Posted by Most people have one simple purpose, which is to house, feed and clothe themselves and their families. Control of such people is straightforward – it’s simply what’s called “bread and circuses”. Keep their focus on survival and mindless entertainment. There is one further element to control though, beyond bread and circuses: Fear. Without the element of fear, control cannot be assured.
Back in the days when control of the masses primarily utilised the tool of religion, the Catholic Church was the face of control. And they had the perfect weapon for control: Fear of death.
But the church also had a magnificent solution to that fearful problem – they promoted their ability to fix that problem on Judgment Day through their system of a ‘confession’ to the church’s intermediaries (the ‘priests’) and the subsequent absolution from ‘sins’ committed during a person’s life. A payment of some sort would be required, however (‘alms’ for souls in purgatory, as Lambert said in The Cathars). The riches that followed were like an ATM working overtime. They also ruthlessly eliminated any opposition to that solution.
This ‘fix’ wasn’t accepted by every group, and those that opposed the Catholic totalitarian control system became rebels. One group that disputed this solution was a fascinating group called the Cathars. Their philosophy was that death was nothing to be feared, and they had an equally simple solution that didn’t involve fear.
This anti-totalitarian threat to the control system at that time was ruthlessly dealt with in what became known as the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusades, which culminated in the end of the Cathar movement with leading Cathar personnel eliminated. They tried to change the world and failed.
But what was so interesting about their teachings that seekers of truth still seek out the Cathar philosophy today, six hundred years later?
It goes to the heart of the spiritual war we are facing today.
The basic Cathar philosophy was ‘duality’: a Good God and an Evil God. The domain of the Good God was entirely spiritual and filled with Light, where souls were created and originated from. The domain of the God of Evil was the earth itself, the material world and all physical life upon it – a place of suffering, pain and punishment, filled with Darkness. Hell, in fact.
The Catholic controllers quickly spotted the problem they had with the Cathar philosophy. It was that the Cathars implied that the worship by the masses of the Catholic philosophy was directed towards that Evil God, and for this, they were eliminated by the all-powerful church. This implied that the Pope was the Devil’s representative on earth.
But the Cathars went further: they said that the church’s purpose was not to transmit our souls back ‘home’ after death, but to trick us into returning time and time again to the hell-realm of the material world.
They advocated that only a lifetime of self-denial which culminated in “the knowledge” would save us from this trick and allow us to return ‘home’.
The Cathars advocated chastity, humility, poverty, fasting and simplicity of lifestyle. This process of purification (back to how we were during childhood) allowed release of our immortal souls from the cycle of rebirth in human bodies and return to source.
This was the essence of the cosmic, spiritual war, which the then-Catholic Church as the controllers of the realm objected to. It was contrary to their desire to control the process of life and death.
Hell wasn’t an unknown destination, to which we were sent for sins defined by the Catholic Church, but a known one in which we were already present but which it was our destiny one day to escape.
The Cathars said “we are not of this world, and this world is not of us. We are trapped here and want to get home, to depart this Hell. This is not our domain”. [How we got trapped here however is unclear, though the Gnostics have suggested a concept called ‘The Fall’, where divine sparks ‘fell’ into the Hell-realm of earth].
Where ‘home’ is exactly, or what it is, is also beyond our knowledge. It is where ‘we’ (our consciousness, our assemblage point in the human body, our essence) derive from however.
By releasing our attachments to the material realm, and purifying ourselves of all thoughts that are not ‘ours’, we can prepare for that return home, as the Cathars advocated.
16 July 2025
Piers Morris Blogspot 