Templars, Cathars and Mary Magdalene (part 2)

Guillaume De Nogaret would was born in St Felix de Carman, that same town near Toulouse where the Cathar Council was held, long before in 1167. The inquisitorial records for 1236 mention a Cathar minister called Raymond de Nogaret. In the 1440s, several Cathars would be burned alive in St Felix de Carman. Some speculate that De Nogaret's grandfather and parents were amongst them. (Guillaume de Nogaret was also denounced as a Patarin during the Anagni scandal- Patarin being a term for Cathars in Calabria). The irony, in the end, was that the man accusing the Templars of secretly adhering in some way to the Cathar heresy, had his own secret links to the Cathars. He was taking revenge where he could on the Catholic institution that had killed them.

It may have rankled with de Nogaret a little that he had to sup with the Devil to achieve his vengeance; and one wonders if he anticipated that the Inquisition would emerge stronger from the persecution of the Templars. The Inquisition was stronger, apparently vindicated, and poised to stay in business for centuries to come- by persecuting members of a spurious satanic conspiracy. The ensuing witch persecution might have been less wide reaching and destructive had not the trials of the Templars fostered paranoia about humans conspiring against Christianity under the Devil's command. If De Nogaret wanted personal revenge, though, the enduring consequences may not have concerned him excessively. He could not get at the Inquisition so had to transfer his wrath. The Templars had not been the organisation responsible for the persecution of the Cathars- they weren't the ideal group to attack as payback for the massacring of the sect. But equally these knights had hardly done anything to stop it. De Nogaret, who also gained materially from his role in the affair, would have derived some sense of satisfaction from making them suffer.

Many outrageous accusations were fabricated against the Templars,from sodomy and idolatry to consorting with demons. One of the few charges that stuck was relatively unsensational- the practice of lay absolution. In the course of this the Templar was said to beseech forgiveness from the master as God pardonned Mary Magdalene and the thief that was on the cross. This reveals a rather conventional conception of Mary Magdalene among the Templars as a penitent sinner and a symbol of redemption.

Since 1969 the Catholic Church has abandoned the view that Mary Magdalene was identical with Mary of Bethany, and it seems no longer to be official doctrine that the Magdalene was the penitent sinner who annoints Jesus in the Gospel of Luke.
Gerard of Nazareth has lost his argument. The saint remains popular, and still attracts pilgrims both to Vezelay and St Maximin near Aix. The idea of her as the redeemed sinner lingers in the religious mainstream, while the Gnostic Magdalene has also made a comeback in popular culture. Since the publication of Baigent Lincoln and Leigh's the 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail', and various derivatives including a certain novel, the notion has been abroad that the Knights Templar discovered (perhaps under the ruins of Solomon's Temple, some proof not only of Magdalene's special status but also of a marriage to Christ and the existence of a bloodline, for which the Holy Grail supposedly served as a metaphor. Possession of this 'secret' according to the conspiracy, enabled the Templars to blackmail the Holy See securing their sudden rise to power from obscurity. One searches in vain for compelling evidence that the Templars found any such thing nor that they held wildly heterodox views on the Magdalene's status, even if Gerard's polemic raises the possibility that some of them accepted the Greek view (now also the Catholic view) of her distinctness from Mary of Bethany.



Ironically, meanwhile, the originators of the bloodline conspiracy take seriously the legends that the saint came to the Carmargue, and actually argue for identification of the two Marys. The far-fetched assertion was that Mary, Christ's widow came to the South of France bearing a son whose descendants married into the Merovingian dynasty, thus preserving the 'Davidic Line' through Clovis I and his heirs. (The legend of Mary Magdalene's coming to Gaul could not in fact be taken seriously, as Monsiegneur L. Duchesne demonstrated in the late nineteenth century). The holy bloodline theory goes on to represent Godfrioi de Bouillon as a scion of that supposed dynasty, thus having an ancient claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. There is little proof that Christ married Mary Magdalene or had a family. Though the theologian B. Thiering argued for this being the case (also that they divorced), coming to the conclusion on the basis of her idiosyncratic interpretations of the cryptic Dead Sea Scrolls, she failed to substantiate this or any other of her imaginative claims concerning the life of 'Jesus the Man'. It is unclear how the Cathar belief (if such there was) arose that Magdalene was the man Jesus' concubine. What is fairly clear is the view wasn't shared by the Templars, whose own monastic lifestyle was predicated on belief in a celibate Christ.


Recommended Reading:

Charles G. Addison, The History of the Knights Templars, (London, 1842).
M Baigent, R Leigh and H Lincoln, Holy Blood Holy Grail, (Cape, 1982).
Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, (Cambridge University Press, 1978).
_____., The New Knighthood, (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons, (Sussex University Press, 1975).
Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalene, Myth and Metaphor, (Pimlico, 2005)

Katherine Ludwig Jansen ,The Making of the Magdalen (Princeton, 2000)
Andrew Jotischky, 'The Case of Gerard of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene' in Gervase, M. and Powell, J.M., Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades (Syracuse University Press, New York, 2001).
Benjamin Z. Kedar, 'Gerard of Nazareth a Neglected Twelfth-Century Writer in the Latin East: A Contribution to the Intellectual and Monastic History of the Crusader States,' Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 37 (1983), pp. 55-77.
Keith Laidler, The Head of God, (Orion, 1998).
PG Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft, A History, (Tempus 2000).