Part 3 Talisman ... Knowledge of the True Nature of Things ... The Rivals

Talisman

by Graham Hancock

&

Robert Bauval

Chapter 5 

Knowledge of the True Nature of Things 

‘I shall use the term Gnosticism to indicate the ideas or coherent systems that are characterized by an absolutely negative view of the visible world and its creator and the assumption of a divine spark in man, his inner self, which had become enclosed within the material body as the result of a tragic event in the pre-cosmic world, from which it can only escape to its divine origin by means of the saving Gnosis. These ideas are found in most of the original Gnostic writings that have survived, for the greater part in the Nag Hammadi Library…’ 

(Roelof van den Broeck, Emeritus Professor of the 

History of Christianity at the University of Utrecht) 

There is no easy sound-bite description of what Gnosticism was, or is. As we’ve already had reason to note several times, the Gnostic tradition was one in which special emphasis was placed on individual revelation and self-expression. In consequence, though it is true that a number of underlying themes, and even certainties, were shared by all Gnostic sects, there was also a rich and confusing proliferation of differences amongst them. Sects typically developed around the teachings of inspired men – the most famous names from the first and second centuries AD include Simon Magus, Marcion, Basilides and Valentinus. Depending on the precise nature of the revelation of the founder, each sect then added its own speculations, metaphors and teaching-myths, sometimes even complete cosmological systems, to the vast and eclectic body of ideas and behaviour already loosely categorized as ‘Gnosticism’. 

This background state of intellectual anarchy, coupled with the luxuriant multiplication of ‘systems’ within Gnosticism, make the subject a daunting one. But the matter is even further complicated by the determined persecutions inflicted on the Gnostics by the Christian Church between the fourth and the sixth centuries Ad. 1 As well as the holocausts of countless individuals, who were prepared to die terrible deaths rather than relinquish their faith, these persecutions resulted in the collection and burning of huge numbers of Gnostic texts. In this way one of the precious ‘hard disks’, on which was stored a vibrant portion of the intellectual and spiritual heritage of mankind, went up literally in smoke, leaving virtually nothing behind for future generations to ponder over. The thoughts on the human condition of inspired mystics and great philosophers, their journeys into the enigma of death, the liberating gnosis that they believed they had discovered of the true nature and purpose of our existence – all this seemed to have been lost. For fifteen centuries those few scholars who still had any interest in learning about this smashed and apparently forgotten religion were obliged to depend for their knowledge almost exclusively on the works of those responsible for smashing it in the first place. The heresy-hunters would frequently quote passages from suppressed Gnostic works, or report the content of those works in some detail, in order to preach against and attempt to refute them. But relying on such one-sided material, even – or perhaps especially – in the choice of original texts quoted, was almost bound to produce a very one-sided understanding of Gnosticism. A roughly comparable exercise would be trying to build up an accurate picture of Judaism from books written by Nazi propagandists. 

In the case of the latter we can ignore the Nazi trash because Judaism, unlike Gnosticism, is still a living religion and can speak for itself. But there has been some good fortune too in the case of Gnosticism. The vast majority of its scriptures were destroyed in the pogroms that the Christians unleashed. But towards the end of the fourth century AD an unknown group of heretics in Upper Egypt took the precaution of assembling a ‘time-capsule’ containing a substantial collection of banned Gnostic texts. Possession of such texts, if detected, was extremely dangerous, so the ‘capsule’ – actually a large earthenware jar – was buried in the ground, by the side of a great boulder, at the foot of cliffs overlooking the ever-flowing Nile. 

Perhaps the owners hoped that things might improve and that they would eventually be able to return to collect their library. But they never did. It’s very likely that their heresy was detected and they were killed. During the last two decades of the fourth century the dogmatic faction of Christianity that had converted Emperor Constantine years before was flexing its muscles under the full protection of the Roman state. With tacit support from the local authorities, and sometimes with direct military assistance, 2 hysterical mobs of religious fanatics and unkempt monks were on the loose in Egypt, spreading fear wherever they went. 3 They vandalized temples that had stood for thousands of years in homage to the gods. They defaced ancient inscriptions. They murdered priests and philosophers. It was under their pressure that the sublime religion of ancient Egypt breathed its last. However, it was not ‘pagans’ that the Christian terrorists reserved their worst excesses for. Much higher priority, and the greatest violence, were focused on fellow Christians – heretics of the numerous Christian Gnostic sects that had been developing and multiplying in Egypt since the first century. 4 

It would have been the members of one such sect who buried the ‘time-capsule’ beside the boulder at the foot of the cliffs. There it was to remain intact and undisturbed for nearly 1600 years while the life of Egypt, slowly changing, went on around it. 

The Nag Hammadi Library: Time-capsule or Time-bomb? 

In December 1945, near the modern town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a local farmer named Muhammad Ali was clearing land at the edge of a field owned by his family. By chance he exposed a large intact earthenware jar that had obviously been purposefully buried in an upright position by the side of a boulder. When he broke the jar open out spilled thirteen leather-bound papyrus books and a large number of loose papyrus leaves. He brought the complete haul of priceless knowledge about a long lost religion to his home, where his mother put much of the loose-leaf material to use as kindling. But the books – codices is the correct term – survived and eventually found their way on to the black market in Egypt. Through good detective work the government’s antiquities service succeeded in buying one and confiscating ten and a half of the thirteen codices. A large part of another was smuggled out of Egypt and offered for sale in the US. Professor Gilles Quispel, an expert on Gnosticism at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, was quickly able to certify to its importance and the codex was rescued. 

As Quispel made a provisional translation of the text he found to his astonishment that it seemed to be a Christian gospel but one previously unknown to him that did not appear anywhere in the New Testament. Its title was the Gospel of Thomas and it claimed to contain secret words spoken by Jesus to his ‘twin’ – one Judas Thomas. The New Testament says nothing about Jesus having a twin. 5 

Despite the pages burned by Muhammad Ali’s mother a total of fifty-two separate texts survived in the approximately twelve and a half salvaged codices. Direct scientific tests on the papyrus used in their bindings, as well as linguistic analysis of the Coptic script in which they are written, indicates that the codices were manufactured between AD 350 and 400. 6 The age of their content is another matter, since the texts themselves are translations into Coptic, the vernacular of Egypt in the early Christian age, of somewhat older source texts originally written in Greek. Scholars are in general agreement that the majority of these were composed or compiled between AD 120 and 150. 7 But it has been persuasively argued that the Gospel of Thomas, at least, is an exception to this rule. Professor Helmut Koestler of Harvard University has proposed that this heretical gospel includes some content that may possibly be ‘as early as the second half of the first century (50–100) – as early as, or earlier than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’. 8 

The date normally ascribed to the four canonical gospels of the New Testament is in the range of AD 60–110. 9 But in the case of Thomas we’re dealing with a banned text claiming to be a genuine Christian gospel that may also be genuinely older – i.e., nearer in time to Christ – than any of the canonical gospels. This has to raise disturbing questions about the canonical gospels themselves. How canonical are they really? How can we be sure that they contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Christ and the Christic phenomenon? The existence of this ‘elder’ gospel in the Nag Hammadi collection suggests that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John may have been part of a much wider literature that was at some point ‘edited out’ of the New Testament. That impression is enhanced by the inclusion of several other heretical gospels amongst the fifty-two Nag Hammadi texts – the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel to the Egyptians. Were there others still that Muhammad Ali’s mother burned? Or that didn’t make it into the precious Nag Hammadi time-capsule and were erased from history by the heresy hunters? 

The Organization (1): Hints of a Gnostic Secret Society 

There is much more that is disturbing about the texts of the Nag Hammadi Library. Remember that they were composed mainly between the first and third centuries, originally in Greek, translated into Coptic some time later, and finally concealed during the late fourth century. We’ve noted that this was a time when the newly Christianized state of Rome was beginning to turn all its resources against Christian heretics – particularly, and most savagely, against the Gnostics. It is intriguing, therefore, that several of the Nag Hammadi documents make allusions to the existence of something very much like a secret society, usually referred to as ‘the Organization’. 10 Part of its mission, which we will return to in later chapters, is to build monuments ‘as a representation of the spiritual places’ (i.e., the stars). 11 It is also to use every means possible, including guile and stealth, to protect the sacred knowledge of Gnosticism and to oppose the universal forces of darkness and ignorance that are said to have: 

... steered the people who followed them into great troubles, by leading them astray with many deceptions. They became old without having enjoyment. They died not having found truth and without knowing the God of truth. And thus the whole creation became enslaved forever from the foundations of the world until now. 12 

The Gnostic religion revealed by the Nag Hammadi texts is unambiguously dualistic. It starkly envisages two potent spiritual forces at work in the fulness of all existence – the God of light, love and goodness, and the God of darkness, hate and evil. As with the Bogomils and the Cathars a millennium later, the Gnostics believed that it was the latter, the God of Evil, who had constructed the material universe and created human bodies. Our souls, however, were from the spiritual realm of the God of Good and yearned to return there. A primary purpose of the God of Evil was to frustrate this desire and keep these lost souls imprisoned for ever on the earth – to ‘make them drink the water of forgetfulness… in order that they might not know from whence they came’. 13 The evil powers worked to anaesthetize intelligence and spread the cancer of ‘mind blindness’ 14 because ‘Ignorance is the mother of all evil… Ignorance is a slave. Knowledge is freedom.’ 15 

By contrast the Nag Hammadi texts make it clear that ‘the Organization’ serves the spiritual forces of light. Its sacred purpose is to free human beings from their state of enslavement by initiating them into the cult of knowledge. There could hardly be a more important or more urgent task: in the Gnostic view mankind is the focus, or fulcrum, of a cosmic struggle; individual choices for evil, arising out of ignorance, therefore have ramifications far beyond the merely material and mortal and human plane. 16 For these reasons the Gnostics said, ‘Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the world rulers of this darkness and the spirits of wickedness.’ 17 

The Public Craftsman 

In Alexandria, one of their prime centres, the Gnostics lived in close contact with the last vestiges of the ancient Egyptian religion, and also co-existed with Judaism and early Christianity. They honoured Christ. And in precisely the same way as the later Cathars and Bogomils (as well as the Manicheans and Paulicians) they did not believe him to have been born in the flesh but favoured the apparition or ‘phantasm’ theory. 

Evidence from Alexandria suggests that the Gnostic communities there during the first three centuries after Christ also honoured Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of rebirth, 18 ‘who stands before darkness as a guardian of the light’. 19 This was not a cult shared by any of the other post-Christian dualist groups. 

On the other hand – once again like the Manicheans, Messalians, Paulicians, Cathars and Bogomils – the Gnostics saw Jehovah, the Old Testament God of the Jews and Christians, as a dark force, indeed as one of the ‘world rulers of darkness’. He was to them the evil ‘demiurge’ – a Greek term, somewhat derogatory, that means, literally, ‘public craftsman’. 20 In other words, he was a low-class sub deity who had created the earth as his personal fief (rather like an odd-job man with a hobby), placed the human race upon it to worship and adore him and deluded the poor creatures into believing that he was the only God in existence. His sole purpose for us, therefore, was to keep us enchained in spiritual ignorance and darkness for all eternity and enmesh us in acts of evil that would make us truly his for ever. For this reason the account given in the Nag Hammadi texts of the ‘temptation’ of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden depicts the serpent not as the villain of the piece, as the Old Testament Book of Genesis portrays him, but rather as the hero and true benefactor of mankind: 

‘What did God say to you?’ the Serpent asked Eve. ‘Was it “Do not eat from the tree of knowledge [gnosis]”?’ 

She replied: ‘He said, “Not only do not eat from it, but do not touch it lest you die.”’ The Serpent reassured her, saying, ‘Do not be afraid. With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good.’ 21 

After Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of knowledge, the Gnostics taught that they experienced enlightenment, awoke to their own luminous nature and could distinguish good from evil, just as the serpent had promised. Seeing their intellectual and spiritual transformation, the demiurge was jealous and roused his demonic companions: 

Behold, Adam! He has come to be like one of us, so that he knows the difference between the light and the darkness. Now perhaps he also will come to the tree of life and eat from it and become immortal. Come let us expel him from Paradise down to the land from which he was taken, so that henceforth he might not be able to recognize anything better. And so they expelled Adam from Paradise, along with his wife. 22 

What stands out in this Gnostic Genesis story is the way in which Adam and Eve are expelled from ‘Paradise’ down to ‘the land’ – where henceforth they are to live in ignorance of their true potential. The underlying concept of a descent from a spiritual paradise into a fleshly and material world is extremely close to the Bogomil and Cathar notion of angels falling from heaven to earth to inhabit human bodies. In both cases the predicament of the soul is the same – trapped in matter, forgetful of its true nature, unmindful of its divine potential, deluded by the wiles of an evil God, and carried in a frame (the body) that is subject to every whim of that supernatural monster. 

The Gnostic texts continue with their version of the Book of Genesis telling the story of human history on earth after the ‘Fall’. Time passes and we read how the descendants of Adam and Eve achieved a high state of development, manipulating the physical world with clever machines and devices and beginning to engage in profound spiritual inquiries. Out of jealousy the demiurge intervenes again to diminish human potential, calling out to his demonic powers: ‘Come, let us cause a deluge with our hands and obliterate all flesh, from man to beast.’ 23 

According to the Gnostics, the Flood was not inflicted to punish evil – as the Old Testament falsely informs us – but to punish humanity for having risen so high and ‘to take the light’ that was growing amongst men. 24 The devastation of the Flood all but achieved this objective. Although there were survivors, they were thrown ‘into great distraction and into a life of toil, so that mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, and might not have the opportunity of being devoted to the holy spirit’. 25 But fortunately there were a few amongst our ancestors who still possessed the old knowledge, and who were determined to pass it down for the benefit of future generations, for as long as necessary, wherever possible, until such a time as a general awakening might occur again. 26 

‘The Organization’ (2): A Reawakening in the Tenth Century? 

We could not help wondering how the mysterious ‘Organization’ spoken of in the Nag Hammadi texts would have reacted to the persecutions being unleashed on Gnosticism when the texts were sealed away near the end of the fourth century AD. Might its members not have been inclined to see themselves in the same mythical framework as the flood survivors of the Gnostic creation legends? Of course, they were not dealing this time with a literal ‘flood’ sent by the diabolical God of the Old Testament to steal the light of mankind. But from the Gnostic point of view what they confronted was at least equally dangerous – the investigations of the heresy-hunters, the random violence of Christian mobs, the burnings of books and people. 

The Nag Hammadi texts invite us to consider the possibility that a secret society, purposefully set up to secure and preserve Gnostic teachings through periods of difficulty, had been in existence at least between the first and third centuries AD (when the texts were composed). If such an ‘Organization’ still remained active until the time when the texts were buried then there is every possibility that it could have survived the holocausts of the fourth to the sixth centuries. Even without such obvious shelters and vectors as the Messalians and the Manicheans, it would not have been too difficult for a small and dedicated sect of heretics to have maintained a clandestine existence and to have continued to recruit new members through the Dark Ages between the sixth and the tenth centuries. There is no particular reason, if it was discreet, why it should have attracted much attention or ever been recognized for what it was. There were many remote religious communities of hermits or monks that could have provided it with suitable camouflage until such a time as it chose to step out of the shadows again. 

And what better or more auspicious time for Gnosticism to step out of the shadows and make another bid to establish a world religion than the final century of the first millennium? This was precisely the moment – somewhere between AD 920 and 970, as we saw in Chapter 3 – that the heresiarch who called himself Bogomil, ‘Beloved of God’, began to preach so persuasively in Bulgaria. We know already that the Church he founded had ambitions to achieve a general awakening. We’ve seen how its influence spread with great rapidity and success, first in territories under the spiritual hegemony of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and later in areas such as northern Italy and Occitania that were under the control of the Roman Catholic Church. 

On both fronts the absolute dominance of what was by then thought to be established Christianity was challenged with a doctrine in many respects identical to that of the early Christian Gnostics. 

And on both fronts the challenger claimed to be the original Church of Christ whose rightful place had been usurped by the incumbent. 

Gnostics, Bogomils and Cathars: Much in Common (1) 

Gnosticism is thought by many scholars to have been a late pre-Christian philosophical religion that insinuated itself like a virus into early Christianity and attempted to transform it into a vehicle for propagating its own ideas – hence ‘Christian Gnosticism’. On the same evidence that they offer, however, it is equally possible to argue that the Christian cult was Gnostic in origin but was later hijacked by a group of hard-headed scriptural literalists who turned it to their own ends. Either way most authorities point to Palestine in the first century BC as the birthplace of Gnosticism; from there, they say, it spread rapidly to Alexandria, which was to become the main centre for its subsequent expansion. 27 

During that epoch, though they had very different backgrounds, Palestine and Alexandria shared the common Hellenistic culture that had prevailed throughout the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia and Iran since the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century bc. This had been – and indeed continued for some time to be – a period of extraordinary vivacity, intellectual endeavour, creativity, rationality and intense spirituality. It brought together in one gigantic Hellenistic melting pot the priests of ancient Egypt, the dualist Magi of Iran, initiates of the mysteries of Mithras, Platonic philosophers from Greece, Jewish mystics, Buddhist missionaries and a host of other influences from near and far. It was somewhere in that ‘confused but thrilling encounter’, suggests historian Joscelyn Godwin, that ‘Gnosticism was born, the religion of gnosis – knowledge of the true nature of things’. 28 

There are certain fundamental elements of Gnosticism. Of these the most important is the notion that there exists an entirely good, spiritual, light-filled realm that is ruled by a benevolent and loving God, but that the material realm in which we live is the creation of an Evil God. As we’ve seen, the exploits of Jehovah in the Old Testament served the Gnostics very well as illustrations of this idea during the first and second centuries AD. He had created the world, the Bible said, and his actions were also almost invariably wicked, mean spirited, jealous, violent and cruel – exactly what one would expect of an Evil God. It cannot be an accident that we find the identical usage of Jehovah in identical contexts for identical purposes by the Cathars and Bogomils between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries AD.

Another hint that these groups at opposite ends of the first millennium must have been closely linked comes when we remember that all of them believed our souls to have been created by the Good God and to belong in the good realm while our bodies were part of the evil material creation. Gnostics, Cathars and Bogomils all likewise regarded the soul as a prisoner in the demonic material world, where it was in constant danger of being dragged ever deeper and trapped ever more firmly. All three of them offered it a way of escape (from what would otherwise be eternal confinement) by means of initiation into their system and acquisition of the gnosis that they had to teach. 

In all three cases this gnosis appears to have involved an absolutely convincing and probably instantaneous insight into the miserable situation of the soul, the true nature of matter, and the escape route that Gnosticism offered. In all three cases Christ was seen not as a redeemer (who died to expiate our sins) but as an emanation of the divine who had descended to open men’s eyes to their true predicament. Last but not least, although all three groups treated the advent of Christ as a cosmic event of enormous importance, all three also believed that he had never incarnated in the flesh, that his body was an apparition, and that his crucifixion was therefore an illusion. 

Gnostics, Bogomils and Cathars: Much in Common (2) 

The Gnostic religion of the first four centuries of the first millennium and the Bogomil and Cathar religions of the first four centuries of the second millennium shared many other intimate details. We’ve already seen in Chapter 3 how the consolamentum ritual of the latter, which raised the candidate from the status of Believer to the status of Perfect, was essentially identical to the ritual of adult baptism in the Early Church which raised the candidate to the status of a fully initiated Christian. The irony, as Steven Runciman points out, is that: 

While polemical churchmen in the Middle Ages denounced the heretics for maintaining a class of the Elect or Perfect they were denouncing an Early Christian practice, and the heretic initiation ceremony [the consolamentum] that they viewed with so much horror was almost word for word the ceremony with which Early Christians were admitted to the Church…29 Such similarity cannot be fortuitous. Obviously the Cathar Church had preserved, only slightly amended to suit its doctrines of the time, the services extant in the Christian Church during the first four centuries of its life. 30 

What is now clear is that the services used by the Early Church were, in origin, almost exclusively the services of early Christian Gnosticism. 31 They were deleted and replaced as the literalist Christian faction in Rome consolidated its power during the fourth and fifth centuries. But it was natural that the banned rituals would continue to be practised and preserved by surviving Gnostic sects. Some of these have been named in the provisional chain of transmission we sketched out in Chapter 4. But it’s likely that many more lived on in secret either in remote communities or by ‘veiling’ themselves inside the organizations of their religious competitors. 

Although all this sounds very cloak-and-dagger, it is accepted by historians that many Gnostic and dualist sects were extremely secretive in their behaviour. Understandably, they became adept at concealing themselves from authorities who would burn them. We have cited examples in previous chapters of ‘nests of heretics’ – Bogomils and Cathars – being exposed within both Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic monasteries during the tenth to fourteenth centuries. It is significant, and even suggestive of a ‘standard operating procedure’, that veiling of exactly the same sort was also used by the heretics of the fourth and fifth centuries, when Gnosticism was being persecuted. Indeed, it is most likely that the unknown group of Gnostics who concealed the Nag Hammadi Library were themselves Christian monks. At that time two monasteries of the supposedly orthodox Pachomian order stood within six miles of the spot where the codices were buried. 32 

The initiation ritual of the consolamentum served at least two major functions in the religion of the Cathars and Bogomils. 

Firstly, through a chain of direct contact, which they claimed stretched unbroken all the way back to the Apostles, the laying-on of hands transferred the power of the Holy Spirit. As the jolt of sacred energy washed over him, they believed that the candidate’s eyes were opened – in an instant – to the full predicament of his soul, separated from its true heavenly home, imprisoned in the realm of an Evil God. What that flash of enlightenment really gave him, in his belief, was the complete knowledge and spiritual power needed to break the bonds of matter and return his soul to heaven. 

Professor Roelof van den Broeck of the University of Utrecht has made an argument that the consolamentum was not a truly ‘Gnostic’ initiation because no ‘special kind of Gnosis’ was transferred by the ritual. 33 The Professor is an authority in his field, whose work we highly respect. But this statement requires an overly restrictive definition of the kind of ‘knowledge’ that gnosis was, and gives no thought as to how it was supposedly acquired. As we’ve already noted, the Gnostic initiation rituals of the first to the fourth centuries, just like the initiations of the Bogomils and Cathars 1000 years later, were simple ceremonies involving the laying-on of hands. It is absolutely obvious that what descended on the candidate in all three cases was not a specific body of learning to be mastered intellectually either through an oral tradition or from books. It was, instead, revealed knowledge, inspired knowledge, which passed in an instant like a charge of electricity and which he or she had to experience directly and personally. In essence it was not even complicated or difficult knowledge. As Bernard Hamilton maintains, the early Christian Gnostics saw it simply as ‘knowledge of the truth about the human condition.’ 34 As such, you either got it, or you didn’t. 

Besides, despite his reservations about full Gnostic status for the consolamentum, van den Broeck himself goes on to affirm: 

Because of their dualism, be it moderate or absolute, the Cathars can be called Gnostics. If the idea that the material world is made by an evil creator and that the soul is locked up in the prison of the body cannot be called Gnostic, then there are no Gnostic ideas at all. In this sense Catharism is a medieval form of Gnosticism. 35 

The second function of the consolamentum for the Cathars and the Bogomils was to elevate the candidate from the rank of Believer to the rank of Perfect. In this, too, they were following a pattern that had been set down by Christian Gnostics in the first four centuries AD. We’ve already seen that the Manicheans, in exactly the same way as the Cathars and Bogomils, divided themselves into two great classes of Perfect and Hearers. So, too, did an earlier Gnostic Church established by Valentinus in the second century AD. He divided his ‘good Christians’ into two classes – the ‘Pneumatics’ (‘Spirituals’, ‘full of divinity’ 36 ) and the ‘Psychics’ (those with the potential, through effort, to become Spirituals). 37 Marcion, another charismatic heretic of the second century BC, used the same system in the influential and successful Gnostic Church established in his name. 38 As was the case with the Cathar and Bogomil perfecti, severe austerities, fasts, vegetarianism and chastity were the domain of the Pneumatics only. As was the case with the Cathar and Bogomil Believers, the Psychics were free of such obligations but had a duty to care for, worship and protect the Pneumatics. 39 

Gnostics, Bogomils and Cathars: Much in Common (3) 

Another matter which changed not at all between the fourth century and the thirteenth was the peculiarly consistent and cruel manner in which people who held to the Gnostic and dualist perspective were punished by the Church. When you consider what is involved for the victim of a burning at the stake it is obvious that no rational person would choose such a death lightly. So the very fact that so many initiated Gnostics actually chose to die in this awful manner – rather than abjure their beliefs – and that so many Cathar perfecti did the same a millennium later, tells us, at the very least, how deeply all these men and women must have been convinced that they were right. Whether they were deluding themselves or not is another matter – and one that is impossible to settle with certainty in this life. But we cannot doubt that they were absolutely certain about what would happen to their souls after they had passed through the ordeal of the flames. 

As well as having much in common with each other, Gnosticism and the later religion of the Bogomils and Cathars also share one striking characteristic with established Christianity. They are all ‘Salvationist’ faiths – i.e., they all provide a system, and they promise that if it is followed it will ‘save’ the souls of its adherents. Yet even here, when we look closer, we discover that the Cathars, Bogomils and Gnostics stand together on one side of a line while the guardians of established Christianity stand on the other. This is because the doctrine of Catholicism and of the Eastern Orthodox Church might best be summed up as ‘salvation through faith alone’ – blind faith being all that is required. Whereas what the heretics were all offering was salvation through knowledge – revealed knowledge, inspired knowledge, saving knowledge – that was experienced directly by the initiate. [knowledge is of no help without understanding, the Earth, part of what is called a Local Universe, was created by a Paradise Creator Son.  d.c ]

Whether a delusion or not, it was on account of this personal knowledge of what awaited them after death – and nothing else – that the Gnostic and Cathar heretics endured the flames with such calm certainty. 

Pontifex Maximus 

The Roman Catholic Church did not invent burning at the stake as a punishment for heresy but took over the idea intact from long centuries of Roman tradition. Since the reign of Caesar Augustus (23 AD–AD 14) all the emperors, in addition to their other responsibilities, had held the office of Pontifex Maximus – the title of the ancient high priest of the state religion of Rome. 40 The religion could (and did) change from emperor to emperor, but the emperor of the day always remained its Pontifex Maximus. In order to maintain the mandate of heaven he was required to protect the state religion and punish any attempts to undermine it. This did not concern most creeds, which went about their business peacefully and were tolerated. But it did affect militant evangelistic religious movements like the Christians and the Manicheans, which offered a perceptible threat to the dominance of the state cult, and thus to the state itself. Very frequently the offenders were charged with heresy and burned at the stake. 

In 186 BC a mystery cult dedicated to the god Dionysus was banned in Rome and thousands of its initiates executed. 41 On another occasion ‘philosophers’ were burned for threatening the proper conduct of religion. Witnesses said they went to the stake ‘laughing at the sudden collapse of human destinies’ and died ‘unmoving in the flames’. 42 A thousand years later when the persecutions began in the Languedoc, Cathar perfecti were repeatedly seen to do the same. 

The Roman historian Tacitus records a terrible massacre of Christians during the reign of the Emperor Nero (AD 54–68). However, this seems to have had less to do with protecting the state cult than with popular hatred of the Christians at that time. Already despised for ‘their abominations’, they were wrongly blamed for starting the great fire that devastated Rome in AD 64: 

An arrest was first made of all who confessed; then, upon hearing their confessions, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of arson but of hatred of the human race. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts they were torn apart by dogs, nailed to crosses, or doomed to the flames. Those who were burned were used to illumine the night-time skies when daylight ended. 43 

It was to be almost 200 years before there were systematic persecutions of Christians by the Roman Emperor in his role as Pontifex Maximus. Decius was the first of these when he punished Christians who failed to offer animal sacrifices to the pagan gods in AD 250. There were further martyrdoms under Valerian in 257–9, 44 and in 303–5 Diocletian launched separate pogroms against Christians and Manicheans. 45 Diocletian’s Rescript on the Manichees ordered the leaders of that sect burned at the stake together with their most persistent followers. He accused them of committing many crimes, disturbing quiet populations and even working ‘the greatest harm to whole cities’. Making clear why to be a Manichean was to be a heretic, he wrote: 

It is indeed highly criminal to discuss doctrines once and for all settled and defined by our forefathers, and which have their recognized place and course in our system. Wherefore we are resolutely determined to punish the stubborn depravity of these worthless people. 46 

In other words, Diocletian was burning those poor Manichean perfecti because they disagreed with established religious doctrines and dogmas. The tone of his Rescript is eerily similar to papal pronouncements of the thirteenth century calling down the Albigensian Crusades upon the Cathars of the Languedoc. 

As to the Roman persecution of the Christians, authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have made the valid point that ‘in its whole history… Christianity was officially persecuted for a total of five years’. 47 This is not the impression given to children brought up in the Western Christian tradition, who are led to imagine centuries of sustained persecution. The truth is that there were a few isolated incidents between AD 50 and 250 followed by a few years of – admittedly awful – torture, again frequently involving burning at the stake, but also scorching in red-hot iron chairs, scourging, ‘the frying pan’ (!) and consumption by wild beasts. 48 

Such torments ended for the Christians when their champion Constantine the Great defeated his rivals at the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 and became the senior ruler of Rome’s cruel and violent Empire. 49 He immediately extended state tolerance to Christianity. This, however, did not mean that the powers of the Pontifex Maximus, which he continued to hold in his hands as emperor, were done away with. It simply meant that in future – with the notable exception of the reign of Emperor Julian the Apostate (332–63) – these powers would no longer be used against Christians. It was not until 380 under Emperor Theodosius 50 that Roman Catholic Christianity was adopted as the state religion (while other forms of Christianity were denounced as ‘demented and insane’). 51 So this technically was the moment when Catholicism formally acquired the right to be protected by the emperor in his capacity as Pontifex Maximus. But it had long previously been given carte blanche by Constantine himself to persecute its internal enemies – the heretics. 

The First Step on the Road to the Stake 

Even by Roman standards Constantine the Great was not a nice man. He had his eldest son Crispus executed (while the latter was en route to attend celebrations with him) and his wife Fausta locked in an overheated steam room and poached to death! 52 He did not in fact become a baptized Christian until hours before his death, thus allowing himself considerable latitude for cruelty, excess and wickedness along the way. Indeed, it is reported that one of the principal reasons for his adoption of Christianity (other than his ‘miraculous’ success at Milvian Bridge, which is another story) had been that it alone amongst the religions of Rome had promised him expiation of his many sins. Apparently the priests of the pagan temples, horrified even to be asked for expiation by such a brute, had refused him. 53 [ getting baptized hours before death is not  faith, faith can not be assigned to any type of collective. d.c ]

So it seems that Constantine, who had good reason to worry about the afterlife destiny of his soul, owed a very large debt to the Christian bishops. By granting them state tolerance in 312–13 he repaid part of it. But he was a politician with an eye to his constituencies. Despite much urging he therefore refused to abolish or interfere in any way with the freedom of religion of the many other popular and powerfully supported faiths in the Empire. Defending the very same policy of tolerance from which Christianity had just benefited, he reminded the Bishops: ‘It is one thing to undertake the contest for immortality voluntarily, another to compel it with punishment.’ 54 

This was a matter on which Constantine remained consistent throughout his life – with one exception. That exception was announced in an edict (circa 324–6). In it he attacked the ‘venomous errors’ of Christian heretics, confiscated their properties and initiated other persecutions. The wording of the edict has been preserved for us by Constantine’s fawning biographer, the eminent Church Father Eusebius. It is worth quoting it at some length: 

Be it known to you by this present decree, you Novatians, 55 Valentinians, Marcionites [the latter two well-known Gnostic sects], Paulians and those called Cataphrygians, all in short who constitute the heresies by your private assemblies, how many are the falsehoods in which your idle folly is entangled, and how venomous the poisons with which your teaching is involved, so that the healthy are brought to sickness and the living to everlasting death through you. You opponents of truth, enemies of life and counsellors of ruin! Everything about you is contrary to truth, in harmony with ugly deeds of evil; it serves grotesque charades in which you argue falsehoods, distress the unoffending, deny light to believers… The crimes done by you are so great and immense, so hateful and full of harshness, that not even a whole day would suffice to put them into words; and in any case it is proper to shut the ears and avert the eyes, so as not to impair the pure and untarnished commitment of our own faith by recounting the details. 

Why then should we endure such evils any longer? Protracted neglect allows healthy people to be infected as with an epidemic disease. Why do we not immediately use severe public measures to dig up such a great evil, as you might say, by the roots? Accordingly, since it is no longer possible to tolerate the pernicious effect of your destructiveness, by this decree we publicly command that none of you henceforward shall dare to assemble. Therefore we have also given order that all your buildings in which you conduct these meetings… not only in public but also in houses of individuals or any private places… are to be confiscated… and handed over incontestably and without delay to the Catholic Church… and thereafter no opportunity be left for you to meet so that from this day forward your unlawful groups may not dare to assemble in any place either public or private. 56 

It was the first step on the slippery slope of persecution. Within less than a century, in league with emperors like Theodosius, the Catholic Church had begun to burn heretics at the stake… 

When Coercion was Learned 

H. A. Drake, Professor of History at the University of California, thinks that Constantine’s out-of-character initiative against the heretics in 324–6 was almost certainly the result of pressure from the bishops 57 – i.e., that the emperor was paying off another instalment of his spiritual debt to them. Besides, looking at his options at the time, it would have seemed like the obvious move to make: 

With heresy, both imperial and episcopal agendas came together. Punishment of improper worship was the one action that Constantine would have been prepared by centuries of imperial procedure to take, and the one that, in his eyes, a new and important constituency had the most right to demand. It had the additional advantage of demonstrating his toughness to militant Christians at very little cost. 58 

Drake has investigated Christianity’s rise to power in Rome and its changing relationships with the state between Constantine’s initial acceptance of the faith in 312, its elevation as the official religion of the Empire in 380, and the banning of all other faiths in 392. 59 This was a period of immense importance for the future of Christianity in which – for good or ill – it set the course that it has followed ever since. It was also the period, as Drake observes, in which ‘militant Christians first came to dominate and then to define the Christian movement’. 60 Noting that in the decades after Constantine the Church ‘became more militant and more coercive as it became more powerful’, he asks: ‘What happened to the Christian movement, why was it that the militant wing prevailed?’ 61 

During the first three centuries AD we know already that the ‘Christian movement’ consisted of a diverse mass of sects, all of which defined themselves as followers of Christ despite their wildly varying doctrines and contradictory beliefs. 

At one end of the scale there were those like the Gnostics who rejected the Old Testament, interpreted the New Testament allegorically within a dualist framework, did not believe that Christ had been born in the flesh (or crucified), allowed the greatest possible latitude for individual revelation and inspiration, and had no wish to impose dogma on others. Although they claimed to be the original Christians, guarding the true apostolic succession, they were interested not in coercion but in a process of personal inquiry and experience that would lead their initiates to a saving knowledge of the truth. They did not believe that there was just one exclusive path to this gnosis. As such, blind obedience to any form of dogma, together with intolerance for the beliefs of others, were rejected by all the Gnostic systems. 

At the other end of the scale were Drake’s ‘militant Christians’, the Catholics and their bishops who established their primary power centre in Rome in the early fourth century AD after they had won Constantine’s favour. They too claimed to be the original Christians, guarding the true apostolic succession, and it was on the exclusive basis of their doctrines and beliefs that what we now think of as ‘the Christian Church’ took shape during the decades that followed. They accepted the Old Testament, interpreted the New Testament with adamant literalism, believed in Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion and bodily resurrection (and that all humans would experience bodily resurrection too), rejected dualism, allowed no latitude whatsoever for individual revelation and inspiration, and felt it was their duty to impose their beliefs on others. Their interest was in obtaining the complete and unquestioning faith of their congregations in the infallibility of the doctrines that they taught. As such, dogma, the enforcement of blind obedience and violent intolerance for the beliefs of others, were, from the beginning, their stock in trade. 

Why did the militant wing prevail? The answer that Drake gives to his own question is in a sense a tautology. The militant wing of the once broad Church of Christianity prevailed because it was militant and because it was the first to acquire access to the coercive apparatus of the state. As a simple and universal function of human organization, Drake suggests ‘there are persons in every mass movement who are willing to coexist with variant beliefs and others who see such nonbelievers as outsiders and as a threat that must be neutralized’. 62

If coercive powers are made available to people who cannot tolerate variant beliefs, as they were in Rome in the fourth century, then it is inevitable that they will soon be used to enforce uniformity by destroying or marginalizing other religions. But because of Constantine’s calculated squeamishness about persecuting pagans, the dogmatic tendencies of the Catholic bishops during their first few decades in imperial favour were channelled exclusively into the fight against heresy. This was a fight that the Church was subsequently to pursue with single-minded ferocity during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when it destroyed the Cathars, and until as late as the seventeenth century, when heretics throughout Europe were still routinely burned at the stake. Indeed, it may well be that it was only through this early process of discriminating against, stigmatizing, punishing, terrorizing, and physically eliminating internal rivals that the members of the militant faction of Christianity were able to elucidate their own beliefs fully in the first place. ‘The existence of heresy cannot be considered apart from the existence of the Church itself,’ argues Zoé Oldenbourg. ‘The two run pari passu. Dogma is always accompanied by heresy; from the very first, the history of the Christian Church was a long catalogue of battles against various heresies.’ 63 

Thus what had started out as Constantine’s ‘low-cost’ strategy to appease militant Christians, to whom he felt indebted, and to impose uniformity on the more heterodox Christian sects (something that would have appealed to the dictatorial instincts of any red-blooded Roman emperor) was to have unforeseen consequences that rebounded down the ages. Before Constantine there had been an eclectic field of Christians in which no sect held power over any other – because all were persecuted. After Constantine the field was rapidly transformed and polarized. On one side, clustered around a literal interpretation of the Scriptures, were the bishops of the Catholic Church – the militants whom the emperor wanted to appease. On the other side was everyone else and every other shade of opinion. The net effect, after 324–6, was that all anyone needed to do to become a ‘heretic’, and to risk losing freedom of assembly, home, property and life, was to disagree publicly with the infallible pronouncements of the bishops – most particularly the supreme bishop of the Church of Rome. It is not an accident that by the 380s the emperors had renounced their age-old responsibility of Pontifex Maximus – high priest of the Roman state religion – leaving it for the popes to pick up. 64 

To this day it remains their official title. 65 

Longing for Power Long Before Constantine 

We are not suggesting that militant literalism within the Christian Church was created by Constantine’s willingness to punish heretics. On the contrary, a strong literalist tendency had been present in Christianity long before the fourth century – perhaps as long as any of the Gnostic sects – and simply took advantage of this willingness. The really radical transformation of Constantine’s reign was that for the first time it gave literalists the power to impose their views on others. 

It’s obvious with hindsight that they’d been longing for this for centuries. It’s obvious, too, how they consistently made use of rabble rousing emotional arguments and hateful accusations during their years in waiting simply to stir up trouble for their opponents – sophisticated techniques that modern disinformation specialists would call black propaganda. Everything about their demeanour and rhetoric indicates that these people believed they would one day gain the power of enforcement over others – as they eventually did under Constantine – and that once they had it they would not hesitate to use it. 

Consider, for example, the words of Irenaeus, one of the Catholic Church’s great scourges of Christian Gnostics during the second century: 

Let those who blaspheme the Creator… as [do] the Valentinians and all the falsely so-called ‘Gnostics’, be recognized as agents of Satan by all who worship God. Through their agency Satan even now… has been seen to speak against God, that God who has prepared eternal fire for every kind of apostasy. 66 

From the first to the fourth centuries there are repeated examples of this sort of rhetoric, often wound up to an even higher pitch and including accusations of cannibalism, sexual promiscuity, infant sacrifice and so on. Another telling detail is that even before Gnosticism was banned, techniques were in use to ‘flush out’ and identify its initiates for possible future persecution. Because the Gnostic perfecti were generally vegetarian, one well-tried method of identifying their presence amongst the orthodox clergy and monks of Egypt was to make meat-eating compulsory for all once a week. 67 

It is the victors who write history, not the losers; so we don’t know whether such witch-hunts and hate campaigns had begun to spark off physical violence against the Gnostics as early as the second century. But the Gnostics’ side of the story may have survived in one of the Nag Hammadi texts, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, which says in part: 

After we went forth from our home, and came down to this world, and came into being in the world in bodies, we were hated and persecuted, not only by those who are ignorant [pagans], but also by those who think they are advancing the name of Christ, since they were unknowingly empty, not knowing who they are, like dumb animals. 68 

Massacre of the Innocents 

Constantine’s edict of 324–6, cited at length earlier, handed the militant Christians the one thing they’d obviously wanted all along – the power of the state to persecute their old opponents the Gnostics. 

It is notable that the edict is expressed in the peculiarly violent rhetoric favoured by the militants. As Drake points out, it was a very deliberate choice of words when the emperor characterized the beliefs of Gnostics as ‘venomous’ – a term comparing those who held them to snakes. Similarly, 

he likens heresy to a disease, something capable of infecting healthy souls. Such images are important as labels that serve both to identify and stigmatize a group, making it easier to single out its members and deny them humane treatment… This step, however limited in scope and duration, opened the door for the more massive coercion campaigns that would occur at the end of the century. 69 

During the last decade of Constantine’s rule the evidence shows, as expected, that militants began to use the new powers he had given them; 70 but they did so quite tentatively at first – as though feeling out the opposition. Under the reigns of his sons they became significantly more persecuting. 71 During the fifteen years that Emperor Theodosius was on the throne (379–95) he outdid all his predecessors by passing more than 100 new laws aimed at the Gnostics – laws that deprived them of their property, their liberty and frequently their lives, confiscated their places of assembly and commanded the destruction of their books. 72 It is unlikely to be a coincidence that this was the precise period in which the codices of the Nag Hammadi Library were hidden away in Upper Egypt to escape detection and destruction. And though records are incomplete, we know that there was also state sponsorship of anti-heretical terrorism during the same period in Lower Egypt. 

Maternus Cynegius, Theodosius’ governor in Alexandria from 384 to 388, was renowned for his relentless harassment and persecution of heretics and pagans. 73 In that great cosmopolitan city, one of the first strongholds of Gnosticism, a local syncretistic and universalizing cult dedicated to the composite deity Serapis (a fusion of two ancient Egyptian gods, Osiris and Apis) had long enjoyed the patronage of people from many different social and religious backgrounds. Scholars believe that Christian Gnostics may have participated in the Mysteries of Osiris in his Serapis incarnation ‘while professing to place upon what they saw there a Christian interpretation’. 74 

It is also notable that several of the Alexandrine Gnostic sects made direct use of figures of Serapis – generally depicted as robed and bearded in the Greek rather than Egyptian style – as a symbol of the God of Goodness. 75 Such flexibility and open-mindedness in the search for spiritual truths had been characteristic of Alexandria since its foundation some seven centuries previously. But precisely because of this venerable tradition of tolerance and fusion many of its citizens were shocked, and then outraged, when Cynegius began to put the military forces he commanded as governor – supposedly for the protection of all sections of the community – at the disposal of the Catholic campaign to abolish other religions. 76 

In 391, three years after Cynegius’ death, state-sponsored persecution was still on the increase. In parallel Theophilus, the Catholic Archbishop of Alexandria, had been rousing the Christian masses against Gnostics and pagans. Riots were engineered and many members of the oppressed sects fled to the shelter of the Serapeum. This was the great temple dedicated to Serapis that had been built by Ptolemy I Soter (323–284 BC), the former general of Alexander the Great who established the dynasty that ruled Egypt until the time of Cleopatra (51–30 BC). The refugees felt sure that they would be safe there, on ground for so long deemed sacred. But they were wrong. Again at the instigation of Theophilus a huge Christian mob, including large numbers of monks, besieged and then attacked the Serapeum. 77 The temple’s irreplaceable library of ancient books and scrolls, arranged in the cloisters around the central building, 78 was ransacked and burned. Then with imperial troops openly supporting the Christian assault, the defenders were massacred and the temple itself was razed to the ground. 79 

Reviewing the affair some time later, the emperor held the victims responsible for their own destruction and did not punish the attackers. 80 Nor was the loss of the temple library to be lamented. Theodosius’ well-known view was that all books contradicting the Christian message should be burned ‘lest they cause God anger and scandalize the pious’. 81 

The First Inquisition and the Ancient Enemy 

In the early fifth century, though their numbers had drastically declined after the persecutions of Theophilus, Church and state still kept the pressure on the remaining Gnostics in Egypt. We know, for example, that Cyril, who succeeded Theophilus as Archbishop of Alexandria, enforced the persecution of a group that believed the material world to be the creation of the demiurge 82 – a classic Gnostic view – and that refused to accept Cyril as their ‘illuminator’ (a classic Gnostic concept). 83 His emissary Abbot Shenoute seized their ‘books full of abomination’ and ‘of every kind of magic’ and warned: ‘I shall make you acknowledge Archbishop Cyril, or else the sword will wipe out most of you, and moreover those of you who are spared will go into exile.’ 84 

Cyril was a man to take seriously. In 415 he provoked the gruesome murder of an extraordinary woman of Alexandria, Hypatia, a pagan philosopher said to have been of ‘the school of Plato and Plotinus’. 85 She was famous and much loved in the city for her ‘attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time’. 86 Some reports suggest that it was out of jealousy at her obvious popularity that the archbishop had her killed. Whatever the reason she was dragged from her house on Cyril’s orders by a Christian mob, carried into a church and hacked limb from limb with broken tiles (ostrakois, literally ‘oyster shells’, but the word was also used for brick tiles on the roofs of houses). 87 Finally, reports one pro-Christian commentator of the time, ‘they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire. And all the people surrounded Archbishop Cyril and named him “the new Theophilus”, for he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.’ 88 

With such an atmosphere of Christian fanaticism prevalent throughout the Roman world it is not surprising that the numerous Christian Gnostic sects of the second and third centuries had soon all but disappeared. In 447 Pope Leo the Great still felt it necessary to condemn Gnostic writings as ‘a hotbed of manifold perversity’ which ‘should not only be forbidden, but entirely destroyed and burnt with fire’. 89 But by the end of the fifth century it seemed that organized Gnosticism was a thing of the past. 

Some of those prepared to risk their lives for their Gnostic beliefs certainly joined the ragged group of charismatic preachers known as the Messalians. Established at Edessa in the mid-fourth century, they were still going strong in the sixth. We saw in the last chapter how they might have formed part of the chain of transmission that would ultimately bring Gnostic texts and teachings to the Bogomils and thence to the Cathars of medieval Europe. But it was Manicheism, also a Gnostic religion with strong Christian elements, that would have provided the most obvious haven for survivors of the disbanded sects. 90 Perhaps because of this, and because Manicheism was an evangelistic faith that still posed a real threat to the Church, it became the primary target of persecution during the fifth century. So violent and thorough was this persecution that by the end of the sixth century, though it was to survive for another 1000 years in the Far East, Manicheism was a dead force in the Roman world. 91 

The final measures were the work of Justinian (527–65), who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire from Constantinople. Mass burnings of Manicheans soon followed when he equated heresy with treason and subjected both offences automatically to the death penalty. 92 The Manicheans had begun to act like a secret society, disguising their identity and pretending to be good Christians. 93 Justinian’s response was not only to burn them at the stake but to burn any of their acquaintances, Manichean or not, who had failed to denounce them. 94 Significantly, in our view, he also created an official investigative agency, the Quaestiones, which was specifically tasked to root out and destroy the Manichean heresy. 95 

Seven centuries later, did Pope Innocent III have Justinian’s initiative in mind when he created a very similar instrument of terror and oppression called the Inquisition? 96 It was to become greatly feared and would ultimately take on a global role as Catholicism advanced into the New World and Asia. It’s easy to forget that when Innocent established it in 1233 he did so with the specific purpose of rooting out and destroying the Cathar heresy – which we know he believed to be a resurgence of the more ancient heresy of Manicheism. 

So by unleashing the Inquisition in the thirteenth century, it is almost as though Innocent was trying to pick up where his predecessor had left off in the sixth century. This would have been perfectly in character, because together with many other European churchmen of the period he appears to have had a genuine sense of continuity about what the Bogomils and Cathars represented and how they were to be handled. The heretics, too, felt themselves to be part of a continuum and dealt with the Church like an old enemy whom they already knew very well. 

What was odd was that so few of the participants on either side seemed surprised, after such a long silence, that a fully fledged Gnostic ‘anti-Church’ was now straddling Europe like a colossus, confronting both Rome and Constantinople, and threatening to turn the tables of the world. 

Chapter 6 

The Rivals 

‘A monstrous breed… You must eliminate such filth.’ 

(Pope Innocent III (1198– 1216), speaking of the Cathars) 1 

The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, one of the Nag Hammadi texts, speaks of the Gnostics’ experience of persecution at the hands of people who believed themselves to be Christians. The setting could be any time in the first four centuries AD before the texts were concealed. The Treatise then goes on to make a further allegation – one that the Cathars and Bogomils were to repeat 1000 years later. This is that the established Church is an impostor – an ‘imitation’ of the true Church that it has displaced. 2 

So we’re now better able to understand the references in the Treatise, cited in the previous chapter, to ‘empty people’ who ‘think that they are advancing the name of Christ’ when they persecute others. The writer is either speaking of the Catholic Church itself, or of the militant, literalist faction always in favour of persecuting its opponents that would ultimately dominate the Church during the reign of Constantine – and that would impose its agenda on the future. Set against it, and persecuted by it, are the Gnostic adepts, ‘Sons of Light’, founders of the true Church, described as ‘an ineffable union of undefiled truth’. 3 The impostor Church has ‘made an imitation’ of their ‘perfect assembly’ and ‘having proclaimed a doctrine of a dead man’ 4 (the crucified Catholic Christ), it has tricked its followers into lifetimes of: 

fear and slavery, worldly cares, and abandoned worship… For they did not know the Knowledge of the Greatness, that is from above, and from a fountain of truth, and that it is not from slavery and jealousy, fear and love of worldly matter. 5 

It should be obvious to the reader by now that this simple statement of Gnostic dualism, which lay at Nag Hammadi for 1600 years after being buried there in the late fourth century, could equally well have been written by a Cathar or Bogomil perfectus of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. There is the same horror of worldly matter and the same sense that it entraps and enslaves the soul. There is the same belief that while ignorance can extend the soul’s imprisonment, knowledge can set it free. And there is the same concept of what this knowledge is – i.e., that it concerns the existence of a spiritual realm of Greatness, ‘above’, which is the domain of the God of Good, the source of truth, and the long-lost home of the soul. 

The reader will recall that according to Cathar and Bogomil doctrine, Christ was not a physical human being ‘in the flesh’ but an immensely convincing apparition. 6 The Second Treatise of the Great Seth clearly has the same thing in mind when it puts these words into Christ’s mouth after the crucifixion: ‘I did not succumb to them as they had planned… I was not afflicted at all. Those who were there punished me, and I did not die in reality but in appearance…’ 7 

Many other religious ideas that we have come to associate with the Cathars and Bogomils also appear a millennium earlier in The Second Treatise of the Great Seth – for example, that the God of this world is evil and ignorant and can be identified with the God of the Old Testament, and that his minions, the Catholic bishops, are ‘mere counterfeits and laughingstocks’. 8 The passages we’ve quoted here are just fragments of the Treatise – itself only a small part of the overall collection of fifty-two Gnostic texts preserved in the Nag Hammadi Library. Virtually any of them could serve, without alteration, as a manifesto of Cathar and Bogomil beliefs. It therefore seems to us inconceivable, as many scholars continue to argue, that there is no link between the religion of the early Christian Gnostics and the later religion of the Cathars and the Bogomils. 

There is in our view more than a link. Despite some superficial differences – and their significant separation in time – these two religions have so much in common at the level of their vital concepts, cosmology, doctrine and beliefs that they’re almost impossible to tell apart. When we consider that essential elements of ritual, symbolism, initiation, structure and organization were also the same, and that both the Gnostics and the medieval dualists were persecuted with the same spirit of savage repression by the same opponent and for the same reasons, it is increasingly difficult to resist the conclusion that they must, indeed, have been one and the same thing. 

Seizing Control of the Tradition 

Because the Catholic Church won the power-struggle against the Gnostics it gained victor’s privileges over the way history would be told. It’s not surprising, therefore, while all other beliefs and doctrines are regarded as aberrations, that Catholic beliefs and doctrines tend to be treated as orthodox (literally ‘straight-teaching’) and also as ‘authentic’, ‘of true apostolic descent’, etc., in most historical accounts. 9 However, a dispassionate look at what is now known about the broad and eclectic character of Christian beliefs in the first three centuries AD does not support the Catholic claim to primacy. There is no doubt that the evidence shows us the nucleus of the faction that became the Catholic Church forming around dogmatic militants like Irenaeus and Tertullian. But after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, and the gradual revelation of their contents that has followed, it has been impossible to ignore the presence, and equal weight, of the Gnostic Churches in the same period. Since Catholics and Gnostics alike claimed that the teachings in their possession were the earliest and the most ‘authentic’, why has the Catholic version for so long been accepted as gospel (literally!), and left unchallenged, while the Gnostic version was hunted down and persecuted out of existence? Isn’t it equally possible, as the Nag Hammadi texts themselves invite us to believe, that the tradition of the Gnostics was all along the ‘authentic’ one? 

Scholars have known for many years, for example, that the Valentinian Gnostics of the second century AD accepted not only the four gospels of the New Testament that have come down to us today (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), ‘but many additional documents professing to contain traditions of the secret teachings of Jesus’. 10 Writing in 1967, Henry Chadwick, the great historian of Christianity, was happy to accept that such ‘secret teachings’ did in fact once exist and suggested that they would have been similar to ‘the Gospel of Thomas [one of the Nag Hammadi texts] recently recovered from the sands of Egypt’. 11 But he was not interested in questions concerning the authenticity of these Gnostic traditions. He simply took it for granted that whatever ‘secret teachings’ the Gnostics possessed must self-evidently have been false. Chadwick even seemed happy to gloss over the pseudoscientific claptrap of heresy-hater Irenaeus who, he observed approvingly, ‘ingeniously vindicated the fourfold gospel on numerological principles. Four, he urged, was a sacred number corresponding to the four winds, or the four faces of the cherubim in Ezekiel…’ 12 

Chadwick accepts that even as late as the last two decades of the second century a substantial oral tradition was still in circulation, purporting to transmit the true words of Christ. This tradition, he notes, was ‘regarded as an authority which had not yet been wholly merged with the written gospels’. 13 In other words, the canonical New Testament was still incomplete by the end of the second century, 14 and the eventual course of Christian doctrine was not yet set in stone. 

Chadwick suggests that circa AD 185–90, with many different ideas (both written and oral) in circulation, Irenaeus, together with others from the proto-Catholic group, saw the advantage ‘which a written document possessed and which oral transmission did not’. 15 Although the Gnostic leader Marcion had prepared his own canon some time before – much to the consternation of the Catholics – few of the other proliferating Gnostic sects of the period accepted it and the possibility that they would ever be able to agree amongst themselves for sufficiently long to put a representative Gnostic canon together seemed remote. 

Amongst the proto-Catholic group there was no such hesitation. Knowing that those who controlled the written document would effectively have ‘the control of authentic tradition’, 16 they launched their own initiative to compile and create a canonical New Testament. Since this group was dominated by men like Irenaeus, who regarded their own views as infallible and were intolerant of the views of others, they were naturally inclined to label whichever texts or traditions supported their views as belonging to the authentic apostolic line and to cast into the outer darkness as inauthentic any that contradicted them. 

What justified this, notes Chadwick, was that ‘the teaching given by the contemporary Bishop of, say, Rome or Antioch’ was held by the Catholics to be ‘in all respects identical with that of the apostles’. 17 As Irenaeus himself put it in the second century with reference to the so-called ‘Rule of Faith’ (a short summary of the main points of Catholic belief that he and other heresy-hunters favoured), ‘This rule is what the bishops teach now and therefore comes down from the apostles.’ 18 Thus, irrespective of its actual origins and authenticity, any teaching given by the Catholic bishops was automatically deemed authentic and to have come down from the Apostles. Vice versa, any teaching of which they did not approve was automatically deemed inauthentic and not descended through the proper apostolic line – in other words, heretical. 

In an era when oral traditions were still dominant, and the bestowal of canonical status upon texts was in the hands of a militant faction, such circular arguments could only have one outcome. There is little doubt that the proto-Catholics deliberately manipulated the gradual formation of the New Testament so that it could serve them in their early battles against the Gnostics and reinforce their own claims to authenticity and exclusivity as the sole mediators of Christ’s message. 

No Eyewitnesses We Can Trust 

Can we be sure of anything that the New Testament has to tell us? 

No matter how dense the smokescreen surrounding the vexed issues of authenticity, few would dispute that somewhere in the century between 50 BC and AD 50 mysterious and powerful events occurred in Palestine that set in motion the Christian phenomenon. But it is not at all certain what sparked the phenomenon off. Was Christ really the Son of God, born as a flesh-and-blood human being and murdered on the cross – thus somehow redeeming our sins? That’s the Catholic position. Was he a projection or emanation from the divine – an ‘appearance’ only, not really flesh and blood? That’s the Gnostic and Cathar position. Or could he simply have been an urban legend blown out of all proportion, or perhaps even an artificially constructed myth designed to serve the purposes of a particular religious cult? 

The first two possibilities, Catholic and Gnostic/Cathar, are both based on unprovable articles of faith and therefore are equally likely – or unlikely – to be true. Though its defenders claim otherwise, there is no superior logic whatsoever in the Catholic position. It is, after all, no more logical or inherently more probable to insist that Christ was the Son of God in human flesh born of a virgin than to insist that he took form only as a very convincing apparition. 

The third possibility – that the whole story was made up – has much to recommend it. The prime issue is the remarkable absence of solid and convincing historical evidence to confirm that the figure known to the world as Jesus Christ ever actually existed. He might have; it can’t be ruled out. But it’s equally possible that there never was any such being – whether man or apparition. His obvious resemblance to several other much older ‘dying and resurrecting godmen’ – notably Osiris in Egypt and Dionysios in Greece – has not gone unnoticed by scholars, and the possibility must be confronted that ‘Jesus Christ’ was a myth, not a man. 

Since no part of the canonical gospels is thought to date earlier than about AD 60, and some parts may be as late as 110, it is within the bounds of reason that everything we know about Christ’s person, words and deeds was simply invented some time during the first century AD and then passed into the oral tradition in the form of ‘eyewitness accounts’ of events that had supposedly taken place a couple of generations previously. Extensive editing in the late second century began to standardize the oral traditions into the beginnings of the canonical New Testament. By then, needless to say, there was no one left alive who could claim to have witnessed, or to have known anyone who had witnessed, or even to have known anyone who had known anyone who had witnessed, the events surrounding Christ’s life and death. [ he is missing the most important part of Christ and that is The Spirit, that is how it continued, because that is what he promised to his disciples, The Spirit of Truth. d.c ]

Somehow This Secret Religion Went On 

In the early years, along with many smaller factions, we’ve seen that two main competing forms of Christianity evolved, approximately in parallel, and that there is no clear evidence of which came first. Both claimed primacy and sought to reinforce their position with their own selections from the whole stock of oral and written traditions available in that period. The literalist form, which was to become Catholicism, gained the upper hand – and the ear of Constantine. Gnosticism, the interpretive and revelatory form of Christianity, lost out, was declared a heresy and persecuted.  [ And the literalist have been found out in our time for their evilness and wicking doings with the children, among other crimes against the Most High. d.c  ]

We make no claim ourselves as to which form was the oldest or most ‘authentic’. The issue is strictly speaking irrelevant to the hypothesis we’re developing here. Our point is simply that until literalist Catholicism began its sustained campaign to wipe out interpretive Gnosticism, Christianity had been diverse enough to accommodate both simultaneously. The persecutions of the Gnostics were so successful that by the end of the sixth century it seemed that only the literalist form had survived. However, the fact that a strong Christian Gnostic religion emerged again in the tenth century in the form of Bogomilism makes it impossible for us to accept that the destruction of Christian Gnosticism in the sixth century was as final as it looked. Somehow this secret religion went on – either through the Manicheans, the Messalians and the Paulicians – or by another less obvious route. 

This is why the ‘Organization’ spoken of so cryptically in the Nag Hammadi scriptures continues to intrigue us. In Chapter 5 we saw that the references made to it seem to hint at the existence of a secret society charged with a mission to protect, restore and promulgate Gnosticism after times of trouble. 

It would all sound like so much ancient wishful thinking were it not for the fact that this was more or less what happened at the end of the first millennium. The sudden appearance of Bogomilism in Bulgaria during the last decades of the tenth century was not some isolated heresy. It marked the first step in the repromulgation and resurgence of a fully fledged Christian-Gnostic religion after 400 years absent from the scene. The next step was its rapid westwards expansion as Catharism during the twelfth century. By the beginning of the thirteenth century it had become a genuinely pan-European faith and the only serious rival that the established Church had faced for 1000 years. 

We know that the Church did not identify it as a new rival, but as an old and dangerous one seemingly returned from the dead. Perhaps this sense on the Church’s part, of being drawn back into an ancient conflict, one that struck at the very heart of all its shaky claims to legitimacy and authenticity as the true faith, explains the terrible events that followed. 

Christ and Antichrist 

All wars are terrible – no matter in what epoch they are fought, or with what weapons. Medieval wars were particularly ghastly. But the wars of the Catholic Church against the heresy of Catharism in the thirteenth century, the so-called Albigensian Crusades, must rank high on the list of the most repulsive, brutal and merciless conflicts that human beings have ever had the misfortune to be involved in. 

The Cathars are innocent in these matters, by any sane standards of justice. All they did was reject the authority of the Pope and give their loyalty to another religion that sought to correct what it saw as the false doctrines of Catholicism. 

The rational modern mind cannot blame them for acting independently in this way, let alone detect any reason why their beliefs and behaviour should have merited so gruesome a punishment as burning at the stake. We know that the past is another country – where people do things differently. We understand that the medieval world, full of superstition and the fear of damnation (a fear fostered by the Catholic Church and used as a weapon of mind-control), was not governed by the same codes of interpersonal decency that we try to live by today. Yet the savage persecution of the Cathars, carried out in the name of the Church, and frequently on the direct orders of its bishops, went so far beyond what was normal – even for that blood-stained period – that it has to raise disturbing questions about the beliefs of the perpetrators. 

Because our primary focus in Talisman is on the long-term survival of a secret religion, irrespective of its ‘authenticity’, we will not pursue such questions further here – notably the vexed issue of whether Catholic or Cathar teachings represent ‘authentic’ Christianity. Nonetheless, it seems patently obvious to us that the spirit of the gentle and loving Jesus who pervades the New Testament did not ride with the Catholic clergy and knights who ravaged the once free land of Occitania in the first half of the thirteenth century. A chronicler of the time, one of the two authors of the epic Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois, summed the problem up in an ironic unofficial epitaph for Simon de Montfort, the fearsome general who led the Catholic armies in Occitania for almost a decade of unremitting slaughter before being killed in battle in 1218. He was buried with much pomp and ceremony at Carcassonne, where, the Chanson reports: 

Those who can read may learn from his epitaph that he is a saint and a martyr; that he is bound to rise again to share the heritage, to flourish in that state of unparalleled felicity, to wear a crown and have his place in the Kingdom. But for my part I have heard tell that the matter must stand thus: if one may seek Christ Jesus in this world by killing men and shedding blood; by the destruction of human souls; by compounding murder and hearkening to perverse council; by setting the torch to great fires; by winning lands through violence, and working for the triumphs of vain pride; by fostering evil and snuffing out good; by slaughtering women and slitting children’s throats – why, then, he must needs wear a crown, and shine resplendent in Heaven. 19 

In other words, unless the lessons of humility, non-violence, forgiveness and unconditional love so plain to read in the New Testament have somehow been turned upside down, inside out and back to front, there is no way that anyone seeking Christ in this world is going to find him by following Simon de Montfort’s route. And if that is the case, since we’re in a position today to stand back from the propaganda and prejudices of the time, doesn’t it suggest that the entire Catholic onslaught against the Cathars was fundamentally unchristian? [ yes 100% no doubt, it is easier to see who is not a Christian through actions taken or not, then by their word d.c ]

Or even, as the Cathars themselves suggested, ‘anti-christian’? 

‘More Evil than Saracens...’ 

We’ve already filled in the background to the Albigensian Crusades in earlier chapters. The tremendous success of the Cathar heresy in Occitania and other parts of Europe during the twelfth century had for many years been watched with envy and growing alarm by the Catholic hierarchy in Rome. By the early thirteenth century it is estimated that more than half the Occitanian population had abandoned the Church and that growing numbers were looking exclusively to Catharism to meet their spiritual needs. Worse still, as we saw in Chapter 1, the local nobility gave tacit and sometimes even overt support to the Cathars, frequently had relatives amongst them, sided with them in disputes with the bishops, and were closely linked to some of the leading perfecti. Once it had become clear that the Cathar religion was not a flash in the pan, but quite possibly formed part of a great coordinated plot against the Church, it was obvious that sooner or later one Pope or another was going to have to do something about it. The only question was what exactly, and when? 

That the ‘what’ should be the terror weapon of a Crusade had probably been decided by Pope Innocent III some years before the perfect excuse to use such a weapon presented itself. 20 But when that happened he acted immediately.

The precipitating incident was the assassination of the Papal Legate to Occitania, one Peter de Castelnau, in January 1208. A former monk of the Cistercian Abbey of Fontfroide, de Castelnau was in Occitania on Innocent’s orders, accompanied by another leading Cistercian, Arnald-Amalric, the Abbot of Citeaux. 21 In 1207 they stirred up deep-seated resentments when they tried to form a league of southern barons to hunt down the Cathars. Raymond VI, the powerful Count of Toulouse, refused to join and was excommunicated by de Castelnau. The excommunication was withdrawn in January 1208 after Raymond had been forced to apologize personally to the Papal Legate – a shameful climb-down for such a highly placed nobleman. The very next morning one of Raymond’s knights, perhaps seeking to avenge the humiliation of his master, rode up to de Castelnau as he prepared to ford the river Rhône and ran him through with a spear. He died on the spot. 22 

Two months later, on 10 March 1208, Innocent declared the Crusade – the first time ever that the term ‘Crusade’ was used for a war against fellow Christians. Like the Christian emperors of Rome long before, he clearly gave the highest priority to the extirpation of heresy – higher even than to the wars to regain the Holy Land. He wrote: 

Attack the followers of heresy more fearlessly even than the Saracens – since they are more evil – with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Forward then soldiers of Christ! Forward brave recruits to the Christian army! Let pious zeal inspire you to avenge this monstrous crime against your God. 23 

Meanwhile, Arnald-Amalric, Abbot of Citeaux, had been sent to northern France to rally support amongst the nobles there. ‘May the man who abstains from this Crusade,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘never drink wine again; may he never eat, morning or evening, off a good linen cloth, or dress in fine stuff again to the end of his days; and at his death may he be buried like a dog’. 24 

But such browbeating was hardly needed to mobilize the rednecks at the court of the King of France. They were raring to go anyway. Here was an opportunity to acquire wealth and status with an adventure relatively near to home and to earn Papal indulgences and forgiveness of sins that would normally have required much harder work in the Holy Land. Along with dozens of B-list aristocrats like Simon de Montfort, who were looking to get rich quick, thousands of volunteers at the foot-soldier level also poured in from all walks of life. The lowliest man could benefit since crusading meant the automatic postponement of all his debts and the release of his property from the hold of creditors for the duration of his service. 25 

Still, the preparations took more than a year. By February 1209 military detachments for the Crusade were reported to be massing all over northern France. 26 But it was not until Saint John’s day, 24 June 1209, that the full force, estimated to number 20,000 men, had assembled at the French city of Lyons ready for the march south. Simon de Montfort was with it but not yet its general. For this first campaign the terrifying Christian horde was headed by Arnald Amalric himself. 27 It need not be imagined that being a Cistercian abbot, supposedly dedicated to a lifetime of Christian peace and charity, would inhibit him in any way on the battlefield. Far from it. At Béziers, the first Cathar city that he attacked, Arnald-Amalric was about to order an infamous atrocity… 

Hell’s Army 

Conditioned as we are by television images of modern warfare with smart bombs and other high-tech weaponry it is difficult to imagine the atmosphere of primal harm and menace that must have radiated like heat off the big medieval army that marched out of Lyons on 24 June 1209. 

Its iron fist, mounted, armoured from head to foot and heavily armed, was an elite fighting force of trained killers. These were the knights – the samurai class of old Europe. Gathered from the aristocracy, they were men who had been groomed for warfare since childhood. They probably totalled no more than 1000 individuals, but each of them, depending on his resources, was supported in battle by anything from four to thirty hand-picked cavalry and infantry who fought at his side as a skilled and disciplined unit. 28 [ I have heard so much about reparations here in America, but if history is examined  honestly is there any other organization more than the Catholic Church who deserves to pay ? The Catholic  Church should be liquidated  and it's ill gotten gains returned to the peoples of The Earth. d.c ]

Lower down the social ladder the theme of discipline in the crusading army was continued amongst divisions of professional soldiers specialized in particular military arts. They included the gunners who operated the great war catapults and stone-guns – the trebuchets and mangonels that had a range of almost half a kilometre and could hurl projectiles weighing 40 kilograms. There were teams of battering-ram specialists who would breach the city-gates, while other teams assembled and operated huge siege towers from which archers could fire down on the defendants inside the walls. Sappers and siege engineers were also needed for the business of filling in moats and undermining foundations. 29

Less disciplined but equally deadly, and in a way far more frightening, were the mercenaries, known as routiers, who had been hired for their unprincipled ferocity. These were times of widespread poverty and frequent famines in Europe, and droves of the landless, the unemployed and the dispossessed wandered the countryside. The most efficient and ruthless amongst them formed up into lawless bands, looting and killing to support themselves, and were hired en masse by the Christian army that the Pope had unleashed on Occitania. 30 ‘They were,’ notes Zoé Oldenbourg: [ huh interesting take on the homeless. medieval indeed something about the word medieval at this time has a connection to the jabs of 21-22, I hope for man's sake it is not true.  d.c ]

desperate fellows with nothing to lose, and therefore would plunge on through thick and thin regardless… They formed a series of shock battalions, all the easier to utilise since no-one had the slightest qualms about sacrificing them. The most important thing… was the terror they inspired in the civilian population… Not content with mere pillage and rape they indulged in massacre and torture for the sheer fun of the thing, roasting children over slow fires and chopping men into small pieces. 31 

Even lower down the pecking-order than the feared routiers were the ribauds, the unpaid camp followers, numbering several thousands in their own right, who had attached themselves unofficially to the Crusade. They too were desperate people – a ragged bunch of bare arsed muggers, rapists and corpse looters. But weirdly they elected their own ‘king’ on the campaign, who divided the chores and the spoils of war amongst the rest. 32 

Last but not least there were the holy rollers – wild, itinerant Christian preachers and groups of their fanatical followers armed with crude weapons like scythes and clubs who hoped to gain a special dispensation in heaven by murdering any Cathars that the main army missed. 33 

It seems richly ironic that the self-proclaimed Catholic Church of so peaceful and loving a figure as Jesus Christ was not only prepared to raise an army to massacre those who disagreed with it, but also to pack its ranks with the most notorious murderers and brigands of the age. But if we look at the whole affair from the Cathar perspective the sense of disconnection goes away. It is not, as its later apologists would claim, that the Church of a good and loving God was somehow (aberrantly, temporarily) provoked into extreme violence by extreme circumstances. In the Cathar take on this, the Catholic Church served the God of Evil; accordingly it was behaving entirely in character when it recruited an army of demons. 

Now formed up behind Arnald-Amalric into a vast column of men and supplies more than four miles in length, this demonic force – or army of valiant Crusaders depending on one’s point of view – bristled with axes and pikes and seethed with the intent to do violence. 

‘Kill Them All’: the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene 

and the Workings of Divine Vengeance... 

After taking a meandering course through Occitania, pausing only to accept the surrender of settlements unable to defend themselves and to burn small groups of Cathars along the way, Arnald-Amalric and his 20,000 hooligans fetched up in front of the prosperous city of Béziers on 21 July 1209. Its walls were very thick, very high and very well defended and everyone assumed that this was going to be a long siege. 

Some curiosities now coincide. 

It is our hypothesis that the Cathars were the descendants, through an underground stream of secret religion, of the Christian Gnostics of the first few centuries AD. Scholars agree that the Christian Gnostics of that period had a special reverence for Mary Magdalene, who plays a small but highly significant role in the New Testament. By comparison her status in the Nag Hammadi texts is elevated to that of Christ’s first Apostle, his closest confidante, and perhaps even his lover. 34 We were therefore naturally interested to learn that the area around Béziers had been known for centuries before the Crusade for its special and fervent dedication to Mary Magdalene. 35 A local tradition had it that she had fled here by ship from Palestine in the mid-first century, landed at Marseilles, and become the first Christian missionary in what was then the Roman Empire’s Provincia Narbonensis. 36 Odder still, 21 July, the date that the Pope’s army pitched camp before Béziers, was the eve of the annual feast of Mary Magdalene, held on 22 July. 37 Oddest of all, however, was what would happen on the feast day itself. 

Béziers was by no means entirely a Cathar city. There may have been as many as several thousand Cathar credentes living there, but Catholics are likely to have been in the majority. We know that there were 222 Cathar perfecti present on the day the siege began because a list of their names, prepared by Renaud de Montpeyroux, the Catholic Bishop of Béziers, has survived. 38 The bishop (whose predecessor had been assassinated in 1205) scuttled through the gates with the list soon after the Crusaders began to arrive and returned from their camp a few hours later with an offer. If the townsfolk would hand over the 222 named Cathar notables for immediate burning then the city and everyone else living in it would be spared. 39 

It was in fact a pretty good offer but, to their lasting moral credit, the Catholic burghers of Béziers rejected it, stating that they ‘would rather be drowned in the salt sea’s brine’ than betray their fellow citizens. 40 

What was to follow was a good deal worse than drowning. 

It started on the early morning of 22 July with a minor and wholly unnecessary skirmish. Separated by some distance from the main force of the Crusader army, the ribauds – camp followers – had gathered by the banks of the River Orb, which flowed a little to the south of the city walls. A bridge leading to one of the city gates spanned the Orb at this point and now one of the ribauds strolled on to it, shouting insults and challenges to the defenders. Angered by his temerity, some inside rushed spontaneously out through the gate and down on to the bridge, where they caught and killed him and threw his body into the water. Probably they expected to retreat to the safety of the city at once but before they could do so a gang of camp followers swarmed on to the bridge and locked them in combat. At the same moment, with what was obviously an experienced eye for the main chance, the elected ‘king’ of the ribauds‘called all his lads together and shouted, “Come on, let’s attack.”’ 41 

Within minutes, driven on by an ugly cocktail of crowd psychology, blood-lust and greed, a howling mob bore down on the scrum at the bridge. According to the chronicler of the Chanson de la Croisade, ‘There were more than 15,000 of them, all barefooted, dressed only in shirts and breeches, and unarmed save for a variety of hand weapons.’ 42 

Hatchets? Butchers’ knives? Cudgels? The mind boggles at the thought of what primitive bludgeons and rusty blades these dregs of the Crusade wielded as they forced the bridge and pursued the foolish skirmishers back up the slope towards the city walls. No one is quite sure exactly what happened next, but by now the whole Crusader camp was roused and bands of mercenaries and regular soldiers were charging into the fray. Most probably the ribauds succeeded in seizing control of the gate as the skirmishers tried to slip back inside, and were able to hold it open while Crusader reinforcements poured through. But whatever the mechanism, the result was the same. With their defences hopelessly breached the proud citizens of Béziers were now doomed beyond any redemption: ‘No cross or altar or crucifix could save them. And these raving beggarly lads, they killed the clergy too, and the women and the children. I doubt one person came out alive.’ 43 

The leaders of the Crusade made no attempt to stop or even limit the massacres. Quite the contrary, as the knights rushed to arm and mount, eager not to miss the action, a group of them reportedly asked Arnald-Amalric how they were to distinguish the many Catholics in the town from the heretics they had come to kill. The Abbot is notorious for replying in Latin: ‘Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.’ Which means: 

‘Kill them all; God will look after his own.’ 44 

Though most of the killing was done by the lower orders, a particularly awful bloodbath was unleashed inside the Church of Mary Magdalene by the knights themselves. Here a multitude of Cathars and Catholics – old and young, men, women and children – were cowering in fear. Their numbers were estimated by chroniclers at the time as between 1000 and 7000. Just like the Gnostic and pagan refugees who had taken shelter inside the Serapeum in Alexandria nine centuries previously when it was attacked by Christian forces, they probably hoped that the hallowed ground would save them. And just as in Alexandria, it didn’t. The knights burst in and slaughtered them all. 45 

By noon, a few hours after the fighting had started at the bridge, the entire population of the city had been murdered. Working with all the contemporary estimates, and allowing for exaggeration in some cases, modern scholars generally concur on a figure of between 15,000 and 20,000 for the total number of the dead of Béziers. 46 Guiraut Riquier of Narbonne, one of the last of the Occitanian troubadours, expressed the scale of the tragedy in a song: 

Béziers has fallen. They’re dead. 

Clerks, women, children. No quarter. 

They killed Christians too. 

I rode out. I couldn’t see or hear 

A living creature… 

They killed seven thousand people, 

Seven thousand souls who sought sanctuary in Saint Madeleine. 

The steps of the altar Were wet with blood. 

The church echoed with the cries. 

Afterwards they slaughtered the monks 

Who tolled the bells. 

They used the silver cross 

As a chopping block to behead them. 47 

Clearly Riquier’s sympathies were not with the Crusaders and he had no interest in making them look good. We might think that the whole scene was just something he’d invented as anti-Catholic propaganda were it not that all other accounts of the sack of the city, supported by archaeological evidence, also speak of a fearful massacre taking place inside the Church of Mary Magdalene. 48 Indeed, the Catholic forces felt they had nothing to hide or be ashamed of in the killing of so many heretics in so holy a place. The Cistercian chronicler Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay proclaimed: ‘It was right that these shameless dogs should be captured and destroyed on the feast day of the woman [i.e. Mary Magdalene] they had insulted and whose church they had defiled…’ 49 

Arnald-Amalric, Abbot of Citeaux and leader of the Crusade, was thrilled too – and not just with the slaughter in the church but with the overall tally of the day. In a breathless letter to his master, Pope Innocent III, the man at the source of all this carnage, he wrote proudly: ‘Nearly 20,000 of the citizens were put to the sword, regardless of age or sex. The workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.’ 50 

Truth in Extremes 

Our purpose thus far has been to track the secret tradition that lay behind Catharism, that kept a complex system of Gnostic spirituality alive in the West through 1000 years of persecution, and that the Albigensian Crusades were designed to obliterate for ever. We will not offer a detailed history of the Crusades themselves, since several excellent books already exist that provide a thorough record of the main sieges and battles. Nevertheless, the best chance to study human behaviour always comes in the starkest, most dangerous and most extreme circumstances. For this reason, as we will see in the next chapter, the Crusades provide a unique opportunity to get closer to the truth about the two sides. 

The truth is that upon the citizens of Béziers, who had threatened no one, aggressed no one, gone out to make war on no one, and merely followed their own harmless beliefs, the Catholic side unleashed an army from hell to inflict a hellish atrocity of rare and terrible evil. Zoé Oldenbourg suggests that we should reflect on what this tells us: 

Massacres such as that at Béziers are extremely rare; we are forced to accept the proposition that even human cruelty has its limits. Even amongst the worst atrocities which history has to show us through the centuries, massacres of this sort stand out as exceptions; and yet it is the head of one of the leading monastic orders in Catholic Christendom who has the honour of being responsible (while conducting a ‘Holy War’ to boot) for one such monstrous exception to the rules of war. We should be on our guard against underrating the significance of this fact. 51 

Nor did the atrocities stop with Béziers. They went on and on, seemingly endlessly, each with some mad demonic quality of its own. But soon after Béziers, having bathed in sufficient blood to satisfy his appetite, Arnald-Amalric opted for a less ‘front-line’ role. His successor, chosen to prosecute the Crusade with the utmost vigour, was Simon de Montfort, described as a man who ‘prayed, took communion and killed as easily as drawing breath’. 52 

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The Sword and the Fire