“Humans seek conformity but nature loves diversity”
We Are One: A Manifesto for Humanity
A characteristically 21st century phenomenon has been the manifestation of the many-coloured splendour of genders, sexes and sexualities. Yet we have also seen a backlash from some religious conservatives. They view anything outside of the traditional world of the heterosexual male or female as the work of the devil. Striking therefore, that the Cathars, for all their austere medieval outlook, would have seen sex and gender in almost exactly the opposite way spiritually.
A word of caution here. Cathar writings on their cosmology are few and far between and it’s not always clear how representative they are of Cathar thinking as a whole. More importantly, most Cathars – or ‘Good Christians’, as they were known at the time – were focused on living a life in the footsteps of Jesus and his apostles rather than being preoccupied with abstract matters of theology.
Bearing those caveats in mind, we can make use of one of their works, which seems to have had a wide circulation, The Secret Supper of St John (also known as The Questions of John and other similar titles). This sets out broadly the Cathar version of the Fall, when we lost our privileged position in heaven and ended up on earth.
Our start was not as humans but as angels, made up of spirit and soul. Spirit: the Divine in all of us and inextricably part of the heavens; soul: individual to each one of us and capable of travelling between different levels of existence. As in the traditional Christian story, Satan rebels against God, but in the Cathar version he takes a third of the angels with him, luring them to the denser regions. Too late, the angels found themselves imprisoned in physical bodies, unable to return to the heavenly realms. St John recounts:
“(Satan) took clay of the earth and made man like unto himself...and made another body in the form of a woman. And the angels grieved deeply that they thus had a mortal form imposed upon them and that they now existed in different forms.”
In other words, angels, that had only known life united in one being, found themselves split into male and female, just as they found their souls, now on earth, split from their spirits that had remained in heaven. The Cathar spiritual journey, therefore, is the search for the reuniting of their being beyond its present material form and gender.
Consequently the idea of ‘non-binary’ – that is, not identifying with an exclusively female or male or even any gender; or intersex – people whose chromosomal or genital characteristics are not either typically male or female; or asexuality – experiencing little or no sexual attraction – are actually expressions of our true spiritual selves, not aberrations from the natural order. Our original angelic being lived a life beyond sex and gender.
Cathar initiates were celibate and saw marriage and sex as ways of tying angels to this planet. Reproductive sex was the most undesirable as it brought new souls into this world that would be trapped on earth in a cycle of reincarnation. They would only be released to return to the heavens by their spiritual ceremony, the ‘Consolamentum.’ So it maybe they viewed non-reproductive sex as less harmful though there is no direct evidence for it. As a homophobic slur, however, male Cathars were often accused by Catholic critics of having gay sex, the word “bugger” being derived from Bulgaria, the original Cathar homeland.
A final thought: when the Cathars wrote of the fallen angels ending up here on earth, they meant us – all of us, reading this article.
By Simenon Honoré
For further information on the Cathars, why not view our three videos in our Cathars/”Good Christians” Playlist: Spirit of the Rainbow YouTube: Cathars
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