The hatred of the Cathars for the church was terrible. Rome was a den of murderers, Rome was the apocalyptic whore written about in the Book of revelation . . . Now, in this they were not far off. They derided and killed the priests wherever they could catch them, used the holy implements for obscene purposes, and a large part of their ritual was only a parody of the Catholic cult.
In their gatherings, their parody of the Mass, the Sabbath was already completely set out, right down to the smallest detail. In the later Sabbath hardly any additional elements are found, with the possible exception of a higher level of ecstasy brought about through artificial means by the consuming of so called narcotic materials.
Upon induction every novice had to denounce all Catholic belief, spit on the cross, renounce baptism and unction. After this he would be kissed by the whole congregation and hands were laid upon his head.
The church was powerless against this sect which was growing with tremendous speed. It was magnificently organized, had a powerful pope in Toulouse and held a council in Syon. The inhabitants of Languedoc kicked the priests, ridiculed them as they sang their masses, ripped their vestments off and put them on their wives. The greatest pleasure, however, was throwing the host into manure, breaking the legs of Christ, and soiling him with the most unbelievable filth. “Hugofaber iuxta altare purgavit ventrem et in contemptum Dei cum palla altaris tersit posterior sua”. (“The Hugofaber took the sanctified altar cloth and wiped it on his belly as a way of insulting a God that was not his own,”) recounts a chronicle about one of these fanatics.
Now a Crusade against these heretics began to be preached. St. Dominic, the creator of the Holy Inquisition, was charged with conducting the campaign. He, the indefatigable weeper, who poured out streams of tears while praying, became one of the most gruesome executioners world history has ever known. At the head of the crusade stood Count Simon de Montfort, the most Christian of all the princes, who were otherwise almost all Cathars.
And then a horrendous massacre began.
During the conquest of Bériers 60,000 people were cut down. It was all the same if they were Christian or Cathar: “Caedite omnes, novit enim Deus, qui stunt eius!” (“Kill them all, for God knows who are his!”) cried the abbot of Citeaux when asked whether the Christians should be spared. He himself confessed to Pope Innocent III that he was only able to kill twenty thousand. When the inhabitants fled into the woods and mountains, only Carcassonne remained. But no one dared defend Carcassonne. Hundreds were hanged and five hundred burned.
The Albigensians scattered and fled to the fortresses of the nobles. But one after the other was conquered and the church allowed the kindness of the savior shine in its fullest brilliance.
At the conquest of the fortress of Minerva it was promised that those who repented would be allowed to live. Nevertheless they were burned: “S’il ment il n’aura que ce qu’il mérite, s’il veut réellement se convertir, le fen expira ses péches!” (“If he lies, he will get what he deserves, if the converts to the true faith, the fire will extinguish his sin!”) This was the standard formula used in this all too common procedure.
The knights of the Holy Spirit murdered, hanged, burned and broke on the wheel, not just individuals, but hundreds and thousands of people. This was done at Lavour to a few hundred, “avec une joie extreme”, (“With an extreme joy!”) Twelve thousand at Maurillac and Toulouse “avec une joie indicible” (“with an unspeakable joy.”)
The entire south was destroyed, and not a single stone remained standing. All of the fortresses were demolished, all the counts and barons were hanged or burned, and all the noble ladies were stoned out of gallantry.
The church believed it had triumphed. But never had Satan felt more powerful than in that moment. Only the external form of his church had been destroyed, but what did the visible form mean to him? The people remained loyal to him in their hearts. They crept into subterranean catacombs, hid in mountain valleys, and never before had they worshipped him as ardently or as criminally as they did then after the fall of anti-Christian Toulouse.
Scarcely had the last Albigensian finished spitting out his venomous blasphemy against the kind and beardless youth [Jesus] as he burned on the stake, before the new priestess of Satan proudly and powerfully raised her terrible head—the witch.
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First of all, however, the ground had to be thoroughly prepared. As many poisonous seeds as possible had to spring up in order that the epidemic could spread out as quickly as possible.
An old allegory recounts how Satan once decided to take a wife in order to increase his kind. He had slept with Godlessness and conceived seven daughters with her. When these had grown up he married them off to mankind. The eldest, Pride, he gave to the powerful of the earth, Greed to the rich in gold, Infidelity to the common people, Hypocrisy to the priests, Envy to the artists (at that time there were no critics), and Vanity he gave to women. The seventh daughter, Fornication, alone was held back. Satan wouldn’t give his dearest daughter to anyone in particular, but instead kept her for everyone to enjoy in common.
And it appeared that in no other time period were Satan’s offspring more recklessly exalted than at the end of the hysterical l3th century.
Hysterical epilepsy was as common then as consumption is today. Almost everybody was a little bit leprous, and the leper’s extraordinary greed for sexual satisfaction is well known. The succubi and incubi destroyed people with weak blood. Women were seen everywhere who suddenly fell down, pulled up their skirts and turned to giving themselves sexual pleasure. This sexual hysteria was also nourished by the Albigensian theory, which by now was deeply ingrained in the popular mind: Nemo potest peccare ab umbilico et inferius. (There is no sin from the navel and below.)
Namely it was the priests, those eternally unsatisfied servants of God, who made more than generous use of this theory and who developed it further to turn the cloisters into dens of pestilence.
“To kill sin by means of sin!”
That was the great principle behind the sexual orgies of the priests, negation of the individual and the death of the will! Those who sacrificed themselves became divine to the extent that they could no longer commit any sin. The upper part of the body had become so divine that it no longer knew what the lower part wa s doing.
The priests went even further. They taught that to the saint every act was holy. The priest sanctified all the women who sinned with him. This theory was so common that the people in Spain and France called the nuns “consecrated ones,” i.e. that they were known as the mistresses of the priests.
Under the influence of this doctrine the church confronted its complete collapse. In his visitation diaries the Franciscan Eude Rigaud documented proof of horrendous corruption within the monasteries and the reports of St. Bertin are overflowing with such hair-raising accounts about monastic life that in comparison to them the sodomy which was so common in the Middle Ages appeared to be an innocent game.
The church was boundlessly despised, mocked and scorned, but the deathblow was given to it by Philipp the Fair. First he utterly destroyed at the stump what little bit of authority the church still had with the people.
In the midst of the people, who were dying of hunger, it was only the church that owned immense wealth. The monarchies were breaking up due to a lack of money in a time when every king had to be a counterfeiter of coins. In Germany the bishop was also a prince who could raise armies, in England the church owned half of the entire land and it was the same in France.
It became a popular idea to confiscate the church. Edward I incited soldiers against the priests and forbade the judges to hear their complaints. Philipp the Fair imperiously demanded a tenth of their enormous income.
On the throne of St. Peter at the time there sat a perjured lawyer who had attained a sad popularity by means of very disreputable practices. He was a savage atheist who depraved the church with his filthy blasphemies, le père très fecond, Pope Boniface VIII.(“the most terrible father”)
The church could be despised and mocked as much as one wanted—even the pope did this—but to require a tenth of its income, that would not do. The pope released bull after bull against Philipp the Fair. In response to these the pope received an answer from Nogaret, Philipp’s chancellor, which among other things contained the following gem: “Sedet in cathedra beati Petri mendaciorum magister, faciens se, cum sit omnifario maleficus, Bonifacium nominari.” (“He sits in the chair of St. Peter, the master of lies, making himself, in every respect a wizard named Boniface.”)
The pope raged. Nogaret and Sciarra` de Colonna traveled to Rome in order to hand over the answer in person. The 80 year-old man was derided, insulted with the most offensive words, and when he dared to speak up; the representative of Christ was slapped across the face with the iron gauntlet of Nogaret.
But this was too much for the people. It liberated the pope, who in the meantime had gone insane. The pope gave the people absolution for all their sins, except for sacrilege or stealing from the church and died possessed by the Devil.
“You will ascend to the throne like a fox, you will reign like a lion, you will die like a dog,” his predecessor, Pope Celestine, had said of him.
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