Tea at Trianon: The Sufis and the Cathars

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Sufis and the Cathars

I have been asked if there was a connection between the Sufis and the Cathars. It seems that there was, at least according to Mystagogue (a New Age site):

Of course I could not miss the fact that to the Sufi, the term baraka was symbolised by a boat and itself became fused with the symbol of the dove. The dove itself was the Christian and Gnostic symbol of the word or spirit of the Lord and hence it was the baraka. The later Gnostic Christian Heretics, the Cathars took this symbol and with their own links within Islam fused the two devices together:

“… One important Cathar symbol was the dove. It represented for them then, as it does for us today, the idea of ‘peace’ or, more accurately the more subtle concept of ‘grace’, that state of being in God’s love. After the first crusades, when the European Cathars in the entourage of Godfroi de Bouillon established some contact with the Sufi mystics of Islam, the symbolism of the dove sometimes became linked iconographically with the Islamic mystical idea of baraka, which also means ‘grace’ and with the idea that a person can be a ‘vessel of grace’… In some instance, the Cathar dove flying with its wings outstretched was rendered in an artistic motif very similar to the stylised ship meaning baraka in Sufi calligraphy, with the feathers of the dove and the oars of the vessel alike representing the flight and freedom of the soul.” [5]

Orthodox Christianity could not allow these ancient esoteric truths to be spread abroad as it had built its power base upon the literalism’s of the Bible and so they persecuted the Cathars and burnt them out of sight. However it does seem that these Cathars did hold the secret of the Temple of Solomon. They were the ‘perfecti’ who protected the esoteric wisdom of the Ark, for they were the Western version of the Eastern Sufi who themselves protected the ba-ra-ka. The only ‘vessel’ that they spirited away from their ill-fated Montsegur was the vessel of grace – knowledge.

Once again it is demonstrated how Catharism was much closer to paganism, the occult and even to Islam than it was to anything remotely Christian, except for the Christian symbols which they appropriated. Share