Women play an unusual role among them. They are the equals of men, for the law of reincarnation is indifferent to the sexes. The sole restriction on that equality is that they are not allowed to preach. Marriage is hateful and its indissoluble bonds are not recognized. The union of man and woman ought to have no other sanction than that of their reciprocal love. That union is, however, forbidden to the perfecti, who ought not to propagate the human species and thus perpetuate dolor in the slavery of form. The simple believers who unite themselves with one another in the flesh ought not to lose sight of the effort toward the final liberation. One therefore sees in the Midi the sons of the nobles families espousing, without any sort of ritual, the most humble prostitutes, the daughters of the Toulousan or Bitterois suburbs, or camp-followers, in order to regenerate them, to enable their soul to take a forward step on the long road to perfection, for that fraternal aid is the most noble mission of human beings on earth.
They professed a horror of lying and they took as far as the Hindus the prohibition of killing an animal and eating its flesh. They had the injustice, however, of excepting snakes from that prohibition, for it was one of their superstitions to believe that evil willingly incarnates itself in reptiles, and that the bodies of those creatures cannot under any pretext serve as the temporary body of a soul condemned to penitence in an animal form.
What excited the greatest hatred against them, however, was their scorn for terrestrial wealth, their exaltation of poverty as an ideal. They did not recognize property and as far as human history goes back, one sees that anyone who renounces that essential attachment and despoils himself with love has been an object of execration, because of the social danger that he poses.
It was imitation of the Albigensians that Dominic waked barefoot along the roads and begged, was a fashion of combating them with their own weapons, those of disinterest and poverty. Saint Francis and his order were only following their example. But the asceticism that was permitted to the respectful monks of the Church was no longer tolerated if it was generalized among an independent people whose voice was loud enough to protest its indignation against Roman tyranny and royal cupidity. One had the right to raise oneself toward God by meditation and asceticism if one was an obscure member of a monastery whose other members levied tithes and extracted taxes in accord with seigneurs and the King; but if an entire people ceased to labor and give birth, no longer recognizing the authority of its masters, only to obey an interior authority, if it decided to converse directly with God, neglecting interested intermediaries, it was better to destroy that people. That was what was done.
The principal cause of the great Albigensian massacre, the hidden but true cause, was that the secret of the sanctuaries, the ancient teaching of mysteries so jealously guarded in all the temples of the world by all fraternities of priests, had been revealed. More than that: it had been revealed and understood. What happened at that time had never been seen before in the history of the world. While the ecclesiastical guardians of the secret stammered the Latin ritual of its formula, the meaning of which they had lost in the bottom of their heart, the divine secret had been brought to the comtés of the Languedoc by unknown messengers, along the clear waters of the Tarn and the Ariège. The humblest of men had been dazzled by it, and they had laid down the sword and abandoned the plow in order to respond to the appeal of God. For the universe they had just glimpsed was a thousand times more beautiful than their horizon of vines or their valleys covered with forests.
But then the masters of sentences, the faithless guardians, knew that the gold of tabernacles was about to be extinguished, that the sumptuousness of altars was about to fade. They shivered, as the Brahmins of India had shivered for a danger less great at the moment of the reform of Buddha, like the Persian priests of fire when the words of Zoroaster resounded.
Woe betide those who take possession of the secret and reveal it! The hierarchies of Greek and Roman priests, supported by republics and emperors, also punished with death the divulging of mysteries. Never had the mystery been so completely unveiled for humans. Never had organized society with its edifice of priests, seigneurs and kings been in such great danger. The slaves might liberate themselves from their servitude without destroying their masters’ fortresses, without evolution and without effort, naturally, by the simple play of their intellect. Pope Innocent III and Philippe Auguste must have had a vague consciousness that their domination was compromised, that their thrones would henceforth repose on a void. The oppressed mass of the weak was escaping the strong by means of a portal to the afterlife that had been opened by no one knew whom.
The war of the Albigensians was the greatest turning point of human religious history. When the laborer understands the vanity of laboring, when the beggar refuses alms because he discovers that he is richer than the person who gives them, when the words of priests become devoid of meaning because everyone has a higher consolation within himself, then the social organization crumbles of its own accord.
The liberation that humankind nearly acquired was much greater than that of a vanquished people that rids itself of its conqueror. It was liberation from evil itself, from its crushing nature. It was communicated with the rapidity of fire among pine trees in summer. But those who hate the light were the stronger. Not content with extinguishing the divine fire, they ran after every wisp of straw susceptible of giving heat and light, and they covered the slightest spark with ashes. They summoned to their aid their old ally, the friend of Darkness, invincible ignorance. They did not allow even a fragment of information to subsist, not a single page of a book or inscription on a wall.
No trace had to subsist of the Albigensian verity. Six centuries later, when people flatter themselves on knowing everything and learning everything, history has been able to by-pass that enlightenment without reigniting it. The Albigensian war is nothing but the birth and death of a heresy, a chapter added to the history of French unity.
The sublime secret of the consolamentum, which permits humans to die in delight because they identify by the illumination of love with their interior God is lost forever. No hill in the Lauragais, no Pyrenean mountain, has retained the trace of it in its stone. In any case, ignorance has obscured souls to such an extent that no one thinks of looking for it; no one even believes in the possibility of its existence.
Ferrocas’ Hawthorn
Napoléon Peyrat recounts in his Histoire des Albigeois than on going to visit the village of shepherds called Montségur, which is situated at the foot of the ruins of the château, he was struck by the sight of a tomb to the right of the roadside surmounted by an iron cross, devoid of ornaments. Having interrogated the guide who had led him there, the latter replied to him that it was the tomb of a certain Ferrocas, buried a few years before.
Ferrocas, whom the guide had known, was a solitary old peasant, a sort of country philosopher, who had never wanted to go to mass throughout his life. The curé had reproached him for that vehemently, and had even denounced him publicly from the height of his pulpit. Ferrocas claimed to be the only man to practice the true religion, which as not that of the churches. He said, familiarly, that he bore Christ within himself, that he discovered him a little more every day but that he would only find him completely much later, in a subsequent life—words incomprehensible for those who listened to him, and caused him to be reckoned a madman.
When he died, the curé, although he was a worthy man, resolved to set an example and forbade Ferrocas’ body to be carried to the cemetery. The inhabitants of Montségur dug a grave for the old philosopher by the roadside, as if for a dog. Nevertheless, they elected to place the grave under a large white hawthorn. The equitable grace of nature caused the hawthorn to flourish intensely and to spread out in a vault of flowers The curé died in his turn, but his successor, to whom the story of the impious individual was recounted, and who went past his floral monument every day, had the hawthorn cut down and planted in its place the rude cross that Napoléon Peyrat saw.
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br /> It was about 1860 when that historian, passionate about the Midi, visited Montségur and saw Ferrocas’ cross.
Ferrocas was doubtless the last Albigensian, an Albigensian who must have carried semi-consciously within him the residues of the doctrine for which his forefathers had died. But it was written that, until the very last, the pure of southern France would be persecuted in their faith. It is because of the liberty of the century that Ferrocas’ bones were not disinterred and dispersed. His white hawthorn was uprooted. He has still to endure over his mortal remains the weight of that cross, in the name of which he had once been made to suffer and die.
Poor Ferrocas of the Ariège! His fate is that of all the men of the Midi. When the great Albigensian movement was extinct, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of the heretics were obliged to bear on their garments, in front and behind, a yellow cross a foot long, in order that their heresy was known and that the malediction could be perpetuated over them. Civil employment and the right to engage in commerce were refused to them. Under the name of cagots they were assimilated to lepers in the villages of the mountains.59 Like them, they had a special street or quarter in each town, they could only enter the church through a side door in a reserved chapel because the stones that their feet touched remained soiled.
Nowadays the descendants of the Albigensians no longer suffer the same treatment as lepers and no yellow cross is displayed on their chests. That is because they have become similar to common humankind. But they all bear a sign more redoubtable than the yellow cross, which is that of ignorance. They have forgotten. They no longer know. They have been detached from the woes of their forefathers. They learn the history of France, vaguely, but they do not know the history of their homeland. When the bell of the Church of San Salvi resonates in Albi, it does not awaken any echo. No one numbers of the dead of the Pré-comtal near Toulouse. When foreigners wandering along the ramparts of Carcassonne carrying the mute Baedeker under their arms ask what dust is rising on the far horizon, no one replies that it is the phantom of Montfort’s army.
When I was twenty years old, coming from my homeland of Toulouse, I went down the slopes of the Castellar of Pamiers, where Esclarmonde de Foix had lived, without emotion; I have seen Mirepoix and Lavelanet; I have walked on the roads where Esclarmonde d’Alion’s horse whinnied without knowing the epic that had once unfolded in those places. All I knew about the Albigensians was what one can learn at school—which is to say, barely the name, the glory of Simon de Montfort and the defeat of Toulouse. I have advanced between the peak of Bidorte and the forest of Bélesta, among the chestnut trees and the ferns, to the sound of sawmills and water splashing against rocks. I thought I saw in the distance the vague silhouette of a ruin, that of Montségur, and as the sun was about to set I measured the distance, my meager curiosity, and decided to retrace my steps.
It is the same for all those who have wanted to study Catharism and its sublime philosophy. They are put off by overly complicated documents, they have found the route too long. They have glimpsed from afar, veiled in clouds, the tower of Montségur, and they have renounced reaching it.
It is necessary for me to remember my walk of days gone by to explain to myself the forgetfulness into which an entire section of history has fallen. And I wonder sometimes whether there is not a more profound cause than the absence of clear texts that has distanced Occidental minds from the wisdom of the perfect sect. When I see cultivated southerners confounding their heroic ancestors with the Saracens, and even the Goths, and when I see those erudite in the history of philosophies and religions paying no attention to the Cathar doctrine, I think of a kind of conspiracy of silence, an organized effort to keep the dead truth silent.
It is true that verity is imperishable and when it is stifled here it is reborn elsewhere, a little later, in a more beautiful form. It is true that an iron cross beside a road still remains, the symbol of the spirit. But in place of the one that stands to the right, a little before arriving in Montségur, who will plant Ferrocas’ hawthorn again?
Notes
1 Available from Black Coat Press.
2 Author’s note: “At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the south of France was ravaged by a crusade that Innocent III preached against the Albigensian heretics, and whose goal was to dispossess Raymond VI, Comte de Toulouse. The Comte de Toulouse was then the most powerful lord of Christianity after the King of France, and his Estates enjoyed an exceptional liberty and a great civilization.”
3 Author’s note: “A monk of the Abbey of Fontfroide, whom the Pope sent to repress heresy in the Midi. He rapidly rendered himself odious by the violence of his repressions. Raymond VI, Comte de Toulouse, was the principal object of his hatred. He had undertaken a personal campaign in Provence to detach his vassals from him.”
4 Author’s note: “The papal legates were monks, but to reinforce their authority, they traveled in lay vestments and magnificent apparel. It was the man who was to become Saint Dominic who first had the idea of fighting the Albigensians with their own arms, simplicity and poverty, and going to preach barefoot, as mendicants.”
5 Author’s note: “The Albigensian heresy taught that life is evil, that a man is condemned to live again incessantly through successive reincarnations, until he is detached from desire by absolute disinterest.”
6 “Cagots” were a Medieval European population analogous to the “untouchables” of India, not distinguished from the majority population by religion, ethnicity or any external feature, but nevertheless loathed, despised and cruelly persecuted throughout western France and northern Spain, for reasons that are profoundly unclear, as they left no writings of their own and references to them tend to be obliquely unhelpful. Active discrimination was not officially halted in France until 1789, and muted popular prejudice continued even thereafter.
7 Author’s note: “The Capitouls were the municipal magistrates of Toulouse, elected by the people. There were twelve for the city and twelve for the outlying districts. They enjoyed considerable power. In the absence of the Comte they sometimes even declared war without consulting him.”
8 Author’s note: “In 1206 Innocent III had excommunicated an abbé, of Faenza, because he had refused to allow a heretic to be disinterred.” That datum is reproduced by Lamothe-Langon in the introductory chapters of his history of the Inquisition, where the first version of the story of Pierre Maurand is also found, both copied from there by Napoléon Peyrat, but Marie the draper is entirely Magre’s invention.
9 Author’s note: “At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Saint Gilles was a port on the Rhône, where pilgrims embarked for Jerusalem. There was an immense abbey there, and the city had at least thirty thousand inhabitants. Consequent to displacements of the Rhône, it is now a town surrounded by land.”
10 Author’s note: “The Albigensians practiced absolute fraternity. Many young men of noble families married humble prostitutes as a symbol of their love for all beings.”
11 Author’s note: “Pierre Vidal was one of the most celebrated troubadours of the Midi. His humorous adventures in the Orient were legendary.” A number of songs attributed to the widely-traveled Toulousan troubadour Peire Vidal (Peire is the Occitan form of Pierre) are still extant; the brief biographies that exist date from fifty years after his death and are probably fictitious.
12 Truands were members of a supposed organization of thieves and professional beggars. The role attributed to them here in the taking of Béziers seems to be based on a mistake, the probable origin of which is explained in a footnote to the account of the event in the essay appended to the novel.
13 Dominic de Guzman (1170-1221), later Saint Dominic, the founder of the Dominican Order charged with special responsibility for persecuting heretics. He attempted to convert the Cathars, but with little success. He is now the patron saint of astronomers—mass-murderers, of course, have no official patron saint.
14 Author’s note: “The cities and châteaux of the Mid
i all possessed very extensive networks of subterranean workings. It was Arab engineers who had taught the techniques of their construction.” Generally-accepted history has no record of any such tunnel being employed during the siege of Carcassonne, but records that Roger Trencavel was taken prisoner on 7 August, in spite of the guarantee of safe conduct he had been given in order to negotiate, and died nor long afterwards in mysterious circumstances; the city surrendered on 15 August, but its inhabitants were not massacred and were allegedly allowed to leave. Pìerre de Cabaret attempted to defend his own castles against the crusaders but capitulated after a matter of months, and is said to have escaped with his life, at least for a while.
15 Author’s note: “Pope Innocent III himself mentioned that murder in one of his letters and qualified it as a ‘violent death.’”
16 Author’s note: “The Château de Cabardez was besieged by the crusaders several months after the capture of Carcassonne, but it resisted all assaults and Simon de Montfort was obliged to lift the siege. Subsequently, thanks to his cunning, Pierre de Cabaret was always able to avoid the vengeance of the leader of the crusade.”
17 Author’s note: “The consolamentum was a Catharist extreme unction. Its rite, practiced by the Perfecti, permitted the person who received it to escape the chain of reincarnations.”
18 Author’s note: “In addition to that ring, the Pope made him a gift of a cloak and a horse.”
19 Author’s note: “Pierre de Vaux-Cernay accompanied Simon de Montfort and was the vilely partial historian of the crusade.”
20 Author’s note: “Pierre de Vaux-Cernay reports in his chronicle that they were burned ‘with great joy.’ It is impossible to determine exactly from this phrase whether he meant the great joy of the crusaders or that shown by the Albigensians, on being rid of life.”
The Blood of Toulouse Page 26
