Cathars and Their Legacy

Back in the Middle Ages, there have been many religious restraints due to the great power of the Roman Catholic Church and its Inquisition. Any individual or group who made any slight sign of thinking outside the Catholic box, was bound to end up burnt on a stake. Anyway, out of the numerous sects that appeared despite the great menace of the Inquisition, is the Cathars.

There are many contemporary references to Cathars and Catharism. Thus, there appear many Cathar characters in video games, in T.V. series, or in the music of such bands as "Era", for instance. In fact, "Era" seems to openly express its fascination with the Cathars and their mysterious legacy. Their songs are partly in Latin, partly in English, and have a catchy, out-of-this-world sound. Their videos are quite beautiful and expressive, full of such Cathar symbolism. For instance, let's take the video of the song "Mother". The very first image is that of a little girl dressed in white, found in a white graveyard, apparently in front of her mother's tomb. Suddenly she can see a Cathar cross falling in her hand, a sort of gift from her mother, who, as the video suggests, has left this devilish material world and joined the land of pure spiritual freedom. The lady in the picture on the gravestone, that is the pretty little girl's mother, dances all through the video, dressed in a black dress. Only the spiritual elite of the Cathars used to wear dark clothes, the so-called "Parfaits/Parfaites", or Perfect Ones, namely those who had received the so-called "consolamentum", a sort of baptism of the Holy Spirit. Cathars believed that all creation was evil, as it was the work of Satan, and that humans were striving to break free from the demonic prison of their own body. Those who received consolamentum were saved from the matter and would start up a new life of asceticism and purification, until their final liberation through death.

Although they called themselves "Christians" and claimed to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus and His disciples, they had many ideas that seem to contradict the Christian doctrine. Such is the principle of dualism, the idea that the God of the Old Testament was in fact the evil one, and he created the material world, whereas the God of the New Testament was the truly loving and forgiving One. The God of the New Testament had created the spiritual creatures and elements. They also rejected the idea of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, as they did not share the common belief that Christ took a human body, and they claimed He was a sort of spiritual ghost, and therefore he could not have actually died on the cross. They also stated that he was not resurrected. Jesus was in fact reincarnated, according to the Cathar beliefs.

Many Cathar nuances are to be found in literary works, if we only think for example of the strange resemblance between their ideas and the "words, words, words" of Shakespeare's Hamlet:

"O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!"

Naturally, such uncanny theories could not have been tolerated by the Catholics, the main Christian authority in medieval times. When peaceful attempts of conversion failed, they took arms against tens of thousands of "heretics", who preferred to shed their blood in the name of their faith. Cathars in fact used to practice suicide by starvation, or other means, in order to get sooner to their long-dreamed of spiritual realm. The crusade against them took place mainly in the 13th century France. Those regions in which Catharism flourished make up the French part that still bears the name "The Cathar Country" (Le Pays Cathare).

Cathars often claimed to have a certain mysterious legacy, that some supposed referred to the Holy Grail, or their books. At any rate, what is fascinatingly unbelievable nowadays is the presence of Cathar elements in the present-day, updated Catholic doctrine. Fascinating how people embrace what they once casted away!