Crusade Against the Grail - Rennes-le-Chateau Research and ...

74 PART TWO
Wife and children slaughter they;
And we all
Hasten to a certain fall.
A Druid:
Thus far His right
That we by night
Our Father's praises sing;
Yet when 'tis day,
To Thee we may
A heart unsullied bring
'Tis true that now,
And often, Thou
Fav'rest the foe in fight
As from the smoke is freed the blaze,
So let our faith burn bright!
And if they crush our golden ways,
Who e'er can crush Thy light?
GOETHE, THE FIRST WALPURGIS NIGHT
And the Christians came to the Pyrenees. They were persecuted by their
brothers, who declared them heretics in the councils of Saragossa (A.D. 380) and
Bordeaux (A.D. 384). Together with six of his most famous converts, their teacher
Priscillian was tortured and executed in Trevesin in 385 by the Roman emperor
Magnus Maximus, himself a convert to Christianity, and Bishop Itacius. 5 The
Priscillianists—as the members of this Gnostic-Manichaeist sect were called—
were welcomed by the Druids, who assigned to them a new homeland in the
Sarralunga forest between Sabarthes and Olmes, in the mountain range of Saint
Bartholomew's Peak. The Priscillianists were the ones who finally managed to
convert the Druids to Christianity.
From the Druids and vates [soothsayers] emerged the Cathars. Out of the
bards, the troubadours.
To understand the philosophical and religious doctrine of the Occitan Cathars
with any sort of clarity, we should consult their literature, which was once very
rich; it was destroyed in its entirety by the Inquisition as a "source of
contamination of a horrible heresy." Not a