The Sixth Station(93)
Apparently you couldn’t drive up there and there was not even a towrope. If you wanted to get to the top, you hiked it—straight up. I couldn’t wait to never do that.
I’d just have to hope that my newest new best friend Y, Pan, Y’s “you must see in the morning” involved giving me the secret to the Cathar’s lost treasure, clearing my name through his various connections, and getting me the hell back home with all charges dropped.
Good luck with that, sister. Do not go getting your hopes up of Pantera coming up with any Hail Mary pass—literally—to save your sorry ass.
I found one book of sorts on the shelf, which was written in English. It was a photocopied version of what looked like information collected from Web sites, but with a similar title to every other book in the town. They didn’t seem to get much past the thirteenth century around there.
This one was titled Cathar Country History.
I opened and read with all grammatical and spelling errors intact:
Catharism was for many years the prevalent form of Christianity in large areas of France, Spain, and Italy. The Cathars called themselves the friends of God and condemned the Catholic Church as the Church of the Anti-Christ. Like the original Christians, the Cathars were vegetarians (Cathars interpreted the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” as referring to all animals), believed in reincarnation, and considered the Old Testament God Jehovah to be a tyrant.…
Then there was a note typed separately and inserted into the text:
Perfecti observed complete celibacy, while the Credentes—true believers—believed that sexual activity was to be enjoyed, but procreation was strongly discouraged. This resulted in the charge by their opponents of sexual perversion. (Wikipedia entry)
Did Pantera mean that since little Theo was a Perfectae, they didn’t have sex? Dear God, say it is so!
The regular text then continued:
The Albigensian Crusade and subsequent Inquisition was launched by Pope Innocent III specifically to eradicate the Cathars, the largest and fastest growing Christina sect in Europe. The Crusaders undertook the task with ferocious enthusiasm, burning alive men, women and children. From 1139 onwards the pope declared that ‘anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of God which conflicted with Church dogma must be burned without pity.’
Upwards of half a million people were maimed, dispossessed, slaughtered by the king’s soldiers (French King Philippe Auguste who wanted to confiscate Cathar’s lands joined the pope in this Crusade) or burned at the stake by the officials of the Catholic Church.
In 1208 he offered land to anyone killing Cathars, which launched a brutal 30-year pogrom, which decimated southern France killing at least 250,000 Cathars.
Instead of being lulled to sleep, I was fully awake now. The Inquisition here in France was created just to eradicate the Cathars? Damn. They did such a good job, I never even heard of them.
Catharism disappeared from the northern Italian cities after the 1260s, under pressure from the Inquisition. The last known Cathar stronghold was at Montségur.
I was dumbstruck to find out that there had been Italian Cathars. Who knew? The Russos, for sure, weren’t among them. For one thing, we wouldn’t belong to any group that preferred celibacy and vegetables to sex and meatballs. Agnostic over ascetic was definitely our motto!
And finally, there was this reprint from a guidebook:
The castle at Montségur was besieged in 1243 by Hughes des Arci, Seneschal of Carcassonne for the King of France, under the guidance of the Pope. For nine months a few hundred Cathars successfully resisted 10,000 Catholic forces until shortly before Christmas when a small group of Basque mercenaries scaled a seemingly impossible sheer cliff-face, and overran a forward position. They were defeated.
The 225 or so remaining Cathars were given a choice: renounce Catharism or be burned alive at the stake.
On March 2, 1244, Pierre-Roger de Mirepoix, the Cathar’s military leader, negotiated a two-week truce with the king’s forces for the defeated religious group. Fourteen days, he reasoned, would give the lay population among the Cathars time to leave the fortress, while granting those Cathars who sought to become Perfecti time enough to take their vows and die in grace.
Sometime on the night before the mass execution, two males, most likely rogue Templars, and two female Perfecti rappelled down the impenetrable and nearly impossible sheer 4,000-foot cliff face on the northeastern slope of the mountain.
They carried with them Le trésor Cathare.
Theories vary widely about the nature of that treasure—ranging from gold to the Holy Grail itself.
The next morning, on March 16, between 200–225 Cathars willingly marched down the opposite, southern face to the meadow below where they climbed up ladders and positioned themselves onto the hundreds of huge stakes erected by the Catholic army. The pyres were lit and as the flames engulfed them the martyrs sang hymns of forgiveness.