Montségur supported on its squat escarpments, above its stages of granite, with its tunnels opening into precipices and its subterranean reserves, which hides within its walls the sepulchers of saints, whose towers are bristling with the spears of its defenders, is still holding out against the King, against the Pope, against the malediction of the Christian world.
Ramon de Perella is in command there. The Barons expelled from their feudal dwellings, the Lantars, the Belissens and the Caramans have come with their men-at-arms. Wheat has been accumulated there for years, alongside stables for the horses and cells where hermits pray. Corridors plunge into the earth and spiral stairways piece the immense fortified rock. As in Toulouse, women share in the defense, for Montségur is the last refuge of the perfecti.
A new crusade has been decided and an army under the Seneschal of Carcassonne and the Bishops of Albi and Narbonne circles all the defiles, blockading all the Ariègeois valleys. Machines of war of an astonishing force have been brought to batter the towers. Reinforcements arrive every day. Lavelanet has become a camp for carts and Tarascon shelters the spare ballistas. And the siege lasts for two years, with daily combats.
Help also comes to the besieged, for the Comte de Toulouse and the Comte de Foix, terrorized by the Church, protect the Albigensians secretly. Once, it is the son of the poet Pierre Vidal, a poet himself, who succeeds in piercing the lines and throwing himself into Montségur to announce good news. On a road by night he has crossed the path of a phantom paladin on horseback with a crimson cloak and sapphire gloves, which is a certain presage of the victory of the believers. Scarcely has he brought the hope than he dies in combat. Another time, it is Esclarmonde who erupts into the place with a little troop of armed men. She soon leaves again, taking responsibility for taking away a few Cathars.
But the heroes fall one by one. There are no more than a few hundred left. From the depths of the gorge of the Ers or the vale of the Abès, the royal army can count their broken suits of armor, still glinting, on the high stone barbicans, mingled with the white robes of perfecti. They have been told to wait. A great movement is in preparation. The south is about to rise. The Comte de Toulouse will cease to flagellate himself and kiss the Pope’s feet. His armies are advancing toward Montségur. Another seven days, the messengers say. And they murmur on the towers: “White Doves, can you not see the host of Toulouse coming?”
The host of Toulouse never comes. Driven by a presentiment, Ramon de Perella has sent away the Cathar treasure by night, with a few men to guide it and hide it in the grotto of Ornolhac. Shepherds betray Montségur and reveal the narrow path by which the treasure had escaped. The Seneschal of Carcassonne’s soldiers penetrate the tower of the Ers under cover of darkness and force the posterns. The general massacre is only halted by the promise of surrender, the following morning. The heroic Albigensians have one night to bid one another adieu, and when the sun appears over the mountains of Belesta, they deliver themselves to the power of the Catholic bishops. Only Pierre Roger de Mirepoix, who commands the combatants, obtains permission to leave with his arms and his soldiers.
All the others are chained by the neck and led to a vast platform overlooking the Ers. A formidable pyre is constructed with oaks and beeches from the forest. The Bishop of Albi, out of the goodness of his soul, promises eternal prison to those who abjure. No one accepts. Priests and soldiers intone canticles and precipitate the three hundred perfecti of Montségur into the flames.
The flame rises so red into the sky, the smoke rises so high and to straight, that the people of the Toulousain, the Lauragais and the Albigeois who look in the direction of the Ariège with anxious hearts know by that flaming sign of death that their heroic brethren have perished and that the last hope of the Midi is extinct.
The Château de Montségur was destroyed. Apart from its calcined stones, there was nothing but the name of Esclarmonde, which survived in the popular soul and in legend Esclarmonde de Foix the chaste and Esclarmonde d’Alion the amorous were confounded in a single creature who was Esclarmonde de Montségur. For a long time the people of the villages claimed to see her wandering in the cloudy mists that rise in the evenings from the steep banks of the Ers.
After six centuries she still stands on the vestiges of the tower that faces north. She will always stand there. Her hand will be seen above the clouds. She makes a sign that she has come back and that no ecclesiastical tyranny and no dogmatic wrath can get rid of her. For where the spirit has breathed, it remains. Esclarmonde has come back to the heart of the Pyrenean mountains to affirm that humans ought to reach for spiritual perfection and that, in order to find the way that leads there, one can give one’s life joyfully.
The Grotto of Ornolhac
In the region of Sabartez, in the place where the forests of Serralongue expire, there was a cavern famous for its depth and its labyrinthine tunnels. It opened half way up the mountain above escarpments overlooking the Ariège, at the spot where the springs of Ussat fall in the icy waters of that river. The druids had celebrated their mysteries there. The Saracens had stopped to sleep there. The Albigensians were to sleep there in their turn.
Those who still remained were hunted in the mountains like wild beasts. In the same way that there were later to be lieutenants of wolf-hunting, there were officers appointed to the pursuit of Cathars, who had packs of dogs at their disposal trained to track them down. The fugitives lived amid the brushwood of the plain or the stones of the heights. They lived in huts that it was necessary to quit in haste when the hunters were announced. They sometimes lived in the trees like monkeys.
A large number of these accursed wanderers retreated toward the grotto of Ornolhac, where it was known that the Cathar treasure was hidden. A new center was constituted there, a new Montségur, but it was as profoundly hidden underground as the other had been resplendent in the sky.56
The untiring Inquisition could not lave that refuge of the wretched in peace in its darkness. In accord with the Seigneur de Castelverdun, to whom the land belonged, it sent troops commanded by the Seneschal of Toulouse.
Legend relates that when those troops advanced, either out of heroism in order to share the fate of a young man she loved, Esclarmonde d’Alion raced along the Ariège on horseback and arrived at the sheer path leading to the grotto, abandoned hr mount, climbed the stone zigzags on foot and went to join those of her faith.
The grotto had two entrances, which were surrounded, but the Albigensians hoisted themselves up on ladders, which they withdrew to a deeper, more inaccessible grotto. It seemed to the Seneschal of Toulouse that it was impractical to attempt an assault. He thought it wiser and perhaps more humane to exchange for the Albigensians torture and the pyre for a silent death in the darkness. He had all the entrances to the cavern solidly walled up. He camped for some time on the banks of the Ariège. He waited. He listened to see whether any sound was reaching the surface from the interior of the granite, and then he quit the mountain, which had become a tomb.
The Albigensians must have lived for quite a long time in the darkness, for they had stored grain in the grotto. Several bishops and a large number of perfecti were among them. In the silence of the night the bishops must have pronounced the words announcing the grace obtained by imminent death and deliverance of the spirit. They must have extended their hands to make the invisible gesture of the consolamentum over prostrated heads. And perhaps, for the embracing Albigensians, for the groups that said adieu in the darkness, for Esclarmonde herself, clinging to her lover of flesh, a magnificent light made the vault resplendent with a thousand extinct crystals, the petrified sweat of the rock and the age-old stalactites. Perhaps, by the miracle of the love that united them so closely, they were projected together, as it is taught in their religion, toward the abode where matter no longer has weight, water fluidity and fire heat, and where one enjoys the bliss of endless love.
The Ariégois mountain has kept the secret of the mass without candles, the death without graves and sh
rouds. The book of Nicetas conserved in the treasure, the kisses of lovers, and the bishops’ gestures of benediction, must have been mineralized, mummified by the absence of air. The last Albigensians, immobile, clad in stone, are still celebrating their supreme ceremony in the middle of frozen ferns and dead mica, in a basilica of darkness.
The Doctrine of the Spirit
What, then, was the spiritual poison, the mortal error of souls against which the indignant Occident rose up and caused so much blood to flow? The books in which the ancient verities were enunciated, where the tradition of the spirit had its written bases, were carefully destroyed, to the last page, and we can only recover Cathar thought in the bitter refutations, full of imprecations and threats, of the monks of the time.
The mysterious Nicetas, before departing again for the Orient, to disappear from the society to which he had brought the word, is reputed to have left a written monument of his doctrine. The manuscript must have been conserved with the Cathar treasure in the Château de Montségur and must now repose underground in the grotto of Ornolhac, between the bones of a faithful guardian.
A certain Ramon Fort of Carmanan had one of the sacred books of the Albigensians in his possession at the end of the thirteenth century. Sensing that his life was insecure because of the possession of that book, he confided it to the Seigneur de Cambiac. That seigneur’s wife belonged to the Christian faith and animated by an appetite for treason. She ran to inform the Inquisitors, but when they came, the book had disappeared. Torture made it known that it was in the hands of a certain Guilhem Viguier. Men went to his house to arrest him. He was found dead, seemingly by suicide. What had become of the book? It escaped the fury of the Inquisition. None of those who had kept it amorously and preserved it from destruction were Albigensians. There were no more Albigensians then. The radiant power of the doctrine had disengaged from the parchment the vivacious force that permitted the book to subsist, engendering fidelity in the hearts of those who possessed it but were no longer able to comprehend it. It must have been conserved for a long time in the archives of a château blackened by the old sieges of the time of faith. But where is Ramon Fort’s book now?57
Almost all the authors who have studied the doctrine of the Albigensians have affirmed with the powerful authority that Christian prejudice gives and the ignorance that renders it invulnerable, that the Albigensians were either Manicheans or Catholic heresiarchs, of which the religion of Christ engenders so many. They are mistaken.
The Roman Church, in burning and extirpating, was logical from its own point of view. History shows that it had vowed the destruction of everything that was not in accord with its intangible dogma. With the Albigensians it was in the presence of an Occidental branch of the Asiatic tree, the flower of the millenarian Vedas, the pure truth of the Orient. The Albigensian belief that, after having spread through the south of France, might have extended its tolerance and its purity throughout the Occident, but which was to expire under the Pyrenean trees, was born under the fig-tree of Kapilavastu where the Buddha preached his reform.
The Albigensians were Occidental Buddhists who impregnated the Oriental doctrine with a mixture of Gnostic Christianity. How the words of the Indian sage were able to fly across the continents and fall into the souls of the people of the Languedoc we do not now, and it is, in any case, of scant importance. Thought has such a great fluidity that we are not sure whether it can act, even without means of expression, simply by the fact of being thought, by virtue of a subtle quality that escapes us. Buddhism traversed the world and it stirred what Catharism was in the people of Oc, then more mystical then sensual. It is probable that after the great surge toward the spirit, persecution and misfortune changed the race, caused it to retrogress and brought it back to the materialism of the southerners of today.
For the Albigensians, the origin of God was unknowable, in the same way that, for the Hindus, Brahma, the cause of causes, is enveloped by a sextuple veil and remains closed to human conception. At a given moment in time, the souls of humans, by virtue of a force of desire that Christians call original sin, were detached from the celestial matrix and the endless spirit is incarnated in matter in order to enjoy it and suffer from it. They commenced a course that, after having brought them to the lowest point of materialization, was to enable them to climb back up from step to step through the organized hierarchies of beings, toward the primal source, the divine spirit from which they were detached.
That latter part of the course, that return to the divine, is operated by successive reincarnations in imperfect human bodies. It is our endeavors in each life, our capacity for detachment, that enables us to elevate ourselves more or less rapidly. The more desires we have, the more we yield to our passions, the more we love that which is material and the more we delay our arrival in the realm of the Spirit.
It is by virtue of an illusion that we place happiness in the satisfaction of our senses. All pleasure of the senses is limited to a counteraction of dolor. Every physical enjoyment is comparable to a backward step that a traveler makes, turning his back on his goal. The goal is the return to the spirit, in which one enjoys endless bliss. That is what the Hindus call Nirvana, which is not, as the ignorant claim, the annihilation of consciousness, but participation in the universal consciousness, or something more subtle and inexpressible, a kind of permanent state of love, which that divine word can scarcely characterize. The means by which that can be reached is the extraction of oneself from the illusory prison of our body, the producer of apparent pleasures.
The Albigensian wisdom, like the Buddhist wisdom, provides a method for annihilating the desire of life, of escaping the law of reincarnation, of reentering in a single existence into the unity of the Spirit. It is a method of renunciation like the one prescribed by the Buddha.
There were several degrees in the sect. Those who simply adhered to it recognized the verity of the enunciated principles, defending them according to their means, but nevertheless continuing to live the life of the world, being believers. They corresponded with those who follow “the middle way” recommended by the Buddha to ordinary people, to the human majority, to all those not animated by a determination for immediate deliverance. Above them were the perfecti. They had sacrificed the life of their body for that of their spirit. They had renounced magnificence of costume, the property of wealth, the joys of nourishment and even the joys of the possession of women.
The perfecti could transmit, by mans of the consolamentum, the sign of purity, to give the dying the invisible aid that permitted them to escape the chain of rebirth and open access to the spiritual realm. The consolamentum was only an external symbol. The Albigensian perfecti were the inheritors of a lost secret originating from the Orient, known to the Gnostics and the first Christians. That secret is based on the transmission of a force of love. The ritual gesture was the material and visible means of projecting the force. Behind it was hidden the gift of the soul, by which the soul was aided to traverse without suffering the narrow portico of death, escape the shadow, and identify with the light.
No other people, at any time, was ever as well-versed in the magical rites that concern death. The consolamentum must have had a power that we cannot suspect, a certain and proven power, so far as the living were concerned, for it could not have propagated with such rapidity otherwise, and it would not have become so popular. The illumination of those who died must have been visible for the observers. And they had, in order to aid one another in dying, procedures that science has lost forever.
In the Black Mountains not far from Carcassonne, a crypt full of skeletons dating from the Albigensian era has been found. “They were laid out in a circle, the heads in the center and the feet at the circumference, like the spokes of a perfect wheel.”58 Those who have studied magic rediscover in that posture for death a very ancient rite serving to facilitate the emergence of the soul and to enable it to traverse the intermediary realms thanks to the boost that union gives.
The co
nsequence of the Albigensian philosophy is that life is bad and that it is appropriate to escape the form that encloses us within it. The principle of creation, the creator God, is therefore evil, since he has engendered form, the cause of evil. He is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, the irascible exterminator, who takes pleasure in punishment and vengeance. The Albigensians saw in that terrible God the retrograde power of matter. Jesus Christ, the symbol of the Word, came to inform humans of the means to escape that God and return to the celestial fatherland. Some people claim that Jesus had no terrestrial existence and only came among humans clad in a spiritual body, and that the miracles recounted in the New Testament have a symbolic character, only being realized on the plane of the Spirit. The blind were only cured of a spiritual blindness because they were blinded by sin. The tomb from which Lazarus returned was the tenebrous abode in which humans imprison themselves voluntarily.
The veritable worship of the Albigensians was that of the Holy Spirit, the divine Paraclete—which is to say, the principle that permits the human spirit to attain the truly real world of which ours is only the inverse or the caricature: the invisible world, the world of pure light, “the permanent and unalterable city.”
What was able to flow from that belief had effects that, in spite of their rigorous logic, appeared monstrous to the men of the twelfth century, just as they appear monstrous to the men of the twentieth century. Suicide, in order to escape the evils of life, aggravated by persecutions, was, if not recommended, at least permitted.
The Albigensians gave themselves willingly to death by opening their veins, like the ancient Romans. But it was prescribed not to terminate life thus until one had attained absolute calm and complete indifference, in order to avoid in the afterlife the anguish obtained by a death obtained in anguish. The executioners of the Inquisition often found the Albigensian perfecti exsanguinated in their dungeons and bearing in the pallor of their visages the reflection of the eternal light toward which they had lunched themselves.
The Blood of Toulouse Page 25