The History of Sex: Seville -- The Church of Me, Myself, and I -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 5)

The Holy Office of the Inquisition got its start in Seville in 1478 after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella—the self-styled 'Catholic Monarchs'—became convinced that their newly united kingdom needed to be saved from fake converts to Christianity: namely, closet Jews and Muslims.

Conveniently, the men who convinced them were Dominicans, members of the order that had been founded by a saintly Spaniard but later racked up loads of expertise on How to Persecute Your Opponents.

The so-called 'Dogs of God' had burned the Cathars into oblivion two centuries earlier, and armed with the same how-to manuals on terror and interrogation, they resolved to do the same to heretics in Spain.

What's more, as Protestantism spread throughout Europe—with its very own 'Rome' in Geneva!—Spain's 'Modern' Inquisition increasingly served as an inspiration for the Catholic fightback known as the Counter-Reformation.

Detail from The Inquisition Tribunal by Goya

To be fair, just as Luther and Calvin had good reasons for reforming the Church, Rome's backlash wasn't just about preserving its earthly perqs.

Devout Catholics must have divined that once you start attacking the foundations of any institution, there's a danger the whole edifice will come tumbling down.

In that sense, the crisis in England was a warning of things to come, with a cretin like Henry VIII—as debauched as any Borgia—personally denouncing Luther yet setting himself up as the pope of his very own breakaway 'Protestant' church and murdering his wives because he couldn't father a healthy son.

It was even more perverse that the English should celebrate him as a jolly rogue—or at worst, a sympathetic monster—rather than a woman-killing tyrant.

And if King Harry could break away, it was just a matter of time before every Tom-and-Dick Commoner would end up worshiping at their own Churches of Me, Myself and I.

So for followers of the old faith, heresy had to be stamped out.

Like its European, Portuguese, American, and even Goan imitators, the Spanish Inquisition was so complex that historians still can't agree on body counts or how universally its diktats were applied.

At best, it seems to have tolerated transgressions so long as you didn't brag about them.

At worst, it fostered a culture of spying and informing on your neighbours, torturing and murdering innocents, and then stealing their estates to feed the killing machine.

As one man put it, 'if the Inquisitors don't burn, they don't eat.'

The History of Sex: South of France -- The Total Eclipse of All Values? -- (Chap. III, Pt. 13)

Serves the Church right, you may think. 

And sure enough, this massive reversal could be karmic—or even Christian, with Catholicism finally reaping what it's sown.

But if the Church dies out in France (and Europe), I can't help but wonder what will come next.

Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, famously declared God dead (and subsequently lost his mind), but also warned that the spiritual void would lead to 'wars the likes of which have never been seen on earth' followed by 'the total eclipse of all values.'

So I've traveled to Toulouse, the hometown of the Inquisition, to meet a priest who's witnessed a bit of both in his eighty-five years on earth.

A BEAUTIFUL CONCEPT

Father Yves Denis was born after World War One and took his vow of celibacy as a priest after World War Two.

I meet him just around the corner from the cathedral, where Guirdham's past-life lover was supposedly held against her will.

For me, it's been so long since I've talked with a priest, I feel awkward, not least in asking Father Denis about his avowed lack of a love life.

Before coming here, I tried to bone up on celibacy, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I'd forgotten why Rome adopted it in the first place.

Somehow, I'd absorbed the conventional view that celibacy was the Church's way of keeping its men in check—literally holding them by the privates.

The last time I went to Mass, with Lena the Latin South African, I kept thinking of the bearded, bespectacled priest in the pulpit as a sexual misfit at best; either way, he seemed, well, less than a man. How could someone who's never had sex possibly relate to me? 

After refreshing my memory on the subject, though, I can assure you that apart from the no-sex bit, celibacy is a beautiful concept.

Apart from the no-sex bit.

The History of Sex: South of France -- Sexing up the Messiah -- (Chap. III, Pt. 12)

Of course, Catholics might have argued, just as believably, that Mrs. Smith's spirit guide was a demon deluding her about the afterlife, but she and Dr. Guirdham preferred to see her visions as proof of reincarnation. The psychiatrist subsequently became something of a neo-Cathar guru.

In his follow-up book—centered on another younger woman—Guirdham touted the idea of group reincarnation, telling the incredible tale of how he and seven other people in the West Country came to realize that they'd all known each other as Cathars in the thirteenth century.

And here's a curious coda.

Another Oxford-educated psychiatrist who reviewed Guirdham's work initially chalked it up to a bad case of 'shared delusion' and pooh-poohed his 'reincarnational soap opera.'

Several years later, though, he started having his own flashbacks and decided that he'd been a mercenary crusader who'd converted to Catharism and wound up being burnt at the stake.

In addition to clinics on regression therapy and other exotica, this reincarnated Cathar now leads 'pilgrimages' through the south of France 'in search of the Magdalene, the Black Madonna, and the Lost Goddess' charging gullibles—I mean, believers—around £2,000 a pop ('special early bird price:' £1,700—around $2,600).

And that's nothing compared to the success of books like The Da Vinci Code, which resurrected an obscure Cathar legend—namely, that Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene—and miraculously transformed it into a popular 'school of thought.'

A still from Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ

Perhaps a sexed-up Messiah better suits our post-Freudian mindset: we simply can't imagine a leader who wouldn't try it on with his more comely disciples.

So latter-day heresy is big business.

THE LAND OF OO-LA-LA

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church is in danger of dying out in France, with doomsday reports predicting that half the country's priests will meet their Maker within a decade, while the few seminaries that are still open produce a paltry 150 or so pères a year to serve the entire country.

In a special address in 2004, Pope John Paul II commiserated with the bishops of Toulouse and Montpellier about 'the particularly alarming situation that your country is going through,' noting that 'the question of ecclesiastical celibacy and the chastity associated with it is often a stumbling block for young people.'

In the land of oo-la-la, celibacy is a tough sell.

At last count, the diocese of Carcassonne—the old stamping grounds of the Cathars and troubadours—had only seventeen priests under the age of sixty-five.

And whereas Toulouse had more than 700 priests serving 100,000 inhabitants in the 1850s, it now has less than 200 for a population of over a million.

The situation is so desperate the Church has actually started importing African priests to the French countryside.

The History of Sex: South of France -- Born-Again Buggers -- (Chap. III, Pt. 11)

If anything, though, the heretics and hedonists were way ahead of their time.

Nowadays in Languedoc, road signs and brochures welcome you to Le Pays Cathare: 'The Land of the Cathars' or—if the etymologists had their way—'Cat-Ass-Kisser Country.'

Since the early nineteenth century, the Cathars have served as all things to all men, spiritual rebels for any cause ranging from the Reformation to the French Revolution (not to mention Nazism and the French Resistance).

Modern DIY spiritualists like to romanticize the Cathars as proto-hipsters or Gallic Buddhists: pacifist vegetarians who believed in past lives, feminism, and even free love—despite the fact that they were probably more like the Puritans, only without all the sex.

THE CATHAR CRAZE

There's no shortage of 'reincarnated Cathars' in the scenic south of France these days—though curiously there's no corresponding glut of born-again Buggers in the Balkans.

Life after life, it's all about location, location, location.

'Cathar Crystals'
part of the '2010 Cathar Resonator Collection'

An Oxford-educated psychiatrist kickstarted the Cathar craze in the 1970s with a couple of books claiming he'd known one of his patients in the Biblical sense in a past life.

In The Cathars and Reincarnation (tactfully dedicated to his wife), Dr. Arthur Guirdham recounted that a thirtysomething 'Mrs. Smith' was referred to his practice in Bath: 'She was good-looking, open, communicative and smiling.'

And an excommunicated Catholic.

Miraculously, the bad dreams plaguing Mrs. Smith disappeared after she met Guirdham, and she eventually convinced him that they'd been lovers in a former life.

Aptly enough, his Cathar name was Roger.

Dr. Arthur Guirdham

With the help of a spirit guide, Mrs. Smith beguiled the doctor over the years with uncanny details about Cathar life, some of which supposedly even stumped historians.

She often dreamt about her 'Roger' (no doubt to the consternation of Mr. Smith), crying out his name in her sleep and pronouncing it 'in the French fashion.'

According to Mrs. Smith, their love had been a tale of forbidden passion. Roger had been much older than her and a highborn Cathar, whereas she was just a poor Catholic peasant named—wait for it—Puerilia.

Defying her father, she shacked up with Roger and lived in blissful simplicity until the Church got hold of them. Puerilia was locked up in Saint-Etienne Cathedral in Toulouse, while Roger died of a chest infection during interrogation.

Dr. Guirdham had always wondered why he hated Catholicism…

The History of Sex: South of France -- The Christian v. Christian Crusade -- (Chap. III, Pt. 10)

By 1209, the Church decided it had to act.

A Pope with an ironic name—Innocent III—launched the West's first Christian-v-Christian Crusade, giving his blessing to a blood-and-guts campaign by the French king and his northern allies, who were more than happy to steal the land of the lords who harbored heretics.

Cathars being driven out of Carcassonne in 1209

In one infamous episode, the town of Béziers was sacked and its 20,000 inhabitants slaughtered at the behest of a monk who reputedly ordered: 'Kill them all, God will know his own.'

The Church followed up the Albigensian Crusade by inventing an even more insidious institution that would terrorize Catholic Europe (and the New World) for centuries to come.

Based in Toulouse, the Pope entrusted the Inquisition to the rabidly loyal Dominicans, pitting the so-called 'Dogs of God' against the supposed cat kissers.

St. Dominic himself had got his start trying to win back Cathar sympathizers with open-air debates and preach-offs against the Perfects.

In this preach-off, the books of St. Dominic and the Cathars were thrown into the fire--
guess whose miraculously survived
(Pedro Berruguete, 1480)

To his credit, the Spaniard had realized that one of the Cathars' key selling points was that they lived simply, like Christ himself, so he tried to copy them, traveling throughout the south of France as a dirt-poor preacher. Even so, he didn't have much success.

His successors, in contrast, opted to use force.

HUMAN BONFIRES

In 1234, the Dominican Bishop of Toulouse had just finished saying mass in honor of the newly canonized St. Dominic when he received a tip-off that a dying woman in the city had requested the final sacrament from a Cathar.

So he and his friars responded like good, medieval Catholics: they marched to her house, had her carried to a meadow, and burned her alive on her deathbed.

They then returned to their convent, gave thanks to God and St. Dominic, and 'fell cheerfully upon the food set before them.'

The human bonfires raged for decades, but the Cathars were effectively defeated when their last major safe haven fell in 1244.

Unfortunately, the fortress of Montsegur wasn't as secure as its name implied.

After surrendering, the surviving Perfects were led to a clearing at the base of the mountain and burned en masse—all 220 of them.

By the end of the century, the Cathars had been wiped out and most of Languedoc annexed to the north, creating the forerunner of the modern French nation while destroying the culture that first linked France with romance.

The last troubadour died in 1294, lamenting that 'I have come into the world too late.'

Montsegur: the Cathars' last stand

* * *

The History of Sex: South of France -- A License to Sin -- (Chap. III, Pt. 9)

Given the Catholics' own peccadilloes, of course, it was more than a little rich for them to denounce the Cathars for their sexual hangups.

As with most good things, though, apparently it was possible to have too much celibacy.

Rome forced its priests to stay celibate to enable them to convert more children of God, but it realized that the Cathars' teachings could wipe out the human race—and long before that, the Church itself.

Like the troubadours, the Cathars spoke the language of the people rather than Latin.

More damningly, their ragged dark robes and ascetic lives showed up the materialism and debauchery of the 'Christian' clergy.

'LASCIVIOUS LOVE'

Consider this tale of courtly love gone wrong.

A young English cleric was riding through France with the Archbishop of Rheims in the 1180s when he spotted a beautiful maiden alone in a vineyard.

An Essex man at heart, Gervase of Tilbury decided to mosey over and chat her up, or as he blithely recalled, to 'speak to her at length in a courtly way about lascivious love.'

Gervase/Gervais: any relation? 

The shocked girl averted her eyes and told him solemnly, 'God preserve me, young man, from ever becoming your mistress, or anyone else's, for if I lost my virginity and my body was once corrupted, there is no doubt that nothing could save me from eternal damnation.'

Gervase took this to mean that the girl was a Cathar—as opposed to, say, a good Catholic—and denounced her to the archbishop.

For resisting the lecherous 'man of God,' she was burned at the stake.

Not surprisingly, abuses like that didn't endear the Church to the locals.

The Cathars continued to breed sympathizers, if not offspring, for a number of reasons: they practiced what they preached, they rebelled against Rome, they welcomed women as Perfects, and—most importantly—they didn't upset their protectors.

Fundamentally, Catharism was a do-your-own-thing religion, built on the precept that people wouldn't want to come back to live another miserable mortal life.

However, that didn't take into account those sinners who were more than willing to take their chances with reincarnation.

Tolerating the Cathars had to count for something in the afterlife, and even if a jaded aristo had to come back as a milkmaid, well, that would have its own novel appeal.

In a medieval version of Radical Chic, the original Perfect hostesses would invite Cathars to their castles to edify their guests during the day, followed by raunchy songs at night.

As historian Stephen O'Shea puts it in his book, The Perfect Heresy: people could go 'from the dualists' "love your neighbour" to the troubadours' "love your neighbour's wife"' in less than 24 hours.

For adulterous lords and ladies, Catharism provided a license to sin—without having to pay Rome for the privilege.

The History of Sex: South of France -- The Cult of the Cat-Arse-Kissers -- (Chap. III, Pt. 8)

What's confounded modern minstrel buffs is whether the troubadours' love for their ladies, or donnas, was consummated or unrequited.

Most likely, it depended, but Gerard says many relationships were undoubtedly sexual.

His favorite troubadour worked the court in Carcassonne around 1200, when minstrels were top of the pops.

'Raimon de Miraval wrote songs saying "I like to talk with you, I like to write songs for you, but—I like kissing and fucking you better."'

He grins. 'And he wasn't the only one—there were many others who wrote like that. They demonstrated the power of the pen not only to make war but also love.'

Raimon's big head got all the girls

For the record, Raimon had at least five loves on the go, including his wife (a songwriter in her own right), a brown-haired donna and, most significantly, a lady belonging to the sect that ultimately brought about the end of the society that kept the troubadours in love and lute strings.

These spiritual and sexual rebels styled themselves simply as 'good Christians'—an inherent rebuke to the corruption of the organized Church—but their enemies had plenty of other names for them.

Some called them Albigensians, even though their influence spread much further than the town of Albi and the south of France.

In fact, the heresy seemed to have come from the East, having been relayed across the Balkans by a sect of Bulgars who reputedly had a penchant for sodomy; given that their French counterparts also disdained procreation, their opponents assumed that they too were bougres—or 'buggers.'

NO COCK-UPS ALLOWED

However, the best-known epithet for these heretics—Cathar—comes either from the Greek for 'pure' or a German term meaning 'cat-worshipper:' the practicants supposedly paid homage to felines by kissing their backsides.

The hate campaign against this small sect of pacifist vegetarians reveals just how much of a threat their teachings posed to the Church of Rome.

Like St. Augustine's early mentors, the Cathars were Manicheans who taught that the physical world was entirely evil; only the spiritual world was good.

They believed that human souls were reincarnated until they reached perfection; rejects were sent back to Hell—the here and now—until they were ready to join the ranks of the Cathar elect, known as Perfects.

Whereas plain ol' imperfects were free to live pretty much as they pleased—having sex without marriage, for instance—the Cathar leaders were meant to live as spiritually as possible, shunning meat and intercourse as they prepared for their souls' final cosmic journey: any cock-ups, and the ascetics risked another go on bad old planet Earth.

The History of Sex: South of France -- Roma vs. Amor -- (Chap. III, Pt. 7)

I don't know if William's prayer was answered, but I was certainly smitten.

So I've come to the langue d'oc itself to meet a real, live troubadour.

Fittingly, Gerard Zuchetto hails from Carcassonne, one of the last medieval walled cities in Europe, deep in la terre du troubadour.

His parents were Italian Communists who moved to southwest France after the War.

'For us, it was easier to become integrated speaking Occitan than it was speaking French.' He smiles wistfully. 'Back then Occitan was widely spoken. Now it's mainly spoken in the market.'

As a modern-day minstrel, Gerard sings in medieval Occitan with his wife and their Troubadours Art Ensemble, having fallen in love with the music of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at university in the 1970s. 'It was the era of Woodstock and revival, when people focused on the roots of music and poetry.'

LOVE ME DO

Sitting in a café just inside the magnificent main gate of the old town—it has a drawbridge and everything—Gerard scribbles a Latin palindrome on a piece of paper: ROMA and AMOR.

For the troubadours, love wasn't a spiritual ideal dictated from on high by Rome but a romantic—and carnal—emotion experienced by individuals.

'The troubadours didn't invent love itself, of course, but they invented the idea of writing about the emotion of love. For them, love was a feeling that existed outside of God, between two people, who could be a woman and a woman, a man and a woman, or a man and man. It was very original and revolutionary. It was the first time that artists thought as artists: they wrote as people whose work would last down the centuries.'

'When you listen to the songs of Lou Reed or Joe Cocker,'—he continues, dating his own tastes to the late twentieth century—'they're the same themes: "my love may not really love me" or "I'm not sure I love her" and so on. All of these things were written by the troubadours. In pop or punk music, the same sentiments are written about in different words, but they're the same sentiments.'

Maybe it's just me, but that sounds a bit sad.

'So you mean after all these centuries, men and women are still asking the same questions about love?'

'The music has changed—but the lyrics, not much. It seems we haven't evolved much. The sentiments are the same as they were in antiquity.'

You can sample some of Gerard's troubadour music here.

The History of Sex: South of France -- Poetry Slam Meets 'Fight Club' -- (Chap. III, Pt. 6)

Now, I've been fascinated by the troubadours ever since I found out they weren't just men in tights flouncing around and sucking up to lords and ladies.

In reality, they were musician-warmongers, eloquent hellraisers who stirred trouble with both the pen and the sword: think 'poetry slam' meets Fight Club.

At a time when the French king ruled just a miniscule splodge around Paris, the troubadours thrived in the prosperous, independent fiefdoms of the south, soaking up Moorish influences and love poetry from Spain while regarding their northern counterparts as barbarians—the marauding offspring of Viking raiders.

This north-south division was reflected in linguistic differences so basic that they boiled down to the way people said 'yes.' Southerners used oc in the affirmative, while northerners said oil and later oui.

The language of the north evolved into modern French, while the southerners sang of courtly love in the langue d'oc, or Occitan, a now-endangered language that has more in common with Catalan on the other side of the Pyrenees.

The troubadours are often called the first 'modern' poets because they wrote in everyday language rather than highfalutin Latin, spreading their songs throughout Europe and influencing later greats ranging from Dante to TS Eliot.

But the first minstrels are also the spiritual ancestors of every modern pop musician with literary aspirations, artists who can fuse music and verse in a way that makes written poems seem half finished.

The troubadours came up with the ultra-idealistic notion of fin amor, a unique union of souls that countless lonely-hearts still seek today.

But their vision of love wasn't limited to admiring from afar. The first troubadour was a seasoned womanizer—and the grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the 'Grandmother of Europe.'

When I came across this verse by William of Aquitaine, I was staggered to think it had been penned by someone born in 1067 AD:

Our love is like the hawthorn branch 

That trembles upon the tree in the night in the rain and ice 

Until the sun stretches across the green leaves and branches. 

I can still recall a morning when we put an end to warring 

And the great gift she gave to me—her love and her ring. 

God, just let me live to get my hand under her cloak again.

William of Aquitaine

The History of Sex: South of France -- A (Relatively) Chaste Interlude (Chap. III, Pt. 1)

Chapter Three 

A (RELATIVELY) CHASTE INTERLUDE Romance and Celibacy in the South of France 

'To be always with a woman and not have intercourse is more difficult than to raise the dead.'

--St. Bernard of Clairvaux, persecutor of the Cathars and venerator of the Virgin Mary, c1100 AD 

So where do we in the West get our notions of romance from?

A friend of mine has a theory. 'Jack' is a good decade older than me, and he was confessing how he'd put an entire continent (and ocean) between him and his wife.

But somehow, it wasn't enough. They've been married for over twenty years, plenty of time for their love to ferment into a sour mash of kids, bills and mutual recrimination.

Divorce is out of the question, partly because Jack can't afford it, but mainly because his wife is Irish Catholic.

'D'y'know why ye-olde poets used to write all that crap about romance?' he slurred into his beer. 'It's because the average age back then was 25. Most men didn't live long enough to see what love looks like when it has liver spots and cellulite.'

'They didn't have to put up with wives moaning "What about my needs? What about my Botox? What about the SUV to drive to the supermarket to buy food I can't even cook?" They didn't have to deal with that, did they? Lucky bastards.'

You'll have gathered that Jack was having a midlife crisis.

Buffoon Playing a Lute by Frans Hals

Anachronisms aside, though, I wondered if he didn't have a point.

Whereas the Islamic East enjoyed polygamy—at least the men did—the Christian West begrudgingly sanctioned sex as a reproductive necessity.

A Muslim man might have four wives and a slew of 'favorites,' but a Christian was meant to have just one spouse his entire life: ideally, his soulmate.