Nowadays, when we have chicken for dinner, we simply buy some at the supermarket, or we treat ourselves at the convenience of KFC. In the 12th century however, preparing a chicken for dinner, would involve you in killing the chicken, plucking, and deboning it. It was part of a woman's everyday tasks. So, when someone refused to kill a chicken, that would be certainly unusual and even suspicious. This we can see also in the case of a French woman called Serena de Chateu Verde. Who was Serena? Serena was a member of a group called Cathars. The Cathars were persecuted severely as heretics by the Roman Catholic Church. While fleeing from this prosecution, Serena stayed at a guest house, and there, she aroused the suspicion of the female in-keeper. Why so? Okay. It was quite unusual in these times for a woman traveling alone, and of course, everybody knew that there were heretics. So, the innkeeper asked Serena to prepare a chicken for dinner as she, herself, had to attend to some business outside the guest house for a short while. When she returned, the chicken was still alive, and this confirmed her suspicion that Serena was a heretic. After all, only these strange people called Cathars would refuse to kill a chicken, as they observed a quite strict prohibition on killing any living being. So, Serena was discovered as a heretic, and as she would not renounce her Cathar beliefs, she was sentenced to death, and ultimately burnt at the stake. So, let us have now a closer look to these people called Cathars, who didn't want to kill a chicken. The name Cathars come from Greek "katharoi," which means the pure ones. They were a Christian movement that stared the road of Medieval Christianity from the 12th to the 14th century. The Cathars were centered in the prosperous regions of Europe, as the Southern Islands, Southern France, Northern Italy, and Catalonia. Today, let us have a look, a very specific look at the situation in Southern France, where the memory of the Cathars is still alive even if it is becoming more and more commercially exploited as a tourist attraction. So, come with me to Du Pays Cathare. Popes and preachers were terribly frightened when their authority was challenged in the 12th century by men and women, who renounced the Catholic Church's claim to being the true Church of Christ. They wanted to return to the life of the Apostles and live a poor and egalitarian life. They called their organization the Church of God. Within this church, there were two different levels of adherence. First, we have the Cathars called "Good Christians" or more often, Perfecti or Perfectae in the [inaudible] form. These were men and women who had received a special sacrament, the baptism of the Spirit. They call this rite the Consolamentum or consolation. In this right, the Holy Spirit came down upon the initiated through the laying on of hands, fulfilling them with his gifts. Once the Good Christians have been consoled, evil and sin could no longer harm them. They were only able to do good things from now on, because the Consolamentum had changed the essence of their nature. According to the Cathar faith, human beings were fallen angels, whose souls had fallen upon the earth, but whose spirit remained in heaven. This spirit was waiting longingly for the reunion with his soul, and that moment have come when a person received the Consolamentum. In the Cathar view, a human being was an ambivalent being. Only his soul, the invisible part in him came from God. He was the creator of all invisible and spiritual things. Man's body on the other hand, had been created by the evil principle. And as a result, this body presented an obstacle on the path to the union of soul and heavenly Spirit. Through the desires of the flesh, the soul was held captive, until one declared oneself willing to receive the baptism of the Spirit. To resist the bounds of the body, a consoled Cathar had to follow strict ascetic rules: no sexual contacts and no consumption of food through procreation, which meant that the Cathars were practically vegans. However, they made an exception for fish, following the example of Jesus, as he also ate fish. Those who had been consoled we're not allowed to lie, cheat, swear, or kill under any circumstances, as we have seen at the very beginning with the story of the woman who refused to kill a chicken for dinner. It is no wonder that even though many people were fascinated by the exemplary lives of the Cathars, the pure ones, and found their teachings to be more credible than those of the Roman Church, most still did not want to commit to living according to the Cathar's strict ascetic rules. These people found their place in the Cathar movement as 'credentes', Adherents who believed in the Cathar theology, and who supported the Good Christians in whatever way was necessary, and worship them as holy persons. These credentes, still wanted to receive the Consolamentum, but only at the end of their lives, which offered the possibility to avoid the difficult ascetic life of a Good Christian. The Cathars faced severe opposition from the Catholic Church. After preaching and debating against the Cathar belief was found to be unsuccessful, the Church turned to other methods. From 1209 to 1229, the Catholic Church waged the Albigensian Crusade, aimed at the Cathar community around Albi. Those who were unwilling to repent for their false faith were burnt at the stake. Later, a special law court, the Papal Inquisition, was founded to continue the fight against the Cathars and their faith. The inquisition was the legal means to persecute, sentence, and execute heretics, refusing to return to the Catholic faith. As a result, by the beginning of the 14th century, Catharism had been as good as defeated in the Southern France. But now, let's turn the spotlight to the Cathar women. During the prime of the movement, when the Cathar faith had not yet to be lived clandestinely, many women were actively involved in the movement as itinerant, wandering preachers, by educating their children about the faith in their own homes or by engaging in theological disputes. In times of persecution, they took the same risks as men, always fleeing, spending the nights in the fields or in sheds. Perhaps, the risk was even greater for women, as the wandering life made them much more suspicious than men, for whom this vagrancy was much more accepted. However, otherwise Good Christians or credentes, they often remained loyal to their Cathar faith, right up until their painful end when they were burnt alive at the stake. What could have been the reasons for such an unrelenting loyalty, even when faced with death? Unfortunately, we have only a few sources dealing with the lives of common Cathar women, for instance, those working as weavers. Therefore, we must focus on the lives of aristocratic women in answering this question. Above all, there were social reasons for their endurance, where there's somebody in the middle of the 13th century was a Cathar or a Catholic, was not merely a question of their personal conviction, but also the result of family tradition. In the sources, we rarely meet one individual Good Christian, one individual Perfectae. Nearly always they are bound into a large family meaning not only their biological family but rather the "familia", one of the fundaments on which feudal society was based. If the noble at the head of a family was a Cathar, then his clients or dependants would also be Cathars. If the mother was a perfecter, so was the daughter. It can almost be described asymptomatic that at the beginning of a Cathar family tradition we find that the oldest known person of Cathar faith was a woman, a perfecter. We do not know how they came to be Cathars. Was there already a tradition or were these women the initiators of their family's tradition? Some facts seem to confirm the second supposition as these women would only receive the consolamentum later in life usually after they had been widowed. As a widow, they would have a very strong influence on their children. Thus their children, the second generation, would often already in that earliest youth show a very strong leaning to the Cathar faith. Many daughters were already consoled as perfecte when they were very young children and would accompany their mothers as a socia or a companion sometimes even unto the stake. It was possible for the children however to take a different position towards this family tradition. While some would accept the traditions, other would reject it. The women that died on the stake with their mothers and sisters may therefore not only have committed to the Cathar faith because of a family tradition but also out of personal conviction. But why did the women of the first generation convert to Catharism in the middle of the 12th century in the first place? Did Catharism offer certain spiritual traditions or theological ideas that have a stronger attraction for women especially for educated women than those of Catholicism? Christianity is a Book Religion and is therefore based fundamentally on the Bible. So we must ask ourselves how the Cathars used scripture to argue their faith. What we learned from the sources is that the Cathars method of interpretation of the Bible was not literal but rather based on inspiration. They declared that, "All that is written in the New and Old Testament is true if it is understood in a mystic sense." Through such a mystic interpretation, the restrictions that were common for women in the Catholic Church were largely abolished. After receiving the consolamentum, the good Christians, both men and women were the only authoritative interpreters of the gospel within their community. A perfecter could therefore use her own authority to explain the word of God and to interpret it according to the spiritual anti-Ballistic worldview of the Cathars. This interpretation of the gospel provided the foundation for their community in a time during which merely reading the Bible was prohibited not only to Catholic lay people in general, but to women in particular. Therefore it was of the utmost importance to be able to read the Bible and it was consequently translated and transmitted not in Latin but in the vernacular languages, in this case Occitan. We saw that every individual good Christian, man or woman, was allowed to interpret the Bible with equal authority. The reason for this lies in their view of the essence of a human being. Strictly speaking to the Cathars, individuality did not exist. We have heard that they believed that people were fallen angels and that the angels' souls and spirits had been reunited during the consolamentum. As angels do not possess an individual nature, every consoled good Christian would become part of the divine essence just as angels were. Therefore, there could be no disagreements between the individual good Christians as they were essentially one. Furthermore, the angelic nature was also without gender. So after returning to their original angelic status, there was no longer an ontological difference between men and women as the only difference had been a bodily one. After winning back their angelic status, the good Christians have become the perfect mediators between God and human beings and it became their task to bring others to salvation. The female credentes in particular emphasized the role of the female mediator. We know for example that women believed in salvation through female heretics and that also men believed that these female heretics were holy. A consoled Cathar woman, a perfectae, thus did not necessarily need a female example and her attitude towards Mary therefore was one of equality. After all, Mary was nothing else but an angel. In other words, the same as she was after receiving the consolamentum. Consequently one perfectae preached, "That she herself had greater power to liberate than Holy Mary" and very provocative to Catholic years, "That the Holy Virgin Mary and Holy Agnes did not have greater merits than any just consoled sinful woman." The Cathar women were part of an alternative Christian movement which serves as an example of the ever present dissidence within Christendom and of Christianity's tradition of dialogue and interplay between differing views. Throughout the history of Christianity, we find concepts and movements such as the Cathar movement in which the Holy Spirit plays an eminent role. Indeed, a more eminent role than Jesus. Usually, these movements offer more room for women within the structures of authority. The reason is quite simple. With the focus on Jesus comes the focus on his complex nature; divine and human. Let's focus on his human nature. It's clear he was a man. When the emphasis lies on the Holy Spirit, things change. Because now an accent is put to the basically equal essence within human beings. We call that usually the soul. As souls do not know a gender difference, it would be almost difficult to regard only men as the rightful successors of Christ. So this could explain the different and principally totally different situation and position of women in the Catholic communities. But however, I want to end with a skeptical remark. Like the Catholic Church, also the Cathar Church did not know female bishops or female deacons. Furthermore, the administration of the consolamentum by a woman is only rarely, very rarely mentioned in the sources. Apparently, it was and is not so easy to change humans into bodiless ages.
