The Cathars and the Great Heresy

We began our investigation at a point with which we already had a certain familiarity—the Cathar or Albigensian heresy and the crusade it provoked in the thirteenth century. We were already aware that the Cathars figured somehow in the mystery surrounding Sauniere and Rennes-le-Chateau. In the first place the medieval heretics had been numerous in the village and its environs, which suffered brutally during the course of the Albigensian Crusade. Indeed, the whole history of the region is soaked in Cathar blood, and the residues of that blood, along with much bitterness, persist to the present day. Many peasants in the area now, with no inquisitors to fall upon them, openly proclaim Cathar sympathies. There is even a Cathar church and a so-called “Cathar pope” who, until his death in 1978, lived in the village of Arques.

We knew that Sauniere had immersed himself in the history and folklore of his native soil, so he could not possibly have avoided contact with Cathar thought and traditions. He could not have been unaware that Rennes-le-Chateau was an important town in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and something of a Cathar bastion. Sauniere must also have been familiar with the numerous legends attached to the Cathars. He must have known of the rumours connecting them with that fabulous object, the Holy Grail. And if Richard Wagner, in quest of something pertaining to the Grail, did indeed visit Rennes-le-Chateau, Sauniere could not have been ignorant of that fact either.

In 1890, moreover, a man named Jules Doinel became librarian at Carcassonne and established a neo-Cathar church. Doinel himself wrote prolifically on Cathar thought, and by 1896 had become a prominent member of a local cultural organisation, the Society of Arts and Sciences of Carcassonne. In 1898 he was elected its secretary. This society included a number of Sauniere’s associates, among them his best friend, the Abbe Henri Boudet. And Doinel’s own personal circle included Emma Calve. It is therefore very probable that Doinel and Sauniere were acquainted.

There is a further, and more provocative, reason for linking the Cathars with the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau. In one of the parchments found by Sauniere, the text is sprinkled with a handful of small letters—eight, to be precise—quite deliberately different from all the others. Three of the letters are towards the top of the page, five towards the bottom. These eight letters have only to be read in sequence for them to spell out two words: “REX MUNDI.” This is unmistakably a Cathar term, which is immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with Cathar thought.

Given these factors, it seemed reasonable enough to commence our investigation with the Cathars. We therefore began to research into them, their beliefs and traditions, their history and milieu in detail. Our inquiry opened new dimensions of mystery, and generated a number of tantalising questions.

The Albigensian Crusade

In 1209 an army of some 30,000 knights and foot-soldiers from Northern Europe descended like a whirlwind on the Languedoc—the mountainous north-eastern foothills of the Pyrenees in what is now southern France. In the ensuing war the whole territory was ravaged, crops were destroyed, towns and cities were razed, a whole population was put to the sword. This extermination occurred on so vast, so terrible a scale that it may well constitute the first case of “genocide” in modern European history. In the town of Beziers alone, for example, at least 15,000 men, women and children were slaughtered wholesale—many of them in the sanctuary of the church itself. When an officer inquired of the pope’s representative how he might distinguish heretics from true believers, the reply was, “Kill them all. God will recognise His own.”

This quotation, though widely reported, may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, it typifies the fanatical zeal and bloodlust with which the atrocities were perpetrated. The same papal representative, writing to Innocent III in Rome, announced proudly that “neither age nor sex nor status was spared.”

After Beziers, the invading army swept through the whole of the Languedoc. Perpignan fell, Narbonne fell, Carcassonne fell, Toulouse fell. And, wherever the victors passed, they left a trail of blood, death and carnage in their wake.

This war, which lasted for nearly forty years, is now known as the Albigensian Crusade. It was a crusade in the true sense of the word. It had been called by the pope himself. Its participants wore a cross on their tunics, like crusaders in Palestine. And the rewards were the same as they were for crusaders in the Holy Land—remission of all sins, an expiation of penances, an assured place in Heaven and all the booty one could plunder. In this Crusade, moreover, one did not even have to cross the sea. And in accordance with feudal law, one was obliged to fight for no more than forty days—assuming, of course, that one had no interest in plunder.

By the time the Crusade was over, the Languedoc had been utterly transformed, plunged back into the barbarity that characterised the rest of Europe. Why? For what had all this havoc, brutality and devastation occurred?

The Cathar Creed

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the area now known as the Languedoc was not officially a part of France. It was an independent principality, whose language, culture and political institutions had less in common with the north than they had with Spain—with the kingdoms of Leon, Aragon and Castile. The principality was ruled by a handful of noble families, chief of whom were the counts of Toulouse and the powerful house of Trencavel. And within the confines of this principality, there flourished a culture which, at the time, was the most advanced and sophisticated in Christendom, with the possible exception of Byzantium.

The Languedoc had much in common with Byzantium. Learning, for example, was highly esteemed, as it was not in Northern Europe. Philosophy and other intellectual activities flourished; poetry and courtly love were extolled; Greek, Arabic and Hebrew were enthusiastically studied; and at Lunel and Narbonne, schools devoted to the Cabala—the ancient esoteric tradition of Judaism—were thriving. Even the nobility was literate and literary, at a time when most Northern nobles could not even sign their names.

Like Byzantium, too, the Languedoc practised a civilised, easy-going religious tolerance in contrast to the fanatical zeal that characterised other parts of Europe. Skeins of Islamic and Judaic thought, for instance, were imported through maritime commercial centres like Marseilles, or made their way across the Pyrenees from Spain. At the same time, the Roman Church enjoyed no very high esteem; Roman clerics in the Languedoc, by virtue of their notorious corruption, succeeded primarily in alienating the populace. There were churches, for example, in which no mass had been said for more than thirty years. Many priests ignored their parishioners and ran businesses or large estates. One archbishop of Narbonne never even visited his diocese.

Whatever the corruption of the church, the Languedoc had reached an apex of culture that would not be seen in Europe again until the Renaissance. But, as in Byzantium, there were elements of complacency, decadence and tragic weakness which rendered the region unprepared for the onslaught subsequently unleashed upon it. For some time both the Northern European nobility and the Roman Church had been aware of its vulnerability, and were eager to exploit it. The Northern nobility had for many years coveted the wealth and luxury of the Languedoc. The Church was interested for its own reasons. In the first place its authority in the region was slack. And while culture flourished in the Languedoc, something else flourished as well—the major heresy of medieval Christendom.

In the words of Church authorities the Languedoc was “infected” by the Albigensian heresy, ’the foul leprosy of the South’. And although the adherents of this heresy were essentially non-violent, they constituted a severe threat to Roman authority, the most severe threat, indeed, that Rome would experience until three centuries later when teachings of Martin Luther began the Reformation. By 1200 there was a very real prospect of this heresy displacing Roman Catholicism as the dominant form of Christianity in the Languedoc. And what was more ominous still in the Church’s eyes, it was already radiating out to other parts of Europe, especially to urban centres in Germany, Flanders and Champagne.

The heretics were known by a variety of names. In 1165 they had been condemned by an ecclesiastical council at the Languedoc town of Albi. For this reason, or perhaps because Albi continued to be one of their centres, they were often called Albigensians. On other occasions they were called Cathars or Cathares or Cathari. In Italy they were called Patarines. Not infrequently they were also branded or stigmatised with the names of much earlier heresies—Arian, Marcionite and Manichaean. “Albigensian” and “Cathar” were essentially generic names. In other words they did not refer to a single coherent church, like that of Rome, with a fixed, codified and definitive body of doctrine and theology. The heretics in question comprised a multitude of diverse sects—many under the direction of an independent leader, whose followers would assume his name.

And while these sects may have held to certain common principles, they diverged radically from one another in detail. Moreover, much of our information about the heretics derives from ecclesiastical sources like the Inquisition. To form a picture of them from such sources is like trying to form a picture of, say, the French Resistance from the reports of the SS and Gestapo. It is therefore virtually impossible to present a coherent and definitive summary of what actually constituted “Cathar thought.”

In general the Cathars subscribed to a doctrine of reincarnation and to a recognition of the feminine principle in religion. Indeed, the preachers and teachers of Cathar congregations, known as parfaits (“perfected ones”), were of both sexes. At the same time, the Cathars rejected the orthodox Catholic Church and denied the validity of all clerical hierarchies, or official and ordained intercessors between man and God. At the core of this position lay an important Cathar tenet—the repudiation of “faith”, at least as the Church insisted on it. In the place of ‘faith’ accepted at second hand, the Cathars insisted on direct and personal knowledge, a religious or mystical experience apprehended at first hand. This experience had been called “gnosis”, from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’, and for the Cathars it took precedence over all creeds and dogma. Given such an emphasis on direct personal contact with God, priests, bishops and other clerical authorities became superfluous.

The Cathars were also dualists. All Christian thought, of course, can ultimately be seen as dualistic, insisting on a conflict between two opposing principles—good and evil, spirit and flesh, higher and lower. But the Cathars carried this dichotomy much further than orthodox Catholicism was prepared to. For the Cathars, men were the swords that spirits fought with, and no one saw the hands. For them, a perpetual war was being waged throughout the whole of creation between two irreconcilable principles—light and darkness, spirit and matter, good and evil.

Catholicism posits one supreme God, whose adversary, the Devil, is ultimately inferior to Him. The Cathars, however, proclaimed the existence not of one god, but of two, with more or less comparable status. One of these gods—the ‘good’ one—was entirely disincarnate, a being or principle of pure spirit, unsullied by the taint of matter. He was the god of love. But love was deemed wholly incompatible with power; and material creation was a manifestation of power. Therefore, for the Cathars, material creation—the world itself—was intrinsically evil. All matter was intrinsically evil. The universe, in short, was the handiwork of a ‘usurper god’, the god of evil or, as the Cathars called him, “Rex Mundi”, “King of the World”.

Catholicism rests on what might be called an “ethical dualism”. Evil, though issuing ultimately perhaps from the Devil, manifests itself primarily through man and his actions. In contrast, the Cathars maintained a form of “cosmological dualism”, a dualism that pervaded the whole of reality. For the Cathars, this was a basic premise, but their response to it varied from sect to sect. According to some Cathars, the purpose of man’s life on earth was to transcend matter, to renounce perpetually anything connected with the principle of power and thereby to attain union with the principle of love. According to other Cathars, man’s purpose was to reclaim and redeem matter, to spiritualise and transform it.

It is important to note the absence of any fixed dogma, doctrine or theology. As in most deviations from established orthodoxy there are only certain loosely defined attitudes, and the moral obligations attendant on these attitudes were subject to individual interpretation. In the eyes of the Roman Church the Cathars were committing serious heresies in regarding material creation, on behalf of which Jesus had supposedly died, as intrinsically evil, and implying that God, whose ‘word’ had created the world “in the beginning”, was a usurper. Their most serious heresy, however, was their attitude towards Jesus himself. Since matter was intrinsically evil, the Cathars denied that Jesus could partake of matter, become incarnate in the flesh, and still be the Son of God. By some Cathars he was therefore deemed to be wholly incorporeal, a ‘phantasm’, an entity of pure spirit, which, of course, could not possibly be crucified. The majority of Cathars seem to have regarded him as a prophet no different from any other—a mortal being who, on behalf of the principle of love, died on the cross. There was, in short, nothing mystical, nothing supernatural, nothing divine about the Crucifixion—if, indeed, it was relevant at all, which many Cathars appear to have doubted.

In any case, all Cathars vehemently repudiated the significance of both the Crucifixion and the cross—perhaps because they felt these doctrines were irrelevant, or because Rome extolled them so fervently, or because the brutal circumstances of a prophet’s death did not seem worthy of worship. And the cross—at least in association with Calvary and the Crucifixion—was regarded as an emblem of Rex Mundi, lord of the material world, the very antithesis of the true redemptive principle. Jesus, if mortal at all, had been a prophet of AMOR—or the principle of love. And AMOR, when inverted or perverted or twisted into power, became ROMA—Rome, whose opulent, luxurious Church seemed to the Cathars a palpable embodiment and manifestation on earth of Rex Mundi’s sovereignty. In consequence the Cathars not only refused to worship the cross, they also denied such sacraments as baptism and communion.

Despite these subtle, complex, abstract and, to a modern mind perhaps, irrelevant theological positions, most Cathars were not unduly fanatical about their creed. It is intellectually fashionable nowadays to regard the Cathars as a congregation of sages, enlightened mystics or initiates in arcane wisdom, all of whom were privy to some great cosmic secret. In actual fact, however, most Cathars were more or less “ordinary” men and women, who found in their creed a refuge from the stringency of orthodox Catholicism—a respite from the endless tithes, penances, obsequies, strictures and other impositions of the Roman Church.

However abstruse their theology, the Cathars were eminently realistic people in practice. They condemned procreation, for example, since the propagation of the flesh was a service not to the principle of love, but to Rex Mundi; but they were not so naive as to advocate the abolition of sexuality. True, there was a specific Cathar “sacrament”, or the equivalent thereof, called the Consolamentum, which compelled one to chastity. Except for the parfaits, however, who were usually ex-family men and women anyway, the Consolamentum was not administered until one was on one’s death-bed; and it is not inordinately difficult to be chaste when one is dying. So far as the congregation at large was concerned, sexuality was tolerated, if not explicitly sanctioned. How does one condemn procreation while condoning sexuality? There is evidence to suggest that the Cathars practised both birth control and abortion. When Rome subsequently charged the heretics with ‘unnatural sexual practices’, this was taken to refer to sodomy. However, the Cathars, in so far as records survive, were extremely strict in their prohibition of homosexuality. “Unnatural sexual practices” may well have referred to various methods of birth control and abortion. We know Rome’s position on those issues today. It is not difficult to imagine the energy and vindictive zeal with which that position would have been enforced during the Middle Ages.

Generally, the Cathars seem to have adhered to a life of extreme devotion and simplicity. Deploring churches, they usually conducted their rituals and services in the open air or in any readily available building—a barn, a house, a municipal hall. They also practised what we, today, would call meditation. They were strict vegetarians, although the eating of fish was allowed. And when travelling about the countryside, parfaits would always do so in pairs, thus lending credence to the rumours of sodomy sponsored by their enemies.

The Siege of Montsegur

This, then, was the creed which swept the Languedoc and adjacent provinces on a scale that threatened to displace Catholicism itself. For a number of comprehensible reasons, many nobles found the creed attractive. Some warmed to its general tolerance. Some were anti-clerical anyway. Some were disillusioned with the Church’s corruption. Some had lost patience with the tithe system, whereby the income from their estates vanished into the distant coffers of Rome. Thus many nobles, in their old age, became parfaits. Indeed, it is estimated that 30 per cent of all parfaits were drawn from Languedoc nobility.

In 1145, half a century before the Albigensian Crusade, Saint Bernard himself had journeyed to the Languedoc, intending to preach against the heretics. When he arrived, he was less appalled by the heretics than by the corruption of his own Church. So far as the heretics were concerned, Bernard was clearly impressed by them. “No sermons are more Christian than theirs,” he declared, “and their morals are pure.”

By 1200, needless to say, Rome had grown distinctly alarmed by the situation. Nor was she unaware of the envy with which the barons of Northern Europe regarded the rich lands and cities to the south. This envy could readily be exploited, and the Northern lords would constitute the Church’s storm-troops. All that was needed was some provocation, some excuse to ignite popular opinion.

Such an excuse was soon forthcoming. On January 14th, 1208, one of the Papal Legates to the Languedoc, Pierre de Castelnau, was murdered. The crime seems to have been committed by anticlerical rebels with no Cathar affiliations whatever. Furnished with the excuse she needed, however, Rome did not hesitate to blame the Cathars. At once Pope Innocent III ordered a Crusade. Although there had been intermittent persecution of heretics all through the previous century, the Church now mobilised her forces in earnest. The heresy was to be extirpated once and for all.

A massive army was mustered under the command of the abbot of Citeaux. Military operations were entrusted largely to Simon de Montfort—father of the man who was subsequently to play so crucial a role in English history. And under Simon’s leadership the pope’s crusaders set out to reduce the highest European culture of the Middle Ages to destitution and rubble.

In this holy undertaking they were aided by a new and useful ally, a Spanish fanatic named Dominic Guzman. Spurred by a rabid hatred of heresy, Guzman, in 1216, created the monastic order subsequently named after him, the Dominicans. And in 1233 the Dominicans spawned a more infamous institution—the Holy Inquisition. The Cathars were not to be its sole victims. Before the Albigensian Crusade, many Languedoc nobles—especially the influential houses of Trencavel and Toulouse—had been extremely friendly to the region’s large indigenous Jewish population. Now all such protection and support was withdrawn by order.

In 1218 Simon de Montfort was killed besieging Toulouse. Nevertheless, the depredation of the Languedoc continued, with only brief respites, for another quarter of a century. By 1243, however, all organised resistance—in so far as there had ever been any—had effectively ceased. By 1243 all major Cathar towns and bastions had fallen to the Northern invaders, except for a handful of remote and isolated strong points. Chief among these was the majestic mountain citadel of Montsegur, poised like a celestial ark above the surrounding valleys.

For ten months Montsegur was besieged by the invaders, withstanding repeated assaults and maintaining tenacious resistance. At length, in March 1244, the fortress capitulated, and Catharism, at least ostensibly, ceased to exist in the south of France. But ideas can never be stamped out definitively. In his best-selling book, Montaillou, for example, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, drawing extensively on documents of the period, chronicles the activities of surviving Cathars nearly half a century after the fall of Montsegur. Small enclaves of heretics continued to survive in the mountains, living in caves, adhering to their creed and waging a bitter guerrilla war against their persecutors. In many areas of the Languedoc—including the environs of Rennes-le-Chateau—the Cathar faith is generally acknowledged to have persisted. And many writers have traced subsequent European heresies to offshoots of Cathar thought—the Waldensians, for instance, the Hussites, the Adamites or Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Anabaptists and the strange Camisards, numbers of whom found refuge in London during the early eighteenth century.

The Cathar Treasure

During the Albigensian Crusade and afterwards, a mystique grew up around the Cathars which still persists today. In part this can be put down to the element of romance that surrounds any lost and tragic cause—that of Bonnie Prince Charlie, for example—with a magical lustre, with a haunting nostalgia, with the “stuff of legend”. But at the same time, we discovered, there were some very real mysteries associated with the Cathars. While the legends might be exalted and romanticised, a number of enigmas remained.

One of these pertains to the origins of the Cathars; and although this at first seemed an academic point to us, it proved subsequently to be of considerable importance. Most recent historians have argued that the Cathars derived from the Bogomils, a sect active in Bulgaria during the tenth and eleventh centuries, whose missionaries migrated westwards. There is no question that the heretics of the Languedoc included a number of Bogomils. Indeed a known Bogomil preacher was prominent in the political and religious affairs of the time. And yet our research disclosed substantial evidence that the Cathars did not derive from the Bogomils. On the contrary, they seemed to represent the flowering of something already rooted in French soil for centuries. They seemed to have issued, almost directly, from heresies established and entrenched in France at the very advent of the Christian era.

There are other, considerably more intriguing, mysteries associated with the Cathars. Jean de Joinville, for example, an old man writing of his acquaintance with Louis IX during the thirteenth century, writes, “The king (Louis IX) once told me how several men from among the Albigenses had gone to the Comte de Montfort… and asked him to come and look at the body of Our Lord, which had become flesh and blood in the hands of their priest.” Montfort, according to the anecdote, declared that his entourage may go if they wish, but he will continue to believe in accordance with the tenets of “Holy Church”. There is no further elaboration or explanation of this incident. Joinville himself merely recounts it in passing. But what are we to make of that enigmatic invitation? What were the Cathars doing? What kind of ritual was involved? Leaving aside the Mass, which the Cathars repudiated anyway, what could possibly make “the body of Our Lord… become flesh and blood”? Whatever it might be, there is certainly something disturbingly literal in the statement.

Another mystery surrounds the legendary Cathar “treasure”. It is known that the Cathars were extremely wealthy. Technically, their creed forbade them to bear arms; and though many ignored this prohibition, the fact remains that large numbers of mercenaries were employed at considerable expense. At the same time, the sources of Cathar wealth—the allegiance they commanded from powerful landowners, for instance—were obvious and explicable. Yet rumours arose, even during the course of the Albigensian Crusade, of a fantastic mystical Cathar treasure, far beyond material wealth. Whatever it was, this treasure was reputedly kept at Montsegur. When Montsegur fell, however, nothing of consequence was found.

And yet there are certain extremely singular incidents connected with the siege and the capitulation of the fortress. During the siege, the attackers numbered upwards of ten thousand. With this vast force the besiegers attempted to surround the entire mountain, precluding all entry and exit and hoping to starve out the defenders. Despite their numerical strength, however, they lacked sufficient manpower to make their ring completely secure. Many troops were local, moreover, and sympathetic to the Cathars. And many troops were simply unreliable. In consequence, it was not difficult to pass undetected through the attackers’ lines. There were many gaps through which men slipped to and fro, and supplies found their way up to the fortress.

The Cathars took advantage of these gaps. In January, nearly three months before the fall of the fortress, two parfaits escaped. According to reliable accounts, they carried with them the bulk of the Cathars’ material wealth—a load of gold, silver and coin which they carried first to a fortified cave in the mountains and from there to a castle stronghold. After that the treasure vanished and has never been heard of again.

On March 1st Montsegur finally capitulated. By then its defenders numbered less than four hundred—between 150 and 180 of them were parfaits, the rest being knights, squires, men-at-arms and their families. They were granted surprisingly lenient terms. The fighting men were to receive full pardon for all previous ‘crimes’. They would be allowed to depart with their arms, baggage and any gifts, including money, they might receive from their employers. The parfaits were also accorded unexpected generosity. Provided they abjured their heretical beliefs and confessed their “sins” to the Inquisition, they would be freed and subjected only to light penances.

The defenders requested a two-week truce, with a complete halt to hostilities, to consider the terms. In a further display of uncharacteristic generosity, the attackers agreed. In return the defenders voluntarily offered hostages. It was agreed that if anyone attempted to escape from the fortress the hostages would be executed.

Were the parfaits so committed to their beliefs that they willingly chose martyrdom instead of conversion? Or was there something they could not—or dared not—confess to the Inquisition? Whatever the answer, not one of the parfaits, as far as is known, accepted the besiegers’ terms. On the contrary, all of them chose martyrdom. Moreover, at least twenty of the other occupants of the fortress, six women and some fifteen fighting men, voluntarily received the Consolamentum and became parfaits as well, thus committing themselves to certain death.

On March 15th the truce expired. At dawn the following day more than two hundred parfaits were dragged roughly down the mountainside. Not one recanted. There was no time to erect individual stakes, so they were locked into a large wood-filled stockade at the foot of the mountain and burned en masse. Confined to the castle, the remainder of the garrison was compelled to look on. They were warned that if any of them sought to escape it would mean death for all of them, as well as for the hostages.

Despite this risk, however, the garrison had connived in hiding four parfaits among them. And on the night of March 16th these four men, accompanied by a guide, made a daring escape—again with the knowledge and collusion of the garrison. They descended the sheer western face of the mountain, suspended by ropes and letting themselves down drops of more than a hundred metres at a time.

What were these men doing? What was the purpose of their hazardous escape, which entailed such risk to both the garrison and the hostages? On the next day they could have walked freely out of the fortress, at liberty to resume their lives. Yet for some unknown reason, they embarked on a perilous nocturnal escape which might easily have entailed death for themselves and their colleagues.

According to tradition, these four men carried with them the legendary Cathar treasure. But the Cathar treasure had been smuggled out of Montsegur three months before. And how much “treasure”—how much gold, silver or coin—could three or four men carry on their backs, dangling from ropes on a sheer mountainside? If the four escapees were indeed carrying something, it would seem clear that they were carrying something other than material wealth.

What might they have been carrying? Accoutrements of the Cathar faith perhaps—books, manuscripts, secret teachings, relics, religious objects of some kind; perhaps something which, for one reason or another, could not be permitted to fall into hostile hands. That might explain why an escape was undertaken—an escape that entailed such risk for everyone involved.

But if something of so precious a nature had, at all costs, to be kept out of hostile hands, why was it not smuggled out before? Why was it not smuggled out with the bulk of the material treasure three months previously? Why was it retained in the fortress until this last and most dangerous moment?

The precise date of the truce permitted us to deduce a possible answer to these questions. It had been requested by the defenders, who voluntarily offered hostages to obtain it. For some reason, the defenders seem to have deemed it necessary—even though all it did was delay the inevitable for a mere two weeks.

Perhaps, we concluded, such a delay was necessary to purchase time. Not time in general, but that specific time, that specific date. It coincided with the spring equinox—and the equinox may well have enjoyed some ritual status for the Cathars. It also coincided with Easter. But the Cathars, who questioned the relevance of the Crucifixion, ascribed no particular importance to Easter. And yet it is known that a festival of some sort was held on March 14th, the day before the truce expired. There seems little doubt that the truce was requested in order that this festival might be held. And there seems little doubt that the festival could not be held on a date selected at random. It apparently had to be on March 14th. Whatever the festival was, it clearly made some impression on the hired mercenaries—some of whom, defying inevitable death, converted to the Cathar creed.

Could this fact hold at least a partial key to what was smuggled out of Montsegur two nights later? Could whatever was smuggled out then have been necessary, in some way, for the festival on the 14th? Could it somehow have been instrumental in persuading at least twenty of the defenders to become parfaits at the last moment? And could it in some fashion have ensured the subsequent collusion of the garrison, even at the risk of their lives? If the answer is yes to all these questions, that would explain why whatever was removed on the 16th was not removed earlier—in January, for example, when the monetary treasure was carried to safety. It would have been needed for the festival. And it would then have had to be kept out of hostile hands.

The Mystery of the Cathars

As we pondered these conclusions, we were constantly reminded of the legends linking the Cathars and the Holy Grail. We were not prepared to regard the Grail as anything more than myth. We were certainly not prepared to assert that it ever existed in actuality. Even if it did, we could not imagine that a cup or bowl, whether it held Jesus’s blood or not, would be so very precious to the Cathars—for whom Jesus, to a significant degree, was incidental. Nevertheless, the legends continued to haunt and perplex us.

Elusive though it is, there does seem to be some link between the Cathars and the whole cult of the Grail as it evolved during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A number of writers have argued that the Grail romances—those of Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, for example—are an interpolation of Cathar thought, hidden in elaborate symbolism, into the heart of orthodox Christianity. There may be some exaggeration in that assertion, but there is also some truth. During the Albigensian Crusade ecclesiastics fulminated against the Grail romances, declaring them to be pernicious, if not heretical. And in some of these romances there are isolated passages which are not only highly unorthodox, but quite unmistakably dualist—in other words, Cathar.

What is more, Wolfram von Eschenbach, in one of his Grail romances, declares that the Grail castle was situated in the Pyrenees—an assertion which Richard Wagner, at any rate, would seem to have taken literally. According to Wolfram, the name of the Grail castle was Munsalvaesche—a Germanicised version apparently of Montsalvat, a Cathar term. And in one of Wolfram’s poems the lord of the Grail castle is named Perilla. Interestingly enough, the lord of Montsegur was Raimon de Pereille—whose name, in its Latin form, appears on documents of the period as Perilla.

If such striking coincidences persisted in haunting us, they must also, we concluded, have haunted Sauniere—who was, after all, steeped in the legends and folklore of the region. And like any other native of the region, Sauniere must have been constantly aware of the proximity of Montsegur, whose poignant and tragic fate still dominates local consciousness. But for Sauniere the very nearness of the fortress may well have entailed certain practical implications.

Something had been smuggled out of Montsegur just after the truce expired. According to tradition, the four men who escaped from the doomed citadel carried with them the Cathar treasure. But the monetary treasure had been smuggled out three months earlier. Could the Cathar ’treasure’, like the ’treasure’ Sauniere discovered, have consisted primarily of a secret? Could that secret have been related, in some unimaginable way, to something that became known as the Holy Grail? It seemed inconceivable to us that the Grail romances could possibly be taken literally.

In any case, whatever was smuggled out of Montsegur had to have been taken somewhere. According to tradition, it was taken to the fortified caves of Ornolac in the Ariege, where a band of Cathars was exterminated shortly after. But nothing save skeletons has ever been found at Ornolac. On the other hand, Rennes-le-Chateau is only half a day’s ride on horseback from Montsegur. Whatever was smuggled out of Montsegur might well have been brought to Rennes-le-Chateau, or, more likely, to one of the caves which honeycomb the surrounding mountains. And if the ‘secret’ of Montsegur was what Sauniere subsequently discovered, that would obviously explain a great deal.

In the case of the Cathars, as with Sauniere, the word ’treasure’ seems to hide something else—knowledge or information of some kind. Given the tenacious adherence of the Cathars to their creed and their militant antipathy to Rome, we wondered if such knowledge or information (assuming it existed) related in some way to Christianity—to the doctrines and theology of Christianity, perhaps to its history and origins. Was it possible, in short, that the Cathars (or at least certain Cathars) knew something—something that contributed to the frenzied fervour with which Rome sought their extermination? The priest who had written to us had referred to ‘incontrovertible proof’. Could such ‘proof’ have been known to the Cathars?

At the time, we could only speculate idly. And information on the Cathars was in general so meagre that it precluded even a working hypothesis. On the other hand our research into the Cathars had repeatedly impinged on another subject, even more enigmatic and mysterious, and surrounded by evocative legends. This subject was the Knights Templar. It was therefore to the Templars that we next directed our investigation. And it was with the Templars that our inquiries began to yield concrete documentation, and the mystery began to assume far greater proportions than we had ever imagined.