Avignonet
What is a myth? What is a legend?
At school I was always fascinated by folk tales. I liked the way they used one – surface – story to tell another – hidden – story. But the obvious story stood up. It was worth telling in its own right. The second meaning was bonus.
I read and reread historical stories from the English tradition – King Arthur, Gawain, Beowulf – and I remember spending ages with a collection Irish folk tales collected by the poet W B Yeats. These were basically stories of real people doing extraordinary things. I would call them legends.
When I travelled to Australia a few years ago, I discovered a rich seam of brilliant narratives telling stories of the Aboriginal dreamtime, the time soon after creation, when things, animals and people were still unsure of their place in the world. These stories have shaped my children's imaginations as well as my own.
The dreamtime stories are myths. They are tales of supernatural beings – gods? – and animals that talk or transform themselves from one sort of creature into another. (In my daughter's favourite story, the kangaroos got their tails when the tree branches they were using as weapons were thrown and became stuck into their backs and wouldn't come out again!)
Many authors enjoy writing something like a myth or a legend. Perhaps they are what we might call fairy stories or allegories. Often these writers frame their stories for children, believing – perhaps rightly – that children are more likely to respond to their imaginative flights of fancy.
The Cathars had a set of stories to explain creation – seen together they make up the Cathar Creation Myth.
A Cathar believer knew that his or her soul was good, because it was made by God. They knew that God was wholly good, incapable of doing or making anything bad. They knew that the material world was created by Satan and that Satan tricked their immortal souls into leaving Heaven and coming to live in this world of pain. The evils of this world and everything in it – the sickness that carries off a loved child, the storm that destroys the harvest – were also created by Satan. Once on Earth, Satan clothed their immortal souls in 'tunics of flesh' and made them forget their divine origins. Until, that is, Jesus came to remind them.
Unlike many Christians, a Cathar believer had no real Judgement Myth. Sibylle Pèire, a half-hearted Cathar sympathiser, explained to her inquisitor the Cathar version of the end of the material world created by Satan:
'Pierre Authié; said that after the end of the world, the whole world would be full of fire, sulphur and pitch and would be consumed and he called this Hell. But all the souls of men would by then be in Paradise, and in Heaven there would be as much joy for one soul as for another; all would be one and each soul would love each other soul as much as the soul of their father, their mother or their children.'
You see, the end of Satan's material creation will only come when all souls – every single one – has returned home to Heaven. All souls – remember – were created by God and must be saved: we – our souls – are divine.
But we are not necessarily wise.
By 1242, Languedoc was sinking beneath a vicious tide of judicial murders. An ignoble flood of inquisitors, informers and crusaders crept across the land, flowing into the valleys of the foothills of the Pyrenees, rising inexorably up the flanks of even the highest strongholds of the condemned Cathar Church.
It is easy to imagine the leader of the garrison at Montségur – the safe mountain, the seat of the last Cathar Bishop – looking out from the ramparts in impotent frustration. Word had come of the arrival of four inquisitors in the small town of Avignonet, their purpose to conduct an investigation into all evidence of heresy in the area. The inevitable result would be to see Cathar parfaits and credentes imprisoned or burnt alive for believing that God is good and Satan evil, for the certainty that all souls would finally be saved and that eternal damnation was an invention of priests, designed to subdue their flocks.
A troop of 85 knights from the Montségur garrison and elsewhere, armed with swords and axes, with the astonishing stamina of medieval walkers, covered the fifty miles to Avignonet and arrived soon after the inquisitors had gone to bed on the evening of 29 May 1242. Someone crept in through a window and opened the door. With accelerating excitement and fury, the doors to the bedrooms were smashed open. The four Inquisitors and their staff were hacked to death as the knights of Montségur competed in fury and violence.
Later, seven different knights would claim to have struck the first blows. It is said that the inquisitor Guillaume Arnaud died with the Te Deum on his lips. His body was pierced by many swords, his head crushed on the stone floor, his inquisitorial records carried away and destroyed.
The ferocity and audacity of the massacre of the Inquisitors at Avignonet brought a swift response. Though he had nothing to do with the ambush, Raymond VII of Toulouse was excommunicated. The next step in the persecution of the Cathars was to be the siege of Montségur, last stronghold of the Bons Chrétiens.
The stuff of legend …
