Cathars - url pointer to review of recent book

[Doug Millison]

The Cathars come up in the discussion here  from time to time.  Here's a
link to a review of a recent book that sounds interesting:

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=31035997374341

Malcolm Barber. The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High
Middle Ages. The Medieval World Series. London and New York: Longman, 2000.
vii + 282 pp. Tables, maps, illustrations, bibliography index. $79.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-582-25661-5. 

excerpt from the review:

"Perhaps the most intriguing chapter of the book, however,is the last,
"Cathars and Catharism," which sets the heresy in its later
historiographical context. Barber notes at the end of his introduction that
"[e]ven more than most historical subjects, the Cathars are viewed today
through the many-layered filters of the more recent past" (p. 5). He returns
to this idea at the end of the book, exploring how these filters have
influenced the way various people have interpreted the Cathars and their
demise. Deodat Roche, founder of the Cahiers d'Etudes Cathares and a
twentieth-century magistrate of Limoux and Carcassonne who was removed from
his position by the Vichy government for his interest in religion and
spirituality, wanted to lay bare to his contemporaries the light which the
Cathars had tried to reveal to the medieval world. A self-proclaimed
neo-Cathar, Roche believed deeply in the need to uncover the true history of
the Cathars, which had been obscured by an intolerant medieval Church. 

"Simone Weil, a French philosopher of the inter-war period, was moved by
Roche's work, particularly by his discussion of the Cathar's rejection of
the Old Testament Jehovah (whom she saw as a god of "pitiless cruelty" and,
like the medieval Cathars, believed was incompatible with the God of the New
Testament). Living during some of the darkest days of Europe's history (she
died of tuberculosis in 1943), Weil saw the Roman Empire and its child, the
Catholic Church, as the original sources of European totalitarianism,
brutally exercised by the Office of the Inquisition. 

"To the twentieth-century German writer Otto Rahn, the Cathars were able
custodians of a dualist tradition that predated Christianity. In fact, to
Rahn, the Cathars carried on traditions that can be traced back to the Celts
and the Iberians. Published in Germany during the late 1930s Rahn's second
book, Luzifers Hofgesind (1937), argues that the Cathars were disciples of
Lucifer, the Bringer of Light, whose church was an enemy of the "Judaic"
Catholic Church. An instrument of Nazi propaganda (Rahn worked for Heinrich
Himmler, chief of the Schutzstaffel and later head of all German police
forces, during these years), Luzifers Hofgesind argues that until the
thirteenth century the Cathars maintained a European tradition that did not
have to be purified of "Jewish mythology" (p. 210). Although it didn't have
a major impact during the war years, in the recent past Luzifers Hofgesind
has stimulated a genre of books employing unconventional historical
approaches, such as Jean and Michel Angebert's 1971 work Hitler et la
tradition cathare, that claims to uncover secret relationships between the
Cathar tradition and the Nazi regime. "