Inquisition
There is an odd, hands-on museum in Wiesbaden in Germany. It's called the Freudenberg Experience Field.
At first sight the museum appears to be a rather run-down science exhibition. The big old town house is warm – the central heating appears to be new – but the paint is peeling from the flaky plaster. Here and there wooden mouldings are missing from the door frames and panelling. There are rolled-up blankets lying along the draughty gaps between sash windows.
Despite all this, the entrance hall is impressive. A stair and a mezzanine landing curls round three sides of an airy, comfortable space. A till stands on a bench, isolated on the bare floorboards. You ask: How much are the tickets? You are told there are two prices, one higher than the other. You learn that if you pay the higher price you will be contributing more to the refurbishment of the Freudenberg schloss, so you fork out.
On the floor in front of you is a large brass or bronze bowl, close by it a smaller cousin. The bowl must be a metre across and half-full of water. Two beefy handles arch out of the water. A museum assistant is rubbing his hands slowly back and forth across the handles and the bowl is singing like a gong. In the basin the water dances and pops.
Huge organ pipes are suspended in the vault of the entrance hall above you, played by visitors blowing into great oblong mouthpieces; mournful music.
A series of glass chambers packed with cotton wool lines the landing wall, each connected to a two black rubber pipes. One pipe has an open end, then other a rubber bulb about the size of a woman's fist. Squeeze the bulb and the open end of the tube releases a fragrance – vanilla, mint, strawberry, chocolate.
A plumb line hangs over a tray of sand. Set it swinging and it scrapes enigmatic, unpredictable patterns.
Suspended from the ceiling in a further room, a circular board about 1.5 metres across. Carved into the upper surface is a Labyrinth in 11 circuits, on the model of Chartres cathedral – among others. As you push the Labyrinth board from side to side, gravity pulls a ball bearing closer and closer to the centre.
In the centre is the centre.
If you wish you can complete the journey in reverse, playing with gravity to draw the ball bearing back out to your starting point.
There was either no point to the journey, or you were the point of the journey.
Question: What is the central thread that holds everything together?
Answer: I myself am the central thread. As long as I seek this central thread elsewhere than in myself, I only partially inhabit myself.
The Freudenberg Experience Field
How is it that human beings – the same creatures as creating this whimsical, informative, educational, fascinating museum – could also be Inquisitors?
Between 1209 and 1226 – 17 short years – the Crusaders eliminated around 1500 parfaits and parfaites. Despite this, the Cathar Church was in good enough health to create a fourth bishop at Razès. The Catholic hierarchy realised that brute force alone would not rid them of the troublesome Cathars and their attractive alternative Christianity. A new and frighteningly successful strategy was developed. Within 18 years, Montségur, the Cathar 'safe mountain' had fallen.
The Inquisition destroyed the Cathar Church by imposing a cleverly graduated set of punishments. A heretic who recanted and embraced the Catholic faith once more could expect leniency; a Cathar who then relapsed back into heresy would immediately be:
'handed over to the secular arm.'
In other words, to the executioner.
At the same time, rules were framed to protect informers:
'The names of witnesses are to be kept secret. However, an accused person may list the names of his enemies … In a case of heresy any person whatsoever may be admitted as accuser or witness, not excluding criminals, evil-livers or their accomplices.'
Each testimony was carefully recorded by a notary. The Toulouse register contains more than 5600 statements collected by inquisitors.
It is interesting that the Inquisitors consistently refused to take responsibility for the executions they caused to take place. Throughout their brutal campaign, they preserved a fig-leaf of Christian charity over their judicial murders, insisting euphemistically that a defiant parfait or a relapsed credens should be:
'handed over to the secular arm.'
Perhaps they – like the Cathars they condemned – had read in the New Testament:
'Thou shalt not kill.'appear to have been looking for something. They became known as the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon.
And although white people are not recorded to have been seen in Africa until the mid-15th Century, there is a myth in Ethiopia that the impossibly massive obelisk at Axum – it is over 100ft tall, the largest single piece of stone ever quarried in this world – was raised by 'fair-headed' people using the power of the Ark of the Covenant. Were these 'fair-headed' people Knights Templar perhaps?
Disjointed, unconnected facts? Nothing more than a series of coincidences? A desire to see patterns, codes, where none exist? Or the sort of hidden secret history that wriggles further from our grasp the more closely we look?
You decide.
