The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (19 page)

Yet of course it is of prime importance to uncover great historical wrongs - no matter how uncomfortable they may be to our cultural and religious certainties - for only in doing so can humanity ever move forward. And if that involves revisiting and radically revising the character, motives and deeds of Jesus called the Christ, then it must be done unflinchingly, for old prejudices and even basic concepts of right and wrong will have to be revised. As the early Christians were so fond of denouncing their rivals as tools of Satan, perhaps it is time to redress the balance - especially as the persecution of those whose beliefs were different remains an indelible scar on the human psyche.

PART TWO

Legacy of the Fall

CHAPTER FOUR

Synagogues of Satan

After Constantine's Edict of Milan effectively anathematized all forms of Christianity other than the new Roman Church, heretics such as the Carpocratians persisted in following their consciences with either enormous courage or foolhardiness amounting to insanity, depending upon the extent of one's sympathy for martyrdom. Most of them were wiped out swiftly and mercilessly, but as the years progressed, certain heterodox beliefs succeeded in simmering away, by their very existence nibbling at the security and complacency of Rome. Perhaps it is no coincidence that these `evils' usually involved some reverence for the Feminine, provoking Peter's organization to a wrath that echoes in infamy to this day. In particular, one area was to prove a persistent headache for the Pope - the south of France, the area largely encompassed by the Languedoc and Provence.

Pockmarked with caves, its high blue skies riven by the sharp peaks of snow-topped mountains, it is a beautiful but unforgiving landscape, which in the Middle Ages provided a safe haven for many with less than orthodox religious views, such as the Cathars, whose meetings were known to the Church as `Synagogues of Satan'. As Jean Markale comments in his Montsegur and the Mystery of the Cathars (1986), in the caves `there are devils that hold their Sabbaths there in the company of witches. These are the only beings who have no fear of entering such places. Caves represent the forbidden world. And consequently it is also an alluring world." Whether there really were witches in those caves is beside the point: the land as a whole already had a reputation for paganism and heresy even before the terrible events of the thirteenth century, but after that time it was nothing less than the land of Satan to the Church.

This was where, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there arose a Christian cult whose members although known as les bonshommes ('good men', or `good people') to the locals, were in the eyes of Rome `Luciferans'. The successors to the Gnostic Bogomils of Bulgaria, the Cathars2 (meaning `pure'), attempted to reinvent what they perceived to be the simple lifestyle and worship instigated by Christ, renouncing the Church as the corrupt `whore of Babylon', together with all its panoply and hierarchy. They eschewed the use of specially dedicated church buildings, choosing to worship in the open or in private houses - after all, Christ neither built churches nor exhorted his followers to do so - and adopted an ascetic lifestyle, eating a simple, `fishertarian'3 diet, and even sparingly of that. They aimed to become perfecti or parfaits ('perfects'), men and women who had renounced all earthly pleasures, including sex - procreation being especially abominable to them because it prolonged the soul's contact with the hated material world.

As Gnostics, the Cathars truly abominated the physical realm, and this is where most modern readers will part company with them (except for woolly-minded New Agers who tend to venerate them as a species of cosy fellow travellers). High-minded and essentially decent though the heretics undoubtedly were in a society riddled with the most heinous corruption and hypocrisy, they took their hatred for earthly existence to ultimately distasteful extremes. Basically they institutionalized anorexia in the form of the endura, a slow fast to the death, which they believed was almost as `good' a death as martyrdom - although very soon they were to have ample opportunity to indulge their longing for the latter mode of transition to the spiritual realm. (Without a `good' death, the Cathars believed they were condemned to be reborn until they could be martyred and then escape finally to the realms of pure spirit and Light.)

Of course relatively few Cathars made the grade as `Perfects': their rank and file, the credenti ('believers'), developed their own peculiar version of righteousness. Some preferred sex outside marriage, for example, because then they were only committing the single sin of intercourse rather than the two sins of intercourse and (probably) procreation. As Markale notes:

To the Cathar ... to sin was to submit to the world. There was no distinction between venal and mortal sins; all sins were mortal.

... Every sexual union involved the flesh and ran the risk of prolonging Satan's work indefinitely ... They made no distinction between legitimate and illegal unions, free love, homosexuality, adultery, incest or even bestiality.'

Rumours abounded about the credenti's sexual abuses - after all, if one was damned equally for the usual heterosexual coupling and a gay encounter or even a fling with a goat, why not indulge all appetites? They might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb (or a goat). And if creating babies was so evil, then why not use sodomy as the means of contraception? While wild stories always circulate about any self-contained and heterodox sect, whether justified or not, human nature being what it is, almost certainly there would have been some truth in these rumours.

Because anything material was anathema to them, the Cathars even had their own version of the Lord's Prayer, substituting `Give us this day bread beyond substance' for `Give us this day our daily bread's Tinkering with the words of the only prayer believed to be given to us by Jesus himself was beyond the pale to orthodox Christianity (even though there is evidence that the Lord's Prayer actually originated with John the Baptist, not Christ at all.)'

Clearly, this was bad enough as far as the all-powerful Church was concerned - vegetarianism itself was known as `the Devil's banquet',' and of course their rejection of the Church hierarchy marked them out as heretics anyway - but the Cathars' beliefs and lifestyle went considerably further than that.

As Gnostics, they believed that Jesus was the Son of Light, not the Son of God. He and Satan were both the sons of God the Father, the two manifestations of a divinity that is both good and evil. There had been two Jesuses: one of matter, who was the lover of Mary Magdalene,' and one of pure spirit who could never have been crucified - which is why the Cathars refused to accept the traditional symbol of the crucifix, although they had their own form of the cross, the rosace, `signifying the solar Christ'.' In fact, according to Jean Markale, there is evidence that the Cathars built their citadels dizzyingly high on the very top of needle-like mountains because they sought to be close to the sun and stars - a worrying association with ancient pagan rites to the Church. They also rejected the concept of an eternal Hell, the threat of which had long been the Vatican's most powerful weapon in keeping its flock in line: the Cathars believed that even the Devil could be saved.

However, above and beyond all that, for many of the clergy the heretics' days must be numbered because they possessed a secret Gospel of John, which they claimed contained Christ's initiatory teachings. The existence of such a book spelt extreme danger for an organization that had long thought itself safe from the influences of the Gnostic gospels. But, equal to all of the above in degrees of horror for a majority of the Pope's men was surely the fact that the Cathars had female preachers - worse, they ranged about the very land where, according to legend, none other than Mary Magdalene herself had taught.10

True `Luciferans'?

Only too predictably, the fanatical Reverend Montague Summers rails against the `Cathari', claiming `They openly worshipped Satan, repudiating Holy Mass and the Passion, rejecting Holy Baptism for some foul ceremony of their own'," quoting an anonymous Inquisitor as evidence of their Devil worship. Clearly, Summers is useless as an objective source, but even in the twentieth century he did provide an insight into the mindset of those who sought to exterminate the Cathars. (He also denounces them as `incendiaries' and `terrorists', which is startlingly at odds with the view of even most ordinary non-Cathars of the time, who admired and even supported them even in the face of terrible danger to themselves. Besides, the Cathars were sworn pacifists.) However, was Summers' accusation based on a garbled version of the truth? Were the Cathars not Satanists but actually Luciferans?

A major problem in assessing the truth about the heresy is that few records survive other than the accounts of their enemies, but dedicated researchers have been able to piece together beliefs that would certainly not have won the Cathars many favours with orthodoxy. As Yuri Stoyanov notes in his classic The Hidden Tradition in Europe (1994):

In the Catholic records descriptions appear of `Luciferan' sects in whose belief the traditional ... Cathar dualism of the evil demiurge of the material world and the transcendent good God appeared in reversed form, and where Lucifer was revered and expected to be restored to heaven, while Michael and the archangels would duly be deposed to hell."

However, Stoyanov is careful to add, `Whether such dualism "of the left hand really existed as a derivation from decadent forms of Catharism or was formulated in the inquisitorial imagination is still being debated."'" And, of course, Lucifer equates with Satan here.

One researcher to whom there was no debate - and a very different undestanding of `Lucifer' - was the mysterious Otto Rahn, who became obsessed with the last Cathar stronghold of Montsegur, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where approximately 200 Perfecti met a fiery death in 1244 after holding out against the Crusaders for ten months. Rahn spent many months in the 1950s combing the area for clues that might link the Cathars with the Holy Grail, making friends with the locals - although certainly not impressing all of them14 - and perhaps crow-barring in the facts to fit his own hypotheses.'s

In his 1937 book Lucifer's Court16 Rahn argues that what are seen as interrelated groups - Cathars, Knights Templar," the Troubadour movement and so on - were all part of a Gnostic religion centred on Lucifer, also known to them as `Lucibel', or his European equivalent such as Apollo, the solar deity. Rahn also linked the medieval blossoming of `Lucifer's Court' to Nordic myths, attempting to create a religion derived from European, rather than Middle Eastern, roots.'R In Rahn's hypothesis, what links all these groups together is the Holy Grail, since it has been associated separately with both the Cathars and the Knights Templar.

Rahn's university thesis was on the subject of the thirteenthcentury poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, author of Parzival. Although the major German poet of the Grail romances, he claimed he used sources from southern Europe - the Languedoc and Spain. His Grail is not a recognizably Christian symbol, such as a great chalice filled with Christ's blood as in later tales, but a stone linked, if not with Lucifer directly, then at least with fallen angels, although Wolfram himself is not explicit on this point.

In search of the Grail

In the early 1930s Rahn became friendly with Maurice Magre,19 a member of the mysterious secret society, the Fraternity of the Polaires, an occult group keen to be associated with an ancient Nordic tradition. They claimed to be in contact with unknown `masters' in Agartha, `the invisible initiatory centre',20 but Magre was to resign from the group dramatically. Some believe Rahn was a Polaire, which may have been the case as, initially, he heroworshipped Magre, who originally urged him to carry out extensive research `on the ground' in the Languedoc, rather than burying his head in the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Magre introduced his German friend to many local people, one of whom, Arthur Cassou -'an old Ariege sage"' - told him the legend of the aristocratic Cathar heroine Esclarmonde, claiming that she had hidden the Grail in some safe location before the fall of Montsegur.