The Nazis were keen on the Cathars. Heinrich Himmler deemed them preservers of Aryan purity in medieval Europe and funded research into the history.
The detail brought me up short. I was vaguely aware that the Cathars were unlikely to have been a Languedocian para-church of harmless dualists: peace-loving, women-friendly, reincarnation-believing, pescatarian.
But whilst the Nazis were shameless appropriators, their delight in the “perfect ones”, as the word Cathar means, sat too weirdly alongside the hippies that Kate Mosse depicts in her novels and the conspiracists that Dan Brown has in his. Something was not adding up.
So who were the Cathars? Or, as it turns out, there is a better question to ask: were they at all?
A new essay at my Substack, A Golden String. Continue to read…