The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (23 page)

In any case, according to the Inquisition, the Cathars owned the head of John the Baptist ... Surely of all possible types of `Grail', that is the one that the Church would have really loved to have seized from the heretics.

The Cathars' own view of John was somewhat confused: they took the idea from their precursors the Bogomils that the Baptist was `a demon', surreally, `forerunner of the AntiChrist'.36 And in the Cathars' holy book, the Book of John (Liber Secretum or Secret Book) Jesus announces that John the Baptist is an emissary of Satan, the lord of the physical world, despatched to earth to sabotage his mission. But of course this is merely an exaggerated version of what is already in the standard New Testament: as we have seen, Jesus appears to have roundly insulted the Baptist at least twice. Clearly the Cathars realized that the two men were bitter enemies, but assumed - as indeed most Christians would - that Jesus must unequivocally and eternally be on the side of right.

Whatever their beliefs about the Baptist, perhaps they still inherited his head from some other Gnostic group, keeping it to maintain its magical enslavement. Perhaps, too, it was part of the fabled `Cathar treasure' that four Perfecti allegedly carried away the night before the others gave themselves up to the Crusaders. If so, they had also removed the Johannites' most sacred `Grail': perhaps that is why so many Templars were so friendly towards them, despite papal urgings to the contrary.

With the martyrdoms of the Cathars of Montsegur the scene was set for a shift in papal thought: now heresy was intimately linked with Devil-worship, with the horrors of witchcraft. There was no need for the newly-formed Inquisition to kick its heels in idleness now the field was wide open for an even greater crusade.

The terror begins

Colin Wilson comments in his book, The Occult (1973): `Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance.'' However, this definition largely depends on the particular manifestation of Christianity in question. The calm, probity and intellectual capacity of the itinerant Cathar preachers was notably at odds with the decadent lifestyle of the higher Catholic clergy, and the often staggering ignorance of the parish priests, equipped to do little more than say the Mass and preside over the usual offices such as burying the dead. But then came Dominic de Guzman, a fanatical Spanish cleric who aimed to use the Cathars' own methods against them - and in doing so, he unleashed a virtual apocalypse upon at least 100,000 poor wretches, and caused suffering and hardship to many millions more ordinary people for generations. Under the flag of his new order, the Dominicans, he created the Holy Office, otherwise known as the Inquisition, a word that should - but these days rarely does - evoke the same concentrated shudder in the minds of all decent people as does the terrible term `Gestapo'. They are not dissimilar, except the latter was a very brief manifestation of evil compared to the lengthy reign of the Inquisition - in fact, it still operates today, but under the less emotive name of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.'x

This speech of Dominic's to the people of the Cathar country, dating from the 1200s, reveals a hint of the horrors to come:

I have sung words of sweetness to you for many years now, preaching, imploring, weeping. But as the people of my country say, where blessing is to no avail, the stick will prevail. Now we shall call forth against you leaders and prelates who, alas, will gather together against this country . . . and will cause many people to die by the sword, will ruin your towers, overthrow and destroy your walls and reduce you all to servitude ... the force of the stick will prevail where sweetness and blessing have been able to accomplish nothing 39

Despite the unflinching harshness of this warning, `dying by the sword' would no doubt come to seem like an outright luxury compared to the atrocious methods of death meted out to thousands by his henchmen.

Deeply involved with Simon de Montfort, Dominic finally settled his headquarters at Toulouse (Carcassonne proving too hostile), where he founded the Order of the Preaching Friars, or the Dominican Order, in December 1216. Three years later he and his monks were on the move again: Toulouse had proved too hot to hold them. Giving the Languedoc up as a very bad job, the Dominicans spread to various locations, including Paris and, of course, Spain. By the time of Dominic's death in 1221, his movement was riding high, with a hundred houses - and its success was assured when the Dominican-friendly pope, Gregory IX, began his reign in 1233.

A year later two Inquisitors were officially appointed at Toulouse, centre of Cathar country - previously too hostile for the Dominicans to make their base. Now they were back, and they were in charge, with new and terrible powers from the pope himself. However, the Inquisitors by no means enjoyed unmitigated success, as Guillaume Pelhisson discovered after having several living heretics burnt, and, for good measure, also `certain deceased persons ... dragged away and burnt' 40 The people rebelled and set upon the Inquisitor, beating him badly. Outraged, Guillaume remarks apopleptically: `They beat, wounded and killed those who pursued them ... many wicked things were done in the land to the church and to faithful persons.'41

An unedifying story illustrates the fanaticism and dehumanization of the new masters of bodies, if not souls. In 1234 Dominic was canonized - as Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh remark in their 1999 book The Inquisition: `Few saints can have had so much blood on their hands'42 - and while the Dominicans at Toulouse were preparing to celebrate the event, news arrived of a dying woman's heresy. As she lay on her deathbed, apparently she had received the Cathar version of the last rites, the Consolamentum. The Inquisitors, including the Bishop of Toulouse, rushed to her bedside, where they found her steeped in Catharism and obdurate in her heresy. `Forthwith, the bishop . . . by virtue of Jesus Christ condemned her as a heretic. Moreover, the vicar had her carried on the bed in which she lay to the count's meadow and burned at once.'4' As Baigent and Leigh remark dryly, `Thus did the Dominicans of Toulouse crown their celebration of the newly sainted Dominic's feast day with a human sacrifice.'44

Shortly afterwards, the Dominicans were expelled from Toulouse by an outraged populace, but their revenge on that city, and on the neighbouring countryside, was so atrocious that its fallout reverberates to this day in an impoverished land still suspicious of the Church of Rome. First, to establish that their power transcended even the safe haven of the grave, the Inquisition had the bones and putrescent bodies of prominent heretics dragged from their graves and burnt `to the honour of God and the Blessed Virgin, His Mother, and the Blessed Dominic, His Servant [who] ... most happily brought about this work of the Lord.'45

One of the most zealous (and therefore most vicious) of the early Inquisitors was himself a former Cathar, the Dominican friar Robert `le bougre' ('the Bulgar'), also known as `the hammer of the heretics'. He sent many thousands to the stake in both Flanders and France, in 1239 consigning 183 of his former co-religionists to the flames in Mont-Aims en masse as `a fiery propitiation of God'. (But perhaps even Yahweh at his sourest would stop short of demanding such an offering. And there is no record of the Devil doing so, either.) That particular horror is notable for the fact that the local bishop offered them the solace of the Consolamentum before they died 46

Although there had been isolated cases of the execution (or exile) of heretics in the past, now the Inquisition proved a well-oiled, highly dedicated machine, a conveyor belt for tipping whole communities into Hell. However, because of a long-standing ecclesiastical tradition of not actually causing heretical blood to be shed, more or less ingenious ways of torturing and despatching the accused were devised that would keep bloodshed to a minimum, such as the thumbscrew and the rack. As Baigent and Leigh put it succinctly: `Devices of this kind would seem to have been contrived mess."Fire minimum was the answer to the Inquisitors' prayers. From the and pain maximum cause to point of view of the Church it has several major advantages. It is relatively bloodless. It has a unique capacity to evoke terror: the very thought of flames near one's vulnerable flesh induces an immediate atavistic fear, and the real thing is satisfyingly excruciating - particularly if produced by lighting slow-burning green wood, or setting the fire a fair distance beneath the heretics. And, ultimately, it is very cleansing, a purgation of the filth of heresy. As an afterthought, it could be argued that fire cleanses the heretic's soul, although mostly they were led to believe their only possible destiny was eternal hell fire. Suffering beyond imagining in life was to be followed by considerably worse - including the prospect of the spiritual desolation of being for ever removed from the love of Christ. Even the Nazis or the henchmen of Pol Pot contented themselves with mere mortal agonies.

However, the Cathars were relatively soon despatched, as we have seen, culminating in the conflagration of 210 Perfecti beneath the citadel of Montsegur in 1244. Although pockets of Catharism survived - and may, in some form or another, continue to survive to this day - the Inquisition had done its worst and triumphed. But even so, it had hardly hit its stride. Dominic's men had a much older and more widespread enemy in its sights, a more virulently hated opponent of truly primeval standing - women.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the priests of Peter's Church should campaign tirelessly and fanatically against females - after all, the Magdalene had complained to Jesus that he `hates me and all the race of women' - but the ferocity and insanity involved still have the power to rock both heart and soul.

Their excuse was, of course, witchcraft, not only evil-doing and heresy, but also Devil-worship - the deliberate act of aligning oneself with Satan, often, allegedly, by actually signing a pact with the Prince of Darkness himself.

The story of how the Inquisitors dealt with the accused is not for the squeamish, but must be faced if the nature of persecution and the dire potential of bigotry and hatred is ever to be fully understood. Although despicable in the extreme, the Nazis' reign of terror against the Jews and Stalin's atrocities against 20 million of his own people48 only present part of the picture of man's inhumanity to man. The depredations of the medieval Church provide the missing link in the history of sadism - man's inhumanity to woman.

It is here that the Reverend Alphonse Joseph-Mary August Montague Summers enters the story proper - as, if nothing else, a cautionary tale about the limitless capacity of even an educated and intelligent bigot for believing the most arrant and dangerous nonsense. Yet he is no fire-and-brimstone character from the pages of the medieval Inquisition, although no doubt he would have loved to be: Summers died as recently as 1948, a pitiless and fanatical opponent of anything or anyone that smacked of heresy or challenged the smallest detail of Catholic belief. He will be quoted extensively, for although well-balanced modern readers may be tempted to dissolve into giggles simply because of his ,over the top' pompous and self-satisfied style, in fact he is a profoundly serious object lesson. The twentieth-century Summers possessed the same thought-processes and emotional responses as his brothers-in-spirit, the monks and priests of the medieval Inquisition, with hardly an iota of difference. Chillingly, even the jacket blurb of the 1960s reprint of his infamous book The History of Witchcraft (1925), states:

He was not ashamed of the great excesses committed in the 17th and 18th centuries, on the contrary, he vigorously defends everything the church ever did to extirpate witchcraft and heresy.

Interestingly, Summers notes: `All the heresies, and the Secret Societies of heretics, which infested Europe during the Middle Ages were Gnostic ...'49 Just like Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. Just like Jesus himself, in fact.

It is no accident that the first `witches' accused of attending the diabolical Sabbat to fall foul of the Inquisition were in fact Cathars and their maidservants from the Toulouse and Carcassonne area. In 1335 sixty-three people were tortured to extract confessions: chief among them was Anne-Marie de Georgel, who declared - apparently also speaking for the others - that they understood this world to be a battleground between the god of Heaven and the Lord of this world, and as they considered that the latter would triumph, they supported him. This may have seemed like Satanism to the accusing clerics, but it was, of course, simply Gnosticism - although as far as they, and the later Summers, were concerned, there was no great difference between the two. Another young woman admitted to the crime and sin of serving `the Cathari at supper' so

Inherently unclean

Excavating beneath the story of the original witchfinders and the thoughts of Summers, the full horror of a world gone mad is revealed. But it is more even than that: it is a living nightmare where the torturers and killers do so in the name of the highest good, and the `evil' accused are, for the most part, utterly innocent of all great wrong. This was truly a time when Satan walked the earth - in the guise of the God of Love.

While there will undoubtedly be many who object to the witch trials being depicted as primarily a sustained outrage against women, there is no doubt whatever that the witch hysteria `provided a focus for sexist hatred in male-dominated society'.51 It had not escaped the notice of the Inquisition that the hated Cathars practised an almost unique form of spiritual egalitarianism of the sexes, and that their influence had helped foster a great flowering of secular arts in the south of France, including the artful songs of the Troubadours, and the cult of the Lady - clearly a resurrection of ancient goddess worship. (The Troubadour's insistence of loving individual women was quite new to most people - nothing in the classical world was remotely similar.) Everywhere they looked in the Languedoc and Provence, the men of the Church must have blanched at the unavoidable echoes of the unacceptable `Apostle of the Apostles' - Mary Magdalene, whose memory they were so eager to malign, and whose cult they were intent on destroying.