The Cathars Were A Panic?
A Tiny Minority of Historians Point Out That Viewing Everyone Who Disagrees with you is a Satanist can Lead to the Creation of Satanists
There’s a fancy word for thinking that your religion is the true religion, and all others is just an identical anti-your-religion. I can’t spell it right now so I can’t look it up on Wikipedia.
Whatever it is, a few historians think that this belief was the root of the Albigensian Crusade.
The Normie History of the Albigensian Crusade:
Pope Innocent III got wind of a religious group called the Cathars in the Languedoc region of France circa 1209, sent a certain Simon of Montfort to snuff it out, and it got all murder-y and terrible really fast. It lasted 20 years and was incredibly violent, including such ‘holy’ acts as burning their fellow Christians alive.
What A Tiny Minority of Historians Think Really Happened
A handful of books have asserted that, while the Langueduc region of France wasn’t keen on the new Church reforms that Pope Innocent was putting forth, there probably weren’t a lot of dualists or religious types that weren’t Catholic in the area. At most, there were a few people dabbling in Bogomilism.
But not wanting to take direction from the church=heresy=all heresies are the same=St. Augustine and his ilk back in the first centuries bad mouthed dualist types of Christianity as heresy= the Langueduc-ians running their local churches their way is a gnostic type of heresy on par with Arian Christianity or Essene Judaism.
At least, that is what the writers think was the monks’ thought process.
They sent in interrogators that fed lurid tales of wild orgiastic cults to people while torturing them, and the people regurgitated these stories to stop the pain. Then the monks declared that they found a whole nest of heretics and waged a bloody crusade against the whole area.
This crusade spreads word of this amazing heresy that sounds great when the people who are denouncing it just torched your home and killed your family. People started to worship in the ways that the interrogators thought they already were.
That, again, is what the rebel historians think went down.
Are They Right?
Well…
Welllll…
WELLLL….
It isn’t unheard of for people to go into a moral panic over something that doesn’t exist. I grew up during the Satanic Panic, which landed people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit, and some of the victims of those panics are still in jail. I also know that the current Satan’s Temples are reactions to Christianity and not the other way around.
And Margaret Mitchell’s whole ‘Witch Cult of Europe’ took a lot from the torture-induced confessions from Cathars, which in turn led to Michael Gardener founding Wicca.
The idea of a panic creating the thing it fears is not the most implausible thing. It has happened.
On the other hand, it’s complicated. No one church can ever get absolutely everyone to always agree with the hierarchy on everything, and there was the whole Bogomilist thing in Hungary. Eastern Europe resisted converting to Christianity right up until the 1100’s, and there was the whole Northern Crusades against the pagan Livonians and Estonians. The Northern Crusades lasted until the 1400’s, though it started wrapping up when the Russian knights smacked the German knights around an ice-rink in the Battle of Lake Peipus in 1242. (Not the last time that would happen.)
It isn’t impossible for new religious ideas to seep into France from Eastern Europe.
History is complicated because it involves humans being humans, and we’re a confusing lot sometimes.
I won’t dismiss panic over reform-resistance as a factor in the Albigensian Crusade, but I’m not going to dismiss the accepted history yet either. It’s worth keeping in mind that something isn’t right just because it is on the fringe of academia. I’d have to do more research before deciding.
Source:
Esoterica YouTube Channel “Were the Cathars Real?”