Magia Sexualis, by Hugh B. Urban (2006)
p. 32 "The fears of religious heresy dangerously combined with sexual licentiousness were to recur through out the history of Western Christianity, from the time of the Gnostics down to out generation and our own obsessions with Satanic child abuse and devil-worshipping teenagers, but they would reach a particularly intense new height during the high and late Middle Age, from roughly the twelfth to the fifteen centuries.
Malcolm D. Lambert The Cathars (Peoples of Europe) 1st Edition (1998) amazon.com
p. 33
"...the great irony of these accusations is that again, much like the Gnostics, these groups tended on the whole to be anything but hedonistic or sexually indulgent; on the contrary, they were generally highly ascetic and even antisexual. ... held a strongly dualistic worldview that identified the material world and the body with the forces of darkness, condemning marriage and sex as unclean relations. ...condemned marriage, sexual intercourse, and procreation of children, which only perpetuate existence in this suffering physical realm. Rejecting the authority of the Catholic Church as a corrupt and self-serving institution, the Cathars quickly drew a large following from a wide array of groups that had become disaffected with "the world, with its social organization (feudal society) and with its guide, the Church of Rome."
I had read once a book written by a guy who had traveled to Montségur, the final strong hold and martyrdom site of the Medieval Cathars. He asked one woman, "How many of the people here were Cathars?"
She replied, "We all were, and we still are."
Speaking of the Cathars and the related Bogomils
p. 34 "Perhaps the primary reason for the intense persecution of the Cathars, Bogomils, and other groups was simply that they represented a forceful and popular challenge to the existing structure of power. ...according to Cathar belief, human beings can become perfect and free themselves from the bonds of the material world by their own rational choice and free will, without need for external political or religious authority: "Capable of rational control, they can purify themselves of natter and again become perfect. Do they then need control by outside authorities?" Second and more important, however, the Cathars also subverted existing gender roles: a teaching common to virtually all Cathar texts is the condemnation of marriage and procreation. A woman's role as wife and mother has no value, since giving birth and nurturing children only perpetuates the evil of existence in the body. ... Both sexes could become perfects, preach and administer the sacrament."
"...the primary reason for the persecution of such groups was that they were attempting -- not unlike the early Christians under the Roman Empire -- to liberate themselves from the existing social structure by means of an alternative sexual politics. Yet ironically, they were refracted through the lens of the dominant religious and political order, the charge brought against them was precisely that of sexual liberation in the sense of illicit, immoral sexual relations."
SJG
