The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  In his colorful history, medieval Languedoc became the apex of civilization, full of liberty-loving democrats attacked by barbarians who were little better than Norsemen. The spirit of freedom crushed by the crusaders lay dormant for centuries, only to resurface, Peyrat emphasized, among the bourgeois liberals of the French Third Republic, that is, people like himself. In response to the cult of Joan of Arc, an invention of nineteenth-century French nationalists, Peyrat concocted an Occitan equivalent, Esclarmonde of Foix. There was, indeed, a historic Esclarmonde of Foix; she was the sister of Raymond Roger, and she may even have clashed with St. Dominic. Peyrat, however, conflated five separate historical figures to come up with his fanciful, imaginary Esclarmonde. In his treatment, Esclarmonde became a high priestess guarding Cathar treasure and texts, an inspiring warrior like Joan, a preacher of unparalleled persuasiveness and beauty, the godmother of a whole generation of lovely female Perfect, and, ultimately, a martyr who turned into a dove in the flames of Montségur.

  Peyrat created the cult of Montségur and made it central to Cathar country. He spoke of tunnels and grottoes hiding thousands of Cathars. It was, in his words, “our wild Capitoline, our aerial tabernacle, our ark sheltering the remains of Aquitaine from a sea of blood.” The following passage sums up his view of Montségur of the Cathars:

  Montségur was an Essenian Zion, a Platonist Delphi of the Pyrenees, a Johannite Rome, condemned and untamed in Aquitaine. Montségur, from its naked rock, looked out sadly but steadily at the Louvre and the Vatican… . In its grotto it sheltered three irreconcilable enemies of theocracy: the Word, the Nation and Freedom, those powers of the future. It was from its peak that this sweet and terrible conjuration first took wing, under the name of Spirit, to make its secret way through the winds, its invisible path through the storms; it was this mysterious horseman, mounted on the tempest and the thunder, who would through the religious revolution of the sixteenth century and the political revolution of the eighteenth regenerate Europe and the whole world.

  Such was Peyrat’s Hegelian republicanism, now put to use in making myths about a medieval heresy.

  Peyrat firmly established the story of a fabulous Cathar treasure, a notion which would have very long legs. In Peyrat’s defense, the historical record—in this instance, transcripts of Inquisition interrogations of survivors of Montségur—does speak of four Perfect scurrying down the mountain one night during the siege to hide a sack of gold, silver, and coins—obviously the treasury of the 200 or so Cathars atop the hill. Peyrat, however, made the treasure immense, and not just of monetary value. There were also sacred texts. The treasure was supposedly taken to a cave fifteen miles away called Lombrives, which Peyrat saw as a new Montségur. A large Cathar community, according to Peyrat, took to living like troglodytes in Lombrives until a French royal army discovered them and bricked up the entrance to the cave. Peyrat’s passage on the death of the immured Cathars is haunting:

  One day they had nothing left, no food, wood, or fire, or even a wan light, that visible reflection of life. They came together as families, in separate niches, the husband beside the wife, the virgin beside her failing mother, a little baby on her dry breast. For a few moments, above the pious murmur of prayers, one could still hear the voice of the Cathar minister, declaring the Word that is in God and that is God. The faithful deacon gave the dying the kiss of peace, then lay down to sleep himself. All rested in a slumber, and only the drops of water that fell slowly from the roof of the vault disturbed the sepulchral silence for centuries… . While the inquisition damned their memory and even their loved ones no longer dared speak their names, the rock wept for them. The mountain, a tender mother welcoming them in her bosom, religiously wove for them a white shroud with her tears, buried their remains in the gradual folds of a chalky veil, and on their bones that no worm would ever profane, she sculpted a triumphant mausoleum of stalagmites, marvellously decorated with urns, candelabras and the symbols of life.

  Sadly, for all its beauty, the story is utterly the invention of Napoléon Peyrat.

  Peyrat’s prose had a bewitching effect on those of his contemporaries enamored of the past. Earlier in the nineteenth century, the troubadour poetry in the Provençal languages had been rediscovered by French and German scholars, inspiring Frédéric Mistral and others to launch a linguistic recovery movement called the Félibrige. The Languedoc branch of this movement—the dialect of Languedoc being called Languedocien or, much later, Occitan—looked on Peyrat’s work as a new gospel. The Felibrige glorified the pastor’s romanticized Cathars and his glowing portrait of the south before the crusade.

  Many in the Languedoc Félibrige were republicans, but federalists, in favor of a decentralized France where regional identities and languages would flourish. They wouldn’t get very far against the centralizing bulldozer of the Third Republic. In response to their political failure, they retreated to fiction, music, and poetry based on the Cathars, of which there was a considerable production in the 1890s and 1900s. The ethos of the troubadours somehow became intertwined with the supposed libertarian Cathars. Operas were written about Esclarmonde of Foix, who became the subject of choice for turn-of-the-century southern poetasters. In 1911, there was a fight in her hometown, Foix, over whether to put up a statue for her. The Felibrige lost, and the statue was never commissioned.

  Peyrat’s Esclarmonde also began showing up in Paris, usually as a disembodied voice at séances frequented by intellectuals and socialites disgusted, at least for an evening, by nineteenth-century materialism. The Cathar Perfect were ideal interlocutors for such groups. Fin-de-siècle France also saw an explosion of theosophy—a rediscovery of the religions of the East that ushered in a tide of orientalism and esoteric thought. In this hothouse of occult salons and secret societies, Peyrat’s Cathars prospered. They went from being protoliberals to continuators of a line of preclassical, Eastern wisdom. A neognostic church was founded by one Jules Doinel, who declared himself the gnostic patriarch of Paris—and, significantly, of Montségur.

  The treasure of Montségur then became a cache of ancient knowledge. This theory was advanced by an influential occultist named Joséphin Péladan. His friends—Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and others—called him Sar, as befitted his self-proclaimed status as the descendant of the monarchs of ancient Assyria. Péladan-Sar pointed out that Montsalvat, the holy mountain of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and Lohengrin, had to be Montségur. Thus was born the myth of the Pyrenean Holy Grail, yet another landmark of Cathar country destined for future glory.

  The calamity of the First World War, which pulverized rational nineteenth-century certainties, led to a continent-wide upsurge in interest in the paranormal. The call of the Cathars was heard beyond the borders of France. A handful of pioneering British spiritualists descended on Montségur and the caves near Lombrives. There, in the 1920s and 1930s, groups of local Occitanists—heirs of the Félibrige—and erudite occultists welcomed them and worked hard to embroider on Peyrat’s narrative.

  Foremost among these local lights was Déodat Roché, a jurist from a town near Carcassonne. Roché was a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, a system of creative rationality designed to allow its followers a direct and immediate contact with the spirit world. Roché’s Cathar-tainted anthroposophy was open to all influences: hinduism, druidism, gnosis, and so on. He made much of cave scratchings near Montségur, claiming that they were pentagrams traced by Cathar fugitives in an attempt to transmit a message to posterity. Indeed, any cave graffito that was not obviously modern was immediately Catharized by Roché. He died in 1978, at the age of 103, his influence in the construction of Cathar country immense.

  Gravitating around Roché, especially in the 1930s, was a group of young spiritual seekers, which included, for a time, the philosopher Simone Weil. She used an anagrammatic pen name, Emile Novis, to publish her articles about medieval Languedoc as a moral Utopia. But it was two men, especially, who would best export and distort th
e legacy of Peyrat. The first was Maurice Magre, a writer of considerable talent who is now almost totally forgotten. In the 1920s and 1930s, this prolific novelist and essayist—as well as prodigious consumer of opium—brought the energy of Paris’s Montparnasse to Catharism. Magre’s Magiciens et illuminés (The new magi) was a magisterial work of speculative history, a lively examination of the secret influence of Eastern sages throughout the ages. The Cathars held pride of place. This book was widely translated and reached audiences in both Britain and the United States.

  Among Magre’s impressive literary output, there were two Cathar novels, Le Sang de Toulouse (The blood of Toulouse) and Le Trésor des Albigeois (The treasure of the Albigensians). In the first, he brought the fabulations of Peyrat to modern audiences and recast such stories as Lombrives and the Cathar treasure in a vivid, mystical style that made Peyrat’s romantic prose look dated. Magre also took the time to skewer the enemies of the Cathars: Alice of Montmorency, the wife of Simon de Montfort, is described as a creature with rotting teeth, sallow skin the color of “Sicilian lemons,” and a big nose. The second, less successful Cathar novel had the Perfect as Buddhists.

  In 1930, Magre met a young German graduate student in Paris, Otto Rahn, the second of Roché’s circle to internationalize Cathar country. Magre directed Rahn to his friends in the Ariège, and the result, in 1933, was Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (Crusade against the Grail). Rahn essentially assembled all of the Pyrenean Grail stories and compared them to the medieval Parzifal written by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Montsalvat became Montségur, Parsifal (or Perceval) became Trencavel, and the guardian of the Grail was none other than Esclarmonde. What she was guarding was a sacred stone that had dropped from heaven during the time that the angels had fallen. Esclarmonde managed to hide the stone in the mountain before the French stormed Montségur and burned the Cathars.

  This, then, was the true Grail, mistakenly placed in the fourteenth-century cycle written by Chrétien de Troyes somewhere in the north of France and, more important, wrongly transformed by Christian mythology into a chalice containing Christ’s blood. Rahn’s Cathars were pagans; they were also—and this was new—troubadours. Rahn’s Kreuzzug gegen den Gral successfully placed the Cathars in the center of esoteric Grail studies.

  Rahn and his followers then cast the darkest shadow ever to fall across Cathar country. In 1937, Rahn published Luzifers Hofgesind (The court of Lucifer), another Cathar-Grail book. By this time, the visiting graduate student had moved back to Germany and become a member of the SS. Who then were the Cathars, in Rahn’s new formulation? It isn’t hard to guess:

  We do not need the god of Rome, we have our own. We do not need the commandments of Moses, we carry in our hearts the legacy of our ancestors. It is Moses who is imperfect and impure… . We, Westerners of nordic blood, we call ourselves Cathars just as Easterners of nordic blood are called Parsees, the Pure. Our heaven is open only to those who are not creatures of an inferior race, or bastards, or slaves. It is open to Aryas. Their name means that they are nobles and lords.

  Rahn’s benign Grail speculations and his later Hitlerian take on the Cathars inevitably became combined. After the Second World War and well into the 1970s, a cottage industry of former Vichy collaborators churned out an astonishing amount of rumors concerning the connection of the Nazis to the Cathars, such as:

  • On March 16, 1944, the 700th anniversary of the burning at Montségur, Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi theorist, was said to have overflown the peak as a gesture of homage.

  • Hitler and his closest advisers were said to have been part of a neo-Cathar pagan secret society.

  • German engineers were said to have excavated Montségur during the Occupation and come away with the Holy Grail. In this last tale, which prefigures Raiders of the Lost Ark, Esclarmonde’s precious Cathar stone—or, according to some far right-wingers, a non-Jewish tablet of commandments—was buried in a glacier in the Bavarian Alps just before the fall of Germany.

  These rumors, while universally recognized as false, showed stubborn staying power in Languedoc. In 1978, there was a minor diplomatic incident when a group of rowdy German boy scouts was accused by locals of trying to steal blocks of stone from Montségur. The alleged prank was taken as proof that the boys had neo-Nazi leanings.

  There would be no officially sponsored Cathar country signs in Languedoc if the legacy of Peyrat had solely degenerated into nostalgia for the Third Reich. Fortunately, Otto Rahn’s competition eventually overwhelmed him. First, there was the obvious comparison of Cathars to members of the French Underground, fighting an invading force. This trope came up again and again in works published in the 1950s. The Cathars—bourgeois liberals, Buddhists, gnostics, Nazis, and whatever else they were—had now joined the maquis (the Resistance).

  Also, the propaganda of Roché and Magre began to bear scientific fruit. Serious archaeologists and engineers started examining Montségur for signs of hidden chambers and tunnels. They found nothing. This did not stop one author, Fernand Niel, from publishing a chart-laden study showing Montségur to have been constructed as a solar temple. Niel even included one of these diagrams in a volume he wrote about the Cathars for the French “Que Sais-Je” collection, a series of handbooks destined for schools and reference libraries. His learned explanation of the solar nuances of Cathar construction has since been overshadowed by the rigorous scientific conclusion that much of the ruined castle now atop Montségur was built long after the Cathar crusade. (The original castle was demolished in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, then replaced.) The same conclusion about other ruined castles in the Corbières and the Pyrenees has not prevented their becoming les châteaux cathares (Cathar castles)—evocative remnants regularly visited by eco-hikers convinced that they are looking at solar temples destroyed by Catholicism.

  The 1960s brought the counterculture to the Cathars and updated the lore surrounding them. The babas-cool, the French word for back-to-the-land hippie types, made the Ariège one of their prime targets for returning to nature and making goat cheese. When they began arriving in the late 1960s, they were met by Dutch Rosicrucians, neognostics from Belgium, and other groups who had already moved south to Cathar country summer camps. The babas-cool found in the Cathars several appealing qualities: They were vegetarians; they disapproved of marriage—therefore they were pro—free love; women could be Perfect—therefore they were feminists; and they were part of the troubadour love culture of Occitania. The Cathars, in short, became groovy. Rock groups serenaded crowds at the foot of Montségur, where the billows of smoke now came only from reefers.

  In the English-speaking world, British psychiatrist Arthur Guirdham gained notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s through a series of occult books that inspired many Britons to explore southwestern France. Guirdham described how several of his patients independently exhibited signs of being reincarnated Cathar Perfect. He, himself, is/was Guilhabert of Castres. Why so many of these Cathar spirits congregated in Bath, England, the home of Guirdham’s practice, is not answered in his books, but his New Age updating of Parisian salon séances has proved enduring.

  By the late 1970s, Cathar country had truly come of age. People measured the cosmic vibrations at Cathar castles. Occitan nationalists gathered for ceremonies at Montségur. Weekend archaeologists turned up what they inevitably claimed were Cathar crosses, pendants, and stone doves. Replicas of these objects became the staples at craft fairs throughout Languedoc. Stonehengers and other assorted neopagans began taking an interest. French and British television did specials on the various enigmas of the Cathar story, all of which were more or less inherited from the circles of esotericism animated by Déodat Roché in the 1930s. Roché was now in his nineties, a frail Cathar pope to a growing entourage.

  Shortly after Roché’s death, the Anglo-American trio of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln published the most successful book ever to hit Cathar country: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, now past its thirty-fifth printing in Engli
sh. The threesome made Catharism a truly mass phenomenon and turned the international Glastonbury Arthurian crowd on to a new form of medieval romance. The writers took the legacy of Magre, Roché, and others and wrote a thoroughly entertaining occult detective story. The mystery is this: At the turn of the twentieth century, a country priest in the remote parish of Rennes-le-Château, near Carcassonne, suddenly took to living very well and constructing additions to his church and residence. He was spending millions of francs. Where did he get them?

  The short answer is that he had masterminded a system of mail-order fund-raising and conned several local notables into leaving him money in their wills. The long answer is told in the more than 500 pages of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The priest, it turns out, found the treasure that the Cathars had smuggled out of Montségur during the siege. He began selling off parts of it, as well as blackmailing the Vatican. The Cathar treasure, aside from its incalculable hoard of Visigothic gold, was nothing less than the proof that Jesus was not god but a king who had married Mary Magdalene. Their son founded the line of Merovingian kings, who were, incidentally, Jewish. This secret, along with others debunking Jesus’ divinity, was found below the Temple of Jerusalem during the Crusades. It had been transmitted to both the Cathars and Knights Templars. After the treasure’s narrow escape at Montségur, an occult society had kept the secret to themselves until the priest’s discovery at Rennes-le-Château. In the past, the secret society had been headed by, among others, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolas Poussin, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Claude Debussy. The book shrewdly hints that not all of the treasure has been found. Since its publication, the land around Rennes-le-Château has become pockmarked with the spadework of treasure hunters. A landing pad for UFOs has been constructed (in truth, a mown meadow), and tours are now conducted through what is a very ordinary country church.