Since their demise, many legends have circulated about the Cathars, usually centring around the so-called Cathar Treasure, and their relationship with the Troubadours and the Knights Templar. Much of this is the result of the romanticisation of Catharism by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers such as Napoléon Peyrat and Déodat Roché, whose work we will examine later in this chapter. However, such legends have actually been circulating since at least the 1320s,109 and deserve to be briefly outlined below, as they have played a crucial role in shaping the mystique surrounding the Cathars, which has in turn helped retain the interest and imagination of the public, speculative historians and mystics for generations.
Perhaps the most enduring myth about the Cathars is that they possessed the Holy Grail, the cup said to have been used by Christ at the Last Supper, which also caught drops of his blood at the Crucifixion. Although, as will be noted below, modern writers have managed to get a great deal of mileage out of the Grail, they did not invent the Cathar/Grail myth. It originated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while Catharism was still very much alive.
These Grail stories began in the city of Troyes, courtesy of the quill of Chrétien de Troyes; his Conte del Graal, written around 1180, is the first mediaeval Grail narrative.110 It concerns the attempts of King Arthur’s knights to attain the Grail, but, due to Chrétien’s death, it breaks off before the quest is completed. The story was picked up by Robert de Boron, whose Joseph of Arimathea (c. 1200) Christianises the story, and then by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Wolfram’s greatest work is Parzival (c. 1200–1210), which is frequently read as an allegory of spiritual development, betraying the influence of the east (Wolfram was thought to have gone on Crusade) and also of alchemy. In Wolfram’s poem, the Grail castle is called Munsalvaesche, which some (see below) have taken as a coded reference to Montségur, as both names have the same meaning, ‘safe, or secure, mountain.’ Wolfram continued to write about the Grail in the unfinished Titurel, which was fleshed out and completed by Albrecht von Scharfenberg. Albrecht’s poem, Jüngerer Titurel (c. 1272), seems to be making a direct link between the Grail and the Cathars, when he names the first king of the Holy Grail ‘Perilla’. This is the Latinised version of the name of Montségur’s lord, Raymond Pereille. Why does Albrecht make this link? Coincidence? Literary fashion? Or did he know some secret about the Cathars, whose existence he wanted to hint at in the poem?
Speculative writers argue there was indeed a secret: the Cathars possessed the Grail, and draw attention to one dramatic event that seems to corroborate this. During the siege of Montségur, either just before the two-week truce in March 1244, or during it, four Cathars scaled down the mountain in the dead of night, carrying with them a ‘treasure’, which was then either hidden in a nearby cave, given to other Cathar groups, or entrusted to the Knights Templar. Whatever this treasure was, it had to be portable enough to be carried down a precipitous mountainside, and a chalice would certainly fit the bill. Montségur’s sergeant, Imbert of Salles, however, told the Inquisition that the Cathar Treasure was merely money and precious stones.111 But stories about secret hordes of Cathar treasure persisted. Some held that the treasure was simply vast amounts of money, hidden at various locations, while others argued that the treasure could be nothing so mundane or vulgar, that it comprised secret texts or sacred documents, containing divine wisdom and revelatory truths. Conveniently for the myth, the four Cathars disappeared from history, taking the treasure with them.
Although the Grail is usually depicted as a cup (sometimes a platter), Wolfram’s grail, in Parzival, was said to be a stone, which recalls the Philosopher’s Stone in alchemy. However, there have been alternative interpretations of the Grail. One of the more controversial suggestions is that the Grail is, in fact, the womb of Mary Magdalene, which was seen as the chalice that caught Christ’s blood not on Calvary but after the wedding at Cana, at which Jesus and the Magdalene became man and wife, after which they raised a family. The Magdalene hypothesis suggests that the Holy Grail, which is san graal in French, is, in fact, a misspelling of sang real, the holy blood, meaning the bloodline of Jesus and the Magdalene. This theory has most famously been explored in Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln’s classic The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. More recently, it has been the subject of Dan Brown’s global bestseller The Da Vinci Code. However, the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene does not originate with Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln: one of the Cathars’ inner teachings, which was only passed on to the Perfect, was that the Magdalene was Jesus’s wife.112 This is puzzling, to say the least, as the Cathars despised marriage. Furthermore, it was not a belief inherited from the Bogomils. It is possible, in believing that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, that the Cathars were reflecting a popular Languedocian tradition, but we cannot be certain.
The two groups with whom the Cathars are most often associated are the Troubadours and the Knights Templar, both of whom had a very strong presence in the Languedoc during the thirteenth century. The Troubadours were itinerant poets writing in Occitan who flourished between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. In Germany, they had fellow travellers in the shape of the Minnesingers, of whom Wolfram von Eschenbach was one. The Troubadours’ main themes were chivalry and courtly love, in which the virtues of a particular lady would be extolled by the poet. Sometimes these were literal love songs, often addressed to a woman who was unattainable, while other Troubadour poems and songs were in fact allegories of spiritual development, and betray an awareness of the Divine Feminine. Among the most celebrated Troubadours were Peter Vidal, William Figueira and Jaufré Rudel. In the Languedoc, they enjoyed the protection of the same families which protected the Cathars. At least one Troubadour, William de Durfort, was known to be a Cathar; no doubt there were others. The concept of the Divine Feminine suggests another link between the two movements: the Perfect, upon being consoled, were given the title of Theotokos, which means ‘God-Bearer’, an assignation usually associated with the Virgin Mary.
The Knights Templar were the most powerful military religious order of their day, and were major landowners in the Languedoc. While theories suggesting that the Cathar treasure – whatever its nature – was entrusted to the Templars remain fanciful, there are a number of more definite links between the heretics and the soldier-monks. One of the Templars’ great Grand Masters, Bertrand de Blancfort, was said to have come from a Cathar family, and during the Albigensian Crusade, the Templars welcomed fugitive Cathars into the order. In some Templar preceptories in the Languedoc, Cathars outnumbered Catholics. Furthermore, the Templars refused to participate in the Albigensian Crusade. There could have been a number of reasons for this. They had a great deal of support in the Languedoc, so any military intervention there would have been politically disastrous for the Order, and, towards the end of the de Montfort years, they were actively involved in the Fifth Crusade (1217–21), in which they played a decisive role. However, one cannot help but wonder if certain elements within the Temple remained sympathetic to the Cathars, a sympathy rendered all the more plausible by the fact that the Templars were themselves viciously suppressed between 1307 and 1312, on charges of heresy, blasphemy and sodomy – charges that had been formerly levelled against the Good Christians.113
The romanticisation of the Cathars began with the Languedocian writer Napoléon Peyrat (1809–81). Despite being a priest himself, he was also a member of an anticlerical group known as the Priest Eaters, and launched numerous attacks on what he saw as the reactionary nature of the Catholic Church. To bolster his arguments, he invoked the name of the Cathars, whom he regarded as southern martyrs. His mammoth History of the Albigensians, published in the 1870s, took frequent liberties with the known facts in the name of mythologising the Cathars and denigrating the Church. Montségur became a kind of Camelot, full of wonders that were still awaiting discovery, and Peyrat was convinced that the Cathar Treasure was a cache of sacred texts hidden in caves at nearby Lombrives. Peyrat also wrote of a community of Cathars taking shelter in the caves after the fall of Montségur, who lived there until they were discovered by northern troops, who walled them up alive in the cave. Despite the high drama of this tragic story, there is no evidence that it ever happened. Like so much in Peyrat’s work, it is the product of imagination, rather than historical record. For Peyrat, the Cathars, in their anti-papal stance, were forerunners of Protestantism and also foreshadowed the French Republic.
Peyrat’s mythologised, semi-fictional Cathars had a big impact on the likes of the Félibrige, a group of scholars which were keen to preserve works written in Occitan. Underneath this goal lay a separatist movement, that wanted to restore Languedocian independence and identity. Peyrat was regarded as something of a guru, and the group began to produce its own Cathar theories, which tended to view the Cathars as occult initiates. The Cathar Treasure thus became a repository of ancient wisdom, with the Cathars being descended from the Druids, Hindus or Buddhists, while Montségur was interpreted as a solar temple. (Again, like Peyrat’s Cathars-in-a-cave story, this is pure fiction.)
Déodat Roché (1877–1978), another southern self-styled Cathar expert, published a number of pro-Cathar works, including L’Église romane et les Cathares albigeois (1937) and Le Catharisme (1938). In 1948, he began publishing a magazine, Cahiers d’Études Cathares, and two years later, founded a group, the Société du Souvenir et des Études Cathares. During the 1930s, he headed a loose-knit group that included the novelist Maurice Magre (1877–1941) and the philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43), both of whom wrote pro-Cathar polemics. Magre famously referred to the Perfect as ‘the Buddhists of the West’, while Weil saw them – along with the Gnostics and the Manichaeans – as being one of the manifestations of the perennial philosophy; what was most needed, she felt, was a revival of Cathar spirituality and the simple lifestyles of the Perfect.
A third figure who came into Roché’s orbit was the young German writer Otto Rahn (1904–39). In his first book, The Crusade Against the Grail (1933), Rahn interprets Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival as a thinly disguised account of the Albigensian Crusade. In Rahn’s reading of Wolfram, the Cathar Treasure is the Holy Grail itself, with Montségur as the Grail castle Munsalvaesche, and the martyred Raymond-Roger Trencavel as Parzival. In his next book, The Court of Lucifer (1937), Rahn compared the struggles of the Cathars against the Crusaders with those of Hitler to establish the Thousand Year Reich, seeing the Cathars as good Aryans who opposed not just Rome but also Judaism. It comes as no surprise to learn that, by this time, Rahn was working for Himmler, and writing what Himmler wanted to hear. Subsequently, myths have grown up around Rahn, depicting him as a German Indiana Jones who actually found the Grail and took it back to Germany, where it was hidden in the Bavarian Alps shortly before the end of the war. Other accounts of dubious provenance have the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg flying over Montségur on 16 March 1944, the 700th anniversary of the citadel’s fall, as a mark of respect for the Good Christians, while Hitler himself was said to belong to a neo-Cathar group. With Otto Rahn, we see the Cathars claimed, not for Languedocian nationalism, but for the perverted Germanic myth-making of the Nazis.
A far more benign form of neo-Catharism is to be found in the work of the English psychiatrist Arthur Guirdham (1905–92). In the 1960s, a certain Mrs Smith, one of Guirdham’s patients, began telling him about her previous life as a Cathar in thirteenth-century Languedoc. Initially sceptical, Guirdham began to investigate her claims, and wrote to Jean Duvernoy, one of Catharism’s leading historians. Much to Guirdham’s surprise, Duvernoy corroborated the details of Mrs Smith’s story. The resultant book, The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970), details Guirdham’s further discoveries, including the possibility that he himself was a reincarnated Cathar. The story was continued in We Are One Another (1974) and The Lake and the Castle (1976). Guirdham’s The Great Heresy (1977) is a brief history of the movement, and included in its later chapters revelations dictated to him by disembodied Cathars, covering such topics as the healing power of crystals, the aura, the emanatory powers of touch and the true nature of alchemy. The Perfect, according to Guirdham, were well-versed in such things during their earthly existence.
The Cathars emerged at a time of profound change in Europe. The historian R I Moore has argued that western society formed its institutions through the persecution of heretics and others in the thirteenth century.114 Furthermore, definitions of heresy played a large part in shaping the concept of witchcraft, which greatly aided the persecution and execution of thousands of innocent people – predominantly women – during the Witch Craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It is perhaps the Cathars’ quest for an authentic spirituality that makes their story still relevant. Their belief that they – and not the Church – were the real Christians calls to mind Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, in which Christ returns to earth, specifically Seville, during the height of the Spanish Inquisition. He is immediately arrested as a heretic, and questioned by the aged Grand Inquisitor. The old man prefers the safety and power the Church offers to Christ’s simple message. He tells Christ ‘If anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. To-morrow I shall burn Thee.’ He waits for Christ to respond: ‘“He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: ‘Go, and come no more... come not at all, never, never!’ And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away.”’115
The Cathars’ claim to be part of an authentic apostolic tradition dating back to the time of Christ cannot be proved, only inferred. The Catholic Church’s claim to descend from Peter is also historically unverifiable. Something that perhaps finds in the Cathars’ favour is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, only made public for the first time in 1991. The end of the Damascus Document – The Foundations of Righteousness: An Excommunication Text – appears to show the excommunication of Paul from the Christian community.116 If this were indeed the case, then it would problematise the Catholic Church’s claim to be God’s vicars on earth, as most of the major forms of organised Christianity owe far more to the teachings of Paul than they do to those of Jesus. The Church obviously feels that publication of the text has not damaged its position, and in March 2000, Pope John Paul II issued an apology for the Crusades. Many felt that the statement did not go far enough in offering rapprochement to the Arab world. No mention was made of the Albigensian Crusade. It remains unlikely that the papacy will ever apologise for the genocide it committed against the Good Christians.
Perhaps the real Cathar treasure is to be found in their stress on simplicity, equality, non-violence, work and love. By not building churches, they necessarily brought divinity into the domestic sphere, suggesting that, for the Cathars, every moment of every day could be used to deepen one’s spiritual life. Maurice Magre’s belief that they were the Buddhists of Europe is arguably not too far wide of the mark. Given that the Church – both the Catholic Church and the religious right in America – seems to be as conservative and exclusive as it ever was, the Cathars’ message is perhaps as relevant now as it was in the Languedoc of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as Simone Weil argued.
Perhaps the real Cathar treasure was indeed smuggled out of Montségur that night in March 1244. But it was not a cup or text: if the Cathars scaling down the mountain that night were Perfect, then they themselves were the real treasure, a reminder and example to everyone who has been moved by the Cathar story down the centuries: a reminder to stand defiant in the face of persecution; to do the work of the Good Christians, the work of Amor, not Roma; to become living icons.