Origins of the Cathars-follow the Old Silk Road...To China??!!!

The Old Silk Road

As a Huguenot descendant, In my efforts to understand the Cathars and their influence upon the Huguenots, I set out on an amateur scholars quest to try and  discover their origins..The Huguenots certainly had been in close proximity to the Cathars , were fellow Protestant Christians and seem to have been influenced  and inspired by them, also the Huguenot Cross clearly is remarkably similar to  the Cathar cross, and its well known that it is based upon it. Both are twelve pointed figures, but the Huguenots decided to put round "pearls" on only eight of their "points" or angular edges, supposedly to represent 'The Eight virtues". I dont know about you by I can see a sort of subliminal Star of David, suggested within the design.

This is the Huguenot Cross

This is the Cathar cross.

This example of the Huguenot cross has larger pearls and I think shows the similarities far better. The Huguenots inverted the central outward points of each cardinal point, and removed its pearl, they added four "Fleur de Lisles" which I understand symbolised the trinity, and was a French symbol, creating four heart shapes in the white empty space between.

You might not realise the significance, or see the similarities, but anyway its a fact that the Huguenot cross is directly based on the Cathar and its also a fact that the dove is a most important symbol to the Cathars. 

The Cathars were an interesting  people,a "heretical" Christian sect heavily persecuted by the Catholic Church, they were vegetarians, they were peaceful, they treated women and men as equals, they believed in reincarnation, they loved poetry and the arts, they gave us the Troubadours,
they were pacifists and never hurt a soul. They also built some very beautiful castles which today can be found scattered around the south of France,

I do confess I have always liked heretics, because I think its question and to come up with ones own unique ideas, No one should be expected to be forced to conform to anyone elses belief system.
 Some of my best friends are heretics-perhaps I am one too. Dont get me wrong, I am a Christian and I love Jesus's,message to humanity and his teachings, but I have always been a free spirit and a free thinker and I dont like it one bit when humans oppress one another and try force their tell beliefs through violence
Whatever you believe in the final analysis must be your own free choice otherwise it means nothing. Do I hear an Amen, a yay a ya or a yea?  So come and get me popey.

. I am a free spirit Libertarian and I love it that humans have the freedom to believe and think and reason freely  to have faith or not to pray or not,  just the way they like, provided that they dont hate and  harm anybody in the process. The Freedom of ideas and beliefs that dont actually really harm anybody, in my view are essential to human liberty and happiness and a healthy society, and a happy healthy planet for that matter.

 The Cathars anyway were referred to as "Le Bonne Homme, (The Good men) and historians agree, they never hurt anybody.  So heres to all the good heretics and infidels out there. Viva freedom. 

The French Cathars lived in the Southerly provencal Languedoc region 

Heres a modern map of Languedoc which is the most useful one I could find, despite being in French because it gives us a zoom out and zoom in view, and also because you can clearly see on it a place called "ALBI"...thats a place where a large population of Cathars were centred, and for that reason the Catholic crusade against these people became known as the "Albigensian" Crusade, which became an alternative name for the Cathars.

Heres a more Old fashioned and totally useless map for our purposes for anyone who feels like looking at something more old fashioned.

 The Cathars were vegetarians , very peaceloving pure people who believed in reincarnation They also loved poetry and music and the Troubadours came from them. They were Gnostic dualists. I wasnt sure what that meant either until recently, but fear not, Aal will be explained....

When googling  the Cathars, the scholars on most of the sites I encountered seemed to agree  that they descended from the Bogomils whose ideas seemed to have been inherited from a movement called  the Paulicians,

If you want to know what a Bogomil or a Paulician, well you cant expect me to tell you everything, so please feel free to do a search andgo find out.

 It  seems that the furthest traced likely source of origin from which Catharic type ideas had come, was the Byzantine  Empire,the capital of which was Constantinople, (Istanbul today), This is a city established, on both sides of the Bosphorous, in Turkey today)-This was the seat of what was called the 2nd Holy Roman Empire. Perhaps thats because their Empire was full of  Holes.

The Cathars were clearly moving in an East west direction, and the sites I googled including the following map, hinted that the Cathars had probably travelled to Byzantium  from Eastern Anatolia (Turkey).

The Journey of Catharism into Europe from the East

A quick translation of the French terms on the map , from East to West "The Paulicians"In Turkey (Asia Minor), then to Bulgaria to the "Bogomils"then through Dalmatia (I will have to google that), then to Croatia,  from there into Northern Italy where "Vaudois" refers to the Protestant group the "Waldenses", a movement who influenced and joined with the Huguenots, who I now understand to like many of the Huguenots to also be of  Israelite origin, as so many of the tribes of Europe I now know were,including the Goths, The Celts,the Gauls, some scholars say even the Brits , Irish and Scots descend from them, call me crazy if you like but seek and you will find-
  most of the tribes of Europe came out of the Caucasus region, soon after the so called "Lost Tribes" of Israel dissapeared into it. The Tribes of Dan seemed to have dominated Europe,. Consider doing some research of your own on this subject and try find out where the other tribes  went. Yes , some may not like to hear it,  but most European Caucasians have Israelite ancestry, but thats another blog and another chapter...back to the Cathars...

My new online  history-researcher friend  Wanda Richards, Author of the E-book “Huguenots and Jews of the Languedoc” had said she felt that the Cathars had probably originated somewhere along the Old Silk Road…this resounded with me and I felt rather inclined to share her hunch, and so I decided to consult "Uncle Google" to do an online  exploration of the Old Silk Road whose Western terminus  was located in the ancient city of Antioch,  eastern Anatolia.(Ancient name for Turkey.) The other Terminus on the opposing fork to Antioch was Tyre in Phoenicia, where the Phoenicians were master dyers, no doubt never tiring of dying all the fabulous Silks brought to them down the Old Silk Road and then shipping them off to trade them throughout the ancient Mediteranean world. 

Heres another map of the Old Silk road, for those who would prefer something brighter and more colourful:

I knew that Cathars followed a faith that harmonised and had many similarities with a number of Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, Manicheism, Zoroastrianism, and even Hindu philosophies such as Krishna Consciousness …so in my search up the Old Silk Road I was looking for places where a good number of those religious/spiritual /philosophies/ ideas converged.

 Manicheism's founder,  Manes, had harmoniously merged together  elements of Christianity with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. He was a dualist whose worldview corresponded pretty well with the dualist Gnostic  theology of the Cathars,. 

Manicheistic dualism like Catharism meant that they believed that there  were two creators one good and one bad, the good creator boss ruling over the realm of  of Spirit, and the bad one lording it over all things physical and material. According to this view our divine spiritual beings created by the good creator were trapped inside a physical vehicle in a physical world in a physical universe created by the bad boss architect-

 The Cathars and Manicheists like the Buddhists and the Krishnas also  believed in reincarnation. By Gnostic, the Cathars and their related movements believed that a relationship with the Divine God, could be experienced directly and personally, without any need for a priest, intercessor, pope or Church, and this of course greatly angered the popes and roman papists clergy who fancied themselves as God's earthly authority and last word in human form.
Come to think of it the Catholic churches own Saint Joan was a gnostic in that sense because she totally believed that she could have a personal direct relationship with God, and you know what, they burnt her too. (alive) Ouch. 

The Old Silk road, which as you can see by the maps I posted isn’t actually one road at all, but a network of roads- runs  into the eastern edge of Turkey ending at Antioch , pretty much where  the map I saw showing the Cathar origins reached the terminus of its search, so I decided to research the  ancient towns and cities of the old silk road from  west to east  with a special view of understanding the religions and cultural aspects of those places and how they  might have influenced or been forerunners of the Cathar faith. The first stop on my venture was Hamadan… today  located  in Iran, in ancient times called Persia,  The Jewish silktraders were well established here ,and the Cathars too were weavers- the tomb of Esther and her uncle Mordechai is situated there. Hamadan is believed to be among the oldest continually inhabited  Iranian cities in Iran and  in the world.

(Buddhism and Zoroastrianism I discovered did indeed seem to have been present there.

Just by the way, the singer Freddy Mercury,s family were Iranian Zoroastrians or Zarathustrans  and the poet Kahlil Gibrans book "The Prophet"seems to ring a bell as being related to Zarathustran thought, and old Friedrich Nietschze (hope I spelled that right)I think wrote something called "Thus spoke?spake Zarathustra. 

 I  continued my search further east, of the towns and cities I explored, such as Hamadan , Samarkhand and plenty others, but  just one,  Bukhara caught my attention as being a  perfect  likely candidate for the source of the Cathar spiritual worldview.

 Not only had Bukhara been a home to  Buddhism , Zoroastrianism and Manicheism but it was also host to Nestorian Christianity, yet another “heresy” that had made the  “Holy”Catholic Church feel murderously insecure.  Whats more,In Bukhara  they had a Nestorian cross, which if you take a look at it- is quite obviously a forerunner of the Cathar cross, the Languedoc  which was in turn the predecessor of the Huguenot cross.

 Of all the cities on the old silk road, Bukhara definitely seemed to me the perfect candidate for the origin of the Cathar movement. Furthermore Nestorius the founder of Nestorian Christianity had become a Patriarch of Constantinople (ancient Istanbul) in the Byzantine Empire. That to my mind seemed to definitely explain the existence of Cathar –like ideas in Byzantium.

The Nestorian  Cross, or Cross of St Thomas or or Anuradaphura was also known as the CATHAY cross..wow, now I was feeling excited, The word “Cathay” was only one letter different from “Cathar”, was this the original term for “Cathar”?

The CATHAY  cross, or Nestorian cross,

 or Cross of St Thomas, or Anuradaphura

If you look closely,you will notice that the Cathay, Cathar and Huguenot crosses all have these rounded beads or "pearls" on the edges...

 Here they are again, so that you can compare them:

 The Cathar cross

Now here is the "Cathay" cross , or Cross of Saint Thomas, or the "Nestorian"cross:

Notice also, that they each have twelve round "pearls" on the edges, perhaps these represented

The twelve apostles, or the Twelve tribes of Israel

Now here is the Huguenot cross, to which the Huguenot cross is the direct descendant, extremely closer to the Cathar cross both geographically and in time

Once again. the pearly beads on the edges, it also has twelve points but my Huguenot forebears put pearls on only eight of them, , apparently they symbolise eight virtues for us Huguenots,

The Cathars also liked the number Eight and this is another symbol of theirs and it looks like an Eight sided Pentagram, I have seen it before, and I was told that Terry Pratchett the author invented it, but its not true, its an old Cathar symbol. I guess this is the Cathar representation of the "Eight virtues"

But now honestly, compare these three crosses,  and tell me,Am I right or am I right, The Cathar and Cathay (Nestorian) crosses bear more resemblance both in appearance and name, despite being separated further apart in both time and space. 

 In Bukhara It had called the Anuradaphura, and it was strongly associated with Saint Thomas, and the Cathars as I had read previously  seem to have had quite a predilection (liking) for Saint Thomas, his apocryphal Gospel has many similarities which resound with Catharism, and which the Catholic church had excluded from the bible.

It was also called the Cathay cross, and scholars had also felt it to be related to the Portuguese cross. 

Having first googled the definition of the word “Nestorian” which yielded the following result

Nes·to·ri·an  (nĕ-stôr′ē-ən)    adj. (adjective)

1. Of or relating to the theological doctrine, declared heretical in 431, that within Jesus are two distinct persons, divine and human, rather than a single divine person.

2. Of or relating to a Christian church whose teachings are historically derived from this doctrine.

My next step was to Google the term “Cathay” and when I found out what that meant, then I really got excited… I totally  flipped my lid.

“Cathay” was a more Western term for China., yes- the country !!

”Cathay” meant China, and it had in ancient times been home to Nestorian Christianity, its Cathay Nestorian church used a Nestorian/Cathay/Anuradaphura type cross…which looked remarkably similar to the Cathar cross of the Languedoc in France.

Had a Gnostic form of Christianity in ancient times travelled all the way to China, and then back again along the Old silk road through Asia, across Europe and into France? Well we know that Christianity didnt start in China, so for there to be any form of Christianity in China, it must have travelled there !

The Cathay faith still exists in China, only today it is controlled by the long arm of the Catholic church, and no doubt since the name Catholic means “Universal”, they somehow feel like God they have the authority to control the whole Universe, and thus have extended their reach all the way to China. Couldnt they go control another part of the Universe far away, like Vulcan or Uranus or their own anuses? Or damn, couldn’t they just stick to controlling the city of Rome, then the rest of the world would be a much happier place.

I would rather be a Catatonic Alcoholic than a Catholic. 

The Roman church had hunted down every Cathar during their Albigensian Crusade and had burnt them alive at the stake. They had murderously turned on my ancestors the Huguenots, who fortunately escaped to England.  Before  completely exterminating  the Cathars, a gentle peaceful people who harmed nobody, and  a people whose ancient gnostic Christian ideas seem to have travelled to China and back to France, and now the Papal bullshit  had extended their search all the way back to CATHARSi Chinese (CATHAY) Oriental source and turned the Cathay Nestorians into Roman Catholics. Interesting bad sad old world, isnt it?

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