Part 1 Talisman Sacred Cities, Secret Faith ... Behind the Veils ... Lost World

Talisman 

SACRED CITIES, SECRET FAITH 

Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval

The Sacred Cities 

Chapter 1 

Behind the Veils 

‘The boat of Isis, a feast which was celebrated in Rome with great pomp, was known as Navigium Isidis; after it had been launched in the water, it was brought back to the temple of Isis and prayers were made for the prosperity of the emperor, for the empire and for the Roman people…’ (F. Noël, Dictionaire de la fable, Paris, 1823) 

‘No one ignores that Paris was originally enclosed in the island (de la Cité). It was thus, since its origins, a city of navigation… As it was in a river rife with navigation, it took as its symbol a boat, and as tutelary goddess, Isis, goddess of navigation; and this boat was the actual one of Isis, symbol of this goddess.’ (Court de Gebelin, Monde Primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, Paris, 1773) 

On 14 July 1789 a furious crowd ran riot on the streets of Paris and stormed the great prison known as the Bastille. Less than an hour later the fate of France hung in the balance and European history seemed set on a new and alarmingly unpredictable course. 

Contemporary engravings of the Bastille show a forbidding rectangular structure flanked by eight tall towers. It does not look easy to storm. Built in the late fourteenth century as a fortress to protect eastern Paris, it was converted in the seventeenth century into a squalid and ghastly prison for dissidents. By the time of the Revolution it was firmly established in the public mind as an instrument of tyranny and as a powerful symbol of the despotism of the French Crown. 

The day after the storming of the Bastille an enterprising local contractor, Monsieur Pierre-François Palloy, 1 took it upon himself to mobilize a workforce of 800 citizens to dismantle the hated prison stone by stone. 2 The work was so well done that within a month most of the structure had been reduced to rubble with only a small part of the perimeter wall and foundations still intact. 

At this point something curious occurred. The suggestion was made, and for a while taken seriously, that the stones of the Bastille should be salvaged in order to construct a replica of an ancient Egyptian pyramid on the site. 3 And although the project later stalled for lack of funds, the core idea of making a symbolic connection with ancient Egypt persisted behind the scenes. If a pyramid could not be managed, something less would have to suffice. Thus it was that on 10 August 1793 a group of revolutionaries ceremoniously installed a large statue of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis where the Bastille had formerly stood. Depicting the goddess seated on a throne flanked by two lions, the statue had been conceived by Jacques-Louis David, the famous artist and propagandist of the Revolution. It was to be one of the props in a macabre republican feast hastily put together in order to celebrate the decapitation of Louis XVI six months previously and the forthcoming guillotining of Queen Marie-Antoinette still two months ahead. 

The sculptors Suzanne and Cartelier did not have sufficient time to cast the statue in the preferred medium of bronze, so they simply moulded it in plaster and coloured it with bronze paint. 4 From the bare nipples of the ‘goddess Isis’ water could be seen being ejected into an open basin below the statue. Known as the ‘Fountain of Regeneration’, the general idea was for the crowd of people to pass in procession in front of ‘Isis’ and drink ‘from her fertile breasts the pure and salutary liquor of regeneration’. 5 

De-Christianization 

Everyone knows that philosophical ideas, notably those of Rousseau and Voltaire, were part of the ferment that led to the French Revolution. Still, it is hard to explain why an overtly religious ritual – such as the Isis ceremony described above – should have received official sponsorship from the revolutionary government as early as 1793. That it did so, moreover, on a site so powerfully symbolic as the Place de la Bastille raises an interesting question. Is it possible that spiritual and even ‘religious’ beliefs could have played a greater role than has hitherto been recognized in precipitating and sustaining the changes that gripped France after 1789? 

For example, although the matter has been little studied, it became clear in the early days of the Revolution that its core objectives included not only the eradication of the monarchy and a radical readjustment of the social and economic order, as might be expected, but also another, even more far-reaching goal: the eradication, no less – one might almost say the extirpation – of Christianity from the soil of France. This objective was adopted as official policy in the winter of 1793, a few months after the Isis rituals at the Bastille, and set in train an intense and systematic national campaign of ‘deChristianization’. 6 As French historian Michel Vovelle sums up, this now almost forgotten facet of the Revolution was not some passive and progressive attempt at conversion, but a methodical and forceful enterprise imposed though violence and intimidation. 7 

Why this sudden rush to stamp out Christianity? 

Was it just that the Revolutionaries saw Christianity as a rival for the loyalty of the masses and hated and resented the ancient ties between the monarchy and the Church? 

Or was there another, deeper game being played? 

Very Christian King Beheaded by Cult of Supreme Being 

The kings of France liked to trace their origins back to the Merovingians, a Frankish dynasty of the fifth to the eighth centuries AD. Nothing is known about Merovech, the semi-legendary founder of the dynasty, but his son, Childeric I, is a historical figure who ruled a tribe of Salian Franks from his capital at Tournai circa AD 470. In AD 481 or 482 Childeric was succeeded by his son, Clovis I, who united almost all of Gaul and converted to Christianity around AD 496. 

Clovis died circa AD 511, but the Merovingian dynasty continued to rule much of what is now France until AD 750. It was succeeded by the Carolingian dynasty, which gained great renown circa AD 800 with the dramatic coronation by Pope Leo III of Charlemagne as the very first ‘Holy Roman Emperor’. Thereafter all kings of France were regarded as the protectors of the Roman Church and to this effect bore the title Roi Très Chrétien – ‘Very Christian King’. Indeed, so pious were France’s medieval kings that one of them was actually canonized as a saint – Louis IX, a hero of the Crusades, whom we will meet in Part I. 8 

Meanwhile, to return to that terrible year of 1793–4 – the year, in fact, of the revolutionary ‘Terror’ with its unruly orgy of beheading – a different kind of religious phenomenon was suddenly widely observed in France: Catholic priests began to ‘abdicate’ their positions in droves 9 and a new, officially sponsored cult was launched by the Convention (the revolutionary government) within recently ‘de-Christianized’ churches and cathedrals all across the land. Sometimes referred to as the ‘cult of Reason’, but more commonly as the ‘cult of the Supreme Being’, it seems that this new religion was the brainchild of the revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre and that its establishment was masterminded once again by the artist Jacques Louis David (who had previously been involved in the Isis/Bastille stunt). 

The Tricolour Goddess with the Phrygian Cap 

In street festivals staged during the French Revolution, the ‘goddess Reason’ was routinely personified by an actress garbed with a tricolour red, white and blue veil and wearing the so-called Phrygian cap. This same little red cap was in great vogue with the general public in the early part of the Revolution and was worn especially by the Sans Culottes, the most zealous faction, who partook in the thousands of guillotine executions in Paris and throughout the country. 

The Phrygian cap is the typical headwear of two well-known pagan deities: the goddess Cybele and the god Mithras. 

Cybele was one of the great mother goddesses of antiquity and, more particularly at one stage, of Rome, whose ‘republic’ the French revolutionaries tried to emulate. As the name of her cap suggests, her cult origins were in ancient Phrygia (modern Turkey). In statuary she was routinely associated with two lions, either depicted harnessed to her chariot or flanking the ceremonial throne used by the high priests of her cult. Medieval and Renaissance scholars frequently identified her with the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis. It therefore seems unlikely to be an accident that a Cybele-like goddess was to figure so prominently in the iconography of the French Revolution – for example in the so-called Génie de la République, a marble sculpture by the artist Joseph Chinard, made in the aftermath of the fall of the Bastille, which shows ‘République’ as a young woman in Graeco Roman garb wearing the Phrygian hat. 10 

In the strange and terrible year of 1793–4 the so-called cult of Reason spread like wildfire in the French provinces alongside the deChristianization process. It became common to witness large processions, or street theatres, in which the goddess ‘Reason’, wearing the Phrygian cap, was towed on a cart to the nearest church or cathedral. Such events might look like nothing more than excuses for men and women to get drunk together, yet in France there were always more serious undertones. On 7 November 1793, for example, no less a figure than the Bishop of Paris was forced by the Convention to recant his faith. Three days later, on 10 November, huge celebrations were organized at his cathedral in honour of the alternative cult of ‘Reason’. 

As the highlight of the celebrations a certain Mlle Aubry, a beautiful and popular actress wrapped in a white veil and blue tunic and wearing the red Phrygian cap, emerged from a ‘temple’ dedicated to ‘philosophy’ and was sat on a throne while the crowds came to pay homage to her. The procession then marched to the Convention, where Citizen Chabot, a zealous revolutionary and one of the co-architects of the new cult, decreed that henceforth the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, the oldest and most revered Christian sanctuary in the land, was to become the ‘Temple of Reason’. Several ceremonies then followed where the role of the ‘goddess’ was assumed by various Parisian beauties, among them Mlle Maillard, Mlle Lacombe and Mme Momoro. 11 

The Obelisk and the Painting 

In 1813, twenty-six years after the storming of the Bastille, the great culture-changing momentum of the French Revolution seemingly came to a grinding halt with the defeat of Napoleon. Seizing the moment, the exiled Count de Provence, Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, younger brother of Louis XVI, promised the French people that he would uphold some of the tenets of the Revolution in a new form of monarchy. Then, advised by the brilliant statesman Talleyrand, he entered Paris in May 1814, where he was received with open arms by the war-weary French and, amid much jubilation, was installed on the throne as Louis XVIII. 12 

Louis XVIII ruled for ten years. He was a Freemason. On his death in 1824 he was succeeded by his brother, the Count d’Artois – also a Freemason – who took the name Charles X. Both monarchs showed a marked preference for ancient Egyptian symbolism in their public works and two projects of Charles X are of particular interest in this regard. The first involved transporting an intact ancient Egyptian obelisk to Paris. The second called for the commissioning of a gigantic painting in the Louvre. 

The Obelisk 

In 1827, Jean-François Champollion (dubbed the ‘father of modern Egyptology’ for his breakthrough decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs) was commissioned by Charles X to arrange for the importation to Paris of a 3500-year-old obelisk – one of a pair – that stood at Alexandria in Egypt. 13 

The obelisk was destined for the Place de la Concorde, a prestigious location of great personal significance to Charles X. It had originally been named in honour of his father, Louis XV, an equestrian statue of whom had once graced it. But the statue had been pulled down and destroyed during the 1789 Revolution and the site renamed by the Convention as ‘Place de la Concorde’. Here also the guillotine had been erected that had beheaded Louis XVI in January 1793 and Marie-Antoinette in October of the same bloodstained year. May we speculate that the installation of the obelisk was to commemorate the idea of a reborn and restored monarchy, with the ancient solar symbol of the divine kings of Egypt rising in the heart of the Parisian skyline like a ‘phoenix’? 

The Painting 

Charles X’s second noteworthy project was to commission the artist François-Edouard Picot to decorate the ceiling of his personal museum at the Louvre with a specific ‘Egyptian’ theme. 

Picot, like many promising artists of the time, had studied under the master Jacques-Louis David – the man responsible for the statue of Isis in the Place de la Bastille. We should not be surprised, therefore, that the very same ‘Isis’ is found on Picot’s painting for Charles X. 

Still decorating a ceiling of the Louvre, the great work was completed in 1827 and measures roughly 5 × 4 metres. Its title is L’Etude et le Génie dévoilent à Athènes l’Antique Egypte (‘Learning and Genius Unveil Ancient Egypt to Athens’). The figure of Isis dominates the scene and is depicted seated on a throne flanked by two lions – as was the case with David’s earlier Isis of the Bastille. The viewer, however, is immediately drawn to contemplate the sky above the goddess, where can be seen flying two angels in the act of ‘unveiling’ the secrets of Isis. 

We catch a tantalizing glimpse of a haunting landscape containing in the far distance an obelisk and a group of pyramids at which Isis languidly casts her gaze. From the clouds next to the angels, the Greek goddess Athena appears with an owl at her feet symbolizing initiation and wisdom. To the left of Athena is a winged goddess wearing a laurel wreath symbolizing ‘Learning’ (l’Etude). To the right of Athena is the so-called Génie de Paris, a naked winged youth brandishing a torch in order to illuminate and reveal to Athena the Egyptianized landscape below. 

After the abdication of Charles X in 1830, Louis-Philippe I became the new ruler of France. Also known as the Citizen-King, he commissioned a monument to commemorate the Trois Glorieuses, those three days of 26, 27 and 28 July 1830 that marked France’s Second Revolution. This monument, which was completed in 1836, is a tall pillar erected in the Place de la Bastille on the very spot where David had positioned his statue of Isis in August 1793. On top of the pillar is a close replica of the winged youth with the torch seen in Picot’s painting in the Louvre. 

Is Picot reminding us that here, below the winged Génie de Paris, had once been a statue of Isis as also seen in his painting? 

Coincidence, or Blueprint? 

Let us imagine ourselves in Paris today, riding in a helicopter above the Bastille pillar and looking westward, along the line of sight of the Génie de Paris. We are hovering over the city’s oldest and most sacred quarters. Sprawled beneath us are some of the most impressive buildings and monuments that Paris has to offer. To our left runs the Boulevard Henri IV leading to the river Seine. The river itself runs roughly from east to west, and thus parallel to our westward line of sight, while beyond Boulevard Henri IV is the old Pont Sully arching over the eastern edge of the Ile St Louis, with its famous abbey of the same name. The western tip of the island is linked by a pedestrian bridge to the much larger Ile de la Cité, site of the celebrated Cathedral of Notre-Dame and the impressive Palais de Justice. 

Across the Seine is the tall bell tower of the Abbey of St Germain – the latter, as we shall later see, intriguingly once a sanctuary dedicated to the goddess Isis. Yet all these wonders will pale when we focus our eyes along our line of sight westwards with the Génie de Paris, for before us will unfold the most enchanting urban landscape that Europe has to offer. Shooting westward and parallel to the Seine is the Rue de Rivoli, leading to the Church of St Germain L’Auxerrois – the oldest in Paris, where the ancient kings of France were traditionally baptized. Immediately beyond the church is the crab shaped Grand Louvre, perhaps Europe’s most wonderful museum and, until 1663, the main palace of the kings of France. 

And there is yet more to feast our eyes upon. Today an imposing glass pyramid – commissioned by President Mitterrand for the bicentennial celebration of 1989 – looms like a giant diamond in the Cour Napoléon of the Louvre. This out-of-place pyramid seems to define for us an open vista westward leading through Napoleon’s Arc du Carrousel and towards the impeccably groomed gardens of the Tuileries. Our line of sight further takes in the wide and perfectly straight Avenue des Champs-Elysées, the backbone of Paris that was once known as the Axe historique – the Historical Axis. At this point it is impossible not to see the tall Egyptian obelisk that rears up towards the sky in the Place de la Concorde at the entrance of the ChampsElysées. And nor can we ignore the way in which the whole layout that we observe from the high vantage point of the Génie de Paris bears an uncanny and striking similarity to the layout and general scheme suggested in Picot’s painting. For if we examine this painting more closely and try to imagine ourselves now alongside the other winged Génie de Paris which hovers over the mysterious Egyptianized landscape of Picot’s masterpiece, something immediately becomes clear. The obelisk and the various pyramids that Picot included not only seem to define the central axis of the painting but, if transposed to the layout of Paris, will correlate with the Concorde obelisk and the Louvre pyramid that define the central or ‘historical’ axis of the city! 

Charles X’s decision to send Champollion to Egypt to bring back the obelisk was taken during the year 1826–7 while Picot was in the process of painting his masterpiece at the Louvre. We also know that Picot was deeply involved in the furbishing of Charles X’s Egyptian Museum at the Louvre palace and that he would almost certainly have been privy to the discussions surrounding the importation and positioning of the obelisk. Even though it was not until 1836 that it was finally raised up in the Place de la Concorde, therefore, it’s easy to understand why the artist might have been inspired to put an obelisk in his 1827 painting – and in the right place. 

Much harder to explain is the relationship between the pyramids Picot shows in the painting and the glass pyramid visible in our aerial view. This is because the latter is a modern work, less than twenty years old at time of writing, designed by architect I. M. Pei and completed in 1984. 

So the question is, how could Picot have anticipated I. M. Pei’s pyramid? Or – more conspiratorially – did the 1827 painting allude to some sort of occult plan or blueprint for Paris that has continued to be implemented over more than 150 years? Or is it just a huge coincidence that the Egyptianized landscape being unveiled in the painting has been reproduced in the architecture of Paris? 

Was Freemasonry Behind the French Revolution? 

We have already seen how during the 1789 Revolution it was proposed to raise a pyramid at the site of the Bastille – something that Picot would certainly have known of. Picot is also likely to have been aware of a number of other grandiose ‘pyramid’ projects that were planned before and after the Revolution but that had been stalled because of shortage of funds. 

There had been, for example, a massive ‘pyramid tomb’ planned in Paris in honour of the scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who was a hero of the ‘Enlightenment’ and, consequently, of revolutionary ideals. The ‘pyramid’ was designed by the French architect, Joseph-Jean-Pascal Gay, in 1800, and was to have had a great perimeter wall with four gates modelled on the temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt, and an alley of eighteen sphinxes leading to the ‘pyramid’. 14 

There were, too, the various pyramids proposed by the architect Etienne-Louis Boullée. One of his surviving sketches is of a group of pyramids closely resembling the pyramids in Picot’s painting – where they are seen enveloped in clouds and haze with their capstones missing. 15 The historian Jean Starobinski, in his study of the emblems and symbols of the 1789 Revolution, explains that the ‘language of the Revolution’ was intensely ‘symbolic’. Starobinski also speaks of a mood that seems to have seized architects in the immediately pre-revolutionary period: a novel need to use basic geometrical shapes – cubes, spheres, pyramids – on a monumental scale and to transform Paris into some sort of ‘utopian city’: 

there was a need to add images to ideas, and to design the plans of an ideal city. This city, like all other utopian cities, would be governed by the laws of a simple and strict geometry… All these grand architectural styles in line with simple principles of geometry presented as projects remained unrealized. And although a harmonious city, a city for a new age… existed in the portfolios of certain architects, well-before the storming of the Bastille… the Revolution would have neither the time, nor the resources, nor perhaps the audacity to ask them to undertake these great civic projects…16 

But why an Egyptianized utopian vision for Paris? Why pyramids and pseudo-Egyptian landscapes? Where did such strange ideas come from? And who was promoting them? 

Such obsessions with Egyptian symbolism, architecture and particularly geometry once again suggest the influence of Freemasonry. Yet the authorities are divided on the matter. Scores of historians argue that an important role was indeed played by Freemasons in the French Revolution while, on the other hand, equal numbers argue that Freemasonry had nothing or little to do with it. This state of affairs is adequately expressed by the French historian J. Godechot, an expert on the subject: 

There is a whole genre of literature, which shows no sign of abating, which attributes the responsibility of the Revolution, and especially the days of 1789, to the Duc d’Orléans [the first Grand Master of the Grande Orient, the supreme body which regulates Freemasonry in France]. According to this literature, it was the Duc d’Orléans who was responsible for the riots of the Reveillon, those of the 14th July, those of the night of the 4th August, and those of the days of October. The Duc certainly attempted to profit from these events but whether he was the cause of them seems highly doubtful. In any case, if he did play this game, his efforts constituted a small influence compared to the much larger forces that pushed the people, France and even all of the Western world towards Revolution…17 

The truth is that no historian, however thorough his or her research, can really know what ‘forces’, visible or occult, moved the French people to erupt in total revolution against the monarchy and the Church in 1789. By definition such ‘forces’ are impossible to gauge and sometimes may not be ‘visible’ or ‘documented’ at all. It is a similar problem attempting to catalogue the forces behind the Crusades in the Middle Ages or behind the Holocaust in Nazi Germany – or indeed those ‘forces’ that launched the United States on its war against ‘terrorism’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century. No single force, occult or otherwise, can be deemed solely responsible for any of these events; rather a combination of forces has in every instance been at play. 

In the case of the French Revolution, it is clear that one of the main forces was generated by the terrible oppression of the people and the abuse of power by the monarchy. Yet no historian will deny that there was also a strong philosophical and/or intellectual undercurrent to the Revolution which exerted a powerful influence on the behaviour of key figures such as Robespierre, Danton and Marat, as well as others such as the painter Jacques-Louis David and the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. At this stage of our investigation Freemasonry remains as good a candidate as any for the source of this undercurrent.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in America, another, ‘sister’ Revolution had taken place a decade earlier. There, too, a strong philosophical/intellectual undercurrent can easily be detected which moved the main players such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and George Washington. And there, too, a utopian city was, quite literally, in the making – to an esoteric plan far less veiled than that of Paris. 

Franklin, Freemasonry and Revolution 

That the American Revolution or War of Independence was much influenced by Freemasons and Masonic ideologies and principles is a well-accepted thesis. There are several good works on this topic 18 that leave little doubt that Freemasonry was one of the driving forces behind the ideals and tenets, and the attachment to republicanism, of the American Revolution. What is less well known is the fact that there was a very close connection between the French and American Masonic lodges at that time. 

It is not clear whether or not Freemasonry might have entered North America before the establishment of United Grand Lodge in 1717, but the earliest surviving records of formal Masonic lodges in America are from Boston and Philadelphia in the early 1730s. 19 The spread of Freemasonry in America occurred through the so-called ‘military lodges’, and by the eve of the War of Independence in 1775 it had become extremely popular among the ranking officers and gentry. 

One of the first American Freemasons was Benjamin Franklin, who was initiated in February 1731 and became Master of the St John’s Lodge in the city of Philadelphia, where he ‘produced the oldest draft of American lodge by-laws still in existence’. 20 Franklin, who had founded the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, is also renowned in Masonic circles for printing (in December 1730) the very first article in America which referred to Freemasonry. 21 

In those days Freemasonry in America was regulated by United Grand Lodge in England, which appointed ‘Provincial Grand Masters’ in various regions of the North American continent. In 1749 Franklin was appointed Provincial Grand Master of Pennsylvania. An intellectual, a brilliant politician and, above all, a cunning agent provocateur, Franklin was to become the key figure in the American revolt against Britain and, of course, the most renowned ‘Founding Father’ of the United States. 

Both as a young man and later in his adult life, Franklin passed three sojourns in England – a total of fifteen years accumulated between 1724 and 1726, 1757 and 1762, and 1765 and 1775. During these lengthy stays no one disputes that he gravitated in his choice of friendships towards influential Freemasons and radical intellectuals. On his return visits to America he became notorious for stirring up dissent against British colonial rule – so much so that the Privy Council of London found it necessary to summon him and severely warn him not to rouse anti-British sentiment in the colonies. 

It was Franklin who, while in England, had encouraged the rejection of the so-called Stamp-tax imposed by the British on the American colonies (the tax required settlers to pay a fee to certify all legal documents and transactions). Franklin managed to intercept a series of letters written by Thomas Hutchinson, the British governor of Massachusetts, in which several important American political figures were spoken of in very hostile terms. Franklin dispatched copies of these letters to friends in America, who had them published, causing such an outrage that the British had to appease the situation by retracting the Stamp-tax. 

By the spring of 1775 the pressure was mounting against Franklin in England, and he decided it was time to return to America. He arrived there on 5 May. While he had been at sea, war had broken out between the British and the American revolutionary forces at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775. 

On his arrival in Pennsylvania, Franklin was immediately appointed as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, the body that was soon to become the Congress of the United States of America. Other newly appointed members were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Among the first decisions that the Congress made (on 15 June 1775) was the appointment of Washington as commander-in-chief of the revolutionary armed forces. 

Washington was forty-three years old in 1775 and Franklin sixty nine. Like Franklin, Washington was a Freemason. He had been initiated into the brotherhood in 1752 at Fredericksburg in Virginia, and had been raised a Master Mason the following year. 22 John Hancock, a rich Harvard gentleman, was president of the Congress at the time. He, too, was a prominent Freemason, later to be distinguished as the first man to sign the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. 

In September 1776 the Congress agreed to send a commission to France in order to seek military and financial support for the war against Britain. Franklin was a member of the three-man commission. He arrived in Paris just before Christmas that year. Although France was not at war with England at the time, it was regarded as its natural enemy and, therefore, sympathetic to the American cause. 

Franklin immediately struck up friendships with important figures in French society and, particularly, among the elite and the Freemasons. To the French he personified the unsophisticated nobility of the New World, and he quickly became the darling of French society and the hero of the intellectuals and military gentry. A sort of ‘Franklin cult’ was to emerge, and his portrait was seen everywhere, from snuffboxes to chamber pots. His company was in great demand by artists, intellectuals and high-society ladies. Spies and informers infested his house. 

Franklin was to engage in secret negotiations with the Comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. These negotiations lasted several years, and eventually treaties were signed in 1778 in which France pledged military and economic support to the revolutionary cause in America. 

Meanwhile, in Paris Franklin pursued his social and intellectual interests with gusto by joining the illustrious Nine Sisters Masonic lodge. 23 This famous lodge was founded in 1776 by Joseph Lalande and the l’Abbé Cordier de Saint-Fermin, the latter the godfather of Voltaire. This was the same year that the Declaration of Independence was signed in America, with Franklin being the most senior of the signatories. Lalande was France’s most respected astronomer, and wielded much influence amongst Parisian intellectuals. 

Nine Sisters Lodge 

The Nine Sisters lodge, named after the nine muses of Greek mythology, was in fact the successor of an older lodge, Les Sciences, which Lalande had founded in 1766 with the philosopher and mathematician Claude Helvetius. Helvetius was a staunch advocate of absolute atheism whose political and philosophical ideas would much influence the 1789 Revolution. After the death of Helvetius in 1771, his wife, Anne Catherine Helvetius, joined forces with Lalande and Saint-Fermin in the creation of the Nine Sisters lodge. Her own elite salon in the Rue Sainte Anne in Paris was famous throughout Europe, and was dubbed ‘the general headquarters of European philosophy’. 24 Another of her salons in Auteuil near Paris maintained very close links with the Nine Sisters lodge. 25 

Not surprisingly, Franklin was a regular visitor to Mme Helvetius’s salon. Another was the Marquis de Lafayette, a young officer in the French army. Lafayette belonged to a Masonic lodge, Le Contrat Social, which was linked to other important lodges throughout France. Notable amongst these was the lodge La Société Olympique, with its membership of young officers such as the Count de Chambrun, the Count-Admiral de Grasse, the Count-Admiral d’Estaing and the buccaneer John Paul Jones – all of whom would fight for the American cause a few years later. 26 

In 1779 Franklin became the Venerable Master of the Nine Sisters lodge. Earlier, in 1778, he had been given the ultimate honour of assisting in the initiation of the 84-year-old Voltaire. It is said that the aging Voltaire was supported on the arms of Franklin and Court de Gebelin, the Swiss-French inventor of the modern esoteric Tarot. 27 

In April 1777 Franklin’s agent in Paris, the diplomat Silas Deane, succeeded in recruiting the young Marquis de Lafayette, then only nineteen years old, and dispatching him to America to serve under Washington. 28 

All in all, therefore, there is ample evidence of Masonic activity – in France – focused on the care and nurture of the American Revolution and centred around Franklin and the Nine Sisters lodge. Such evidence is suggestive but does not permit us to deduce that the Nine Sisters lodge and/or Freemasonry in general were also responsible for the violent eruptions in Paris on 14 July 1789 with the storming of the Bastille and the total revolution that followed. 

Still, the suspicion lingers. As the French historian Bernard Fay explains: 

The revolutionary impulse, the revolutionary funds, the revolutionary leaders, during the first two years of the Revolution, came from the privileged classes. If the Duc d’Orléans, Mirabeau, Lafayette; if the Noailles family, the La Rochefoucauld, the Bouillon, the Lameth and other liberal nobles had not deserted the nobility in order to join the cause of the people and the Revolution, the revolutionaries would have been deprived of this advantage which allowed them to triumph from the outset. Now, all these nobles who rallied in haste to the cause of new ideas, although at the end they lost their fortunes, their situation, their ranks, and their lives, were Freemasons and we cannot attribute this to hazard, unless we ignore the evidence. 29 

Not surprisingly, Bernard Fay also sees the Nine Sisters lodge as being the focus of the activities that marked the early years of the French Revolution. This lodge, as we know, harboured not only several key players in both the French Revolution and the ‘sister’ Revolution in America, but also writers, intellectuals, politicians and artists, who used their talents to extol the virtues of the Republic in their publications and artwork. ‘It is certain’, writes Masonic historian Jean-André Faucher, that ‘the Freemasons [of the Nine Sisters lodge and other lodges] who contributed to the collapse of the monarchy and to the success of the Revolution were in great numbers.’ 30 

Another alleged member of the Nine Sisters lodge was the brilliant trained orator, lawyer and self-made politician Georges Jacques Danton. He is credited by many scholars with the pivotal role in toppling the French monarchy and in the creation of the First Republic in September 1792. He was also the founder of the infamous Club des Cordeliers, an ultraradical revolutionary society officially known as the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. 

Robespierre and the Cult of the Supreme Being 

Danton was one of the so-called Triumvirs, contesting the control of the Republic with two other revolutionary leaders, Robespierre and Marat – the latter a Freemason. It has never been conclusively established that Robespierre was a Freemason too. Nevertheless, his intellectual ideals and obsession with the ‘virtues’, as well as his promotion of the cult of the Supreme Being, all reek of Masonic influence. 

In Freemasonry God is often described as ‘the Grand Architect of the Universe’. His symbol is either a five-pointed star – the Blazing Star, in which is depicted the letter G – or a glowing pyramid or triangle with the all-seeing-eye (the eye of vigilance) inscribed within it. This symbol can still be seen on the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and appears quite obviously to have been modelled on the ‘Supreme Being’ of the Freemasons – likewise symbolized by the all seeing eye in the glowing pyramid. 

English Freemasonry in particular has gone to great lengths to assert that belief in a Supreme Being is a precondition of membership. 31 Thus, in an official statement by the ‘Board of General Purposes’, ratified by Grand Lodge in London, it was confirmed that: 

The Board has given the most earnest consideration to this subject, being convinced that it is of fundamental importance to the reputation and well-being of English Freemasonry that no misunderstanding should exist on either side of the craft. It cannot be too strongly asserted that Masonry is neither a religion nor a substitute for religion… On the other hand, its basic requirement that every member of the Order shall believe in a Supreme Being and the stress laid upon his duty towards Him should be sufficient evidence to all but the wilfully prejudiced that Masonry is an upholder of religion since it requires a man to have some form of religion before he can be admitted as a Mason…32 

The above statement was, in fact, construed from the Constitution of Freemasonry, drafted in 1723, where in the so-called First Charge, which is entitled ‘Concerning God and Religion’, the following statement appears: ‘Let a man’s religion or mode of worship be what it may, he is not excluded from the Order, provided he believe in the glorious Architect of heaven and earth…’ 33 

The term ‘Supreme Being’ is widely used in the information literature of United Grand lodge where, for example, an official leaflet declares that ‘members must believe in a Supreme Being, but there is no separate Masonic God’. 34 In other Masonic pamphlets the term ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’ is also extensively used. Clearly no distinctions are made between terms like ‘Glorious Architect of Heaven and Earth’, ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’ and ‘Supreme Being’. All are, quite obviously, considered appropriate and interchangeable epithets for the Masonic idea of ‘God’. 

Taking into account that most of the main players of the French Revolution were Freemasons (including fellow Triumvir members Danton and Marat), and giving thought to the terminology used by Robespierre for his republican cult, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that his Supreme Being was one and the same as the Masonic ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’. Indeed, the historian Michel Vovelle, an expert on cults of the French Revolution, quite readily equates the ‘Supreme Being’ of Robespierre with the ‘Grand Architect’ of the Freemasons. 35 

Rousseau and the Contrat Social 

It is well known that Robespierre was much influenced by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), the writer and philosopher whose Contrat Social (a political tract which extolled the virtues of social equality and the dignity of man) set the foundation for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the natural successor to the American Declaration of Independence. Although Rousseau was not a Freemason, French Masons took many of his philosophical and political ideas as gospel – so much so that one of the most important and influential pre-Revolutionary Masonic lodges, La Loge du Contrat Social, was named in his honour. It must be remembered that both Voltaire and Rousseau were – and still are – regarded as having been the intellectual dynamos behind the Revolution. It would be going too far to say that they actually caused it, but it is fair to say that they provided the moral framework upon which the Revolution rested. 

Thus, it is not at all surprising to find that the two most important Masonic lodges in France in the years immediately preceding the 1789 Revolution were the Nine Sisters and the Contrat Social, the former linked to Voltaire and his godfather, and the latter to Rousseau’s political masterpiece bearing the same name. It was at these lodges that many of the protagonists of both the French and American Revolutions would gather. 

La Loge du Contrat Social was founded in Paris in 1776 at the same time as the Nine Sisters lodge. Originally going under the name of La Loge Saint-Lazare, it had taken over the function of an older lodge, La Loge Saint-Jean d’Ecosse de la Vertu Persecutée based at Avignon, the latter acting as the ‘mother lodge’ of the Philosophical Scottish Rite, the forerunner of one of Freemasonry’s elite orders, the so-called Scottish Rite, also known as the Supreme Council of the Thirty-third Degree. 36 

Almost as popular as the Nine Sisters lodge, the Contrat Social recruited its members from the very best of the liberal nobility, the intellectuals and the military. Under its warrant other lodges were set up all over France, the most notable being the lodges Saint-Alexandre d’Ecosse and L’Olympique de la Parfaite Estime. 37 The name of the Contrat Social lodge had, in fact, been chosen by one of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s intimate friends, the Baron d’Astier, 38 who, like Robespierre and many other intellectuals of the Revolution, practically deified Rousseau. In April 1794 Robespierre even had Rousseau’s body exhumed and reburied at the Pantheon in Paris next to other national heroes. 39 

Designer Cult 

Robespierre’s cult of the Supreme Being was officially installed in France on 7 May 1794, a little more than a year after the beheading of Louis XVI. By then the de-Christianization process had taken its toll, with the clergy abdicating en masse, and many Christian places of worship converted into ‘temples’ for the new revolutionary cult. 

Although a staunch anti-clerical, Robespierre was not an atheist. He was to present a report to the Convention on the ‘principles of political morality which must guide the Convention in the administration of the internal affairs of the Republic’, in which he stated: ‘the idea of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul is a perpetual reminder of Justice. It is thus social and republican’. 40 

The Convention agreed, decreeing soon after: ‘The People of France recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul.’ 41 

‘A deist in the mould of Rousseau’, 42 Robespierre firmly believed that at the true basis of the new democratic state should be a natural religion, one that was intrinsic to the human condition, one that could root the virtues of the nation on to ‘eternal and sacred foundations’. 43 It was proposed that the cult would consist of celebrations and gatherings throughout the year – Robespierre wanted thirty-six festivals in all 44 – devoted notably to the important events of the Revolution (such as 14 July), to various entities and concepts such as the Supreme Being, Nature, Liberty and Equality, and finally to the ‘virtues most useful to man’, such as Truth, Patriotism and so forth. 

As part of Robespierre’s cult, the old Gregorian calendar was abandoned in favour of a ‘republican’ calendar with the months given ‘natural’ names. This new calendar was divided into thirty-six decadi of ten days each, producing a year of 360 days to which were added five ‘complementary’ days to commemorate ‘virtue, genius, labour, opinion and rewards’. 45 

It is indeed odd to discover that this republican calendar appears to have been modelled on the ancient Egyptian solar calendar – which was divided into thirty-six decans each of ten days, producing a year of 360 days to which five additional days were added to commemorate the virtues of Osiris, Isis and other divinities. 

Lalande and Sirius 

The task of developing the republican calendar was given to Charles Gilbert Romme, a respected mathematician and president of the Committee of Public Instruction. According to Masonic historian Charles Sumner Lobingier, Romme was a prominent Freemason of the Nine Sisters lodge. 46 Romme was assisted in technical matters by the mathematicians Gaspard Monge and the astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange. Monge, too, was a staunch Freemason and a prominent member of the Nine Sisters lodge, which in turn had been founded by the astronomer Joseph Lalande, who had served as director of the Paris Observatory since 1768. 

Lalande, and the astronomer-historian Charles Dupuis, sat on the committee established by Romme to create the new republican calendar. Dupuis was a firm believer that all religious ideas stemmed from ancient Egypt and, more particularly, that the city of Paris was somehow associated with the Egyptian goddess Isis. We shall return to this later. Meanwhile, David Ovason, in his intriguing book The Secret Zodiac of Washington DC, makes this most revealing comment concerning Lalande during the obituary ceremony for Voltaire at the Nine Sisters lodge in November 1778: 

The French astronomer Joseph Lalande, so used to standing in the darkness while looking up at the stars, would probably have thought of only one star as he stood in the darkened Parisian room on 28 November 1778. In his capacity as Master of the Lodge of Nine Muses [Sisters], Lalande was mourning with his Brothers [of which one was the American Benjamin Franklin] the passing of the writer Voltaire… Among the symbols guarded by the 27 Brothers was a pyramid… As he gazed at the Pyramid, Lalande would almost certainly have been drawn to thinking about the star Sirius. An astronomer who had shown great interest in ancient orientations, he could not help realizing the importance assigned to this star by the ancients. If the Egyptian Pyramids themselves were not aligned to it, he knew full well that a large number of Egyptian temples had been, and that an entire Egyptian calendar was regulated by it. In his four-volume study of stellar lore, Lalande had listed six alternative names for Sirius, and gave its position in 1750 with remarkable accuracy. His interest was almost personal: he would have known that in the horoscope of his own birth, the sun and Mercury had bracketed this powerful star. 47 

Ovason also points out that Lalande’s involvement with and deep admiration for Voltaire make it very likely that he would have been familiar with Voltaire’s book Micromégas, published in 1752. In this curious work of fiction Voltaire set the home of the hero in the star Sirius and prophetically noted that this star also had a satellite – a fact only discovered to be true in 1844 by the Prussian astronomer Frederick Bessel. 48 Sirius, of course, was also the star identified by the ancient Egyptians with the goddess Isis – and again Lalande would have known this. 49 Indeed, so interested were Lalande and Dupuis in the goddess Isis that one of their colleagues at the Académie des Sciences could not help commenting: ‘MM. Dupuis et de Lalande voient Isis par-tout! [Messrs Dupuis and Lalande see Isis everywhere!]’ 50 

Monge, Isis and Osiris 

There is another connection with Egypt and the ‘republican’ calendar which needs to be mentioned. The mathematician Gaspard Monge, who worked out the mechanics of the calendar, was a keen student of Egyptology. Through his close friendship with Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he accompanied to Egypt in 1798, he was to found the Institut d’Egypte in Cairo. Like many Freemasons of his time, Monge believed that Masonic rituals had originated in ancient Egypt and that modern Freemasons had inherited ancient Egypt’s secret system of initiation and symbolic language. Even today, confirms a Masonic historian, ‘Many Freemasons consider that the Masonic Order draws much of its mysteries from Pharaonic Egypt. It is thus that they refer themselves to Osiris and Isis, symbols of the supreme being and universal nature…’ 51 

Celebrations and Iconography 

The first official celebrations held in honour of the Supreme Being under France’s new republican calendar took place on 8 June 1794. 

At the heart of the proceedings, organized by Robespierre’s close friend the artist Jacques-Louis David, was a huge amphitheatre in the Tuileries gardens in front of the Louvre Palace. There the official congregation gathered to listen to a sermon preached by Robespierre in honour of the Supreme Being. At the close of the sermon, David had arranged for the dramatic burning of a Hessian cloth statue representing ‘Atheism’ – from which emerged, like a phoenix from the flames, a stone statue representing ‘Wisdom’. 

Next the choir of the Paris Opera sang: ‘Father of the Universe, Supreme Intelligence, Benefactor unknown to mortals. You will reveal your existence to those who alone raise altars in your name.’ 52 

‘Those who raise altars’ were, of course, the republicans; and the ‘altar’ in this particular case turned out to be a massive artificial mountain (historian Jean Kerisel calls it a ‘pyramid’) in the heart of the Champs-de-Mars, where today stands the Eiffel Tower. 53 Representatives of the forty-eight districts of Paris, as well as those of the Convention with Robespierre at the helm, made their way to the pyramid/mountain and ascended its flanks. Robespierre was then raised on the summit next to a symbolic ‘Tree of Liberty’, while patriotic hymns were sung by the Paris Opera choir. 

Let us note that in the iconography of the Revolution the all-seeing eye (or ‘eye of vigilance’) was often shown above the ‘Tree of Liberty’, while at other times it was also seen within a glowing triangle or pyramid hovering above the scene, much like the symbol seen today on the US one-dollar bill. This symbol, in fact, was originally designed for the so-called Great Seal of the United States in 1776 by a committee that included Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. 54 

The very same symbol was also to appear in 1789 on the frontispiece of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette, a close friend of both Franklin and Jefferson. The symbol clearly represents the Supreme Being of the republicans and, by extension, the Masonic ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’ – also depicted as a pyramid with the all-seeing eye or ‘eye of providence’. In one propaganda poster which has survived from the 1789 Revolution, the all-seeing eye is portrayed above the words Etre Supreme, i.e., Supreme Being, which confirms the link between the two ideas. 55 In this poster the ‘eye’ is not within a pyramid but inside a solar disc from which shoot down golden rays of light on the ‘People’ and the ‘Republic’. There are two figures on the bottom of the poster, the one on the left is the aging Voltaire, and the one on the right is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the two intellectual heroes of the Revolution. 56 

This sort of iconography and rhetoric is strongly suggestive of an attempt to push forward some sort of deist-cum-Masonic ‘religion’ as an alternative to Christianity. And as British historian Nigel Aston remarks in his book Religion and Revolution in France, the ‘belief in the Supreme Being permitted enough variations to accommodate many tastes’. 57 Aston quotes the patriot Lazare Carnot, a Freemason and also a member of the Convention, who made a speech in 1794 extolling the many virtues of mankind, and explained: ‘these are things to be found in the Supreme Being; he is the seal of all thoughts which make for the happiness of man’. 58 

Meanwhile, on the Other Side of the Atlantic... 

This perhaps unpremeditated association of the ‘Supreme Being’ with the idea of a seal brings to mind the Great Seal of the United States, which not only displays the ‘Supreme Being’ with the symbol of the glowing pyramid and the all-seeing eye, but also is an icon of the individual’s constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness. 

On 18 September 1793, just a few weeks after the festivities that were staged at the Place de la Bastille by David, another sort of ceremony, this time blatantly Masonic, took place across the Atlantic at the site of the future Capitol in Washington, DC. Wearing a Masonic apron given to him by the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol on Jenkins Hill during a ceremony attended by hundreds of Freemasons. The Masonic apron worn by Washington, which had been embroidered by Mme de Lafayette, contained an assortment of well-known Masonic symbols, but its centrepiece is undoubtedly the all-seeing eye emblazoned by a radiating sun disc. Interestingly, author David Ovason, a Freemason who has conducted extensive research into the meaning of this Masonic ceremony, concluded that it was, among other things, primarily intended to consecrate both this building as well as the federal city to the zodiacal constellation of Virgo: 

The idea of Virgo plays an important role in the astrological symbolism which dominates the city. I have also examined two foundation ceremonials in which the Virgoan element was of considerable importance. By taking this approach I might have given the impression that the sole Masonic concern in these early years of the building of the federal city was with Virgo… The importance of Virgo, and her connection with the goddess Isis, has been recognized in Masonic circles from the very early days of American Masonry. The French astronomer Joseph Lalande had been an important Mason, and his writings were widely read by Americans of the late 18th century. As early as 1731, Lalande had recognized that: ‘The Virgin is consecrated to Isis, just as Leo is consecrated to her husband Osiris… The sphinx, composed of a Lion and a Virgin, was used as a symbol to designate the overflow of the Nile… they put a wheat-ear in the hand of the virgin, to express the idea of months…59 

In his book Inside The Brotherhood, author and Masonic researcher Martin Short has this to tell us about George Washington’s affiliation to Freemasonry: 

His [Washington’s] funeral in 1799 had been conducted according to Masonic rites. The coffin had been draped with a Masonic apron given to him by a brother revolutionary and Mason, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the many Masons present each cast a sprig of acacia, to symbolize both Osiris’s resurrection and Washington’s own imminent resurrection in the realm where Osiris presides. 60 

It is perhaps significant that the national memorial later built in Washington, DC in honour of George Washington was in the form of a huge Egyptian-style obelisk, and that on its eastern entrance was displayed the ancient Egyptian symbol of the solar disc. It is reported that during the dedication ceremony a prominent Mason read a speech and, after extolling the virtues of Freemasons, added those strange words: ‘Their minds enlightened with divine love, their hearts radiant with discovering of pure love, their souls cherishing – like the ancient Egyptian worshippers of Osiris – the hope of immortality.’ 61 

We shall see later how many of the symbols involved with the cornerstone ceremonies of the Capitol and the Washington memorial were veiled with symbolism involving the ‘star of Isis’, i.e., Sirius. Meanwhile we hope that it has become fairly evident that, for reasons and motives not yet too clear, the ceremonies, festivities and city monuments associated with the ‘sister’ American and French Revolutions display Masonic ideas and imagery and, perhaps even more intriguingly, are heavily tinged with ‘Egyptian’ connotations and symbols.

The Secret Faith 

Chapter 2 

Lost World 

Mixed with the many other currents and forces that are acknowledged to have driven the French Revolution we have tried to demonstrate in Chapter 1 that powerful religious and spiritual energies were also at play. These energies surfaced visibly in an aggressive deChristianization campaign that saw great cathedrals, including the famous Notre-Dame in Paris, reconsecrated as Temples of the ‘Supreme Being’. Throughout the land, ancient Egyptian and other ‘pagan’ images were substituted for Christian symbols, notably the cross, and even ancient Egyptian deities such as the goddess Isis were venerated. The Convention was thus not referring to the God of the Christians, or to the Christian vision of the afterlife, when it affirmed in 1794 that ‘The People of France recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul.’ 

Strange and startling though these developments were, the late eighteenth century was not the first time that a religion utterly opposed to Christianity, showing signs of an ancient Egyptian influence, and deeply interested in the fate of the soul, had taken root in the land we now know as France. In the twelfth century, more than 600 years before the Revolution, just such an alternative religion had materialized in Provence and Languedoc – seemingly out of nowhere – already deeply entrenched in the hearts and minds of large sectors of the population. It was also present in force in adjoining districts of eastern Spain and northern Italy, and scattered in smaller communities throughout the rest of Europe as far afield as Belgium, northern France and Germany. 

The name of this religion that had so rapidly and successfully displaced the Roman Catholic Church in areas so close to the seat of its own power was… Christianity.

Occitania, thirteenth century.

At any rate its practitioners called themselves ‘Good Christians’, but the Church labelled them heretics from the moment they first came to its attention. Their contemporaries in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries frequently called them ‘Manichees’ (after the ancient dualist heresy of Manicheism, supposedly wiped out in Europe hundreds of years previously). And they were known by a wide variety of other epithets including, most commonly, ‘Albigensians’ (after Albi, a prominent city of Languedoc) and ‘Cathars’ (derived from the Greek word katharos, meaning ‘The Pure’). 1 

These Cathars (the name that we will generally use here) venerated Jesus Christ every bit as much as the Catholics did. That was why they called themselves ‘Good Christians’. But the place that he occupied in their religion was radically different. In the Catholic view Christ was ‘the Word… made flesh’ who ‘dwelt among us’. 2 The Cathars repudiated this utterly and worshipped him as a being of pure spirit – an emanation from the ‘Good God’, a projection or an apparition. They categorically denied his material incarnation as the ‘son’ of God, born in a human body to ‘dwell among us’. They also forcefully rejected the Catholic teaching of Christ crucified to redeem our sins. How could he have been crucified, they asked, if he had never existed physically in the first place? Far from revering the central spiritual symbol of Christianity, therefore, the Cathars denied the significance of the cross. For them it was an obscene instrument of torture that the Church of Rome had misled millions into worshipping as an idol. 

Turning the most cherished symbols, doctrines and dogmas of Christianity upside down like this was a Cathar speciality that infuriated and repeatedly challenged the medieval Catholic Church. 

The source of the problem was that, unlike the single all-powerful and all-good God of the Christians, the Cathars were ‘dualists’ who believed in the parallel existence of two deities – a God of Good and a God of Evil. Each was powerful only in his own domain and nearly impotent in the realm of the other. The domain of the God of Good was entirely spiritual, intangible, immaterial and filled with Light. It was here that human souls had originated – the creation of the Good God. The domain of the God of Evil was the earth itself, the material world and all physical life upon it – an infernal place of pain and punishment filled with Darkness and iniquity. In the Cathar scheme of things it was the God of Evil, the maker and ruler of the material world, who had fashioned the bodies (though not the souls) of mankind out of ‘mud and water’. And it was towards this same Evil God, Cathar preachers argued, that the worship of the Roman Catholic Church was directed. 

The Pope, in other words, was not a servant of the Good God but the Devil’s representative on Earth. And the purpose of the Catholic Church was not to transmit our souls to the spiritual and light-filled domain of heaven after death, but to trick us into returning again and again – in one human incarnation after another – to the hell-realm of the material world. Only a lifetime of self-denial culminating in the special gnosis – or inspired knowledge – attained on initiation into the highest grade of the Cathar faith could save us. 

It was a revolutionary teaching and, in twelfth-century Europe, an extremely dangerous one. 

Hesitating at the Crossroads 

During the period of world history for which written records have survived – most of the last 5000 years – no scholar would seriously argue with the proposition that religions have played a fundamental role in shaping the character of civilization and directing its course. Likewise, few would dispute that the human race during this period has consistently been divided not only by different languages and cultures but also by the competing spheres of influence of different religions. Some ancient faiths that once commanded absolute obedience across vast areas have withered away and vanished. Others that were insignificant have risen to prominence. Others still are almost forgotten in their original homelands but have flourished in distant lands. Against the recent background of rampant secularism in many rich countries, and rampant religious fervour in many poor ones, we are left today with four great faiths commanding distinct socio-geographic spheres of influence that still collectively claim the allegiance of roughly nine of every ten of us: 

Hinduism is strong only in the Indian subcontinent but there it has 800 million adherents. 

Buddhism sprawls from Sri Lanka to Tibet, and from China to south-east Asia and Japan. 

Islam has hundreds of millions of followers in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, the Levant and North Africa, but its heartland and historical home is in the Arabian peninsula. 

Christianity has a near-monopoly in the Americas, having obliterated or utterly marginalized all the New World’s indigenous faiths during the past 500 years. It also predominates in Australia, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and other areas of former European colonial expansion. Its historical home is in the eastern Mediterranean. However, after the triumph of Islam in the Middle East and North Africa more than a thousand years ago, Christianity’s heartland moved to Europe itself. 

Today, as a result, it is a habit of mind to think of Europe as a region locked so firmly and for so long within the Christian sphere of influence that no other faith need be considered to have shaped its destiny. For scholars prepared to look hard enough there are, of course, faint traces of earlier, pagan beliefs in the European heritage, but these are rarities and throwbacks – quaint exotica with no mainstream impact. Whether we travel to Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain or Switzerland, the reality is that all the countries of Europe confront us with very long, unbroken traditions of Christianity. In some cases these traditions substantially predate the fourth century AD, when the Roman Empire under Constantine adopted Christianity as its state religion and established Rome (where a persecuted Christian community had already existed for 250 years) 3 as the headquarters of the newly empowered Catholic Church. 

Almost immediately after coming into imperial favour the formerly persecuted Church Fathers themselves turned persecutors. They sought to impose their control on Christians throughout the Roman Empire, to suppress schisms and to distil a universally agreed doctrine out of the great variety of teachings that the faith had previously encompassed. To this end, as we will see in later chapters, they promulgated dogmas and defined and declared anathemas upon a whole series of heresies. These were then systematically hunted down and obliterated over the next three centuries. 

Notable among the forbidden faiths was the great dualist heresy of Manicheism (to which no less a figure than Saint Augustine, one of the four most revered ‘Doctors of the Church’, had belonged for nine years before converting to Christianity in AD 386). 4 Claiming to lead to direct and personal knowledge of the divine, all forms of Gnosticism were also persecuted to vanishing point. Influenced by elements of the ancient Egyptian religion, Asian and Middle Eastern mysticism, Greek philosophy and alternative interpretations of Jewish and Christian teachings, Gnosticism was as profoundly dualistic as Manicheism and was for some centuries the chief rival to Roman Catholic hegemony. 5 

By the seventh century, however, Manicheism had been expelled to the distant East, and the numerous Gnostic sects that had confronted the early Church seemed to have been obliterated. 6 No longer facing any organized spiritual competition, Catholicism was able to see out the remainder of the Western Dark Ages with its defences relaxed. The result, by the early eleventh century, was that churchmen had no living experience of heresy. Those who sought to remind themselves of its dangers could only turn to books – among them Saint Augustine’s agonized account of his own ‘errors’ as a ‘Manichee’ written 700 years earlier. 7 

It therefore came as something of a jolt when a heresy (looking very much like Manicheism) suddenly resurfaced in the twelfth century in the form of Catharism in areas at the very heart of Western culture. Moreover, it proved to be no transitory movement linked to the lives of a few charismatic leaders but the most deadly threat ever to confront the Catholic faith. Appearing as though from nowhere, it was a well-organized ‘anti-Church’ that claimed an antiquity even greater than that of Catholicism itself. It also had the temerity to recruit its new members directly from Catholic ranks. 

What made Catharism such a threat and outrage to the Catholic Church, however, was not just its embarrassing success at converting Catholics, nor the challenge of its doctrines – radical though they were. Nor was it simply the shock of confronting a dualist heresy that seemed to have conjured itself up out of the past like a ghost. Nor was it the heresy’s obvious dynamism, nor the uncomfortably rapid spread of its sphere of influence ever closer to Rome during the twelfth century. The real problem was that as well as winning over large numbers of ordinary people, Catharism had succeeded in attracting the tacit and sometimes even the overt support of some of the most powerful noble families in south-western Europe. These included, most notably, the Counts of Toulouse, the Counts of Foix, and the Trencavel viscounts who ruled the walled cities of Albi, Béziers and Carcassonne. With their knights and castles and strength of arms concentrated in the Languedoc and surrounding areas, such men had transformed Catharism into something that the Church of Rome had never faced before. Here was a heresy that could fight back, that would not easily be crushed by the use of secular force and that might conceivably, if allowed to grow further, push the Catholic religion out of Europe altogether. 

For more than a century, with consequences that reach us today, European civilization hesitated at the crossroads of two competing spiritual systems and confronted the choice of two very different ways forward into the future. Let us take a closer look at the key players and events during this decisive period of history.

A Language in Which ‘Oc’ Means ‘Yes’ 

Languedoc in the twenty-first century is part of the colourful mosaic of southern France. It adjoins Provence to the east and is separated from Spain to the west by the Pyrenees mountains. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was famed for the romantic poetry of its troubadours, for its ‘Courts of Love’, 8 for the fiercely independent character of its people and for its unique culture. 

Underlining this sense of difference was the basic fact that the people of Provence and Languedoc had never been French subjects and did not even speak French. Indeed, at that time what the word ‘France’ conjured to mind for most was just the Ile de France, the region immediately around Paris. More broadly defined, ‘France’ also included the territories lying between the Loire, the middle part of the Meuse and the Scheldt. But the lands to the south of the Loire and south of the Massif Central, as well as the whole of the Mediterranean coast, were excluded. As late as the fourteenth century travellers heading north from Toulouse or Avignon thought of themselves as journeying to France rather than within it. 9 

Together with the regions of Limousin and old Aquitaine, and the southern part of the French Alps, Languedoc and Provence were known in medieval times by the collective name of Occitania. They by no means formed a ‘state’ or a ‘country’ as we understand those concepts today. On the contrary, other than to family, friends and neighbours, the primary loyalties of the majority of the inhabitants were to the town or city in which they lived or to the aristocrats whose fields they ploughed. Still, they had much more in common with each other than they did with the cultural and political community of northern states that were in the process of becoming ‘France’. And above all else these ‘Occitanians’ were united by their common language, literally the langue d’oc – that is to say the language in which the word for ‘yes’ is oc (as opposed to the langue d’oil, the twelfth-century language that was to evolve into modern French, in which the word for ‘yes’ was oil – later to become the more familiar oui of today). 

Medieval scholar Joseph Strayer points out that the French of the north and the Occitan of the south are separated by one of the sharpest breaks in the whole family of Romance languages and are mutually incomprehensible. Occitan is, however, very close to Catalan and quite close to Castilian. The result is that in the twelfth century: 

A merchant from Narbonne would have been easily understood in Barcelona, while he would have needed an interpreter in Paris… A baron of the Ile de France would have found more men to talk to in London, or even in Cologne, than he would have in Toulouse. Now a language barrier is not an impassable obstacle, but it is a real one, and it is the kind of barrier that creates misunderstandings and suspicions. 10 

The Mailed Fist of Occitania 

Power in Occitania was in the hands of a feudal aristocracy dominated by the three great families of Foix, Trencavel and Toulouse. 

Described at the time as ‘the peers of kings, the superiors of dukes and counts’, 11 the princes of the house of Toulouse ruled a domain extending from Toulouse itself to Nimes in the east, and from Cahors in the north to Narbonne on the Mediterranean coast. 12 They also enjoyed, and could sometimes call upon, an impressive range of international alliances. Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse (1194–1222), for example, was a cousin of the King of France and brother-in-law to the Kings both of England and of Aragon. 13 He also tolerated and sometimes even promoted Catharism and travelled with a Cathar holy man. 14 

The Counts of Foix, lords of the high Pyrenees along the border with Spain, were renowned for their military prowess, stubborn ruthlessness and strong Cathar connections. In 1204 Raymond-Roger, Count of Foix (1188–1223), witnessed the reception of his widowed sister Esclarmonde into the perfecti (literally the ‘Perfect’), the highest rank of Cathar initiates. 15 Two years later his own wife, having borne him six children, was also received into the perfecti and retired from the world to preside over the Cathar equivalent of a nunnery. 16 Though never avowedly a Cathar himself, Raymond-Roger was staunchly anti-Catholic all his life. On one occasion it seems that soldiers in his employ chopped a Canon of the Church into pieces and used ‘the arms and legs of a crucifix to grind up spices with, in lieu of a pestle.’ 17 In a lengthy essay on ‘the barbarity and malignity of the Count of Foix’ a contemporary pro-Catholic chronicler wrote: ‘His wickedness exceeded all bounds… He pillaged monasteries, destroyed churches, excelled all others in cruelty.’ 18 

The Trencavel dynasty, controlling lands that stretched from the Tarn to the Pyrenees, added their own combination of wealth,hereditary influence, military might and pro-Cathar sympathies to the equation of power in Languedoc. Raymond-Roger Trencavel, who ruled from 1194 until his capture and murder by Catholics in 1209, had been tutored by the well-known Cathar scholar Bertrand de Saissac. The latter had once shown his contempt for the laws of Catholicism when a monk he disliked was elected abbot at the monastery of St Mary Alet. Bertrand’s response was to have the corpse of the former abbot exhumed and placed, mouldering, in the abbatial chair to supervise a new election. Not surprisingly the abbot elected on this occasion did meet with Bertrand’s favour. 19 

Support for and involvement with the Cathars, combined with a rejection of the Church, were not confined solely to the upper levels of the aristocracy. In the Lauragais, the populous area between Toulouse and Carcassonne, the minor nobility are reported to have been almost solidly Cathar. The same was also the case for their counterparts in the Corbiàres between Carcassonne and Narbonne. 20 Tellingly it has been calculated that 30 per cent of all Cathar perfecti were of noble birth. 21 Moreover, even the remaining Catholic nobility of Occitania often proved to be at least sympathetic to the Cathars – and at times were openly supportive of them. An indication of their dilemma is to be seen in the reply given by the Catholic knight, Pons Adhemar of Rodeille when he was asked by Foulkes, the Bishop of Toulouse, why he and his co-religionists had not expelled the heretics from their lands: ‘We cannot. We have grown up amongst them. We have relatives amongst them, and we see them living good, decent lives of perfection.’ 22 

Weaving the Threads of the Great Heresy 

Thus sheltered by the aristocracy of the region on both sides of the religious divide, the Cathars also found strong support at all other levels of Occitanian society. Large numbers of them were skilled craftsmen and artisans. A list of Cathars present in the city of Béziers in 1209 includes 

one noble (baronus), four doctors, five hosiers, two blacksmiths, two pelterers, two shoemakers, a sheep-shearer, a carpenter, a weaver, a saddler, a corn-dealer, a cutler, a tailor, a tavern-keeper, a baker, a wool-worker, a mercer, and a money-changer. 23 

Malcolm Barber, Professor of History at Britain’s University of Reading, observes that the Béziers list includes no fewer than ten individuals employed in the textile industry, and that a great many other primary documents from the period likewise link weavers (textores) to the heresy. 24 

This is true both within and outside the borders of Occitania. In France the general name by which Cathars were known was simply Texerant, ‘the weavers’. 25 In 1145 the renowned French ecclesiastic Bernard of Clairvaux undertook a preaching tour to warn against a ‘heresy of weavers’. 26 It had supposedly sprung up fully formed ‘from the suggestions and artifices of seducing spirits’ 27 and was so successful at winning conversions that ‘women have quitted their husbands, men have deserted their wives… Clerks and priests… often abandon their flocks and their churches, and are found in the throng, among weavers male and female.’ 28 

Likewise, in 1157 Archbishop Samson of Rheims was almost certainly complaining of Cathar missionary activity when he spoke of a ‘Manichean plague’ that had recently infected the greater part of Flanders 29 (we noted earlier that twelfth-century churchmen commonly referred to the Cathars as Manicheans – after the dualist sect of that name that had supposedly been stamped out hundreds of years previously). This new outbreak of the heresy, Samson said, was being spread by itinerant weavers and cloth-merchants. 30 [ The Catholic Church was doomed from it's beginning, because it took the Truth of a Personal God, which is what Christ taught, and twisted it into a vengeful dogma of rites with no room for the sons of God, and taking it upon itself to assign sin to the whole of the human race. This is why the Church is in the process of imploding in the 21st Century via Jesuit control. d.c ]

The explanation is simple. Employment as weavers and in other sectors of the medieval cloth trade – with its extensive international connections – was chosen as ‘cover’ by Cathar perfecti. They needed cover to avoid early detection by Church authorities because they were mounting what can only be described as a large-scale and well thought-out missionary campaign. The rather gentle, patient and systematic methods that they used to win local trust, and eventually conversions to the heresy, have been nicely described by the Canadian historian Stephen O’Shea: 

On the paths and rivers of the Languedoc of 1150 there were not only traders and troubadour but also pairs of itinerant holy men, recognizable by the thin leather thong tied around the waist of their black robes. They entered villages and towns, set up shop, often as weavers, and became known for their honest hard work. When the time came, they would talk – first in the moonlight, beyond the walls, then out in the open, before the fireplaces of noble and burgher, in the houses of tradespeople, near the stalls of the marketplace. They asked for nothing, no alms, no obeisance; just a hearing. Within a generation these Cathar missionaries had converted thousands. Languedoc had become host to what would be called the Great Heresy. 31 

The Perfect and the Believers 

The missionaries were all Cathar perfecti, and, as O’Shea rightly observes, it was their custom – like modern Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses – to travel and evangelize in pairs. 32 Their black robes would have given them something of the look of Christian monks or priests. Other than their appearance, however, there was really no similarity at all between the lifestyles of these perfecti and the lifestyles of the typical Catholic clergy of the period. As even their most bitter opponents were willing to admit, the distinguishing characteristic of the Perfect was that they lived exemplary lives of chastity, humility, great poverty and simplicity throughout the whole period of Catharism rise and fall. 33 Meanwhile, the Church of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had already become decadent and disreputable. It was widely despised because of the rampant sexual licence of so many of its ministers. In some areas it was openly hated because of its vast wealth, corruption, greed, and unnecessary ostentation. Doubling as large-scale feudal landlords, most bishops enjoyed lives of profligate, scandalous luxury. No wonder, then, that they were unpopular in their own dioceses where they were reviled for their indifference to the privations of the poor. 34 

To understand the extreme asceticism for which the perfecti were renowned, one need only recall the teaching that lay at the core of Cathar dualism. The material world was the wholly evil creation of a wholly evil god. All contact with matter was therefore also evil and could only inhibit Catharism primary project. This was the gradual purification and eventual release of immortal human souls from their cycle of rebirths in mortal human bodies. ‘O Lord, judge and condemn the imperfections of the flesh,’ went one of their prayers. ‘Have no pity on the flesh, born of corruption, but show mercy to the spirit, which is imprisoned.’ 35

The perfecti were active participants in what they saw as a cosmic struggle between utterly incompatible powers – spirit and matter, good and evil. 36 Success in the struggle required them to lead lives in strict accordance with their beliefs and teachings. Since flesh was ‘born of corruption’, it followed that any foodstuff thought to have originated from processes of coition and reproduction was absolutely forbidden to them. This meant, in practice, that they could eat neither flesh nor fowl, nor any of the derivatives from these creatures such as eggs, milk, cheese, cream or lard. 37 Their diet consisted of bread, vegetables, pulses, fruits and nuts. Inconsistently (to the modern mind) fish were also allowed. This was because of a medieval misconception that fish did not issue from sexual reproduction but were somehow spontaneously generated in water or mud. 38 

The same anti-reproductive, anti-coital logic meant, of course, that the perfecti must themselves be totally celibate – even an ‘unchaste’ kiss was believed sufficient to destroy their ritual purity. All other bodily needs and desires brought the same peril and were likewise to be shunned. 39 To harden their resistance to the desire for nourishment they not only rigorously followed the already sparse diet outlined above but also subjected themselves to lengthy fasts amounting to more than seventy days a year on bread and water alone. 40 The purpose of all these privations was to loosen the bonds that imprisoned the soul within the body. 41 [ The soul is NOT imprisoned within the body, the issue with most is that the soul has been forgotten. No one is here on the Earth in duress d.c ]

In pursuit of the same objective, and in order further to minimize their contacts with the snares and lures of the material world, the perfecti renounced all property and personal possessions except the clothes they stood up in. 42 Many other austerities were also required of them. Despite these, however, there was no shortage of candidates for the perfectus grade and the Cathar religion in fact made it very difficult for anyone to achieve it. Aspiring perfecti underwent a period of training and direct exposure to the full rigours of the life that they would lead after initiation. Known evocatively as the abstinentia, this typically involved three years of full-time attachment to a senior perfectus. Only at the end of the abstinentia, if they had conducted themselves satisfactorily, would they become eligible for the ritual known as the consolamentum (‘consoling’) that completed their own elevation to Perfect status. 43 

Though often referred to as the ‘priests’ of the Cathar religion, several researchers have noted that the perfecti were in reality much closer in terms of their austerities, their personal comportment and their function within the faith to the ‘ascetic teachers of the East, the bonzes and fakirs of China or India, the adepts of the Orphic mysteries, or the teachers of Gnosticism’. 44 This impression is enhanced by contemporary reports which seem to describe perfecti in trancelike or meditative states. One eyewitness speaks of the ‘extraordinary sight’ of a Cathar perfectus seated on a chair ‘motionless as a tree trunk, insensible to his surroundings’. 45 

But the Cathar authorities knew very well that a life of meditation, total chastity, austerity and withdrawal from the material world was beyond the reach of the average mortal. Moreover their society did not – and could not – consist solely of perfecti and candidate perfecti whose celibacy would provide them with no successors. What was needed was a much wider pool to draw on. This was supplied by a second grade or rank, far more numerous than the Perfect, known as the credentes (‘Believers’). It was they, in their tens of thousands, who constituted the vast majority of all Cathars. It was they who contributed the social and economic energy – to say nothing of the military muscle – that made this religion such a threat to the Church of Rome. 

What the ‘Believers’ believed in were the fundamental tenets of the dualist faith concerning the existence of two gods, the evil nature of matter and the imprisonment of the soul in flesh. They might even aspire, ultimately, to becoming wandering gurus of perfectus rank themselves. But the reality was that most credentes never took up the challenge. Instead, wherever Catharism was established, we know that its Believer class lived ordinary lives of no great self-denial. They married, produced children, owned property, ate well and generally enjoyed the world. They certainly attended the simple services and gatherings led by perfecti that were part of the Cathar calendar. Along with all other Believers they likewise accepted and took with extreme seriousness a general duty to accommodate the impoverished perfecti on their travels and to provide them with a strong network and support system. They were also required to offer a ritual salute to any perfecti they might encounter. Called the melioramentum, this involved triple genuflections and greetings to the Perfect and culminated in the following exchange:

Believer: Pray God for me, a sinner, that he make me a good Christian and lead me to a good end. 

Perfect: May God be prayed that he may make you a good Christian. 

The exchange, explains medieval historian Malcolm Lambert, was standardized and had a special meaning: 

To be a Good Christian, or a Christian at all, in Cathar belief was to become a Perfect. To come to a good end was to die in possession of the consolamentum, not having forfeited it by lapse. In the exchange and genuflection Perfect and adherent reminded each other of their own status, the one waiting, not yet freed from Satan, the other outside his power, in a unique position. 46 

Believers were taught that it was particularly important for them to find a Perfect and to perform the melioramentum if they had in any way been exposed to the contamination of Catholic influences. This was so at least partly because obeisance – amounting almost to worship (and referred to in some contexts as ‘adoration’) of the Perfect – represented a direct and public denial of the Catholic Church. 47 When the prominent credens, the Lady Fidas of St Michel, travelled to Rome with Countess Eleanor of Toulouse, she cheekily took a Cathar Perfect with her, ‘to worship him in the very chapel of the Pope’. 48 

Whether they were nobles or peasants, however, the majority of Believers would postpone until their deathbeds the moment when they felt ready to summon a perfectus to confer upon them the dualist baptism of the consolamentum. It was an act of momentous importance that filled the recipient with a charge of the Holy Spirit, and, for some, could open the door to the Kingdom of Heaven. Though it amounted, on the surface, to nothing more than a short ritual accompanied by prayers and a laying-on of hands, the consolamentum was considered to be so powerful that it was sufficient, by itself – even without years of itinerant austerity – to initiate the dying Believer into the ranks of the Perfect. He or she would thereafter consume only bread and water, avoiding any further contamination from the evil world of matter. The hope for those thus consoled, and in a state of ritual purity, might not have been that death would this time bring a final release from the cycle of rebirth in human form, but that it would, at the very least, bring ‘progress on the chain of being towards it’. 49 On occasions when patients unexpectedly recovered after being consoled they could always return to the normal life of a credens and to full involvement with the world. In that case they would have to receive the consolamentum and enter a fast once again when death approached or whatever progress their souls might have made in this incarnation would be lost. 

It was by no means certain that the next incarnation would bring the soul to a body that would again receive the Cathar teaching (or even necessarily to a human body at all – rather than, say, the body of a donkey – let alone to the body of a Cathar). Believers were therefore provided with a strong incentive to receive the consolamentum in this life (where they knew it was definitely available) but to so juggle things that they did not have to go through with it until their deathbed. During the late twelfth century, when there were large numbers of perfecti on the roads and living in every village, town and city of Occitania, this was not usually difficult to accomplish. But during the thirteenth century, as we shall see in Chapters 6 and 7, Catharism became a persecuted faith throughout Europe – with the greatest attention paid to Occitania. There, amidst demonic scenes from the lowest circles of Hell, the populations of entire cities were put to the sword by soldiers of the Church of Rome. The Papal Inquisitors followed and as they went about their work the numbers of perfecti fell into an ever more catastrophic decline with each new mass burning. 

By the early fourteenth century there are only known to have been three Perfect still at work in the whole of the Languedoc, once the very epicentre of the faith. Surviving Believers faced great uncertainty as to whether they would be able to obtain the consolamentum at all. The desperate solution of many Cathars nearing the end of their natural lives in these last days was the endura – an Occitan word meaning ‘fasting’ or ‘hungering’ applied to the bread and water fast that normally followed deathbed consolings. 50 Now, however, those who had received the ritual preferred not to risk breaking their fast even if they later began to show signs of recovery. The consequence was that the endura ‘came to have the precise and technical meaning of fasting to death after receiving the consolamentum’. 51 

Abolishing Superstition and the Fear of Hell 

When extensive persecution of Catharism began in the thirteenth century the fundamental difference in lifestyle between the consoled and the unconsoled – between Perfect and Believers – was sometimes seized on by the latter to try to persuade their accusers that they weren’t heretics at all. In the Bourg of Toulouse in 1223 for example Jean Teisseire, a credens in the prime of life who had no interest in an early consolamentum, was arrested and accused of heresy. ‘I have a wife and I sleep with her,’ he protested, ‘I have sons, I eat meat and I lie and swear’ 52 (along with marriage, sex, reproduction and meat eating, lying and the swearing of oaths were forbidden to perfecti). 53 Teisseire was convicted on the evidence of witnesses, and his arguments were ignored by the court. He was sentenced to burn at the stake and placed in the bishop’s prison to await execution. The procedure now allowed him to recant and go free, but he stubbornly continued to profess his innocence and remained on death row. There he fell into conversation with several Cathar perfecti and a few days later accepted the consolamentum at their hands. Still refusing to recant beliefs that he now acknowledged he held he was ‘burnt with the rest’. 54 

There are many reports of courage and extreme self-sacrifice from the era of persecution. They tell us that Catharism was capable of inspiring its adherents with profound and strongly held beliefs concerning the progress and afterlife destiny of the soul. Indeed, these beliefs were so strong that again and again perfecti and credentes like Teisseire were prepared to suffer death in the utmost agony rather than recant and jeopardize their imminent release from the evil world of matter. 

There are several well-attested accounts of the condemned rushing en masse towards the pyres that had been prepared for them and flinging themselves joyfully into the roaring flames. Whether we think of them as credulous fools, therefore, or as exalted martyrs, it seems that Catharism had liberated these people from the paralysing fear of hell that the Catholic Church had used for centuries to terrify and close the minds of medieval Europeans. Indeed, such a liberation would have followed more or less automatically from conversion to Cathar dualism – which proposed no lower hell than the earth itself, ‘the lowest plane of consciousness to which we sink’ 55 – a place of trial and torment in which our souls were already undergoing fierce penances and had remained trapped for countless prior incarnations. 

Hell, in other words, was not an unknown destination, to which we would be sent for sins defined by the Catholic Church, but a known one in which we were already present, but which it was our destiny one day to escape. 

In this way, at a stroke, the Cathars not only abolished all fear of death in their initiates but also sundered bonds of superstition and demonology that had stalled the progress of Western civilization throughout the Dark Ages. Seeking to sweep the cobwebs away from all aspects of habitual religious behaviour, they said that chanting in church ‘deceived simple people’, and ridiculed as an irrational waste of money the Catholic practice of paying alms for souls in purgatory. 56 

By giving exposure and prominence to such ideas – albeit for just a brief period of history – the Cathars encouraged a new freedom of thought and a new spirit of flexibility and openness to change. The psychologist Arthur Guirdham believes that this was ‘perhaps their most significant contribution to the emancipation of the common man’: 57 

Not to understand this is to fail to realize that Catharism was not only an enlightened but an optimistic creed. Some of the contemporary defenders of Catharism regard it as a dour, Calvinistic and basically pessimistic religion. Sir Steven Runciman who is, on the whole, very fair in his assessment of the Cathars, regards the religion as foredoomed because of its builtin pessimism. Those holding such views are at a loss to explain how such a repressive and pessimistic creed could have spread like wildfire through the most sophisticated and sceptical region of Europe…58 

A Renaissance Ahead of Its Time? 

Catharism sudden flowering took place at a time when Europe, stimulated by the contact with the East that the Crusades had brought, was shaking off the slumber of the Dark Ages and rediscovering ancient wisdom in the classical texts. Often described by historians as ‘the Renaissance of the 12th century’, this period of change, experimentation and broadened horizons’ 59 ended hundreds of years of intellectual stagnation. It saw the birth of many new philosophical and scientific ideas, witnessed the rise of the first towering Gothic cathedrals and experienced far-reaching social and economic changes. 

Together with the neighbouring parts of eastern Spain and northern Italy, where the Cathar religion was also strong, the twelfth century civilization of Occitania – urbanized, sophisticated, cosmopolitan – was ‘indisputably ahead of anywhere else in Europe’. 60 It lay at the epicentre of what promised to become a great upheaval in Western values marked by a spirit of inquiry and the introduction of a gentler, more cosmopolitan and more tolerant world view. Moreover, had Catharism succeeded in all its aims, we can be certain that there would have been no place, in this new age, for the Catholic Church – which, as the Church of Satan, had for so long led so many souls astray. Far from succeeding, however, the Cathar heresy was crushed by a series of violent and genocidal ‘Crusades’, unleashed by the Catholic Church in the first half of the thirteenth century. The last of the resistance was then slowly and methodically finished off by the Papal Inquisition, which was officially established in 1233 specifically for the repression and extirpation of Catharism. 61 Had it not been for the destruction and dislocation wrought by these so-called ‘Albigensian Crusades’, some believe that the culture of the Languedoc could have anticipated the Renaissance in Italy by more than two centuries. 62 

Such speculations are frowned on by mainstream historians. 63 As a result questions like ‘What would have happened to the West if Catharism had won its struggle against the Catholic Church?’ are rarely given any serious scholarly consideration. An exception was the French social philosopher and activist Simone Weil. She died in 1943 as a result of voluntary starvation in sympathy with her compatriots then under German occupation. Aged only thirty-four at the time of her fatal endura, Weil had spent the last few years of her life cultivating a deep interest in the unique culture of twelfth-century Occitania. She believed Catharism to have been the source of all its inspiration. By crushing the Greeks more than 2000 years ago, she argued, the Roman Empire had ‘brought sterility to the Mediterranean basin’. Only once since then had another civilization raised its head in the same region which might have had the capacity to attain ‘a degree of freedom and spiritual creativity as high as that of ancient Greece’. Snuffed out in the thirteenth century by the Church of Rome, this was the lost Occitanian civilization of the Cathars – which, in Weil’s analysis, had somehow plugged itself into much older currents of thought: 

Little as we know about the Cathars, it seems clear that they were in some way the heirs of Platonic thought, of the esoteric teachings and mysteries of that pre-Roman civilization which embraced the Mediterranean and the Near East…64 

Weil was one of those for whom Occitanian civilization in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had conceived the true Renaissance. Its potential had been greater even than that of the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century. Because Languedoc was the heartland of this precocious civilization, the brutal engine of the Albigensian Crusades smashed not just the Cathars but Europe’s last living link with the ancient wisdom traditions of India, Persia, Egypt and Greece. By contrast, the centuries that followed the destruction of Languedoc ‘were an essay in totalitarian spirituality’. 65 

Cosmopolitan Cities 

Occitanian society under the influence of the Cathars was anything but totalitarian. It was far ahead of the rest of Europe in the process of urbanization. Its rapidly expanding cities like Narbonne, Avignon, Toulouse, Montpellier, Béziers and Carcassonne proudly guaranteed the freedom of thought and the economic and political independence of their citizens. Even in his own city, for example, the Count of Toulouse lacked any executive legal authority over the citizens and was only obeyed so long as he respected local common law. 66 Narbonne, Avignon, Montpellier and Béziers were hives of intellectual activity – in every sense university cities even before their universities had officially been founded. The most advanced course on Aristotle in Europe, which took account of the latest work by Arab scholars, was taught at Toulouse. 67 

Arab merchants and doctors had long found their way to Occitania across the Pyrenees from those parts of Spain then under Muslim control, or by sea from the east. They had been welcomed by the Cathars – who were inclined to see the Roman Catholic Church, not the ‘infidel’, as the natural enemy. Besides, for the Cathars, all human bodies, whether Muslim, Christian or Jew, were the prisons of entrapped souls. Since all suffered the trials and rigours of the material world equally, and since only Catharism offered a way out of it, the oppression of one man by another on grounds of race or creed was absurd. 

Such ideas spilled over into civic life and resident aliens in the cities of Occitania enjoyed full citizens’ rights, regardless of their nationality or creed. 68 Moreover, while Catharism maintained its resolute antipathy to the Church of Rome, it was open-handed and liberal with other faiths that were willing to co-exist peacefully with it. This was a time when possession of land by non-Christians was a criminal offence in northern France. It was a time when mobs of Catholics throughout Europe could frequently be worked up into frenzies of anti-Semitic prejudice. Yet in Occitania large and long established Jewish communities owned land, worshipped openly in synagogues and prospered unmolested throughout the twelfth century. 69 

They, too, seem to have been going through a period of creative intellectual and spiritual inquiry, just as the Cathar communities were. Indeed, it was in the coastal cities of Languedoc in this same period that Jewish savants elaborated the occult philosophy of the Cabala and began to explore its implications. 70 A system of mysticism rooted in ancient Judaic traditions, Cabala laid claim to secret knowledge and divine revelation. It also exhibited strong dualistic tendencies in which the ‘left side’ and ‘right side’ of the cosmos were envisaged in constant opposition and conflict. 71 

It is notable that acclaimed schools of Talmudic Law flourished at Narbonne, Lunel and Beaucaire in the twelfth century and that there is a report from 1160 of Jewish students from ‘distant lands’ studying there. 72 Intriguingly the same source – Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela – also describes an encounter with a Jew at Lunel who had ‘discarded all worldly business, studied day and night, kept fasts, and never ate meat’. 73 This suggests the possibility that Cathar ideas about how we should live in the world and what we are doing here had begun to have an impact not only on the large number of former Catholics it had freed from the fear of hell but also on the followers of other faiths as well. 

Cathars and Troubadours 

It was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Catharism briefly lit up people’s minds in Occitania. In the same period another extraordinary intellectual phenomenon also appeared and disappeared in precisely the same region now encompassed by southern France, northern Spain and northern Italy. This parallel phenomenon was the lyric poetry of the troubadours – a form that was invented in Occitania and composed in the Occitan language. Judged by literary experts today as ‘one of the most brilliant schools that ever existed’, it is accepted as an influence on all later European lyrical poetry. 74 Of much greater consequence, however, is the fact that troubadour poetry also had an unprecedented social impact. Indeed, it brought about what has been described as ‘a revolution in thought and feeling, the effects of which are still apparent in Western culture’. 75 

The revolution had to do with attitudes towards women in society. The troubadours themselves were favoured at the many noble courts of Occitania – where they enjoyed high status and exceptional freedom of speech (sometimes even intervening in political matters). Launched from this position of eminence, their poetry focused respect-filled eyes upon women in general (including such lowly figures as shepherdesses), and upon the ladies of the courts in particular, bestowing an exalted, almost saintly, status on the female gender. These poems promulgated the idea of courtly love in which the male protagonist existed to worship his lady and to serve her faithfully. Such love was adulterous, in the sense that the lady was almost always married, but also pure in the sense that it was not to be consummated physically. 76 The essence of the whole exercise was self-denial and frustration, longing from afar and the ennoblement of chastity. In the process the man who must love and yet not touch, must desire and yet never be fulfilled, was raised above the common herd. 77 What was really being celebrated, suggests Zoé Oldenbourg, was ‘nothing else, surely, but the urge to proclaim a triumph of self will’. 78 

Is it a coincidence that Cathar perfecti, too, sought to impose their will over every physical need and desire, and believed it necessary for their bodies to pass through suffering, protracted vigils, deprivation of the senses and many deaths before that goal could be achieved? For these and other reasons, Oldenbourg believes that there must have been a considerable degree of overlap between the troubadour movement and Catharism. She goes so far as to argue that on many occasions when ‘the troubadours… mention God and Jesus Christ it is very probable that they are speaking as Cathars, and that their deity is the “Good God” of the Manichean faith’. 79 

But Oldenbourg is out of line. It is the consensus of medieval historians and literary scholars that the ideas diffused through Occitania by the troubadours in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had very little and perhaps even nothing at all to do with Catharism. 80 We may only comment, with Arthur Guirdham, that this simply makes no sense: 

How could two such startling manifestations of culture occur at the same time and in a limited area without their being related to each other? To hold such an opinion is equivalent to saying that the teachings of Freud swept London in the 1920s but had no influence on medicine or literature. 81 

Women Hold Up Half the Sky 

In tandem with the poetry of the troubadours, the basic organization and beliefs of Cathar religion also had the effect – whether by accident or by design – of elevating the status of women in Occitanian society. Catholicism had done nothing to dismantle the gross inequalities of the sexes that prevailed in the European Middle Ages and explicitly forbade women to become priests. Catharism, on the other hand, regarded the souls of men and women as absolutely equal. It saw no reason why the material envelopes that they were imprisoned in – namely their bodies, which by chance could be either male and female – should be treated with any less equality. 

For this reason membership of the Cathar perfectus class was not restricted by sex and both men and women could and did become perfecti. On the highways and byways of these dangerous times Cathar perfectae preached and travelled less than their male counterparts 82 – for understandable reasons of physical security. Nor do we find any women among the relatively few ‘bishops’ and ‘deacons’ at the top of the simple, low-maintenance and minimally hierarchical structure by which Catharism was administered in Occitania. Nevertheless there is no doubt that women Perfect were highly esteemed and enjoyed great influence in their communities, 83 where they often established group homes for ‘the daughters, widows and dowagers of the local petty nobility and artisan classes’. 84 

In practice it is thought that the cadre of active Perfect present in Occitania at any one time is likely to have included rather more males than females (perhaps on the order of 6:4), but this resulted from individual choices, not policy, and was compensated by a higher ratio of women amongst the credentes. 85 

In summary, by contrast with anything the Catholic Church had to offer, the status of women within the Cathar faith was high and their role both important and recognized. This liberation, too, must have played its part in the great awakening of ideas and human potential that took place in Occitania in the twelfth century. 

The Revolution and the New World Order 

The point we wish to make here is that although Catharism was a system of inspired spiritual knowledge and in every sense a religion, it was also a great deal more than that. 

We’ve seen that it was, at one level, a social programme anticipating by centuries the modern recognition that human potential can never be fully realized without ‘women’s liberation’. Likewise, we’ve seen how the Cathar doctrine of the equal predicament of souls – and the basic irrelevance of the sex, race or creed of the bodies in which they happen to be trapped – lent itself naturally to the refreshing liberalism, open-mindedness, cosmopolitanism and democratizing tendencies of Occitanian society. 

Catharism was also a comprehensive philosophy of anti materialism that offered all who adhered to it a choice of two very clear ways forward in this life – a ‘high’ road and a ‘low’ road. The high road was the way of solitary meditation and renunciation of the world – the suppression through willpower of all physical needs, attachments and desires – that was followed by the Perfect. The low road was the way of engagement in the world followed by ordinary Believers until they received the consolamentum on their deathbeds. They hoped to make solid progress in this incarnation in the great project of freeing their souls from the trap of matter but understood that they might need to return again and again to the material plane before that objective would finally be achieved. 

Had it been allowed to become widespread and to win dominance over the Catholic Church throughout Europe we cannot say what the long-term political and economic consequences of such a philosophy might have been. Simple logic suggests that it would have been most unlikely to have led to either of the two great political and economic systems – capitalism and communism – that were ultimately to dominate human affairs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both are entirely materialist in their outlook and their disagreement is only over the manner in which the riches of the world are to be extracted and divided up. We can suppose that the very different concerns of Catharism, and its horror of material entrapment, would have led during the course of history to very different arrangements concerning ‘production’, the ownership of its ‘means’ and the uses and exploitation of the masses. 

Already in twelfth-century Occitania there is evidence that the Cathars had begun to meddle with the feudal economic order through programmes of adult education and practical training for the poor and disenfranchised. For example, workshops run by skilled perfecti were set up to provide apprenticeships in leather, paper-making and the textile trade. 86 One of the objectives of these workshops was undoubtedly to turn out missionaries who could be self-sufficient as they wandered from town to town making conversions (as we noted earlier, surviving records show a particularly strong concentration in Cathar areas of weavers and other workers in the textile trade). But the long-term effects of such an education programme, leading as it did to the foundation of an instructed artisan class, might have been literally revolutionary if it had been allowed to continue. Little wonder, therefore, that the French philosopher Voltaire seized on the memory of the suppression of Catharism to rabble rouse against the evils of the Church and of feudal oppression of the masses. 87 Initiated as a Freemason in 1778, as we saw in Chapter 1, Voltaire’s ideas were amongst the cocktail of influences that precipitated the French Revolution in 1789. 

Pacifism was another central value in the ethical system of the Perfect and a resolute commitment to non-violence was part of the regime of self-control over the baser bodily instincts and desires that their initiation required of them. There are cases on record of Perfect who chose to be burned at the stake rather than satisfy the Inquisition that they were innocent of heresy by killing even as lowly a creature as a hen. 88 Yet surprisingly for people with such apparent contempt for their own lives – and for the pains of death – it has been observed that the Perfect ‘retained an absolute respect for the fact of life itself; they would not allow any violent intervention by the human will (which they regarded as invariably evil and arbitrary) in the fate of a soul pursuing its road to salvation’. 89 

The same reasoning explains why the perfecti were utterly opposed to the use of the death penalty, even for capital offences. They also claimed that common criminals should not be punished but instead educated to become better citizens. 90 Such avant-garde doctrines were, of course, denounced by the Church as scandalous. 91 

Equally controversial was the strident insistence of the Cathars – quite contrary to the spirit of the times and the teachings of Catholicism – that preachers of Crusade were ‘murderers’. 92 Had the Cathars continued to win converts at the rate they achieved in Occitania, instead of themselves being stamped out (significantly by a Crusade), what might the consequences have been? Isn’t there every likelihood that they would have transformed the international landscape of the Middle Ages – again with incalculable but quite possibly very positive consequences for the subsequent course of world history? 

Fighting Back 

But the world is the way it has been, not the way it might have been, and the Cathars did not win. As we will see in Chapters 6 and 7, they lost everything – their lands, their culture, their freedom and their lives – in the blood-drenched horror of the Albigensian Crusades. Ravaging Occitania between 1209 and 1244, 93 these were thirty-five years of virtually unremitting war – a brutal war of sieges and burnings and fearful massacres. Despite belonging to ‘the Church of Love’, therefore, which ‘did violence to no man’, 94 the very fact that a nation of vegetarian pacifists were able to resist the Papal armies for so long tells us that they did not simply lie down and surrender when they were attacked. They fought back – tooth and nail. 

This is by no means the only such paradox that Catharism offers. We’ve noted already that its doctrinal horror of sex (as the production-line that delivers new material incarnations for trapped souls to be reborn in) did not result in a concomitant change in reproductive behaviour in Occitania during the Cathar heyday. On the contrary, Cathar families went on producing children in large numbers and the region enjoyed rapid population growth. The solution to the apparent paradox lies in the very different standards of behaviour expected of credentes and perfecti. The former adhered to the beliefs of Catharism but were not required to emulate the practices of its adepts. 

We’ve seen how this system left Believers free to marry, make babies and eat meat as they chose. By the same token, despite its pacifism, it also left them free to resist persecution, and to defend their country and their faith with force of arms – even if doing so required them to commit acts of ‘violent intervention in the fate of other souls’. The perfecti themselves seem always to have stood back from the fray, leaving the actual job of fighting the enemy to the credentes. Still there is evidence, in the face of pitiless Catholic aggression and mounting atrocities against Cathars, that even the Perfect found reason to qualify their philosophy of absolute pacifism and non-violence. Since this world was the creation of the Evil God, and the material realm was fully in his power, it followed that he could create beings of pure evil – demons who merely looked like humans but had no souls – to destroy the Good Men and Good Women of the Cathar faith. To fight against such beings, who were numerous in the crusading armies and amongst the Inquisitors, was hardly a crime.95  

The Ancient Enemy 

So, in defending themselves against the murderous assault of the Albigensian Crusades, Cathars came to feel vindicated in their beliefs. The Catholic Church was the instrument of an Evil God who had created the material world as his personal fiefdom of suffering and horror, pain and misery. Now day by day in Occitania there was ever more compelling evidence for the accuracy of this proposition: the massacres repeatedly unleashed upon the civilian population; the tortures and the informer culture devised by the Inquisition; the endless holocaust of the Cathar faithful. 

The scale, ferocity and sheer thoroughness of the Crusades are of course a measure of the threat that the Church perceived in Catharism. We already knew that the military support given to the Cathars by the great lords of Occitania had triggered this perception of danger. But as we looked through the heresiological literature of the period, we could not fail to note that something else, perhaps almost equally potent, seemed to have been at work as well. 

For although the scale of the Church’s response was new – indeed unprecedented – the Catholic authorities clearly recognized Catharism as an old and deadly enemy. It was for this reason that they so often referred to the Cathars as ‘Manichees’, a heresy over which Rome had supposedly triumphed centuries before. For their part, though they would never have identified themselves as ‘Manichees’, the Cathars claimed that their religion had come down to them from antiquity, ‘passed from Good Man to Good Man’. It was, they said, the true faith that the Church had usurped in the early days of Christianity. 

Most medieval scholars today prefer to argue that Catharism was essentially a new phenomenon and very much the product of its times. But neither of the protagonists in this affair, Catholics or Cathars, thought this was the case. They believed themselves to be caught up in the latest episode of an ancient struggle of profound consequence for the future of mankind. 

In the next chapters, with due respect to the opinions of the experts, we will investigate the possibility that the protagonists could have been right.

next-74

Where Good and Evil Me

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