The original gift of Spirit breathed by God into the parents nevertheless is transmitted through the act of reproduction to their descendants, and their souls, now enchained to matter, are reborn again and again on the Devil's earth.
Another myth tells a different story to make essentially the same points. In this case the Evil God starts out not so much as a completely separate principle but as an emanation from the Good God – a heavenly being of the type that we might think of as an angel. Like Satan in Christian cosmology his pride, arrogance and avarice corrupt him and he must leave the good heaven. In the momentum of his Fall he draws down with him: … a great crowd of souls who had been created by God and were living close to him in a state of beatitude. It was from this inexhaustible reserve of fallen or captive angels that human souls derived.63
In other recensions the God of Good and the God of Evil may be portrayed as equal and opposite powers, or the latter may again be a fallen emanation of the former. Having created the material world, the God of Evil lures a host of angels out of heaven. This he does by promising them: … possessions, gold, silver and wives, till they fell like rain upon the earth for nine days and nights to be shut up in bodies by Satan.64
Many accounts say that a third of all the angels in heaven,65 due to their own ‘weaknesses’, were thus tempted to descend to earth to animate the zombie bodies that the God of Evil had prepared for them. Meanwhile the God of Good notices the radical decline in the angel population and discovers that the departure of so many has ripped a hole in heaven. He prevents further losses by jamming his foot in the hole and tells those who have already fallen that they will remain on earth, encased in bodies ‘for the moment and for now.’66 Through the cycle of reincarnation, harnessed to the sex impulse that ensures an endless supply of new bodies to replace those that wear out, the Devil believes that he has imprisoned the fallen angels in the human race forever. But the enigmatic words ‘for the moment and for now’ lead us to understand that the God of Good has a plan that will frustrate the Devil and restore the lost souls to heaven.67
Christ's Holographic mission to the realm of an alien God
Since the dualist perspective makes the God of Good powerful only in the spiritual realm, and the God of Evil powerful only in the material realm, it does not easily provide a mechanism for either to operate on the other's home turf. Perhaps this is why it takes a very long time – thousands of years we're told, in all the Cathar and Bogomil cosmologies68 – for the Good God to implement his plan to frustrate the Devil.
It is a plan conceived out of compassion for the imprisoned souls of the angelic host – because their life on earth, isolated from the Holy Spirit that had filled them before their fall, is one of ‘unimaginable suffering’.69 Denied the radiance of the Spirit, and all that is good, they are trapped far from their true home in a dimension to which they do not belong. A Cathar prayer expresses their grief: We are not of this world, and this world is not of us, and we fear lest we meet death in this realm of an alien God.70
The prayer goes right to the heart of the problem. How is the God of Good to project his spiritual power into the material realm of the God of Evil in order to rescue the souls trapped there?
The dualists all gave the same answer to this question – Jesus Christ. But their Christ was a very different figure from Jesus the ‘Son of God’, born a man, later crucified and resurrected from the dead, who is worshipped by Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians. The reader will recall that the Cathars and Bogomils believed Christ to have been non-human – an emanation from the Good God who could never have been ‘born’ into evil flesh but who had manifested in our material dimension as a particularly convincing yet ‘non-physical’ apparition. Indeed it might even be helpful in explaining what the dualists had in mind here to say that their Christ figure was a sort of avatar – not a created, material being, but an emission or radiation or instrument of the Good ‘sent forth to deal with the created world.’71
Christ's mission was threefold.
First he was to preach a religion, and transmit a gnosis, that would lift the scales from the eyes of mankind and provide high initiates with insight into the meaning of death, the true character of existence and the fate of the soul.
Secondly, he was to offer instruction as to how humans might best live together through their vast cycle of incarnations in the hell called the earth. In the long-term project of cleansing souls contaminated by matter and preparing them to return to heaven there was no doubt that certain social arrangements and personal commitments were more conducive to the success of the ‘mission’ than others. For example if humanity could be persuaded to organise itself according to principles of love, nonviolence, kindness, frugality, tolerance and mercy then this would obviously be better for all concerned than hate, bloodshed, cruelty, excess, dogmatism and vengeance. Since the God of Evil sought every opportunity to urge us on to all of the latter – and to every other ugly and wicked impulse of which we are capable – the purpose of the teachings of Jesus was to provide a counter-balance. Though in fact he was a phantasm, the perfect ‘life’ that he would appear to live on earth would also serve as an example to show others the way.
The third and by far the most important objective of Christ's holographic mission was to bring down with him from heaven a blazing fragment of the Holy Spirit. For those souls who succeeded in purifying and perfecting themselves on earth it would provide the final necessary burst of sacred energy that would break the bonds of matter and return them to heaven.72 We might envisage it as a flaming torch, lit from the main fire of the Spirit in heaven and now able to transmit its revivifying flame to souls marooned in the material world below.
Before his feigned death upon the cross, the Cathars and the Bogomils believed that Jesus had passed custody of this spiritual flame to the apostles through the laying on hands – the original ritual of the consolamentum – and thence to the primitive church.
A short excursion to parallel worlds
For some years our own long-term research interest has been in religious systems that give special emphasis to the dualisms of ‘heaven-earth’, ‘sky-ground’ and ‘above-below’. We have argued in previous books that such systems were once prominent in the ancient world – most notably amongst the Egyptians.73 There are, for instance, funerary texts 3500 years old (and older examples of the same type of material could be cited) that instruct the pharaoh to make a copy on the ground, and gain knowledge – gnosis – of a region of the sky called ‘the hidden circle of the Duat’.74 He is to do this so that he may become a ‘spirit’ after death and be: … well-equipped both in heaven and earth, unfailingly and regularly and eternally.75
The source of this passage is the 11th division of the Book of What is in the Duat (written on the walls of the tomb of Thutmosis III, 1479 – 1425 BC). A little later in the same text – in the 12th division – the pharaoh is instructed for a second time to make a copy on the ground of the hidden circle of the Duat so that it may: … act as a magical protector for him, both in heaven and upon earth.76
We have argued that such dualistic sky-ground thinking was a key element in the religion of ancient Egypt for at least 3,000 years from the beginning of the Old Kingdom to the time of Christ. And we've tried to show how that religion inspired the pharaohs to undertake great construction projects – the Pyramids of Giza, for example, or the Temples of Karnak and Luxor – which in a variety of different ways sought to ‘copy’ or ‘reconstitute’ the perfection of the heavens in the land of Egypt.77
We were therefore intrigued to discover that surviving texts, traditions and inquisitional records from Occitania, Italy and Constantinople contain not only copious illustrations of the well-understood ‘spirit-matter’, ‘goodevil’ dualism practiced by the Cathars and the Bogomils but also rarer examples of a distinctly ‘ancient Egyptian’ heaven-earth dualism.
For example, when Euthymius Zigabenus interrogated the Bogomil evangelist Basil in Constantinople around th
e year 1100 he was told one of the versions of the ‘fallen angel myths’ often used to explain how souls created by the God of Good had come to be in bodies created by the God of Evil. In this variant both Satan and Jesus are ‘Sons’ – emanations – of the Good God. Satan, the elder ‘Son’ covets the father's kingdom and rebels against him. The rebellion fails and Satan is expelled from heaven. Yet through pride and envy he still yearns to possess a realm where he might be God. He therefore creates the earth and ‘a second heaven’ (our emphasis), moulds his zombie humans from mud and water and persuades the Good God to breathe souls into them.78 The reader knows the rest of the story.
Another hint of the same kind of thinking comes in reports, collected by the Inquisition, of Cathar teachings concerning ‘the truth of the Upper and Lower Worlds’.79 Here we read about the God of Good ‘preaching in the sky to his people’, and how he sent Satan down to ‘this world’ and how afterwards Satan desired: … to have a part of the Lower and Upper possessions, and the Lord did not wish it, and on this account there was war for a long time.80
Striking and colourful reference was also made to a Cathar teaching that:
Oxen … grazed and ploughed the soil and worked on the sky as on the earth.81
Rather than outlining actual ‘beliefs’ it seems to us that such teachings are best understood as simplified illustrations or mental images to assist neophytes in the analysis of difficult concepts. Embedded in all of them is the fundamental dualist idea of two parallel worlds, one all spirit, one all matter, but here visualised in terms of graphic sky-ground metaphors. It was in the same vein that the Cathars would often speak of the ‘earthly earth’ and the ‘heavenly earth’82 – the former being our planet, this underworld or hell-world on which human incarnations are served out; the latter to be understood as a parallel celestial or heavenly realm.83
There was a text that was held in the highest regard by the heretics. Known as the Vision of Isaiah it reached the Cathars in the late 12th century from the Bogomils, being translated in the process from Greek or Old Slavonic into Latin. However it is believed by scholars to have ‘deep roots in the past, probably finding its origins among the Greek Gnostics towards the end of the first century AD.’84 In it we read how Isaiah (a prophet generally exempted by the dualists, for reasons that need not detain us here, from their general hatred of the Old Testament) is given a great privilege by the God of Good. He sends an angel from heaven to take the prophet by the hand and lead him on a journey through both the earthly and the celestial realms, crossing the barrier between the two – something that ‘no one who desires to return to the flesh’ has ever before been permitted to do. As they ascend through the heavens they see tremendous battles raging on all sides between the emanations of the God of Evil and the emanations of the God of Good: For just as it is on earth, so also it is in the firmament, because replicas of what are in the firmament are on earth.85
Rainier Sacconi, a relapsed Cathar perfectus who turned inquisitor in the mid-12th century, reported significant discussion of such ideas amongst his former co-religionists. They believed, he said, that certain of their sacred books had been written in heaven and brought down to earth (our emphasis) by Christ who entrusted them to the primitive church on the completion of his mission.86
It was to this primitive church, ‘which alone could offer true consolation to the souls dwelling in exile,’87 that the dualists claimed to belong. Through an unbroken chain of consolations, they said, their perfecti had preserved and passed down the flame of the Holy Spirit undimmed from the time of Christ. The only problem was that they had been forced to preserve it in secret because the God of Evil, absolute master of this world, had substituted a false Church for the true Church one century before and endowed it with immense material power. This imposter Church masqueraded as ‘Christian’ but actually served the Devil.88 By working for its downfall, therefore, the Bogomils and Cathars claimed that they only sought to restore the status quo ante that had prevailed at the time of the apostles.
Ancient legacy or medieval invention?
It sounds like blatant propaganda. Of course heretics would like us to believe that only their Church was the authentic descendant of the church of the apostles. Even if they'd only invented themselves yesterday, why settle for anything less? Surprisingly, however, several leading scholars in this field are convinced that such claims are solidly based and that the Cathar and Bogomil Churches somehow did manage to preserve genuine traditions from the earliest days of Christianity.
The pro-Catholic scholar Martin Lambert doesn't want to make too much of it when he admits that. By a strange chance the rite of the consolamentum that appears in the 13th century texts does seem to have been based on a rite for baptism and on practices connected with the catechumenate [those who were candidates for baptism] much earlier than the contemporary Catholic rites of baptism or ordination.89
But Steven Runciman points out that this is by no means the only close resemblance. In his view, whether we think them ‘strange’ or not, there are far too many similarities for us to put them all down to ‘chance’: The Ritual Feast of the Cathars [which involved a simple breaking-ofbread ceremony] is, if we equate the Perfect with the Early Christian priest, exactly the same as the Early Christian Communion Feast. The Kiss of Peace terminated Early Christian services as it did those of the Cathars … The consolamentum in its two aspects was closely akin to the adult baptism administered by the Early Church to the dying and to the ordination or initiation into its ministry. The very details of the service are similar. In the Early Church [as was the case with a prospective Cathar perfectus] the catechumen was tested by a long and stern probationary period [prior to] his initiation ceremony … The actual ordination was identical, consisting of the laying on of hands and of the Gospel upon the catechumen's head …90 … While polemical churchmen in the Middle Ages denounced the heretics for maintaining a class of the Elect or Perfect they were denouncing an Early Christian practice, and the heretic initiation ceremony that they viewed with so much horror was almost word for word the ceremony with which Early Christians were admitted to the Church.91
Such similarity cannot be fortuitous. Obviously the Cathar Church had preserved, only slightly amended to suit its doctrines of the time, the services extant in the Christian Church during the first four centuries of its life.92
Runciman notes that everywhere they went – whether it was amongst the oppressed Slav peasants of Bulgaria or amongst the free-thinking burghers of Occitania – the heretics were able to exploit pre-existing social and economic conditions in order to gain a foothold. But, he concludes, ‘the political impulse was not everything’: Behind it there was a steady spiritual teaching, a definite religion, that developed and declined as most religions do, but that embodied a constant tradition.93
It is his view that this tradition is in one sense as old as human speculation about the nature of evil in the world – dating back, long before Christianity, to whatever prehistoric age it was when men first asked ‘why God, if there be a God, could permit it?’94 From there Runciman is willing to trace the same primordial religion very tentatively into the historical period, seeing elements of it drawn together from ‘Egyptian, Zoroastrian and even Buddhist ideas.’95 Three centuries after Christ it was likewise notable how: Stoics and Neoplatonists each in their own way condemned the world of matter; and Jewish thinkers of Alexandria began to face the problem [of evil], influenced by the emphasis on spirit that they found in the Hermetic lore of Egypt.96
Runciman concludes that it was the Gnostics of Alexandria and Syria who were responsible – roughly between the first and fourth centuries AD – for finally gathering together all such lines of thought and applying them to Christianity.97 Thereafter a series of overlapping heresies could be sketchily made out in the historical record. It was these together, Runciman argues, that had preserved the ‘constant tradition’ from the early Gnostic schools, by way of Manicheism between the third and sixth centuries
AD, to reach eventually the Bogomils in the tenth century. They in their turn transmitted it to Western Europe in the form of Catharism in the 12th century.
Hans Soderberg is a second major authority in this field who is satisfied that the religious beliefs and practices of the medieval dualists were connected by ‘an uninterrupted traditional chain’ to the Gnostic religions that had flourished a thousand years earlier.98 He believes, moreover, that the Cathars merely gave ‘a Christian clothing’ to the even more ancient, indeed virtually universal, myth ‘of the combat between the two powers.’99
But other historians are not at all happy about tracing the origins of medieval dualism so far back.100 Malcolm Lambert thus speaks for many when he tries to place the whole Cathar/Bogomil phenomenon firmly in the context of its times, seeing it primarily as a reaction to specific economic, political and social circumstances. Even he, however, is prepared to admit that Bulgaria (converted to Orthodox Christianity barely a century before the pop Bogomil began teaching) may have provided uncommonly good ground for the heresy because of the possible influence of ‘pre-existing dualist beliefs in the country.’101
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