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TRANSCRIPT #29 - The Cathars

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Vulcan59:

--- Quote ---The Cathars

Announcer: This is  radio-free Signs of the Times....broadcasting into the heart of an occupied America.

Joe: You are welcome to another signs of the times podcast. This is our final podcast of 2005 and rather than do the standard look back at the year and the yearly round up we decided to ignore all that and do something completely different. This week we have a guest and since we are in France we decided that it was about time we had a French guest. With us tonight is Pierre who is from Marseilles and he is interested in the Cassiopaea material and the various other aspects of the Cassiopaea site and we thought that we we would just have him on the show tonight to talk little bit about things that he knows about and you are going to find out exactly what they are throughout the course of the next half hour or so. So Pierre you are very welcome to the our end of the year podcast and so...

Henry: We'd like to thank you for coming in and subjecting yourself to this.

Pierre: Yes.

Joe: Yes, so maybe you can tell us about a little bit about yourself.

Pierre: Thanks all and thanks to the Quantum Future Group for your interest and for welcoming me tonight. Well I am some French. I am 33 years old. I first studied engineering and then management. Currently I am working as a management position. Some hobbies like sports, nature and what we call now esoterism I am born in Toulouse and I am currently living in Marseilles, Southern France.

Henry: And how did you first find the Cassiopaea websites?

Pierre: I discovered the Cassiopaen website say 4, 5 years ago. I have always had a strong interest in how can we call that, hidden things or invisible things. I went to Buddhism, Taoism, Freemasonry all those schools where you can touch or reach the invisible and along this quest, through books, chats  and Internet research, I finally found this Cassiopaen website.

Joe: So are you a Mason?

Pierre: (Laughing) Most Masons when there are, they say there are not and when there are not, they say they are. [Joe: Ah ha, so where does that leave us?] (Laughter) [Henry: You'll never get a straight answer.] (Laughter) [Joe: We'll never know.] I mean I've been and I stop and that's not the place that I find the answers to my questions, definitely, but it was a interesting experience..

Joe: Did you learn how to build anything? Like a house or wall or something? [Pierre:(Laughing) Or Solomon temple.] Yeah.

Pierre: No, (laughing) nothing like that, (laughing) nothing like that

Henry: You didn't make it up to the 33rd degree? [Pierre: Laughing]

Joe: That's where you learn to build your own house, you know, for like ten dollars (laughter) or something. That's the deep secret, cause I mean they are Masons right? Got to be some aspect to like you know putting bricks and mortar together, right?

Henry: Using old copies of dogma and morals as building materials.

Pierre: I've build a house with 33 levels in it (laughing) [Joe: Ah ha] It's a pretty big house. (laughter)

Joe: Okay so we understand that when Ark and Laura were in Marseilles a few months back which, the pictures from that trip actually can be seen on, there is a link on the Signs website, we understand that you offered to take Laura to see a historic site which we know that she has talked a little bit about to us anyway but what exactly was that site and can you give us some details about it?

Pierre: In Marseilles there is one big dominant church called Notre Dame de la Garde where every tourist goes and there is another less famous church called St. Victor  Church. I think it is an interesting building because of different reasons. First of all, it is the very old church, maybe the oldest Christian church in Western Europe. It was build in 4th century AD. Second, it is dedicated to St.Victor who was one of the saint who slayed dragons like, St. Michel, St. Marcellus, St. George. St.Victor was built by St.Cassian. St.Cassian who came from Bulgaria when the Bogomils develop in the 9th century AD and in the foundations of St. Victor you have a black virgin, black virgin with an infant. I find this black virgin tradition quite interesting because it maybe kind of link from Egypt goddess Isis, Mary Magdalena and black virgins and last thing is that St.Cassian you find same waters Cassiopaea, is the one who build the Lumini historic building and Sainte-Baume building and Sainte-Baume is believe to be the place where Mary Magdalen had her hermitage [Henry: Uh hmm] after reaching France.

Henry: And off course Mary Magdalena for those of you that have read the infamous Da Vinci Code is the woman who is purported to be the consort or the spouse of Jesus. We don't believe that for a minute because we think that it was somebody else but we'll talk about that another time. But there are many stories of Mary Magdalene coming to France after the death of Jesus and for those of who don't know [Joe: The alleged death of Jesus, you mean] yes, the alleged death of Jesus, that she lived around Marseilles and there's a cave if I am not..

Pierre: That's right, there is a cave in this mountain called Sainte-Baume as ? cause Baume means “bold??�  in English and that there is a mentioned of baume used between Mary Magdalena and Jesus Christ in the Bible.

Joe: Yeah the alabaster jar.

Pierre: I share the same diagnostic as you as far as Jesus Christ dynamics is concerned.

Henry: We were talking earlier, I think you said that St.Cassian, are the tarot cards of Marseilles attributed to him as well?

Pierre: Yes indeed. St.Cassian is believed to be the one who introduce tarot cards, what we call the genuine one, called Marseilles tarot cards and apparently St.Cassian along his way has been living in Eastern countries and maybe brought back some knowledge from those places, materialized within tarot symbols. [Henry: Uh hmm]

Henry: You mention St.Cassian and the Bogomils. One of the topics we wanted to get on with you is the subjects of the Cathars and the Cathars for those of you who don't know, were a Christian group that flourished in the 11th and 12th century before the church set out to kill them all off with the Crusade in the south of France. They were linked or their origins are tied to the Bogomils. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Pierre: I don't have concrete proofs about the links between Bogomils and the Cathars  but what we can see is all of the centuries from the 4th century until the Cathars and even later, you can perceive all around Mediterranean sea a dualist tradition, [Henry: Uh hmm] I mean a dualist way of seeing the world. [Henry: Uh hmm]

Henry: Maybe you could enlighten our listeners as to what the dualist tradition is?

Pierre: Hope I will enlighten that listeners. More probably I will give some information about dualism. Dualism is a paradigm philosophy region where there would be say two worlds. One material world, that is a world of suffering, of impermanence of fights and rules and dominations and struggles or wars and that is the material world that according to the Cathars is ruled by the bad god, I say Satan. There is also another world that is the good world that is the invisible world that is ruled by the good god. But this tradition is long lasting and wide spread. You can find it in Mitraism, [Henry: Uh hmm] Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, wide spread this vision of world, Bogomils too and later on Cathars.

Henry: It's one of those themes that keep re-emerging and in the work that we've done and especially Laura, you see that there is kind of subterranean teachings that  keeps sprouting from time to time throughout history and the dualism seems to be one of the fundamental ideas in this subterranean teachings. In esoteric Christianity it gets expressed in the ideas of the absolute 1, 2 and 3 where the absolute 3 is this world that we are in now and the absolute 2 would be the world of Christ, the world into which we could be born if that which has to be done before certain time gets accomplished.

Pierre: Yeah, yeah. There's a  lot of connections between Mouravieff works and Cathar philosophy. You mention church, the Roman church and actually in the 11th, 12th and 13th century, there were in a sense two church co-existing, [Henry: Uh hmm] there was the official Roman Church, [Henry: We should say this is in the West because in the East, the Orthodox Church was in existence and by the 11th century there had been a split between the Roman Church and the Orthodox Church.] Indeed. In Southern France you had  two crazy things church a dominating and fierce church and a small and forgiving one.

Henry: It had a great influence on the culture in the Languedoc at the time.

Pierre: Yes. Catharism was wide spread  all along French Mediterranean coast reaching some northern Italian territory and north eastern Spanish territories [Henry: Uh hmm] known as Catalonia now and it became a highly wide spread religion [Henry: Uh hmm] and therefore having a major influence on the cultural dimension way of life in relationship with others with a notions of good and bad and way of seeing the life in the world.

Henry: Languedoc in that time it was a flowering of culture. You had the Troubadours and all that [Pierre: Yeah] and all that is very closely related to the Cathars. There was a culture and an environment that was much different from that inf Northern Europe [Pierre: Yeah] or elsewhere.

Pierre: Actually it shows that, probably the idea as you have been when you are here, obviously in France, religious environment has a strong impact on non religious environment like cultural, economic. The official Roman church and Cathar church was co-existing, I think that fundamentally the teaching of the Cathar religion was highly widespread and those way of seeing the world had a strong impact on economic, cultural and social life and that's why in 11th and 12th century Languedoc, southern France was one of the most developed region in the western world. [Henry: Uh hmm] At the same time Roman church that was spreading different dogmas, different vision of the world lead to kind of under-developing world. [Henry: We certainly see that continuing today. With the effects of the  Catholic Church.] Certainly.

Henry: I know that in the Cathar church and in the south of France in that time, the role of woman was very different than it was elsewhere. Could you talk a bit about that?

Pierre: Behind purely religious dogma, like the nature of Christ, the nature of god, all those concise contents, Cathar religion was carrying a specific vision of society. For example there was not a strong hierarchy [Henry: Uh hmm] as you can see in some other religious organization and there was no differentiation between man and woman. Why, because of this dualist vision of human beings. Human beings are made of, one first component coming from the bad world, that is the flesh, that is the body and the brain, and the second component, that we could call the remains of the fallen angel, the soul, and woman and man come from this same world. So they are fundamentally equal even if their material envelop is slightly different.

Henry: Uh hmm. And the material envelop is impermanent and will leave and what remains will be the permanent soul which is identical between the two.

Joe: Obviously. And the Cathars you know they believed in reincarnation. The idea that, obviously a strong belief in reincarnation would kind of preclude any prejudice against one sex's or the other if you know that you can be one or the other in any future life or past life.

Pierre: Yeah sure the same time I can imagine a vicious religion believing in reincarnation and think that if you not good you will become a woman and if you are not good at all you will become an animal. [Joe: Infinite ways to twist it.] At the same time, seven centuries after the end of, the official end of Catharism, this religion has been erased, almost totally destroyed and it is difficult to talk with a certainty about Catharism.

Henry: Yes because there are very few original documents of their rituals if you could call them that of their prayers or what their religion or philosophy was.

Pierre: Indeed at the same time I think it would be mistake to perceive Catharism as a monolithic religion [Henry: True] There were this specific way of dealing with free will that led to a highly diverse religious movement respecting in a sense the will and way of seeing the world of each of the community member. As far as the Cathar documents are concerned, one of the main reference was the new Gospel and most specifically the St. John Gospel. That is in the sense the source of all the heresies because of this sentence, “My kingdom is not from this world� . That gives legitimacy to another world, to a non-manifested, non-tangible, [Henry: Uh hmm] non-material world, that would be the real world. [Henry: Uh hmm] Catharism is strongly based on the content of new Gospel but with slightly sometime fundamentally different interpretations.

Joe: So you say that you are attracted or interested in the Cassiopaean material or Cassiopaean philosophy. What in the Cassiopaean philosophy do you see that if anything that compared to or comparable to the philosophy of the Cathars, the kind of philosophy that you've just described?

Pierre: There is a lot of material in Cassiopaean philosophy. One strong analogy I can posit between Catharism and Cassiopaean philosophy is this dualistic vision of the world. There are incarnated human beings living in a material world, impermanent world, and there is something behind that. Our quest in a sense is to discover what is behind the mirror, what is behind this material, tangible world. I think that Cathars were aware of this paradigm.
Henry: And there is two paths towards this other world the invisible world and there is a path towards the material world. One is towards creativity and one is towards entropy.

Pierre:  What you say is very true, ? I don't know to which extent Cathars formalized that, about this...

Henry: No, I don't know either cause from what I've read of the Cathars it wasn't as this explicit and the trouble there is there are very few remaining Cathar texts and much of what we get about them and about their beliefs come from the documents of the Inquisition and as we know from recent events, confessions and information gotten under torture are not necessarily the most reliable.

Pierre: Indeed. Indeed we can suspect that there were some content relating to importance of free will, entropy versus creativity, importance of knowledge, because you can judge the tree through it's fruits and the fruits of this Cathar culture, Cathar community were brilliance, were beautiful. [Henry: Uh hmm] So you can imagine, you can assume that Cathar being dealing with those concepts [Henry: Uh hmm] but I don't have any proof, any written text, any tangible material proving interactions between Cathar and those concepts.

Henry:  One of the differences that I've read about between the say the north of France and the south of France in that period was,  in the north of France the heritage of land and wealth were always went to the eldest son, whereas in the south they tended to divide land, property and wealth among all of the children which is a much more just way of doing things and that created social conditions in the south  which were very very different from that in the north because you didn't get the ensconced positions of power that were reinforced generations after generation. You had divisions, so the society seem to have been much more equitable and also the difference between the rulers if you will and the rest of the population would have been much different then that was found to the north of the country.

Pierre: Yeah. Redistributing ground is an excellent way to fight against entropia. [Henry: Uh hmm] You change power structures, you redistribute opportunities [Henry: Uh hmm] for creation. [Henry: Yeah] Indeed. Another difference is language. Languedoc comes from “languedoc�  “oc�  language [Henry: Uh hmm] by opposition to “languedoi�  that was the language that was spoken in the northern territories, French northern territories. [Henry: The “oi�  and the “oc� ] Yeah exactly. “oi�  and “oc�  [Henry: Uh hmm] that means “yes�  [Henry: Uh hmm] in this two language. And we can also imagine that Catharism represented a major threat. Finally Philip LaBelle  the king of the Franks at this time, French didn't really exist, but Philip LaBelle organize a crusade not in Jerusalem but in what is now France, what is now southern France and for over 40years soldiers from Languedoi, speaking Languedoi, from Languedoi, fighting in Languedoc and killed something like 100,000 people, [Henry: Uh hmm] over   40 years, torturing, burning village, killing man, women and kids. [Henry: Uh hmm]

Henry: Well we should say that there were also Cathars in the north of France and in Germany as well and so it wasn't limited. This was a teaching and a belief that was fairly wide spread but there were smaller pockets [Pierre: Yes] as I understand it in the north.

Pierre: In Cologne [Henry: Uh hmm] for example, in Tuscan we talked about it Italy, [Henry: Uh hmm] and off course after the relative destruction of Catharism in France, the Cathars survived by spreading everywhere, [Henry: But not in.?.] including northern France. [Henry: Uh hmm]

Joe: It seems to me, and I'm just kind of hypothesizing here, because as you say, there is very little known  about the Cathars in terms of what they actually did or believed or as you say there is no text or very few text detailing their lives and their beliefs, but it seems to me as Henry said, throughout the course of history or recorded history, that there were groups that sprung up every so often that seem to have, and how they formed together we can only guess at, but there are a group of people who had a common ideal, and a common view or vision of what life was about and the way to live life. There is another example just when you were talking about the kind of laws that governed kind of what we know of laws that governed Cathar society. There was maybe a 1000 years before that in parts of Europe, in Ireland for example there was a under the kind of pre-Christian, Celtic kind of societies there were laws kind of similar laws that were organized in a much more equitable way. Sure there was a chief or a guy who was kind of appointed or elected to be the leader, but in terms of how the community functioned there was not a matter of him basically controlling everyone else but they saw themselves as a unit and had a very different view of how to live than people do today or have done for a long time. And the other notable thing is that this systems or ways of lives that spring up are usually very quickly or quite quickly destroyed by some other force. In the case of the Cathars it was the Catholic church obviously. It' interesting to me that the Catholic church has apologized for all of it's kind of transgression in the past in terms of the crusades and the inquisition and the massacring of thousand of people including the Cathars, but as I see it, there is very little, in terms of ideology, there is very little has changed. Okay, the Catholic church doesn't have armies anymore to go and massacre people but in terms of ideology the Catholic church isn't very much different from the Catholic church that massacred the Cathars.

Pierre: I am afraid you are right. About analogies between Celtic culture, Celtic religions and Cathar religions, we can see that Cathar religion, keeping in mind the role of women, this high diversity, this very low level of hierarchy in this religious organization that Cathar is more likely to be part of the circle civilization and part of the triangle civilization. In the beginning of our discussions we were talking about Jesus Christ and his death, by the way Cathar thought that Jesus Christ  didn't  die on cross maybe for different reasons, since they were monophysite. They thought that Jesus Christ didn't have a double nature [Henry: Uh hmm] as the Roman church said in Nicea Council.(?) For Cathar, Jesus Christ was definitely from the good world, so from divine nature, so consequently he couldn't die on a cross or somewhere else.

Henry: And for them the cross was not a symbol that they honored. I think almost to the contrary they saw it as a symbol of all that was wrong with the Catholic church, the Roman church.

Pierre: Yes. It can relate to this myth or non myth of Templars spitting on cross but if you take some distance, cross is fundamentally a torture too. I could imagine some very evil modern cult having as a main symbol a Kalashnikov. I would allow myself to spit on a Kalashnikov and I think I would be a satanist because I spit on a Kalashnikov. People at this time could have the same interpretation for the torture tool that is a cross. [Henry: Uh hmm]

Joe: The symbolism of taking someone if we, I mean if we take the idea that Jesus didn't die on the cross or was crucified, if we take that idea to be true, then it is pretty dastardly for later Catholic church or the early Catholic church or the early Roman church to concoct this kind of story and to take someone that they obviously knew was someone of great importance in terms of the teachings that he thought or the lessons that he thought to people and the information that he had to share, they took that person and they essentially nailed him to the cross and they established that as the symbol of the religion that people who initially maybe had followed Jesus and knew exactly what he was and what he was teaching. It just seems like a really evil thing to do and certainly in terms of the symbolism. [Henry: The dead man on the stick.] Yeah, they wanted to destroy the teachings in a very blatant symbolic way, they did it by nailing him to the cross.

Pierre: Cathar might think that it's normal to notice evil things that happens in the world would by evil, the bad god. It's perfectly consistent. Cathar had a pater noster, like a Christian, like a regular [Henry: It's the, Our father] Our father noster in Latin that is almost exactly the same as the Roman church pater noster, except for one sentence about this daily bread which says that “Panem nostrum  supersubtancialem da nobis hodie�  that means give us our super substantial bread and that's a major difference with the classical pater noster. Obviously Jesus Christ teachings symbolized by bread has a influence on the, says spiritual dimension of human beings.

Joe: Yeah it's something that the people who invented the Catholic religion did in general with the kind of teachings of Jesus in that they took everything that was thought in a spiritual way, they took spiritual concepts and made them completely physical. The very idea of putting Jesus on a cross corrupted the idea of his teachings of suffering, suffering for an ideal and they made it all completely physical and say that he suffered and died not only that but kind of we killed him, the people killed him. People killed their own kind of savior,and obviously they created all this saviorship as well in the same way as in this Cathar version of the...

Pierre: And this crucification thing was a kind of a major move backwards because Jesus Christ was opening the era that was transcending this notion of sacrifice and in a sense crucification was kind of mixing up again this suffering and sacrifice and salvation. However as we say here often, it not Jesus Christ who made christianism it's christianism who made Jesus Christ and who wrote [Henry: Uh hmm] the official story and this time again the winners wrote the story and wrote the history, the history of Jesus Christ.

Henry: Let's be clear that when we are talking about suffering in what we understand as being the real teachings of Jesus, it's the suffering of becoming the master of oneself. There is suffering of being in this material world and trying to attain a contact with the real self that is there but that is hidden by all this layers of  false selfs that we have, our ideas about ourselves, the false personality that we have and the real suffering is the work that you do to try to align each of this little selves with your real self so that you can reach it in some sort of a permanent way.

Pierre: Your worlds are kind of syncretizing Buddhism, Catharism and Mouravieff teachings for example, yes. Probably the quest for human beings is this quest for transcending egos and the different personalities, different aspect of ego in order to reach and discover the real self and awakening.

Scott: Well that about raps it up for this weeks podcast. We'd like to thank Pierre for joining us today. As always if you like to find more information on the topics we discuss today, you can read the articles  at www.signs-of-the-times.org  and have a happy new year and we'll see you next year.
--- End quote ---

Stevie Argyll:
Transcript #29 seems to be missing from here, does anyone know where I can find it?

Gandalf:

--- Quote from: Stevie Argyll on April 27, 2010, 04:19:46 PM ---Transcript #29 seems to be missing from here, does anyone know where I can find it?

--- End quote ---

I will inform Belibaste about that and maybe it will be back in a couple of days.

http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=14016.msg157020#msg157020

Stevie Argyll:

--- Quote from: Gandalf on April 27, 2010, 04:25:40 PM ---
--- Quote from: Stevie Argyll on April 27, 2010, 04:19:46 PM ---Transcript #29 seems to be missing from here, does anyone know where I can find it?

--- End quote ---

I will inform Belibaste about that and maybe it will be back in a couple of days.

http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=14016.msg157020#msg157020

--- End quote ---

Much appreciated !

voyageur:
Interesting discussion above on the Cathars and Landuedoc which was further expanded by a recent Sott article, which got me thinking about Andorra north of the Catalonia district of Spain and what was going on there at the time. Seems that some were of the same ‘house’ such as Foix against the Crusaders.

There seems a great many gaps in the history of Andorra but here is one link if interested: _http://www.medinnus.com/andorra/history.html

Title - A Concise History Of Andorra

Not so sure if this is all so correct, seems to have a Crusaders historical gloss, but have not read enough from other sources yet.


--- Quote --- The most important document in the country of Andorra is the Carta de Fundacio d'Andorra, a charter for the country written by Charlemagne, and given to his son, Louis the Pious, establishing Andorra's independance. it is kept under lock and key by the Andorran government, and they rarely let it see the light of day. However, there are many who suspect that the document is a forgery dating from the 12th century, made by the Andorrans themselves as fraudulent documentation to support their claims to independence against claiments from both Spain and France.
--- End quote ---

Seems that being independent, hands off, would have advantages during those times of the 12th century.

In this link _http://www.cathar.info/120550_crusadersarms.htm there is a legend of the Coat of Arms divided by;

1)   Coats of Arms of the Crusaders

And

2)   Coats of Arms of the defenders of the Languedoc during the Cathar Wars

Which lists some interesting alliances.

Of Foix


--- Quote --- Raymond-Roger de Foix (1155-1223) :
Count of Foix.
Lord of Pamiers (Toulouse)
Lord of Andorra, Castillon, Prayas (Aragon).
Raymond-Roger married Philippa, the sister of Gaston VI de Béarn, William I de Moncade and William-Raymond III de Moncade.
--- End quote ---

Thanks for the Podcast  :)

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