The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  Guilhelm’s stinging eyes widened in sudden discovery. On the night of Jourdaine’s death, he and Esclarmonde had scrambled the letters ROMA to form AMOR. He performed the kabbalistic operation again and came up with ROTA. The Latin word for wheel, turning ...

  Revolution.

  Whoever had created these cards was trying to preserve the subversive teachings of the Cathars for future generations: The scroll protected by this High Priestess would one day turn the world upside down—but only if it were rediscovered.

  Otto demanded Guilhelm’s attention with a sharp kick. “Was there a gospel guarded by those witches on Montsegur? Forged by an imposter claiming to be the brother of Our Lord?” Receiving no response, he grasped Guilhelm’s sweat-soaked beard. “Were your Templar brethren infected with its lies?”

  Guilhelm begged to pass out. “Have done with me!”

  “They say you were her troubadour.”

  “I told you! I knew no such woman!”

  “The wretches called out her name from the fires,” said Otto. “The dying don’t waste their last breaths on the whimsies of minstrels.” He turned to a hooded scribe who sat at a tallow-lit table in the corner. “How went the one?”

  The scribe read from the confession of an Occitan prisoner who had admitted hearing Guilhelm perform servientes in courts on both sides of the Pyrenees. “‘May God save and guard the Guardian Lady of Montsegur, for she is peerless in delicate beauty,” the scribe droned in a monotone. “Men would not die, it is my belief, as soon as they do now, if they only knew the joy of such a love.’”

  Otto grinned with derision at Guilhelm’s love-sick paean. He leaned near the Templar’s ear to impart a final indignity, “The conversios say she baptized them in her bed. Yet she never permitted you to taste of her sweetness ... Is that why you abandoned her after Muret?”

  Guilhelm lunged in an attempt to bull the Dominican into the fire, but the ropes wrangled him back to the floor. Groaning, he sank his head between his knees and waited for the rope’s retaliation.

  Otto grasped Guilhelm’s hair and arched his neck. “On the next ascent, stretch the throat,” he whispered. “Deliverance will come quicker.”

  The monk surrenders too soon! Guilhelm cursed under his breath, only then realizing that he had unwittingly given up what the inquisitors had sought all along. If the Cathar gospel did not exist, even a Templar trained to endure the horrors of Moslem executioners would fabricate a claim of its survival to avoid such a cruel death. In an effort to throw Otto off the path of the scroll, he had spoken of gold, then of the Shroud and the Cup. But Otto and his conniving friars cared naught about lucre or relics. What they wanted was confirmation of the gospel’s existence and—more importantly—its perpetual suppression.

  Guilhelm suspected that the Dominicans had finally calculated from the Montsegur rolls that he escaped with the three Occitans on the night before the surrender. His fellow climbers had likely been captured and, refusing to speak, sent to the stake. He himself had survived for six years disguised as an itinerant troubadour, walking from village to village while bearing whispered witness to Esclarmonde’s fate. When the Inquisition agents began closing in, he buried the relics and scroll in the barrens of the Languedoc and took refuge in the isolated foothills of Aragon. But the Calatravans, settling an old score, had caught up with him near the monastery of San Juan de la Pena and had handed him over. Now, with his imminent death, Rome would be assured that the only surviving evidence of Our Lord’s true mission remained lost forever.

  And Esclarmonde’s sacrifice will have been in vain.

  Perverse and wicked world! As he waited to leave its bloody clutches, he searched his fevered memory and could sift only two verities that had proven constant throughout his miserable life. The first: The Church always appropriated the virtues and spiritual mastery of its buried enemies. He had seen that strategy played out firsthand when the Temple adopted the ways of its fanatical Syrian rivals, the Assassini. Now, Rome was cleverly at work confiscating the very ideals preached by the Cathars that it had massacred. By sanctioning the Assisi monk’s new order of mendicants, the Vatican was scraping the palimpsest of history and championing such reforms as fathered sui generis. These Franciscans, as they were being called, modeled themselves on the lives of the Bon Hommes by walking barefoot across Christendom and imitating the Apostles in charity, poverty, and respect for the lowest of God’s creatures.

  The second certitude flowed from the first. Since the days of their wolf-suckling ancestors, the imperious Romans had cultivated a savage blood thirst for turning on their own. Deprived of their popular death games, they had transmogrified the monastic orders into teams of spiritual gladiators, pitting the tonsured dogs against one another in public spectacles just as vicious and tawdry as the ancient Colosseum duels. The rabid Dominicans spread rumors that the Franciscans were rife with the Occitan heresy. The Franciscans countered that the Black Friars had become decadent bons viveurs with their false claims that Christ wore shoes and carried a money purse on His belt. The Cistercians, looking down their long noses at both upstart orders, turned Dominic Guzman’s famous indictment on its head by condemning their fellow brethren as Pharisees in Christian garb.

  “I almost envy you, Templar.” Otto yanked Guilhelm’s scalp to regain his attention. The monk retrieved the session’s testimony and dispatched the parchment to the flames. “Soon you will learn if the woman—”

  “Your mother!” reminded Guilhelm.

  Otto signaled for the scribe to desist from recording that claim. With a lording smile, he turned back to Guilhelm to finish his taunt. “You are about to learn if the woman was a prophetess or a demoness.” After contemplating that mystery longer than faith would permit, the monk nodded for the henchmen to complete their grisly work. He looked down at Guilhelm as if wishing to ask one question more, then thought better of it and departed the chamber.

  The strappado raised Guilhelm’s limp arms again. He cried out in anticipation of the agony, but this time his mangled body floated miraculously, as if exalted by angels. The Moorish laceria scored into the tiles slowly alchemized into a beatific vision: Before him lay the sun-drenched pog of Montsegur, just as he remembered it when he had first climbed its jagged slopes with the most beautiful maiden in all Occitania.

  “You owe me a song,” said a dulcet voice above him.

  Guilhelm shook the blood from his burning eyes and looked toward the approaching rafters to find the source of that accusation.

  “Race me to the top,” said the voice, full of playful challenge. “Whilst we climb, you can tell me about your many deeds of valor.”

  A swirling, golden nimbus descended around Guilhelm’s head, nearly blinding him. He protested weakly, “I could never sing!”

  “You are my troubadour, and always will be. If I reach the summit before you, I wish a story well sung for my prize.”

  “I cannot—”

  “Look!” teased the voice. “I’ve gained the crest!”

  “Esclarmonde!” he cried. “I failed you again!”

  “You have never failed me, Guilhelm.”

  “The gospel!”

  “We have marked the path for others to follow,” she promised. “One day, when the world despairs, the way to the Light will be discovered anew ... Now, my beloved, you must come to me.”

  “I cannot find you!”

  “Have you forgotten?”

  “Forgotten?”

  “To be in love is to reach for Heaven through your lady.”

  Reminded of that old troubadour promise, Guilhelm strived with all his waning strength to grasp her outstretched hand. At last he conquered Montsegur’s cliffs and dragged his battered body over the precipice. Chaliced in a dazzling white effulgence, Esclarmonde sat waiting for him on their boulder. He crawled to her side and rested his battered head on her lap. In the vale below, rolling waves of bluegrass and goldenrod swept across the Ariege valley like warring armies of shadow and sun. She kissed him
sweetly and offered a viol for him to play. He strummed a chord, and paid his final debt:

  I pray thee, seeker, forget thee not this tale now finally done, Though priests will wish it never told and knaves will curse it falsely spun. In once a castled land where sun turned moon and moon turned sun,

  Did shine a Light to chase the Dark, my lady, Esclarmonde.

  It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in’t.

  - Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

  Author’s Note

  Lamenting the dearth of Cathar accounts of the Albigensian Crusade, the historian Zoe Oldenbourg observed: “If the centuries had preserved the work of some Catharist Vaux de Cernay, telling the deeds and gestes of his spiritual leaders, the miracles God had wrought on their behalf, and describing the grandeur of their work, then no doubt the Crusade would present a radically different appearance to us.”

  If Oldenbourg is correct, then history has not given us the full story of the Cathars. It thus falls to the historical novelist to imagine what might have happened but can never be proven. Jane Austen understood this subversive task when she had her heroine in Northanger Abbey remark about history, “I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention... ”

  In my quest for this “radically different” view, I relied on many of my own suppositions, creations, interpretations, as well as some variances from the few contemporaneous accounts. As with any novel, there are by necessity imagined thoughts, motives, conversations, and actions.

  Over the centuries, the three Esclarmondes became merged into one legendary Esclarmonde of Montsegur. The execution rolls of March 16, 1244, confirmed that Esclarmonde de Perella, an invalid perfecta, was burned with her mother, Corba, and her grandmother, the Marquessa de Lanta. The Viscountess Esclarmonde de Foix was not listed among those who surrendered, but she held the chateau in her inheritance and was believed by some to have directed its reconstruction. She participated in the Pamiers disputation and became so celebrated that Pope Innocent III condemned her ex cathedra during the Fourth Lateran Council. Angered that a woman would dare contend in matters of theology, the Catholic chroniclers gave her short shrift by depicting an unlikely scene in which she was cowed to silence after being admonished to return to her spinning. Her relationship with her brother was acrimonious. Called to account in Rome, Count Roger de Foix publicly denounced Esclarmonde and her Cathar faith. Some sources suggest that Esclarmonde may have died as early as 1215, but the historian Goodrich and others have noted that nothing is known about the circumstances of her death. Professor Goodrich even speculated that the Viscountess could have undertaken the Endura at Montsegur. In this novel, I explored the possibility that she lived much longer than thought, and that reports of her passing were spread to confuse the leaders of the Crusade.

  In the preface, I described how the word Mallorca appeared to me in the dream that gave birth to this novel. During the writing of this story, I learned that the House of Aragon held land in southern France, including Perpignan, the capital of the short-lived Kingdom of Mallorca. The Mallorcan fortress still stands a half-day’s drive from Montsegur. The Balearic island of Mallorca, now part of Spain, was a haven for Cathar and Templar refugees. A few decades after the capitulation of Montsegur, a female descendant of the extended Perella family married James, the King of Aragon and Mallorca. After his father’s death at Muret, James was entrusted into the care of the Knights Templar in Aragon. His new queen came from Foix—and her name was Esclarmonde.

  Folques de Marseilles is an equally fascinating character. As a young troubadour, he enjoyed the patronage of Foix and undoubtedly sang for Esclarmonde. He took the Cistercian vow after being spurned in love by a lady. I supplied his romantic interest in Esclarmonde. Their paths crossed many times, and his vengeance against her would have been consistent with his hatred of the woman-worshiping culture that had so injured him. As Bishop of Toulouse, he prosecuted the Occitan massacres with such fury that his name is reviled in southwest France to this day. It was said that he suffered greatly in his last years on hearing his old chansons sung in public. Dante, who has been accused of Gnostic leanings, inexplicably placed Folques in his Paradisio, perhaps empathic to a fellow poet whose soul was so tortured.

  Less is known about Guilhelm de Montanhagol. He left us servientes extolling Esclarmonde, and he was heralded by medieval chroniclers as her troubadour. He became so critical of the Cathar persecution that he was forced to escape to Aragon. I portrayed him as an apostate Knight Templar; there is a record of Templar troubadours, as well as echoes of a covert collaboration between the Cathars and the Temple, which would suffer its own persecution six decades after Montsegur’s fall. Both groups were rumored to have discovered evidence casting doubt on the Roman Church’s legitimacy.

  Did the Cathars protect the Holy Grail, or whatever it represented? There are tantalizing similarities between Montsegur and Montsalvache, the Grail Castle of Cretien de Troyes. Some researchers suspect that crusaders brought the Keramion vessel and Mandylion shroud from Constantinople to Montsegur. In France, two camps have drawn battle lines on this issue. Traditional academicians and some modern admirers reject the possibility of Cathar involvement with the Grail, Jewish kabbalah, Islamic mysticism, Light meditation, and sacred architecture, contending that the faith had no use for magic or relics. Yet exponents of the more mystical view refuse to rely on evidence extracted by torture and shaped by the Inquisition. As was famously said by the French writer Simone Weil, who was sympathetic to the Cathars: “Official history is believing the murderers at their word.”

  The dubious value of such forced confessions is made even more apparent by the contradictions one encounters when attempting to understand the Cathars. The perfects were said to loathe the world, and yet they embraced, and were embraced by, the world-loving troubadours. The crusade brought utter destruction upon Occitania, but the Catholic nobles of that region persisted in treating their Cathar subjects with great respect and admiration. The perfects avoided sexual encounters and yet they nurtured the ideals of chivalry and considered women their equal in intelligence and spirituality.

  Every faith has its cadre of initiates whose esoteric practices are kept hidden from the laity, and the Cathar perfects were likely no exception. They may well have protected the traditions of the first Christians, the Gnostics, and perhaps the Druids. Investigators such as Fernand Niel and Arthur Guirdham have found too many synchronicities to dismiss the Cathars as mere misguided strays. Rather, such defenders contend that the Bon Hommes inherited the arcana of the soul’s individual quest for the salvatory Light from the Egyptians, the Zoroastrians, the Essenes, and the Nasoreans, whose descendants include the persecuted Mandeans of modern Iraq. Oldenbourg recognized the possibility that some form of esoteric sun worship once took on Montsegur, and even the most hardened of rationalists concede that a mysterious treasure appears to have been secreted from Montsegur the night before the surrender. The present ruins, which were reconstructed after the surrender in 1244 on the old foundations, possess a perplexing design poorly suited for defensive purposes.

  The greatest of all the mysteries may be this: Why would the Cathars accept such a horrific martyrdom if they did not possess knowledge of a more authentic version of early Christianity? That question vexed the Cistercians and Dominicans, who deemed fortitude in the face of death to be the exclusive privilege of Christ’s true followers.

  In the end, we are left with mostly circumstantial evidence: Cave discoveries of skeletons arranged in a circle and accompanied by Cathar etchings; testimonies of the German poet and archaeologist Otto Rahn, who scoured Montsegur and claimed to have found underground Grail chambers; the tantalizing dimensions of Montsegur’s ruins that Niel correlated to the seasons of the sun; and claims by local shepherds that Esclarmonde’s spirit still inhabits the mountain.

  Having stood on these haunting Occitan sites and felt both their power and sadness, I count myself amon
g those who believe that something remarkable happened in these desolate foothills and causses, only to be crushed by a Church that could not bear the impact of the threatened revelations. I also came to suspect that the Cathar gnosis and the suppressed story of that faith’s demise were preserved within the Tarot, whose origins become lost in the latter part of the fourteenth century. Halfway into writing the novel, I found confirmation for this intuition in the works of Margaret Starbird, a biblical scholar who has written on Cathar gnosticism and the rejected feminine elements of Christianity.

  As the Gnostic gospels warn, Darkness will always seek out the Light. In a tragic irony, the Nazis became obsessed with the Cathars, victims of the first western holocaust. And yet these two groups, one pacifist and the other genocidal, could not have been more different in beliefs and conduct. During the occupation of France, the S.S. became so convinced that the Cathars possessed the Holy Grail that they conducted searches in the region.

  Today, pilgrims can still walk the flagstones of St. Nazaire Cathedral in Beziers, explore the refugee caves of Lombrives, feel the wind above Esclarmonde’s towers in Foix, gaze upon the reconstructed walls of Carcassonne, climb the Pas de Trebuchet up Montsegur, and stand in mourning on the Field of the Burned. Near these places, on bridges and gravestones and ancient walls, graffiti can be seen calling for the return of Occitan independence and the resurrection of the lost troubadour language. These places remain sacred to those who fight for freedom of spiritual conscience. Their whispering stones were the only voices that Esclarmonde and the Cathars were permitted to leave us.

  Children tell stories,

  but in their tales are enfolded

  many a mystery and moral lesson.

  Though they may relate many ridiculous things,

  keep looking in those ruined places