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Thread: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

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    Australia Avalon Member Alpha141's Avatar
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    Default The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Hi all,

    Here is a clip of a discussion between myself and Andrew Bartzis on The Cathars during middle ages Europe. It is about 26mins from a 4hr discussion (4x 1hr videos yet to be released) on how the play for our technology era we now all find ourselves in was setup as a by product the Industrial Era in a gathering in Genoa Italy 1717-20. It is also part of a much bigger 10000yr plan also and a Wizard vs Priest battle that the Priesthood won and eliminated much of the wizard lineages.

    Enjoy this clip however. It is very informative and many in this sort of community may have possibly had past life experiences in this expression. As it is triggering many to have conformational recalls.



    Cheers
    "Fraud and Falsehood Dread Investigation. Truth Invites It' - Thomas Cooper -
    My website latest creations - http://www.servantoftruth.org

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    Avalon Member lunaflare's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    So Andrew stated he was getting his info from Wikipedia at one point in the interview.
    Where does he source his information when he was speaking about the Cathars being traders of technology? Can you explain what kind of technology and for what specific purpose.
    Some clarification would be helpful. It was a little hard to hear as Andrew sounded as though he was eating chunks of bread and dip..
    Thanks

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    Australia Avalon Member Alpha141's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Fair Qs Lunaflare,

    He has Akashic Access related to the crystals / stones of a a planet which have information in their structure. That is what the Akashic Records of a planet are. He checks Wiki at times just to get the frequency of the whole of what has been said / taugh etc as a focal point to tune into things...then uses a reference of it to offer the more broader perspective. Like gain a feel. The linguistics used there are interesting at times. So, if he hasn't accessed some info like that then checks the reality and marries up what is from his perspective.

    The 'Technology' trade would in part refer to Human DNA. Our codes in our bodies are a very sought after prize throughout the universe. Relationship of that with particular soul consciousnesses highly sought after. Entire civilizations have been cultivated and harvested. The Mayans. Pix of Scotland (sorry bad spelling of that people right now) are 2 examples. Our codes by being in a 'skin suit' from Earth allow us access to the entire universe. DNA is the key to access areas. Species are in trouble and need it to rectify their issues. And, there is alot of non DNA stuff here on Earth too which is also sought after. Alot of the time though from him it refers to our body as technology. DNA is traded for device sort of tech. These sorts of linguistic things become clearer when a certain volume of his perspectives is explored. At the word patterns can be pretty complex.

    The relaxed nature of it. No problem and welcome the feedback. These weren't intended to be public and just mates chatting. He had some people close pass on and it helps to tune into some theme to ground him and stay here. The info is pretty amazing, never offered and i just said i can do something if all cool with him. I had a joke with him today that we might have a chat and he goes to reveal the great mystery of the universe and just munches through something and we miss the whole elusive secret wisdom. Headphones are pretty helpful. But yeah, we are aware. It takes a fair bit of energy to hold the frequency so sustenance is a necessity. Because i am in AUS the times usually are around his dinner time.

    If you want to see him in action doing radio / studio akashic readings of people from all over the globe on how amazing our fuller history is do have a look at his YouTube channel below. The individual callers also are pieces to the bigger puzzle and display his abilities wonderfully:

    https://www.youtube.com/user/galactichistorian/videos

    Enjoy
    "Fraud and Falsehood Dread Investigation. Truth Invites It' - Thomas Cooper -
    My website latest creations - http://www.servantoftruth.org

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages


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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    The Akashic records are not held within the material of a given planet, stone, crystal, or otherwise.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    This is strange but awesome. I was taken by the Cathars when I read a post on an unrelated thread So found this one and then when i went back to copy the original post to start more HERE... Bill had already written this post

    Quote
    Quote Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
    Quote Posted by Anna70 (here)
    Quote Posted by jaybee (here)
    ... I first came across the Cathars when I stumbled on a book in a charity shop 45 years ago 'We Are One Another' by Arthur Guirdham - it's about group reincarnation ...

    ... Legend denotes 700 years after the last Cathar was burnt at the stake, 1321, the laurel tree will blossom once again and Cathars will return. Certainly the tree is green and while they may never have disappeared completely, the Cathars are openly returning.

    700 years from 1321 is NOW....
    My apology for leaping onto this little tangent , but the Cathars thing jumped out at me, as one of my very dearest friends is highly likely connected to this. Would you know if there is a dedicated thread that goes into this more deeply? (I did look but did not see a specific one on this topic.)
    The only thread I see that discusses the Cathars (an important historical topic!) is this one.
    I am listening to this now. I FEEL like maybe if such a thing can be true that I am a returned Cathar.


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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Jaybee posted

    Quote
    Quote Posted by jaybee (here)
    Quote Posted by Delight (here)
    Quote Posted by Trisher (here)
    Even though people have willingly gone forward for the jab for all their different reasons, can it be called free will when what the jab actually does and its ingredients have been hidden? Those that are in the know must have an antidote. I have heard Suramin mentioned. Has anyone investigated this further?
    This is a really basic question concerning free will. I think I have to get over the feeling of frustration that I did report concerns to my family and friends and they discount what I suggest. Perhaps the deprivation of free will began long ago when people with herbal and other deep knowledge were hunted and murdered?

    The DOCTOR knows best and MUST be obeyed. You WILL OBEY. Some sort of insinuation was introduced into the consciousness that only certain "specialists" can help us with our maladies? Moreover, we the supplicants to the specialists cannot be let in on the ingredients or even our own "diagnosis"> Maybe that was when people associated medical treatment with pain, knives, poison and EXPECTED illness, debilitation and helplessness? Then people still feel letdown and angry when they can get no help. They will talk endlessly about the bad doctors and care... NOT KNOWING that the whole SYSTEM on which their hopes are based is BOLLOCKS.

    The pharmaceutical industry did not create the hole. They stepped in to deepen and widen the disconnect. In my whole life of study about various aspects of medicine/nursing/health, OVER and OVER new books have been written "Health Secrets they do not want you to know". "Your Doctor Your SELF" and people will read the miracle stories and be wowed that SOMEONE SURVIVED CANCER. How is it that decades and centuries and eons pass and people still cannot pass along essentially good news about us (and have it STICK)?

    In recent years, IMO the vaccination campaign has been the out picturing of a tortured human psyche who is at bottom line THREATENED, not empowered. Despite not wanting this latest round of jabbs, we hear so many apologize for themselves as in" "Polio was cured by vaccines. Small pox was cured by vaccines. I am NOT an antivaxxer". This is an absurd position for a human. The reason is that it is accepting that one MUST have a vaccine.

    If PUBLIC HEALTH demands vaccination as a PRINCIPLE, then TRY to bargain for what kind. It will be a futile battle as the very notion assumes no matter the price, it will be paid. The very notion is that mankind is toast without vaccines means that dead and injured individulas are just the price paid this time. IMO there is ONLY one reason people seek the jab and won't listen to me. They believe more in jabs than Humanity.

    Thank you

    I realized a while back that because much of modern medicine, practice and drugs - is based on the torture and suffering of millions - billions? of animals that are used for experiments..... it's based on evil / darkness of the soul - then the logical conclusion is that it's fruits must be rotten as well - even though it doesn't always feel like it and it all gets jumbled up with helpful and unhelpful things and people...

    Re you first paragraph - that I bolded...

    That makes me think of the Cathars that were ruthlessly stamped out and burnt at the stake and generally hounded out of existence around the 12th and 13th and 14th (ish) centauries...

    They were very much about healing - natural remedies and whatnot - and were considered to be an expression of primitive Christianity spreading out over Europe but especially remembered in Southern France -

    You yourself are probably a reincarnated Cathar maybe .... I first came across the Cathars when I stumbled on a book in a charity shop 45 years ago 'We Are One Another' by Arthur Guirdham - it's about group reincarnation -

    The Cathars have been 'with me' ever since and had a big revival in my life this year when they came (are coming) in real strong... I bought 'We Are One Another' and another of Arthur Guirdham's books 'The Cathars and Reincarnation' off ebay and re- read them in March -

    Don't want to go off topic too much but it's to do with what you said.... and there is a story about one of the last Cathars that was burnt at the stake - that he made a prophesy...


    https://inkblurb.com/sacred-france-m...ly%20returning.

    quote from the above random link about it....

    Quote The weather is perfect, warm, clear skies. We leave the bus and walk towards the laurel of Catharism. Legend denotes 700 years after the last Cathar was burnt at the stake, 1321, the laurel tree will blossom once again and Cathars will return. Certainly the tree is green and while they may never have disappeared completely, the Cathars are openly returning.
    700 years from 1321 is NOW....
    I wonder, what will the reincarnated Cathars do now?

    This was an interesting article

    Quote The Cathars and Reincarnation: The Strange Revelations of Arthur Guirdham
    BY RICHARD SMOLEY

    From New Dawn 145 (Jul-Aug 2014)


    The Cathars remain an enigma. An austere, world-denying sect, they were nevertheless associated with a remarkable cultural renascence in the southern France of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Beloved in the regions that supported them, they were popularly known as the bonshommes, the “good men.” Labelled by the Catholics as “the great heresy,” Catharism was so formidable a rival that the church formed the Inquisition to crush it.

    Arthur Guirdham’s story is told in his book The Cathars and Reincarnation
    Who were the Cathars, and where did they come from? The name comes from the Greek katharós, meaning “pure” or “clean.” Their origins are obscure, but they appear to have some connection with sects that stretched back at least to the time of Christ, with exotic names such as the Bogomils, Paulicians, Massalians, and most famously the Manichaeans. I cannot sketch out this history here (I have tried to do so in my book Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism), but it is probably safe to say that some kind of continuous link connects all these groups spanning the first millennium of the Common Era.

    The chief feature these sects all shared was dualism. This word has many meanings. Here it means the belief in a cosmos that is made up of two opposing and more or less equipotent forces: good and evil, light and dark. This polarity is cosmic: it began with the universe and will end only when the universe ends. Our world, the world of matter, is the creation of the dark forces; the light is imprisoned and alien here.

    Note how this differs from conventional Christianity, which teaches that the world, including the world of matter, is fundamentally good. Its evil arises from the Fall of man in the garden, prompted by that old serpent, the Devil. By the old Catholic axiom, natura vulnerata, non deleta – “nature was wounded but not destroyed” by the Fall.

    But the differences are not quite as clear-cut as they may seem. Mainstream Christianity – by which I mean practically all of the churches that call themselves Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant – has its own strain of pessimism and world-denial. One obvious example is the pathological hatred of the body that Christianity has shown almost since its earliest days. Conventional Christianity may not teach that the world is evil, but it frequently acts as if it is. And while Christianity claims that the sole and ultimate power is good, it also makes the Devil and his minions seem very nearly as powerful. Some scholars even say that Christianity is semidualistic.

    Moreover, if Catholic Christianity and its offspring teach that this world is fundamentally good, why have they so often cast shadows of fear, gloom and barbarism? And if the Cathars were so gloomy and world-renouncing, why was the culture they influenced the most – Languedoc in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – the most prosperous, open, tolerant, and cultivated society of medieval Europe? What did the Cathar have to do with this efflorescence?

    You can read a great deal about the subject and still be left groping for an answer. The scholarly books, however serious and exhaustive, offer no real clue to this puzzle; the authors themselves often seem baffled by it.

    A Psychiatrist’s Past-Life Memories
    The most vivid and plausible picture of the Cathars comes from an extremely strange source: past-life memories as assembled by a twentieth-century British psychiatrist.

    Arthur Guirdham (1905-92) was born in Cumbria, England, the son of a steelworker. By sacrificing the education of his sisters, his parents were able to give him a decent enough education so that he was able to attend the University of Oxford. Eventually he qualified as a psychiatrist. He was practicing in this capacity in 1962 when he met a patient that he calls Mrs. Smith. His first words to her (as he would be reminded later, to his own surprise) were “Have I seen you before?”

    Mrs. Smith, an otherwise normal woman in her early thirties, came to him with a complaint about a recurring dream that had been disturbing her: “A man entered her room from the right side. She was lying on the floor. His approach filled her with terror.” Although in itself “the dream was not of any particular interest,” it struck a chord in Guirdham. He had been having a similar recurring nightmare in which “a tall man approached the place I was sleeping. He came from behind me on the left. Sometimes he bent over me. I felt rigid and speechless with panic.” Although he could not remember exactly when his nightmares had started, he was certain about when they ended: it was around the time he encountered Mrs. Smith. Moreover, as he later learned, her dreams of this kind stopped as well. “Is this significant?” he wrote. “Not in itself but… I feel that my nocturnal visitor was the same man who disturbed Mrs. Smith’s dreams.”

    For the next year, curious coincidences and synchronicities continued to occur linking Guirdham, Mrs. Smith and the Cathars. Then, in a session in December 1964, Mrs. Smith made a remark to the effect that “love was an immensely creative force and that through it mankind would be bound together.” She attributed this statement to Guirdham himself, even though he was sure he had never said any such thing.

    A member of Dr. Guirdham’s circle made this drawing when she was seven years old. It is said to depict two Inquisitors killed by the Cathars, as well as an English child’s attempt to render “Avignonnet” – a site were Cathars were massacred – in her own language.
    Mrs. Smith then revealed a startling fact. When she was a teenager she had written a novel, which she later destroyed, about life in a medieval women’s community and a man she loved named Roger.

    Two months later, in February 1965, Mrs. Smith told Guirdham something still more astounding: he himself had been Roger, the man she loved, in a past life. “We were from a very poor family but you were of noble birth. I fell in love with you then, and my father said I must never meet you again – you were not of our class and what was more important to him, you were not of our faith. I refused to be parted from you, and was eventually excommunicated. I went to live with you. We weren’t married. You told me that if anything should happen I should go to Fabrissa.” But she was not sure whether this was a person or a place.


    Soon after Mrs. Smith’s revelations about her past life as a Cathar, other women started coming forward with similar flashbacks and detail, leading Dr. Arthur Guirdham to believe he was witnessing an unbelievable occurrence – mass reincarnation. The above photo of Dr. Guirdham with some of his incarnated soul group was taken at Montségur, France in the 1970s.
    Thus began a strange series of revelations, dreams and encounters, combined with serious historical research into the Cathar saga. It developed that a certain Fabrissa de Mazerolles was a well-known protector of heretics (i.e., Cathars) in early thirteenth-century Languedoc. The identity of the man in Guirdham’s and Mrs. Smith’s dreams also became clear: he was Pierre de Mazerolles, Fabrissa’s nephew. Although Mrs. Smith, or her previous incarnation (named Peirone or Puerilia), was frightened by her memory of Pierre, he had not meant to harm her. He had come to announce gleefully that he had committed murder.

    This crime, which took place in Avignonnet in 1242, is well-documented. It was of two Inquisitors who had been sent by Rome to ferret out Cathars. This did not signal the start of the great persecution launched by the papacy (which had begun in 1209). But it did provoke a reprisal that ended in the climactic siege of Montségur in 1244, the most famous episode in the Cathar epic, which ended with two hundred parfaits being burned alive, and marked the beginning of the end for Catharism as a movement. (Pierre de Mazerolles, incidentally, was not a Cathar; he was motivated by greed and by the sheer joy of murder.)

    Guirdham’s story, told in his book The Cathars and Reincarnation, continues with many ramifications. He does not tell it well. His narrative lurches back and forth between Mrs. Smith’s revelations, his own experiences, actual historical events, the love story of Roger and Peirone, and the teachings of Catharism. Many other characters are introduced, a number of whom can be identified from historical records but who begin to blur together in the narrative.

    Of the two main characters we learn that Roger was imprisoned and died, probably of tuberculosis, while awaiting interrogation by the Inquisition. Peirone suffered a more dramatic fate, and one of the most memorable passages of Guirdham’s books gives her first-person recollection of being burned at the stake:

    The pain was maddening. You should pray to God when you’re dying, if you can pray when you’re in agony… I didn’t pray to God. I thought of Roger and how dearly I loved him. The pain of those wicked flames was not half so bad as the pain I felt when I knew he was dead. I felt suddenly glad to be dying. I didn’t know when you were burnt to death you’d bleed. I thought the blood would all dry up in the terrible heat. But I was bleeding heavily. The blood was dripping and hissing in the flames. I wished I had enough blood to put the flames out. The worst part was my eyes. I hate the thought of going blind… I tried to close my eyelids but I couldn’t. They must have been burnt off, and now those flames were going to pluck my eyes out with their evil fingers.

    As compelling as this is, does it stem from an overactive imagination? The answer lies in the historical veracity of many details in this bizarre story. Mrs. Smith knew many things that she could not have known from her conventional education; indeed some of them were not discovered until after her experiences.

    Active Imagination or Real Memories?
    One example is the colour worn by the Cathar parfaits (“perfect ones”). The parfaits were the elite, the few who had received the initiation known as the Consolamentum and who served more or less as a clergy. Most of the books say they always wore black robes. But Mrs. Smith remembers that Roger’s were dark blue. It was only several years after these revelations that Guirdham came across a statement in La vie quotidienne des Cathares du Languedoc au XIIIe siècle (“The Daily Life of the Cathars in Languedoc in the Thirteenth Century”) by the well-known scholar René Nelli that, although the parfaits had originally worn black, they often switched to dark blue as a disguise in times of persecution. Since Mrs. Smith’s memories were of those days of persecution, this would make sense. This detail had not appeared in print when she had her dreams. Nelli, whom Guirdham consulted, was so struck by the accuracy of her recollections that he told him that when in doubt about some detail he should trust the memory of the patient.

    And the memory was considerable. Like many people of the era, Peirone/Mrs. Smith had a facility for remembering songs and verses that was much better developed than that of people today. She wrote down some of the songs she remembered that Roger had sung. She had transcribed them when she was a teenager. Moreover, some of her verses strongly resemble those in anthologies of medieval French poetry. She only knew a little French, which she had studied at school, and had no knowledge of Languedoc (the Romance dialect spoken in that region) or of medieval French. But, for example, in her verses she uses the word foliete for “foliage.” The French equivalent, which she would have learned at school, is verdure, but the word in Provençal, a language close to that of Languedoc, is folhet.

    Behind all this is a background of detail that brings a lost age vividly to life. Of Peirone’s house, she recalls, “It was little more than a hovel. One room, that’s all… I am sure there was no upstairs. The only furniture was a rough bench and a table. It was almost as dark inside as out, for the small window had no glass in it and was covered with a crude wooden shutter to keep out the elements.” She and her family slept in their clothes on the floor. Frequently she gives details about medieval life that Mrs. Smith knew nothing about, such as the custom of drinking diluted wine.

    Beyond a certain point it is useless to argue about whether these are genuine past-life memories or not. Our age has forgotten that scepticism is not in and of itself a sign of intelligence. It would be more interesting to see what we can learn from these accounts, and how they supplement conventional sources on Catharism.

    The Cathars: New Revelations
    Let us begin with a question already asked: how, if the Cathars were such a dour sect, did they thrive in the free, open, joyous atmosphere of the Languedoc of the period? Guirdham’s answer is clear and sensible. The Cathar parfaits were extremely strict with themselves: they wore robes like monks, they ate no meat, they were celibate, and they fasted often. Those demands were only made of the parfaits. Unlike the Catholic priests of the time, the parfaits actually lived up to their vows; thus they won the affection of the people, and the nickname bonshommes. But ordinary believers – the croyants – were under no such obligations. The demands made on them were light.

    Nor was Catharism as gloomy and world-denying as it has been painted. The Cathars, it is true, believed in covalent forces of good and evil, which existed from the beginning and would last until the end of the universe. They also believed that the world of matter was fundamentally evil (a case that is easy to make). But unlike the Catholics, they did not cling to the gloomy and improbable doctrine of eternal damnation. Guirdham writes:

    In the Middle Ages people were dominated by the fear of Hell. Catharism to some extent dissipated this fear. If the world was regarded as being made by, or under the domination of Satan, it followed that one was entitled to regard this life as Hell. Considering that one got through it somehow, and that there were many compensations in the sunshine of the Languedoc and the Midi, the idea that the world was Hell was really an optimistic one. If this world is the worst Hell one has to put up with, it must have been, even at its lowest, vastly preferable to the perpetual damnation of the orthodox Christians of that epoch.

    This view helps explain how the supposedly sombre Cathars were able to thrive in, and foster, the lively and cheerful civilisation of Languedoc. The world is evil, so one does not need to take it too seriously, and certainly there is no point in making things worse than they already are.

    Another detail casts some light on the cultural impact of the Cathars: they put little stock in marriage. There was no Cathar wedding ceremony, and many Cathar couples lived in what the Catholics would call sin. It is clear from Mrs. Smith’s evidence that Roger and Peirone were not married either.

    Courtly Love
    This point explains another strange fact about the Cathar milieu: it was when the curious tradition of courtly love came into being. (Actually this was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, earlier than the time of persecution that we have been discussing, in the thirteenth century.) Courtly love, a kind of intense love from afar that was usually unconsummated, was the inverse of marriage: it was often practiced between a man and a woman of divergent social classes, it was not for the purpose of having children, and it was, at least ostensibly, chaste.

    Courtly love was also associated with the poetry of the troubadours, which had Cathar echoes of its own. Guirdham mentions the tradition that says the troubadour poets would wear a rose when singing songs with esoteric themes; when they did not, the songs were about ordinary human love. Denis de Rougemont, in his influential book Love in the Western World, argues that the troubadours invented what we now call romantic love. This view is hard to sustain. Greek lyric and Roman elegiac poetry show people in love much as they are today. But de Rougemont may be right to this extent: the troubadours, and the courtly love they celebrated, were the first (at least since Plato) to connect human love with divine love.

    The Cathars’ indifference to marriage resembles the attitude of another religion that may be called world-denying. The Buddhists have no marriage ceremony as such. Monks do not marry a couple; the couple marry each other; a monk may bless the ceremony, but he does not perform it. This peculiar fact may have something to teach about world-denying religions and their fate in the world, particularly in the West.

    Religion, whose name originates in Latin roots meaning “to bind back” or “to connect,” plays more than one role in society. It attempts to connect man with God, but it also has a social function. Religion holds society together; at least that is how it worked in the past. If, however, religion is to do this, it must take society’s concerns somewhat seriously. A religion that regards the world as ultimately rather unimportant is not likely to be enthusiastic about taking on the role of guarantor of the social order. This attitude may help explain why dualistic movements such as the Cathars and the Manichaeans never established any long-lasting dominance in societies and nations. It is true that Buddhism, which is also somewhat world-denying, has managed to establish itself, but it is striking that a number of Buddhist nations have continued to use native traditions – Shinto in Japan, Confucianism and Taoism in China – to continue to fill some social functions.

    Bodywork, Herbal Healing & Plant Auras
    Guirdham has much more to say about the Cathars in their context, informed by both Mrs. Smith and a woman he calls Miss Mills, who had similar past-life memories. But at this point we may turn to another dimension of Guirdham’s portrait: his own contact with discarnate entities who in their last lives on Earth had been Cathar adepts, including the important and much-honoured Cathar bishop Guilhabert de Castres (c.1165-1240).

    These teachings, assembled in the final section of Guirdham’s book The Great Heresy, deal with subjects ranging from the properties of plants to reincarnation and intercourse with divine beings. These things do not, on the face of it, strike one as part of Catharism. On the other hand, they do not contradict what we know about the Cathars either. In their way, like the rest of Guirdham’s work, they serve to fill out its portrait.

    The Cathar parfaits were, as we have seen, a kind of clergy; they administered the Consolamentum (the only sacrament they acknowledged), taught doctrine, and led services. But they had another important function: they were healers. Guirdham points out that one of Christ’s original commands to his followers was to heal the sick. The parfaits did this using a number of techniques, including what we today would call bodywork and administering herbs and tinctures. Guirdham also discusses the use of jewels in healing, although he acknowledges that they are not as useful for this purpose as they were in bygone ages, when people were more psychically sensitive.

    Guilhabert also told Guirdham a great deal about plants. Plants have auras like human beings, and when, in certain instances, a person finds a certain plant, like a tree, to give off a healing quality, it is the result of this aura. Guirdham himself recalled the case of an old miner who was subject to periodic bouts of depression. At these times he would go off and sit under a particular roadside tree, and afterwards he felt better. But plants can have negative properties as well; some thrive on maleficent vibrations, including perhaps toadstools and fungi that thrive in dank underground cellars. Guilhabert makes the arresting remark that evil can insert itself in nature, citing as an example the lurid aniline-dye colours of recently developed varieties of roses. “The harsh colours bred into the roses were a flamboyant challenge to reinforce their attractiveness to man,” according to Guilhabert.

    Some of these remarks are reminiscent of the ideas of the Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner, who also spoke of the etheric bodies and auras of plants. This may not be a complete coincidence. Steiner laid claim to the heritage of the Rosicrucian brotherhood of the seventeenth century, and Guirdham suggests that the Rosicrucians may have been the spiritual descendants of the Cathars. “It is traditional,” he observes, “that the Rosicrucian movement arose in Germany in a family where a monk from Narbonne [in Languedoc] had been a tutor.”

    A Secret Cathar Lineage?
    Did the Cathars survive in any other form after finally vanishing from history in the early fourteenth century? Conventional scholarship says they did not. But there may be some evidence of underground Cathar survivals. In a persuasive book called The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch, author Lynda Harris suggests that the great Netherlandish painter and forerunner of surrealism may have been secretly a Cathar two hundred years after the faith supposedly perished. Harris’s argument is too intricate to go into here, but the facts that Bosch’s ancestral home was the town of Aachen, a former Cathar centre, and that many of his bizarre images have curiously heterodox implications, suggests the Cathars may not have perished as thoroughly as the Inquisitors wished.

    The question keeps presenting itself to the minds of those who think about these subjects. These lost, half-forgotten faiths – the Cathars, the Manichaeans, the Gnostics – did they really die out completely? Did they survive sub rosa under other names, handed down through lineages of secret and untraceable initiations? Or do they reflect something that continually arises out of the depths of human experience? Guirdham suggests as much, writing, “Perhaps it is best to regard Dualism as analogous to a repressed impulse. It passes from memory but continues to exert its influence in different directions below the conscious level.” Perhaps, too, there is another answer, suggested in his books: the religions may vanish, but their adherents do not, and as they return in later centuries and in other bodies, the teachings and truths of those ancient faiths may return as well.

    This article was published in New Dawn 145.
    Quote The text of this Cathar hymn contains an encoded message,
    Joana being the medieval cathar church,
    which has been weakened and finally eliminated in Southern France (Occitanie)
    through the horrible Albigensian crusade.
    The spiritual essence of the cathars is still vibrating in caves and waters.
    very little remains of this vibrant community
    which has for centuries, been reduced to a museum diorama in the conquerers history section.
    may this fragment of a past time bring back perhaps a memory in some.
    they said the leaves of the tree would green again after 700 yrs had passed.
    https://www.religiousforums.com/thre...C3%A8r.231769/


    Last edited by Delight; 2nd May 2021 at 21:25.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Quote Posted by Delight (here)
    This is strange but awesome. I was taken by the Cathars when I read a post on an unrelated thread So found this one and then when i went back to copy the original post to start more HERE... Bill had already written this post

    Quote
    Quote Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
    Quote Posted by Anna70 (here)
    Quote Posted by jaybee (here)
    ... I first came across the Cathars when I stumbled on a book in a charity shop 45 years ago 'We Are One Another' by Arthur Guirdham - it's about group reincarnation ...

    ... Legend denotes 700 years after the last Cathar was burnt at the stake, 1321, the laurel tree will blossom once again and Cathars will return. Certainly the tree is green and while they may never have disappeared completely, the Cathars are openly returning.

    700 years from 1321 is NOW....
    My apology for leaping onto this little tangent , but the Cathars thing jumped out at me, as one of my very dearest friends is highly likely connected to this. Would you know if there is a dedicated thread that goes into this more deeply? (I did look but did not see a specific one on this topic.)
    The only thread I see that discusses the Cathars (an important historical topic!) is this one.
    I am listening to this now. I FEEL like maybe if such a thing can be true that I am a returned Cathar.
    You may enjoy a wander through this site:

    https://www.cathar.info/cathar_whoswho.htm

    I found it after @Mecklenburger introduced me to the Templar accounts and at some point I wound up reading about Esclarmonde de Foix.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    I am really fascinated by all the comments and "connection" to the Cathars I see for instance posted below youtube videos about Cathars. I found a whole thread of people resonating with this idea of being reincarnated as a Cathar.

    Quote Pleased to meet you all and any Cathars! One poster Kaye has a fascinating account

    I had a past life regression last year, over an hour long. I have tried looking up different Cathar groups but all seemed focused on new catharism which was not what I experienced at all. I was with women, with an older one specifically who I wad learning from. The outlook was so unusual. It really moved me. They were 'gathered' and not taken, 'without a destination'. The word Dying or Death was not in my regression. It was thought of as transitioning, and I was told it was like 'Stepping over a stone'. That we were from light to light, returning through light (fire). That we were well prepared for the transition. Also some huge emphasis that 'All time is one'. That message was told to me over and over and I do not understand. I was told it was very important I understand that. Except I do not and it frustrates me. The clothing I describe as dark blue, midnight blue, black blue and she had on some plin white shift under it with something around her waist. Extremely plain. Extremely thin, older. What floored me is as I am watching her I am struck by how humble and plain she was. That it was not about knowledge but about understanding. That she understood her place within the transition into forever. That I was going to experience illness in this life and not to dwell so much. I was told 'endure what you must as we did and then you step into forever and then forever was simply forever'. Also they had a 'sympathy' for everyone who was here now but it was important we chose to be here now. That they were able to move back and forth but could not impact matter here. Again, huge impact that 'there is only one Time, Time is one' over and over. I have zero idea what that means. It hurts my head trying to understand that. Anyhow, my life was really impacted by that.
    Oh also, HUGE emphasis on being chaste and 'free from desire'. Not just sexually, free from wanting. We were from light to light returning through light. And the fire did not matter. The preparation was like hypermeditation, to not focus around you but to focus inward like stepping over a stone together. I was with 4 women, 1 older one. And I am blown away by the beauty of it all in simplicity, humble, and living with the purpose of returning to light which the thought of as forever.

    Also.. they were really quiet, not full of constant chatter like life is now. I was also told that me now, because I 'dwell' that I had 'scattered my energies'. Some of it made me feel I would not live a very long life now, not into an old lady but the message was I was to understand they were there. Also that it was when I felt the most hopeless that they were close to me. It left me feeling just cut off from modern catharism and some incredible yearning to find someone from then. Also, you are not special or anything just because you saw your regression. Its about the loss of you concept of self in the material word. There are a lot of cathars born now. I dont know why, was not told that. I cant add anything other than the regression scenes. Its a mistake to. I saw through a window of past. Just a window though and nothing more.

    I was shocked my regression was so detailed and long, when he brought me out I could not remember the dialog but he recorded it. Here were some unusual points:
    - I bought some books later and found it pretty absurd to see history said they walked into the fire singing. What I saw was they knew they would die and were prepared. That was done in prayer and meditation. I was instructed to not look around me, to not look back, to focus on the light we would enter into by figuratively stepping over the stone. Talking, panicking, being caught up in your body would break your concentration. It was going inward, inward and further still. Ir was being in a state of within
    Singing would never have happened.
    - I say that we are part of something very established and it was consideted an honor to be there
    - The concept was very personal. That is that each soul is within a body here. Great emphasis to not be of the body. But to understand the personal journey of each soul to return to light, to complete its journey. To return to light.
    - that part of the other dide being light you carry as light in terms of the soul. So no death but a transition.
    - Abstinence was seen as spiritual over the physical, with the intent of being free of want, of desire. Not driven by 'want'
    - the elder one knelt before like 1 long stone.. I describe it looking like a step in middle of floor on stone.
    - Zero adorment, on her or walls. Her clothes I describe as material draped on her, of no importance
    - I am im awe watching her, the simplicity. Describe her gesture as humbling herself beneath something far greater. And that she understood her link into forever, something like that. I say 'her undetstandimg is what carries her'.
    - it was Montsegur, 4 women with those who burnt. I have to wonder if it was Rixende??
    - I say that the moment we had standing close together before we were separated to be burned, that the moment was imprinted on us. Which is why The regression opens with me seeing them in spirit first.
    - when I saw them in spirit, from shouldets up with gold ligjt streaming from behind them towards me.
    - I say if the light had a name it would be kindness.

    I was regressed by Karl Schlotterbeck. He is psychologist and regressionist. I had a passing interest in cathars in 1992. Never shared that and moved on with life. 2 years ago, maybe 2 1/2 I came down with a 5 day fever which resulted in broken red spider veins and very large 1-2 inch bruises all over my lower legs and shoulders and the whites of my eyes were red. I was scared I had some horrible disease like lupus since I have RA. Took a lot of pictures and kept sending to my rheumatologist, what is wrong with me? Lots of lab work and no answers, not disease. Took about 3 months to fade. In meantime I began to have back to back dreams over 1 month. Always viewing scenes that had some lesson or challenge and end of each dream I found out its directed at me. Each dream had me looking at something else. Then glimpses of me, but maybe 22 and fire. Really quick, maybe seconds I started experiencing a gut wrenching crying related to the cathars. Where does this leave a person, in a place of nowhere. Did not know any cathars, no exposure, no one I knew had even heard of them. It felt like neing pulled into a cathar lige. But for what, why, why now and for what reason as this had zero to do with any beliefs. Karl was in my state hiving workshops and I had reached out to him how troubling all of this was. Then he regressed me and it changed my life. I had had dreams of celibacy and that my life would be forever day and never night. And I moved into that mindset. I reached out online then trying to find places to connect and it was very disappointing. So I gave up and decided I would quietly live a cathar life. Some that I connected with were very full of self, as if it was of great importance to have beem someone 'famous' with the cathars. I had seen the complete opposite, that your connection to your sense of self or personal acclaim haf zero importance. It was instead an inner pathway that had nothing to do with your body.

    The cathars were very threatening to the catholic church, they were supported by a lot of nobelmen and became entirely too popular. They scorned the catholic chuch for what they perceived as a false church, corrupted. They did not have reverence for the crucifix as they considered that pretty much the same as if you carried around a knife that had stabbed someone.

    Also, the cathar perfects had male and female equality. Women could perform anything their male counterparts did. In the 12th and 13th centuries, how offensive would that have been? They believed as we had all been male or female by reincarnation, then therefore we were same. Only a small % were the parfait, the overwhelming cathars were believers. They also believed held Mary Magdeline in high regard and she was not the prostitute the Catholics insisted she was.

    Their core beliefs were on reincarnation, in direct contrast to the catholic church. They considered a complete separation of earthly life where they felt their souls were passing through, and the other side of spirit and light. The light from other side was present inside you and the goal was to focus on that and live within those ideals. They saw sex as ending in procreation and as a result more souls became trapped in this realm. The earthly realm was seen as the realm of bodily distractions, needs, and excessive desires.

    So in order to live a life connected to the light, they chose to be aesthetics and not give in to the world. In their minds, they were attaining the simplistic lige of Jesus. Jesus had Mary by his side, he appeared to her first, clearly she was of equal status as the disciples. The catholic church has always collected wealth, had been infused with sex, idolatry, etc. The life of a golden palace had nothing to do with living in the truth as they perceived it. So they embodied that simplistic made of living. Completely passive, owning nothing, chastity, equality of women, vegetarian except fish. (I have been vegetarian since 1976 as a choice, not cathar though). That purity of life, of truly loving but in the realm of heart and spirit, rather than the body. Its very important why their concept of earthy life was so extreme, they lived in times of public executions. Can you imagine how horrifying passing people on fire must have been?

    Of course you weren't just rounded up, you were interrogated and tortured first. To break your spirit and force you to confess or denounce others. They would come into a town and demand the names of heretics. If a persons name was given who was dead, they would dig the corpse up and publicly burn the corpse as a heretic. These times were barbaric and the birth of any more souls who were trapped into this existence was intolerable. No one used contraceptives then and to prevent the possibility of souls being trapped here, sex was the means to be shut down.

    The women I lived to express their femaleness through spirituality. I think a lot see them as too strict, hung up on this or that but reasons are behind those choices. By the defined choice to follow this path, yet be equal with men, to understand and unveil their inner light until they transitioned... it was their attempt to bring their light into a darkened world.

    That energy is needed now for balance and as it was before the mass majority were cathar believers who had families. We live in trying times now. Of complete excess, of destruction of our planet and resources to open warfare on TV. Cathars are here now to try to bring some type of light back. Even as an individual flame. But again, by the loss of self and of what you give off rather than what you acquire. Simply a flame of spirit in a world that is in a spiral.
    Kaye

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    This is part of an article that demonstrates the scope of genocide of the Cathars.

    Quote John C. CarletonAmerican by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God
    IN THE 12TH-13TH CENTURIES, ROME (VATICAN) HOLOCAUSTED (BURNT ALIVE TILL DEATH), GENOCIDED ABOUT 1 MILLION OF JESUS THE CHRIST FOLLOWERS WHO WOULD NOT BOW DOWN TO ROME (VATICAN)


    All in all some 500,000 men women and children were massacred in the Church’s campaign*. The holocaust was so severe that, apparently by accident, it extinguished the high culture of the troubadours. Educated and tolerant rulers were killed, and replaced by relative barbarians from France, who were prepared to toe the Church’s line. At the end of the extirpation of the Cathars, the Church had convincing proof that a sustained campaign of genocide can work. It also had the precedent of an internal crusade within Christendom, the machinery of an inquisition, and two bodies of dedicated men, Dominicans and Franciscans, prepared to man it.

    Cathars were exterminated elsewhere. There were mass burnings at Montwimer in Champagne in 1239, at Plaisance in Lombardy in 1268 (28 cartloads), and at Verona in 1278*. From a secular point of view there was no harm in the Cathars. Their fate is still mourned in the Languedoc to this day. Yet it is not difficult to find Roman Catholic authorities that seek to justify the Church’s genocide and make out that it acted for the best. A Handbook of Heresies, approved by a Roman Catholic Censor and bearing the Imprimatur of the Vicar General at Westminster, refers to Guzmán’s “heroic exercise of fraternal charity”*. His failure as a preacher is not mentioned, nor the fact that even using trickery and torture no more than a handful of perfecti could be induced to abandon their faith. The thousands of Cathar deaths are not referred to — except in the most oblique terms: “The long and arduous task was at length successful, and by the end of the fourteenth century Albigensianism, with all other forms of Catharism, was practically extinct”*. The handbook also takes the opportunity to condemn Cathar beliefs once again: “This anti-human heresy, by destroying the sanctity of the family, would reduce mankind to a horde of unclean beasts …” *. There is not a hint of remorse or regret for the holocaust, and one can only assume that, if it could, the Church would act in the same way again if similar circumstances arose in the future.

    Most chillingly, numerous Catholic websites, including many associated with seminaries feature variations on the following joke, refering to Cathars as Albigensians. A young man with a religious vocation asks

    “Which Order is most successful, the Jesuits or the Dominicans?”

    “Well, the Jesuits were founded by a Spaniard to wipe out the Protestant heresy, and the Dominicans were founded by a Spaniard to wipe out the Albigensian heresy”.

    “So which is best?”

    “The Dominicans, obviously.”

    “Why?”

    “Seen any Albigensians lately?”

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Quote Posted by Delight (here)

    I am listening to this now. I FEEL like maybe if such a thing can be true that I am a returned Cathar.
    I knew it !!!!

    I'm too tired to write much more tonight but when I was about half way through the video about the Cathars + 700 year old prophesy that you posted on the other thread (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36SeyxSkYwE)

    I paused it and went and opened the back door to let my dog out and as I stood in the garden a little bat was flitting about - then 2 - then three... the light was fading and the silhouette of the trees and the bats was a beautiful sight - with the birds singing their late night songs before settling down for the night...

    It felt like a shamanic sign... it was a meaningful moment - in two ways combined

    One because of the timely visitation of bat spirit - but also because of the connection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how the poor little bat is the fall guy... and they could have created the virus using the bat genes / DNA somehow - so it's got a bad rap with it all and doesn't deserve it...

    anyway...

    aaa - eee - iii - ooo - uuuuuuuuu .... lol

    I played that Cathar chant many times during March this year... thanks for posting it here - and the article about Arthur Guirdham...
    Last edited by jaybee; 2nd May 2021 at 22:31.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Quote Posted by jaybee (here)
    Quote Posted by Delight (here)

    I am listening to this now. I FEEL like maybe if such a thing can be true that I am a returned Cathar.
    I knew it !!!!

    I'm too tired to write much more tonight but when I was about half way through the video about the Cathars + 700 year old prophesy that you posted on the other thread (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36SeyxSkYwE)

    I paused it and went and opened the back door to let my dog out and as I stood in the garden a little bat was flitting about - then 2 - then three... the light was fading and the silhouette of the trees and the bats was a beautiful sight - with the birds singing their late night songs before settling down for the night...

    It felt like a shamanic sign... it was a meaningful moment - in two ways combined

    One because of the timely visitation of bat spirit - but also because of the connection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how the poor little bat is the fall guy... and they could have created the virus using the bat genes / DNA somehow - so it's got a bad rap with it all and doesn't deserve it...

    anyway...

    aaa - eee - iii - ooo - uuuuuuuuu .... lol

    I played that Cathar chant many times during March this year... thanks for posting it here - and the article about Arthur Guirdham...
    I have always been attracted to the Essenes. Intuitively I wonder if there was an originally "true" religion which filtered out and still is present in Christ's words... the red letters.

    There is an emphasis of the Christ on our emulating his example.

    I read a book that is the past life memory of Elizabeth Haich. Initiation. My major take away is that this woman was a prodigy who insisted on being give knowledge TOO SOON. I am impressed that she had not lived enough to be harmless. She wanted to skip over the lessons lived by experience. She was a princess and could demand her way. It backfired on her terribly because her passion for a man led her to misuse power. Haich reports having to make up so many lifetimes of struggle with her terrible betrayal of the responsibility of power.

    I read on the Cathars. The story about them is almost nonexistant and what there is came from a POV of a genocidal victory.

    There were Cathars who were extremely powerful and wise. They were initiated. The perfect ones were those who had vowed to act in a perfect manner commensurate with the power they held. They were only a few of the followers and with the community, people appear to have been joyfully living in abundance, creative expression and peace. I am reminded of the idea of mirror neurons where we learn from others.

    My ideal of a teacher is to learn form his/her example. Personally at this time in life, simplicity, austerity seem no problem. However I doubt that I would have enjoyed them at one time and where there is no punishment for being free to express, we move through phases easily. Eventually it is just natural to renounce "stuff" and be more free. Desire is something that needs to be lived or it will IMO fester and be a poison.

    I personally think that any teaching of The need for general renunciation comes from hypocrisy and an intent to control others.

    I do not recall any past lives except for one story of a past life regressoion. It seemed like a day dream in which I imagined a broken man in a dungeon dying. He was there for reasons of how he lived. He had been seeking knowledge and "the power of the secrets" and become a dangerous kind of threat. He had rebuked an authority by refusing to cooperate. He had refused because he really had nothing the authority sought from him, like some kind of arcane formula?

    I felt that he would have kept seeking if this was not the "end". He had never found that tantalizing "philosopher's stone". But this personae NOW regretted so much the home he had left on his quest. OMG regrets are the worst torture.

    Home was in a bright sort of dry landscape, not humid. This was a Mediterranean kind of sea side with vineyards and terraces and stone dwellings... not primitive but ancient. He had a daughter whom he loved more than any other person. Now she is grown with children. He wishes so much he could be there and die but he is in dirt, starved and thirsty and so regretful. I have used that deep feeling to try to transmute my regrets. It is such a deep sorrowful but connected feeling. One can project oneself to a location and transmute the intense "negative" to something else... like wisdom? Like an imaginary mirror neuron vision which I can use to change my destiny.

    My imaginary instructor had abandoned his family. To abandon is as painful as being abandoned. Now he was trying to send a message to his daughter so she would KNOW him fully, his failures, regrets, love for home which he knew had been his REAL place of power. In my reverie he travelled to the house and was on a veranda and there he found his daughter who knew why he was there.

    They communed and he revealed and she revealed and the peace of a complete forgiveness came in. He was taken form there to the light. It was satisfying as a reverie to me. I wonder now if She was not a Cathar and he a renunciate of the true god of light.... UNTIL he realized the truth and went home? That thought is because of the way he felt, like one who had been a bit unwilling to be humble with any authority, even one's own inner "god". A huge ego.

    The thing is, if we are Cathars returning en masse, were we unable to let go of our attachment to earth before? is it just so we will remember the light and THIS time follow it to the Source? I of course have no idea of the truth but I have so many suspicions like RAW.
    Last edited by Delight; 3rd May 2021 at 05:20.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Why are the Cathars important for now?



    I read this and thought it has elements of what I find is said about the Cathars. A thread of light stretches Atlantis to Egypt and then finally to the Cathars?

    Quote Thoth-the-Atlantean — The Emerald Tablets

    “I began preaching to people the beauty of religion and knowledge.

    “O people, men born on the Earth, who indulge in drunkenness, sleep, and the ignorance of God! Sober up, cease your surfeit, awake from your dullness!

    “Why do you give up yourselves to death while you have power to partake of immortality?

    “Depart from the dark path, be partakers of immortality, abandon forever your vices!

    “Nowhere but in God can you find good!”

    (From Hermes’* address to the Egyptians)

    Atlantis was an archipelago consisting of two large islands situated in the Atlantic Ocean near the Mediterranean Sea. There existed a highly developed civilization of the Atlanteans. The most important point about this civilization is that it possessed the true religious-philosophical knowledge, which allowed many people to advance quickly in their development — up to the Divine level — and accomplish thus their personal human evolution.

    However, with time Atlantis’ spiritual culture degraded, and as a result the power in the country was taken over by aggressive people, who preferred black magic and domination over others rather than the principle of the true spiritual development. Then God made the islands of Atlantis sink into the ocean.

    But the higher spiritual knowledge was preserved by some Atlanteans, Who achieved Divinity. They brought it into Egypt and other countries, where this knowledge existed for some time providing a basis for the local spiritual culture.

    About the Emerald Tablets*
    In the Emerald Tablets, Thoth-the-Atlantean explains the reason for the destruction of Atlantis: confidential knowledge was imparted to unworthy people and the latter began using it for evil purposes. They also adopted bloody sacrifices — and this resulted in numerous incarnations of hellish beings among people.

    When the destruction of Atlantis happened (two islands submerged into the ocean one after another according to the Divine Will), Thoth-the-Atlantean moved to Egypt (Khem) with a group of other Divine Atlanteans.

    The Primordial* advised Thoth thus: “Go forth as a Teacher of men! Go forth preserving the records (with Teachings) until in time the Light grows among men!

    “Light* shall You be all through the ages, hidden yet found by enlightened men.

    “For working on all the Earth, give We You power, free You to give it to others or take it away.”

    And then Thoth worked as a Representative of the Primordial.

    … Thoth relates that He went the entire Path to Mergence with the Primordial. He writes that anyone can traverse this Path. The Path necessarily contains obstacles, which create difficulties for travelers: these difficulties prevent weak, ethically unworthy, or intellectually immature people from going further. “Go! But do not take with you the unwise, insincere, weak!” says Thoth.

    Thoth gives basic recommendations for initial harmonization of the chakra system. For fulfilling just these recommendations He promises health and longevity.*

    On the higher stages of meditative practices (i.e. on the stage of Buddhi Yoga), one has to dive with the consciousness into the Depths of the multidimensional space and cognize there “star worlds” and the Light of the Great Fire on the Path to the Abode of the Primordial*. There are also other spatial dimensions, which are “vacant to all seeming, yet hidden within them are the keys…”*

    Thoth also explains one of the higher meditations — the Temple and its particular variation — the Pyramid.

    About the history of His own spiritual ascent Thoth says the following:

    “Once in a time long forgotten, I, Thoth, opened the doorway, penetrated into other spaces and learned of the secrets concealed.

    “Often did I journey down the dark pathway unto the space where the Light ever glows.

    “Long then dwelt I in the Temple of the Primordial until at last I was One with the Light.”

    Later Thoth embodied Himself again in Egypt and was Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-born)*.

    * * *

    Thoth gives the following directions to spiritual seekers:

    Preserve and keep the command of the Primordial One:

    Look in your life for disorder and get rid of it! Balance and order your life!

    Quell all the chaos of emotions and you shall have harmony in life.*

    Conquer by silence the bondage of words.

    Keep ever your eyes on the Light!

    Surely when you deserve it, you shall be one with your Master! And surely then you shall be one with the All*!

    Know My commandments! Keep them and fulfill them, and I will be with you, helping and guiding you into the Light!

    Out of the darkness shall you rise upward, one with the Light!

    Man has to strive to become the “Divine Sun”*.

    Follow this Path and you shall be One with the All!

    Light comes only to those who strive. Hard is the Pathway that leads to the Wisdom; hard is the Pathway that leads to the Light. Many stones shall you find in your pathway, many mountains shall you climb towards the Light.

    Man, know that always beside you walk the Messengers of Light. Open to all is Their Pathway, to all who are ready to walk into the Light!

    Suns are They, Messengers of Light to shine among men. Like man are They and yet are unlike.

    Know that many dark shadows shall fall on your light* striving to quench with the shadows of darkness the light of the soul that strives to be free. Many the pitfalls that lie on this Way. Seek ever to gain Greater Wisdom! Cognize — you shall know the Light!

    Light is eternal and darkness is fleeting. Seek ever, O man, for the Light! Know ever that as Light fills your being, darkness for you shall soon disappear!

    Open the soul to the Messengers of Light! Let Them enter and fill you with Light!

    Keep ever your face to this Goal!

    … Open the soul, O man, to the cosmos and let it “flow” through you as one with the soul!*

    Man’s evolution consists in the process of changing to forms that are not of this world. Grows he in time to the formless — to live on a higher plane. Know that you must become formless before you can be one with the Light.

    Listen, O man, to My voice, telling of pathways to Light, showing the way of attainment: how you shall become one with the Light:

    Search first the mysteries of the Earth’s Heart! Seek the Flame* of the Living Earth! Bathe in the glare of this Flame!

    Know, O man, you are complex, a being of matter and of Fire. Let your Flame* shine out brightly! Be you only the Flame!

    Seek ever more Wisdom! Find it in the Heart of the Flame! Know that only by your striving can Light pour into you!

    Only the one, who of Light has the fullest, can hope to pass by the guards of the Way, who prevent unworthy people from entering it.

    You shall cognize yourself as Light and make yourself ready to pass on the Way.

    Wisdom is hidden in darkness. When shining with Soul-Flame, find you the Wisdom, then shall you be born again as Light, and then shall you become the “Divine Sun”.*

    Grow into One with the Light! Be a channel of Divine Principles to the world of men!

    Seek, O man, to find the great Pathway that leads to eternal Life — through the image of the “Divine Sun”!

    … Know, O man, you are only a soul! The body is nothing! The soul is everything! Let not your body be a fetter!

    Cast off the darkness and travel in Light! Learn to cast off your body, O man, and be free from it!* Become the true Light and unite then with the Great Light!*

    Know that throughout space the eternal and infinite Consciousness exists. Though from superficial knowledge It is hidden, yet still forever exists.

    The key to these Higher worlds is within you; it can be found only within.*

    Open the gateway within you, and surely you, too, shall live the true life!

    … Man, you think that you live… but know that your former life can bring you only to death. For as long as you are bound to your body, no true life exists for you! Only the soul which is free from the material world has life which is a really true life! All else is only a bondage, a fetter from which to be free!

    Think not that man is born for the earthly! Though born on the Earth, man is a light-like spirit! Yet, without true knowledge, man can never become free!

    … Darkness surrounds the souls seeking to be born in Light. Darkness fetters souls… Only the one who is seeking may ever hope for Freedom!

    Let you be the “Divine Sun” of the Great Light! Fulfill this and you shall be free!

    The Great Light that fills all the cosmos is willing to help you, O man! Make you of your body a torch of Light that shall shine among men!

    … Hear and understand: the Flame is the source of all things; all things are its manifestation!

    Seek to be One with the “Divine Sun”!

    Hold your thought on uniting the Light with your human body.

    Light is the Source of all the life; for without the Great Light nothing can ever exist!

    Know, Light is the basis of all formed matter.

    Know, O man, that all space is filled by worlds within worlds.

    Deep beneath the image of the Pyramid lies My secret. Seek and find it in the Pyramid I built.

    Follow this key I left for you. Seek and the doorway to the true Life shall be yours! Seek in My Pyramid deep beneath it, and in the Wall.*

    Know that it is in the Pyramid I built that you shall find the secret way into the true Life.

    … Seek and find there That Which I have hidden! There shall you find the “underground entrance” to the secrets hidden before you were men.

    Know We that of all, nothing else matters except the growth of the soul. Know We the flesh is fleeting. The things men count great are nothing to Us. The things We expect from you are not of your bodies but are only the perfected state of the souls.

    When you can learn that nothing but progress of the soul can count in the end, then truly you are free from all bondage, free to work in accordance with your predestination!

    Know, O man, you are to aim at Perfection, for only thus can you attain to the Goal!

    Know that the future is never in fixation but follows man’s free will! Man can only “read the future” through the causes that bring the effects in destinies.

    Know that your body when in perfect balance may never be touched by the finger of death! Aye, even “accidents” may only approach when you abandon your predestination! When you are in harmony with your predestination, you shall live on in time and not taste of death.

    … Know you not that in the Earth’s Heart is the source of harmony of all things that exist and have been on its face? By the soul you are connected with the Earth’s Heart, and by your flesh — with the matter of Earth.

    When you have learned to maintain harmony in yourself, then shall you draw from the harmony of the Earth’s Heart. Exist then shall you while Earth is existing, changing in form, only when Earth, too, shall change: tasting not of death, but one with this planet, living in your body till all pass away.

    … Three are the qualities of God in His Light-Home*: Infinite Power, Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Love.

    Three are the powers given to spiritual Masters: to transmute evil, to assist good, to use discernment*.

    Three are the things They manifest: Power, Wisdom, and Love.

    Three are the Manifestations of Spirit creating all things: Divine Love possessing the perfect knowledge, Divine Wisdom knowing all possible means of helping living beings in their development, Divine Power which is possessed by the Primordial Consciousness Whose essence is Divine Love and Wisdom.

    Darkness and Light are both of one nature, different only in seeming, for each arose from one Source. Darkness is chaos. Light is Divine Harmony. Darkness transmuted is Light.

    This, My children, is your purpose in being: transmutation of darkness into Light!
    Adding this here for those interested:
    Mystery of Southern France- Chapter 1 Rennes Le Chateau background

    Last edited by Delight; 3rd May 2021 at 06:38.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Les, Mes Albigeois:

    Les catholiques, un culte très étrange et sombre. Les Cathares, ne sont pas restreints par beaucoup de dogmes.
    Je me souviens de la chanson "Dominique" comme un enfant, par la nonne chantante.
    Dans la première partie de la chanson, elle parle de son père combattant les Albigeois.

    Plusieurs siècles après la persécution des Cathares, l’orgueil de l’arrogance religieuse encore vend le mensonge, et confirme la menace de ceux qui s’opposent à l’obscuritées
    Intéressant que j’ai quitté l’église quand on m’a donné le nom de confirmation qui me semblait si mal à l’aise, Dominic.
    Tout à fait en dehors de la famille, mais plus à l’aise avec la séparation.
    Il est bon de voir que l’Univers a aussi un sens de l’humour.


    The, My Albigeois:

    The catholics, a very strange and dark cult. The Cathars not constricted by much dogma.
    I remember the song "Dominique" as a child, by the singing nun.
    In the first part of the song she talks about her father fighting the Albigensians.

    Many centuries after the persecution of the Cathars, the pride of religious arrogance still sells the lie, and confirms the threat of those who oppose the darkness.
    Interesting that I left the church when I was given the confirmation name that seemed so uneasy to me, Dominic.
    Quite apart from the family, but more comfortable with the separation.
    It is good to see that the Universe also has a sense of humor.


    C’est la chanson...

    This is the song.....

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=6g_G5U4Ze9Y

    J’ai des souvenirs de la langue et d’autres, mais ils n’étaient pas si formels.
    Dans cette vie, je ne sentais pas de contenu émotionnel dans l’enseignement, mais je me sentais naturellement en train de le dire.
    Je préfère écouter Eloise, chanter avec la chanteuse...dont l’habitude est beaucoup plus saine, avec ou sans les reines.
    Si j’écris une chanson sur la vérité des Cathares, c’est elle qui la chantera..Comme nous, elle doit être différente.

    I have memories of the language and others, but they were not so formal.
    In this life, I felt not emotional content in the teaching, but I did feel natural speaking it.
    I prefer to listen to Eloise, and sing with the singer...whose habit is much healthier, with or without the queens.
    If I write a song about the truth of the Cathars, she would be the one to sing it.
    Just like the few of us, she must look different at this time.
    Last edited by Hym; 3rd May 2021 at 08:16.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    I just want to say thank you Alpha141 and everyone posting here.

    This is a wonderful discussion!

    I've been browsing through this and the links since about 8:30 this morning. I was using another browser and hadn't logged in to comment!!! Anyway, I really should be getting on with my work, but I'll think about that later and spend some more time exploring this.

    Thank you so much for sharing the links.

    I'd never heard of the Cathars before and now I'm so happy to be learning about them! (Though I'm upset to learn of their persecution)
    xxx
    Last edited by Bassplayer1; 3rd May 2021 at 17:45.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    These are fascinating articles

    Quote Hidden History of the Secret Church
    By Tau Mikhael


    “Where is the true Church of Christ?” This is a question that has plagued Christians since the time of the apostles. For millions of believers, the Roman Catholic Church remains the ‘One True Church’ led to this day by the successors of the apostle Peter. Other Christians are convinced their particular church is equally ‘true’ and faithful to the ‘original teachings’ of Christ.

    Beyond all the apparent confusion and division, what unites the overwhelming majority of professing Christians is a shared acceptance of doctrinal statements drawn up back in the fourth century. The story of Jesus as the unique Son of God, born of a virgin, who died and rose again on the third day, only became Christian dogma thanks to the Council of Nicea which convened in 325 CE in an attempt to unify the diverse Christian communities under Emperor Constantine. Bart Ehrman, professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, describes the process that brought this about:

    One form of Christianity… emerged as victorious from the conflicts of the second and third centuries. This one form of Christianity decided what was the “correct” Christian perspective; it decided who could exercise authority over Christian belief and practice; and it determined what forms of Christianity would be marginalised, set aside, destroyed. It also decided which books to canonise into Scripture and which books to set aside as “heretical”, teaching false ideas… Only twenty-seven of the early Christian books were finally included in the canon, copied by scribes through the ages, eventually translated into English, and now on bookshelves in virtually every home in America. Other books came to be rejected, scorned, maligned, attacked, burned, all but forgotten – lost.

    Back in the early centuries after Christ there were also many Christians who did not accept the Christian ‘orthodoxy’ that was fast becoming dominant thanks to the patronage of the Roman Empire. These Christians had their own sacred writings and distinct traditions received from the apostles. One significant group of these early Christian ‘dissenters’ are identified as the ‘Gnostics’.

    Gnostic Christians distrusted the surface manifestations of the orthodox Christians: the deity piously on display, officially worshipped and within everybody’s easy reach. The Gnostics spoke of a hidden God, the true and nameless One, who goes unperceived by the materially minded mob. Only through the experience of the Gnosis – that is through the gift of profound spiritual insight – can human spirits approach the Secret of Secrets.

    The Gospels record Christ’s sayings which point to this path, rather than tell the story of a god-man sacrificed for the sins of the world, as the orthodox Christians believed. Christ was the cosmic teacher who took on the form of the man Jesus to impart His gnosis to the apostles, but only gradually and not to all of them in equal measure. Mary Magdalene and St. John the Evangelist were held in particularly high regard by Gnostic Christians. It was to these disciples, rather than the apostle Peter, that Christ had imparted His profoundest ‘secret teachings’.

    With the triumph of the Roman Catholic Church in the fourth and fifth centuries, Gnostic Christians suffered persecution and were forced underground. The Gnostic tradition could not be exterminated and it survived to resurface throughout history in various movements. This is the story of Christianity’s other tradition, the hidden one.

    Hidden Church of John
    You know without doubt, dear Unknown Friend, that many …promulgate the doctrine of the so-called ‘two churches’: the church of Peter and the church of John, or of two ‘epochs’ – the epoch of Peter and the epoch of John. You know also that this doctrine teaches the end – more or less at hand – of the church of Peter, or above all of the Papacy which is its visible symbol, and that of the spirit of John, the disciple loved by the master, he who leaned on his breast and heard the beating of his heart, will replace it. In this way it teaches that the ‘exoteric’ church of Peter will make way for the ‘esoteric’ church of John, which will be that of perfect freedom.
    – Valentin Tomberg1

    In the Gospels it is the apostle Peter who openly denied Christ Jesus, while it the ‘beloved disciple’ John to whom the dying Jesus commended His mother Mary (symbol of wisdom). The Gospel of John speaks more about the Holy Spirit than the other Gospels. Gnostic Christians invoked the mystical and apocalyptic St. John as the source of their authority. The twentieth century mystic Omraan Mikhael Aivanhov explains in his book Aquarius:

    All the Initiates in the past, the purest, most learned men were all disciples of St. John; they were also all persecuted by the official church because of their superiority. But the church of St. John, obliged as it always has been to exist and work in secret, continues to produce sons and daughters of God, and the time is coming when it will manifest itself in the world and show how far above the other churches it is. When it does, the church of St. Peter will have to reform and make many changes, whether it likes to or not.

    Unlike the church of Peter – the church of empire, the exoteric, involved with law and power – the church of John is an underground church of the esoteric, concerned with transcendence. It is the ‘Secret Church’ whose only law is love. The Johannite church of Love (Amor) is decentralised, shamanistic, free and eternal; the church of Rome (Roma) is centralised, hierarchical, complex, and worldly. The battle between the two churches is the Old Testament battle of the prophets with the priests. Mystic vision versus organised religion. The church of John is the affirmation of spiritual brotherhood and rejection of the alienation of a worldly material civilisation. We find signs of this universal church of John in the different Gnostic communities appearing through the ages.

    The Gnosis in the West
    France plays a prominent role in the spread of the Gnostic tradition in the West. Mary Magdalene, it is said, fled for safety to the South of France with Lazarus and his sister, Martha. Early French literature tells of her arrival on the shores of Provence. Her Feast Day, July 22, was a major celebration in France during the Middle Ages and is still observed to this day.

    Lyon, today France’s second largest city, is also the place from where in the second century the virulently anti-Gnostic bishop Irenaeus penned his writings which helped forever define ‘orthodox’ Christianity. Ironically, until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts in 1945, much of what we knew about the early Gnostics came from Irenaeus, one of their fiercest critics.

    Southern France is also the area where the ‘Good Christians’ or Cathars (the name derived from the Greek word katharos, meaning ‘The Pure’) emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Cathars received their Gnostic teachings from the Bogomils (meaning ‘beloved of God’), a Gnostic community active in the Balkans since the tenth century.

    At the heart of Cathar doctrine is the notion that true Christianity (which the Cathars claimed to receive in a secret line of apostolic succession from St John) is a life lived, not simply a doctrine believed. For them the life of Jesus was a model the ‘Good Christian’ must strive to emulate, not a vicarious sacrifice to be blindly accepted on trust. The existence of the Cathars challenged the legitimacy of the Roman Church as Zoe Oldenbourg explains in Massacre at Montsegur:

    The Cathars declared themselves the heirs of a tradition that was older than that held by the Church of Rome – and, by implication, both less contaminated and near in spirit to the Apostolic tradition. They claimed to be the only persons who had kept and cherished the Holy Spirit which Christ had bestowed upon His Church; and it looks as though this claim was at least partially justified….

    After the manner of the Bogomils and the followers of the Eastern Gnostic Prophet Mani, the Cathars believed in a cosmic battle between the principles of Light and Darkness on whose meetings and encounters everything in the universe is based. Darkness was for them dark matter, the unperfected, the transient. They identified all clerical and secular rulers, principally the Roman Church, as the personification of the Darkness.

    “Today we are better informed than they were concerning the practices of the Early Church,” writes Zoe Oldenbourg, “and have to admit that the Cathars merely followed a tradition somewhat more ancient than that of the [Roman] Church herself. It was with some appearance of reason that they claimed Rome as the party guilty of ‘heresy’ through her falling-out from the original purity which had characterised the Church of the Apostles.”2

    As with the ancient Gnostics, Rome saw the Cathars as a threat. “Catharism was spreading with extraordinary speed in Southern France,” points out the French writer Maurice Magre. “It was the radiant cult of the pure spirit which took possession of men’s souls, and it seriously endangered the materialistic Church of the pope.”3 We know from their sacred books, primarily the Book of the Two Principles and The Questions of John, which relates a discussion between Jesus and the apostle John, that the Cathars believed they were true Christians faithful to a secret tradition stretching back to St. John. Rejecting most of the Old Testament, whose deity they identified with Satan, the Cathars held the Gospel of John in highest esteem and made use of it in their rituals.

    Early in the thirteenth century Pope Innocent declared a Crusade against the ‘Good Christians’ of Southern France, announcing:

    Attack the followers of heresy more fearlessly even than the Saracens – since they are more evil – with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Forward then soldiers of Christ! Forward brave recruits to the Christian army! Let pious zeal inspire you to avenge this monstrous crime against your God.

    On the annual Feast Day of Mary Magdalene, July 22, 1209, the pope’s army prepared to attack the city of Beziers, many of whose sixty thousand inhabitants were devout Catholics, in order to wipe-out the Cathar ‘heretics’. “It was here, in the name of the Christian religion and through the fanaticism of one of the most venerated popes,” says Maurice Magre, “that there took place one of the most ferocious massacres in all history.” When asked how they were to distinguish pious Catholics from the Cathar ‘heretics’, the pope’s envoy the Abbot of Citeaux, replied, “Kill them all, the Lord will know His own.” The fall of the fortress-town of Montsegur in the Pyrenees in 1244 marked the end of the Cathars as a ‘public’ movement.

    The Cathars were the legitimate heirs of the early Gnostic Christians and through them of the first apostles. The central tenets of the Cathars, particularly the prominence they ascribed to Mary Magdalene and St. John, confirms they were a manifestation of an underground stream of secret teachings called by the prophet Mani, the universal ‘Religion of Light.’ The persecution and massacres unleashed by the Roman Church again forced the Gnostics underground to reemerge at a later time in fulfilment of the Great Plan.

    The Gnostic Revival
    Six hundred years after the pope launched the murderous Crusade against the ‘Good Christians’, three French mystics were each inspired to play unique roles in the revival of the Gnostic Johannite tradition in the modern world.

    Dr. Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat (1773-1838) was deeply immersed in the esoteric traditions of France, particularly those relating to the medieval Knights Templar who were said to have imbibed Gnostic ideas while in the Holy Land. Only a few years after the bloody massacres of the Cathars, the Templars met a similar tragic fate at the hands of the pope and king of France. In 1812 Fabré-Palaprat claimed to have discovered a manuscript written in Greek called the Levitikon, containing a version of the Gospel of John. Most historians today believe the work actually dates from around the seventeenth or eighteenth century, but some researchers say it may originate as early as the eleventh century. To Fabré-Palaprat it was an ancient text revealing the truth about the Church of John and the secret history of true Christianity. According to Peter Partner, the author of a scholarly book on the Knights Templar, in the Levitikon “the orthodox presentation of Christ had been excised in favour of a version which eliminated the miracles and the Resurrection, and presented Christ as an initiate of the higher mysteries, trained in Egypt.

    God is understood as existence, action, and mind, and morality as rational and benevolent conduct. The cosmos, in the ancient Gnostic tradition, is viewed as a hierarchy of intelligences. The part played by privileged initiation in the transmission of divine knowledge is central. Christ conferred the essential knowledge of this Gospel on John as the best-loved apostle, and it was transmitted thence through the Patriarchs of Jerusalem until the arrival of the Templars in 1118, after which the secret teaching was kept by the Templar Grand Masters. The esoteric doctrine was passed down through the official medieval Order until its fall in 1312, and then through their successors who extend the chain down to the present.4

    Inspired by what he found in the mysterious Levitikon, Fabré-Palaprat set about establishing a ‘Johannite Church’, with himself as the Sovereign Pontif or outer head of ‘John’s Church’. Around 1828 he reorganised the fledgling Johannite community under the name of the “Holy Church of Christ,” or the “Church of Primitive Christians.” Six years later Fabré-Palaprat, on the authority he claimed to have as successor of St. John, publicly celebrated a ‘Johannite Mass’. Facing considerable opposition from the Catholic clergy, the Johannites discontinued their open activities. Fabré-Palaprat retired to Southern France, where in a region alive with the memory of the Cathars and Mary Magdalene, he died in 1839.

    On August 6, 1839 Eugene Vintras had finished work in the French village of Tillay when an extraordinary event irrevocably changed his life. An old man knocked at his door and addressing Vintras by his baptismal name ‘Pierre-Michel’, told him the time had come for him to carry out a special mission. The end of the age (that is, the age of the Second Reign, that of Christ) was at hand, and Vintras was to announce the coming of the Holy Spirit and the commencement of the ‘Reign of Love’. The old man ‘whose face shone so brightly you could not look at him,’ again appeared to Vintras while he was on a visit to Paris. Subsequent visionary experiences confirmed the ‘old man’ was the Archangel Michael and Vintras a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah. In addition to Archangel Michael, Vintras told of being visited by the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, as well as other angelic beings, who disclosed to him the secret teachings of the original Christians. Followers flocked to Vintras, who now known by his spiritual name “Elie-Strathaniel,” celebrated Mass wearing a vestment adorned with an upside down cross. “I want this cross to be known as the cross of grace, because this is an age of crime and corruption, having drawn down on all the earth the terrible effects of my Father’s justice,” Christ had told Vintras in a vision.

    Vintras, the pious, mild-mannered Catholic, had been transformed by his experiences and as ‘Elijah returned’ radiated a powerful presence. People from all over France rushed to join his “Church of Carmel” or “Work of Mercy,” with its new priesthood which was to replace the ‘corrupt’ priesthood of the Catholic Church. Lacking any formal religious training and with only a basic education, Eugene Vintras, the Prophet Elie-Strathaniel, preached complex rites and doctrines which remarkably resembled those of the ancient Gnostics. As the historian Richard Griffiths explains:

    These rites were sacrificial in nature, and they enabled those who performed them to receive the merits of ‘redemption’, and to participate in the preparation for the coming of the Paraclete. The belief in the efficacy of a specific rite in freeing man from the fetters of matter and bringing him nearer to the spiritual redemption which would announce the Third Reign is very near to that of most gnostic sects, for whom the method of redemption consisted not so much in the profession of certain opinions or virtues as in the practice of certain rites.

    The ancient Gnostics included both men and women in the priesthood, a tradition revived by Vintras in the Church of Carmel.

    Women were permitted into the priesthood of the rite, in fact they held a very important place, for it was through Woman that salvation was to come. And in the attitude towards the Virgin Mary we find a conception of her as ‘created Wisdom’, the invariable reflection of ‘uncreated Wisdom’. This can be seen to be very close to one form of Valentinianism, a gnostic belief in which Sophia, or Wisdom (a divine principle which had fallen from the realm of light into the realm of matter) was conceived as being a double figure. The higher Sophia remained in the sphere of light, the lower Sophia had sunk into darkness. Through this duality Sophia became the fallen divinity through whom the mingling of light and dark, of spirit and matter, in the world, had been achieved; she was also seen as the intermediary between the lower and higher worlds and an instrument of redemption.5

    In 1842, under pressure from the Catholic Church, Vintras was arrested by the French authorities and imprisoned for five years on the trumped-up charge of soliciting donations from people to whom he claimed to reveal the name of their guardian angel. While he was in prison, the Abbe Marechal, known as Ruthmael, took over the community. He apparently began publicly teaching certain rituals that had a sexual content. According to some reports, he confided to his congregation, “Those who feel love for one another should share it often. Every time they do, they are sure to create a spirit in heaven.”

    In 1848 the Church of Carmel was formally condemned by the Vatican, and during the years 1852 to 1862 Vintras lived in London, where he published The Eternal Gospel. On his return to France he founded new congregations and a ‘college of prophets’ in Lyon, a city with a strong connection to the Gnostic tradition. For some years the Church of Carmel continued with congregations in Spain, in Belgium, in Italy, and in England. The Church survived Vintras’ death on December 7, 1875, but by then the rites were only celebrated in the utmost secrecy. A Vintrasian church functioned in London up until at least the beginning of the Second World War. From England, Vintras’ followers resettled in other countries, free of the acrimonious scrutiny of the Catholic Church. Others went on to join the new spiritual groups that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    Dr. Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat and Eugene Vintras made unique contributions to the rediscovery of the Johannite Gnostic tradition. The religious movements started by these French visionaries helped prepare the way for the establishment of the modern Gnostic Church in 1890 by Jules-Benoit Doinel (1842-1902). Doinel had for some years frequented esoteric and mystical circles, where he encountered the teachings of Fabré-Palaprat and Vintras. One of these circles, formed around the Countess of Caithness, took a particular interest in ancient Gnosticism. Lady Caithness was well acquainted with France’s occult and mystical groups, including the Church of Carmel. Jules Doinel also entered Freemasonry, being initiated Master in 1885 with the “congratulations and encouragement” of Albert Pike. Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller informs us:

    It was into this milieu that the ancient Gnostic tradition was reborn in France in the late nineteenth century. Jules-Benoit Doinel du Val Michel, a scholarly esotericist who had been a devoted researcher of the documents of the Cathar faith, had a mystical experience in 1890, in which he received spiritual empowerment to reconstitute the Gnostic church of old. His experience occurred in the splendid chapel at the residence of the Duchess de Pomar, Countess of Caithness, in Paris. This remarkable noblewoman was a friend of Madame Blavatsky and an early Theosophist and patroness of esoteric movements….

    Jules Doinel gathered a following and established the Eglise Gnostique, which was organised along sacramental lines. The teachings of the new church were strictly Gnostic, and in homage to Valentinus, Doinel assumed the ecclesiastical title of Patriarch Tau Valentin II. In a most progressive step he ordained women to priestly and episcopal offices; he also established once again the sacrament of the Consolamentum reminiscent of the Cathars.6

    Given Jules Doinel’s connections to France’s leading mystics and occultists the Gnostic Church soon became known as “the church of the initiates.” Doinel consecrated the remarkable esoteric writer Papus (Dr. Gerard Encausse) as a Gnostic bishop, and also joined Papus’s Martinist Order. Among Doinel’s acquaintances was Abbe Berenger Sauniere, the parish priest of Rennes-le-Chateau.

    At this time a number of gifted esotericists joined the French Gnostic Church, among them Fabré des Essarts, Albert de Pouvourville, Paul Sedir, Lucien Mauchel, Victor Blanchard and René Guénon.

    In 1908, Joanny Bricaud (1881-1934), held at Lyon the Holy Synod of Gnostic Bishops, which elevated him as patriarch of the Gnostic Church under the name Tau Jean II. Bricaud had studied the Johannite teachings and greatly admired Eugene Vintras and the Church of Carmel. He was committed to fully restoring the ancient Gnostic wisdom, faithful to the sacred tradition of Saint John. On becoming patriarch he declared:

    The religious evolution of which we are a part shows us that a new religion is necessary. Gnosticism offers itself as the desired religion. Gnosis is the complete and definitive synthesis of all beliefs and all ideas of which humanity has need to realise its origin, its past, its end, its nature, the contradictions of existence and the problems of life….

    Gnosis is the very essence of Christianity. Here, my beloved, is the just definition of Gnosticism. But, by Christianity, we do not only mean the doctrine taught since the arrival of the divine Savior, but also the one taught before Jesus’ arrival, in the old temples, the doctrine of Eternal Truth. Our Church is the antinomy of that of Rome. The name of that one is Force; the name of ours is Love.

    Our Sovereign Patriarch is not Peter, the impulsive, who denied three times his master and took up the sword, but John, the Savior’s friend, the apostle who relied on his heart and in it knew best the immortal sentiment, the oracle of light, the author of the Eternal Gospel, who took up only Speech and Love.7

    In The Esoteric Christian Doctrine, published in 1907, a year before he became patriarch of the Gnostic Church, Bricard wrote:

    The main aim of the Universal Gnostic Church is to restore the original religious unity, that is to establish and spread a Christian Religion true to the universal religious tradition. It is not hostile towards any Church. It respects the customs and laws of all peoples. It is essentially large and tolerant, which permits it to admit all men without distinction of nationality, language or race.

    Sadly, the ecumenical brotherhood and openness of spirit cultivated by Bricaud could not prevent persecution and strife befalling the Gnostic Church in France. Bricaud’s successor, the saintly Monsignor Constant Chevillon, Tau Harmonious (1880-1944), was cruelly executed by Nazi collaborators after the Vichy government suppressed the Gnostic Church. Nevertheless it was from France that the Gnostic Church spread to Portugal, Italy, Belgium, and South America. “The Gnostic tradition, which originally had its home in France,” Dr. Stephan Hoeller tells us, “came to be established in England and later in the United States, initially as a result of the efforts of a bishop of French descent who was raised in Australia.”

    The Gnosis Restored
    With fascism and communism on the rise across Europe, far away in Australia a young spiritual seeker began questioning the historical foundations of Christianity. In his quest for truth, Richard, Duc de Palatine (born Ronald Powell in 1916), joined “the biggest occult library in the Southern Hemisphere at the Theosophical Lodge in Melbourne,” where he studied “the extant writings concerning the Gnostics, Essenes and Secret Mysteries.” By 1944 he became convinced “that one day he would cause to be formed a Brotherhood which would partially restore the Sacred Lore and encourage people to prepare themselves for the Illumination and Interior Communion with the God within.”

    In the 1940s Richard, Duc de Palatine, a learned and charismatic figure, attracted much attention. His insight was uncanny, but for all this, he was perceived as being a very humble person who seemed to exude love and peace wherever he went.8 In 1948 he told his friends his mission was not in Australia and he travelled to London, where in 1953 he was consecrated as Bishop Richard John Chretien Duc de Palatine by the Patriarch Hugh George de Willmott Newman. The name of Duc de Palatine is a personal and spiritual title.

    In October, 1953 the Most Rev. Richard, Duc de Palatine established in London the “Pre-Nicene Gnosto-Catholic Church,” with the stated object of “restoring the Gnosis – Divine Wisdom to the Christian Church, and to teach the Path of Holiness which leads to God and the Inner Illumination and Interior Communion with the Soul through the mortal body of man.”

    From his base in London’s Kensington, Richard, Duc de Palatine travelled on several occasions to France where he made contact with bishops of the French Gnostic Church. They encouraged him to fulfil his mission of transmitting the Gnostic tradition to the English-speaking world. He was also received by representatives of France’s leading mystical orders, including the surviving Grand Master of the Johannite Templar Order. In a profile of Richard, Duc de Palatine’s life we read that he held high office in many esoteric bodies:

    Through these Orders and his many contacts, particularly in France which he frequently visited, Richard was able to bring forth in a semi-public forum the hidden teachings, the Gnosis of the Soul, which exposed the false vestiges of truth that had been foisted onto the people.

    Through his London based Pre-Nicene Publishing House, Richard, Duc de Palatine issued a series of booklets on Christian Gnosticism, with titles like “The Inner Meaning of the Mystery Schools,” “The Christian Mysteries,” and “Christ or Jesus?” He also published “The Lucis Magazine” as the official organ of ‘The Sovereign Imperium of the Mysteries.’ Reviewing Richard, Duc de Palatine’s early writings it is obvious how far-sighted and spiritually gifted he was. Articles in his magazine ranged from discussions of “The Fallen Angels” and the “Dead Sea Scrolls” to the “Christian Fathers on Reincarnation” and “Spiritual Illumination”. In the book The Key to Cosmic Consciousness, he is described as an “outstanding mystic and illumined teacher and writer” whose “knowledge and experience stems from his own illumination in 1956, after applying the teachings of the early Gnostic Fathers…”

    Writing close to fifty years ago, Richard, Duc de Palatine contrasted the Gnostic spirit of tolerance with the dogmatism of the mainstream Churches:

    The true Gnostic or Christian makes no claim that he alone is right or that his teaching is the only one required or necessary for salvation. He demands that no one accept the statements of himself or anyone else on faith, but insists that every one should prove these things for himself.9

    Richard, Duc de Palatine’s magazines and booklets were disseminated around the world and his ‘Brotherhood and Order of the Pleroma’ had branches in South Africa, Nigeria, the USA, and Australia. In 1971 he moved to the United States where he continued his work up to the time of his death in 1977. “He left behind a rich heritage, and because of his pioneering work a breach was made in the consciousness of the people…. but the keys to find the Door are still guarded and can only be found within the Wisdom Schools which through its Rite of Succession pass on the Keys to the Door.”

    Since Richard, Duc de Palatine’s passing, the work of the Gnosis, of necessity, has taken on many guises and has appeared in different forms. In the United States the Gnostic tradition restored by Richard, Duc de Palatine is carried on chiefly by Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller, Regionary Bishop of Ecclesia Gnostica, who was consecrated in 1967 by Bishop de Palatine. In Great Britain and Australia the Gnostic work has taken on a private approach in order to implement links with the more esoteric side of the Gnostic tradition. The Universal Gnostic Alliance, a consortium of Gnostic organisations in the Asia and Pacific region, was established in Australia at Easter, 2005. Formally chartered “to perpetuate the work of encouraging the study and propagation of the Ancient and True Universal Philosophy of the Inner Gnosis,” the Universal Gnostic Alliance is faithful to the vision of Bishop Richard, Duc de Palatine, and the Great Teachers of the Gnosis who went before.

    Experience of the Heart
    The first followers of Jesus the Christ did not see His teachings as merely intellectual fodder meant for endless debate, nor as a mere set of humanitarian principles and moral pronouncements. The teachings of Jesus were meant to be lived so that the individual person may awake to “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” For as the mystic Angelus Silesius wrote: “Even if Christ were born a thousand times in Bethlehem, But not in you, you would still be lost for all eternity.”

    The ‘Secret Church’ still exists in the world in the twenty-first century. Gnostic Christians are a worldwide community united not by a rigid set of beliefs, but by a mysterious bond of brotherhood derived from a shared vision and experience of the living Christ. Gnostic Christianity is experiential. It is about transformation, about a higher consciousness, not about dry words or external forms. Theologies and commandments are the formulations of men. No matter how sublime or noble, rational or logical, they are all man-made. Gnosis is the experience of the divine. Words along with all theological and philosophical discourses are insufficient to explain it. You must taste it, as the Psalmist declares: “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).

    The goal of the Gnostic Christian is nothing short of Awakening, of Christ Consciousness. Following the Way of the Christ, as revealed in the Gospels, we are called to “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”

    Almost the entire history of Christendom is a protest against the words of Jesus the Christ. Hatred and persecution, hypocrisy and ignorance, intolerance of one’s neighbours: all in the name of Him who gave the command to love your enemies. In the name of Him who said: “My kingdom is not of this world”! Institutional Christianity, with its religious dogmatism and obsession with commandments, is a contemporary example of the same force that confronted and sought to kill Jesus in his own time. But behind worldly Christianity is the interior Church of John, the universal Gnostic Church where the Living Christ continues to impart spiritual knowledge.

    This is the other tradition of Christianity, the hidden one, but it is always accessible to seeking souls.

    Footnotes
    1. Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot (Tarcher, 2002).
    2. Zoé Oldenbourg, Massacre at Montségur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade (Pantheon Books, 1962).
    3. Maurice Magre, Return of the Magi (Philip Allan, 1931).
    4. Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myths (Oxford Univ Press, 1982).
    5. Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution (Constable & Co Ltd, 1966).
    6. Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller, Gnosticism: New Light On The Ancient Tradition Of Inner Knowing (Quest Books, 2002).
    7. Extracted from the Patriarchal Homily of Tau Jean II, Bishop Primate in France, Patriarch of the Universal Gnostic Church, Lyon, 25 February 1908.
    8. Reminiscences, Lucis Magazine, Vol. 8 No. 2, 1966.
    9. Bishop Richard Duc de Palatine, The Christian Mysteries (Pre-Nicene Publishing House, 1958)
    Quote secret mysteries of the son

    From 1209-1249 one of the worst genocides in history was conducted against the Cathars, a heretical sect in southern France.

    Pope Innocent III, promising gold and indulgences (the remission of punishment due for sins) in exchange for the blood of the Cathars, sent 30,000 crusaders into France to massacre the Cathars and their supporters.

    The Cathars were hunted, tortured, burned at the stake and savagely murdered by the Church's hired killers. Estimates place the total number of Cathars and sympathizers murdered between 300,000 and 1,000,000 men, women and children. Throughout this bloodbath, an amazing phenomenon was witnessed.

    The Cathars did not express fear, anger or pain, but only bliss, despite the most horrendous atrocities committed against them.

    What were they on?

    According to William Henry in Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator, it was a psychoactive substance produced by the brain - the Cathars had learned the techniques necessary to produce it from the secret teachings of Jesus.

    It was called Christos (anointing oil) by the Essenes, who passed on their secrets to Jesus from Moses, who had obtained them in Egypt from descendants of the banished Atonite priests of Akhenaton.

    These teachings involve the power of the sun and the power of the spoken word and constitute what I call "the mysteries of the sun."

    They were part of the Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek mysteries, and the Gnostic teachings of the early Christians and secret societies. They have been given to every culture by great adepts as means of enlightening the minds of the people and freeing them from the darkness of ignorance and superstition.

    In this article, I will briefly examine the life and teachings of the founders of various mystery schools in the Middle East and Mediterranean area from the Pharaoh Thutmose III to Omraam Mikhail Aivanhov.

    There were other mystery schools in India, China, Peru and elsewhere, but the ones I have chosen represent a continuity that spanned millennia and formed the spiritual roots of the Judeo-Christian heritage.

    The story of the mysteries of the sun is as old as mankind and as new as the latest scientific breakthrough.

    In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. In this book, he argued convincingly that Atlantis had established colonies in Peru, Egypt and elsewhere and that the mythologies and mysteries of these peoples represented the original religion of the Atlanteans, which was a form of sun worship.

    He wrote,

    "The religion of the Atlanteans, as Plato tells us, was pure and simple; they made no regular sacrifices but fruits and flowers; they worshipped the sun.

    In Peru a single deity was worshipped, and the sun, his most glorious work, was honored as his representative. Quetzalcoatl, the founder of the Aztecs, condemned all sacrifice but that of fruits and flowers. [We can see how far the Aztec religion degenerated over the centuries to the low point of human sacrifice by the time of the Conquest.]

    The first religion of Egypt also was pure and simple; its sacrifices were fruits and flowers; temples were erected to the sun, Ra, throughout Egypt. In Peru the great festival of the sun was called Ra-mi."

    Between pre-dynastic Egypt and the eighteenth dynasty, the "pure and simple" solar religion of Egypt became very corrupt and complicated.

    There were several sun Gods and a whole host of minor Gods. The priesthood was rich and powerful and the people depended on them for magic amulets, praying to the Gods on their behalf and giving them a proper elaborate send-off into the afterlife. Fruits and flowers were no longer fitting sacrifices; animals took their place.

    Enter Pharaoh Thutmose III. A younger son of Amenhotep I, he owed his rule to the intervention of the priesthood of Amen-Ra who, in a religious ritual invoking the will of Amen-Ra, appointed him pharaoh, even though he was not in line for the succession.

    Thutmose realized that the priesthood was becoming too powerful and sought to curb their power by outwardly paying obeisance to Amen-­Ra, but secretly worshipping Aton and supporting a separate priesthood of Aton at Heliopolis who were loyal to the throne.

    Under his rule, Thutmose III permitted the common people to indulge in all their fanciful beliefs and superstition such as magic amulets.

    He believed that a gradual change in the existing religious beliefs could be more easily and permanently accomplished by establishing a secret mystery school, the students of which would put into practice higher standards. He wanted to gradually infuse into Egyptian religion from the top down those mysteries, myths and rites that would raise the people to a higher understanding and morality.

    Thus, in 1489 BCE he founded a secret mystery school, the Order of the Rose Cross, which the Rosicrucians claim descent from and which still exists today. Members of this mystery school were called the Therapeutea, meaning "physicians of the soul."

    The sungazing Essene sect of Alexandria later adopted this name and the rosy-cross symbol.

    William Henry, in The Healing Sun Code, linked the rosy-cross and the Rosicrucian secrets with the,

    "rising of the Healing Sun, the source of life and wisdom."

    I recently talked to a woman who studied Egyptology for 25 years and knew about Thutmose III and the Rosicrucians.

    She told me that she once knew a Rosicrucian lady, who every time she felt ill would face the sun and do a special breathing exercise in which she would breath in the fire of the sun to burn impurities in her body. She lived to be very old.

    This technique was part of the secret teachings of the Rosicrucians, which they were very careful not to reveal to the uninitiated.

    Another technique used by Thutmose III and members of his order was the use of healing rods while sungazing. These were copper and zinc tubes that contained hardened coal and magnetite respectively. They were reintroduced to the world by the Russian mystic Count Stefan Colonn Walewski, who was a member of a sungazing mystery school in the Caucasian Mountains.

    They amplify the current that passes through the body between the sun and earth while sungazing, enhancing meditation and quickening healing and the development of psychic powers.

    Thutmose III's son and grandson continued with the mystery school and the cult of Aton, but it wasn't until his great grandson, Akhenaton, took the throne that things came to a head.

    The Revolution of Akhenaton

    In 1369 BCE, Amenhotep IV took over the reigns of Egypt from his ailing father Amenhotep III.

    During his upbringing, he was educated at the Temple of the Sun at On (Heliopolis) where the priests instilled in him a devotion to Aton. When he became pharaoh, he was given the secret mysteries of the sun handed down from his great grandfather.

    He learned that Aton was the one true, self-created, unmanifest God and that most of the other Gods, including Amen-Ra, were man-made. Early in his reign, he changed his name to Akhenaton, meaning "the servant of Aton." Unlike his great grandfather, he had no tolerance for spiritual ignorance.

    Akhenaton initiated a change in the religious climate from a fear-based polytheism with its death cult, magic amulets, numerous idols, animal sacrifice, and secretive rituals of a powerful priesthood to a more devotional religion, which was free of graven images, obsession with the afterlife, and magic; which emphasized reverence for sunlight and cleanliness, and simple burial; and which allowed ordinary citizens to freely worship in open-air temples with offerings of fruits, flowers and incense, as was done in the original solar religion of Egypt.

    Aton's temples had no idols or graven images other than the one Akhenaton devised - a sun disk from which proceeded rays, the ends of which terminated in graceful hands. Some of these hands held the ankh, the symbol of life, to the nostrils of his sungazing worshippers.

    This symbolism shows that Akhenaton understood the relationship between sunlight, prana and breath.

    He knew that sunlight is the source of all life upon earth. This was not worship of the physical sun but worship of one God, a supreme deity, whose spirit was in heaven and whose physical manifestation was the sun - the symbol of life. It changed the worship of the sun as a God to the worship of God symbolized by the sun.

    Paintings and carvings of Aton were always accompanied with a sort of hieroglyphic footnote, stating that it was just a representation of the All-encompassing Creator.

    Thus, Akhenaton established the first monotheistic religion by elevating Aton over Amen-Ra and other Gods. His mother, Tiya, did much to mediate and stem the tide of controversy caused by his bold opposition to the powerful priesthood of Amen-Ra.

    However, after she died, he took the offensive and ordered his army to disband the priesthood and deface their false Gods.

    Akhenaton loved to officiate at ceremonies as the high priest of Aton.

    The following quote from a decree made by Akhenaton upon the founding of his capital city, Akhetaton, shows that morning sungazing was a daily ritual of Atonism:

    "Every eye beholds him without hindrance while he fills the land with his rays and makes everyone to live. With seeing whom my eyes are satisfied daily when he rises in this temple and fills it with his own self by means of his rays, beauteous with love, and embraces me with them in life and power forever and ever."

    During these ceremonies, Akhenaton and his congregation would sing his Hymn to Aton.

    Although the vast majority of Egyptians did not give much credence to Atonism, and Akhenaton's court followed the rituals of the outer religion out of a sense of duty, there existed an inner circle of about 300 initiates who learned from Akhenaton the mysteries of the sun.

    Among these were Joseph the son of Jacob, who Robert Feather, in The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran, claims was Akhenaton's vizier Nakhte.

    The Bible records that Joseph married Asenath the daughter of Potiphera, a priest of Aton in Heliopolis, and archaeologists discovered a private chapel to Aton in the ruins of Nakhte's home in Akhetaton.

    Robert Feather thinks that after Akhenaton's death, some of these initiates went to the sun temple of Heliopolis and others, including Joseph and his family, went to Elephantine Island in the land of Cush (Ethiopia), where they built another sun temple and established a branch of Judaism that exists to this day.

    The Mysteries Formed the Basis of the Judeo-Christian Tradition

    After the death of Akhenaton, the teachings of Atonism, its rituals and precepts, were almost completely destroyed by fanatics of the established religion.

    This has been the fate of every mystery teaching involving the sun in the past. Most historians and religious writers think that Akhenaton's monotheism was a brief aberration in a long tradition of Egyptian polytheism and that it died with him.

    But, buried in the pages of historical and scriptural texts are hints that his ideas survived in the Jewish faith. For example, Psalm 104 is almost identical to the Hymn to Aton.

    They also survived in the secret teachings of the Essene and Therapeut Brotherhoods, which were associated with early Christianity.

    In the History of Egypt, the Egyptian priest Manetho wrote,

    "Moses, a son of the tribe of Levi, educated in Egypt and initiated at Heliopolis, became a High Priest of the Brotherhood…

    He was elected by the Hebrews as their chief and he adapted to the ideas of his people the science and philosophy which he had obtained in the Egyptian mysteries when he established a branch of the Egyptian Brotherhood in his country, from which descended the Essenes.

    The dogma of an 'only God', which he taught, was the Egyptian Brotherhood interpretation and teaching of the Pharaoh who established the first monotheistic religion known to man [Akhenaton].

    The traditions he established in this manner were known completely to only a few of them, and were preserved in the mysteries of the secret societies, the Therapeutea of Egypt and the Essenes."

    After returning from Heliopolis, Moses became an annoyance to the priests of Amen-Ra and the court of Ramses II because of his Atonistic ideas.

    The historian Josephus records that Moses was sent on a military expedition to Cush in an effort by Pharaoh's courtiers to get rid of the "dissident." There he not only found a wife but another outpost of Atonism on Elephantine Island.

    Robert Feather thinks that it was in the wilderness of Cush that Moses saw the burning bush and received his mission.

    Flavia Anderson, in The Ancient Secret: Fire from the Sun claimed that the burning bush was actually a small golden tree with a crystal that reflected sunlight so brightly that it appeared to be on fire. A similar talisman, called a punchao, was used by the Incas to put worshippers in a trance so that they could see and communicate with beings of light.

    Anderson also relates this golden tree to the Urim and Thummin (perfect light) of the Jews, which was a crystal set in a golden stand, and by which the high priest communicated with God.

    Anderson thinks that Moses encountered this golden tree during an initiation in the sun temple of Heliopolis. But it's more likely that he saw it in the sun temple of Elephantine Island right before he returned to Egypt. It's also likely that some of the Atonite priests who were descendants of Joseph and his family joined Moses in his mission.

    The Bible records that there were two rival factions of priests during the Exodus. One faction had Egyptian names such as Korah, Dathan, Abiram and On.

    In The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran, Robert Feather shows how the descendants of these Egyptian priests, originally appointed at the time of Akhenaton, could have maintained their cohesion down to the beginning of the Qumran Essenes (610 BCE).

    When they entered Canaan, they settled around Shiloh and so became known as Shilonite priests. They became prominent around the time of Ezekial (589 BCE), Onias IV (160 BCE) and Jesus (4 BCE). These were also times when the Essenes were active.

    The Qumran Essenes, based on the Shilonite priests, came to have a much purer Judaism that rejected animal sacrifice, idols, amulets and burial with worldly goods which crept into the Judaism of the rest of the Israelites. During the Exodus, these priests were pro-Moses and against the priests of Aaron.

    It is likely that the priests of Aaron, who backslid into idolatry of the golden calf (the Egyptian Goddess Hathor) while Moses was on the mountain, may have been responsible for reintroducing another Egyptian practice of holocaust sacrifice, prohibited by Atonism. On Mount Sinai, God gave Moses the first set of tablets to present to the Hebrews.

    It shows Moses receiving the tablets from the sun, which is depicted as an opening in the sky.

    However, when he came down the mountain and saw how the people had lapsed into idolatry, he realized they weren't ready for what was on the tablets. So he smashed the tablets and went back up the mountain where God engraved ten simple commandments on a second set of tablets.

    What could have been on the first set? Perhaps the solar mysteries! In any case, the mysteries were handed down by word of mouth from Moses to the Shilonite priests to the Essenes.

    Archeologists found in the catacombs of Rome a drawing of Jesus holding a rod of power when raising Lazarus from the dead, showing that early Christians understood that the source of Jesus' power came from the sun.

    The Bible records that just before Jesus raised Lazarus, he "lifted up his eyes" to the sun and prayed. The rod is a symbol of the life force, which every Egyptian sun God and sun Gods from Babylonia, India and Peru are shown wielding in paintings and wall carvings.

    Many scholars are now coming around to the realisation that Jesus was a member of the Qumran Essene movement and that many of his teachings are similar to the Essene teachings.

    The Essenes and Therapeuts considered themselves to be the children of light and so did the early Christians.

    According to Gene Savoy in his book 'The Essaei Document: Secret Teachings of an Eternal Race', Jesus received the Essenes' secret teachings, which he calls the paradosis, meaning a divinization process by which one became immortal. Savoy hints at sungazing being a key factor in this secret teaching.

    He writes:

    "That the Essaei [Essenes] faced the sun at these times [sunrise and sunset] suggests that the sun was used as an intermediary by which men of the earth were linked by 'cords of light' with heaven… and were nurtured on a divine food upon which the angels fed…"

    The Therapeuts believed that pure souls returned to the sun and that sunlight indeed is the heavenly, incorruptible food of the soul.

    Savoy's "cords of light" linking everyone can be thought of as an energy grid.

    The sun is one part of this energy grid; the earth is the other. Savoy wrote elsewhere:

    "The followers of Mithra gathered on the summits or stood in the waters, lifting their hands in prayer before the rising sun…"

    Savoy also mentioned in Project X that sun worshippers in Peru would stand on the summits of mountains or sun temples.

    This made me think of the vortices and ley lines of the earth grid, which are focal points and lines of electromagnetic energy usually found on high points on the earth's surface and in stream beds.

    Richard Leviton and Robert Coons, in "Ley Lines and the Meaning of Adam," a chapter from Antigravity and The World Grid, claimed that the electromagnetic system of our bodies, the entire biosphere and the earth grid are part of a much larger solar system grid and it's all connected.

    And the energy that powers this grid is the light of God.

    They wrote,

    "The landscape temple made of stones and crystal… linked Heaven and Earth through Man.

    The terrestrial temple also functioned as a Grid Door by which human consciousness… could actually exit this plane and enter 'the realm of the Gods' [what William Henry called 'the dimension of the blessed'].

    Through this Grid Door, the Gods could also channel their spiritual vibrations and messages."

    Perhaps that's how God channeled the mysteries of the sun and then the Ten Commandments to Moses on the terrestrial temple of Mt. Sinai.

    It's significant that key events in Jesus' ministry occurred on the peaks of mountains and in streams (his baptism, his last temptation, the sermon on the mount, his transfiguration, his death, and his ascension).

    Jesus passed on the Essene secret teachings on the mysteries of the sun to his disciples, including Mary Magdalene.

    The early Christians, who were not privy to these teachings, at first worshipped the spirit of Christ in the sun, but around the third century they lapsed into a personality cult of Jesus worship, which has continued to this day.

    Fragments of these secret teachings can be found in the Dead Sea scrolls, in the apocryphal text known as the Pistis Sophia, and in the Essene Gospel of Peace, which was hidden in the Vatican library for centuries before Edmond Bordeux Szekely discovered it in 1928.

    In the Pistis Sophia, an ancient gospel suppressed for over a thousand years and ignored by the orthodox churches even after its publication in the last century, Jesus, after his resurrection, elaborates on the solar mysteries and how necessary they are for entering the kingdom of heaven:

    "Ye are to seek after the mysteries of the Light, which purify the body of matter and make it into refined light exceedingly purified. Amen I say unto you…

    I have torn myself asunder and brought unto them all the mysteries of the Light, that I may purify them… else would no soul of the total race of men have been saved, and they would not be able to inherit the Kingdom of the Light…"

    How this purification occurs is hinted at in this further passage:

    "Now, therefore, he who shall receive the mysteries of the baptisms, then they becometh a great, exceedingly violent, wise fire and it burneth up the sins and entereth into the soul secretly and consumeth all the sins which the counterfeiting spirit hath made fast on to it."

    In the 'Essene Gospel of Peace', Jesus gives a teaching on the purifying role of sunlight in this baptism of fire.

    He tells the sick after instructing them on fasting,

    "And if afterward there remain within you aught of your past sins and uncleanness, seek the angel of sunlight… For I tell you truly, holy is the angel of sunlight who cleans out all impurities and makes all evil-smelling things of a sweet odor.

    None may come before the face of God, whom the angel of sunlight lets not pass.

    Truly, all must be born again of the sun and of truth, for your body basks in the sunlight of the Earthly Mother, and your spirit basks in the sunlight of the truth of the Heavenly Father."

    The receiving of this fire through sungazing with arms upraised in a Y formation or bent at the elbow and hands spread out and facing the sun was called by the Greeks "fire blooming" because the radiance or essence of the sun thus channeled burned away impurities in the solar plexus, which, by the way, is associated with the sun and with fire.

    One can find wall carvings, paintings, statues, woodcuts and photographs of sun worshippers from all over the world - Hindus, Muslims, American Indians, ancient Egyptians, Medieval monks, Russians, Incas, and even aborigines in prehistoric petroglyphs - all with upraised arms.

    William Henry wrote in Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator that when Jesus taught his disciples the Lord's Prayer, he also taught them this prayer position, which he learned from the Egyptians, who called it the Ka position.

    Moses also learned it from the Egyptians and used it to invoke the light of God during the Israelites' battle with the Amalekites. Significantly, the battle was won at sunset.

    This leads us to consider another part of the mysteries revealed by the Pistis Sophia, which is a certain power of the spoken word.

    The soul, in order to be cut free from the counterfeit spirit, must utter,

    "the mystery of the undoing of the seals and of all the bonds."

    This is the science of the spoken word, the uttering of sacred mantras, prayers and songs that remove or restrain the evil self, the "karmic records" of the individual.

    These spiritual sciences and techniques were not revealed to all the faithful. According to the Pistis Sophia, the mysteries were to be given only to those initiates who proved themselves worthy through years of testing.

    They were also kept secret because of the threat of persecution.

    The Mysteries Survive Persecution During the Dark Ages

    In Lost Light, Alvin Boyd Kuhn wrote that sun worship,

    "was the heart's core of all religion and philosophy everywhere before the Dark Ages obscured the vision of truth… The dreadful shadows of the Dark Age will not end until the bright glow of the solar wisdom is released once more to enlighten benighted modernity."

    During the Dark Ages, the mysteries of the sun survived and were passed down through the,

    Knights Templar

    Cathars

    Paulicians

    Bogomils

    other Gnostics

    Many of these saints were brutally murdered by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in an attempt to suppress their teachings, which threatened the Churches' established authority.

    One of the most inspired Gnostics was Saul of Tarsus. Saul experienced a sudden conversion and gnosis on the way to Damascus. Paintings of this experience usually show Saul being blinded by the noonday sun shining through a break in the clouds directly upon him.

    Gene Savoy, in The Essaei Document, claimed that Saul had learned that the Essenes sungazed in order to communicate with God. When Saul tried it, he received a powerful, life-transforming message, which left him blind and temporarily insane so that he could not eat or drink for three days.



    In 1840, Dr. Gustav Fechner, the father of psychophysics, experimented with gazing at the sun through colored filters and liquids. He did it at noon and, as a result, became blind and insane. However, after much prayer and meditation in a dark room, he recovered his sight and sanity and more.



    He began seeing auras and angels, whom he called "beings from the sun."

    Socrates taught in his academy that personal transformation was only possible through understanding the word of God, the Light, and that it was attained only through inner illumination absorbed from the sun. Apparently, Saul the persecutor was transformed by the sun into Paul the proselytizer.

    Clement of Alexandria recorded that Paul, before going to Rome, said that he would bring to the brethren the Gnosis, or tradition of the hidden mysteries, as the fulfillment of the blessings of Christ, who, Clement says, reveals the secret knowledge and trains the Gnostic by mysteries, that is, revelations made in the state of higher consciousness.



    Such a state can be attained through deep meditation, chanting and sungazing. Unfortunately, Paul was arrested in Rome and a few years later executed.



    His true teachings on the mysteries of the sun were lost for several centuries until they were resurrected in Armenia and Syria during the late seventh century by the Paulicians. This group was so named because their teachings were the Gnostic mysteries handed down from St. Paul when he brought them to the Balkans and Syria during his ministry.

    The Paulicians were persecuted and diminished in the ninth century, although until relatively recently there existed an Armenian sun cult whose adherents were known as Arevorti, "children of the sun."



    In the tenth century, a new Gnostic movement, the Bogomils, arose in Bulgaria, which carried many of the same beliefs and practices of the Paulicians, including sun worship.



    However, their teachings were based on the Gospel of John.

    At the beginning of the 12th century, Byzantium started to persecute the Bogomils. Many were killed, but some fled to Italy, southern France and elsewhere.



    By the middle of the 12th century, Gnostic schools like the Knights Templars and Cathars had sprung up and spread throughout Western Europe. These were the Western European counterparts of the Eastern European Bogomils.

    The Cathars "pure ones" and the Knights Templars were concentrated in the Languedoc and Midi regions of Southern France.

    The Cathars claimed to possess the Book of Love (AMOK) the original initiatory version of the Book of John (the only gospel the Cathars, Knights Templars and Bogomils read) which likely contained the solar mysteries. It taught that a spark or tiny sun of the Christ light dwelt in man's heart and it revealed how to nurture it like a seed of divinity so that it blossomed into the rose of the original rosy-cross mystery school.

    This teaching, which reputedly could transform a human into a divine being, once belonged to,

    Thutmose III

    Akhenaton

    Moses

    Solomon

    Jesus

    John the Beloved

    It was reputed to be able to dissolve all hatred, anger and jealousy from the hearts of men.

    The Cathars believed that the key to this divine transformation was the correct understanding of the symbolism of the Eucharist, that is, the bread and wine and the Holy Grail.



    The light of the sun is the bread; its warmth is the wine. The Holy Grail is the brain's third ventricle or cavity containing the pineal and pituitary glands. This secret, known to the Cathars as the consolamentum ("with the sun in the mind"), was kept hidden from the uninitiated.



    The Cathars believed man entered the kingdom of God through his soul, the seat of which was considered by Descartes to be the pineal gland. The Cathars believed that the solar elements of the Eucharist transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ within themselves.



    The world transubstantiation comes from the Latin trans, across, and substantia, substance.



    This substance or glandular secretion, caught by the Holy Grail (the third ventricle), is what,

    the Hindus call Amrita, "the elixir of immortality"

    the Greeks called Ambrosia, "the nectar of the Gods"

    William Henry, in Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator, wrote,

    "All the occult mysteries speak of a key that is required to unlock mystical secrets of enlightenment.



    Specifically, the lost secret of the Templars… is about building a better human through the release of secretions from the astounding manufacturing plant of spiritual oils, the human brain. This oil or essence was the key secret of Mary Magdalene and the Essenes, recovered by the Templars from between the temples.



    The skull [specifically the third ventricle] is… the Cup of Life, the Grail, that catches these secretions from the brain… The Templars' ultimate objective was to restore true Gnostic monotheism to the world, uniting Christianity, Judaism and Islam in a New Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.



    The 'new' humans that inhabited this New Jerusalem (or New Atlantis) would know and embody the secret of the Kingdom of Heaven within the brain and its capability of producing… the elixir of life, the Sacred Soma, the tonic of immortality, for these terms all refer to the cosmic essence or brain substance."

    It was also called Christos (anointing oil) by the Essenes.

    Like their forerunners, the Bogomils, the Cathars engaged in chanting. This along with sungazing was the key to activating the pineal gland and producing the oil of Christos.



    The use of mantras and chanting can awaken the pineal because it sits above the mouth suspended in the third ventricle, a chamber filled with cerebrospinal fluid.



    Its location above the mouth in a fluid chamber makes the pineal gland quite uniquely positioned to respond to sonic vibrations.



    Manly P. Hall, in The Opening of the Third Eye, stated that the pineal gland,

    "vibrating at a very high rate of speed, is the actual cause of true spiritual illumination."

    The bliss that is experienced during sungazing and chanting is not just a natural high.



    According to William Henry, bliss is created by Christos and is a state of extreme happiness and freedom from attachment, conditioned responses and fear. It is the key required to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.



    Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov said that only those who are happy and carefree like children can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

    The teachings of the Cathars posed quite a threat to the fledgling Catholic Church. Unlike the Cathars, the Church of Rome clearly did not produce a substance that gave people an experience of divine bliss. And if it did, it would keep it from the people.

    That's why the Church had to exterminate them.

    Fortunately, today we live in an age of spiritual freedom and anyone can teach and learn the science of the spoken word and techniques of sungazing presented by sun yogi Hira Ratan Manek and others.

    Although the light of the Cathars was snuffed out in the 13th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the teachings of the Bogomils were revived by the master Peter Deunov and his chief disciple, Omraam Mikhail Aivanhov.

    The Mysteries of the Sun Revealed

    On January 31, 1900, Mikhael Aivanhov was born into a poor family in Serbtzi, a small village of Macedonia.

    Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he was inspired by reading the Gospel of John, lives of the saints and books on yoga, which led him, at the age of fifteen, to an experience of illumination or samadhi.

    He went to the seashore to gaze at the sunrise. After meditating and sungazing for a little while, he sensed the presence of a heavenly being. Suddenly bathed in a cloud of brilliant light, he was plunged into a state of ecstasy.



    Later, he commented:

    "It was so beautiful that I was beside myself.



    To see such a being, with all those colors, all that light! He was almost invisible in the extraordinary luminosity that surrounded him. I found myself flooded with light. I was in a state of bliss, of ecstasy so immense, so powerful, that I no longer knew where I was. It was a delirious joy; it was heaven; it was the universe!



    Ever since then I have felt that if God were not all beauty I could not believe in him. It is beauty that remains in my mind as the one essential: neither power, nor knowledge, nor wealth, nor glory.



    Only beauty!"

    On the basis of his own spiritual experiences and of his reading of what he called the "Book of Nature," he discovered the mysteries of the sun before being taught them by Peter Deunov.



    Mikhael and his master would go together to meditate in the pre-dawn stillness and watch the sun rise. Deunov also gave him the basic methods and exercises in mantra, prayer and sacred song: the mysteries of the spoken word.

    In 1959, he travelled to India, where he visited numerous ashrams and met several spiritual leaders. He was welcomed by several renowned Hindu sages as an accomplished master in his own right. One adept hailed him as a "solar rishi." Another gave him his spiritual name, Omraam.



    One of the masters he met was the immortal bodhisattva, Babaji, who in 1992 and 1998 gave his blessings to another teacher of sungazing, sun yogi Hira Ratan Manek.

    Central to Omraam's teaching is the concept of light. He saw in light the first emanation of the Divine, retaining the Divine's qualities more than any other manifestation.



    As he insisted:

    "Light is a living spirit which comes from the sun and which establishes a direct relationship with our own spirit."

    He explains how we can use light to transform ourselves and become radiant as the sun.



    In The Splendour of Tiphareth, he wrote,

    "Only the sun's rays are capable of replacing all that is impure, worn out or obscure within you, and they can only do so if you learn to receive them.



    If you welcome them with your whole heart, they will begin their work of replacing the 'old man' in you, so that you will be wholly regenerated, renewed and resuscitated; your thoughts, feelings and acts will all be different.



    Only the sun's rays are capable of working this transformation within you."

    Omraam loved to talk about the Spirit of the sun.



    In this respect his philosophy coincided with the age-old mysteries of the sun, which taught that the true sun is not the star that is visible in the sky, but the invisible spiritual sun, the source of all life, light and love.

    He pointed out that,

    "On the physical, material level, the sun is the door, the link and the medium thanks to which we can make contact with the Lord…



    Through the sun, we work with God Himself. I can say that certain things that no human can teach me have been revealed to me by the sun. No book can give you what the sun gives you if you learn to have the proper relationship with him… If you want to create a bond between you [and the sun], you have to look at him in all consciousness.



    If you do that there will be a communication of vibrations between the sun and you in which forms and colours, a whole new world, will be born… The sun is an intelligence, a life, a living light. And when you understand that, all of a sudden he begins to speak to you…

    Try asking him a question and you will see that he will answer you."

    Omraam died in 1986, but his teachings on the mysteries of the sun live on in numerous books. Over 90 books have been published in English, and there are enough notes from his hundreds of lectures to fill another 400 books.

    Of these books, the ones that are primarily concerned with the mysteries of the sun are,

    The Splendour of Tiphareth: The Yoga of the Sun

    Toward a Solar Civilization

    Light is a Living Spirit

    Louise-Marie Frenette's newly-released biography of Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov, The Life of a Master in the West, has just been published in New Zealand by First Edition Press.
    Last edited by Delight; 4th May 2021 at 01:04.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Quote ‘Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood under the Sign of Love’. Under that
    motto a congress took place in May 2017, in St. Félix Lauragais (France).
    This conference, organized by the Bulgarian scholar Damyan Popchristov
    and the association ‘Bulgarians in the Pays d’Autan’, wanted to contribute to a spiritual unification of Europe “from a historical and spiritual
    perspective.”

    The underlying motive was the mission of Nikètas in 1167,
    now 850 years ago. The purpose was to investigate how the crucial Bogomil-Cathar synod over which Nikètas presided, could promote a similar
    ‘convivencia’ in our modern age.

    The various texts bore the character
    of testimonies, while the meeting itself instigated a great impulse. The
    participants experienced that the pure and intelligent Christianity of the
    Spirit is still internationally active. It is spiritually very much alive in a time
    in which our society changes drastically. And again, the Occitan region is
    the scene of action.

    The ‘Council of the Cathars’ in 1167 was led by Nikètas, patriarch of the
    seven churches of Asia. During this synod – with the allure of a great medieval knight and damsel meeting – tens of the sons and daughters of the
    nobility were sealed again with the consolamentum of the living. It was
    proof that the Cathar ‘Church of the Spirit’ formed the heart of Occitan
    society. The young Esclarmonde of Foix was also present.

    It was in 2017 that Damyan Popchristov brought an international group
    of speakers together such as the English Anne Baring, the grande dame
    of esoteric thinking on the impact of the Light Message through the
    ages. She proved how this “Church of the Spirit” was firmly anchored in
    the ancient knowledge of the connection between humans and cosmos.
    Eduard Berga discussed an old Bogomil text. Dick van Niekerk treated the
    impact of the Bogomil version of the ‘Our Father’. Pierre Gohar spoke of
    the “universal community of the rose” – which forms a meeting place
    for all light-sparks and Petra Augrandjean opened the day with a specific
    focus on the work of the patriarch Nikètas.

    Pentagram offers only a selection from the various presentations. Not
    all texts were available at the time of publication of this issue. For the
    “World images”, the editors chose modern images of some cities and
    places where the two brotherhoods undertook their work in earlier times.
    The accompanying texts are derived from David Lorimer’s contribution.
    The Congres
    in Saint-FélixLauragais

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Here are a few hours of history

    Quote From Graham Hancock's "The Master Game", a wonderful account of the most radical and revolutionary Christian sect in History- The Cathars. The Roman Catholic Church INVENTED the Great Inquisition to stamp out the Cathars as they were the greatest threat that, up to that time, had ever been posed to the Roman Empire Catholic Church, the Popish Power and the Vatican Nation-State.
    Graham Hancock 2017 - The Cathars LightWeavers of Languedoc Pt.1.mp4



    Graham Hancock 2017 - The Cathars LightWeavers of Languedoc Pt.2.mp4



    Graham Hancock 2017 - The Cathars LightWeavers of Languedoc Pt.3.mp4


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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Immersing myself in what is written about the Cathars, I am thinking about the dualism core belief. There is a split between good and evil. In the genocide of the Chathars, according to GrahamHancock , both the Catholic church and the Cathar community saw themselves in a battle over humanity. There was a spiritual war behind the world play.

    The split between good and evil seems too extreme. Also, in a deep way, I feel God is PRESENT in matter and the good/evil split is in a MATRIX THAT EVIL has constructed. EVIL is strangely in English the opposite of LIVE. Also in English Heart/Hearth/Earth are all held together.

    IF I AM A CATHAR RETURNEE< NOW WHAT?

    At this time, I think I am here with others to embed consciousness of the God Force in ourselves. Once that is embedded, LIGHT begins flowing and this is what I think I am doing with a whole LOT of others. We need not meet one another. It matters that we KNOW we are ONLINE, that we are all here to bring LIGHT into matter.

    It is IMO the demons and the angels archetypes showing up. Am I on the side of the angels? I feel like the world is HORRIBLE. This is NOT fun. But I have chosen that I am in a HUGE game with my experience. One goes back to the idea that MIND and thought precede my reality. I intend to manifest a clear vision of what I LOVE.
    I do not need to know how it will unfold. I am here to forgive what I remember and The God Force acts as it will do ... who I am is what I get.

    In hooponopono we have to take on all of whatever we observe as ours. Then we have to forgive it. This seems overwhelming but focusing on the feeling of God all around us makes it easier. When one feels the PRESENCE, one can FEEL energetically the clearing in our fields. This is a sense we are developing.

    I am taking on the idea that my mind place is like my computer operating system. I am the model for all earthly computers and just as I could learn to work on a laptop, I operate my Mind. I am creating the perfect transmitter/receiver for the LIVING GOD becaue I absolutely am in love with God.

    The metaphor is I am allow the emptying of stuff (off load the hard drive), Increase my RAM, Increase the battery life of voltage, have a clear channel to receive and have a powerful emanation. WE SHINE the information, good news, like a WI FI of divine miracles. WE ARE ALREADY IN HEAVEN and we are playing a game of Good versus Evil.

    I just cannot grok two God's. I can look at the subject more as God expresses in all ways through man and woman. This is a simulation at best and the matrix created is EVIL. I don't understand how but I feel I may see a new earth where evil is transmuted to LIVE with the inspiration and PRESENCE of the Living God. I may not be a Cathar or I am playing in the next stage of the MUNDANE expression on earth of unification of Matter and Consciousness of God. I feel we are building a LIVING new matrix (the matrix being what we create) which is IMO the scheme of things.
    Last edited by Delight; 4th May 2021 at 04:19.

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    Default Re: The Cathars: Gnostic Catholic Opposition in the Middle Ages

    Recommend a book, In Search of Zarathustra, by Paul Kriwaczek. Lots of information about the Cathars, the Albigensian Crusade and other groups all around Europe starting in Roman times that had ties back in some way to the Zoroastrians.

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