Cathar Belief and The Gnosis

 

The following should not be construed to be "Cathar beliefs", originated from and the exclusive property of this preceding brotherhood. These are some of the pillars of gnostic thought, existing since time immemorial and passed down through the ages like a lantern in a storm. All truly spiritual gnostics will recognize these tenets, no matter their time, place, race, national or planetary origin. 

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According to Antonin Gadal, the spiritual source from which Catharism emanated is undeniably Gnostic.

Here are some of the explanations he used to give:

"Gnosis is the knowledge of all that is related to God, to Jesus Christ, to the Return to Divine Life. It is the Christian synthesis of all the philosophies of Liberation scattered in the world before the coming of Christ. Like all the spiritual traditions, the Gnosis considers the world as an illusion, a pseudo creation, unstable, imperfect. The only, unique Reality is in God.

Without God’s Knowledge, men chain themselves to an unreal, material world. To go beyond matter in order to get closer to God, to consider sufferings as a basis for purification, to follow, tirelessly, the path of Perfection, is, to summarize, trying to get as close as possible to the purity of Jesus Christ, the divine Master.

How to achieve this? By the practice of the “Endura”!

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Breaking Free from Illusion

To get away from matter, we must break with the links that tie us up to the world of the senses. Breaking free from matter is to break the hold it exerts on our senses, to conquer the individual or collective illusions it produces; it is to renounce the ego. Only then shall we be able to come back spiritually to the world and work for its redemption because then matter has no hold on us anymore.

Such is the work of initiation of the Perfects, the Pure Ones or “Bons hommes”, the Cathar priests. Detachment, renunciation of all forms of instincts and passions, self-abnegation: poverty in spirit, the “Endura” of the Cathars.’

To break free from the grip of matter and evil does not imply that there is an evil god. ‘God is love.’ Gnostics, Cathars, Rosicrucians and Templars never believed in two Gods. As such, they never were ‘di-theists’. They recognized in Jesus the Divine Word manifested to us as a man, uniting the Divine essence with human nature through the appearance of a human being. That Word awakens in men’s souls the remembrance of the lost Kingdom. It opens in them the sources of the sanctifying Spirit for a complete Liberation".

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What is the cross?

- Master, if Christ had an ethereal body, did He not suffer? Did He not die on the cross?

- He suffered 'in spirit'. His soul was tortured in the agony of Gethsemane.  But He did not die! A God cannot die!

The cross is the human body through which the divine soul goes its 'path of the cross': From Bethlehem (the heart) to Golgotha (the mount of the skull) to his resurrection, passing through hell (the sacral plexus, the subconscious) and to the eternal Fatherland (the Father).

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Who Is Lucibel?

He is the one who sets the dawn. The most famous and glorious of all angels. The highest of  God’s creatures.

How did he fall?

Arbitrary will and rebellion; disproportionate ambition; immoderate desires. He is less guilty than unfortunate; the chief of the exiled souls who willingly accompanied him in his ruin.

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Will All Souls Be Saved?

All of them! After countless series of ordeals and purifications, after the hard trials to reach Perfection, they will go back up into the Azure. 

Look at this Ocean of Ether. It is sparkled with fire islands, archipelagos of light. They are the souls’ stations in the space, the many mansions Christ talks about, the Path of the Stars. The souls will climb from star to star, from constellation to constellation up to God’s bosom.

During that process, the soul unties all its earthly links and puts on the ‘Light Vesture’ that it had to leave behind after the fall into the lower world.

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What About Satan?

Why would Satan be the only outcast excluded from Salvation? God is love! Christ will bring the great outlaw back to Heaven, consoled.

Is Satan not evil? Does absolute, substantial evil exist?

Where would it be, as God is the absolute, substantial, infinite Good? Evil is independent from God. It is non-being established in time, outside of the Divine Creation.

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Who Is Our Patriarch?

It is John, son of Zebedee. John, Jesus’ Beloved who rests on his heart and knows all the mysteries of that Divine heart. The virgin apostle of Love, the Eagle of the mystical theology, the prophet of Patmos, Plato of the Gospel, Homer of the Apocalypse.

He is no pontiff in the Church of the Paraclete, but simply a Master of the Gnosis. His Gospel is called ‘the Spiritual Gospel’ of the Redeeming Word.

‘In the beginning is the Word’ who is God, Life, the Light of men:

- everyone is linked to his lost Divine original Sonship.

‘And the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not receive It’:

- within us and in the world, reign two opposed nature orders.

‘To those who receive It, It gives the power to become children of God’:

- deliverance is an absolute fact.

From 'Gnosis And Its Foundations'

Source Link: Antonin Gadal - The Work of a Man Inspired By The Spirit

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Antonin Gadal was a special human being. It was he who, practically single-handed, kept alive not only the memory of the Cathars, but their essence, their history, their rites and traditions. He was known as the 'Grandfather of the Cathars', 'The Patriarch', and 'the New Bon Homme'. Gadal explored and maintained as best he could the miles of caverns that were used by the Cathars in the Ariège valley. He held on in this capacity, laboring alone until the mid-1940's where he made the acquaintance of two more special human beings. Again, from the site referenced above:

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There certainly were, in France or elsewhere, broadminded human beings who possessed the soul qualities and wisdom that would have awakened them to the unique Universal life; who would then aspire to that imperishable Treasure of the Light and would have enough love of mankind to undertake to bring that Knowledge to their consciousness.

Antonin Gadal finally met them. They were a man and a woman of Dutch origin: Jan Leene (Jan van Rijckenborgh) and Mrs. Henny Stok-Huizer (Catharose di Petri). In the Netherlands, they had founded a school of thought, a Gnostic Brotherhood, the Spiritual School of the Golden Rosycross.

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These three, linked by their genuine spirituality and devotion to the Liberation of mankind would eventually join forces in 1956 to form the youngest link in the Chain of Universal Brotherhoods. Grail, Cathar and Rosycross were united in a Tri-Unity of Light.

~ g
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