Around the year 1,150 some strange bearded missionaries appeared on the roads of the Languedoc, in the South of France ... They used to travel in pairs, dressed in black or navy blue, with a rope girdle.
They preached to the humble in the squares and markets, in the villages and in the cities without avoiding the mansions of nobles or merchants.
They spread a message of love, tolerance and freedom and confessed Christians but rejected the church in Rome.
The Cathar doctrine was much more attractive than the Catholic one who constantly threatened the hell for the most insignificant faults. They were more optimistic and tolerant of human weaknesses ... although they also had certain views of reality that could certainly be criticized. The Cathars (katharoi = "pure") were declared heretics ... they were clear about it.
Pope Innocent III negotiated unsuccessfully with them and consequently organized a crusade of twenty thousand horsemen and forty thousand men who concentrated on Lyon. On July 22 of the year 1,209 they decided to put an end to the components of that group that were in Beziers.
They were assailed by a question that they asked the pope's delegate:
How will we know how to differentiate Catholics from heretics among the population? - "Kill them all, God will already recognize their own..."
The massacres continued in many other places until the year 1243. At that time the Cathars took refuge in the strongholds of the region.
Among them the one of MONTSÉGUR became famous, in the department of Ariège (France). A small castle built on the steep Tabo mountain, at an altitude of 1272 meters. An impregnable position, surrounded by precipices.
In March of 1243 the seneschal of Carcassonne, Huges de Arcis, received the order to end with "the head of the dragon". Some ten thousand men besieged Montségur ... in the end he surrendered. Under the conditions of surrender, the members of the heresy were required to abjure their error in a public act.
215 Catharos refused to do so and were burned in the plain that extends at the foot of the mountain. The place where the great pyre rose is known since then as Campo de los Quemados.
The castle of Montségur has become for half a century the symbol of the resistance, passion and death of the faithful Cathars. Today, it constitutes a point of reference for European esoteric thinking and every year, a crowd of people interested in these issues make a pilgrimage to it.
On the day of the Spring Solstice, the first rays of the sun penetrate through a loophole and leave through the opposite side, crossing the castle. Chance or causality? We have already served the mystery ...
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