The Master Game

by Graham Hancock

  It is perhaps significant that the national memorial later built in Washington, DC in honour of George Washington was in the form of a huge Egyptian-style obelisk, and that on its eastern entrance was displayed the ancient Egyptian symbol of the solar disc. It is reported that during the dedication ceremony a prominent Mason read a speech and, after extolling the virtues of Freemasons, added those strange words: Their minds enlightened with divine love, their hearts radiant with discovering of pure love, their souls cherishing – like the ancient Egyptian worshippers of Osiris – the hope of immortality.61

  We shall see later how many of the symbols involved with the cornerstone ceremonies of the Capitol and the Washington Monument were veiled with symbolism involving the ‘star of Isis’ i.e. Sirius. Meanwhile we hope that it has become fairly evident that, for reasons and motives not yet too clear, the ceremonies, festivities, and city monuments associated with the ‘sister’ American and French Revolutions display Masonic ideas and imagery and, perhaps even more intriguing, are heavily tinged with ‘Egyptian’ connotations and symbols.

  Part I:

  The Secret Fatith

  CHAPTER TWO

  LOST WORLD

  Mixed with the many other currents and forces that are acknowledged to have driven the French Revolution we've tried to demonstrate in Chapter One that powerful religious and spiritual energies were also at play. These energies surfaced visibly in an aggressive de-Christianisation campaign that saw great cathedrals, including the famous Notre Dame in Paris, reconsecrated as temples of the ‘Supreme Being’. Throughout the land, ancient Egyptian and other ‘pagan’ images were substituted for Christian symbols, notably the cross, and even ancient Egyptian deities such as the goddess Isis were venerated. The Convention was thus not referring to the God of the Christians, or to the Christian vision of the afterlife, when it affirmed in 1794 that the ‘People of France recognise the existence of the Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul.’

  Strange and startling though these developments were, the late 18th century was not the first time that a religion utterly opposed to Christianity, showing signs of an ancient Egyptian influence, and deeply interested in the fate of the soul, had taken root in the land we now know as France. In the 12th century, more than 600 years before the Revolution, just such an alternative religion had materialised in Provence and Langeudoc – seemingly out of nowhere – already deeply entrenched in the hearts and minds of large sectors of the population. It was also present in force in adjoining districts of eastern Spain and northern Italy, and scattered in smaller communities throughout the rest of Europe as far afield as Belgium, northern France and Germany.

  The name of this religion that had so rapidly and successfully displaced the Roman Catholic Church in areas so close to the seat of its own power was … Christianity.

  At any rate its practitioners called themselves ‘Good Christians’, but the Church, labelled them heretics from the moment they first came to its attention. Their contemporaries in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries frequently called them Manichees (after the ancient dualist heresy of Manicheism, supposedly wiped out in Europe hundreds of years previously). And they were known by a wide variety of other epithets including, most commonly, Albigensians (after Albi, a prominent city of Languedoc), and Cathars (derived from the Greek word katharos and meaning the ‘Pure’).1

  These Cathars (the name that we will generally use here) venerated Jesus Christ every bit as much as the Catholics did. That was why they called themselves ‘Good Christians’. But the place that he occupied in their religion was radically different. In the Catholic view Christ was the ‘Word … made flesh’ who ‘dwelt among us’.2 The Cathars repudiated this utterly and worshipped him as a being of pure spirit – an emanation from the ‘Good God’, a projection or an apparition. They categorically denied his material incarnation as the ‘Son’ of God, born in a human body to ‘dwell among us’. They also forcefully rejected the Catholic teaching of Christ crucified to redeem our sins. How could he have been crucified, they asked, if he had never existed physically in the first place? Far from revering the central spiritual symbol of Christianity, therefore, the Cathars denied the significance of the cross. For them it was an obscene instrument of torture that the Church of Rome had misled millions into worshipping as an idol.

  Turning the most cherished symbols, doctrines and dogmas of Christianity upside down like this was a Cathar speciality that infuriated and repeatedly challenged the medieval Catholic Church.

  The source of the problem was that unlike the single all-powerful and all-good God of the Christians, the Cathars were dualists who believed in the parallel existence of two deities – a God of Good and a God of Evil. Each was powerful only in his own domain and nearly impotent in the realm of the other. The domain of the God of Good was entirely spiritual, intangible, immaterial and filled with Light. It was here that human souls had originated – the creation of the Good God. The domain of the God of Evil was the earth itself, the material world and all physical life upon it – an infernal place of pain and punishment filled with Darkness and iniquity. In the Cathar scheme of things it was the God of Evil, the maker and ruler of the material world, who had fashioned the bodies (though not the souls) of mankind out of ‘mud and water’. And it was towards this same Evil God, Cathar preachers argued, that the worship of the Roman Catholic Church was directed.

  The pope, in other words, was not a servant of the Good God but the Devil's representative on earth. And the purpose of the Catholic Church was not to transmit our souls to the spiritual and light-filled domain of heaven after death, but to trick us into returning again and again – in one human incarnation after another – to the hell-realm of the material world. Only a lifetime of self-denial culminating in the special gnosis – or inspired knowledge – attained on initiation into the highest grade of the Cathar faith could save us.

  It was a revolutionary teaching and, in 12th century Europe, an extremely dangerous one.

  Hesitating at the crossroads

  During the period of world history for which written records have survived – most of the last 5,000 years – no scholar would seriously argue with the proposition that religions have played a fundamental role in shaping the character of civilisation and directing its course. Likewise few would dispute that the human race during this period has consistently been divided not only by different languages and cultures but also by the competing spheres of influence of different religions. Some ancient faiths that once commanded absolute obedience across vast areas have withered away and vanished. Others that were insignificant have risen to prominence. Others still are almost forgotten in their original homelands but have flourished in distant lands. Against the recent background of rampant secularism in many rich countries, and rampant religious fervour in many poor ones, we are left today with four great faiths commanding distinct socio-geographic spheres of influence, that still collectively claim the allegiance of roughly nine of every ten of us: • Hinduism is strong only in the Indian subcontinent but there it has over 800 million adherents.

  • Buddhism sprawls from Sri Lanka to Tibet, and from China to Southeast Asia and Japan.

  • Islam has hundreds of millions of followers in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, the Levant and North Africa, but its heartland and historical home is in the Arabian peninsula.

  • Christianity has a near-monopoly in the Americas, having obliterated or utterly marginalised all the New World's indigenous faiths during the past 500 years. It also predominates in Australia, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and other areas of former European colonial expansion. It's historical home is in the eastern Mediterranean. However, after the triumph of Islam in the Middle East and North Africa more than a thousand years ago, Christianity's heartland moved to Europe itself.

  Today, as a result, it is a habit of mind to think of Europe as a region locked so firmly and for so long within the Christian sphere of influence that no other faith need be consid
ered to have shaped its destiny. For scholars prepared to look hard enough there are, of course, faint traces of earlier, pagan beliefs in the European heritage, but these are rarities and throwbacks – quaint exotica with no mainstream impact. Whether we travel to Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain or Switzerland, the reality is that all the countries of Europe confront us with very long unbroken traditions of Christianity. In some cases these traditions substantially predate the fourth century AD when the Roman Empire under Constantine adopted Christianity as its state religion and established Rome (where a persecuted Christian community had already existed for 250 years3) as the headquarters of the newly empowered Catholic Church.

  Almost immediately after coming into imperial favour the formerly persecuted church fathers themselves turned persecutors. They sought to impose their control on Christians throughout the Roman Empire, to suppress schisms and to distil a universally agreed doctrine out of the great variety of teachings that the faith had previously encompassed. To this end, as we will see in later chapters, they promulgated dogmas and defined and declared anathemas upon a whole series of heresies. These were then systematically hunted down and obliterated over the next three centuries.

  Notable among the forbidden faiths was the great dualist heresy of Manicheism (to which no less a figure than Saint Augustine, one of the four most revered ‘doctors of the Church’, had belonged for nine years before converting to Christianity in AD 386).4 Claiming to lead to direct and personal knowledge of the divine, all forms of Gnosticism were also persecuted to vanishing point. Influenced by elements of the ancient Egyptian religion, Asian and Middle Eastern mysticism, Greek philosophy, and alternative interpretations of Jewish and Christian teachings, Gnosticism was as profoundly dualistic as Manicheism and was for some centuries the chief rival to Roman Catholic hegemony.5

  By the seventh century, however, Manicheism had been expelled to the distant East, and the numerous Gnostic sects that had confronted the early church seemed to have been obliterated.6 No longer facing any organised spiritual competition, Catholicism was able to see out the remainder of the Western Dark Ages with its defences relaxed. The result, by the early 11th century, was that churchmen had no living experience of heresy. Those who sought to remind themselves of its dangers could only turn to books – amongst them Saint Augustine's agonised account of his own ‘errors’ as a ‘Manichee’ written 700 years earlier.7

  It therefore came as a something of a jolt when a heresy (looking very much like Manicheism) suddenly resurfaced in the 12th century in the form of Catharism in areas at the very heart of Western culture. Moreover it proved to be no transitory movement linked to the lives of a few charismatic leaders but the most deadly threat ever to confront the Catholic faith. Appearing as though from nowhere it was a well-organised ‘anti-Church’ that claimed an antiquity even greater than that of Catholicism itself. It also had the temerity to recruit its new members directly from Catholic ranks.

  What made Catharism such a threat and outrage to the Catholic Church, however, was not just its embarrassing success at converting Catholics, nor the challenge of its doctrines – radical though they were. Nor was it simply the shock of confronting a dualist heresy that seemed to have conjured itself up out of the past like a ghost. Nor was it the heresy's obvious dynamism, nor the uncomfortably rapid spread of its sphere of influence ever closer to Rome during the 12th century. The real problem was that as well as winning over large numbers of ordinary people, Catharism had succeeded in attracting the tacit and sometimes even the overt support of some of the most powerful noble families in southwestern Europe. These included, most notably, the Counts of Toulouse, the Counts of Foix, and the Trencavel viscounts who ruled the walled cities of Albi, Béziers and Carcassonne. With their knights and castles and strength of arms concentrated in the Languedoc and surrounding areas, such men had transformed Catharism into something that the Church of Rome had never faced before. Here was a heresy that could fight back, that would not easily be crushed by the use of secular force, and that might conceivably, if allowed to grow further, push the Catholic religion out of Europe altogether.

  For more than a century, with consequences that reach us today, European civilisation hesitated at the crossroads of two competing spiritual systems and confronted the choice of two very different ways forward into the future. Let's take a closer look at the key players and events during this decisive period of history.

  A language in which ‘oc’ means ‘yes’

  Languedoc today is part of the colourful mosaic of southern France. It adjoins Provence to the east and is separated from Spain to the west by the Pyrenees mountains. In the 12th and 13th centuries it was famed for the romantic poetry of its troubadours, for its ‘Courts of Love’,8 for the fiercely independent character of its people, and for its unique culture.

  Underlining this sense of difference was the basic fact that the people of Provence and Languedoc had never been French subjects and did not even speak French. Indeed at that time what the word ‘France’ conjured to mind for most was just the Ile de France, the region immediately around Paris. More broadly defined, ‘France’ also included the territories lying between the Loire, the middle part of the Meuse and the Scheldt. But the lands to the south of the Loire and south of the Massif Central, as well as the whole of the Mediterranean coast, were excluded. As late as the 14th century travellers heading north from Toulouse or Avignon thought of themselves as journeying to ‘France’ rather than within it.9

  Together with the regions of Limousin and old Aquitaine, and the southern part of the French Alps, Languedoc and Provence were known in medieval times by the collective name of Occitania. They by no means formed a ‘state’ or a ‘country’ as we understand those concepts today. On the contrary, other than to family, friends and neighbours, the primary loyalties of the majority of the inhabitants were to the town or city in which they lived or to the aristocrats whose fields they ploughed. Still they had much more in common with each other than they did with the cultural and political community of northern states that were in the process of becoming ‘France’. And above all else these ‘Occitanians’ were united by their common language, literally the langue d'oc – that is to say the language in which the word for ‘yes’ is oc (as opposed to the langue d'oil, the 12th century language that was to evolve into modern French, in which the word for ‘yes’ was oil – later to become the more familiar oui of today).

  Medieval scholar Joseph Strayer points out that the French of the north and the Occitan of the south are separated by one of the sharpest breaks in the whole family of Romance languages and are mutually incomprehensible. Occitan is, however, very close to Catalan and quite close to Castilian. The result is that in the 12th century: A merchant from Narbonne would have been easily understood in Barcelona, while he would have needed an interpreter in Paris … A baron of the Ile de France would have found more men to talk to in London, or even in Cologne, than he would have in Toulouse. Now a language barrier is not an impassable obstacle, but it is a real one, and it is the kind of barrier that creates misunderstandings and suspicions.10

  The mailed fist of Occitania

  Power in Occitania was in the hands of a feudal aristocracy dominated by the three great families of Foix, Trencavel and Toulouse.

  Described at the time as ‘the peers of kings, the superiors of dukes and counts’,11 the princes of the house of Toulouse ruled a domain extending from Toulouse itself to Nimes in the east, and from Cahors in the north to Narbonne on the Mediterranean coast.12 They also enjoyed, and could sometimes call upon, an impressive range of international alliances. Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse from 1194 – 1222, for example, was a cousin of the king of France and brother-in-law to the kings both of England and of Aragon.13 He also tolerated and sometimes even promoted Catharism and travelled with a Cathar holy man.14

  The Counts of Foix, lords of the high Pyrenees along the border with Spain, were r
enowned for their military prowess, stubborn ruthlessness, and strong Cathar connections. In 1204 Raymond-Roger, Count of Foix from 1188 – 1223, witnessed the reception of his widowed sister Esclarmonde into the perfecti (literally the ‘perfect’), the highest rank of Cathar initiates.15 Two years later his own wife, having born him six children, was also received into the perfecti and retired from the world to preside over the Cathar equivalent of a nunnery.16 Though never avowedly a Cathar himself, Raymond-Roger was staunchly anti-Catholic all his life. On one occasion it seems that soldiers in his employ chopped a canon of the Church into pieces and used ‘the arms and legs of a crucifix to grind up spices with, in lieu of a pestle.‘17 In a lengthy essay on ‘the barbarity and malignity of the Count of Foix’ a contemporary pro-Catholic chronicler wrote: His wickedness exceeded all bounds … He pillaged monasteries, destroyed churches, excelled all others in cruelty.18

  The Trencavel dynasty, controlling lands that stretched from the Tarn to the Pyrenees, added their own combination of wealth, hereditary influence, military might and pro-Cathar sympathies to the equation of power in Languedoc. Raymond-Roger Trencavel, who ruled from 1194 until his capture and murder by Catholics in 1209, had been tutored by the well-known Cathar scholar Bertrand de Saissac. The latter had once shown his contempt for the laws of Catholicism when a monk he disliked was elected abbot at the monastery of Saint Mary of Alet. Bertrand's response was to have the corpse of the former abbot exhumed and placed, mouldering, in the abbatial chair to supervise a new election. Not surprisingly the abbot elected on this occasion did meet with Bertrand's favour.19