Religion, Mystery

Courtesy of Terra Umbra

Medieval Montsegur

Medieval

Case closed – or so I thought until august 2007 when a chain of events described elsewhere on this site drew my attention to the fact that every conventional English language historian seems to have drawn their data from the same French language sources. As far as I know not one has taken the time to master Occitans and go back to the surviving songs and troubadour ‘romances’ of the period, such as the ballads of Guilhelm Montanhigol who was writing in the mid to late thirteenth century, a first hand witness to the events he describes. If they had they would have realized there was a third Esclarmonde in the story – one who far more ably fitted the larger than life myth that has grown around her.

Surviving records show there was at least one Esclarmonde who perished on the Camp de Cremat, but she was the sickly daughter of the Castle’s Lord – Esclarmonde de Pereilha who was barely in her teens and already at death’s door when she was carried down the mountain and heaved into the flames. The hapless child was probably named after the celebrated high priestess and historians argue that popular memory has confused the two, merging them into the single mythic figure of Esclarmonde de Montsegur.

In any case it was bestowed upon Esclarmonde de Foix after she had lived a full life as a wife and a mother, whose face was said to have had ‘as many lines and wrinkles as the south has martyrs’. She is recorded as having spoken out against the Papal legates at the Lateran Council where she was famously advised to ‘go back to her spinning’ and is believed to have advised Raymond de Pereilha on the initial fortification of Montsegur, although considering her age at the ceremony in Fanjeaux she would in all likelihood have been in her grave by the time of the castle’s siege and burning in 1244. The fact that she has no grave is hardly surprising considering the lengths to which the unfortunate heretics were forced to go to hide the bodies of their loved ones from the crusaders who, believing in physical resurrection at the end of time, were prone to dismembering or otherwise violating the remains of those who escaped them in life.

The tale survived in song and story, providing the inspiration for Wolfram von Eschenbach’s 13th century epic ‘PARSIFAL’ which in turn provided the backbone for Wagner’s celebrated opera. Equally listenable, albeit somewhat lesser known, is Massanet’s opera ‘ESCLARMONDE’, composed in the late 19th century and immortalized in recordings by Joan Sutherland. Conventional historians made somewhat shorter shrift of the legend. In historically documented ‘real’ life the last high priestess of the Cathars was one Esclarmonde de Foix, the sister of the noble Raimond Roger, the warlord of the Ariege, who stood in outspoken opposition to the Roman church and the French kings who coveted his land. Esclarmonde is historically recorded to have taken the ‘consolamentum’ in a public ceremony in Fanjeaux in 1204. The ‘consolamentum’ seems to have been a mysterious form of direct initiation – possibly in the form of a laying on of hands – a sort of supernatural game of tag thought to go back all the way to the time of Christ and the apostles.

In any case it was bestowed upon Esclarmonde de Foix after she had lived a full life as a wife and a mother, whose face was said to have had ‘as many lines and wrinkles as the south has martyrs’. She is recorded as having spoken out against the Papal legates at the Lateran Council where she was famously advised to ‘go back to her spinning’ and is believed to have advised Raymond de Pereilha on the initial fortification of Montsegur, although considering her age at the ceremony in Fanjeaux she would in all likelihood have been in her grave by the time of the castle’s siege and burning in 1244. The fact that she has no grave is hardly surprising considering the lengths to which the unfortunate heretics were forced to go to hide the bodies of their loved ones from the crusaders who, believing in physical resurrection at the end of time, were prone to dismembering or otherwise violating the remains of those who escaped them in life.

According to popular tradition the sacred treasure was guarded by the last high priestess of the ‘Cathars’ – the ‘White Lady’ of Montsegur -the fair Esclarmonde whose very name betokens ‘light of the world’ in old Occitan. When all seemed to be lost, a dove is said to have descended from on high and split the mountain with its beak. Esclarmonde cast the treasure into the rock, which closed around it, before turning into a dove herself and flying away to the east. When the war hounds burst into the castle they could find no trace of the Grail and in their rage they fell upon the ‘pure ones’ and burned them alive at the base of the castle crag.

The events of the crusade against the south were suppressed by successive chroniclers who all too readily took their lead from the inquisitors. The castle’s history as a symbol of resistance made it impossible for the conquering orthodoxy to Christianize or take into the Holy Roman faith as they did at Montserrat and countless other pagan sites. Around the few facts that have come down to us about the castle’s siege (largely drawn from inquisition sources) a complex web of poorly substantiated and often contradictory legends began to accrue. It is widely thought that the ‘Cathars’ sheltered the treasures of their faith within the walls of the castle, although to this day no-one can agree what exactly that treasure might have been. Some say it was a hoard of scrolls or manuscripts, perhaps the lost gospel of Saint John the Divine, the ‘Book of Love’, the Book of Nicetas the Bogomil or even the ‘Book of Seven Seals’ – an ancient magical grand grimoire whose opening would bring about the end of the world. Others whispered that the citadel had housed the Holy Grail itself – the ‘Cup of Abraham’ or ‘Cup of the Last Supper’ said to contain the blood of Christ. Some folkloric accounts insist the cup was carved from the stone that fell from Lucifer’s diadem when he was cast out of heaven and that the minions of the Prince of Darkness himself laid siege to the castle so that their master might retrieve his property and hence reclaim his rightful place in the kingdom of heaven.

The weather took a turn for the worse in the spring of 1244 and the castle fell to treachery shortly before the vernal equinox when shepherds from a neighbouring village showed Teutonic knights, accustomed to the icy Alpine conditions, the secret path up the sheer side of the mountain by whence the defenders smuggled in their supplies. On March 16th 1244, the last of the ‘Cathars’, some 225 surviving men, women and children were dragged down the mountain in chains to perish on a massive bonfire built at the base of the mountain in a place that has come to be known as the ‘Camp de Cremat’ or the ‘field of the stake’.

At best the castle could never have sheltered much more than four hundred souls while the ranks of their besiegers numbered upwards of seven to ten thousand battle-hardened sons of bitches who, having scented blood, had no intention of backing down. The outcome was sadly inevitable. Perhaps a knight that is true cannot fail in single combat but truth alone cannot prevail forever against those sort of odds.

De Mirepoix was nicknamed the ‘peacock’ because of his foppish good looks which he claimed were the result of his family being descended from Belisenna – an obscure Iberian moon Goddess. In those days ‘divine monarchy’ was no joke with a great many monarchs and nobles believing they were literally the offspring of supernatural beings or minor divinities. De Mirepoix is a particularly intriguing case in point.  He was as brave as he was learned with an abiding interest in alchemy that apparently led him to perfect a form of phosphorescent paint that was used to decorate the skin and armor of the garrison so that they would resemble ghosts or glowing skeletons in order to strike fear into the hearts of the superstitious Christian crusaders. It is thanks to de Mirepoix’s efforts and the ancient traditions of Goddess worship surrounding the mountain of Montsegur that the castle’s defenders came to be known and feared as the ‘sons and daughters of Belisenna’.

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The last stand of the Cathars took place at Montsegur, literally the safe or ‘secure’ mountain. It was the highest, oldest and least accessible of the castles that we now recognize as one of the first examples of gothic stonework to be found in Europe. The supreme act of resistance lasted more than a year and there were battles fought every day. Many of the great heroes of chivalry made their final stand there -”men such as Lantar, Belissen and Caraman” who rallied to the aid of Montsegur’s liege, Raymond de Pereilha, and the commander of the castle garrison, Pierre Roger de Mirepoix.

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The short supply lines and Occitania’s lack of a unified political identity promised an easy victory for the dogs of war that followed de Montfort despite lacking the mechanization of the Nazis; it took the northern barons more than a generation to achieve their aims. By the time the dust settled, the kingdom of Occitania had been expunged from the map and its language and culture trampled into the ashes. Not only were libraries and records burned and the written word outlawed, but the race itself literally bred into extinction by new laws making it illegal to marry or procreate with anyone who did not eat meat or speak French. It is one of the darkest and bloodiest chapters in western history and rightly referred to by modern scholars as the ‘death of chivalry

The very word ‘Cathar’ is a calumny, a fighting word or insult, that simply betokens one who does not believe in the one God and which turns up in Apartheid era South Africa and present-day Afghanistan with variant spellings but always the same meaning – ‘kafirs’, ‘heretics’ or ‘devil worshippers’. In 1209 Pope Innocent III authorized a punitive military crusade against the so-called heretics that would become a war of extermination, ultimately claiming some eight million lives. The brilliant military strategist Simon de Montfort was placed in overall martial command of the crusade. De Montfort was very much the Dick Cheney of his day, having honed his talents during his time in the Holy Lands where he showed an extraordinary aptitude for re-organizing and methodically asset-stripping conquered cities and nations. Religious authority was vested in the Spaniard Dominic de Guzman who was later to be canonized as ‘Saint Dominic’ – founder of the Dominican order, the black garbed monks who oversaw the bureaucracy of the Inquisition:  the system of terror, interrogation and persecution that would provide the template for the modern police state.

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It was the tolerance of the south that proved to be its undoing, for its mountainous fastness acted as a nurturing ground for a variant form of Christianity that admitted no intermediaries between man and God and admitted eastern concepts such as reincarnation and vegetarianism on account of perceiving animals as having souls similar if not identical to our own. Some believe it was an older surviving form of Christianity, similar to the original faith said to have been practised by John the Baptist and the Essenes, while others maintain it was essentially a form of Manichean Christianity introduced to the south in the 12th century by the Bogomil missionary Nicetas. This is neither the time nor place to address the finer theological detail, save to say that by the end of the 12th century the rise of the so-called ‘Cathar’ faith in Occitania represented a genuine challenge to the hegemony of the Roman Church which was still trying to consolidate its hold over mainland Europe after the psychological shock of the loss of the Holy Lands and the military fiasco of the Third Crusade.

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Any burgher or serf could become a knight if he was valiant and loyal or knew how to compose music or poetry. Elsewhere in Europe knighthood was inconceivable without nobility, but the attributes of Occitan knighthood – accessible to anyone regardless of race, country or class – were nothing less than the sword, the word and the harp. A troubadour would swear fidelity to his lady as if she were a feudal lord and from then on she would receive him according to the statutes of chivalry determined by the ‘Court of Love’ at Puivert. While honor and loyalty were cherished, ‘truth’ remained the essential quality of knighthood for (as you may have heard) a knight that is true in heart can never fail in single combat.

Terra Umbra

Once upon a time, more than seven centuries ago, there existed between France and Spain a land known as Occitania. It was not a nation state as we currently understand a modern democracy to be, but a patchwork of feudal demesnes and warrior dukedoms with every river valley under the sway of its own warlord and the whole bound together by complex ties of blood, marriage and a common language – an all but vanished tongue known to modern linguistic scholars as ‘Romans’ or ‘old Occitan’. It seems to have been an oddly enlightened culture for its time, perhaps too enlightened, and the high concentration of Jews and Muslims among the population bears silent testimony to an unusual degree of religious tolerance. Doubtless it was this overlapping of ideas and cross-fertilization of Christian and Moorish culture that gave rise to the South’s artistic and scientific achievements. By the dawn of the 13th century the world was lit only by fire, yet there was a school of Jewish medicine in Toulouse and a school of magic in Salamanca. Several of the cornerstone works of the kabbalah were written during that period in northern Spain and the area saw the first flowering of gothic art and architecture. While not actively matriarchal, as some have claimed, Occitania at least embraced equal rights to the extent of offering a level playing field to both genders and democracy of a sorts in the form of ‘capitouls,’ or elected magistrates who acted as a check on the power of the aristocracy. Above all the citizens of Occitania embraced the code of chivalry…

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