The Cathar Conspiracy

Believe it or not I've never read a Harry Potter book. Probably the only person on the planet. I've never been to Thailand, either. From what I saw yesterday it does make me think I would not want to write a book that inspires people to wear funny hats.
Neither have I read The DaVinci Code but I have read some of the sources the author used to concoct his tome, such as Michael Baigent who wrote an unintelligible account of some mysterious doings in southwestern France. I forget the title and the co-author. Alignments, paintings, codes, in which with a really fertile imagination someone could discern the most astounding things. Templars and Frankish Kings, oh my. Great stuff. I've always been a little bit gullible when it comes to mysterious doings that might illuminate unknown forces in history. Although antediluvian civilizations are my favourite fantasy, a good conspiracy theory can be fun, too. But when you already know that Dan Brown's thesis is poppycock then it spoils everything. Opus Dei as a candidate for a subterranean force that has shaped history just doesn't add up.
However, I'm not dismissing the possibility that there has been a hidden influence, an organization unknown to conventional historians, and I do have a candidate. The Manicheeans. That's just a label of my own convenience I use to designate what most students call Gnosticism. A protean creed, it is rather difficult to describe but it is basically a kind of materialism where our bodies and all matter is a creation of an evil being. Who that evil being is may vary according to which version is being studied, but usually it's the creator god depicted in Genesis. The true story according to the Manicheans is that this god was a fallen angel who created this world as an act of rebellion. We human beings are actually sparks of the divine imprisoned in matter. All matter is therefore evil, including our bodies. A good source of texts (intended I think, as promotional material) is Willis Barnestone's The Other Bible. When I first came across this very interesting collection I was inclined to his position, but it was while comparing these gnostic writings to orthodox Christian scripture that I came to realize they were not comparable at all. The Christian scriptures are on a different plane altogether. But The Other Bible taught me a lot, and I still like to read from it from time to time, if only from a historical point of view. It tells us a lot about how religious belief evolved during a time of great spiritual ferment.
Manicheeanism, a sort of bastardized amalgam of Neoplatonism and Judaic lore, was very influential in the Roman Empire during the early years of Christianity. In fact, they were competitors. I'm pretty sure the false teachers St. Paul warned about in his epistles were Manicheeans. The impulse by the early church to regularize the scriptures was probably due to Manicheean influence. Barnestone and others of his like call this regularization of the canon suppression and try to claim that these non canonical writings are as true or even truer than what we read in the Bible. But the Church Fathers knew what they were doing. They had a strong oral history to draw upon that was in direct line from the apostles, and they had a very sharp understanding of the logical implications embedded in any given religious dogma.
There were many versions of this belief system floating around in the late Roman empire. There was a Judaic Manicheism, a Pagan Manicheeism, a Christian Manicheeism. St. Augustine was originally a Manicheean. It was after meeting an apostle of that creed that he converted to Christianity.
The vital difference between Christianity and Manicheeism (from the point of view of doctrines) is that according to Christian belief the world and ourselves are creations of God and therefore good. It's true we have a fallen nature due to Adam's sin, but we are redeemable, and have been redeemed by the intercession of God, who took on the form of a man, suffered as a man, and gave up his life in the place of ours so that we could be redeemed. Logically, of course, if you think the world is evil then it follows that its creator is evil, and this cannot be countenanced by a religion that believes God to be infinitely good and infinitely loving.
Nevertheless, I think a lot of Manicheeism did infiltrate Christian beliefs and may be responsible for the aversion to sensual pleasure which led to the mortification of the flesh, a prominent feature among the early Christian hermits.
After Christianity became the official religion of the Romans, Manicheeism seemed to die out. But did it? During Medieval times there were repeated breakouts in widely separated European locations of cults that were obviously very similar to Manicheeism. One peculiar logical consequence of viewing the body as evil is that it doesn't matter what you do with your body. Thus there is really no morality. The world is intrinsically evil, so you can do whatever you feel like. Thus many of these cults were orgiastic. I'm pretty sure that well known trove of medieval poetry known as the Carmina Burana is a Manicheean document. I think it's more than likely that Manicheeans were deeply involved in alchemy and the 'black arts.'
There were Bogomils in Eastern Europe but it has been the Cathars in southwest France who have attracted most of the attention lately. The inquisition was largely a response to the Cathars, who were accused of witchcraft. After that they seem to have disappeared from history. But what if they just went underground? What if it continued as a religion but in secret? Is it possible that Cathars have blended in with every Western institution since then, including the Church, the banks (an early center of European banking was located in Cahors in southwest France), the courts of princes, and learning institutions. Maybe there were Jewish Cathars, and Cathars networking throughout Europe. Maybe there were Muslim Cathars in Spain. Maybe they learned how to occupy positions of influence wherever they went, in universities, publishing, etc. Maybe they were the original Masons, maybe they were the Templars. I don't know. It's just a wild speculation. Dan Brown has proved it isn't necessary to let facts stand in the way of a good book but I would hesitate to put forward this speculation of mine as truth. Nevertheless I halfway believe it.
Those ancient Church Fathers were a lot smarter than people today realize. They knew beyond any doubt that what people believe is incredibly important, that beliefs have consequences. This is in direct contradiction to the modern commonplace that one belief is pretty well as good as another. Well, thanks to bellicose Islamists we are finding out all over again that beliefs do matter. Islam may teach of the existence of one god, but that is where the similarity to Christianity and Judaism ends. Islam glorifies force and conquest, the methods used from the beginning in its expansion. Christianity teaches love, not killing. True it is that many who claimed to be Christians used the faith as justification for war, but that's not how Christianity came to dominate the Roman world and what came after. Christianity was spread by persuasion and acts of charity. Unarmed bishops stood up to barbarian invaders with nothing except moral force to back them up. The story of Christianity in Dark Age Europe is of Christian preachers gentling warrior chieftains. A lot of gentling was needed, as Gregory of Tours chronicled. They were taught by the Christian preachers, who often wandered alone in pagan territories, of a new way of thinking which was instrumental in growing the West into the greatest civilization the world has yet known while Islam, centered in the Near East where civilization as well as Christianity was born, languished and stagnated.
Our ability to stand up to the new Islamic onslaught has been compromised by a secularism that bears many similarities to Manicheeism. Whether this secularism is attributable to an occult organization or to some sort of cyclical turning of social beliefs I do not know, but I do often wonder how people come to believe the things they do.