MONTSÉGUR AND THE TRUTH WE DARE NOT SPEAK

“Montségur has become a place of pilgrimage for all those who have realized that their souls have been stolen.” — Jean Markale, Montségur and the Mystery of the Cathars

“But I say that he who created and made the visible things of this world is not the true Creator.” - from The Book of the Two Principles, 13th c., attributed to John of Lugio.

Let me tell you a scary story. There is a good God, and there is a bad God, and they each hold equal pull on your soul. You are the rope in their cosmic tug of war. The bad God accounts for the evil in the world, and there is a lot. You might even say, especially on days when everything seems ready to take a sharp turn to the dark side, that evil defines the world. But the good God, who accounts for all that’s beautiful and loving in the universe, for the light that pours forth from a newborn star, puts up a good fight, doggonit. You might even say, especially on that day you hear your infant son or daughter laugh for the first time, that it’s the good God who keeps the universe from collapsing in on itself or flying apart, which the physicists tell us is only a matter of what they call a phase transition in the Higgs field, or maybe a bit more or less dark matter. Yes, in some ways, this seems a children’s story, or perhaps one for simple-minded adults who need a conspiracy theory to explain why things are the way they are. But I suspect that somewhere, deep down, it’s a conspiracy theory to which many of us subscribe. Luke Skywalker certainly did. So, seemingly, did David Lynch. And so did the pure-hearted Cathars of the Languedoc.

It begins with what theologians and philosophers call the problem of evil. Where did it come from and why can’t God make it go away? Rationalists might frame an answer in terms of ethics, and speak of evil in a relative sense, e.g., the absence of good, without really defining what good is. But they won’t grant evil the rank of an independent force, much less one personified by a supernatural being. Atheists will say God can’t banish evil because there is no God and there is no evil, and leave it at that. Religious people will speak of evil as a falling away from God, from the straight and narrow path, or perhaps, like Saint Augustine, as a sexually transmitted disease. But all will make it an essentially human problem. They’ll either be with the fundamentalists in saying that we took a bite of the wrong apple because we wanted to be like God, or with the less sanguine evolutionary psychologists in saying that sociopathic behavior was hard-wired into us from the start. We’re killer apes, after all. Even worse are the nihilists, who say that everything is and always was fucked.

The Cathars, preeminent heretics of history, believed that evil was sewn right into the fabric of the cosmos, alternating stitch for stitch with good. And they thought we could do something about it, both on earth (up to a point) and in heaven. The world—that is, the material world, into which we are born, grow old and die—is ultimately unsalvageable, because it was the creation of the bad God. But the spiritual realm, the realm of the good God, is accessible to us and is awaiting our return, because, you see, our true ancestry lies with the angels. Our souls, which were stolen away from heaven aeons ago by the bad God, still retain a spark of our original divinity. The bad God, in some accounts, started out as the good God’s son, but went astray, or rebelled, more or less like Cain, or Oedipus. The version I prefer is that God was originally One, perfect, self-contained, neither bad nor good because those things don’t matter if you’re perfect, and then split, fractured, came apart, with the bad God hurtling down, down, down into the cosmos of matter, taking all those souls with him, and aeon by aeon, sphere by sphere, spinning out a world that is a mere facsimile, a simulacrum, or if you’re with Elon Musk, a simulation. If you fail to realize this, and blithely live your life getting and spending day-after-day in the Matrix, then you’re condemned to perpetual imprisonment in life after life on the wretched wheel. If that sounds like the Buddhist concept of samsara, or the Hindu notion of maya, it’s because it basically is. But if you see the light, if you become a hearer, if you give up the life of the world and become a Parfait (not the dessert, but the French word for Perfect), you can return.

I said that this was a scary story. For whom? you ask. Isn’t it good news that we come from angels and can return to them? Wouldn’t things be better if we were all truly created equal, no one could enslave or make war on us, and all we had to do was live simple lives of charity and compassion, avoiding meat and meat by-products, until our time on earth was up? Think about it, because along with that deal comes the acknowledgement that until then, we are waking up every day in Hell. We will never be king, or duke, or pope, or CEO, or Taylor Swift because, well, if we made that choice, we’d never get our wings back and anyway, what would be the point of being Taylor Swift in Hell? Procreation? Why? That only keeps the wheel of samsara spinning, and it can’t be good to bring children into an evil world (the Cathars may have been the first anti-natalists). In the time of the Cathars and their dualist forebears and fellow travelers like the Bogomils of Bulgaria, ascendant from roughly the 11th to the 13th centuries, this story was so horrifying to institutions of Church and State— to anyone, in fact, who had an investment in worldly life—that in the first half of the 12th century, tens of thousands of Cathar men, women, and children were massacred in the name of God. The bad God, the Cathari would undoubtedly have said. It was a kind of genocide, or more accurately, an ideocide.

The most hideous of these massacres took place in cities like Beziers and Toulouse, but the most legendary took place at Montségur.

The story of the Cathars of Medieval Europe is the story of a community of believers who solved the problem of evil with a split decision. It was, in many ways, a logical decision, but one that no orthodoxy, then or now, could sanction. The Cathars concluded that “the human experiment” was a terrible mistake, and if that was true, then no priest or potentate need be obeyed. All were corrupt. Most corrupt of all was the Church of Rome, which Jesus—the original Perfect—would surely have purged just as he had the Temple in Jerusalem. Earthly existence was not so much a test as a prison sentence, to be endured by living in the manner of the New Testament Apostles and fanning that divine spark until its heat was sufficient to return us (usually at death) to the embrace of the Good God. Most of what we know about the Cathars comes from the records kept by their enemies, which, of course, makes it suspect. But scholars have recently brought certain documents to light that give us a fuller picture, among them the 13th c. Book of the Two Principles, attributed to one John of Lugio. In Section [13], we read: On the Principle of Evil. Therefore, it behooves us of necessity to confess that there is another principle, one of evil, who works most wickedly against the true God and His creation; and this principle seems to move God against His own creation and the creation against its God, and causes God himself to wish for and desire that which in and of himself He could never wish for at all.

This, in a nutshell, is dualism, and dualism has been the bane of orthodoxy pretty much since Constantine, though it goes back long before this, at least to the Orphics of 6th c. BCE, and probably farther. It is, in fact, an unfathomably ancient creed, representing a schism in the human mind, and it arises from trying to make sense of evil and suffering, as well as the feeling that there is something “other” about us—as in “other than material”—what religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal calls “the Human as Two.” Dualism’s most distilled expression was Manichaeism, the religion founded in 3rd century CE Persia by the prophet Mani, but it’s also at the core of Gnosticism, which during the first centuries after Christ fought for ascendancy with what became orthodox Christianity, and you can even find traces of its lineage in Buddhism. There are radical dualists and moderate dualists, but all believe in the ultimate seprateness of flesh and spirit (or, if you prefer, of body and mind), with flesh being susceptible to corruption (evil) and spirit representing “our better angels.” When you say that you are a spiritual person, you are speaking, in a fashion, as a dualist, because you are recognizing this separateness. Interestingly, dualists, whether Orphics, Gnostics, Bogomils, today’s BDSM-inclined ascetics, or even many in the posthumanist and anti-natalist camps, have always come from the intellectual elite. Whatever they are, they are not ignorant peasants. The Cathars were dualism’s expression par excellence, and they made their last stand at Montségur—a place of great mystery that, nearly eight centuries later, continues to draw latter-day heretics, pilgrims, trekkers, scholars, neo-hippies and New Agers, all of them looking for what the French call le Pays Cathare, a state of mind as much as a geographical place.

I made my own pilgrimage to Montségur in the early spring of this year. Even for the hinterlands of rural southern France, the village seems almost impossibly miniature, especially in view of its outsized historical importance. It is a fulcrum on which the history of the West turned. As Stephen O’Shea writes in The Perfect Heresy, speaking of the phase of the Middle Ages that culminated here in 1244, “a threshold was crossed in the ordering of men’s minds.” Montségur was and still is a threshold, a liminal place that brings into confrontation two completely different ways of seeing the world. That confrontation, and the psychic disturbance it causes, is why two-hundred people were burned alive here. We don’t burn heretics anymore—not literally, anyway—but the worldview held by the Cathars is no less dangerous now than it was eight centuries ago. We still put it to torch and sword. Because it quite literally scares the hell out of us.

When we are in Montségur, we are in the Languedoc (now called Occitania, the southernmost administrative region of France), where the rocky ground provided fertile soil for the rebellion against Church and King that provoked the bloody Albigensian Crusade, and later, the Inquisition, perhaps the most shameful display of man’s intolerance until the Holocaust. If the wholesale slaughter that occurred here cannot quite be called genocide, it was certainly history’s premier example of an ideological pogrom. In Montségur, we are also in the Pyrenees Mountains, which are all that separate us from Occitania’s spirit-twin of Catalonia. With a year-round population of just 116, a single restaurant, and a city hall managed by a fellow who seems to be mayor, chief of police, and coroner all rolled into one, Montségur barely registers a blip on Google Maps. You won’t find a Starbucks within fifty miles, and if you’re there off-season, as I was, it may feel eerily as if you’ve wandered on to an abandoned movie set (“French hamlet, circa 1300”). You also may feel, as I did, that eight centuries of time have dissolved in the mists that swirl around the 3900 foot “pog” (from the Occitan for peak) that lords over the village, atop which sit the ruins of the castle that was the last stronghold of Catharism, where, in a seige lasting nine months from mid-1243 to March 1244, the Pope sent a ten-thousand man army against fewer than five-hundred men, women and children, all of whom were pacifists and, in most visible ways, exemplary Christians. Occitania is the part of ‘the South’ that Cote d’Azur-bound tourists don’t visit in the summer, but that holds far and away the greatest historical and cultural fascination, not to say the greatest mysteries, for this is also the country of the Grail, and Montségur is, by some accounts and in popular longing, the Grail castle. How do Cathars and the Holy Grail connect? The Da Vinci Code gave us a breathless popular account, based in part on the Cathars’ scandalous belief that Jesus and Mary Magdalene produced a child, but that’s for another article. The deeper truth is that they connect by way of that schism in the mind that fosters dualism, a belief system so ancient and marvelous that most of us would be surprised to learn that it is still very much with us.

Cathar has been interpreted as deriving from the Greek word for pure, but by a number of reputable scholars as a defamatory epithet that alludes to the libelous allegation, promulgated by the Inquisition, that these Medieval mavericks, in their most solemn ritual, planted loving kisses on the anus of a black cat as a prelude to a non-procreative orgy (the Cathars, who foreswore reproduction along with meat and all products of animal intercourse, were also derided as Bougres, or sodomites, but this actually derives from the probable origin of their faith in Bulgaria). But this is all a sideshow. The reason the Cathars, most of whom were simple weavers or tradesmen who practiced a gentle and ascetic Christianity, had to be hunted down and slaughtered, is that they spoke of a truth that could not and still cannot be spoken of: that God has an enemy, and that enemy, in its material form, is represented by the world, by the worldly institutions to which we cede power, and by us. To contend that earthly existence is an exile, that the life of the flesh is without value except as preparation for our return to a spiritual home, is pretty much the definition of heresy. It’s also at the hidden shadow-heart of virtually every human belief system. The binary -0- to our affirmative -1-. The flipside. The stark possibility that wakes us up in a cold sweat and can drive us to sainthood or madness.

I climbed the trail to the Castle of Montségur on a cool but sunny morning in March. On the way to the magnificent ruins at the Pog’s summit, you pass a grassy, level area with a marker identifying it as the Field of the Burned. The locals will tell you that the burning took place a bit further down the mountain, but it doesn’t really matter. Precise coordinates are irrelevant here. Everything at Montségur feels shifted in time and space, as if into a parallel set of dimensions, a reality as alien to our own as life on another planet. And yet, when I arrived and stood within the walls of the castle, letting the sunlight pour down on the crown of my head, I felt strangely comforted, embraced, maybe even winged. They say that the Cathar martyrs marched into the fire singing, certain in their faith and freed at last from the charade of earthly existence. Perhaps they were deluded. Perhaps they knew something we’ve chosen to forget. For when you look around at the catastrophe we call the world, at the butchery, the tyranny, the suffering, the ignorance, do you not see evidence of an enemy?

From the Book of the Two Principles:

“Now it must be kept in mind that no one can point to the temporal and visible existence of the evil god in this world, nor, indeed, to that of the good God. But a cause is known by its effects. From this, it should be understood that no one can prove him to be an evil god or a creator, except by the fact of his evil works or his fickle words. But I say that he who created and made the visible things of this world is not the true Creator. This I intend to prove by the fact of his evil works and his fickle words, assuming to be true what our opponents most openly affirm, that the works and words which are recorded in the Old Testament were actually produced, visibly and materially, in this world."