What can /his/ tell me about the Cathars?

>>2010208
got FUKIN REKT

>>2010219
why were the catholics so autistically violent towards them? they wouldn't even defend themselves.

>>2010238
They were weird.

>>2010208
They allow Absolute Cognatic succession and female temple holders. They also lack a religious head.

>>2010208
>Cathars
Dualist Gnostics where I'm an adherent of nondualism, so not much more than what's in the wiki article which appears significantly expanded since I last checked.

Kurt Rudolph's Gnosis the Nature and History of Gnosticism touches on them in later chapters, iirc. In either case it's still the best overview of Gnosticism writ large that I've ever read.

>>2010238
>>2010419
Also gross. If the Middle Ages think you're gross, you have problems

The Cathars or Albigensians revived the Manichean doctrines. Instead of a single divine being they conceived both good and evil deities with the realm of Satan being all material creation. To escape domination by Satan meant renouncing all material things, including meat-eating and sex, some Cathars underwent a kind of sacred fast in which they slowly starved to death.

As if to prove Cathar beliefs about satans rule, the armed might of Rome exterminated them and over the next eight years most of southeastern France was conquered by crusaders and eventually became part of the French royal demesne. In the process thousands of the inhabitants were slaughtered and a highly sophisticated civilization destroyed.

>>2010436
t. Paradox employee

>>2010208
commie fucking shits

>>2010469
There are accounts on hundreds of cathar captive soldiers getting their eyes gouged out with only one spared (with one eye left) to lead them back to their villages and towns to burden their economy which was even brutal for medieval standarts.

>>2010208
I'm confused as to how it managed to spread.

>>2012481
bogomil influence from the east