Fantastic Metropolis

Proceeding now to the Grimoire of Honorius, it is to the third bearer of that name, or to one of the most zealous pontiffs of the 13^th century, that this impious book is attributed. Assuredly Honorius III was eminently likely to be hated by sectarians and necromancers, and well might they seek to dishonour him by representing him as their accomplice. Censius Savelli, crowned Pope in 1216, confirmed that Order of Saint Dominic which proved so formidible to Albigensians and Vaudois—those children of Manicheans and sorcerers. He established also the Franciscans and Carmelites, preached a crusade, governed the Church wisely and left many decretals. To charge with Black Magic a pope so eminently catholic is to cast similar suspicion on the great religious orders which he instituted, and the devil thereby could scarcely fail to profit.

—Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic

In response to the murder in 1208 of his legate Pierre de Castelnau, Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade against the “Albigensians,” as the French invaders, who spearheaded the crusade, called the heretics (after the Tarn town of Albi). A cycle of death and destruction ensued. The massacres at Beziers (1209), Minerve (1210) and Lavaur (1211) were chonicled in the contemporary epic about Simon de Montfort’s crusades, the vernacular Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, and the havoc wreaked in the region by de Montfort and his crusaders lives on in the local folklore to this day. The bloodletting ended only with the fall of the Cathar fortresses of Montsegur (1244) and Queribus (1255). Catharism had been contained, but not eradicated, by the French crusades, and the continuing suppression of heresy was entrusted in 1233 by Pope Gregory IX to the Dominicans. One of their number was the Inquisitor Geoffrey d’Ablis. It was he who almost exactly 100 years after the first crusade of 1209 oversaw the crushing of the last Cathars. By 1310 most of the leaders of the Cathar risorgimento had perished on pyres in Carcassonne and Toulouse.

—Rene Weis, The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars’ Rebellion Against the Inquisition, 1290–1329

When attempting to untangle the Gordian Knot of the Cathar heresy and those figures most tied up in suppressing it (figures like Hildegard of Bingen, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Dominic, Popes from Eugenius to Innocent III to Honorius III and beyond, the infamous Simon de Montfort) we find ourselves in a welter of motivations and possible contradictions. Obviously the Kings of France, resurgent under Philip Augustus, sought to unify the French-speaking lands held by the Kings of England and the powerful lords of Languedoc under direct royal rule, and the Capetians would be ultimately successful in dispossessing the Plantagenet King John and his nephew Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor, of their European lands. So powerful would France become that eventually the Papacy itself would be split, half-dancing in Avignon to a royal French tune while the other half struggled on in Italy, a dance of pope and antipope. If the fact that two popes stared at each other across the divide of southern France, what was once Languedoc, in a parody of Ahriman and Ormazd, brings us to mind the Cathars broken and burning… well, perhaps it is more than a coincidence.

In the past, we’ve considered the slaughter of the Cathars as a movement by the Papacy to avoid losing the power of its most powerful weapons in the war on secular might—excommunication and interdict—as well as a means to the end of controlling the image of God in the minds of the faithful: by building in the heart of Europe a conception of God and Jesus as the means to martial victory, using Christ the Warchief as the inspiration for crusades in Jerusalem as well as Languedoc, it’s certainly conceivable to imagine specific inheritors of the Papacy as trying to create the impression (and impression can be reality) that Christ’s servant on earth, his Vicar, should be the Warchief of all Europe. Innocent III’s meddling in the succession of the Holy Roman Emperor through his cat’s-paws Philip of Swabia and Otto IV, and the eventual elevation of his ward and charge Frederick II of Hohenstaufen to the Kingdom of Sicily and the throne of the Holy Roman Empire showed how an ambitious pope could attempt to recreate the Empire of the Romans with another Bridge Priest in charge, as Augustus had been. (Pontifex Maximus, one of Augustus’ titles, basically referred to an ancient religious rite of blessing for bridges in Rome, and it survives today as the title Pontiff for the Papacy, much as the pagan priesthood survived in Iceland as the goði, a wandering judge and official, well into Christianity’s reign on the island.) It’s possible the bridge the Papacy sought to cross was the ancient “Bridge of the Separator” that groups like the Cathars and the Bogomils had inherited from Manichæanism and Gnosticism, that ancient Essenic/Zoroastrian inheritance of co-existent principles of matter and spirit, good and evil, light and darkness. Recalling the visions of Hildegard, which so resembled the Inferno of Dante Alighieri (born in 1265 in Florence, to be embroiled in the same controversy between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines that led to Innocent’s meddling in the Imperial succession 65 years before his birth), and the later visions of Swedenborg and his disciple and eventual eclipse, William Blake, it’s possible that the Papacy, under popes like Sylvester II and later lawyer-popes like Innocent III and Honorius III, sought to bring Satan back into the monotheistic relationship of the Book of Job: the accuser of the divine court, useful in defining and destroying one’s enemies. Did the Grimoire of Honorius stem from the same urge towards diabolism that would later see Borgia installed upon the Throne of Peter? It’s not that hard to imagine the Papacy, feeling beset by heresies, reverting back to the tactics of St. Augustine and using fire against fire. By creating the Dominican and Franciscan orders, one could argue, Honorius did exactly what a good diabolist in the heart of the Church would do to cover up his presence—it’s as easy to invert Eliphas Levi’s argument as it is to accept it on face value. How better for a master magician who seeks to recreate God in his own image to do away with his rivals than to set the hounds of the Inquisition upon them?