Holy Blood, Holy Grail (5 page)

Sauniere must also have been familiar with the numerous legends attached to the Cathars. He must have known of the rumours connecting them with that fabulous object, the Holy Grail. And if Richard Wagner, in quest of something pertaining to the Grail, did indeed visit Rennes-leChateau, Sauniere could not have been ignorant of that fact either.

In 1890, moreover, a man named Jules Doinel became librarian at Carcassonne and established a neo-Cathar church.” Doinel himself wrote prolifically on

Cathar thought, and by 1896 had become a prominent member of a local cultural organisation, the Society of Arts and Sciences of Carcassonne.

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In 1898 he was elected its 41 secretary. This society included a number of Sauniere’s associates, among them his best friend, the Abbe Henri Boudet.

And Doinel’s own personal circle included Emma Calve.

It is therefore very probable that Doinel and

Sauniere were acquainted.

There is a further, and more provocative, reason for linking the Cathars with the mystery of Rennes-leChateau. In one of the parchments found by

Sauniere, the text is sprinkled with a handful of small letters eight, to be precise quite deliberately different from all the others. Three of the letters are towards the top of the page, five towards the bottom. These eight letters have only to be read in sequence for them to spell out two words “REX 1vtuNDt’. This is unmistakably a Cathar term, which is immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with Cathar thought.

Given these factors, it seemed reasonable enough to commence our investigation with the Cathars. We therefore began to research into them, their beliefs and traditions, their history and milieu in detail. Our inquiry opened new dimensions of mystery, and generated a number of tantalising questions.

The Albigensian Crusade

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. When an officer inquired of the pope’s representative how he might distinguish heretics from true believers, the reply was, “Kill them all. God will recognise His own.”

This quotation, though widely reported, may be apocryphal Nevertheless,

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it typifies the fanatical zeal and bloodlust with which the atrocities were perpetrated. The Map 3 The Languedoc of the Cathars

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same papal representative, writing to Innocent III in Rome, announced proudly that

“neither age nor sex nor status was spared’.

After Beziers, the invading army swept through the whole of the Languedoc.

Perpignan fell, Narbonne fell, Carcassonne fell, Toulouse fell. And, wherever the victors passed, they left a trail of blood, death and carnage in their wake.

This war, which lasted for nearly forty years, is now known as the Albigensian Crusade. It was a crusade in the true sense of the word. It had been called by the pope himself. Its participants wore a cross on their tunics, like crusaders in Palestine. And the rewards were the same as they were for crusaders in the Holy Land remission of all sins, an expiation of penances, an assured place in Heaven and all the booty one could plunder. In this Crusade, moreover, one did not even have to cross the sea.

And in accordance with feudal law, one was obliged to fight for no more than forty days assuming, of course, that one had no interest in plunder.

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By the time the Crusade was over, the Languedoc had been utterly transformed, plunged back into the barbarity that characterised the rest of

Europe. Why? For what had all this havoc, brutality and devastation occurred?

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the area now known as the Languedoc was not officially a part of France. It was an independent principality, whose language, culture and political institutions had less in common with the north than they had with Spain with the kingdoms of

Leon, Aragon and Castile. The principality was ruled by a handful of noble families, chief of whom were the counts of Toulouse and the powerful house of Trencavel. And within the confines of this principality, there flourished a culture which, at the time, was the most advanced and sophisticated in Christendom, with the possible exception of Byzantium.

The Languedoc had much in common with Byzantium. Learning, for example, was highly esteemed, as it was not in Northern Europe. Philosophy and other intellectual activities flourished; poetry and courtly love were extolled;

Greek, Arabic; and Hebrew were enthusiastically studied; and at Lunel and

Narbonne, schools devoted to the Cabala the ancient esoteric tradition of

Judaism -were thriving. Even the nobility was literate and literary, at a time when most Northern nobles could not even sign their names.

Like Byzantium, too, the Languedoc practised a civilised, easy-going religious tolerance in contrast to the fanatical zeal that

characterised other parts of Europe. Skeins of Islamic and Judaic thought, for instance, were imported through maritime commercial centres like Marseilles, or made their way across the Pyrenees from Spain. At the same time, the Roman

Church enjoyed no very high esteem; Roman clerics in the Languedoc, by virtue of their notorious corruption, succeeded primarily in alienating the populace. There were churches, for example, in which no mass had been said for more than thirty years. Many priests ignored their parishioners and ran businesses or large estates. One archbishop of Narbonne never even visited his diocese.

Whatever the corruption of the church, the Languedoc had reached an apex of culture that would not be seen in Europe again until the

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Renaissance. But, as in Byzantium, there were elements of

complacency, decadence and tragic weakness which rendered the region unprepared for the onslaught subsequently unleashed upon it. For some time both the Northern European nobility and the Roman Church had been aware of its vulnerability, and were eager to exploit it. The Northern nobility had for many years coveted the wealth and luxury of the

Languedoc. And the Church was interested for its own reasons. In the first place its authority in the region was slack. And while culture flourished in the Languedoc, something else flourished as well the major heresy of medieval Christendom.

In the words of Church authorities the Languedoc was “infected’ by the

Albigensian heresy, ‘the foul leprosy of the South’. And although the adherents of this heresy were essentially non-violent, they constituted a severe threat to Roman authority, the most severe threat, indeed, that Rome would experience until three centuries later when teachings of Martin

Luther began the Reformation. By 1200 there was a very real prospect of this heresy displacing Roman Catholicism as the dominant form of Christianity in the Languedoc. And what was more ominous still in the

Church’s eyes, it was already radiating out to other parts of Europe, especially to urban centres in Germany, Flanders and Champagne.

The heretics were known by a variety of names. In 1165 they had been condemned by an ecclesiastical council at the Languedoc town of Albi.

For this reason, or perhaps because Albi continued to be one of their centres, they were often called Albigensians. On other occasions they were called

Cathars or Cathares or Cathari. In Italy they were called Patarines. Not infrequently they were also branded or stigmatised with the names of much earlier heresies Arian, Marcionite and Manichaean. “Albigensian’ and “Cathar’ were essentially generic names.

In other words they did not refer to a single coherent church, like that of Rome, with a fixed, codified and definitive body of doctrine and theology. The heretics in question comprised a multitude of diverse sects many under the direction of an independent leader, whose followers would assume his name.

And while these sects may have held to certain common principles, they

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diverged radically from one another in detail. Moreover, much of our information about the heretics derives from ecclesiastical sources like the Inquisition. To form a picture of them from such sources is like trying to form a picture of, say, the French Resistance from the reports of the SS and Gestapo. It is therefore virtually impossible to present a coherent and definitive summary of what actually

constituted

“Cathar thought’.

In general the Cathars subscribed to a doctrine of reincarnation and to a recognition of the feminine principle in religion. Indeed, the preachers and teachers of Cathar congregations, known as parfaits (“perfected ones’), were of both sexes. At the same time, the Cathars rejected the orthodox

Catholic Church and denied the validity of all clerical hierarchies, or official and ordained intercessors between man and God. At the core of this position lay an important Cathar tenet the repudiation of “faith’, at least as the Church insisted on it. In the place of ‘faith’

accepted at second hand, the Cathars insisted on direct and personal knowledge, a religious or mystical experience apprehended at first hand. This experience had been called “gnosis’, from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’, and for the

Cathars it took precedence over all creeds and dogma. Given such an emphasis on direct personal contact with God, priests, bishops and other clerical authorities became superfluous.

The Cathars were also dualists. All Christian thought, of course, can ultimately be seen as dualistic, insisting on a conflict between two opposing principles good and evil, spirit and flesh, higher and lower.

But the Cathars carried this dichotomy much further than orthodox Catholicism was prepared to. For the Cathars, men were the swords that spirits fought with, and no one saw the hands. For them, a perpetual war was being waged throughout the whole of creation between two irreconcilable principles -light and darkness, spirit and matter, good and evil.

Catholicism posits one supreme God, whose adversary, the Devil, is ultimately inferior to Him. The Cathars, however, proclaimed the existence not of one god, but of two, with more or less comparable status. One of these gods the ‘good’ one was entirely disincarnate, a being or principle of pure spirit, unsullied by the taint of matter.

He was the god of love. But love was deemed wholly incompatible with

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power; and material creation was a manifestation of power. Therefore, for the Cathars, material creation the world itself was intrinsically evil. All matter was intrinsically evil.

The universe, in short, was the handiwork of a ‘usurper god’, the god of evil or, as the Cathars called him, “Rex Mundi’, “King of the World’.

Catholicism rests on what might be called an “ethical dualism’. Evil, though issuing ultimately perhaps from the Devil, manifests itself primarily through man and his actions.

In contrast, the Cathars maintained a form of “cosmological dualism’, a dualism that pervaded the whole of reality. For the Cathars, this was a basic premise, but their response to it varied from sect to sect. According to some Cathars, the purpose of man’s life on earth was to transcend matter, to renounce perpetually anything connected with the principle of power and thereby to attain union with the principle of love. According to other Cathars, man’s purpose was to reclaim and redeem matter, to spiritualise and transform it.

It is important to note the absence of any fixed dogma, doctrine or theology. As in most deviations from established orthodoxy there are only certain loosely defined attitudes, and the moral obligations attendant on these attitudes were subject to individual interpretation.

In the eyes of the Roman Church the Cathars were committing serious heresies in regarding material creation, on behalf of which Jesus had supposedly died, as intrinsically evil, and implying that God, whose ‘word’ had created the world “in the beginning’, was a usurper. Their most serious heresy, however, was their attitude towards Jesus himself.

Since matter was intrinsically evil, the Cathars denied that Jesus could partake of matter, become incarnate in the flesh, and still be the Son of God. By some Cathars he was therefore deemed to be wholly incorporeal, a ‘phantasm’, an entity of pure spirit, which, of course, could not possibly be crucified. The majority of Cathars seem to have regarded him as a prophet no different from any other a mortal being who, on behalf of the principle of love, died on the cross. There was, in short, nothing mystical, nothing supernatural, nothing divine about the Crucifixion if, indeed, it was relevant at all, which many Cathars appear to have doubted.

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In any case, all Cathars vehemently repudiated the significance of both the Crucifixion and the cross -perhaps because they felt these doctrines were irrelevant, or because Rome extolled them so fervently, or because the brutal circumstances of a prophet’s death did not seem worthy of worship. And the cross at least in association with Calvary and the Crucifixion was regarded as an emblem of Rex Mundi, lord of the material world, the very antithesis of the true redemptive principle.

Jesus, if mortal at all, had been a prophet of Ahs oR the principle of love. And

AMOR, when inverted or perverted or twisted into power, became ROMA Rome, whose opulent, luxurious Church seemed to the Cathars a palpable embodiment and manifestation on earth of Rex Mundi’s sovereignty. In consequence the