Pub Crawl

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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby TisILeclerc » 7:20 pm

The Hospitallers appear to have been closely attached to the Cathars and did what they could to protect Raymond of Toulouse even as he was dying. They took his body away from the Church after confirming him as one of their own.

The Cathars apparently had their origins in Bulgaria and were known as Bogomils. It would appear they were persecuted by the Catholic church from the very start.

They regarded every material being to be the work of Satan. They also opposed established forms of government and church. Bogomils were both Adoptionists as well as Dualists . They accepted the teaching of Paul of Samosata, though at a later period the name of Paul was believed to be that of the Apostle. They apparently did not accept the docetic teaching of some sects.

The Bogomils taught that God had two sons, the elder Satanail and the younger Michael. The elder son rebelled against the father and became the evil spirit. After his fall he created the lower heavens and the earth and tried in vain to create man; in the end he had to appeal to God for the Spirit. After creation Adam was allowed to till the ground on condition that he sold himself and his posterity to the owner of the earth. Then Michael was sent in the form of a man; he became identified with Jesus, and was "elected" by God after the baptism in the Jordan. When the Holy Ghost (again Michael) appeared in the shape of the dove, Jesus received power to break the covenant in the form of a clay tablet (hierographon) held by Satanail from Adam. He had now become the angel Michael in a human form; as such he vanquished Satanail, and deprived him of the termination -il = God, in which his power resided. Satanail was thus transformed into Satan. Through his machinations the crucifixion took place, and Satan was the originator of the whole Orthodox community with its churches, vestments, ceremonies, sacraments and fasts, with its monks and priests. This world being the work of Satan, the perfect must eschew any and every excess of its pleasure.

They held the "Lord's Prayer" in high respect as the most potent weapon against Satan, and had a number of conjurations against "evil spirits". Each community had its own twelve "apostles", and women could be raised to the rank of "elect". The Bogomils wore garments like mendicant friars and were known as keen missionaries, traveling far and wide to propagate their doctrines. Healing the sick and exorcising the evil spirit, they traversed different countries and spread their apocryphal literature along with some of the books of the Old Testament, deeply influencing the religious spirit of the nations, and preparing them for the Reformation. They accepted the four Gospels, fourteen Epistles of Paul, the three Epistles of John, James, Jude, and an Epistle to the Laodiceans, which they professed to have. They sowed the seeds of a rich, popular religious literature in the East as well as the West. The Historiated Bible, the Letter from Heaven, the Wanderings through Heaven and Hell, the numerous Adam and Cross legends, the religious poems of the "Kaleki perehozhie" and other similar productions owe their dissemination to a large extent to the activity of the Bogomils of Bulgaria, and their successors in other lands.

For Bogomils "the Logos was not the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Eternal Word incarnate, but merely the spoken word of God, shown in the oral teaching of Christ". Although Bogomils regarded themselves as "Trinitarian", anathemas against Bogomils (circa 1027) charge Bogomils with rejection of the Trinity.

Its followers refused to pay taxes, to work in serfdom, or to fight in conquering wars. They ignored the feudal social system, which was interpreted by their enemies as suggesting disorder if not the destruction of the state and church.


http://www.cathar.info/cathar_origins.htm

The church and secular authorities objected to them on doctrinal grounds but the last paragraph would certainly seal their fate.

The site mentions a film The Secret Book. It's in French with Russian or Bulgarian subtitles. So should be easy to understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS4CePL068k

A bit of light entertainment. A kind of Dan Brown look at Catharism and the search for their Holy Grail.

As for the spread of Bogomilism or Catharism here's a picture.

Image
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 10:21 pm

This is starting to make my head ache.

All these European Christians, coming over here, and taking our Celtic Saints jobs...
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 6:22 am

The head aches from trying to make a nice tidy linear progression out of all this information. Whereas these came in waves, like tides going in and out. So there may some poetic symbolism in our Celtic Saints (and everything that came before and after) often travelling by sea. They often had to wait for the tide, and they then themselves became a tide of change, of people, and knowledge and beliefs.

From memory:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyages of their lives
Are bound in shallows and miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat.
And we must take the current where it serves
Or loose our ventures.
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby TisILeclerc » 8:37 am

Sentimental lot you yokels aren't you Borry?

Perhaps the stone age druids who later became Celtic Saints got in their coracles and sailed eastwards and spread the word?

And the word came back west?
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 9:04 am

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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby hvered » 9:59 am

I looked up Bogomilism on Wiki and the first thing that caught my eye was

Much of their literature has been lost or destroyed by the contemporary Christian Churches.

So no extant sources about Bogomils. Inconvenient but understandable since this is the by now familiar Dark Age and Bulgaria allegedly ruled an empire (the 'First Empire' because later on history will repeat itself).

The Gnostic social-religious movement and doctrine originated in the time of Peter I of Bulgaria (927–969), alleged in the modern day to be a reaction against state and clerical oppression of the Byzantine church. In spite of all measures of repression, it remained strong and popular until the fall of the Second Bulgarian Empire in the end of the 14th century.

Amazing. Four hundred years of fighting, apparently successfully, the most powerful city of the time and then....what?
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 11:16 am

They also opposed established forms of government and church. ... Its followers refused to pay taxes, to work in serfdom, or to fight in conquering wars. They ignored the feudal social system, which was interpreted by their enemies as suggesting disorder if not the destruction of the state and church.


I suppose these days we would call them Libertarian Anarchists? We'd probably find them doing things like living in communes and Peace Camps, going on protest marches and anti-something campaigns, chaining themselves to trees, etc. Harmless enough for most of us, and Tisi would be reading about them in the Daily Mail. But clearly these would be regarded as trouble makers by any established authoritarian order.

Perhaps this is one example of one of the dimensions of the whole Megalithic Empire life cycle? i.e. cyclic waves in the whole tidal wash backwards and forward between Libertarian and Authoritarian regimes. I'm not saying our Celtic Saints (et al) were Libertarian, just that our "Celtic Christianity" types tended to be more Libertarian than their Rome-based counterparts.

(edit) Especially that Pelagius fellow. A born trouble maker if ever I saw one.
Last edited by Boreades on 11:22 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 11:19 am

hvered wrote:Amazing. Four hundred years of fighting, apparently successfully, the most powerful city of the time and then....what?


Err, perhaps the Bogomils said bugger this and bogged off, as yet another wave of immigrants from eastern Europe looking for a better life further west?
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 9:33 pm

Unlike my clan, which was part of a wave of immigrants c.1770 from up north. They'd had had enough of midges and subsistence farming, and headed south for the rich pastures and fertile fields of London Town. And ended up among the pubs and gin palaces of Hogarth's images.

Image
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby TisILeclerc » 10:02 pm

What it seems like is that Christianity was a very divided religion right from the start. Well, after Jesus that is although it could be said that it was divided even then. Judas betrays him, the crowds deserted him and then called for his death etc.

Then there was the problem of whether it should be just a Jewish religion or could the Gentiles be allowed to join the club as well. From then on we had the various Coptic and Syriac churches along with Ethiopia and I suppose even Arabia.

The split of the Roman and Orthodox and all the heretical plots and witch hunts. Each one of the various sects needed the help and finance of a strongman. So we see a variety of lords and knights protecting their local heretics, not always completely successful. Richard II had a Lollard bible in his possession and, no doubt through the influence of his wife, had Jan Hus as a guest. Of course Richard II didn't last long. Done to death by his cousin who wasn't as soft as him. And his wife was parcelled off to Spain well out of the way. And of course Jan Hus got his just deserts for not doing as the pope told him. As did thousands of Czechs and Bohemians. Genocide seems to have been a popular method of dealing with dissent.

So it's not surprising that the Cathars should be wiped out really or that some of them may have gone underground. Europe was a battleground fought over by factions who wanted total control and the wealth that went with it.

There's not much room for spirituality in that mix.
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