The Archive of Stanley Messenger The Cathar Connection a novel by Stanley Messenger 5. CLOTHILDE

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When I settled in this area over twenty years ago to practice medicine I had little thought that I might find myself at the focus of what is sometimes regarded by its critics as a religious fad, or worse, an anticlerical perversity. In fact that is so far from being the significance of the revival of the mediaeval heresy known locally in this area as the Albigeois that we who have lived with its teachings for a long time scarcely recognise the description. On the other hand, the fact that such a misconception could arise is easily understood. Why after all should such a group of modern people apparently sane in other ways appear to ally themselves with a body of doctrine which was long ago discredited by the Church, and which has, moreover, little to offer to those whose view of the nature of reality is opposed to Christian orthodoxy? We may be sympathetic to its teachings, but these are not as important to us as the Cathari themselves.

The Albigeois were the French manifestation of a widespread heresy represented in different forms, and with some doctrinal variation in several parts of Europe. The Vaudois or Waldenses on the Swiss border, the Patarini in the Apennines, the Bogomils in Bulgaria, were all variants of a common religious stream, linked with Manichaeism and Gnosticism in the East, and with Sufi teachings coming up with the Moors through Spain. Known collectively as the Cathari, they represented in Christian form that universal current, present in all religions, which lays greater emphasis on the spiritual evolution and training of the candidate towards some form of insight and enlightenment. It is this which contrasts them with the other more numerous stream, that of orthodoxy, which links salvation and redemption with a system of beliefs. The latter stream dubs other streams as infidel with implacable hostility, and then even further divides sect from sect within one religious stream. Each adherent to the orthodox stream is taught to see himself as having a unique and privileged access to the divine, provided he pledges sectarian allegiance to ‘the true path’.

By contrast, the stream of illuminates, although it bridges the gaps among religions and sects, is just as selective through its path of inward evolution. It tends to classify aspirants vertically on a ladder of development, instead of horizontally in a spectrum of sects. In the end the one-pointed path of development and initiation often draws to itself a set of one-sided philosophical attitudes as rigid in their way as the orthodoxies which they attempt to transcend.

This is what happened to the Cathari, who came to embody an extreme form of philosophical dualism, quite alien to their profoundly wise and timeless system of training, which was based on the ancient clairvoyance of Greek, Mithraic, Egyptian, Persian, and even more deeply time-embedded mystery schools going back to Atlantis and earlier. It was this dualism, teaching that only the spiritual world was created by divine beneficent powers, and that everything earthly was the creation of the Devil, which brought down on these heresies the implacable hostility of the Church, leading in the end to their virtually total suppression and destruction by the Inquisition. Even more shocking to orthodoxy was their contention that, though the Cosmic Christ was unquestionably divine, he cannot possibly have gone through incarnation and death as Jesus. The cross was therefore for them a symbol having a completely different significance. At the most it represented the impact of spirit upon matter, the crossing point of good and evil upon which it was the destiny of man to be martyred, till such time as he was relieved by death from the evil world. The outward and visible sign of this was the ‘consolamentum’, their only sacrament, normally reserved for the moment when death, especially by martyrdom, was imminent, and giving the seal of divine blessing to this wonderful release from the Devil-created world. It was claimed also, and with demonstrable truth, that in many cases the consolamentum relieved the martyr of the worse excesses of physical suffering, enabling the release of consciousness to take place far more easily and blessedly.

If the candidate for initiation progressed far enough he could become eligible to receive the consolamentum much earlier in his life as an earnest of a more committed dedication to the world of spirit. He was then known as a ‘parfait’ or perfected one, as opposed to a ‘croyant’ or believer. It was only the ‘parfait’ who was expected to renounce the ways of the flesh, to become celibate and practice an ascetic way of life. Otherwise the lives of the ‘croyants’ were in every way normal, and high spiritual value was set on the life of relationships. This condensed account of the average attitudes of the Cathari is intended to clarify what most of them believed and how it affected their behaviour and lifestyle. I say most of them, because there were numbers of them who held mitigated less extreme views, especially on the subject of redemption from sin by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. These ‘mitigés’ in some areas made it much more difficult for the Inquisitors to tie down the accused to actual proof of heresy. As happened later also with the Templars, confessions were increasingly extorted by torture, and not only to de facto heretical beliefs, but also to abominations and malpractices for which circumstantial evidence was virtually non-existent.

It should be clear from this account that for many of those who in modern times take a profound interest in the Cathari, it is not so much the doctrinal aspects of Catharism which are of interest, for these were for the most part confused if not demonstrably perverse, but the mysterious link with a system of training and a path of mystical illumination. Of equally great interest is the survival in Catharism of the teaching of reincarnation and karma, suppressed in orthodoxy by the early Church, but inseparable from a doctrine which sees life as a multistage path of illumination, in which the release from matter is a protracted process, necessitating repeated return to earthly conditions which provide opportunities to solve new problems or old ones in a new way.

Had I encountered a descriptive article about the Albigeois on these lines when I was young, the only part that would have intrigued me would have been the cryptic reference to a path of illumination linked with the doctrine of reincarnation. The rest of the story would have associated itself with the horror I always felt as a child for the accounts of religious persecution in the history books, and the fact that always as a child I was on the side of the heretics and martyrs who were burned. In a childish way I was sure that the wicked practices of which they were accused, linked with witchcraft, Satanism, and the worship of idols, were either pure invention, or misunderstandings of secret knowledge which had a quite other significance, attached to the deeper meaning and purpose of life, which I wanted to know about.

The very word Catholic was for me a source of fear and distaste, something to do with masses of superstitious ignorant people, huddled together in petty-minded self-comforting beliefs, slavishly following greedy self-indulgent priests, and terrified of the least originality, progress or individual distinction. Not only did this heaving morass of indistinguishable mediocrity seem to me to be quite incurious about any deeper dimension to life, but it was obviously prone to turn with a horrifying sadistic savagery on anyone with an inquiring mind and destroy them, shrieking with agony in the name of gentle loving Jesus, his virgin Mother, and the holy Saints. And as a child in that part of my existence which was isolated and self-absorbed, I shrieked and cowered inwardly with the heretics. Establishment of any kind was for me embodied evil, gross and mediocre. As can be seen I was prone like most children to believe the side of the story which was presented to me. I learned of other aspects later on.

But all that is a far cry from identifying myself as an adult with what the protagonists of heretical religious beliefs appeared actually to have taught. It had a lot to say about what kind of a child I was, and it seemed as I got older also to raise questions to which knowledge of reincarnation might well suggest some sort of an answer. But as far as doctrine was concerned I felt no more sympathy with Manichaean dualism than with the Catholic Church. If anything my sympathies were more with the Pauline view, a discovery of the higher self through the invocation of an inner identity with the ‘I’ of Christ. The first hint I had that my irrational feeling of identification with the Cathari might have a more objective basis was much later, when I became deeply involved with the esoteric teachings of the Austrian initiate sage Rudolf Steiner. This is not the place to do more than indicate with a light touch the central place his system occupies in the underlying dynamic of spiritual evolution in our day.

From the most ancient times there has been a fundamental problem for the divine creative beings, within whose own evolution mankind has come into existence as the latest flowering, the tenth hierarchy. It is this. The divine aim is that there should be at last be, as crowning glory of the hierarchies, a being who could embody at one and the same time both freedom and love. How is there to be achieved and preserved in Man this possibility, without at the same time losing for him, perhaps forever, his connection with the reality which preceded him, the ‘conformity of thought to thing?’ If Man unavoidably knew the divine, he could never be free of it, and so freely seek it. If he was free of it, he would never be bound to love it. To this paradox, only the Christed ego, the marriage of the free ego with the very principle of freedom and egoity itself, provides at the same time a conceptual answer, and its fulfilment in a living evolving process of embodiment and experience. Only the Christ in Man is God, and at the same time, free of God, and free to love God.

On the path embodied in the school of spiritual science inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner, there slowly grows over the years in the student, an indissoluble link between the incompatible truths in this paradox of paradoxes. The long vista of mankind’s gradual loss of all clairvoyance, all spontaneous unquestioned knowledge of his divine origins, is bonded first with a sure-footed muscular grasp of freedom as a philosophical reality. Then on the other swing of the pendulum there builds up a panoramic view of the world temple of love, the earth embodiment of the Cosmic Christ, where each soul may be both performer of the Christ Mystery, and his destiny the arena in which that performance is enacted.

It was necessary to give this condensed, almost telegraphic word-picture of how on Rudolf Steiner’s path of knowledge freedom and love as the meaning of mankind meet in his picture of the Cosmic Christ, because it gradually became apparent to me that it was over their partial failure to discover the resolution of this paradox that the Cathars had finally lost themselves in the blind alley of dualism. Imagine then, the impact it had on me, wrestling with these concepts as a young person, when I discovered that Rudolf Steiner, speaking of the way in which souls embodied in the different streams of evolving Christianity would reincarnate in our time, drew attention to the fact that many souls connecting themselves with the movement for Spiritual Science associated with his own teachings, were in fact former Cathari. If this is so, then it seems clear to me that this Cathar stream in Spiritual Science has a double task. Firstly, to act as a spearhead, through the metamorphosis of its own suffering and suppression, for the knowledge of reincarnation in our time. Secondly, by participating in the contemporary stream of Cosmic Christianity, to embody in its own being the resolution of the dualistic paradox which took it down into darkness in the fourteenth century.

The immediate effect on me as a young person meeting Steiner’s Spiritual Science, and at the same time feeling an intuitive identification with the Albigeois of the Pyrenean valleys, was to send me off on a romantic pilgrimage to discover for myself the mysterious places where all these things had happened. As a medical student at Montpellier these places were easily accessible to me. I was able to spend a lot of holiday time, and even weekends, with a pack on my back, endlessly walking and dreaming my way through the magical landscape of the Langue d’Oc. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends as besotted as I was, re-enacting with our guide-books and our inflamed imaginations the journeys of the troubadours, the clowns and their initiated mentors, as they spread the secret, heretical Gnostic word of love and illumination. Although most of this heady joyous adolescent stuff was in the nature of a preparation of the heart for more mature perceptions, it did lead directly to an experience which has remained with me all my life. This became a turning point for my commitment to much else besides the recollection and transcendence of Catharism, and I recount it here because I feel it will resonate with the experiences of others, and perhaps provide a clue to the understanding of many accounts quite different from this, but linked with it through the common channel of typically Cathar insights.

 

During one memorable summer in the early fifties a friend and I rode the wave of our common enthusiasm into the Pyrenées with a more determined intention to penetrate the heart of the mystery. The beacon which drew us was the single word Montségur, which for me had only the magic of the name itself, and the knowledge that it had been the scene of the most famous of the massacres of the Albigeois in 1244. A more detailed account of its place in this story is given elsewhere. We only had the vaguest idea of the place of Montségur on the map. It seemed to shine in our imagination like an inner light, so that we felt it was only necessary to travel in its general direction in order to find it. Montségur would do the rest. It was thrilling to discover later on that this was quite a common experience among similar moths to this particular candle. It had led to its being commonly known among latter-day adherents to the cult as ‘la phare du Catharisme’. However, for us at first, the lighthouse shone with a somewhat fitful gleam. We came to bless this elusive quality as time went on as the chief factor in the heightening of consciousness, which proved to be crucial as preparation for the actual experience.

Much of the journey was by the time-honoured young person’s method of ‘auto-stop’. Hitchhiking is one of the few ways available in our time to recapture some of the essential features of mediaeval pilgrimage. It is far too easy nowadays to plan a journey. Hitchhiking reintroduces, even if in a somewhat artificial way, the element of happenstance into travelling. It teases out and loosens up the warp and weft of chance events so that meaningful incidents have a greater chance of dropping into the pattern of the tapestry. Expectancy is heightened and at an early stage there is far greater sensitivity to the rhythmic element in time and space.

For example, circumstances precludes one from usually travelling in a direct line towards the objective. We made it a rule never to refuse a lift which aimed within forty-five degrees on either side of the supposed line of approach. The vagueness of the latter ensured that we saw a lot of country, encountered a lot of people, both on and off the road and had a lot of unplanned conversations. Within this mosaic we began to discern the first features of a pattern of space-time relationships which would only culminate at Montségur itself. Particularly on going to sleep and on waking, in the states of extreme fatigue and early freshness induced by the arduousness of the journey, there began to emerge a pattern of rhythms which became more vivid and distinct as the days wore on, and the possibility of culmination drew nearer. None of these rhythms was more fundamental than any other. They were like overlapping and superimposed waves of widely different amplitude and wavelength, advancing and receding with our moods and the circumstances of the day. As you plod along in the hot sunshine between lifts, the light and shade of endless ranks of dappled plane trees falls upon your unprotected head. Heat and relief from heat have their own rhythm, as if a sun- born lion was panting above you with its own slow breath. Within this pattern is your own breathing and heart beat, and the plodding of your laboured steps on the metalled road, punctuated and relieved by the windy rush and roar of passing cars and lorries.

Deeper and longer waves suggest themselves as the day rolls on, the rhythm of morning and afternoon light, of day and night of heat and cold, the longer tide as summer heat points towards autumn ripeness. More inwardly the rhythm of dream and wakefulness, of restfulness and exertion, fatigue and freshness, underpin and confirm the outer pulses. One begins to lose all sense of self in a new identity with a world wholly composed of interlocking rhythms. As consciousness ascends into this world it evokes fantasies of the rhythm of memory and oblivion, of comprehension and ignorance, of identity and equilibrium, and from the latter even faint intimations of a rhythm of relationship with the far past, of presence on the earth and off it, and of its needs in former incarnations. All this becomes increasingly one-pointed and agonising as it homes in on the crucial rhythm of pilgrimage itself Is the goal reached or is it not? Does Mecca lie far away, or is it present in one’s own heart at home?

One day we reached a kind of limit to our endurance. It was as if consciousness popped out above the heaving oceans of rhythm into a colder clearer air. In a kind of desperate gamble, we submitted the enterprise to the toss of a coin. If it was heads we would hitch one more lift and go wherever it took us. If tails, we would return to base, accepting that Montségur was not for us. The coin spun in the air, reflecting all the other rhythms in dappled sunlight. Heads.

The lorry came trundling along and stopped. We climbed up on a spare wheel and over the tailboard. It was full of Algerian workers with their shovels and wineskins. As they shared their wine with us we chattered of Montségur and our journey. They laughed at our clumsy efforts, spurting wine over our faces and clothes.

"Si, si, Montségur. Ancient chateau", they said. We dozed. Soon we woke and spoke of Montségur again.

"Oui, oui, Montségur." Every time we said Montségur, they said Montségur. It slowly dawned on us that they were going to Montségur. They were going to repair it. Of course, the picks and shovels. We laughed and wept and rolled about. And laughed again, and I think prayed, and sang. There was a lot of wine. So we arrived.

It is not necessarily better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Climax is a special talent. Perhaps the art of lovemaking is to have an equivocal and wholly accepting relationship to orgasm as a grace. If not, then not. If so... We were not disappointed. Suddenly and with a divine inevitability the rhythms coalesced. All the up-beats, irrespective of wavelength, resonated together. The illusion that time is extended along a spatial and linear wave-pattern was dispelled. All time became present time. We were not only climbing up the Chateau de Montségur. The climbing of Montségur was eternally present. We knew too that the clue to the eternal awareness of all other present moments was being revealed to us, whatever use we made of such a revelation in future vision, or in past recollection.

It turned out to be the start of a lifetime of learning. It took me some years to find my way to the area and make it my home. I was not ready for it until I had been through several more life chapters, medical and otherwise; including a short but wonderful marriage, before the opportunity of a practice in the Ariège valley came my way. I had thought that I would have to seek out others who felt as I did about the area and its history. But they came to me. Over the years, not only as patients, but through contacts with visitors and people of the region, interested in Catharism from many different points of view, a lifetime’s work has opened up for me. It is far from over yet, and I sometimes feel that the best of it is yet to come.

  

In the section that follows I have condensed an account of the area written after my friend and I returned from our first pilgrimage. I hope this will provide a historical perspective for those who wish to make some of these journeys themselves.

 

CATHARISM AND THE GRAIL IN THE PYRENÉES

In the ninth century the post-Manichaean movement of Gnostic heretics was already well established in Eastern Europe. Spreading from centres in Bulgaria eastward into Russia, northward into Eastern Germany, and south and west into Italy and France, came wave after wave of devotees. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries they settled in great numbers in two principal regions of France. Near Lyons and on the Swiss border they were known as the Waldenses, ‘Les Vaudois’. But far more numerous were the Albigenses, whose name came from Albi, a town in the Tarn region, north east of Toulouse.

Toulouse became for a time their great centre. Later on when persecution became more serious they migrated southward. Foix, Carcassonne, Béziers, Narbonne, and many other places between Toulouse and the Spanish border became centres of a widespread civil and religious culture, which was not finally annihilated by the Inquisition until 1328.

Why was it to this particular region of Europe that these heretics came? We find that where many relics of French Catharism are still to be seen they are chiefly concentrated in the ancient province of Sabarthez. If we glance very briefly at the political history of Sabarthez we unfold an astonishing story of fanatical independence, which, in the age when the formation of the great European nations was in full swing, is almost inexplicable, unless a motive of extreme importance for remaining free underlay it. Sabarthez began by resisting successfully the invasions under Julius Caesar and Augustus. Later when the whole of the region between it and the sea was united as the province of Narbonnais, Sabarthez again remained free. About 613 AD we find France united under Clothaire II. About 770, a descendent of the latter, Wandrille, had four sons. In 845 an edict was issued under Charles la Chauve that Sabarthez should be governed by Wandrille and his descendants in perpetuity as an independent province. Not only do we find this succession faithfully maintained well over the first millennium, but descendants of Wandrille and their connections have a hold in many neighbouring provinces and in the noble families.

One branch, for example, of Wandrille’s family gives rise to the Comtes de Foix. At the time of the Albigensian crusade it is this family among others which is prominent in organising resistance against the Crusaders. Finally between 1200 and 1330 the whole region is conquered and united under France. But even then so strong is the spirit of independence that the hardier spirits retreat up the valley into the Pyrenées and over them, and there became the mainspring of a further resistance against absorption by both France and Spain. The little republic of Andorra remains independent to this day, largely as a result of these forces.

What had they to defend? If we look at a map of Sabarthez we see as we face the Eastern Pyrenées a long Y-shaped valley, whose stem and eastern arm are formed by the river Ariège between Foix and Ax-les-Thermes, and whose western extension is the valley of the Sos, leading up to the Spanish frontier at Pic Montcalm, the giant of the Eastern Pyrenées. At Ax-les-Thermes we can turn and climb for an equal distance due south, reaching the source of the Ariège at the Col de Puymorens which separates us from Andorra. Half way up the stem of the Y a third valley comes in from the east. It bears a little stream from the hills of the Plantaurel, which separate the Pyrenées from the plains round Carcassonne. These three valleys formed the old province of Sabarthez, and they form the stage upon which the last tragic century and a half of Albigensian history are unfolded.

The crusaders approached Sabarthez from Carcassonne in the northeast, and climbing the Plantaurel, struck the eastern valley at Lavelanet. They climbed beyond it into the first real foothills of the Pyrenées, and there above them, towering over the surrounding countryside at a height of over 3000 ft, were the massive ramparts of the Château de Montségur. The mount of safety, whose conquest in 1244 marked the end of the military phase of the Crusade, and has always been regarded historically as the death-blow of the movement. How much survived it and for how long we shall see later.

All we can say here of the bitter struggles which preceded the tragic capitulation of Montségur will give only the faintest inkling of the richness and importance, historically and spiritually, of the culture whose destruction ended there. The Crusade destroyed not merely a minor heresy of the Catholic Church, but the germ of a whole civilisation. For the revival of early Christianity which these men had achieved built up in the course of two and a half centuries a human culture which was not only the richest in Europe, but could almost be called a kind of premature renaissance, so far had this Langue d’Oc civilisation gone in terms of human intercourse, religious tolerance, and in the limited sphere of music and poetry, also in art. This was the seat of the troubadours and the ‘Courts d’Amour’. Only a superficial judgement sees in these nothing but the depravity and license that afterwards overcame them. There is little doubt that the mainspring of the Troubadour culture was a Cathar one, and that many of the epics they sang in the courts of the Langue d’Oc nobility were genuine mythos, thinly disguised esoteric doctrine in the form of romances.

It would be a great mistake to regard this civilisation as French in the sense of the France of the north that afterwards overcame it. On the contrary it represented by 1200 a serious obstacle to French unity, and more than the germ of a different nation altogether. This fact was the real driving force behind the Crusade. We may doubt whether Pope Innocent III at any time really intended the ghastly massacres which were perpetrated in his name, although we may suppose that he experienced to the full the necessity for keeping esoteric activity under the kind of control that the Church was in a position to exercise. He was determined to persuade the Cathar initiates to join the Church, if necessary by force. But no doubt he would have preferred that through the impulse of St. Dominic, who was a local man from Fanjeaux, something of the purity of life style of the Cathar brotherhood could have entered the Church by way of the Dominican order.

In the end, however, Dominic became as ruthless an Inquisitor as any. A great tragedy for the Church underlies the failure of Dominic’s mission, and the perversion of the Crusade into the cynical and barbaric conquest it became. The entire populations of Carcassonne and Béziers, Catholic and Cathar, were massacred. There remains to us the famous dictum of the Grand Prieur Armand Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, one of the chief local instigators of the Crusade, and later a Grand Inquisitor, on the occasion of the massacre of Beziérs: "Kill them all; God will recognise which are His". This attitude was characteristic, and there is no doubt that far more Catholics than heretics were slaughtered.

The northern French were incapable of appreciating the extent to which Catholicism and Catharism were intermingled in Langue d’Oc. Not only were the doctrinal differences too slight to be appreciated by citizens of such a heart-centred culture, but a degree of actual religious toleration had been attained which was centuries ahead of its time. Further south in Spain it had even reached the point where Catholics, Cathars and Moorish Muslims met and exchanged wisdom, borrowed much of each others ritual and architecture, and where the Muezzin was even happy to call the faithful Christians to prayer. From the official viewpoint, faced with Cathar abbots in Catholic monasteries, ‘Tuez les tous’, was the only answer.

To Montségur retreated the great ones of the movement. Protected by the universal sympathy, though rarely the actual membership of the local nobility of Foix and other centres, they concentrated their forces, and remained for several years the beacon of esoteric Christianity in the barren land. Siege was at last laid to them in 1244, and after six months they capitulated. Two hundred parfaits, croyants and sympathisers were burned alive on a vast pyre at the foot of the rock. The Abbot Amiel Aicard, his friend Hugo, and two others were permitted to escape. They took with them a certain treasure. The manner of what was written about this leads us to ask whether a spiritual treasure is meant.

If we think about the fire on that tragic night in March 1244, and the castle looking out across miles of Pyrenean foothills towards the lost lands of Langue d’Oc, and if we add to these thoughts the fact that it lies in the destinies of many people, French and otherwise, in our time to approach these Cathar mysteries through an experience of Montségur, we are led with Antonin Gadal, one of the instigators of a modern Cathar movement in the Ariège valley, to call Montségur, ‘La Phare du Catharisme’, the lighthouse for an approach to Catharism.

If we follow the route Amiel Aicard took as he escaped from Montségur we have to climb to a height of over 6,000 ft and drop down in a south-westerly direction from the Pic St Barthélémy into a high mountain valley running parallel to the Ariège, and known as the route des Corniches. We follow this for a mile or two north-west, and then leave it on a westerly track over the Montagne de Lougat, which is still known as the ‘Route des Cathares’. From here we drop down a further 1,500ft into the bed of the Ariège valley near the village of Ussat-les-Bains.

It is here that we find, in the words of Antonin Gadal, the harbour for which Montségur is the lighthouse. It is difficult to find words to describe the melancholy tenderness with which this quiet little valley is enfolded by the great green and grey limestone giants that surround it. Above and below Ussat the valley narrows a little and expands near the village owing to the entrance of the small lateral valley of Ornolac. This results in a three sided expansion of the valley across whose flat grassy floor rushes the Ariège in its stony bed through a mass of flowers in spring, and a green carpet in summer. Tradition has it that a lake filled this expansion till 1279, when geological changes caused the water to escape from this and from another lake higher up.

Similar escapes of water from underground lakes deep in the fathomless caves of these hills in recent times lend weight to the tradition. To these caves, and in particular to the immense grotte de Lombrives, came Amiel Aicard and his followers, and there the treasure they brought with them was preserved until 1328. The Inquisition found them at last, and after a battle in the mouth of the cave in which the Catholic forces were routed, the last 500 of the Cathari were sealed up alive, where their bodies remained till Henri Quatre, then still Duc de Navarre, unsealed the cave, and had the bones removed to an unknown cemetery. His signature, and those of his companions, is still clearly legible on the wall, half a mile inside the mountains.

What brought Amiel Aicard to Lombrives? Well, if you climb up the side of the mountains on each side of the valley at this point, you will find a whole circle of caves of varying depth and extent, and at different heights above the river. There are a dozen or more, some no more than shelters, some with connecting galleries many kilometres in extent. Lombrives has been explored to a depth of three miles, and is suspected to re-emerge high up in the valley of the Sos mentioned above. In at least half a dozen of the caves the walls are interlaced with countless drawings and signs, some readily identifiable, others to be interpreted only with expert knowledge of Cathar and Templar symbolism. A seemingly innocent area of wall reveals after an hour or two’s study sign after sign, scratched chiselled or roughly drawn in manganese, rust or ochre, many superimposed and in every degree of legibility. Many of the caves are fortified, and in some cases the ramparts are excellently preserved.

Now some of the symbols have been identified by modern investigators of Catharism as being far older than Christianity. They have arrived at the wonderful conclusion that this circle of caves was the centre for an ancient Mithraic initiation and was already a holy place when first the Grail mystery, and later the Cathari sought it out and perpetuated it as a mighty initiation centre right into the times of which we are speaking. These investigators speak of a circle of seven cave churches ‘gleisas’, each of which was a temple of initiation into one of the seven stages, first of Mithraic, and later of Cathar mysteries. They lead one finally to a tiny double chambered cell, still known locally as Bethlehem, approached step by step through a succession of fortifications. In one place these enclose a tiny meadow of transcendent sweetness and peace. Beyond a gateway is a place where ritual bread was baked and distributed. Finally there is a second gate, through which only the Grand Initié himself was permitted to pass. Here the candidate received the seventh initiation, standing with arms and legs outstretched in a great chiselled pentagon high up in the wall, and reached by seven steps, which his Mithraic forebears had left. The side of the pentagon was so cut at his left side as to facilitate his experience of the wound of Christ, through which passed at the Crucifixion the element which renewed the earth, and through which must pass for the time being at his initiation, the candidate’s own astral body. Opposite him the wall is itself a huge pentagon, and at one side of it is seen the indistinct form of a dove in flight. He gazes too upon a sacred silver vessel in a recess in the wall, upon which is also embossed a dove. This vessel was recently unearthed from its hiding place in the floor of the cave, and its dove has become the symbol of the modern movement.

When the candidate emerged, he was called ‘parfait’, and he and his companion, initiated on the same day, and bound to him by lifelong vows, went forth as vagrant mendicants, and taught as troubadours and monks until the Inquisition caught them. The Grotte de Lombrives is the most holy of all Cathar shrines. It leaves an indelible impression of sanctity and tragedy, and a mighty question unanswered. Beyond the narrow bottleneck which Henry of Navarre unsealed, which is already a quarter of a mile from the surface, there opens out a tremendous cavern of the proportions of a Gothic Cathedral. Here, for a further eighty years after Montségur, the persecuted remnant of the movement gathered day by day from their refuges in the heart of the limestone, and heard the sermons and exhortations of the ageing Amiel Aicard and his successors. The echoes still convey something of the tremendous force the words of the initiate must have conveyed, charged mantrically with the wisdom of Manichaean tradition, fed by intimate contact with the Knights Templar, the guardians of the Grail, and reflected, echoed and magnified by the laminated, reverberant walls of these endless limestone grottoes. Beyond the cathedral one climbs almost to the level of its roof, passing the inscribed names and symbols of many noble Rosicrucian pilgrims of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and at a depth of nearly a mile inside the mountain one reaches the shores of a quiet lake. On these shores, and along the peaceful corridor that approaches them, the last five hundred of the Albigenses lay down to die.

In the middle of the cave is a stalagmite, of the height of a man and somewhat larger. One steps up it, and in the top is a pool of clear water. No font can have been made more perfectly by nature, or used at so perfect a last sacrament. Looking back at its dazzling whiteness in the delicate modern lighting, and touching the switch which leaves it to the long black vigil it has kept for six hundred years, one feels that the world of light into which slipped those five hundred souls from a blackness which could no longer receive their spiritual knowledge, is almost tangible beyond the dark. Not least in the questioning mood of Lombrives is the mystery of what lay beyond the lake.

The world of the Pyrenées is a world of stone. There is a legend that Pyrène herself, who gave them her name, was turned to stone, and that the gleaming white stalactites above her tomb are the frozen tears of Hercules, her lover. Stone was the daily companion, friend and enemy, protector and frustrator of the Cathar. Stone resisted his incarnation and walled him out of it, stone protected his gleisas and spoulgas, the fortified churches in which he worshipped. He lived in stone castles, and with stone defended them. And in the sacramental transformation of the fallen earth, that Cathartic purification of and release from dead matter, which gave him his name, and is the secret of his doctrine, it is to stone again that he turns for the symbol and substance of his meditations.

As one leaves the cold night of Lombrives and re-emerges into the dazzling southern sunlight, we find the stones upon which he meditated everywhere. For three, nearly four hundred years, these valleys were inhabited and worked by men and women who were our forerunners in the conviction that the dead matter of the earth is redeemable by the Christ, and that Sun-substance arises phoenix-like and aflame out of stone which Christ-filled thought and will have transformed by love and art. The symbol of the Cathar croyant was the dove, and of the parfait the pentagon. There is hardly a pebble at the side of the track that some Cathar has not redeemed by art or meditation. Many and many he has carved into the form of doves, however crudely, ---- doves flying into the bosom of the spirit; doves alighting into incarnation; doves with head under wing in the sleep and darkness of profoundest contemplation; the soul in all stages of spiritual experience. Those he has not carved as doves he has seen as doves, as we still can; stones formed by nature into shapes which, with a scratch here and a piece chipped off there, remind him sufficiently of his theme. Occasionally a pentagon of startling accuracy shocks our scepticism out of the thought that the eye sees in any curious shape what it wishes to see. Behind all these relics and evidence of the teeming life of Catharism during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, and yet still superimposed on the far older Mithraic life, comes hint after hint of the profoundest connection of all these matters with an important chapter in the history of the Holy Grail.

What was the treasure of Montésgur? What if anything was carried beyond the water through the further five or more miles of Lombrives to an unconfirmed exit high up in Vicdessos? An answer, and a further question is to be found at the top of the Vicdessos valley itself. Near the village of Vicdessos, on a great rock by the present hamlet of Olbier, and set like a picture in the mighty frame of Pic Montcalm, there stood until Richelieu pulled it down, one of the biggest castles in France, Le Château de Montréalp de Sos. If you walk from one corner of the wall to its diagonal opposite, and these two corners are all that remains above ground you must walk all of 220 yards. Below the battlements in the rock, however, is a tiny grotto which Richelieu could not, or at least did not destroy. On the wall of this cave is a picture, now almost washed away, of the Sun descending and crowned with thorns, and a broad-bladed sword, and a cross, and a lance from whose point drip five drops of blood, each one guarded by a white cross. All this is faintly executed in black and white and blue-grey and orange-red, and the picture guarded on its outer side by a column of orange-red crosses.

The local tradition that this was the Grail Castle reaches as far as an indirect reference on the ordnance map, which marks a ‘Rge.Fr. de Grail’ only a kilometre away. Modern investigators of Catharism refer to the fact that the Templars were servants and guardians of the Grail as a karmic compensation for errors in previous lives. They say that it was to Cathar initiates that the Templars looked for spiritual leadership, that they were frequently initiated by Cathar leaders. They say that some of the initiations in the Parsifal story were Cathar initiations. They suggest that the now empty lake in the Ariège valley was the lake referred to by Wolfram von Eschenbach as Brumbane. They point to a remarkable hollowed out rock near the shores of this lake as the Hut of Trevrezent, and they show the cave where Parsifal must have slept because there was no room for two in Trevrezent’s hut. (This was on Parsifal’s second visit to the castle, mentioned by Wolfram von Eschenbach. (Chrétien’s account is incomplete) Galahad, they say was initiated at ‘Bethlehem’.

These hints, shared with us by Antonin Gadal, take their place with many other accounts, historical, legendary, perceived clairvoyantly in ‘far memory’. A picture grows up over the years, and we can look at it, and set it beside whatever else we can discover of the Grail Mystery. In due course it will begin to speak.

---oOo---

Stay calm, for soon, satisfied,
They will travel relentlessly on
To the definitive meeting where all is ratified
In high summer
From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’

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