steve dee | The Blog of Baphomet

Reading is good. Reading does all sorts of great stuff to us, it provides stimulus, transports us to new worlds and at best promotes curiosity. In my last post I had the pleasure of reviewing Andrew Phillip Smith’s excellent The Lost Teachings of the Cathars and like many a good book it left me with as many questions as it provided answers.

The Cathars have always proved to be something of an enigma. While on one level they provide a vivid example of how Gnostic religion survived into the medieval period, it can still be problematic trying to discern what they did and did not believe. This is partly due to history often belonging to the most powerful, i.e. the Church and the Inquisition, but it may also reflect a religious tradition more focused on a living encounter with mystery, rather than codifying a systematic theology.

Cathar cross

What does seem clear about them, is that they were incredibly courageous in being willing to question the orthodoxies that the Church and State were hugely invested in maintaining. As with the Gnostics of antiquity, Cathar theology seems to have been derived from an encounter with a God who seemed irreconcilable with the material realm. The stark realities of human pain and impermanence led to them adopting a worldview that was a radical inversion of Church teaching.

The Cathars’ dualism meant a rejection of the creator God. By extension they rejected the Church teaching that the project of marriage and reproduction was actually a good idea. If your view is that the material realm needs to be escaped from, then the entrapment of even more spiritual beings tends to not be viewed positively. Not only were the Cathar Perfecti clear in their rejection of sexual activity that could lead to childbirth, they viewed marriage itself as negative and were accused by the church as advocating abortion.

The historic connection between the Cathars and the Bulgarian Bogomils is fairly well attested, and the accusation of the latter engaging in “buggery” and other forms of non-reproductive sexual activity may have some credence beyond mere slander. The terms Bogomil originally meant “Friend of God”, but those threatened by their Gnostic teachings were so persistent in their accusations of sodomy, that the group became synonymous with anal activity. It may well be difficult to ascertain whether the Perfecti themselves were absolute celibates, but it seems probable that an engagement in non-penis in vagina sex in the wider Cathar church was consistent with their desire to avoid pregnancy.

Whatever one makes of their dualism, it’s fascinating to consider how these themes of inversion and the unnatural became central to not only the persecution of heretical groups such as the Beginues, Cathars and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, but also how such themes contributed to the perception of Medieval Witchcraft. As Norman Cohn has rightly highlighted, the accusations brought against the alleged practitioners of Witchcraft are as old as time its self. Accusations of sexual depravity, cannibalism and abortion are the stock-in-trade for those in power wanting to depict a religious minority as being the hidden cause of societal unrest. Jews, Christians, Gnostics and practitioners of Magic have all been persecuted on the basis that they engaged in such activities and that their practice of such unnatural inversions is a direct threat to the well being of the masses. Such acts of depravity either promoted the presence of disorder and disease e.g. the Black Death, or they invited divine retribution due to the failure to eradicate such miscreants.

What seems fairly clear is the manner in which minority groups such the Cathars and those accused of Witchcraft became a location onto which the fantasies and fears of those in power could projected. Whether it was the imagined orgies of Witches at the Sabbat or Cathars having tonnes of Queer sex, their status as outsiders, without real power and recourse to stable judicial process, made them highly vulnerable to persecution. Sadly, history confirms that such strategies of distancing and demonising only make it easier for the powerful to view such minority communities as dangerous, threatening and therefore disposable and warranting of savagery.
In light of the recent traumas inflicted by both the UK’s Brexit vote and the US presidential elections this can seem like decidedly bleak reading. Indeed those of us seeking to avoid such catastrophes must know, understand and promote awareness concerning such saddening examples of powers’ misuse. But dear friends, be of stout heart! These heretic heroes provide us with some keys for reclaiming both power and the magics of conscious subversion.

Never again the burning times

While some occultists may sneer at the way that the Witch as truth-teller has been co-opted by the so-called “liberal agenda” (like that’s such a bad thing?) recent events in Poland provide us with a powerful example of liberation. In being faced with a parliament hell-bent on implementing draconian laws aimed at further restricting Women’s access to safe and legal abortions; the Witches took to the streets. Thousands of black-clad (predominantly women) activists downed tools and protested as a potent and defiant “fuck you” to those who sought to further their control. While the battle for religious and reproductive liberty is ongoing, I couldn’t help but smile and be inspired at a social media post by a Polish friend of mine who had taken part:

“We are the granddaughters of all the Witches you were never able to burn.”

For most of us, the pursuit of spiritual paths that involve magic and gnosis entails a direct challenge to the forms of reality that the mainstream wants us to accept. We are the inverts, the Queer and the outsiders seeking to push forward the liminal edge of our cultures, so that they may evolve and that we may have space to thrive. I do not reject nature and the wild beauty of our world, but I continue to question concepts of what it means to be “natural” within it. Concepts of fixity and desires for a romantic stone age should be open to questioning and as a heretical freethinker I will continue to do so.

Hail to those seeking liberty, diversity, kindness and freedom! May we be inspired to new levels of wisdom and action, by those heretical heroes who have come before us.

Book Review: Andrew Phillip Smith The Lost Teachings of the Cathars, Watkins Books 2015

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when trying to get your head around a religious movement. The moment we get beyond catchphrases and pop culture references, the ideas and experiences that lay behind words like “Tantra” or “Gnosticism” can quickly result in the need to have a bit of a lie down in a darkened room.

lost-teachings

Given the potential complexity of such terrain, it always comes as a relief when you find an author who is able to maintain the precarious balance between factual accuracy, readability and contemporary relevance. In the realm of Gnostic studies Andrew Phillip Smith has consistently been such a voice. Not only has he been editor of the fabulous journal The Gnostic but he has also penned a clutch of super-helpful volumes such as The Secret History of the Gnostics and A Dictionary of Gnosticism. In The Lost Teachings of the Cathars, Andrew has now turned his attention specifically to the issue of how the Gnostic religious impulse has continued from antiquity into the medieval period and beyond.

The first part of the book provides us with a well-written account of the Cathars as a religious movement, and their likely connection to other groups such as the Paulicians and Bogomils that pre-dated them. While there are a number of other books out there that cover similar territory, Smith’s account reads like a lively travel journal that incorporates both his own travels through regions such as the Languedoc, and his insights regarding what we know about Cathar teachings and their connection to earlier forms of Gnosticism.

While the Cathars can rightly be viewed as exemplifying a heroic attempt at religious freethinking, their story is ultimately a tragedy. The period between the 11th and 14th centuries in which they flourished in southern France and northern Italy was continually beset with conflicts with the orthodox Roman church, which they viewed as corrupt and in thrall to a false understanding of both God and salvation. Although there was variety and complexity in what we know of Cathar belief, it is generally agreed that they were dualists who viewed the realm of matter as being the product of a lesser god.

What Andrew’s book does more fully than most studies of Catharism is to closely consider their practices and their likely significance within the community of believers. He explores the available material that we have regarding their primary sacraments such as the consolateum and the apparellamentum, as well as the purpose behind the celibacy and vegetarianism adopted by the group’s adepts (the Perfecti). He also examines the manner in which their radical reinterpretation of Christ’s teaching ultimately brought them into such violent conflict with both civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Whatever one makes of their dualist theology, it is hard to remain unmoved by the devastating holocaust that was inflicted upon them at Montsegur at the culmination of the Albigensian crusade.

Brother on Brother Action

Most of the previous books that I have read on the Cathars have tended to end here, trying to make sense of these peace-loving mystics who fell foul of a corrupt church so desperate to hold on to its ability to control. Here though, what Smith does next is consider the way in which the last embers of the Cathar tradition have been revived by various teachers and groups in subsequent centuries. Like so many traditions that produced few written documents to define their teachings, the Cathars have become a screen onto which all manner of groups and writers can project their own desires and agendas.

From here it gets both weird and interesting as we get to dig into some more recent history. Otto Rahn’s imagining of the Cathars as the custodians of the Grail brought him to the attention of Himmler and the SS (Indiana Jones anyone?) and probably contributed to his early demise. Also we have the French Gnostic Church getting revived (in 1889) via disembodied Cathar Bishops turning up at séances, and perhaps most spectacularly we have a mass Cathar reincarnation occurring in Bath, England. This latter story of an English psychiatrist being convinced by a patient that both of them were reincarnated Cathars, illustrates something of the way in which they have become a conduit via which the aspirations of our Aquarian age have been funnelled.

While lesser authors (and cynical chaos magicians) might take cheap shots at the nature of these explorations, Smith examines such efforts in a spirit that is at once critical and yet generous in understanding them as part of our shared human attempts to find meaning and identity. Such generosity is to be applauded and to my mind reflects a tolerance that the Cathars themselves would have welcomed.

Highly recommended.

For a chance to see Andrew and myself co-presenting about the Gnostics at the Occult Conference in Glastonbury, here’s a link! http://www.occultconference.co.uk/schedule/speakers/exploring-gnosticism