Fantastic Metropolis

It just keeps getting longer: my apologies.

When last we left our Cathar “pure ones,” they had begun to expand throughout France during the 11^th century, in part due to a combination of their own novelty, powerful converts like Roger Trencavel II, Raymond-Roger of Foix and Raymond of Toulouse—descendant of the Raymond of Toulouse who had been the first over the wall during the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099—, and the particular political and social conditions of the time. For example, Languedoc was prized by the Capetian kings of France, the Angevin kings of the Plantagenet dynasty, and even the ambitious Aragonese crown from its role as the County of Barcelona. Languedoc itself was religiously tolerant, a wellspring of the courtly style popularized by Eleanor of Aquitaine herself (and we remember the early charges at the turn of the eleventh century that Manichaeans had infiltrated Aquitaine), and had large colonies of Jews (as the composition of the Sepher Bahir here in 1176 tells us) and Waldensians as well as Catharists. And as Catholicism itself had, Catharism primarily spread through converting the wives and ladies of the nobles: the Count of Foix’s sister and wife converted to Catharism before he did and probably helped convince him to do so as well. However, as we saw, figures like Hildegard of Bingen revised the old Catholic policy (as imagined by Augustine of Hippo and Clement of Alexandria) of accusing some other sect of the offenses they were considered to be propagating and changed it so that the expansion of the Cathars, which depended on pointing out the moribund nature of Catholicism as it had become the status quo, was reversed: the Catharist charge that the evil principle, known variously as Yaldabaoth, Samael, Satan, etc. was the demiurgic lord of this world and one had to escape him through knowledge of the true Good God and the perfection of the spirit over base matter became inverted, and the Cathars were charged with worshipping Satan as God himself, aided in part by laborious metaphorical texts like the Desenzano text that argued for the creation of Christ via Lucifer’s seduction of the celestial wife of God or its rival, the argument that God himself slept with the wife of some evil principle. While it seems relatively clear that these texts were attempts to bring earlier, more Manichæan/gnostic thought into a Christian context, they were a heresy that struck at the very heart of Catholicism itself. The fact that most Cathars did not hold such extreme beliefs availed them almost nothing.

By training, Innocent was a canon lawyer, the first of a number of lawyer-popes, but his approach was never narrow or pedantic. With extraordinary energy, he promoted the pastoral reform of the Catholic Church and the clarification of its teaching that was codified in the decrees of the fourth Lateran Council that met in 1215. He insisted upon orthodoxy: it was a time when, beneath the superficial uniformity of the Catholic faith, there were many undercurrents of religious enthusiasm and varian belief. The affluence and worldliness of many of the clergy provoked challenges to the Church. Innocent was sufficiently open-minded to recognise the value of an idealistic innovator like Francis of Assisi but he condemned and set out to extirpate the heretical teaching of the Cathars in Languedoc.

—Piers Paul Read, The Templars

Innocent III was no fool. Even as he moved to ensure that powerful women like Hildegard would no longer be able to directly influence the Church as the heads of Abbeys, he realized that he could best fight the Cathar message by means of preaching much like hers: perhaps only a woman who saw visions from God could possibly compete with the Perfects of Catharism, a rank open to both men and women alike. Indeed, Catharism was a religion spread by women: both by conversion of women important to the powerful and by raising women in the faith, the Katharoi spread their ranks through Languedoc. The political independence of the land, at this time still free from the Capetian kings, made this more possible than it might have been elsewhere, but Catharism’s greatest strength in this regard was its seductive message to women. Join us, and be equals. A woman could be a Perfect the same as a man. A woman could minister, could testify to her faith, could serve as a missionary if she was a Cathar. This spread throughout Languedoc at approximately the same time as the idea of courtly love, and for much the same reason: it appealed to women because it gave them a power they’d otherwise lacked, and it was in those aspects of daily life that feudal society had already designated to women. How children were raised, how courtship was structured, there were in no means part of the warrior ideal of feudalism, where a man’s worth was measured literally in how much money you could receive for not killing him in battle, but rather capturing and ransoming him, or perhaps in how many men-at-arms and horses he could provide for war. Wealth existed to be turned into fighting strength… it was the era of men like William Marshal, who in his long lifetime of fighting served several kings of England, defeated French and rebel armies, and charged into battle at the age of seventy-five. When he died, he separated from his wife so that he could be said to be shriven like a monk in order that he might enter the Knights Templar upon his death. Why the Templars felt it necessary to have the greatest warrior knight in Europe as a member posthumously, we may discuss. But clearly, in a society so stratified, it was to the benefit of Catharism to appeal to women, since it was women who made decisions as to what faith to bring the household into. And Innocent III saw this threat to his own vision of a Europe ruled by a Papacy set above any temporal power, and took steps to prevent it. But why should Innocent be so opposed to women that he would actively turn them away or marginalize them?

Of course, part of this might simply be misogyny. For that matter, part of it might be pragmatism: if, like Innocent III, you seek to promote the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church (and the Papacy, of course) over all of Europe, you want to crush the heretical movements. If women seem to be the most susceptible to heresy and the means by which it spreads, you marginalize them. Innocent, as has been stated, was no fool: in the hundred years before he became Pope, two women had shaken the face of Europe’s political landscape. In 1141, the same year that Hildegard first revealed her visions in her Nosce Vias Domini, a woman was crowned Monarch of England. Matilda, daughter of Henry I, granddaughter of William the Conqueror, had been appointed heir by her father and the lords of England had promised to uphold her rights, but her own cousin, Stephen of Blois (son of the Stephen of Blois we mentioned in part one, who accompanied Raymond of Toulouse as he breached the walls of Jerusalem; Raymond’s descendants would face Innocent’s Albigensian Crusade and the wrath of his creature, Simon of Montfort, who would dispossess them) who, despite being the son of the daughter of William the Conqueror (and thus claiming royalty through a woman himself) argued that England needed a King. Years of civil war between the two failed to decisively settle this issue: in the end, Stephen remained King while he lived, and Matilda’s descendants in the Plantagenet dynasty would rule after he died. Matilda’s son would marry a woman even stronger and more forceful, and perhaps more subtle and manipulative as well, in Eleanor of Aquitaine, who brought the rich lands of Aquitaine into the marriage, and thus created a Anglo-French empire that threatened to swallow France whole. Eleanor was a genius, sexually active, had gone on crusade along with her then-husband Louis VII in 1147 (and while doing so had initiated affairs with, rumors indicated, her own uncle Raymond of Poitiers and a captured Saracen), and when her libidinous ways estranged her from her monkish husband, she simply left him for the devilish Henry Plantagenet. Her sons would include John Lackland, the king who would be forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, and Richard Cœur de Leon, the Crusading King of England who would rule as Richard I. When looking at the immediate history of the Europe Innocent desired to bring wholly under control of the Papacy, he could see that women were a threat to all his hopes and plans; women were spreading the Cathar heresy, women were gathering power and influence within his own Church with visions and preaching, women were even endangering the social order that would serve to help maintain the Crusading drive into the Holy Land. Matilda and Eleanor were women who ruled in their own right, Eleanor even going so far as to help import the tolerant southern French social graces into the kingdom of her husband, tangling England and France up in social and territorial knots. To a man who sought to impose order, and to whom Canon Law was all important, they were a great threat.

And that’s not even considering if he was a sorcerer or not.

At the time, Spain was still struggling to determine its future, occupied by both Christian and Muslim rulers in the kingdom of al-Andalus, and Italy was fractured into squabbling states and partially occupied by the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, which itself was divided into petty palatinates and minor kingdoms. As the 12^th century progressed into the 13^th, Europe was still divided between the growth of royal power and the zealously guarded rights of the nobles, the remainder of the martial traditions of the Germanic tribes that had swept over the rotting remains of Rome. We know that when he became Archbishop of Reims, Gerbert of Aurillac was forced to swear to articles of faith that expressly contradicted Catharist tendencies, even though the Cathars as such were entirely unknown in the tenth century. (Manichæanism, as we have already expressed, was not.) Later, Gerbert became Pope Sylvester II, sat upon the throne of Peter for three years and died, and by 1080 the rumors of his having recanted on his deathbed from having invoked the devil were beginning to spread, including the establishment of a Vatican School of Magic. Of course, Gerbert was thought to have wrenched magical secrets from his time spent attending schools in the south, in Moorish Spain: one of Gerbert’s innovations or discoveries, the astrolabe, so entranced the imagination of Europe that more than a century after the man’s death the infamous Peter Abelard and Heloise named the son born of their tumultuous affair after it.

Abelard had discovered the power of logic as a young man, and clung tenaciously to it throughout his life, even when it was abundantly clear that he was in dire straits thanks to his notion that Christian faith itself could and should be subject to logical scrutiny. He created something he dubbed “theologia” to serve as the logical and scientific language of Christianity, and he had developed a dialectical method of dealing with philosophical, existential and religious problems, famously called the Sic et Non, an open-ended and relentlessly inquisitive “on the other hand.” For Bernard of Clairvaux, the guardian of a very different Christian tradition from the one that Abelard and the Cluniacs cultivated, all these notions reeked of heresy. Surely, no one could really imagine that Plato could be made over into a Christian, as Abelard had suggested.

—Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World

Christianity was divided, and nowhere can that division be more clearly seen than in its attack on both the gnostical elements of Catharism and the philosophical inquiry of Abelard. Once Bernard of Clairvaux had finished with Abelard, the man was totally broken, spent, and even condemned by the Pope. He died a year later in the care of Peter the Venerable and the abbey of Cluny, the wounds he’d suffered through his life of teaching and inquiry catching up with him. (Peter had been castrated by the relatives of Heloise due to their affair, although obviously too late to prevent Astrolabe from being born.) But the approach he’d resurrected in Western Christendom, the application of the intellect to religion, is almost identical to that of gnosticism… the idea that through wisdom (sophia) and the application of knowledge (gnosis) one can unravel the mysteries of the universe and achieve freedom from deception. Ironically, both the Cistercians under Bernard and the Cluniacs under Peter the Venerable would adopt aspects of the Manichæan/gnostic worldview that the Cathars, too, would embrace: the Cistercians saw the temporal world as inherently sinful and corrupt, requiring the domination of the Mother Church, while the Cluniacs took to heart the application of education and learning to questions of dogma and belief.

These paradoxes would later come to tear the Church apart, thanks to the course that Innocent III would set as Pope: his attempt to raise the Church to a position of power over temporal princes and kings would result in the Church often acting as a temporal power, and when it did so, other temporal powers would move against it. During his lifetime, however, Innocent had little to fear: the Capetian dynasty would come to use his crusades to help unify France under its own banners, making bastards of the Saint-Gilles clan in its own holdings in Languedoc as it did the Plantagenets in Anjou and Aquitaine and Normandy. Philip Augustus was not the monarch of France who would later cause the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy (that would fall to his descendant Philip IV, also known as the Fair, he who struck down the Knights Templar) although he used the Albigensian Crusade admirably to help grow his own power base. Innocent III was in the tradition of Eugenius III, the student of Bernard of Clairvaux who had supported Hildegard of Bingen’s preaching. But unlike Eugenius, he came to the throne of Peter at a pivotal time when her fortunes were low: the Second Crusade agitated for by Bernard and Eugenius had ended in bitter failure, ultimately culminating in the loss of Jerusalem itself to Saladin. Several Popes rose and died in quick succession. The constant conflict between the papacy and the imperial power to the north only added to the confusion, but Innocent quickly took control of the situation, finding it easy enough to bring the Prefect of Rome (nominally loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor but, with the death of Henry IV in 1197, having no better alternative than Innocent) under his sway. He soon established his power through a series of actions, one of which included extorting from Henry IV’s widow various concessions that would lead to later conflict between the papacy and Frederick II, the emperor who would become known as Stupor Mundi for his intellect and outrageousness. (For a time, Innocent even served as Frederick’s mentor and guardian: one wonders if the intensely facile and inventive mind of Frederick found its first real adversary in the legalistic mentality of Innocent.) His intrigues reached into the dispute between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs that led to the double election of Philip of Swabia and Otto IV as Holy Roman Emperor in 1198, ultimately choosing Otto IV. (Granted, he flip-flopped on it, as Otto was as truculent and quick to anger as his uncle, Richard Cœur de Leon, and managed to offend most of his allies: only the assassination of Philip of Swabia prevented Innocent and the Princes from switching allegiances.) And when Otto went too far, tried to seize the Sicilian territories of Innocent’s ward Frederick II, and eventually allied with his uncle John of England against Innocent and his ally Philip Augustus in 1214, he was excommunicated, defeated and deposed in favor of Innocent’s choice Frederick.

Of course, Innocent may have lacked the ability to see into the future, elsewise he might not have been so quick to pick that particular brilliant but willful suzerain when his goal was papal supremacy over the empire, and indeed all Christendom. But it is still illustrative of Innocent’s essential nature and his use of the papacy as a temporal power: he dealt out interdiction and excommunication not as a matter of faith and salvation, but rather as a tactical weapon to keep rebellious lords and princes in line. To interdict a realm was to use the faith of a sovereign’s own people against him, to deny them mass and the sacraments, and to encourage rebellious lords under him to rebel. To excommunicate him was to render him without support in his own lands, to essentially make him a bastard in his own house. Now, when you look at Innocent’s tactical application of Christianity, of course heresies become problematic. If the Cathars spread out of southern France, and more lords pledged allegiance to their creed of opposition to the worldly, sexual abstinence outside of marriage, the effect on society would be immense. Cathars were paradoxically seductive to their opponents and yet fiercely and defiantly chaste: Gervase of Tilbury once attempted to seduce a Cathar lass in Reims and was rebuffed by her, which led to her arrest, trial and death sentence. Yes, that’s right: a Christian monk had a Cathar burned to death because she refused to surrender her virginity to him. Yet Domingo de Guzmn, the later St. Dominic who would establish the Dominican order, admitted in his letters that not only had he failed to make much headway preaching in Languedoc, but that the pretty young Cathar maids had often had more of an impression on him than he’d had on them. Think of the shock that must have coursed through the popes when the Dominic reported himself vulnerable to Cathar temptation. And a state within a state like Languedoc, nominally French but really a polyglot collection of independent lords owing but the most tenuous fealty to one another or to their suzerains, who were often helpless or disinclined to control them… such a state, totally seduced to Catharism, would be immune to Innocent’s greatest tactical weapons. Excommunication and interdict were of no avail against those that believed the Papacy to be a tool of corrupt matter, no more enlightened than any other institution of man, lacking in the knowledge of true spiritual good (the gnosis of the Perfect Ones, as the Cathars called their holiest figures) and thus no more or less able to do one whit to their souls than the French king. For sixty years, the papacy tried everything it could think of to end the Cathar heresy. It tried threats, excommunication, debate… the greatest scholars and debaters were sent into Languedoc. Bernard of Clairvaux himself, fresh from his defeat of Abelard and rational philosophy applied to the church, a setback for “Plato made into a Christian,” found himself unable to seduce Languedoc to his side. Nor did Dominic, nor did the arguments of Hildegard, herself probably the closest to the Cathar vision yet unable to cross the divide set in her path by Bernard and his student Eugenius, the rejection of Abelard’s Sic et Non, yes and no, and its application to Catholicism.

To be a Cathar was difficult. A true member of the Perfect, a combination of Priest and Missionary, had to be chaste and celibate: while those who believed the message of the faith but were not of the Perfect could marry and have children, the Perfect could not, for in their perfection they represented what Mani would call freedom from the cage of fleshly existence and the end of the iron prison house of material existence. (Comparisons to Buddhism are apt: both a Buddhist and a Perfect would look forward to ending their time on the cycle of death and rebirth.) Also, Cathar could not eat meat of any kind, nor its products. Plants and fish were their diet, and sexual contact of any kind would end the Perfect state and worse, end it for anyone whom the Perfect in question had granted the consolamentum, so if you succumbed to temptation and embraced the great lie of the material world over the truth of the spirit, you would condemn any who had received that truth from you as well. One can understand that Cathar lass going to the flames willingly rather than submit to Gervase’s touch, when the consequences to her were ultimately that she would ascend forth into the true Godhead of all creation if she burned, and further imprisonment in the hell of matter—not only for herself but for any she had helped achieve perfection—if she fornicated. Perfects’ lives served as examples to all of their freedom from temporal concerns and their ultimate embrace of their faith, a powerful countermeasure at a time when Popes were very concerned with worldly power. However, they were as limited by this as they were freed by it: their total disregard for oaths meant that they were in essential disagreement with the very bedrock of feudal society. Their disdain for any form of sexual congress (which, ironically, put them into agreement with St. Paul and St. Augustine of Hippo, those notorious attackers of Manichæanism) meant that while they could spread through women they were limited, since no Perfect could have a family to raise or a husband or wife, a form of aesceticism that left them isolated. Furthermore, while the faith’s appeal to women lay in great part in its acceptance of them as equals, this also led to dissention: not only did mainstream Catholics like Bernard use their acceptance of women as “proof” of their essential fornications (even while the Church burned them at the stake for not fornicating) but even some Cathars argued that a Perfect’s last incarnation on Earth had to be a man. Even powerful men like Raymond-Roger of Foix were less likely to become Cathar themselves than to simply tolerate it and allow Cathar Perfects into their entourage to perform the consolamentum in case of serious injury in a manner similar to the old deathbed conversion of Constantine. But the conflict between the Cathars and the Papacy, while rooted in their vast discordances, also has similarities in that both Innocent and the Cathars believed that the physical world was corrupt and impure. Innocent merely believed that obliged the Papacy to take control, much as in years to come the Yezidi would believe that Malek Taus, the Peacock Lord, was the master of this world and one had to come to an accommodation with him: the Cathars, on the other hand, believed that you couldn’t do that and retain your purity, and the gnosis which leads one to ultimate union with God requires total abstinence from all the pleasures and traps of this world, which is a lie.

But then, why did the Cathars seem so determined to infiltrate the nobility of Languedoc, which they did with great success, and not just the nobles, but the minor lords, and even the common folk? If the temporal world is so corrupt, why bring so many of its princes into your ranks? In part, this might have been due to the example of the Bogomils, who were extant in Byzantium at the time, and who openly attempted to convert the Patriarch and the Emperor to their faith and were burned for it. The Bogomil heresy predated that of the Cathars, and indeed was contemporary with the rise of Gerbert of Aurillac. But another possibility presents itself, and this one is a more unusual one. What if Gerbert was a Manichæan of sorts? After all, the young Cathar who died rather than be defiled was from Reims, his bishopric and the home of the Cathedral School he reformed after his years of study in Spain, including possible trips to al-Andalus itself. It’s possible that while Gerbert was in Muslim Spain, he became acquainted with the Isma’ili sect of Islam, and possibly even its Druze subcurrent, which preserved many Neo-Platonic elements and a marked dislike for materialism. (The Druze still exist today, and take part in the fighting in Lebanon.) Was Gerbert introduced to the Druze belief in reincarnation and an eventual freedom from same in union with God? Isma’ili, Bogomil, gnostic or Manichæan, they all seem to preserve a fragment of that ancient teaching called variously Zoroastrian and Zurvanite, the teaching of dual opposition between forces in the maintenance of the world. But unlike the Manichæanism of Catharism, held also by the Bogomils and the Druze (who are not dualists) the Zoroastrian faith did not hold matter in contempt or as corrupt: it was part of the good creation of Ahura Mazda, and thus too would be redeemed at the final battle between good and evil.

Assuming for a moment that Gerbert was exposed to Isma’ili thought, perhaps even Zoroastrian doctrine preserved in Islamic sources, it does not seem to have dampened his faith: he willingly signed the oath that rejected Manichæan doctrines to become Archbishop in 991. He clearly did not reject Catholicism. But did he bring back the idea of rationalism applied to faith preserved in Neo-Platonism and gnosticism? It’s interesting that among his achievements, none was more famous in all of Europe than his Book of the Astrolabe. And that book clearly had a salutory effect on Abelard himself, because the man named the child he and Heloise conceived after it. Abelard never reached the Neo-Platonic idea that matter is corrupt and the source of evil, but it’s likely he might have. His near-contemporary Moses ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides, writer of The Guide for the Perplexed was more fortunate than Abelard, and had access to translations of Aristotle and Plato that Abelard did not. Like the Neo-Platonists, he came to view matter as the source of all evil and imperfection.

But perhaps not. Perhaps Abelard would have moved past this ancient argument, transmitted through Orphism into Manichæanism and gnosticism and the Bogomils and Cathars, and instead come to a similar conclusion as the Druze: there is one source of wisdom, one God, and it is large, it contains multitudes. Perhaps Abelard’s God might have quoted Whitman, perhaps it would have read the Book of Job.

It was that vision of the universe precisely reflected in the wonderful name, which is “yes and no”—not “or” or “instead of” or “not” or anything else that would suggest that there was a single view, that clear divisions or dichotomies existed because one proposition was self-evidently right or good and the other was to be discarded. For Abelard, and for many of his students, the possibility, perhaps even the necessity, of contradiction clearly existed in God’s perplexing and often difficult universe. With his insistence that faith needed to be subject to rigorous rational scrutiny, a novel and threatening idea in his circles at that time, Abelard almost uncannily anticipated the intellectual upheaval that came to dominate Europe a few years later. The Latin Christian Europe, in which Abelard seemed quite unique (unicus, “the unique one”, is how his learned lover, Heloise, referred to him), could hardly have imagined that in a very few years it would have available the vast Aristotelian corpus in an accurate Latin translation.

—Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World

We already discussed the contrast between the Manichæan outlook of both the Cathars and their enemies (as personified in the previous part of the essay by Hildegard of Bingen, that most fiery of anti-Cathar agitators, a woman and a visionary of tremendous mental and spiritual gifts… I often wonder what fate would have made of a Hildegard who went to the University of Paris instead of to a crazy anchoress on the banks of a river) and the Blakean view which most closely resembles that of pre-Manichæan Zoroastrianism: God is good and so are all things, spirit and matter, within his creation. In fact, you can take it even further, and mirror the Qabalistic ideal using Zurvan: all matter and all spirit are one, energy and matter are one, and an all-knowing, all seeing omnipotent God is both positive and negative, Good and Evil, matter and spirit, Ormazd and Ahriman, and even Yahweh and Asherah. The alchemical ideal (and we remember that alchemy is al-kīmiya, brought into Europe via that al-Andalusian interaction that also brought us Gerbert’s astrolabe, by which the intellect pierces the heavens, and that Aristotelian corpus that just barely missed Peter Abelard, who stood ready for it) of male and female in one body, the rebis, is as divine as it is mundane. One recalls the gnostic tale of the Demiurge Yaldabaoth or the Ophite serpent who is matter and energy in one form, Michael and Samael… and then one remembers another sect of pure ones who attempted, despite their purity, to affect the politics of a small but important region.

The king of the Kittim shall enter into Egypt, and in his time he shall set out in great wrath to wage war against the kings of the north, that his fury may destroy and cut the horn of Israel. This shall be a time of salvation for the people of God, an age of dominion for all the members of His company and of everlasting destruction for all the company of Belial. The confusion of the sons of Japheth shall be great and Assyria shall fall unsuccoured. The dominion of the Kittim shall come to an end and iniquity shall be vanquished, leaving no remnant: for the sons of darkness there shall be no escape.

—Geza Vermes, trans., The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English

It was Augustin Calmet who mentioned in his Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits that the seven angels who sat before the throne of God in the Old Testament might be an allusion to the seven principal officers who were allowed in the presence of the Persian Emperor, in effect an example of Persian culture affecting that of the Jews following their Babylonian Captivity and Cyrus’ ending of that tenure of captivity which earned him the title the anointed one. We know that before the captivity and the teachings of the prophet Jeremiah that Judaism was a monotheism of choice—that they chose and were chosen by their God, that there was a covenant between them. There was nothing to indicate that no other gods existed, merely that the God of Abraham and Isaac had singled out the Hebrews as his people. Following the captivity, Jeremiah brought forth the tale of the bridegroom whose wife had turned away from him, and insisted that the reason Babylon had crushed them and taken them into captivity was not that their gods were stronger, as would normally be assumed to be the case, but rather that the God of Abraham and Isaac, the seventy-two fold name encoded in the book of Exodus in chapter 14 within verses 19–21 had allowed it to happen. Indeed, Jeremiah insisted, all that happens is due to the will of God, for there is only one God, and the Babylonians merely served as his instruments in correcting the recalcitrant bride that was Israel. As a result, when Cyrus freed the people of Israel and seized Babylon to make it part of his growing Persian Empire (a conquest remembered in the message of Daniel interpreting the burning letters on the wall while Nebuchadnezzar was away at conquest: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin) Cyrus is the anointed one because he is the instrument of Israel’s liberation, the literal tool of God. Perhaps it should not surprise us, then, that later writers imagined the court of God to resemble that of Cyrus. What is interesting is that Cyrus himself, as well as later successors like Darius, were deliberately imitating Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, and his seven Amesha Spentas. Therefore, in emulating the Persian king while writing of God, the later redactors of scripture were literally inserting Zoroastrian thought into Judaism.

The ultimate manifestation of this redaction of dualism into what had finally become a true monotheism is the Dead Sea Scrolls. (And is it me, or does the Hebrew movement from many to few to one God remind anyone else of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? I know I’ve mentioned that book before in different contexts, but the idea of God growing a sense of self fascinates me.) The Essenes (or whoever composed the Scrolls) were at once possessed of a religious desire to “turn back the clock” as it were, return to a purer Judaism that adhered to the law in opposition to what they saw as the secular corruption of the Temple at that time, and also sought the purification of the body politic of Israel. Their tales of the teacher of righteousness and the wicked priest, of Michael and the army of light against Belial and the Kittim of Ashur seem almost purely Zoroastrian. But if we keep the Book of Job in mind when we look at the Scrolls, we return to that essential component of true monotheism, the idea that mere mortals cannot apply their morality to the actions of God. It’s not merely the case that the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous always… they exist in a scale and a context humans cannot understand.

In fact, it may be the search for comprehension that creates the difficulty. Blake argues, “the ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.” It was, and is, a compelling notion and was especially so at its time, post-Swedenborg and his vistas of Hell… the idea that Blake had, that there is no separation between opposites, but rather a unity, was new and hadn’t really been uttered in millennia outside of a Druze meditating on the Kitab al-Hikma. But let’s look at it from a different angle for a moment. Maybe the ancient Poets didn’t animate or endow various objects with anything. Going back to our earlier conception of the Zurvanite/Qabalistic void which was simultaneously Good and Evil, spirit and matter, that created itself by means of separating essence from existence, the emanations from the all-possible which is simultanously everything and nothing… as things become real, tangible, physical objects they lose their abstract nature. Nothing in the world of Assiyah, the realm we can perceive with our senses (Blake’s means to the soul) is a Platonic ideal, all things are particular manifestations. You do not have boulder, you have a boulder. The same with mountains, rivers, trees, canaries, etc., etc. It is possible for us to conceive of mountains as an ideal, or of abstract concepts, but those things don’t dwell here, they exist up from here, or amidst the qlippothic garbage heap. Crowley expressed it as so: “In the first part we have seen all numbers as Veils of the One, emanations of and therefore corruptions of the One. It is the Universe as we know it, the static Universe. Now the Aspirant to Magic is displeased with this state of things. He finds himself but a creature, the farthest removed from the Creator, a number so complex and involved he can scarcely imagine, much less dare to hope for its reduction to the One.” Everything we see and everything we seem is but a dream within a dream, and we are not the dreamers. Everything around us, in other words, is inadequately perceived: Blake may have been correct about the unity of spirit and matter, but his argument that the five senses were “the chief inlets of Soul in this age” both allows for the possibility that there were far better inlets in the past, and far better ones to come. In attempting to ascertain the true nature of that most sublime and complicated calculation that is, essentially, one or One when you work it all out, we fracture the nature of God.

Usually, the story goes like this: there was an infinity that was both nothing and everything. It contracted itself down to one point and flared into light, illuminating all that existed and creating it at once. As existence essentially coalesces from the pure white light of the manifestation of God, or the Godhead, or the Creator, or Zurvan, or whatever word you want to make use of, it develops into the spheres and their reflection and shadow, the shells. We can belabor it at some length, but it isn’t important: part one of the essay lays them out fairly extensively, and here we only need to consider that the movement from Atziluth to Briah to Yetzirah to Assiyah mirrrors the development of the mind and its processes of thinking. The world becomes separate, becomes real, as everything in it becomes just exactly what it is, and not what it is not. We move from archetype to creation of the thought to formation of it, and finally to the translation of the thought into an action or physical creation separate and unique, and each creation therefore contains both matter and spirit just as the Ophitic serpent that climbs down the Otz Chaim and back up again. We think, and think of gods and spirits, and gods and spirits are patterned onto the world: what once was unvariated becomes variated.

The fourth is the Asiatic world, OVLM HOShIH, Olamh Ha-Asiah, the world of action, called also the world of shells, OVLM HQLIPVTh, Olamh Ha-Qlipoth, which is this world of matter, made up of the grosser elements of the other three. In it is also the abode of the evil spirits, which are called “the shells” by the Qabalah, QLIPVTH, Qlipoth, material shells. The devils are also divided into ten classes, and have suitable habitations. The demons are the grossest and most deficient of all forms. Their ten degrees answer to the decad of the Sephiroth but in inverse ratio, as darkness and impurity increase with the descent of each degree. The two first are nothing but absence of visible form and organisation. The third is the abode of darkness. Next follow seven Hells occupied by those demons which represent incarnate human vices and those who have given themselves up to such vices in earth-life. Their prince is Samael, SMAL, the angel of poison and death. His wife is the harlot, or woman of whoredom, AShTh ZNVNIM, Isheth Zenunim; and united ther are called the beast, CHIVA, Chioa. Thus the infernal trinity is completed which is, so to speak, the averse and caricature of the supernal Creative One.

—Aleister Crowley, 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings

After being ejected from Ohrmazd’s spiritual world, Ahriman lay in his realm of Darkness in lethargy, his fear of Righteous Man prolonging his passivity. After three millennia, however, Ahriman was finally restored to action by the “Accursed Whore.” Seen sometimes as the first woman, she was created by Ohrmazd but defected to the Destructive Spirit, by whom she was defiled and elevated as “the demon Whore queen of her brood.” Roused by her frenzy to demolish the dignity of the “Righteous Man” and the Bull, Ahriman rallied his demons and weapons and, rising up in the form of a serpent, burst into the visible world at the time of the vernal equinox.

—Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God

If one is reminded of the various gnostic tales of Sophia, either through her own offices or through the defilement of the Demiurge, or the tale of Satan mating with God’s celestial wife to create Jesus as told by the Desenzano sect of Catharism, then consider the possibility that even Crowley postulates both Male and Female aspects for the Creator as well as the Destroyer: “Now, for some reason or other best known to themselves, the translators of the Bible have carefully crowded out of existence and smothered up every reference to the fact that the Deity is both masculine and feminine. They have translated a feminine plural by a masculine singular in the case of the word Elohim. They have, however, left an inadvertent admission of their knowledge that it was plural in Genesis iv. 26: ‘And Elohim said: Let Us make man.’ Again, how could Adam be made in the image of Elohim, male and female, unless the Elohim were male and female also?” So, as we consider Yahweh, we can consider Asherah as the other part of the Elohim, and as we consider Ahriman and the Whore can we not consider Samael and Isheth Zenunim? Those gnostic tales of God seducing the other god’s wife, or of the Serpent seducing God’s are just admitting the crucial linkage, the reflection between Creator and Destroyer. The division is created by man, man divides, man separates, man creates and destroys, man is the bringer of complication, of permutation, man is the means of emanation. In essence, the entire cosmos and everything in it is the body and mind of the ultimate creator, the impersonal, mindless, all-in-one Zurvanite/AIN nothingness that is in of itself unvariated. It can only see itself by contraction, and in the process of contracting creates distinction and separation by means of us. We are the manifold hands of the blind idiot god experiencing itself subjectively, we are exactly half-way between the formless, shapeless void of the bottom-most qlippoth and the formless, shapeless void of the highest sphere of the sephiroth. If one is reminded of the blind nuclear chaos Azathoth in the void with Yog-Sothoth on one side and Nyarlathotep on the other… that Lovecraft sure could dream big, could he not?

So what of the Cathars, then, you ask? What of Innocent III and his quest to impose his will on Europe? What of Abelard dying by inches, desperate to find a means to bring his wisdom to bear on his faith? To partially answer that, we can look to Abelard’s contemporary Moses ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides. At the same time as the Cathars were living in Languedoc and the Sepher Bahir was being composed or transcribed in that same location, Maimonides was born in Cordoba and lived his life, traveling to Morocco, Jerusalem and finally Egypt. Maimonides argued, in his commentary on the Mishna, that “angels” are not what most people believe them to be. Instead, he argues, God never works outside the order of nature and “angels” are just metaphoric representations of the laws of nature or universal principles of operation and organization, similar to the Platonic “ideal form.” And since we know that the Neo-Platonic conception of the “ideal form” runs itself through the similar concept in Qabalism of archetypical forms that descend into existence and matter, we come to a possible conclusion. Angels are the thoughts of God, and demons are the thoughts of the other god, who is of course one and the same, the opposite pole on a sphere, the other side of the ring, the reflection whose existence makes it all possible. And that makes us the neurons of God, basically. Metaphorically, of course, but I don’t think Maimonides would mind.

One imagines Gerbert bringing the al-jabr, the reduction equations based on Restoration and Compensation of al-Khwarizmi, out of Muslim Spain, along with the Isma’ili notion of God as an emanating force and perhaps even the magical concept of all existence as number. This he encodes in his Book of the Astrolabe along the lines of the Kitab al-Hikma, concealing the knowledge as a metaphorical construct, the astrolabe being the mathematical reduction of the Creator back down to One or the conceptual reduction of many gods down to one, take your pick. From there, the information gets fragmented: the Vatican and its school of magic inherit Gerbert/Sylvester II’s work on the particular formulas and equations to address and even perhaps control “Angels,” which dwell in Atziluth as pure Platonic ideal forms of various natural forces, control of which leads to fortuitous manipulation of events such as seen by Innocent III and his excellently rigid lawyer’s mind… but one slip and you get the events of the late 1100s, with Jerusalem lost, several Popes dead in a year, and so on. The Cathars and Bogomils are influenced by Gerbert’s restoration of several lost classics and in contacting each other create the Perfects, seeking to manipulate the mind of the cosmos so as to allow them to opt out of the internal survey of the Godhead seeking to know itself: they wish to report back with their final observations. They also seek to eventually bring all of mankind back into the perfect light of Ain Sof Aur, to escape the half-qlippoth existence of matter with all its implied is not. Ultimately, the Cathars are attempting to reduce the divine equation down to One by rejection of all other possible sums. Abelard is inspired by the hidden secrets of the “Astrolabe,” not the mere item but the Platonic ideal of it, the application of reason to the heavens as suggested by Gerbert’s book. Each is, quite literally, trying to expose or even revise the face of God.

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In part three, “The Menhir-Spearing God,” we’ll continue to explore the Cathar heresy, and its real and imagined ties to Sigismund of Hungary, the Maid of Orleans, the butcher Marechal de Retz, and the deeply religious son of a prized member of the Order of the Dragon.

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Discuss this and other heresies at Matthew Rossi’s message board.

Matthew Rossi is the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003). He has work forthcoming in Peter Crowther’s Postscripts magazine, and a new collection of essays, titled Bottled Demons, will be out this year from Prime Books.