Cathares and their symbols

Between March and May, 1978 I hauled my skipping and ever-cheerful four-year-old son, S., to France. I was working as a chauffeur, tour-guide, and companion to a millionaire American who wanted to visit France and left the hauling, driving, and planning to me. We lived for a few months in the beautiful little town of Cordes, not far from Albi. My bouncing boy attended the creche (pre-school) and coped as well as he could with the language while I showed my boss around the region, took her to all the sites, and conducted my Cathare research at the feet of a wise and generous Frenchwoman, Madame Lucienne Touren. Madame was a life-long admirer of the Cathares , and she accepted my enthusiasm and didn't ask for credentials (which was good, since at that time I had none and my French was halting and ungrammatical). During those months I lived and walked where the Cathares had lived, ate what they had eaten, read Madame's books about them, and during my boss's side-trip to Egypt, when S. and I were left alone in Cordes and I didn't have to drive, I tried to induce in myself the hallucinogenic state the Cathares acquired from their habit of waking every few hours around the clock. They woke themselves to pray; I woke to write in my journal and keep a record of the experiment. I did hallucinate a bit, but mostly I fell asleep and woke up blaming myself for failing. Madame said it was not my fault, that it was the strength of the Cathares' community and purity of belief that woke them, and not a flimsy alarm clock.

I was drawn to the Cathares because of their four principles: non-violence, vegetarianism, avoidance of heterosexual activity, and charity; and because among them women and men had been equals, a condition otherwise unheard of in the medieval world. They formed life-long same-sex pairs and wandered around France relieving suffering and administering a ritual called the Consolamentum, which is fascinating but way beyond the scope of a blip. They were known throughout the region for their purity, although the Roman Catholic church called them heretics, mounted an inquisition against them, tortured them, and massacred several hundred thousand of them and their followers. Their torturers called them Albigensians. I wanted to write a play about them. That's another project never finished, though the process of gathering the information was one of the great adventures of my life.

I am blipping these stones tonight because Chaiselongue blipped a peek at the croix occitane today, and that got me thinking more about the Cathares, who featured in a minor role in my blip yesterday. I purchased the two river stones in this picture from a stonemason in Cordes who did a little light tourist business selling stones when he wasn't busy restoring gargoyles and masonry. He sold both designs as "croix Cathare" in his shop. He told me the more complicated design was the real Cathare cross, the ancient one, but I've never been able to corroborate that. It features the distaff as part of the cross because many Cathares supported themselves by weaving. The simpler one, he said, is easier to represent and has been popularized as the croix Cathare and re-emerged as the croix occitane.