of ideas. According to him it longs to be freed from the chains of the body. Early Christianity had adopted Neoplatonist ideas. Neoplatonism taught a doctrine of salvation alongside Dualism. Human bodies were material objects made of earth and dust, but our immortal souls were not, they were sparks of the divine.

The divine was characterized as light, opposed to the darkness. According to Plotinus, souls were illuminated by the divine light. Matter on the other hand was just darkness, and had no real existence. These Neoplatonist ideas were an integral part of Early Christianity, later dropped in mainstream Christianity when it switched from Plato's philosophy to Aristotle's as a result of Thomas Aquinas's attempts to reconcile Christianity with Aristotle's philosophy. The Cathars' teachings on this, as on many other matters, reiterate those of the early Church. They provide one of a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence that their origins date from early Christian times.

The idea that flesh was inherently evil became popular in mainstream Christianity too - it was formalized in the concept of Original Sin and was enormously popular up until the twentieth century. Significantly, the doctrine of Original Sin was invented by St Augustine, a Christian who had previously been a Manicaean - ie a Gnostic Dualist. Today this traditional teaching is played down, and it comes as a shock to many Christians to hear the words like that of the Burial service from the Book of Common Prayer, contrasting an evil material body with a good spiritual one: ".... our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it may be like to his glorious body."

Cathars were also Gnostics. Gnostics believed, and still believe, that divine knowledge is granted only to an inner elite, like the "esoteric" knowledge of the Pythagoreans. The inner elite undertook a long period of training before becoming being formally accepted as members of the elite, and thereafter leading severely ascetic lives. Their lives of meditation, fasting, hardship, poverty and good works matched exactly the highest ideals of Catholic and Orthodox hermits, monks and friars. The Cathar Elect are now popularly known Parfaits or "Perfects", though they never referred to themselves as such. They also believed in metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls, as had the Pythagoreans. In other words, both Pythagoreans and Cathars believed not only in reincarnation but in the rebirth of the soul in animals as well as humans - and both refrained from eating meat for exactly this reason.

Cathars were also universalists, which means that they believed in the ultimate salvation of all human beings. Here is an account of how they saw themselves, recorded in 1143 or 1144 by Eberwin, Prior of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Steinfeld writing to Bernard of Clairvaux (St Bernard):

‘Of themselves they say: "We are the poor of Christ, who have no fixed abode and flee from city to city like sheep amidst wolves, are persecuted as were the apostles and the martyrs, despite the fact that we lead a most strict and holy life, persevering day and night in fasts and abstinence, in prayers, and in labour from which we seek only the necessities of life. We undergo this because we are not of this world. But you, lovers of the world, have peace with it because you are of the world. False apostles, who pollute the word of Christ, who seek after their own interest, have led you and your fathers astray from the true path. We and our fathers, of apostolic descent, have continued in the Grace of God and shall so remain to the end of time. To distinguish between us and you Christ said "By their fruits you shall know them". Our fruits consist in following the footsteps of Christ.’ (Sancti Bernardi epistolae, (letter 472, Everwini Steinfeldensis praepositi ad S. Bernardum) cited by Walter L Wakefield & Austin P Evans Heresies of the High Middle Ages, (Columbia, 1991) p. 129.)

Many early Christian writings reflect the same early Christian distaste and even loathing of the material world. Most of these writings were discarded from the orthodox version of the New Testament, but a few passages made it into canonical scripture. Here is an example of one:

John 2:15-17: Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.

Paradox - 700 Years On - Lyrics

Lyrics

[How the events of the 13th century are remembered today, and does it really have any boaring on today's society]

A country splintered by religion

Torn by anarchy

Heretics burned for their derision of the holy See

Seven hundred years on

World, do you recall

Just what happened then

Gentlemen and Gentlewomen

Let into the pyre

Seven hundred years ago

Let's think

Images of war

Flashing swords, burning homes

The Albigensian Crusade

See the ruins upon the hills

Just seven hundred years on

So now in nineteen eighty nine

How much do we know

Except for learned scholars

No-one knows at all

Blind

Apathy

Forgotten

A part of history

Flashing swords, burning homes

The Albigensian Crusade

See the ruins upon the hills

Just seven hundred years on

To blind to see that religion's free

Believe what you believe

Established Churches still don't agree

Seven hundred years on

Heresy a different route

From mother church in Rome

See us, we're hurting no-one

Why can't you leave us alone

Hunted

Persued

Burnt

Marched into the fire

Oh, then!

Cathars The Pure Ones Albigensian Tradition Gnostics

A 15th century CE illustration showing the expulsion of the Cathars heretics from Carcassonne during the Albigensian Crusade in southern France (1209-1229 CE). (British Library, London)

Pictures Videos Music and Additional Reading

The Perfecti and the Consolamentum

Above is a rare picture of Cathar perfecti from contemporary medieval sources. The perfecti or "perfect ones," also referred to as the bons hommes or "good men," were the elite of the sect who were bound to abstain from meat and carnal relations. In the illustration the consolamentum or "baptism of light" is being conferred upon a dying Cathar Believer, as Franciscan friars try to intervene.

Source: https://teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2010/04/perfecti-and-consolamentum.html

Chant of the Gnostics: Lo Boier - Cathar Music - Gnostic Chant - Gnosticism - Catharism - Le Bouvier

"Lo Boier" is a mysterious Chant left for us by the Gnostic Cathars, when they were killed and annhiliated by religious powers in the 13th/14th century. It is highly symbolically and contains a hidden message for spiritual seekers. Singer: Patrick Lenk.

In the center wall of the chamber directly opposite the door sat two men in midnight blue robes, girt with cinctures and scrolls. Each had long hair, with the foreheads shaved from ear to ear, and bearded faces. The hair of one was grey; the other, black, but both had visages that were gaunt, pale, and strangely illumined, with black-lidded eyes. Raphaëlle froze to see Raymond crouched on the floor at their feet, like a vigilant snake, ready to bite if provoked. Terror rose in her at the memory of the morning’s attack upon herself by Raymond, and she fought the desire to run away.

Esclarmonde prostrated, touching her face to the floor, before the grey-haired Perfectus, saying, “Good Christian, grant me God’s blessing and yours.” She performed the gesture three times, each time she asked for the blessing. It reminded Raphaëlle of how her father had described the worship of the Saracens.

~The Night's Dark Shade by Elena Maria Vidal

Catharism

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism

Catharism (/ˈkæθərɪzəm/ KATH-ər-iz-əm; from the Ancient Greek: καθαροί, romanized: katharoí, "the pure ones") was a Christian quasi-dualist or pseudo-Gnostic movement, which thrived in the anti-materialist revival in Southern Europe, particularly in northern Italy and southern France, between the 12th and 14th centuries. Denounced as a heretical sect by the Catholic Church, its followers were attacked first by the Albigensian Crusade and later by the Medieval Inquisition, which eradicated the sect by 1350. Many thousands were slaughtered, hanged, or burnt at the stake, sometimes without regard for age or sex.

Followers were known as Cathars or Albigensians, after the French city Albi where the movement first took hold, but referred to themselves as Good Christians. They famously believed that there were not one, but two Gods—the good God of Heaven and the evil god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4). According to tradition, Cathars believed that the good God was the God of the New Testament faith and creator of the spiritual realm.

Many Cathars identified the evil god as Satan, the master of the physical world. The Cathars believed that human souls were the sexless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god. They thought these souls were destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the "consolamentum", a form of baptism performed when death is imminent. At that moment, they believed they would return to the good God as "Cathar Perfect". Catharism was initially taught by ascetic leaders who set few guidelines, leading some Catharist practices and beliefs to vary by region and over time.

Herbst9 - Consolamentum

Dark Ambient, Industrial, Tribal

The Wounded Kings Consolamentum Consolamentum

Lyrics

These seven gates lay open

Bare flesh and naked soul

The flames of wrath

Reach out to claim us now

In the time of the fifth moon

The lady of the silver wheel

A woven cloth of Ether

From the heart of the Dragon Queen

How long must we wait

Before the dawn

How long must we wait

Before the darkness fades

These seven gates lay open

Resist the devil’s toll

The veil must part

Death has no dominion now

In the time of the fifth moon

The lady of the silver wheel

Blazing cloth of Ether

A kiss from the Dragon Queen

How long must we wait

Before the dawn

How long must we wait

Before the darkness fades

Je t`ai aime dans le passe.

Je t`aime aujourd hui.

T`aimerais encore dans l`avenir.

Le temps revient.

(Spoken prayer of the Cathars)

(I have loved you before.

I love you today.

And I will love you again.

The time returns.)

Consolamentum [3x]

Free from voice

Ascension - Consolamentum

Lyrics

1. Asleep...Awake, my heart

2. Reflection, aware of the necessity to slay the sibling. Teach me the failure of lower two.

Sow and reap unity in my heart. As I shall become one in thee.

3. Rebellion, no heart beats in my chest. Rise above earthly contraries and broken mirrors.

Rod of equilibrium, born of yourself. Suspended in chains. Conjunction, a heart beats not in my chest.

4. As the wise mistaker spoke. There is only light in darkness. As I wander down the darkest valleys,

no shadow may cast on me. A world released of vileness and compassion, down in the core of light.

A word released of chains and contradiction, down in the core of light.

5. As the serpent passed the chalice of faith, I may be released from starvation.

As I wandered along the rivers of truth, I distinguished they never could stay still.

6. And god never spoke of peace (but the double-edged blade), knight under the banner of mixed blessing,

march, stumble, release yourself from this soul. O Heroine, dressed in white and red,

O Heroine, slay the unjudged.

7. O angel of the burning sun. In maternal love. Lactating, spilleth simmering tardrops down on me.

Searing, sealing my lips and aflameth my tongue. Thou art sky, concede me to ascend.

I cut this silent oath of love out of trembling flesh.

8. Consolamentum, nourished by fire a heart is pure. Sired of ash a soul will live.

Let me see what they see not, visions clearly while eyes rot. A gracious star fell burning from the sky,

O timeless king, you teached me how to die.

This song is dedicated to the 220 perfect cathars who were burned in steak near the castle Monsegur in 1244. According to the legend they didn't die but ascended to the Heavens in immortal bodies.

In the illustration the consolamentum or "baptism of light" is being conferred upon a dying Cathar Believer, as Franciscan friars try to intervene. After receiving the consolamentum no food or drink could be administered to the sick person so that starvation would usually hasten the dying process. Death by starvation was called the endura. According to a biographical article about St. Dominic de Guzman:

The Albigensian dislike for marriage, for motherhood, for the eating of animal flesh, for the sacraments, for the clerical state and monasticism, for private property and physical beauty, etc., are all derived from this one fundamental idea that the physical world was evil. 14

It was the hope of every Albigensian to achieve a level of asceticism so profound that he would stop eating altogether and abandon the use of physical comforts. Those among these heretics who attained to this level of mortification were known as the Perfect. The Perfect were the prophets of this heretical system, and they commanded a tremendous level of respect from their coreligionists. Within Albigensian society, they were responsible for the administration of the heretical “sacrament” of Consolamentum.

The Consolamentum was administered by the Perfect to other, less observant members of the community known as Believers, who, due to their attachment to the things of the world, had no hope of attaining salvation on their own. The Consolamentum was administered by the Perfect to the Believers at the moment of death, by the placing of the Perfect’s hand on the head of the Believer....The Endura was necessary because the administration of the Consolamentum could only be performed once in a person’s life, and it was seen as absolutely necessary to assure the salvation of the non-Perfect among the members of the community. 15

Year of No Light - Consolamentum (Full Album)

Track lists

1. Objuration - 00:00:00

2. Alètheia - 00:12:46

3. Interdit aux vivants, aux Morts et aux Chiens - 00:20:26

4. Réalgar - 00:31:36

5. Came - 00:44:22

The Albigensian Crusade

Source: https://teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2010/04/perfecti-and-consolamentum.html

The Albigensian Crusade was a Crusade against the people of the Languedoc which began in 1208. It is also known as the Cathar Crusade. Like all crusades it was a war, declared by the Pope, (Innocent III) backed by the Roman Church with promises of remission of sins and a guaranteed place in heaven. Why is it called the Albigensian Crusade rather than the Cathar Crusade ? In order to answer this, it is important to remember that Cathar is only of many names the Roman Church invented for members of this particular brand of Gnostic Dualism. Among any other names, they were called Albigensians, from the (erroneous) belief that they were concentrated in the town of Albi. The term Cathar has become the standard term for them only in recent times.

The term Albigensian Crusade (or Cathar Crusade , or Cathar Wars) is used loosely to describe a series of formal Crusades, interspersed with continual warfare against the people of the Languedoc which lasted for some forty years. The (unspecified) target of the Crusade was Raymond V of Toulouse and his vassals, but Raymond joined the Crusade himself. This meant that he and his vassals came under the protection of the Church.

That is why the first stages of the Crusade were directed against Béziers and Carcassonne, which did not belong to Raymond of Toulouse, but to a close relative Ramon-Roger Trencavel. The trick did not work for long, and soon Raymond was excommunicated and his castles were under attack. After the initial sieges of Béziers and Carcassonne, the (mainly French) Crusader forces were led by Simon de Montfort and later his son Amaury de Montfort, who were responsible for series of bloody battles, sieges and massacres. Voltaire wrote about this crusade against the people of the Languedoc.

Ascension - Angel of the Burning Sun

Lyrics

A fire was falling from heaven, enlightening the skies of night.

Where serpents winds storm and dark waters form a maelstorm he,

crowned with halo of death and the scepter of damnation erected his temple of heresy.

And he bears the torch of salvation.

Lucifer - Lightbearer

Lucifer - King divine

Eosphoros - Lightbearer

Eosphoros - Prince of mine

Unto my spirit send thy flame now as I follow thee into the night.

In the absence of all senses the circle shall crack under the weight of thy light and pride.

Under thy wings I shall walk from life and I shall see truth.

The darkness of thy flaming fall, the mark of rebellion I shall carry through aeons to come.

Lucifer - Lightbearer

Lucifer - King divine

Eosphoros - Lightbearer

Eosphoros - Prince of mine

I believe now. I am free of life. I pound myself to dust again, so grant me thy pestle.

Rise and raise the merciless claw, to crush this earthly vessel.

Lucifer - Lightbearer

Lucifer - King divine

Eosphoros - Lightbearer

Eosphoros - Prince of mine

Lucifer - Lightbearer

Lucifer - shining one

Eosphoros - Lightbearer

Angel of the burning sun