The Fire and the Light

TWO BOOK REVIEWS

Impressions by two people who have read this  masterfully orchestrated historical novel by Glen Craney, published by Brigid's Fire Press,                 Los Angeles, 2008.

 

REVIEW ONE

by Abe van Luik

What is a masterfully orchestrated novel?  One like this one, that tells a spellbinding tale but also has rich illustrations and provocative quotations at the start of each section and chapter.  These images and thoughts do not simply illustrate the story, they tell a parallel story in Tarot-card faces and in citations from some of the most thoughtful sources we are blessed with: Rumi and the Gospel of Thomas most prominent among them.  These pre-figures and pre-thoughts set the mood for what follows.  Not unlike how mood-altering music is used in the background in a dramatic movie.

OVERALL IMPRESSION

The Fire and the Light is a marvel of a tale, tied quite firmly into what facts there are, and woven deftly into a tapestry touching those facts and connecting them into a tale at once enjoyable and alarming.  

CRANEY'S INSPIRATION AND MAIN CHARACTER

Glen Craney was inspired by a dream featuring this wonderfully multi-faceted gem of a woman, Esclarmonde of Foix.  The dream was in symbols, as all true revelations are, according to me and Carl Jung, and if Jung  is right about them. they represent some need in us being answered by our own subconscious store of archetypes elevating an archetype or two up into our consciousness.

In other words, this dream represents something coming into consciousness from within Craney, not an external personage coming for a visit.  If Jung is correct, of course. He must be correct because this is what Craney himself says revelation is, on page 455, where he writes as if with ancient authority that the hope that comes to us when we search for and feel we are approaching the Kingdom is coming from inside us, the Kingdom is inside us:

Esclarmonde, as portrayed by Craney, is one of the most perfect human beings that ever lived, once she got past her childhood.  In her childhood she played with peoples’ feelings (men’s, of course), and as she got older even this slight imperfection was corrected.  But some of her perfect moves seemed to be the wrong moves: she gives up love for her religion.  She is impatient with several people (for cause, but she seems to be intolerant of doubt and fear and just plain exhaustion in others).

Later, she is not wrong, but simply makes an a error thinking that if she were only dead, the enemy would stop attacking her people.  She doesn't realize they already think she is dead (page 369) and are attacking anyway!  She is important, but the enemy is out to kill a religion, not just her.

If there was ever a person deserving sainthood, it is Craney’s Esclarmonde.  Does his Esclarmonde fit history? Esclarmonde was a perfect one, a perfecta, a female Cathar healer and leader of great renown and reputation, and a great irritant to the Inquisition.  

Her status as a female, as well as a person that is a member of the nobility, cracks two pillars of the Divine Order that governed in the Middle Ages: God created classes, setting nobles and clergy protectively over peasants, whose lives are spent supporting their civil and ecclesiastical lords. Similarly, God created women to serve men.  

Esclarmonde cracks one pillar by being a female leader who speaks to teach and who heals.  She cracks the other pillar because she sees no difference between herself and her peasant followers in her faith, regardless of their station in life as “cloggers,” a derisive appelation meaning they are field workers, hence serfs.  

So Esclarmonde and her religion threaten not just the Church’s hegemony, but also the very structure of Medieval society, its feudal institutions, that exist as an expression of God’s will.  

Craney defines Esclarmonde in a way that matches the few superlatives that survive about her in history, and makes her fully worthy of the Inquisition’s acrimony.  She is a credible person in Craney’s story: her life could have been as Craney describes it!  

It is interesting to note that between the few facts that exist about Esclarmonde, facts described in Oldenbourg's classic Massacre at Montsegur, little is known of the woman herself.  Oldenbourg says of Esclarmonde that her . . . "personality remains a decided mystery," . . . even though . .  "she exercised great influence in the area, since Foulques pays her an oblique compliment by asserting that 'through her evil doctrines she succeeded in making a number of conversions.'" (p. 318).  This means that Craney had much freedom to weave, and he wove a character worthy of her reputation.

I suspect that some of the events in the story have been exaggerated to make them revolve around Esclarmonde, where in history she may have been more peripheral to them.  But, there is no proof one way or the other, and that is the beauty of the genre of historical fiction.  Anchor to the facts, yes, but then weave a story tied to those anchors that keeps the reader’s interest and moves the reader emotionally, perhaps even educates the reader.  

COURTLY LOVE AND TROUBADOURS

I very much appreciate how Craney wove the troubadours and the institutions of courtly love into the story.  His estimation of the importance of these two movements in the region at the time, and his hint that the troubadours' Religion of Love was very compatible with Catharism matches the prejudices I have derived from my own readings and tell about on this website.

Page 7 describes Andreas Capellanus, the author of De Arte Honeste Amandi or The Art of Courtly Love (written about 1174-1176) as “a lecherous old cleric who clearly knew nothing about women.”  That is a modern view of Capellanus, and I am glad Craney inserted it because I agree.  But was this the attitude toward him in his own time?   I don’t believe so.  This is the book that tells a man to never use the word ‘love’ around a woman of lesser social status, that if you really must have a woman carnally,  go rape a servant girl, but do not encumber yourself with women of lesser social stature who feel you have spoken some sort of commitment to them.  That was not shocking in its time.  We’ve come a long way.  I think.

SOME STRANGE AND DELIGHTFUL IDEAS ATTRIBUTED TO THE CATHARS

Saul of Tarsus, who I believe created the Christianity we know today, is accused of hijacking the new religion from James and Mary Magdalene on page 63.  Mary Magdalene is said to have been a person

I like this.  It combines Dead Sea Scrolls arcana about a Teacher of Righteousness and his evil counterpart, with gnostic ideas.  Gnostics felt this way about Saul/Paul, whose teachings basically borrowed from the mystery religions just enough to make it look as if his newly adopted (and adapted) religion was the successor of those religions as well as of Judaism.  Paul aced the gnostics out of the mainstream.  He also aced the Jewish Christians, including James, out of what they probably felt to be their destiny, and created a whole new religion that passed them by.

It was Paul’s religion that spread like a wildfire through the religiously dry Roman world, after making a few accommodations to the paterfamilias that was the backbone of Roman society, telling slaves to serve their masters well and women to keep quiet in churches and be obedient at home.  I realize these are likely interpolations into Paul's letters, but they were credible interpolations in their own time.

Turning to another religious tradition that Craney suggests to have had something to do with early Christianity, on this same page 63, he has a Cathar speak on an “initiation into the gnosis,” making it crystal clear that Catharism is the continuation of this ancient gnosticism.  OK, there is a good basis for thinking this is so, gnostics were generally dualists of the same type as the Cathars, and they believed our spirits were imprisoned in this world and that knowing, or gnosis, was the key to emancipation back into the light.  

The Cathars were not known to have practiced any secret initiatory rites that bestowed the gnosis being referred to, but as Craney and others correctly point out, this history was written by their conquerors (pages 482-483), who needed to paint the victims as black as possible to help justify their bloody and cruel campaign.

So, what temple rites is Craney referring to, with a woman bringing a man into a knowledge of the mysteries of the light?  The mystery religions of the time of Christ had initiations that had a person symbolically dying and coming into a new life.  Experiencing the total absence of light, in a cave or through a mock, but real-feeling burial, often enhanced by some form of hallucinogen, were methods employed.  Craney chooses the faux burial with drugs for his story on pages 149-153.  It seems credible, although it is the first I have heard of such a rite among the Cathar elite.

Baptism, immersion into the waters symbolic of death, and then arising into a new life cleansed of the demerits obtained in the old one, was a faint reflection of the stark  terrors that often accompanied the more severe initiations, which purportedly have caused some to lose sanity, even life.  I suppose we should thank Paul for not including a scary and risky faux burial in his Christianity.  

STEPPING OFF THE PATH OF REASON

Craney uses the burial into darkness/ rising into life and Light initiation, but the idea of a woman initiating a man into the mysteries in a temple-like setting also reminds me of the rites of the Naditu priestess in the world that existed well before Jesus.  Pharaos and shepherd kings of the very ancient world enacted the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage rite.  A priestess, representing the Goddess, would mate with a king or other dignitary in the rite, and if she was satisfied by him she would pronounce blessings upon him, his family, his country, his army, and most of all his land in terms of its fertility.  

I am sure Craney did not have this in mind.  However, his mention of Mary Magdalene, who has been purported by some to have been Jesus’ wife, initiating Jesus into the Light, made me think of this ancient practice!  Bad boy.

OK, that came from within me.  It is no wonder that Craney was visited in his dream by this almost perfect woman, leading him to research and tell this riveting, heart- warming and heart-rending tale of Esclarmonde of Foix, Cathar perfect one.  

In my case I was visited by a Cathar woman, Beatrice de Plannisoles, who simply loved too much and hounded me until I told her story of multiple marriages and multiple lovers.  If I believed in reincarnation, as good Cathars do, I would believe myself to have been her last priest/ confessor/ and most passionate lover, who has obvious personality defects and is simply being reborn again and again until he “gets it.”  

But if I “get it,” encounters with the Beatrices of every age would end and I wouldn’t get it.  (It all depends on what “it” is, of course). . .  So.  I’ll be back (speaking to the Earth).

MORE ON MYSTERY RELIGIONS

Tying Catharism into the mystery traditions of other religions continues on page 65, where Muslim mystics and writers of love poetry are tapped as sources for the troubadour and Cathar traditions and beliefs.   “They are streams that flow from the same river,” is how Craney describes their relationship.  I would have preferred “they are streams that flow from the same well” myself, since streams typically flow into rivers, not the other way around, but that is getting way too picky.  The point is made and made well.

Craney has done his homework well.  There was sufficient travel and communication in the world of that time to trust that influences moved across and between continents.  

Later in the story Craney also ties Jewish mysticism into the mix, and why not?  Kabbalistic mysticism, with a dualistic streak at its heart, grew up in Germany and Spain, surrounding the area where this story takes place, and spreading widely as did everything else in that world. Craney illustrates his book masterfully with Tarot Card faces and citations from Rumi and others, including Kabbalistic books like the Zohar, all of which are very much in keeping with the themes being discussed and explained in this very readable book.  

I never realized there was a possibility that Tarot cards, at least the ancient ones he uses as illustrations, could be illustrating the Cathar tragedy.  

Did the Cathars have rites they performed in a sacred place, like a temple, as Craney has them have in this story?  Perhaps so.  The great authority on this period of time, Zoe Oldenbourg, in her Massacre at Montsegur (p. 323-324) says:

Oldenbourg even speculates that the Cathar treasure may not have been unlike the one described by Craney by including:

Leave it to a "learned doctor" for whom I have special reverence to think so, but could they have been safeguarding ancient Dualist religious manuscripts supporting their beliefs?  Maybe so:

LINKS TO ANCIENT DUALISM

Is all of this asserting of connections between Cathars, Bogomils, Nasoreans, Essenes, Gnostics, Mithraists, Manicheans, Qadiriyyah (a branch of Sufism),Kabbalists, Zoroastrians, and Early Christians historically accurate?  

I am just not sure about the Jewish sect, the Nasoreans, although they did have a relationship with the Essenes. The Qadiriyyah are also a surprise to me, but I will agree that Sufism has a similar temperament and is as peace-loving as the Cathars.  Attaining an ecstatic state by whirling in a dance is something Craney brings into his story in a credible way.  

Several of these groups called their leaders Perfects, as the Cathars did, and the Cathars did invite, at one time, a Bogomil priest, Nicetas, from the Balkans to preside at one of their conferences as if he were a superior, so the Bogomil/Cathar tie is not in doubt.

What most all these groups have in common is some strong flavor of dualism.  Dualism is also strong in Catholicism and Christianity per se, but it is of a different flavor.  

Dualism in Christianity was typically the dualism of spirit versus body and the existence of good and evil in the world.  Arthur Guirdham’s The Great Heresy says that the difference between this Christian duality of good and evil is that evil came into creation at the time of the original sin.

True Dualists believe that both principles have always existed and will always exist, and there is a continual war between the two.  So we regain our place with God, our place in the Light, when we learn, perhaps through several lifetimes, to choose the good and eschew darkness.  

There are hybrids.  Mormonism may stand alone today praising Adam and Eve for making life possible, as Cathars did long ago.  On his page 151 Craney has them suggesting that the snake’s rebellion against the Demiurge of creation, giving knowledge that led to his cursing, was a sacrifice to lead humanity to wisdom, which opens the way to the Light.  The creator was evil and sought to keep all beings trapped in the darkness of matter, and did all he could to keep them from escaping to live in spirit, in the Light.

WOMAN AS TEMPTRESS

On page 107, we have a cleric observing about a woman he was spurned by before he became a priest, and is still obsessed with, that

This is a reaction worthy of the times: if a man is tempted in his heart by the sight or thought of a woman, it was the fault of the temptress!  In the Muslim world this same thought led to the imposition of rules on women’s dress, of course, but the underlying sentiment is the same and can, with some very minor perversity of interpretation, be said to be “Biblical.”

NON-CANONICAL RELIGIOUS WRITINGS AND THOUGHTS FROM OTHER RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS

Craney wrote a wonderful piece of ancient secret writing on his pages 454-456.  It reminds me of an anecdote about a discourse Brigham Young was giving with great passion, wherein he seemed to be quoting scripture, and someone heckled: “Is that in the Bible?”  Brigham Young answered, approximately, “If it isn’t, it should be.”  The same with this wonderful piece of writing: is it historical?  If it isn’t, it should be.

Craney has a grand time weaving non-canonical religious writings into his story.  The Gospel of Thomas would not have been available in print, so some of its thoughts are introduced through revelation on page 111.  On page 147 Craney introduces a rather Buddhist notion: “You must cast aside the chains of desire and attachment.”  Of course Jesus said this also, in so many words, when he suggested that following him meant to give up family and pass by duties such as burying one’s kindred dead.  

On page 153 Craney pulls in an idea I have seen expounded on in Theosophist leader H.P. Blavatsky’s book The Secret Doctrine, the idea that some return to life, even though they have become perfect, just to guide others home.  Esclarmonde is told she is one of these.

Esclarmonde sounds like a Mormon on page 175 when she says: “There are other accounts of Christ’s teachings. Suppressed accounts.”

I was surprised to see Abelard mentioned, meaning Master Peter Abelard the Paris philosopher.  He did create some stir by denying original sin in his writings, of course, which would make him attractive to Cathars.  But his name was used teasingly, with mild derision, but not in an unloving way.  Having read some of Abelard’s words, I can see why a man’s attempt at complex argument is being compared with Abelard’s style of argument.

On page 290, I was surprised to hear of a . . .“Moorish belief that women were the equal of men in intelligence.” Perhaps the “in intelligence” is the key, because they certainly are not considered equal in any other sense in Moorish cultures.

Pages 318-319 describes an almost humorous encounter between Francis of Assisi, Pope Innocent, and Dominic Guzman.  The account makes it seem that had it not been for Dominic’s intercession, Francis would have been turned away and the whole saga of Saints Francis and Claire would not have happened.  Perhaps so. They were friends.

Page 322 has the same Pope taking interest in a young woman dressed in men’s attire, “a trait deemed evidence of heretical perversity in a female.”  Joan of Arc was sent to the flames over the fact she put men’s attire back on after promising not to, making her a lapsed heretic.  But in this instance the young woman is not arrested.

Page 395 is an imagined Cathar version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Interesting but not convincing, but to me neither is the Tibetan version.

Page 435 says: “The popes insisted that God sent His only son to be nailed and flayed to pay off a karmic debt for sins long since lost to our understanding.  How could people worship such a cruel divinity?”  Excellent question and the reason these “true Christians,” as they called themselves, were not considered Christians by Catholics.

A TIMELY WARNING?

Craney fixed his people, events, and places according to history, and then wove a plausible fabric to connect them all in a way that thrills, inspires, and disquiets.  The disquieting part comes, as the back flap of the book’s dust cover suggests, with the realization that these people were not systemically different from us, and therefore “This story offers a timely warning for those who assume that theocracy and religious terror could never take root in the West.”  

At the risk of offending my very good Mormon relatives and friends, the Utah Reformation took a long step in this direction in the 1800s.  When the Governor is also the Prophet, ecclesiastical and civil power are in the same hands.  Never a good thing.

At the risk of offending my very good Republican friends and relatives, the last 8 years under George W. Bush took some frightening steps in this direction with the use of the words “crusade”, the curtailment of civil liberties and the introduction of torture as a means for more effectively fight against “Muslim fundamentalists,” and the curtailment of some avenues of stem-cell research because frozen embryos are “life,” which is sacred.  

Yet wars can be fought that kill over a hundred thousand non-frozen, living, human beings.   The religious undertow is strong, especially when a candidate for the vice- presidency in 2008 suggests in a church setting, in a farewell speech to her son and others going to war from that congregation, that this war in Iraq is God’s work, part of the war between good and evil.  More shades of the Middle Ages!

SUMMATION AND VERDICT

I loved this book, it is very well imagined, it is interesting, riveting in places, and credible.  It links up with so many mystical traditions that I felt I was eating a very mixed salad, with all sorts of delicacies under every new leaf.  

This is the first book I have read that fleshes out Cathar beliefs in a credible way and makes their religion attractive.  Arthur Guirdham’s The Great Heresy does this also, but I shrink from its claim to have been informed by named disembodied Cathars willing to help him understand Catharism.  If Jung is right about all revelation coming from within ourselves, nothing has been gained by this approach as compared with Craney's researching followed by imagining.  Craney does make a surprising claim at the end about a word he "saw" in his dream, mentioned at the start of the book, that much to his surprise (and mine) actually had something to do with Esclarmonde's domain.  

This is a wonderful read, I recommend it highly and unreservedly.  But keep a good dictionary handy, Craney is no slouch where the English language is concerned.

GO TO NEXT REVIEW, by Cheryl Fisher

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