Catharism

Catharism ( KATH-ər-iz-əm; from the Ancient Greek: καθαροί, romanized: katharoí, "the pure ones") was a Christian quasi-dualist and pseudo-Gnostic movement in northern Italy and southern France between the 12th and 14th centuries. According to ecclesiastical literature and propaganda characteristic of the Holy Roman Inquisition, Cathars believed that there were not one, but two Gods—the good God of Heaven and the evil god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4); that the good God was the God of the New Testament faith and the creator of the spiritual realm. Cathars identified the evil god as Satan, the master of the physical world, who was the same as the God of the Old Testament. By reputation, Cathars believed that human souls were the sexless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god. They thought these souls were destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the consolamentum, a form of baptism performed when death is imminent. At that moment, they believed they would return to the good God as "Cathar Perfect". Catharism was initially taught by ascetic leaders who set few guidelines, leading some Catharist practices and beliefs to vary by region and over time. Denounced as a heretical sect by the Catholic Church, the alleged followers of Catharism were attacked first by the Albigensian Crusade and later by the Medieval Inquisition, which claimed to have eradicated them by 1350. Thousands of people were slaughtered, hanged, or burned at the stake. The extent of Catharism—and even the existence of the sect—is contested in contemporary scholarship which, since the 2000's, sometimes questions the extent to which Catharism was an organized movement or whether the sect existed beyond a moral panic against an imagined enemy of the Church similar to later witch trials.