The Archive of Stanley Messenger The Cathar Connection a novel by Stanley Messenger 9. FRASER

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Looking back now after a lapse of two years on the events recorded in these pages I am surprised how little I have had to edit in what I wrote at the time. Bits of hindsight have been added here and there for the sake of continuity, but I haven’t cheated much. Other people’s contributions I have left alone, which, as you will appreciate, was sometimes quite hard.

I went through a period of considerable disorientation for a good many months. It was particularly hard returning to England, which I had to do almost immediately, simply to clear up existing case work. Without Clothilde....

’Without Clothilde’ was the prologue to a good many remarks made by all of us in those first months. Even now we all find ourselves awestruck by her stature again and again as new dimensions of the joint work reveal themselves. She insists that for her the sense of wonder at the release of new possibilities is as great, (or greater) for her as for the rest of us. The whole point is that it is a joint enterprise. What is being done is being done by a group. This is the characteristic feature of this kind of spiritual work in our age, that it can no longer be carried by individuals. The very spiritual beings beyond the Threshold who initiate it have themselves participated in the transformations in that world over the last three or four years, and they too can no longer work in the same way through isolated individuals. The dimensions of individual human consciousness are no longer adequate in range or scale for them to bring through in the old way what has now to be brought to humanity.

At the same time the first stages of what was made possible by the impact we had on one another bore heavily down at first on Clothilde’s broad shoulders and will certainly continue to do so for some time to come. Her physical and professional situation remained the strongest and most stable element, economically as well, as we strove against considerable odds to carve out a form in which we could work together. For the young people guest status covered things for the time being. Later on there would be employment problems to be faced, but we would cross that bridge when we came to it. At least with the EEC there would be no visa difficulties. Meanwhile there was the question of whether Esther should complete her training.

One thing that was quite hard to adjust to, was the extraordinary maturity of soul Esther more and more revealed. In some ways she had changed more rapidly than any of us. Reading through my old notes I remembered worrying at the beginning that she might be growing inwardly too fast, and wishing she could still be her old frivolous self. While she and Raymond were young lovers this lighter side reasserted itself. But after she met Clothilde, and particularly as Raymond carried more and more responsibility for Helène, she went through a very hard time. What saved her was the sheer power of imagination that was born out of her partnership with Clothilde. For partnership it was, very much the junior partner though she remained. She had clearly found in Clothilde the teacher along the spiritual way that she now needed. This quickly emerged in the most wonderful way in their creative work together in poetry and drama. But on another level she was still very young and headstrong. I think she would not have returned to England at all had Clothilde not put great stress on it. She was very insistent indeed about this, saying firmly that Esther had not yet learned to work. She needed to complete her degree, and do at least her remaining statutory placements in the probation service, before, so Clothilde felt, she could carry her part in building up the ambitious project we began to develop.

Another important factor was the situation of Raymond and Helène. This touching relationship was such a delicate plant that we felt for everybody’s sake it needed the most peaceful possible environment to nourish and protect it till we could see whether Helène would be able to emerge into the sunlight and play a balanced rôle in our circle. To our great joy about Michaelmas time she was pregnant. The house was already a happy place to be in, and now became even more so. To complete the pattern it seemed right that Clothilde and I should time our wedding for Whitsunday. (In the event we had a joint wedding, a lovely day, with Esther a double bridesmaid). So instead of Esther having to face day by day the development of more and more intimacy and mutual dependence between Raymond and Helène she spent most of her time in England. But she was still able to arrange her placements so that in University vacations she was here for a few weeks at a time.

As for Raymond, he now grew almost as fast as Esther did. Nothing of course could alter their deep involvement with each other. The love between them would always flow deep and strong. The danger before had been that she was the stronger character, and that he had been the dependent one. In his new relationship he was the strong one, and his strength grew greater as his devoted care for Helène began to bear fruit. As time went on he related to Esther on more and more equal terms, knowing that his maturity did not depend on her.

It spoke volumes for the two of them that Helène never had the opportunity to be jealous. Her dependence on Raymond at first had been absolute, and her trust in him never faltered. About this side of things Raymond never spoke, but how much it had cost him was clear from his obvious stature. As for Helène she would never be other than a slender little personality, but she was never a trivial one. Her essential goodness of soul ensured that she never experienced her relationship with the more formidable personalities round her as a demeaning one. Her growth within Raymond’s care and love gave her considerable power over him, but as far as I could see she never exploited it, and as her pregnancy developed her air of fulfilment was a joy to watch.

I have left my own story to the last. I don’t find it easy to talk about it. Altogether I am not quite the pompous windbag that I used to be. I experience in theory that each of us has been reborn, but I feel that in me this rebirth has been more fundamental. Without the others’, and particularly Clothilde’s, support, the early disorientation I spoke of might well have ended in breakdown. But I never felt it as that. It was much more like post-operative convalescence. I really did become a kind of baby. I had to learn again so many of the simplest things from scratch.

For Clothilde it was much the same. We fell in love like two teenagers. I had never been married, and in every way, including sexually, I was helpless as a kitten. She had been married before, but it never seemed to her that this had taught her anything she needed to make sense of me. Being so utterly in awe of her on a spiritual level I thought I would never manage to be otherwise than infantile with her in a more intimate context. But this hasn’t proved to be so. On the contrary she seems to need as much reassurance in this realm as I do on other levels; and of course this has been very good for my confidence.

Also, thank goodness, we get on extremely well together professionally. I can’t practice in France of course but on the inner healing planes it amounts to a professional partnership between us. This has already begun to open up entirely new possibilities for me as far as vocational life is concerned. I had no qualms about severing my professional links in England with as much dispatch as was decent. For both of us the exploration of field after field of study in areas of psychic healing and other aspects of so-called ‘fringe’ therapies is opening up a virtually new career for me. For Raymond this has fully vindicated what he intuitively felt would emerge from our earliest meetings.

But all these developments are in a way only the fringe of the matter. There is something further that gives meaning to all our lives in a much more fundamental way. One thing in me that hasn’t changed, I’m afraid, is my old theme of ‘conceptualise or bust’. But perhaps that too has gone through a process of transformation and transcendence. So I must try to describe something which is perhaps in its essence indescribable, just as I did three years ago when I first tried to make sense of what happened to us then. I think the place to begin is the cipher.

The instinct for this approach to the realm of the mysterious is strong in our time, but of course largely trivialised in jigsaws, crosswords, anagrams and acrostics, the who-dun-it of fifty years ago, the spy story, the mysteries of consciousness in so-called outer space.

There developed in ancient times a bridge between logical processes, (increasingly embodied in the neuron, that infinitely complicated switching system in our physical brain, of which we now see the technical outcome in the silicon chip), and something else essentially different in kind. The brain-born, silicon chip approach to meaning is essentially an either-or, yes or no, black or white, it-is-or-it-isn’t approach to meaning. But here is a way of knowing entirely different from that, which preceded it in time, and which ancient mankind relied on, put his weight on, just as we put our weight on logical reason. What happens now for most people, (I might say for people who don’t always feel the need to conceptualise everything), is that they firmly insist that they base their view of life on logical reason, but in all important matters they fall back on something quite illogical which they refuse to make conscious. They call it commonsense. There is nothing logical about commonsense, but it turns a key. It links different patches of logic and reason together. It stops people losing faith in logic. It prevents logic itself bringing them too close to its own implications, to the realisation that different areas of logic don’t really hang together in a logical universe as we tell ourselves they do. People need commonsense. Commonsense is a cipher.

I hope you see where we’re heading, and I’m sorry we have to go the long way round to it. In fact I shall have to ask you to take on trust, at least provisionally, something I can’t prove, but can only demonstrate, out of wide reading and study, and the consequent emergence of a kind of dim memory. It is this. Nowadays we have the sense of climbing out of our binary brain-bound thinking greatly helped by cipher, into something more unitary and intuitive. In ancient times, and I am talking about prehistory, way back to Atlantis and beyond, they experienced the opposite. For them it was a question of falling into the brain, not climbing out of it. They had the sense of losing their universal grasp of reality and of getting trapped in yes or no, either-or, which was safe and firm, but somehow not quite true. And as they fell in this way they had the presence of mind to implant in their recording systems reminders, guide marks, NAMES, in a word, ciphers, in the hope that later, when they had become entirely logical, the names would remind them what the logic stood for. They were like dogs lifting their legs against lampposts. Unitary memories were fading, so they had to rely on names. A lamppost for a dog is a cipher.

But times changed. Cipher originally emerged as an aspect of the approach to lost knowledge, something to help mankind to keep hold of mysteries. But later on they were used for the opposite purpose, to conceal. The Aztecs used them to block memory, to guard secret knowledge. This was done for good as well as for bad reasons, to guard knowledge from perversion and misuse by the ignorant, and also to pervert and misuse it for personal power and gain.

There is no need to pursue the history of cipher in any more detail. The memory blocks of Aztec slaves reappear in our time as the keys to huge memory banks in binary computers. These keys have just the same kind of allegorical and arbitrary names as the code words used throughout history to release areas of secret knowledge to aspirants for initiation into the mysteries. Out of this same feeling for the bridge between the logical and the illogical, meteorologists pay tribute to the arbitrary will-element in hurricanes by giving them the names of wayward young girls. Hurricane Jenny is a cipher. She bloweth where she listeth.

So we come to Clothilde and me. Our meeting in the middle ages was for the implantation of a cipher, and it has retained the same cipher character now that we have met again. There was a Templar master in England who in his youth had gone adventuring among the Cathars in the Pyrenées. He was twenty-one when the waters broke and rushed down the Ariège drowning cattle and sweeping away villages. My memories of this time, stirred in the faintest possible degree by the work Clothilde and I have done in the last two years, have scarcely penetrated beyond surmise and deduction. But I think this young man must have gone off with a Templar mission on a tour of castles, estates and administrative establishments in Eastern Europe. He was probably attached to a Templar knight as part of his retinue, a personal servant or something of the kind. I think it was there he heard of the Pyrenean events somewhere along the grapevine operating through the monk and troubadour wanderers they met along the way. Fascinated by the Grail and treasure rumours, he must have abandoned the Templars and joined one of these wandering groups on its way back to Albigeois territory. He may even have had instructions to do a bit of investigation on behalf of his master.

The opening up of so many underground caverns after 1279 posed a quite new challenge and hope for the beleaguered ‘croyants’. Speleology became the great new sport for the adventurous young. Speculation as to whether there really was a way right through the Pyrenées to Spain was rife. What had happened thirty-five years ago after Montségur? What was the Montségur treasure? Where was it? Senior ‘parfaits’ kept their own counsel on these things, but a superhuman mystery undoubtedly overshadowed the spirituality of life in the caverns during these years. Apart from this ‘everybody knew’ that three or four people climbed down the cliffs on ropes in 1244, on the very night before the terrible capitulation of the castle, when hundreds of believers, men and women, parfaits and croyants and servants, aristocrats and knights, had been burned alive on a huge funeral pyre below the castle. The little band of refugees carried with them some unspecified ‘trésor’, but nobody really knows to this day what it was.

Misconceptions of the nature of the Holy Grail have led to the belief that this was what it was, that a physical object embodying this mystery found its way into the caves and later to Spain. Others more mundane thought it was simply priceless treasure in gold and precious stones. Others speak of a secret gospel, perhaps a document hidden in a sacred cross, containing knowledge of the Christ mystery handed down in this way, or perhaps simply by word of mouth and heart from Manichaean to Gnostic to Cathar down the centuries, or enshrined in a priceless ‘heretical’ scripture. Nobody knows, and very few knew then. But the young enthusiasts of the 1280s and 1290s believed in the secret route. It has become my belief that some of them found it.

But after the Templar massacres of 1308 and later this information became very hot knowledge indeed. Senior people clamped down on further uncontrolled exploration. People who might have known were tracked down, and their memories blocked and codified. And in the end as we know the object was defeated and the knowledge was never used. Unless of course there were further wheels within wheels.

One day about a year after the events recorded at the time of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, Clothilde and Raymond and I were talking late at night in the cottage. We had been very meticulous about not questioning him in any way about the development of his work with Helène. As a result a deep trust had grown between the three of us, and we had explored many areas of spiritual life and knowledge together as a group under Clothilde’s gentle and wise guidance. Sometimes in vacation time Esther had joined us, and then a new dimension of extraordinary power emerged, linked with Clothilde, and yet having a rapier quality of freshness and fragrance all its own. We could feel at those times that it was as if a mysterious rose blossomed in the room.

On this occasion there was no Esther, but her presence was there in a subliminal way. Perhaps it was this dimension which prompted me to say quietly to Raymond, "Ray, what was Helène doing that night, right up the valley, almost as far as Montreal-de-Sos?" There was a long pause. I thought for a moment I might have ‘blown it’ as the young say, and put a block into our communication which would be difficult to loosen. But Clothilde took my hand, and after a deep sigh Raymond turned to me and smiled. He had gone rather pale.

"Yes, it is time I brought some of that down into words", he said, "I am tremendously grateful that none of you have allowed your deep concern, and even, let’s face it, natural curiosity, to tempt you to ask me about this before. I needed a long time to get it all straight in my mind." He paused. "Had you found the way through the mountains?" I prompted. "No, but what we believed we had found was the way out at the top end."

He poured us and himself more coffee and settled back in the armchair as if he needed firmer support and warmth from it. He shivered. "I still find it quite hard to make myself go over those three or four days clearly and objectively", he said. "All one’s efforts to make a logical sequence out of it are defeated by the time reversals and space-time exchanges between incarnations which you and I used to discuss two years ago. Some understanding of it on a heart level has been one of the painful fruits of my time with Helène over the past year. Struggling to bear her pain as she climbed inch by inch out of the darkness back into the light and warmth of this wonderful time has been more of a teacher for me than any of the mental effort to grasp what happened that has accompanied it."

As if to ratify and seal the feeling of us all having reached a safe harbour after long months of storms at sea, and the fear of shipwreck, we momentarily heard the thin wail of the tiny baby as Helène opened and closed a door upstairs. "I have to accept" Raymond added, "that during those days I projected out of my time-warped return into Cathar times a series of pseudo-events which in this life appeared in a reversed time sequence. The striving to open up the cave route in which I involved Helène all took place in that dimension before she and I met in this house, but it was in fact set in train by this meeting. Those events actually never occurred. They were a projection of my refusal after I died in 1328 to accept the failure of my mission. Lacking the clue which the cipher would have afforded I battled on after death. Roxane had by then already died with the others in Lombrives. But we both went on struggling to open up the cave route. We chose an appalling night when the river was in flood, and nearly got washed away at the ford. But we got through to Vicdessos across the mountains. I needed her help with ropes and tackle to negotiate a last traverse deep in the caves high up. I was convinced that after that the way would be clear to guide the five hundred survivors out into daylight." "What happened?" "The continuity of consciousness broke. I found Esther again in the valley and we went back to England. I lost the thread of memory, which only reappeared intermittently. Meanwhile I also forgot where Helène was. I think I came here one day to look for her. So I very nearly managed to kill Helène on a fruitless ploy, the greater part of which didn’t physically happen. It was some sort of projection. I also gravely threatened things for Esther."

"I still don’t quite know who Esther was at that time. She was obviously looking after Roxane in some way. Possibly she was one of the seniors who were trying to ensure that the secret knowledge remained so till the right time. What is quite clear is that she is one of those for whom far memory has to be a fully conscious attainment which would be distorted by premature revelation, such as my own obsessional involvement threatened her with."

Clothilde got up and closed the curtains. We all felt cold. She stoked up the fire. Then she came back and shifted the coffee table into the centre of the space. She lit the candle standing on it and doused the oil-lamp. "Sit in a proper triangle", she said. "You too, Esther she added, making it acceptable by a light laugh, as she often did when anything might have threatened credibility for us acolytes. "Esther, you can be at the apex of the tetrahedron." She made us join hands. The invisible Esther felt like a warmth above our heads. "Now", Clothilde said, "I’m going to try to bring through what actually happened. The Rose Cross encloses all these events. Within this context we may begin to see a little more of the spiritual geometry."

"First of all, Raymond, please get out of your mind any lingering feeling you may have that there is any long term difference between success and failure. Your failure in 1328 became your success in 1980. You didn’t bring the Templar agents together then. Instead you brought me and Alan together now. By the same token your success in 1328 was paid for by a failure in 1980, which, by the way, you are not simply dying of as you might well have done. Instead you have turned it into a quite spectacular success, unforeseen in the karmic pattern of the past, creating karma for a whole new cycle of time. This relationship with Helène has hung in the balance for six and a half centuries. Now it moves forward into something quite new for a higher power to use." "You said my success in 1328. What success?" Clothilde looked at him with such a gaze of power that we felt the rosy tetrahedron sparkle in a kind of golden shower. "Your opening up of the route." "I didn’t open it up." "Oh yes you did." "When?" "In 1328. Ramón and Roxane placed their rope ladder as they intended." "But she was dead. I came to England." "You reset the stage last year. You projected it back. You changed the past. Please don’t ask me to describe it in terms of mechanical cause and effect. I don’t know how it ‘works’. It doesn’t work in the ordinary way we use the term. In fact there may never have been a rope ladder. There may have been a fortuitous rock fall. Anyway something happened in 1328 which created an exit that wasn’t there before." "But the five hundred never got through." "No. But someone did and the treasure did. The mystery of what happened in the Sierras to the Grail in the succeeding centuries is another story, and it is not a story I know. Maybe one day we shall all know it." For a few minutes there was nothing but the glow, the peace and the warmth and a faint smell of roses. Then the candlelight returned, the circle broke, the feeling of Esther faded, and we were sitting back in our chairs.

After a long time Clothilde spoke again. "There is still a further dimension, Raymond, in what you have achieved. Until now Alan and I, or our Templar prototypes, have been linked together by a forgotten cipher. Had we known, the need for the switch to that fourteenth-century memory bank was implicitly over. By simply working out your own destiny and by rising beyond it in a certain way, ‘beyond the call of duty’, as one might say, you made the implicit solution of this particular riddle explicit. Somewhere a long time ago you enabled the link, the karmic enciphered knot, between me and Alan to loosen and transform itself into a new range of possibilities. We can now freely associate, and you, and also Esther along with us, forming a grouping of great power which may be able to play a part in transforming the very nature of the Cathar-Templar destiny here in the Pyrenées. It has the possibility of spreading out into the rest of the Western esoteric stream, as something quite new, and far nearer to the mainstream of spiritual evolution in our time. There had been a considerable deterioration in these impulses by the fourteenth century. Catharism in particular had become too narrow a vessel to contain what humanity needed to experience next. It had to disappear for a time into the dark. The narrow dualistic doctrine of dark and light, good heaven and evil earth, needed to be buried in darkness for a time, so that a third element, a rose of rebirth, could be born in the space between them. That is why, in the centuries after Henri Quatre, the Huguenot king, had opened up Lombrives, found the skeletons of the last five hundred Albigeois in the darkness, and had them removed and buried -, the cave became a place of pilgrimage for the Rosicrucian Brotherhood."

 

"So what you did, Raymond, and what we all did after July 1981, when the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction went into its third, initiatory, transformation, was to set the stage for a restoration of what has to happen through the Rose Cross impulse." "Deep in the mountains, as Esther told us, there has been all along an elemental spirit of divine radiance and beauty, waiting for millennia to be released from the bondage of intractable stone; not least from the intractable stone in men’s hearts, which will not allow that anything new can come to birth through spiritual evolution. For her too there can now be a new chapter of hope. Pyrène can now begin to stir from her cavern, and peer forth in the pale spring sunlight, bringing with her the hopes of all the victims over the centuries, victims of the inquisitorial harshness of Experience itself, embodying the Innocence which we, if we work rightly, can husband and nourish towards what Blake hoped for as Imagination."

Heléne timed her entrance perfectly, pushing the door open with her baby-arm, and peering a little short-sightedly through her usual wisps of dark hair, big brown eyes blinking and shinning in the candlelight. "Il ne dort pas", she whispered. We all had to laugh, even Raymond. "Come on, little goddess", he said, "you shall be Pyrène for tonight, and this is the little infant Hercules, born to you as son instead of lover. He shall be the first of a new generation of Albigeois."

I looked across to Clothilde and saw Raymond’s light-hearted prophecy transform in her eyes into a great vista of future space and time. She moved into my arms and then we were all sitting again by the fire, playing with the baby. I thought about Raymond’s wish in the past to help me find a new meaning for the term ex-patient, and then had the thought that, in fulfilling that, the doctor had disappeared as well. They were linked together in a relationship that transcended both. In fact we were all a family. I put my arm round his shoulder, and as I did so there was a sudden rattle at the front door, and a flurry of wind and rain burst out of the darkness. A windswept figure in a blue cloak over sandy tweeds, red hair flying, stood in the doorway. "I’m through my exams", said Esther.

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