The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  200 Qui aytal fara… : This lugubrious chant is related by William Pelhisson in his chronicle.

  16. Backlash

  201 John Textor lay in chains: The imprisonment quickly became a cause célèbre in Toulouse, inciting formerly quiescent citizens to denounce the actions of the inquisitors. Awkwardly, the average-Joe John Textor publicly converted to Catharism while in prison—receiving the consolamentum from a captive Perfect—and thus made his erstwhile defenders appear foolish. William Pelhisson, who tells the story, fairly chortles at the embarrassment of Textor’s partisans. Many of them were subsequently jailed, or worse.

  202 At the behest of the city’s conservative Jews: The bonfire of 1234 in Montpellier may have been the only instance of the Inquisition doing anything for the Jews. By 1240, the wind had definitively turned; the Talmud was tried, found guilty, and burned in Paris. This was a mere prelude for several centuries of anti-Jewish activities by inquisitors (sources: R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, p. 10 and L. Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 1, From Roman Times to the Court Jews, London: Elek Books, 1966, pp. 68–70).

  204 Stephen of St. Thibéry: The appointment may also have been an attempt to wrest the institution of inquisitor away from the Dominicans. In later years, the Dominicans and the Franciscans would engage in unseemly turf wars that would stall the cause of doctrinal purity. In the Balkans in the thirteenth century, the competing friars quarreled bitterly over precedence for nearly a decade before an inquisition was set up.

  208 On May 28, 1242, Stephen of St. Thibery and William Arnald stopped in Avignonet: The story of Avignonet, like most events to follow in the narrative, was culled from Inquisition interrogations, in this instance those of Brother Ferrer, the inquisitor who questioned the survivors of the siege of Montségur some two years afterward. The story of Brother William’s skull comes from the same source.

  17. The Synagogue of Satan

  212 Henry had made landfall in the southwest with a derisively small force of knights: Still, some did make the journey. One of the barons who sailed to fight the French, and thereby indirectly help Raymond VII, was the English king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort. His father, the Simon de Montfort of the Albigensian Crusade, and his oldest brother, Amaury, who had died in 1241 after a decade’s service as High Constable of France, were no doubt spinning in their graves at this switch in allegiance.

  213 Raymond and Louis signed a treaty: The Treaty of Lorris.

  215 In the spring of 1243… : The most scrupulous examination of the siege of Montségur, without recourse to the mythmaking that usually shrouds the citadel of “Cathar country,” is, once again, the work of Michel Roquebert: Montségur, les cendres de la liberté.

  217 A chronicler relates that at sunrise… : The Gascons’ retrospective fright is reported by William of Puylaurens.

  219 These companions of the last hour came from all stations of feudal society: Not all of the credentes to join the Perfect of Montesegur on the bonfire were saintly. William of Lahille had been one of the three faidits to lead the murderous posse into the inquisitors’ quarters at Avignonet. Lahille was the son of a Perfect noblewoman whom Guilhabert of Castres had consoled, along with Esclarmonde of Foix and two other high-ranking ladies, in the well-attended ceremony at Fanjeaux in 1204. Lahille was grievously wounded at Montségur just before the surrender and decided to accompany his Perfect aunt, India, into the afterlife. One of his accomplices, Bernard de St. Martin, also elected to receive the consolamentum and thereby doom himself. The third leader of the Avignonet raid, William de Balaguier, had been captured in the lowlands well before the siege of Montségur. For his complicity in the murders, he had been dragged behind a horse, then hanged. See Jean Duvernoy’s annotations to his translation, Guillaume Pelhisson Chronique (1229–1244), pp. 103–04.

  18. Twilight in the Garden of Evil

  222 a Cathar believer named Peter Garcias: Extended quotations from the hidden friars’ testimony—a well-documented event in these years of treachery—may be found in Carol Lansing’s epilogue to Joseph Strayer’s The Albigensian Crusades, pp. 225–28.

  225 “Heretics are those who remain obstinate in error… : The litany of crime was compiled at the Council of Tarragona. Translated and cited by Edward Peters in his Inquisition, p. 63. Peters argues that the actual Inquisition was not nearly as fearsome as the myth of the Inquisition created by Enlightenment and romantic imaginations. He lowercases inquisition when describing the historical institution and capitalizes the word when discussing the myth. I have elected to follow accepted usage and capitalize the word throughout.

  228 “the bread of pain …”: The felicitous expression, adapted from Kings 22:27, by inquisitor Bernard Gui, cited in Laurent Albaret’s L’Inquisition: Rempart de la foi? p. 53.

  230 the murder of a respected inquisitor: A cult quickly grew around the victim, Peter of Verona, a Cathar-turned-preacher-turned-inquisitor. A speaker of great charisma and a miracle-worker, Peter was assassinated by credentes near Milan. Legend has it that as he lay dying, he wrote out the word credo in his own blood. One of the most popular medieval saints, he was venerated as St. Peter the Martyr. This book, I should add, was written while I was living in a very old Occitan farmhouse called Mas D’En Pere Martre. To my enduring embarrassment, it took me at least a year to realize that my address contained the name of the most famous figure in Italian Cathar history.

  230 The year 1300 saw the papacy institute the jubilee: For details of the jubilee, I am indebted to Paul Hetherington’s Medieval Rome, pp. 78–81.

  234 The 1,000 or so households won back to the illicit faith: This estimate, arrived at by historian J. M. Vidal in 1906, is cited in Malcolm Lambert’s The Cathars (p. 259). Lambert considers the number too low but concedes there is no way of determining a precise head count. See his chapter “The Last Missionary” (pp. 230–71) for the best account, in English, of the Autier revival.

  238 Fournier also discovered that its randy priest: The surviving Inquisition registers of Jacques Fournier were translated into the French in their entirety by Jean Duvernoy in the 1970s. Using Fourniers’s registers, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie delivered a memorable portrait of the social, religious, and sex lives of fourteenth-century peasants in Montail-lou. On the Web site of San Jose State University, Nancy P. Stork has helpfully translated some excerpts from the Fournier register into English; they can be accessed directly at www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/Fournier/jfournhm.htm. For immediate gratification of prurient curiosity, go to the testimony of Béatrice de Planissoles.

  19. Bélibaste

  239 There was now one Cathar left… : The remarkable detail it is possible to employ in telling the sad story of Bélibaste is due, once again, to Inquisition registers. The transcript of Bélibaste’s questioning has not survived, but the debriefing that Arnold Sicre gave Fournier in October 1321 provides a wealth of detail. So too does the testimony of the shepherd Peter Maury, who had been rashly released by the men who arrested Bélibaste in Tirvia. Maury was recaptured on Majorca two years later. The story of the last Languedoc Perfect was transformed into an accomplished French-language novel, Bélibaste, by Henri Gougaud.

  246 the castle at Villerouge-Termenès: The castle still stands today and has not been much modified since the days of the Cathars. The picturesque village holds a well-attended medieval weekend every July, during which poor old Bélibaste is burned in effigy.

  Epilogue: In Cathar Country

  247 “Les chevaliers cathares …”: The song appears on Francis Cabrel’s album, Quelqu’un de l’intérieur. The translation is my own. The roadside art is also called les chevaliers d’Oc.

  249 bouffeurs du curé: Napoléon Peyrat’s anticlerical credentials were severely dented when, shortly after his death, his widow, Eugenie, made a very public conversion to Catholicism. Still, he is making a comeback, as witnessed by the collective scholarly work devoted to Peyrat in 1998: Cathares et camisards—l’œuvre de Napoléon Peyrat
(1809–1881).

  250 The Catholics argued that the Cathars were not even Christians: The nineteenth-century position staked out by Catholic historians has found a frequent echo in the twentieth century, to wit, that the Cathars were adepts of the religion founded by Mani, the self-proclaimed messiah from third-century Babylon. Many of the Cathars’ medieval opponents referred to any dualists—indeed, any heretics—as Manichees, and the affiliation was taken for granted. The masterly 1947 work of Steven Runciman in The Medieval Manichee, which traced a direct line from gnostic to Manichean to Paulician (ninth-century dualists of Armenia and Thrace) to Bogomil (tenth-century dualists of the Balkans) and thence to the early medieval heretic, is now seriously questioned by historians of Cathar thought. Contemporary consensus holds that the Cathars were Christians, that dualism has always been an “underground” strand of Christian thought, and that proving a direct link between the dualists of antiquity and those of the Middle Ages is an impossible, if not irrelevant, task. The thrust of debate now is over whether Catharism constituted a church, that is, an independent hierarchy with coherent rules, dogma, and organization.

  250 an Occitan equivalent, Esclarmonde of Foix: For a thorough examination of the Esclarmonde myth, as well as the place of other female historical figures (Blanche of Castile, Etiennette de Pennautier, Agnes of Montpellier, Alice of Montmorency, and others) who appear in the neo-Cathar delirium, see Krystel Maurin’s immensely entertaining Les Esclarmonde.

  251 “our wild Capitoline …”: Cited in Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “D’Augustin Thierry à Napoléon Peyrat: Un Demi-siècle d’occultation,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 14 (1979), p. 161. My translation.

  251 “Montségur was an Essenian Zion …”: Cited in Jean-Louis Biget, “Mythographie du catharisme,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 14 (1979), p. 279. My translation.

  252 “One day they had nothing left…”: Cited in Michel Roquebert, “Napoléon Peyrat, le trésor et le ‘Nouveau Montségur’ ” Hérésis 7 (1998), p. 365. My translation.

  253–54 A neognostic church was founded: For a full discussion of this weird fin-de-siècle bloom, see Suzanne Nelli, “Les Néo-gnostiques. Jules Doinel évêque de Montségur,” Hérésis 7 (1998), pp. 121–29.

  254 Joséphin Péladan: Peladan-Sar’s 1906 Grail work was titled Le Secret des Troubadours: De Parsifal à Don Quichotte (The troubadours’ secret: from Parsifal to Don Quixote). It is out of print.

  255 Emile Novis: The pedantic might say that Emile Novis is not an anagram of Simone Weil. It is close, and works phonically in French. Weil’s association with Roché is briefly evoked in Biget’s “Mythographie du catharisme,” p. 317.

  255 Magre also took the time to skewer the enemies of the Cathars: Magre was not alone in constructing an imaginary portrait gallery of historical figures that became particularly vivid when women were the subjects. Krystel Maurin, in Les Esclarmonde, examines the pride of place given to Esclarmonde of Foix in neo-Cathar mythology, but also gives a description of the secondary female characters to fall on one or other side of the Cruella/Cinderella divide erected in pro-Cathar novels and plays. Among those particularly vilified, aside from Alice of Montmorency, were Agnes of Montpellier and Blanche of Castile; the women glorified were Geralda of Lavaur, Loba, and Béatrice de Planissoles.

  255 Otto Rahn: The definitive work on the bizarre trajectory of Otto Rahn is a 400-page book of painstaking research by Christian Bernadac, Montségur et le Graal. A more concise summing up of the phenomenon is Marie-Claire Viguier’s “Otto Rahn entre Wolfram d’Eschenbach et les néo-nazis,” Hérésis 7 (1998), pp. 165–79. The speech of the Aryan Perfect, taken from Rahn, appears in Viguier’s article (p. 179). My translation from the French. The rumors about Rosenberg’s and Hitler’s attachment to Montségur were principally spread by Nouveaux Cathares pour Montségur, a quasi-historical novel about Rahn published in 1969 by the extreme-Right French writer Marc Augier under the pseudonym of Saint-Loup. The story of the 1978 incident involving German boy scouts and stolen stones from Montségur is well told by Charles-Olivier Carbonell in “Vulgarisation et récupération: Le Catharisme à travers les mass-média,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 14 (1979), pp. 361–80.

  260 The short answer is that he had masterminded a system of mail-order fund-raising: In fact, the mysterious country priest, Bérenger Saunière, had a simony-by-correspondence racket, whereby he would place ads in small publications throughout Catholic Europe offering to say—that is, sell—masses. He raked in the cash. The story of his discovery of a treasure is decisively debunked in Rennes-le-Château, autopsie d’un mythe, by Jean-Jacques Bedu, who pores over Saunière’s account books. As for The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, it heavily embroidered on a 1967 work, L’Or de Rennes, by Gérard de Sède, a prolific author of occult works who found credulous readers throughout France. Holy Blood internationalized Sède’s hoax and, to the delight of everyone involved, called into question the foundations of Judeo-Christian civilization.

  Selected Bibliography

  This list is by no means exhaustive, or intended for scholars. Books are in French or English only, and the editions cited are those I consulted. N indicates a novel. Asterisks precede and brief comments follow a dozen or so entries that nonspecialists could profitably consult to satisfy a curiosity that, it is my hope, The Perfect Heresy has aroused. Books unmarked by an asterisk, it should be added, are not necessarily dry.

  ALBARET, LAURENT. L’Inquisition: Rempart de la foi? Paris: Gallimard, 1998.

  BAIGENT, MICHAEL, RICHARD LEIGH, AND HENRY LINCOLN. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. London: Arrow, 1996.

  BALDWIN, MICHAEL. The Rape of Oc. London: Warner, 1994. N.

  BAUDIS, DOMINIQUE. Raimond “le Cathare.” Paris: Michel Lafon/Ramsay, 1996. N.

  BEDU, JEAN-JACQUES. Rennes-le-Château, autopsie d’un mythe. Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières, 1990.

  ———. Les Terres de feu. Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières, 1994. N.

  BERLIOZ, JACQUES. “Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens,” le massacre de Béziers (22 juillet 1209) et la croisade contre les Albigeois vus par Cesaire de Heisterbach. Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières, 1994.

  BERNADAC, CHRISTIAN. Montségur et le Graal: Le Mystère Otto Rahn. Paris: France-Empire, 1994.

  BERNANOS, GEORGES. Les Prédestinés. Ed. Jean-Loup Bernanos. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

  BIRKS, WALTER, AND R. A. GILBERT. The Treasure of Montségur. Welling-borough, England: Crucible, 1987.

  BOGIN, MEG. The Women Troubadours. New York: Norton, 1980.

  BOLTON, BRENDA. Innocent III: Studies on Papal Authority and Pastoral Care. Aldershot, England: Variorum, 1995.

  *BRENON, ANNE. Le Vrai Visage du catharisme. Portet-sur-Garonne: Lou-batieres, 1988. Far and away the best examination of Cathar beliefs for the general reader. Unfortunately, it has yet to be translated from the French. No readily accessible English equivalent exists, though Lambert, Moore, and Wakefield deftly cover the ground in a scholarly fashion.

  ———. Les Femmes cathares. Paris: Perrin, 1992.

  ———. Les Cathares: Pauvres du Christ ou apôtres de Satan? Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

  Cahiers de Fanjeaux, no. 14, “Historiographie du catharisme.” Toulouse: Privat, 1979.

  *CANTOR, NORMAN F. The Civilisation of the Middle Ages. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. An accessible introduction to the entire millennium of the Middle Ages.

  ———. Medieval Lives: Eight Charismatic Men and Women of the Middle Ages. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

  CAUVIN, ANDRÈ. Découvrir la France cathare. Alleur, Belgium: Marabout, 1993.

  *COHN, NORMAN. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. A classic of scholarship on medieval apocalyptic cults.

  COSTEN, MICHAEL. The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1997.

  DELORT, ROBERT, ed. Les Croisades. Paris: Seuil, 1988.

  DUVERNOY, JEAN. Le Catharisme. Vol. 1, La Religion des ca
thares. Toulouse: Privat, 1976.

  ———, trans. Guilhem de Puylaurens, chronique; chronica magistri Guillelmi de Podio Laurentii. Paris: C.N.R.S., 1976.

  ———, trans. Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, Evêque de Pamiers (1318–1325). 3 vols. Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1977–78.

  ———. Le Catharisme. Vol. 2, L’Histoire des cathares. Toulouse: Privat, 1979.

  ———, trans. Guillaume Pelhisson Chronique (1229–1244). Paris: C.N.R.S., 1994.

  FRAYLING, CHRISTOPHER. Strange Landscape: A Journey Through the Middle Ages. London: Penguin BBC, 1995.

  FRIEDLANDER, ALAN. The Hammer of the Inquisitors: Brother Bernard Delicieux and the Struggle Against the Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century France. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2000.

  GARDERE, MICHEL, trans. Rituels cathares. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1996.

  *GEORGE, LEONARD. The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics. London: Robson, 1995. Lively writing, impressive scope, crammed with detail. A nonstuffy compendium of spiritual dissent. Eminently readable.

  GOUGAUD, HENRI. Bélibaste. Paris: Seuil, 1982. N.

  ———. Les Cathares et l’éternité. Paris: Bartillat, 1997.

  GRIFFE, MAURICE. Les Cathares: Chronologie de 1022 à 1321. Le Cannet: Editions T.S.H., 1997.

  GUÉBIN P., AND H. MAISONNEUVE, trans. Histoire albigeoise de Pierre de Vaux-de-Cernay. Paris: Vrin, 1951.