Is Chivalry Dead?
More than 70 years ago, Denis de Rougemont, the late Swiss scholar, wrote a fascinating book called Love in the Western World. In it he theorizes that Tantra, which ignited in India some time before 800 C.E. from much older roots, traveled west via the Muslim world under the umbrella of divine passion, or fana (the passing away of the self). Fana was the theme of mystical Arab love poetry and song. It infected the Spanish Moors within a few centuries. When it crossed the Pyrenees into what is now southern France - in the refrains of wandering minstrels - it encountered a version of Gnosticism, which had migrated westward from Bulgaria, or beyond.
The Mysterious Cathars
The result was the wildly popular, doomed, and surprisingly influential Cathar movement, which ultimately gave rise to chivalry, or courtly love. The Cathars were passionate purists who regarded themselves as the true Christians. They believed in the "Good God", and claimed that their principles predated those of the Catholics (who believed in the "other" God, who had imprisoned mankind in matter). Cathars did not kill, were vegetarian, and chaste. The Divine Feminine (the Lady, or Sophia, Queen of Heaven) was a key figure in their cosmology, and women could be clerics in their order. Unlike the Catholics they did not favor physical procreation, choosing instead to place their focus on their spiritual lives beyond the material world.
One of the Cathars' basic beliefs was that 'true love' was not the ordinary human love between husband and wife but rather the worship of a feminine savior (the Lady), a mediator between God and man, who waited in the sky to welcome the pure with a holy kiss and lead them into the Realm of Light. By contrast with this pure love, ordinary human sexuality and marriage were bestial and unspiritual. Cathars believed that the love of man and woman should be an earthly allegory of their spiritual love for the Queen of Heaven.
It was the Catholics who branded these Christians with the epithet "Cathar", claiming that the Cathars kissed cats' arses as part of their supposed devil worship. Ironically, the word "cathar" means "pure" in Greek, and that is how the Cathars are remembered. Their very purity ultimately drove the Church to tighten up on many lax practices, like priests' openly keeping mistresses - a common practice in those times. The impassioned purity of the Cathars also indirectly inspired the Reformation and the Quaker movement....
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