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The Archive of Stanley MessengerThe Cathar Connectiona novel by Stanley Messenger7. CLOTHILDE |
SUNDAY
They should be here soon. I ought to know by now that however clearly the inner pictures foreshadow coming events, the one thing one can never be certain about is timing. The habit of thinking about the supersensible counterparts of physical events as if they operated on the same time scale dies hard. It is so easy to forget that the earthly reckoning of time is basically spatial, whereas even the closest ethereal time exists only on a rhythmic wave, and is therefore in one sense always present. Its actual immediacy can therefore alter according to the intensity with which the participants are experiencing it. If their consciousness and will is intensifying, the time scale shortens, meaning they will be here more quickly. I believe that this has been happening.
How I have retained my faith in the outcome of all this in the last year I really don’t know. Accepting that Raymond had gone back to England with his mind still in hopeless confusion was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. Yet I knew that only he could tease out the strands of reality from the illusion in which he was involved, and to do this he had if at all possible to meet the main characters implicated in his unresolved situation, and come to terms with them. Failing this he would have the same thing to do all over again in another life, in a different form, and perhaps in circumstances even less propitious.
There are other dimensions, and I don’t really know how aware of them he is. Although I do know that in the gaps of his madness he sometimes realised last year that more rested on his ability to solve his own identity problem than just the question of his own sanity. Later, when he reverted almost entirely to a hopeless dedication to working out a fourteenth century problem instead of the one that faced him this time, he ceased to see what a powerful effect he was having on the people here, who depend on me.
I’ve found it impossible to separate these events from the planetary processes that have been going on all year. I suppose I half feared that in some way he really would not survive the ordeal, and that the real danger point was at Christmas time. As this may turn out to be part of the documentation of a chapter in the history of these valleys at rather a crucial stage, I feel it is important to say something about these planetary alignments. It is the first time for nearly 200 years that Jupiter and Saturn have come into conjunction, and then gone into a retrograde stage in the same part of the sky together. As they travel at different speeds Jupiter therefore overtook Saturn twice more before finally leaving the slower planet behind, so the conjunction took place three times in a seven-month period. The connection between these events and what Raymond was going through will be apparent later.
It was quite clear last summer that Raymond was going into a situation which would threaten his mental stability unless he faced the most obvious corollary which confronts anyone who starts to remember a past incarnation before he is adequately prepared for such an experience. This corollary is that at the end of the incarnation you die. Freudians talk about birth-traumas, but we are not yet accustomed in the consulting room to giving a clinical identity to the increasing number of death-traumas affecting people now that recollection of their past lives is on the increase. Clearly hardly anyone comes to the end of a life with all problems solved; loose ends snipped off and bows neatly tied. When people do manage this there is something a bit inhuman about it. One can feel that there is not much left there to love or to hope for.
Raymond, however, was perhaps rather an extreme case of the opposite situation. When he came to me for a casual check up in April last year at my practice in Tarascon, I saw very quickly that his karma had brought him to the valleys to sort out an old problem. More and more people have been doing this in the last twenty or thirty years; a lot of them involved in modern esoteric movements. Rudolf Steiner in particular was on record as saying that many former Cathars would find their way in this century into his so-called ‘anthroposophical’ movement. Raymond had no connection with this movement. In a way it would have been easier for him if he had. The sheer bewilderment of finding himself week by week in situations where he had strong memories and fears which he knew perfectly well tied up in no way with his actual life, threw him quickly into total confusion. The fear that he was going mad was worse than the experiences themselves.
It has been my problem and responsibility to remember my involvement in those times with considerable clarity and accuracy. I knew I had never met Raymond before, but I knew with equal certainty that his arrival on my doorstep now was somehow closely linked with our respective orientations in Cathar times. To have explored this dimension with him there and then, would have been to throw him into even worse confusion. I had to be content to allow him to pour out his experiences, hallucinatory and otherwise, and simply myself to act as a channel, a waste pipe, for the mounting energies. Helping as best I could to ground him in his present situation, and concealing any past links that I began to remember with his story.
The theme again and again in his mounting obsession was death. As his memories of the life in the caverns round Ussat-les-Bains grew sharper he was clearly participating day by day in the creeping paralysis of fear that dogged the footsteps of the heretics. It was eighty-four years since the outer life of the movement as an open culture and civilisation had been crushed and exterminated forever at Montségur. ‘Croyants’ remembered Montségur, the awful siege and starvation, the loss of friends, the burnings, the screams of the dying, as a nightmare of childhood tales told by their parents. This was the terrible bridge which separated them from the happy romantic lives among the troubadours, the poets, the Moorish savants, the wandering ‘parfaits’, who filled the memories of their parents and grandparents. Their own memories were of homelessness and privation, the constant threat of exposure by the secret spies of the Inquisition, the fear of strangers, the village life suddenly interrupted by fearful warnings in the night, the escapes to the caves, the weeks of sleeping in the dark and the cold. Then in later years Raymond remembered the caves becoming a permanent home. Remembered his own development in the movement, the joy of seeing older friends passing stage after stage up the initiatory path, the privilege of himself being allowed to enter, first one, and then a second sanctuary in the mountains. The reverential awe with which he received certain secret information, the ecstasy as this information began to act as a key to open windows in his inner life of soul. Then the gratitude and sure-footedness as he realised how fully in control the path was, how nothing was ever allowed to be released to the aspiring ‘croyant’ too soon, but that when it was revealed it answered all those questions which burned most deeply at that very time.
But for him and his friends all these experiences felt like a race against time. He knew as they all did that it was literally a matter of time before the evidence of their existence, the sheer numbers of Cathars concealed in the mountains, would be fully apparent to the Inquisition. They would inevitably be traced to their actual lair and ruthlessly exterminated. Death loomed over the entire society, just as now death loomed over the consciousness of Raymond in the twentieth century.
This was why as his temporary physician, seeing through my astrological knowledge the first phase of the triple conjunction moving inexorably towards the moment when after Christmas the life and death forces first opposed one another, I began to see this event cosmically as one of Death and Resurrection. Raymond’s own chart linked him inseparably to this aspect. He would either have to face the fact of his death in Cathar times consciously in this life, or he would run the grave risk of permanent madness or actual premature death before he had come to terms with the necessity for transformation.
I knew that I had certainly been deeply involved with this process in the fourteenth century, and had clear memories of gathering together survivors from the Ariège and elsewhere during the 1330s and 1340s, and founding secret cells in various parts of Europe and even England, chiefly through the Knights Hospitallers. But I could not yet see how it was that destiny had brought me now to France once again to meet the successive waves of young people, who were going through at Montségur and here in the caves a kind of catalytic awakening of memory for the fact of reincarnation. For it is often much more the fact of reincarnation and the opening up of a path for understanding it, and removing the many illusions that surround it, that people take away from here, rather than actual soul memories. Antonin Gadal in the forties and fifties was so right in describing Montségur as ‘le Phare du Catharisme’. It was truly a guiding beacon for hundreds, a lighthouse illuminating their arrival at crucial stages in their understanding.
Now Christmas is the most likely time of year to go into the darkness of earthly death with the realisation that new life, a Christ Child, is miraculously born out of it. Yet I feel intuitively that Raymond did not die at Christmas time last year.
At Easter time or thereabouts, however, there is a new possibility of crisis. A few weeks before Easter the two planets had met again in their retrograde state. Just as I identified the first phase with Death and Resurrection, I saw this second conjunction as a Crisis of Identity. I think it is most likely that about this time Raymond would have been first able to sort out in his mind which of his experiences belonged to which century. I see him coming through as Raymond to a more detailed relationship with his Cathar counterpart, greeting him as a brother rather than confusing him with his present identity. This crisis too has its own characteristic perils. It is all very well coming psychologically to the point where one is able to contain at some level of consciousness the acceptance of a multiple identity. What is much more equivocal is whether there is any realm in which this containment can survive the pressures of ordinary life. This would be my actual definition of schizophrenia, that our civilisation is becoming littered with the casualties of this process, people who fail to cross this second threshold.
Here again, Easter is the ideal season in which to weather this storm. At Easter Jesus dies, releasing the Christ; but Christ goes through this death, and resurrects into the earth again. A third identity, the resurrected Christ, comes into existence as a transcended stage of the embodied Christ. The conquest of schizophrenia is conditional upon the birth of a transcendent entity into consciousness, but one that does not lose its hold upon the earth. Lo, I am with you always. If this stage can be achieved, it remains accessible as a permanent resource of consciousness.
It will be clear that this pattern has in it the seeds of its own next phase, and that this is partly my reason for expecting that Raymond will appear, with or without companions, not so very long after the third conjunction of the planets on July 24th.
If death and resurrection was the theme on Dec 31st, and schizophrenia, the meeting with the double, on March 4th, then it will be necessary to embody this third phase, when the planets are once more moving forward on their usual trajectory, in a concept which emerges logically from the other two. I see it as having something to do with initiation, with the ratification of the two stages of rebirth and crisis of identity in a definitive commitment, the crossing of a threshold, or bridge of consciousness, something involving a higher stage of will.
This threefold development has a dynamic with a clear line through self and otherness. The self dies and resurrects; the meeting with the double is both self and other; but in initiation what is met is that other. The self comes to meet one out of the otherness of events. One experiences for the first time I AM THAT. One has the direct experience that the events coming to meet one in life are just as much direct embodiments of the self as is the soul, experienced inwardly, who comes to meet them. All of this lies in the womb of time for us who are involved with these happenings.
Not least for the girls, who I haven’t mentioned yet. One day when he was more than usually identified with his Cathar self, Raymond came to my cottage in Ussat in a high state of excitement. It must have been about August 20th. For some years now there has been a regular meeting at this house, which I have led, and which has been a serious, but not particularly esoteric, study of the civilisation of early Langue d’Oc, the surviving works of the troubadours, the minnesingers, and so on. It arose in the first place out of the pioneering work of Roché, Gadal and others who had their own magazine which is still published. When he first appeared in the area Raymond used to come to these meetings, in fact I encouraged him to do so when he first came to my surgery. I felt inclined to keep an eye on him in a more social setting, especially when I began to realise that his concern with the Albigeois story was becoming a bit obsessional.
On this occasion I really began to have the feeling for the first time that his identification with the Cathar time was slipping over into hallucination. He started to talk about ‘the girls’ in a way that made it clear that he was confusing the group of his young contemporaries in the Cathar times with the two young ladies I still have to write about.
He began to speak very excitedly about a journey to England he now had to make which would be vitally important now that Inquisition pressure seemed to be working up to a final confrontation. He couldn’t tell me any more details, as the less people knew about it this end the less they would be able to reveal under torture if they were captured by the Inquisition. This was why he had to take the girls with him. The trouble was he couldn’t find the dark one. Did I know where she was?
I now became a bit alarmed, as in this life at least they had certainly been together up until the last time he visited me, which was the previous week. But he was in no condition to be quizzed about the present day girl and her friend. I asked him to be sure and let me know if he found her; didn’t the other girl know where she was? He looked at me very suspiciously, and I was aware I had made a gaffe. "Which other girl?" he asked. "What do you know about another girl?" "Why, the Scottish girl, Esther, the one with straight red hair." "I don’t know any Scottish girls", he said darkly, "I shouldn’t be talking to you at all". This was the last time I saw him.
To explain now about the two girls. The previous year another holiday visitor, a girl from Toulouse called Helène Fauré, had come to the meetings on a few occasions, and last year she turned up again bringing a Scottish girl of whom I got an immediate good impression.
Heléne herself was not particularly helpful at the meetings, somewhat hysterical, and critical of what she called the rather dry academic tone of the studies. But on other occasions she has visited me privately, and then she had been more perceptive, and I had told her a great deal about the Cathar history and background, and given her things to read. When she brought her Scottish friend Esther to meet me I thought this would be followed up. But this didn’t happen; the reason for which became clear. It was because when they came to the group they met Raymond. It was obvious during the evening that there was a strong spark of attraction between all three of them. But as far as the meeting was concerned we didn’t see them again. This was somewhat of a relief, as they would certainly have dominated the proceedings, and in a direction which most of the others were not yet ready to go.
Raymond, however, also continued to visit me privately and it was clear that the trio were spending a great deal of time together. As the summer went on Raymond’s visits became more infrequent, and I became more concerned. Then as I have described, communication ceased.
One day towards the end of August I went in to the clinic in Toulouse where I do a monthly psychiatric rota. A colleague called across to me in the common-room: "Hey, Perrier, aren’t you interested in the Albigeois?" "Yes, why?" "Case sheet here might interest you."
Of course it was Helène. She’d been in about a week, found wandering in the mountains somewhere up the Sos valley, wet and distraught, completely out of herself. Before sedation nobody had been able to make any sense of the situation, indeed it could simply have been shock. But under drugs there was a persistent Cathar content to her ramblings, and when I told the registrar I knew her he was prepared to see if I could get any sense out of her.
However, it was clear that she didn’t recognise me at all. I sat with her for some time before her ramblings became any more coherent. Then gradually and with growing horror I began to realise where she imagined herself to be.
If you have never been by yourself in the heart of a mountain cavern without lighting, it is almost impossible to convey qualitatively how much blacker than black, quieter than quiet, how penetratingly cold the experience is. I once tried it out artificially by asking a guide to switch off the lighting for me for a few minutes while the party started back from the innermost point by the lake in Lombrives. He played along with me, but it can’t have been more than about three minutes. I have never quite forgotten that distant sound of retreating footsteps.
Helène started to radiate across to me, as much in her silences as in what she whispered, what this was like after hours and days, past the point when there was any way of gauging the passage of time. It was not only horror, it was ecstasy, and bliss, fear and misery, increasing despair and increasing peace. And then gradually there came the slow dawning through delirium and hallucination the approach of an indescribable light and joy as death came nearer. But for me the listener, the greater her light and joy, the more sober my assessment of her psychiatric condition.
I was able to arrange with the hospital authorities to take her retrospectively onto my register of patients and visit her parents in that capacity. To my surprise it was over two months since they had heard from her. I imagined her as living at home, but apparently she had moved into lodgings in the town over a year earlier. Life, particularly with her father, had become increasingly difficult, and her mother was not even allowed to visit her. Helène visited her mother when her father was at work, and she and her mother got on reasonably well. But affection was increasingly eroded by mutual irritation, and her visits became less frequent. When her student’s grant ended without her getting a degree in England she told her mother she wanted to try and settle in England, which she preferred, and planned to start on the usual ‘au pair’ basis. And now this trouble.
The hospital authorities had no particular plans for treatment. I went on visiting, but there was no improvement. The authorities were prepared to discharge her to her parents’ care, so it became a matter of me persuading the parents to have her out on my say-so. I knew what I was taking on, and that I was saddling myself with her in a less than professional way. Or perhaps more than professional, I thought. The Faurés were compliant, or at least Mm. Fauré appeared to trust me, so I took Helène in the car back to Ussat.
Tuesday
They’ve arrived.
Thursday
Raymond had the grace to phone me before actually turning up at the front door. "Dr Perrier?" "Hallo, Raymond." Silence. My heart began to thump a bit. "Raymond?" "Yes, still here. You sounded as if you expected it to be me." "Yes, I did. I’ve been expecting you for a week." Then in case this might sound over dramatic, I said: "Nothing particularly clairvoyant about it. More a matter of calculation. All the same I’m mightily relieved to hear your voice. Are you alone?. "No." "The Scottish girl? Esther, was it?" "Yes her. And someone else." My heart beat faster still. I chipped in before he could elaborate. "Where are you?" "How are you?" "Just the three of us. Two men. Esther and I live together." Poor Helène, I thought. "All right, you’d better come along straight away. Your friend can sleep at Mme Brault’s next door. There’s room for you two here. Have you eaten?" "Yes, we’re fine. We’re in a Dormobile van. We’ve just finished lunch. See you in. say an hour." My thoughts were going round like a whirlpool. There was only one person he was likely to have brought, but would he have brought that person unless he were still hallucinated? He had sounded very much together. I began to entertain a fantastic hope.
Memory of past incarnations, even if one has attained considerable clarity, never returns all of a piece. It is like any other form of amnesia in that it returns in patches, sometimes just a haunting word or sentence, a familiar smell, sometimes whole sequences, of weeks, months, or even years at a time, whole panoramas which you wonder how you could ever have forgotten. One of the things which one would not perhaps immediately think of is that when the secret knowledge one has in past lives really was held by solemn oath as a secret, even under a kind of hypnotism, it becomes ten times harder to recall it from one incarnation to another. Listening to whole patches of Raymond’s memories last year, I became aware that he, that is Ramón and a group of other young Cathars, had been involved in a conspiracy to encompass the escape of a large number, perhaps the whole five hundred, survivors by a secret route over the mountains into Spain. This series of patchy incoherent memories had started to arouse in me an extraordinary tension which felt remarkably like amnesia. I slowly became convinced that I held a key to this conspiracy which I didn’t know I possessed.
However, the pressure of this amnesiac tension found a let-out by arousing a series of other half-memories that I was sure had a bearing on the matter. It was something Antonin Gadal had once told me in my youth, that he was convinced there was a cave route, right through the mountains beyond the underground lake, and that it emerged high up in the Sos valley, not so very far from the Chateau de Montreal-de Sos itself. Was this the way the young conspirators had planned to lead the party? What made them think they could find this route through miles and miles of mountain caverns? Was this the secret knowledge I myself possessed? But I was convinced that I had never possessed any such knowledge.
Nothing of my memories of that time, with all its Templar and Hospitaller connections in other parts of Europe, would have given me that kind of detailed psychological skill. The only kind of knowledge that could be relevant would be in the realm of cipher, code words, the locking away of secrets themselves, secrets of any kind. Then as now I had psychological skills appropriate to the times. Had the youngsters hit on some secret, which I had played a part in concealing? In that case, why had Ramón gone to England?
Then, suddenly I remembered. After the horrors of the Templar destruction in 1307 and 1308, the few of us Templars who remained were widely scattered. Many were concealed among the Knights Hospitallers, but among the Cathars there were still Albigeois and Patarene groups about, and Bogomils relatively untouched further east. So a good many of us, especially those who had long been link men between the lazy vulnerable establishments that Philippe le Bel had largely massacred, simply went underground into well established secret lines of communication, and continued our spiritual work in this way, helping to encourage and train the groups that still remained to learn the technique of work in cells that could survive anonymously within an orthodox framework.
I now remembered a certain Templar Master in England. It was part of my task to service Hospitaller and other respectable groups where Templars were concealed with certain hypnotic skills, planting mental blocks which could only be released by code-words known only to myself and others of my psychological craft order. The only person I knew of whom Ramon might be able to contact was a man I had visited there ten years earlier. We were never informed of the actual content of the secret knowledge it was our task to put under hypnotic lock and key. Was this the man who knew the way through the caves?
The sudden extermination of the remaining Ariège Cathar groups had taken me by surprise in the middle of a secret mission. It was my precise function in regard to this that I was still struggling unsuccessfully to recall. If my wild guess or intuition was right, and Raymond’s destiny had in fact led him through his illness to the very man he had so desperately needed when he was Ramón, then I was about to confront someone with whom I was supposed to complete a secret mission, but 652 years too late! Moreover, it was a man I had only met once even then, and he had been simply one of a series of very many clients or patients, with whom my only connection had been though a code word, chosen for that mission and never used again.
I am not so blasé about far memory as to be immune to the excitement of the occasional breakthrough of almost incredible unlikelihood when the synchronous mechanics of karma and reincarnation miraculously reveal themselves. I could now only wait with a dry mouth for their appearance on my doorstep.
I busied myself bustling around making beds and preparing a snack meal, and then going in to Marie Brault next door to borrow her spare room, and making up the bed in there. The afternoon wore on. I had known it would be more than an hour.
But the waiting was over at last, and suddenly there was Raymond with his arms round me. This had never been our relationship before, but the relief of tension, and his obvious clarity of mind and new maturity had brought us both a step further. Esther hugged me to.
Then I was confronting across the room a tall middle-aged and strikingly handsome Scotsman, with grey hair in a quiffe and clear, bright blue eyes. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, and the world momentarily stopped for us. Then he stepped across the room and gripped my hands in both his. "You came to see me at Ashridge", he said. "You were the one I was supposed to meet if anything ever went wrong and my knowledge was needed. But you never sent for me." Raymond was looking from one to the other of us in absolute astonishment. "You were the Knight, Dr Perrier", he burst out, "All the time it was you, the one thing last year that never occurred to me. And Alan, what’s come over you? I thought you never remembered anything of past lives." "I don’t" said Alan. "At least I thought I didn’t. But this is an absolutely clear picture, like a still shot from a film. That is all it is, it has no context, just an isolated scene with no before and after."
Raymond was practically gibbering, and Esther was sitting in the corner of the room quietly weeping. "But Dr Perrier", persisted Raymond, "why didn’t you tell me last year?" "Just think back, my dear boy. You were desperately confused and ill. Anything I could have said, and indeed some of the things I did say, would simply have driven you further into confusion and paranoia. Another thing, which you will find harder to believe, is that actually I hadn’t made the connection either. I knew I had something to do with your conspiracy, but I couldn’t remember what. You’re missing the obvious. We never met, and the secret knowledge, which I had, successfully eluded the barrier of successive incarnations. In fact.."
I looked across at the handsome Scot and laughed. "I think it’s time someone introduced us", I said. He looked at me with such tenderness I knew it was going to be all right. "Otherwise I shall never remember the code-word. I’m not sure I shall anyway." "Dr Fraser, meet Dr Perrier", laughed Raymond, moving across to Esther. He knelt beside her and enfolded her in his arms. "Darling, it’s going to be all right", he said. "Yes, I believe it is, sweetheart", she replied. "But do you mean to say you’ve forgotten Helène altogether?" "You know, for the time being I really had forgotten her." "Yes darling you’ve been forgetting her for six hundred and fifty years. The trouble is, though; she’s never forgotten you. Now here you are forgetting her entirely the second time round." Esther got up. "Dr Perrier, I’ve been waiting to ask you this ever since we came. It was here Raymond met Helène and me. She talked so much about you, and you were the one here who knew her. Yet when we were writing to Toulouse to try and find out where she was, it somehow never occurred to us to follow it up this end. Partly it was Raymond’s illness. We were fighting for his sanity for months. But partly it was that I too was caught up in what was almost a hallucination. I wasn’t entirely sure how much of the experience was real. Have you any idea what happened to her?" "Fortunately I have", I replied. "She’s upstairs in bed and asleep."
The wave of relief across the room was palpable. Suddenly everybody was talking at once. There was a crescendo of voices and laughter, and I quickly shut the door in case Helène woke. Marie Brault chose that moment to enter massively through the kitchen calling, "Mon dieu, quel bruit! De quoi s’agit il? Vous allez réveiller les morts, sans parler de la demoiselle qui dort á l’étage du dessus. Allez Clothilde, présente moi la personne qui séjourne avec moi."
She was introduced all round. She has no English and only Raymond speaks more than a very little French. Thank God for that little, thought I, stealing a glance at my Scotsman. Then I realised that Esther was still watching me, as she had continued to do ever since her question. Amid the psychic swirling and colour of the mingling auras in the room she stood like a vertical pillar of radiance and strength. I suddenly felt very sorry for her. She’s the strong one of this lot, I thought ruefully. Raymond, and also my dear Alan, I thought, have clearly got an awful long way to go. But just look at this lass. I remembered my disappointment when she didn’t return last year. Perhaps now, I thought. This is someone I could work with. She came across to me as the others struggled with the language. "She’s ill, isn’t she?" she said. "I mean really ill?" I nodded helplessly. "Is there any hope?" Esther went on. "Is she going to get better?" "I don’t think we can talk now", I said. "I want to talk to you first. We’ll get Dr Fraser settled, then when Raymond’s asleep come down here for a nightcap. We’ll drink coffee and talk." I tried to grip her hand reassuringly, but she only sighed. Then her eyes twinkled. "He’s nice, isn’t he, my old Cousin Alan?" My grip on her hand changed to a little slap, and I felt myself colouring. We looked at each other, and then spontaneously we were both cuddling, and tears spilled over. "I said to Raymond I thought it would all work out", she said. "But I think I’m going to lose him." "We don’t really lose anybody", I replied. "Mais nous verrons. Nous verrons. À plus tard."
Things sorted themselves out. They took their snacks to their rooms, and I collapsed in front of the hearth, where I keep a log fire going even in summer. This high up it gets chilly at night. After such a day and such a turmoil of emotions I didn’t really feel much like talking, but I felt Esther needed to get a few things off her chest. Perhaps we both realised that it was we who would have to carry the situation and steer it through if possible to a creative outcome.
Esther came down fairly soon in her night things. "Here, I’ll get you a dressing gown", I said. "Pour yourself some coffee, if you can take it at this time of night." We settled down, with Esther on the hearth rug at my feet. "Did Raymond get off to sleep?"
"No, but I told him I wasn’t sleepy and was going down for a drink. He didn’t want one. I think he’ll be asleep very soon. I wondered", she said after a pause, "whether he would perhaps creep into Helène’s room" "Do you think he might?" "I don’t really think so. The relationship scares him, he hasn’t come to terms with it. I don’t think he ever loved her, you see, even as Ramón. But he was her hero, and he felt responsible for her." "How much do you remember about the last two or three days before you left?" I asked. "Well, I remember it all now," said Esther. "We’ve worked on it for so long. But it is still a sickening, almost unbearable nightmare. At first, when Helene and I arrived in the area, I managed to keep the strands of modern and mediaeval sequences very separate. I had ways of overcoming illusion in myself, which at first increased my control considerably. But I realised each time that this was only at the cost of losing Helene. I sounded more and more to myself like a prissy schoolmarm. She started concealing things from me. In order to stay in touch with her I was obliged more and more to pretend that I was taking her account of what was happening at face value. But this started to call my bluff, and there were several occasions when I quite lost control of reality, and was convinced we were in quite another world." "Can you describe such an occasion?"
Esther looked at me. Then her gaze blurred. She stared once more into the flames and began to look at her memories. "The crucial incident took place only a few days before Helène brought me to your meeting", she said. "We had been walking and hitch-hiking up the valley a few miles at a time for more than a week. During these days I had sensed the balance of Helène’s consciousness slipping more and more out of control. The previous night we had failed to find lodgings, and had slept in the tiny tent right by the river. Helène had insisted on a most awkward site under a rocky overhang concealed from the road, in case, as she said, a posse of Inquisition priests and their retinue of hangers-on, who were known to be in the area, passed by on one of their night patrols. ‘Since various sporadic attacks on these Inquisitors had taken place in recent months,’ she told me, ‘there was what amounted to a curfew in operation the whole length of the valley’.
"The following morning we were only a few miles below here. Coming so near now to the crucial area Helène’s tension was unbearable. She started and stopped at the least noise. In a desultory way I was still trying to stabilise things, as I could only feel that whatever life we were in, nothing was served by losing our cool at the least incident. "In order to avoid the main highway, (Inquisitors again), Helène and I had crossed the river lower down and were on a parallel track a bit up the slope on the other side, with a forbidding overhang of scree above us to the right, which soon opened out into a small steep side valley down which a torrent rushed from a waterfall above. We stood on the stone bridge crossing this torrent, and Helène looked up the slopes on the far side where the next mountain led round into the main Ariège valley once more. I felt a deep unease which affected me physically. A kind of humming filled my head and ears, and I looked round for reassurance. I couldn’t see our rucksacks and tent, couldn’t remember where we had put them down. "Helène gave a sharp cry, and I followed her gaze up the mountainside. A figure came into view, leaping and bounding with incredible sure-footedness down the slope between the rocks, over clumps of azalea, joining the path, leaving it again, at a speed more like a chamois than a man, growing in size with extraordinary rapidity till he came to a sudden halt only a few yards above us.
"He was dressed all in black with a short cloak, held at the shoulder with the Cathar buckle, cross and fleur-de-lys in silver. He stood there quivering, shimmering almost, as if he were composed of pure energy instead of flesh and blood. He seemed to be part of the mountain. He got his breath, then: ‘C’est toi, Roxane. J’ai besoin de toi.’ He seemed to notice me for the first time. He pulled himself upright, and then gave me some sort of salutation, which aroused a tantalising half memory, and which I found myself returning. They quickly lapsed into a rapid crossfire in the Occitane dialect that threw me strongly back into presence of mind. By the time I had reached the point of preparing to intervene, however, the conversation was over and the figure was rapidly disappearing up the slope and into the rocks.
"Helène was now beside herself with anxiety and haste. She impatiently brushed aside my questions, but with a certain deference which linked in my mind with the young man’s greeting. Almost apologetically she hastened me along, and in a couple of hours we were here in this village. She seemed to know where to go for lodgings, and we settled in. After the meal she disappeared, saying she had to meet the young man Ramón, and receive some instructions."
Esther paused and seemed not to know how to continue. "Did you recognise him in Raymond when you came to the meeting?" I asked. "Well, I didn’t at first. Then I caught him looking at me in a puzzled sort of way. I suddenly made the mental connection, and found I could no longer think at all. It was like being stuck in a limbo between consequence and expectation. I just sat and stared at him.
"Immediately after the meeting he got hold of us both, and we went round to our lodgings. On the way round Raymond was questioning me in a way that seemed as if he were thinking that I belonged to the Cathar brotherhood in some senior capacity. He wanted to know how I had met up with Helène, whom he continued to refer to as Roxane. My answers, which simply referred back to our holiday trip, made no sense to him at all. But later on he seemed to start seeing me as a girl and for a time talked quite sensibly about his own life in the twentieth century. He had been here several months, he referred to you, Dr Perrier, and to your meetings, and even started to tell me bits of Cathar history and about the caves and so on. But the more he did this the more tense and nervous Helène became, and finally she burst into the conversation in French, hysterically anxious about urgent affairs they had to settle. Raymond rubbed his eyes and complained of a headache, and they seemed to forget me altogether for a time. Then he started shooting me puzzled, even suspicious, glances as before."
"You never had any sort of memory which could link with the personality he seemed to be attributing to you?" I asked. "Nothing at all, except an occasional haunted feeling, as if I ought to remember and couldn’t."
I had been leaning back on the settee, and Esther was against my knees, still staring into the fire. Suddenly she turned and gripped my wrists. "And do you know" she said emphatically, "why I don’t remember it? I’ll tell you. It’s because it doesn’t exist any more. Here it is. Here!" She let go of me and knocked herself on the chest and head. "This is what we’ve all come through to understanding in this last year. It is we who are the fortunate ones, the ones who don’t remember, because we can reach firm ground on which to stand, so that we can appreciate and grasp what transformation is about. Then we can ourselves freely plunge back into the past, and draw forward, re-collect into the present the essence of what we have been, and stand on it as ground of our own being. Those like Raymond and Helene whose past lives batter away at their memories, and force actions upon them which they have not themselves initiated in this life, are helpless victims of their own metamorphosing identity."
"Yes, Esther. But at the same time", I put in quietly, "unless there were such people, we solid sane people would have no reason to suspect there was anything else accessible to us but this life. We need each other. More than that, we are one another. We exist just as much in the people who come to meet us as we do in the events that come to meet us. So often the people like us, you and I ,Esther, whose relation to the past starts off by being simply a slow growth of intuitive understanding, we are the very ones who the hysterical, neurotic, clairvoyant, charismatic, wonderful people like Raymond and Helène, home in on with faultless instinct to sort them out. What we don’t always remember is that we need them just as much as they need us." "Yes" I went on after a bit, "and one of the things we need them for is to give us the clues whereby we can acquire for ourselves in freedom the memory of the past which was forced on them by their destiny." "Is that how it went for you?" she asked. "Yes", I replied. "I’ll tell you about all that one day."
We sat and gazed at the fire for some time. Then Esther shifted uncomfortably. "Of course I love him dearly", she said, "But you know I don’t really need him. He’s much more Helène’s than he is mine." "Yes, but does he know that? He’s so close to Helene he doesn’t notice her. He loves you because you’re so different." "Yes" she said, "and it is those differences which will end by driving him away. I’m too critical of the very things in him Helène adores." "It’s not so simple", I said. "It’s Ramón that Helène adores, not Raymond." "You mean it’s Ramón that Roxane adores. What happens when Helène comes to terms with Roxane just as Raymond has with Ramón?"
I looked at her quietly. "It’s not by any means certain we’ll get that far", I said. "She’s shown not the slightest sign so far of having any other experience than the dreamy bliss of having died in Lombrives." "Well Raymond will just have to sit with her day in, day out, till she does", said Esther. "Will you be able to let him? Without coming to hate her?" "You can’t hate her. She’s gentle and faithful and courageous. And a bit silly! If he brings her through he’ll come to love her." "Well I think you’re probably right, though I don’t know whether I could make the sacrifice." "I don’t think I’ve much alternative. Once he allows himself to realise the state she’s in, and that he is himself a good deal to blame for it, he won’t be able to cope with his guilt. And then he’ll blame me, quite rightly. I’ll lose him anyway." "As I said before, you won’t lose him. You’ll gain him on another level. Well, you know you’ve got all my backing. She’s my patient, and that would be my prescription too. But I needed your support." "You think he’ll be able to do it?" "He might. And I doubt if anyone else could."
We said a very warm goodnight and went to bed. I felt a deep happiness, such as I hadn’t experienced for many a long day, not really since my husband died. I felt as if restored to my true family. The tremulous hope I experienced when I realised they were really coming began to stir like a young plant. Endless possibilities for an entirely new beginning in the spiritual work began to dawn in my heart. My meditation before sleep soared into a tremendous flame of gratitude and resolve. My last thoughts were of Alan. I was trembling on the edge of wonder like a young girl.
---oOo---
You will be told in unmistakable terms
Where the choices lie.
From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’
The Archive of Stanley MessengerThe Cathar Connectiona novel by Stanley Messenger |
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