The Perfect Heresy (34 page)

It is exceedingly strange to find chamber-of-commerce boosterism for a faith that was annihilated seven centuries ago, a faith that left no physical trace—no chapel, no monument, no art—of its existence. And it seems perverse, almost Celtic, to celebrate a failed heresy. However much other Europeans revere their past, you do not see roadside attractions elsewhere announcing: “Entering Waldensian Country” or “Welcome to
Spiritual Franciscan Country.” A rejected metaphysic is usually an embarrassment, and an obscure one at that.

Although decried with humorless regularity by local Cathar experts, the cheesy pop exploitation of their subject attests to its presence in collective memory. The Cathars of Languedoc defy obscurity because their story has become legend, a tale which belongs to everyone. The story of their defeat has given rise to a collective, international narrative, its various strands picked up and rewoven by a succession of “alternative” movements for more than 100 years. The Cathar country advertised on the signs is an imaginary landscape first created in the nineteenth century and embellished ever since. The father of the myth is indirectly responsible for those giant concrete tubes by the highway and the logo on the hotel. His name was Napoleon Peyrat, and his peculiar legacy deserves study.

Napoléon Peyrat was born in 1809 in the Ariège, the mountainous French
département
of which Foix is the capital. He was the pastor of the Reformed Church of France, in the Parisian suburb of St. Germain en Laye. More important, Peyrat was a formidable and prolific writer, a poet-turned-historian who could mix the prose styles of Chateaubriand, Walter Scott, and Jules Michelet to electrifying effect. Unfortunately, he had very little respect for the truth.

As one of the most eloquent of that anticlerical brotherhood of the French Third Republic known popularly as
bouffeurs du curé
(priest eaters), Peyrat regularly launched broadsides against what he saw as a reactionary, antidemocratic Catholic establishment. Obviously, the story of the Cathars was a godsend to
such a man. Until Peyrat published his multivolume
Histoire des Albigeois
(History of the Albigensians) in the 1870s, Cathar historiography had been a fairly low-profile shooting gallery between French Protestant and Catholic historians. The Catholics argued that the Cathars were not even Christians; the Protestants, that they were forerunners of the Reformation. Lay liberal historians, ignoring such doctrinal discussions, usually played up the sophistication of Languedoc troubadour culture and the horror of the crusade. No one work until then, however, had the sheer narrative verve of Peyrat’s. Taking the ideas and conjectures that had been floating around in earlier anticlerical, romantic treatments of the Cathars, the polemical pastor went wild.

In his colorful history, medieval Languedoc became the apex of civilization, full of liberty-loving democrats attacked by barbarians who were little better than Norsemen. The spirit of freedom crushed by the crusaders lay dormant for centuries, only to resurface, Peyrat emphasized, among the bourgeois liberals of the French Third Republic, that is, people like himself. In response to the cult of Joan of Arc, an invention of nineteenth-century French nationalists, Peyrat concocted an Occitan equivalent, Esclarmonde of Foix. There was, indeed, a historic Esclarmonde of Foix; she was the sister of Raymond Roger, and she may even have clashed with St. Dominic. Peyrat, however, conflated five separate historical figures to come up with his fanciful, imaginary Esclarmonde. In his treatment, Esclarmonde became a high priestess guarding Cathar treasure and texts, an inspiring warrior like Joan, a preacher of unparalleled persuasiveness and beauty, the godmother of a whole generation of lovely female Perfect, and, ultimately, a martyr who turned into a dove in the flames of Montségur.

Peyrat created the cult of Montségur and made it central to
Cathar country. He spoke of tunnels and grottoes hiding thousands of Cathars. It was, in his words, “our wild Capitoline, our aerial tabernacle, our ark sheltering the remains of Aquitaine from a sea of blood.” The following passage sums up his view of Montségur of the Cathars:

Montségur was an Essenian Zion, a Platonist Delphi of the Pyrenees, a Johannite Rome, condemned and untamed in Aquitaine. Montségur, from its naked rock, looked out sadly but steadily at the Louvre and the Vatican… . In its grotto it sheltered three irreconcilable enemies of theocracy: the Word, the Nation and Freedom, those powers of the future. It was from its peak that this sweet and terrible conjuration first took wing, under the name of Spirit, to make its secret way through the winds, its invisible path through the storms; it was this mysterious horseman, mounted on the tempest and the thunder, who would through the religious revolution of the sixteenth century and the political revolution of the eighteenth regenerate Europe and the whole world.

Such was Peyrat’s Hegelian republicanism, now put to use in making myths about a medieval heresy.

Peyrat firmly established the story of a fabulous Cathar treasure, a notion which would have very long legs. In Peyrat’s defense, the historical record—in this instance, transcripts of Inquisition interrogations of survivors of Montségur—does speak of four Perfect scurrying down the mountain one night during the siege to hide a sack of gold, silver, and coins—obviously the treasury of the 200 or so Cathars atop the hill. Peyrat, however, made the treasure immense, and not just of monetary value. There were also sacred texts. The treasure was supposedly taken to a cave fifteen miles away called Lombrives, which Peyrat saw
as a new Montségur. A large Cathar community, according to Peyrat, took to living like troglodytes in Lombrives until a French royal army discovered them and bricked up the entrance to the cave. Peyrat’s passage on the death of the immured Cathars is haunting:

One day they had nothing left, no food, wood, or fire, or even a wan light, that visible reflection of life. They came together as families, in separate niches, the husband beside the wife, the virgin beside her failing mother, a little baby on her dry breast. For a few moments, above the pious murmur of prayers, one could still hear the voice of the Cathar minister, declaring the Word that is in God and that is God. The faithful deacon gave the dying the kiss of peace, then lay down to sleep himself. All rested in a slumber, and only the drops of water that fell slowly from the roof of the vault disturbed the sepulchral silence for centuries… . While the inquisition damned their memory and even their loved ones no longer dared speak their names, the rock wept for them. The mountain, a tender mother welcoming them in her bosom, religiously wove for them a white shroud with her tears, buried their remains in the gradual folds of a chalky veil, and on their bones that no worm would ever profane, she sculpted a triumphant mausoleum of stalagmites, marvellously decorated with urns, candelabras and the symbols of life.

Sadly, for all its beauty, the story is utterly the invention of Napoléon Peyrat.

Peyrat’s prose had a bewitching effect on those of his contemporaries enamored of the past. Earlier in the nineteenth century,
the troubadour poetry in the Provençal languages had been rediscovered by French and German scholars, inspiring Frédéric Mistral and others to launch a linguistic recovery movement called the Félibrige. The Languedoc branch of this movement—the dialect of Languedoc being called Languedocien or, much later, Occitan—looked on Peyrat’s work as a new gospel. The Felibrige glorified the pastor’s romanticized Cathars and his glowing portrait of the south before the crusade.

Many in the Languedoc Félibrige were republicans, but federalists, in favor of a decentralized France where regional identities and languages would flourish. They wouldn’t get very far against the centralizing bulldozer of the Third Republic. In response to their political failure, they retreated to fiction, music, and poetry based on the Cathars, of which there was a considerable production in the 1890s and 1900s. The ethos of the troubadours somehow became intertwined with the supposed libertarian Cathars. Operas were written about Esclarmonde of Foix, who became the subject of choice for turn-of-the-century southern poetasters. In 1911, there was a fight in her hometown, Foix, over whether to put up a statue for her. The Felibrige lost, and the statue was never commissioned.

Peyrat’s Esclarmonde also began showing up in Paris, usually as a disembodied voice at séances frequented by intellectuals and socialites disgusted, at least for an evening, by nineteenth-century materialism. The Cathar Perfect were ideal interlocutors for such groups. Fin-de-siècle France also saw an explosion of theosophy—a rediscovery of the religions of the East that ushered in a tide of orientalism and esoteric thought. In this hothouse of occult salons and secret societies, Peyrat’s Cathars prospered. They went from being protoliberals to continuators of a line of preclassical, Eastern wisdom. A neognostic church was
founded by one Jules Doinel, who declared himself the gnostic patriarch of Paris—and, significantly, of Montségur.

The treasure of Montségur then became a cache of ancient knowledge. This theory was advanced by an influential occultist named Joséphin Péladan. His friends—Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and others—called him Sar, as befitted his self-proclaimed status as the descendant of the monarchs of ancient Assyria. Péladan-Sar pointed out that Montsalvat, the holy mountain of Richard Wagner’s
Parsifal
and
Lohengrin
, had to be Montségur. Thus was born the myth of the Pyrenean Holy Grail, yet another landmark of Cathar country destined for future glory.

The calamity of the First World War, which pulverized rational nineteenth-century certainties, led to a continent-wide upsurge in interest in the paranormal. The call of the Cathars was heard beyond the borders of France. A handful of pioneering British spiritualists descended on Montségur and the caves near Lombrives. There, in the 1920s and 1930s, groups of local Occitanists—heirs of the Félibrige—and erudite occultists welcomed them and worked hard to embroider on Peyrat’s narrative.

Foremost among these local lights was Déodat Roché, a jurist from a town near Carcassonne. Roché was a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, a system of creative rationality designed to allow its followers a direct and immediate contact with the spirit world. Roché’s Cathar-tainted anthroposophy was open to all influences: hinduism, druidism, gnosis, and so on. He made much of cave scratchings near Montségur, claiming that they were pentagrams traced by Cathar fugitives in an attempt to transmit a message to posterity. Indeed, any cave graffito that was not obviously modern was immediately
Catharized by Roché. He died in 1978, at the age of 103, his influence in the construction of Cathar country immense.

Gravitating around Roché, especially in the 1930s, was a group of young spiritual seekers, which included, for a time, the philosopher Simone Weil. She used an anagrammatic pen name, Emile Novis, to publish her articles about medieval Languedoc as a moral Utopia. But it was two men, especially, who would best export and distort the legacy of Peyrat. The first was Maurice Magre, a writer of considerable talent who is now almost totally forgotten. In the 1920s and 1930s, this prolific novelist and essayist—as well as prodigious consumer of opium—brought the energy of Paris’s Montparnasse to Catharism. Magre’s
Magiciens et illuminés
(The new magi) was a magisterial work of speculative history, a lively examination of the secret influence of Eastern sages throughout the ages. The Cathars held pride of place. This book was widely translated and reached audiences in both Britain and the United States.

Among Magre’s impressive literary output, there were two Cathar novels,
Le Sang de Toulouse
(The blood of Toulouse) and
Le Trésor des Albigeois
(The treasure of the Albigensians). In the first, he brought the fabulations of Peyrat to modern audiences and recast such stories as Lombrives and the Cathar treasure in a vivid, mystical style that made Peyrat’s romantic prose look dated. Magre also took the time to skewer the enemies of the Cathars: Alice of Montmorency, the wife of Simon de Montfort, is described as a creature with rotting teeth, sallow skin the color of “Sicilian lemons,” and a big nose. The second, less successful Cathar novel had the Perfect as Buddhists.