The Cathars:  Cathar Beliefs:  Heaven, Hell, Reincarnation and the Afterlife

Many religions teach that there is an afterlife for humans and sometimes for other animals too. The Greeks had a concept of an afterlife - though it was a rather ill-defined and shadowy one. For heroes there was the prospect of eternity in paradise, a Greek equivalent of Valhalla. For particularly evil people there was the prospect of eternal punishment in Tartarus. But for the most part, the dead would live an anaemic afterlife with no action and not even their earthly memories.

Some Greek sects taught reincarnation, or more precisely the transmigration of souls. According to the esoteric teachings of Pythagorus for example, after death the spirit of one creature might pass after death into the body of another one. The Jews had originally had no concept of an afterlife, but under Greek influence they had developed an ill-defined belief in an afterlife by the time of Jesus Christ. (The words translated as Hell in the Old Testament acually mean grave or rubbish-tip). According to the New Testament Jesus seems to have held that there was a fully developed afterlife in heaven or hell. Ideas such as Purgatory and Limbo were developed much later. More conservative Jews at the time of Jesus still held ideas of an afterlife to be an offensive novelty. As they pointed out the many punishments promised by God in scripture are all punishments in this world. None is promised for an afterlife.

Pythagoras

 

From the more liberal Jews in an Hellenic world, early Christians had ready-made concepts of life after death, fuelled perhaps by other popular religions - Resurrection cults, Egyptian cults, Zorostrianism and even Buddhism (Buddhist missionaries are known in the Middle East at this time). What we now regard as mainstream Christianity slowly evolved its ideas of an afterlife, selecting popular ideas from other religions. Saint Michael weighing souls For example, the popular medieval idea of St Michael weighing the soul of the newly dead to determine whether it should go to heaven or hell is a direct copy of an Egyptian idea. In depictions of the scene, Christians simply substituted Michael for the original Egyptian god. Early Christians do not seem to have a clear idea about the afterlife, and some of them clearly believed in reincarnation. Christian sects such as the Sethians and the followers of the Gnostic Church of Valentinus believed in reincarnation. A Church Council was required to settle the matter some centuries into the development of "orthodox" Christianity. (Fifth General Council, 553, in condemning Origen's doctrine of pre-existing souls) The Gnostic strands of early Christianity were more attracted to ideas of reincarnation and transmigration of souls (metempsychosis). These strands ran from the early Gnostic Dualists, through Manichaeism, the Paulicians, the Bogomils, the Italian Patarenes and into western Europe, including the Cathars of the Languedoc. The beliefs seem to have varied in some details from time to time and place to place, but the following represents a fair if slightly simplified version of their beliefs: Heaven was the realm of the Good God, the god who had made all immaterial things including light and souls. These souls could be thought of as immaterial angels. They belonged in heaven, the realm of light, but some of them had somehow been captured by the Bad God and imprisoned in tunics of flesh - human or animal (generally mammal) bodies. Humans and other mammals were thus hybrid creatures belonging to two realms: a good potentially immortal spirit trapped inside a bad and corruptible body. This was one reason why Cathars refused to kill animals. In some ways the idea reflected certain Buddhist beliefs. A person who lead a relatively good life might be reincarnated with a better and easier life the next time round. One who lived a bad life would be reincarnated further down the scale, possibly as an animal. Apparently even animals could live good or bad lives, because it was possible for an animal to be reincarnated as a human being. A popular Cathar story tells of a man who is overcome with emotion on recognising in the grass an iron shoe he had thrown in his previous life as a horse.

Egyptians believed that the cycle of rebirth was available only to those who had lived properly before death. On its first encounter with Osiris they imagined that the soul had to undergo a judgment, in which the heart (the seat of thought and emotion) was balanced on a scale against a feather, the symbol of the goddess Ma'at (representing the correct order of things). If the two did not balance, the soul was denied the chance to enter the cycle of rebirth The following text is an extract from an as yet unpublished work by Julian Moore. It summarises the Egyptian beliefs concerning the Judgement as depicted above. Note how Christianity has adapted them, with St Michael in the Anubis role, and Satan in the role of Ammit. Gomeisa The ways of life are manifold, the ways beyond uncountable, but dying is a single step across the threshold in-between. Whether thin and frayed by chafing time it seems no longer equal to the weight of years, or whether fate betrays her hand and by untimely happenstance reveals her shears, the thread that binds shall find its end – and flesh and life shall part. Upon that day Anubis will be standing there. He conducts the soul into the judgement hall of Maat. And yet the way of death is also barred. He who would come forth by day shall know the rites and formulae and speak them well if he would walk among the gods, within the Fields of Reeds. So let his mouth be opened up that he may speak. Let Ptah, the Opener of Ways – who dreamed the world and spoke the word – now bend to his appointed task, that when the door shall say, "If thou dost know our names, then speak them now if thou wouldst pass," the dead may have a voice with which to name each part. Then once within he must address in turn the sovereign judges in their winding sheets, call each by name and swear he bears no stain. He must narrate his life and then await the weighing of his soul. Anubis of the jackal head accepts his heart and places it upon the scales against the weight of truth. And Thoth the record-keeper duly marks in clay the balance of the beam while Ammit – Eater of the Dead – looks on with hungry eye; if he should fail the test then he shall die a second time within the belly of the beast. Then, having heard the verdicts of the judges and the scales, Osiris shall decree his soul be fed to Ammit or his soul set free to pass among the gods. A name may be remembered in the House of Fire by those whose hearts are just. Weep long and wail for those who cannot see, whose mouths are shut, who shall not sail to Abydos,. Anubis yet waits overhead; he waits for death, for death will come. And it is here Gomeisa shines. © Julian Moore, 2007

Those who eventually managed to lead a good enough life would be released from the cycle of rebirth. On their death the Bad God would loose his power over the angel trapped within. Released from their imprisonment, such angels would return to heaven, the realm of light to join the other angels there. They are there in the night sky for all to see. We non-believers call them stars.

Cathar ideas of Heaven and Hell included a Fall from heaven, during which a number of angels were expelled from heaven and fell to earth. Here is an extract from Montana of Cremona, a Professor at the University of Bologna who became a Dominican - possibly an Inquisitor, though this is not known for sure. He is listing distinctively heretical beliefs - "What Heretics May Believe, or Rather, Concoct" around 1241-1244: They also say and teach that this devil [Satan], puffed up by the deception which he had practised in heaven, presumed to ascend into heaven with his cohorts and there joined battle with the archangel Michael and was defeated and driven out. They think that the verse Apocalypse 12:7, "And there was a great battle in heaven. Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought with his angels" is to be interpreted with reference to this battle. This they take literally.   English translation from the preface to Book 1 of Monetae Cremonensis adversus Catharos et Valdenses libri quinque I (Descriptio fidei haereticorum), ed. Thomas A Ricchini (Rome, 1743). For a fuller text see Walter Wakefield & Austin Evans, Heresies of The High Middle Ages (Columbia, 1991), p309. Few Catholics today would find this remarkable, since it is now Catholic orthodoxy. One of a number of examples of Catholic teaching adopting Gnostic and Cathar teachings.

The Fall of the angels depicted in an Apocalypse from Northern France, circa 800. The chief angel has changed into a serpent during his fall and the lesser angels are losing their haloes. Their wings are already shrinking too. ( Trier Apocalypse (Stadtbibliothek (Trier, Germany), fol. 38r)

According to some versions of Cathar theology the Fall of the Angels was slightly more complicated than this. The angels also had immaterial bodies which never left heaven. The Bad God had somehow stolen the souls from these angelic bodies and imprisoned them on earth to create human beings and other animals. On their release they were reunited with their angelic body in heaven.

Hell, to the Cathars, was not a remote place under the Earth. For them Hell was here and now. The world itself, the creation of the Bad God, was the only Hell they knew. Torture, pain and misery of this life was all the Hell they needed to contemplate.

The objective for all Cathars was to escape from the cycle of reincarnation, to earn the right to return to heaven and avoid another term of imprisonment here in Hell on Earth. There was only one way to do this, and that was to be reunited with the Good God through the agency of the Holy Spirit. In certain defined circumstances the Holy Spirit would descend (as it had descended on Jesus) and release the soul. But the release was contingent. Until the person died, he or she, was obliged to continue trapped in a corporeal mantle, living a good life in an evil world.

The power to call down the Holy Spirit was conferred on an ascetic elite consisting of men and women who themselves had won their contingent release from the cycle of rebirth. These Parfaits (men) and Parfaites (women) alone could induce the Holy Spirit to descend and create another Parfait or Parfaite. This they did through a Cathar Ceremony called the Consolamentum. The requirements were rigorous and new Parfaits and Parfaites were expected to live, and from all the evidence did live, lives of the utmost purity. They lived as Christian monks have always aspired to as an almost impossible ideal - extreme simplicity, poverty, strict adherence to the commandments, severe fasting, abstinence and deprivation, constant prayer, pacifism, the carrying out of good works, spreading the good word, and so on. If they lapsed in any way they lost their status, their ability to pass on the gift of the Holy Spirit and their soul's place in heaven. Unless they underwent the Consolamentum again (which seems to have happened on a few occasions) they would be condemned to another life sentence in Hell here on earth.

Some Cathars seem to have held that each soul could undergo at most seven or, according to some, nine incarnations. The question then arose as to what happened to those souls that failed to win their Consolamentum and release within the maximum number of cycles. Unfortunately we have no coherent answer to this. Our detailed information about Cathar belief comes largely from Catholic Inquisitors, and this was not a question they dealt with in detail.

For the Albigensian Crusaders and Inquisitors the Cathar idea of Hell was entirely mistaken. As they condemned hundreds of Parfaits and Parfaites to burn at the the stake, they recorded with evident pleasure the certainty of their victims passing from the ephemeral flames of this world directly to the everlasting flames of the next.