The Perfect Heresy (43 page)

230
The year 1300 saw the papacy institute the jubilee: For details of the jubilee, I am indebted to Paul Hetherington’s
Medieval Rome
, pp. 78–81.

234
The 1,000 or so households won back to the illicit faith: This estimate, arrived at by historian J. M. Vidal in 1906, is cited in Malcolm Lambert’s
The Cathars
(p. 259). Lambert considers the number too low but concedes there is no way of determining a precise head count. See his chapter “The Last Missionary” (pp. 230–71) for the best account, in English, of the Autier revival.

238
Fournier also discovered that its randy priest: The surviving Inquisition registers of Jacques Fournier were translated into the French in their entirety by Jean Duvernoy in the 1970s. Using Fourniers’s registers, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie delivered a memorable portrait of the social, religious, and sex lives of fourteenth-century peasants in
Montail-lou
. On the Web site of San Jose State University, Nancy P. Stork has helpfully translated some excerpts from the Fournier register into English; they can be accessed directly at
www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/Fournier/jfournhm.htm
. For immediate gratification of prurient curiosity, go to the testimony of Béatrice de Planissoles.

19. Bélibaste

239
There was now one Cathar left… : The remarkable detail it is possible to employ in telling the sad story of Bélibaste is due, once again, to Inquisition registers. The transcript of Bélibaste’s questioning has not survived, but the debriefing that Arnold Sicre gave Fournier in October 1321 provides a wealth of detail. So too does the testimony of the shepherd Peter Maury, who had been rashly released by the men who arrested Bélibaste in Tirvia. Maury was recaptured on Majorca two years later. The story of the last Languedoc Perfect was transformed into an accomplished French-language novel,
Bélibaste
, by Henri Gougaud.

246
the castle at Villerouge-Termenès: The castle still stands today and has not been much modified since the days of the Cathars. The picturesque village holds a well-attended medieval weekend every July, during which poor old Bélibaste is burned in effigy.

Epilogue: In Cathar Country

247
“Les chevaliers cathares
…”: The song appears on Francis Cabrel’s album,
Quelqu’un de l’intérieur
. The translation is my own. The roadside art is also called
les chevaliers d’Oc
.

249
bouffeurs du curé
: Napoléon Peyrat’s anticlerical credentials were severely dented when, shortly after his death, his widow, Eugenie, made a very public conversion to Catholicism. Still, he is making a comeback, as witnessed by the collective scholarly work devoted to Peyrat in 1998:
Cathares et camisards—l’œuvre de Napoléon Peyrat (1809–1881)
.

250
The Catholics argued that the Cathars were not even Christians: The nineteenth-century position staked out by Catholic historians has found a frequent echo in the twentieth century, to wit, that the Cathars were adepts of the religion founded by Mani, the self-proclaimed messiah from third-century Babylon. Many of the Cathars’ medieval opponents referred to any dualists—indeed, any heretics—as Manichees, and the affiliation was taken for granted. The masterly 1947 work of
Steven Runciman in
The Medieval Manichee
, which traced a
direct
line from gnostic to Manichean to Paulician (ninth-century dualists of Armenia and Thrace) to Bogomil (tenth-century dualists of the Balkans) and thence to the early medieval heretic, is now seriously questioned by historians of Cathar thought. Contemporary consensus holds that the Cathars were Christians, that dualism has always been an “underground” strand of Christian thought, and that proving a direct link between the dualists of antiquity and those of the Middle Ages is an impossible, if not irrelevant, task. The thrust of debate now is over whether Catharism constituted a church, that is, an independent hierarchy with coherent rules, dogma, and organization.

250
an Occitan equivalent, Esclarmonde of Foix: For a thorough examination of the Esclarmonde myth, as well as the place of other female historical figures (Blanche of Castile, Etiennette de Pennautier, Agnes of Montpellier, Alice of Montmorency, and others) who appear in the neo-Cathar delirium, see Krystel Maurin’s immensely entertaining
Les Esclarmonde
.

251
“our wild Capitoline …”: Cited in Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “D’Augustin Thierry à Napoléon Peyrat: Un Demi-siècle d’occultation,”
Cahiers de Fanjeaux
14 (1979), p. 161. My translation.

251
“Montségur was an Essenian Zion …”: Cited in Jean-Louis Biget, “Mythographie du catharisme,”
Cahiers de Fanjeaux
14 (1979), p. 279. My translation.

252
“One day they had nothing left…”: Cited in Michel Roquebert, “Napoléon Peyrat, le trésor et le ‘Nouveau Montségur’ ”
Hérésis
7 (1998), p. 365. My translation.

253
–54 A neognostic church was founded: For a full discussion of this weird fin-de-siècle bloom, see Suzanne Nelli, “Les Néo-gnostiques. Jules Doinel évêque de Montségur,”
Hérésis
7 (1998), pp. 121–29.

254
Joséphin Péladan: Peladan-Sar’s 1906 Grail work was titled
Le Secret des Troubadours: De Parsifal à Don Quichotte
(The troubadours’ secret: from Parsifal to Don Quixote). It is out of print.

255
Emile Novis: The pedantic might say that
Emile Novis
is not an anagram of
Simone Weil
. It is close, and works phonically in French.
Weil’s association with Roché is briefly evoked in Biget’s “Mythographie du catharisme,” p. 317.

255
Magre also took the time to skewer the enemies of the Cathars: Magre was not alone in constructing an imaginary portrait gallery of historical figures that became particularly vivid when women were the subjects. Krystel Maurin, in
Les Esclarmonde
, examines the pride of place given to Esclarmonde of Foix in neo-Cathar mythology, but also gives a description of the secondary female characters to fall on one or other side of the Cruella/Cinderella divide erected in pro-Cathar novels and plays. Among those particularly vilified, aside from Alice of Montmorency, were Agnes of Montpellier and Blanche of Castile; the women glorified were Geralda of Lavaur, Loba, and Béatrice de Planissoles.

255
Otto Rahn: The definitive work on the bizarre trajectory of Otto Rahn is a 400-page book of painstaking research by Christian Bernadac,
Montségur et le Graal
. A more concise summing up of the phenomenon is Marie-Claire Viguier’s “Otto Rahn entre Wolfram d’Eschenbach et les néo-nazis,”
Hérésis
7 (1998), pp. 165–79. The speech of the Aryan Perfect, taken from Rahn, appears in Viguier’s article (p. 179). My translation from the French. The rumors about Rosenberg’s and Hitler’s attachment to Montségur were principally spread by
Nouveaux Cathares pour Montségur
, a quasi-historical novel about Rahn published in 1969 by the extreme-Right French writer Marc Augier under the pseudonym of Saint-Loup. The story of the 1978 incident involving German boy scouts and stolen stones from Montségur is well told by Charles-Olivier Carbonell in “Vulgarisation et récupération: Le Catharisme à travers les mass-média,”
Cahiers de Fanjeaux
14 (1979), pp. 361–80.

260
The short answer is that he had masterminded a system of mail-order fund-raising: In fact, the mysterious country priest, Bérenger Saunière, had a simony-by-correspondence racket, whereby he would place ads in small publications throughout Catholic Europe offering to say—that is, sell—masses. He raked in the cash. The story of his discovery of a treasure is decisively debunked in
Rennes-le-Château, autopsie d’un mythe
, by Jean-Jacques Bedu, who pores over Saunière’s account
books. As for
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
, it heavily embroidered on a 1967 work,
L’Or de Rennes
, by Gérard de Sède, a prolific author of occult works who found credulous readers throughout France.
Holy Blood
internationalized Sède’s hoax and, to the delight of everyone involved, called into question the foundations of Judeo-Christian civilization.

This list is by no means exhaustive, or intended for scholars. Books are in French or English only, and the editions cited are those I consulted.
N
indicates a novel. Asterisks precede and brief comments follow a dozen or so entries that nonspecialists could profitably consult to satisfy a curiosity that, it is my hope,
The Perfect Heresy
has aroused. Books unmarked by an asterisk, it should be added, are not necessarily dry.

A
LBARET
, L
AURENT
.
L’Inquisition: Rempart de la foi?
Paris: Gallimard, 1998.

B
AIGENT
, M
ICHAEL
, R
ICHARD
L
EIGH
,
AND
H
ENRY
L
INCOLN
.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
. London: Arrow, 1996.

B
ALDWIN
, M
ICHAEL
.
The Rape of Oc
. London: Warner, 1994.
N
.

B
AUDIS
, D
OMINIQUE
.
Raimond “le Cathare
.” Paris: Michel Lafon/Ramsay, 1996.
N
.

B
EDU
, J
EAN
-J
ACQUES
.
Rennes-le-Château, autopsie d’un mythe
. Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières, 1990.

———.
Les Terres de feu
. Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières, 1994.
N
.

B
ERLIOZ
, J
ACQUES
.
“Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens,” le massacre
de Béziers (22 juillet 1209) et la croisade contre les Albigeois vus par Cesaire de Heisterbach
. Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières, 1994.

B
ERNADAC
, C
HRISTIAN
.
Montségur et le Graal: Le Mystère Otto Rahn
. Paris: France-Empire, 1994.

B
ERNANOS
, G
EORGES
.
Les Prédestinés
. Ed. Jean-Loup Bernanos. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

B
IRKS
, W
ALTER
,
AND
R. A. G
ILBERT
.
The Treasure of Montségur
. Welling-borough, England: Crucible, 1987.

B
OGIN
, M
EG
.
The Women Troubadours
. New York: Norton, 1980.

B
OLTON
, B
RENDA
.
Innocent III: Studies on Papal Authority and Pastoral Care
. Aldershot, England: Variorum, 1995.