How the hatred for Catholic Rome in the 14th
century would establish a life and death struggle within the European deep-state;
and how this conflict would lead to the rise of a crypto-Cathar counter church,
whose apocalyptic world-ending goals would complete its cycle on November 22,
1963 in the Anglo/Norman America of the present era.
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
On Friday October 13, 1307 the French King Philip IV, who was deeply indebted to the Knights Templar, ordered them arrested and charged with heretical practices and on November 22 of that year under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize their assets.
Whether or not the Knights Templar practiced heretical beliefs as charged, the immolation of Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the hands of the Pope's Inquisitors in 1314 would serve as an inspiration to generations of people who did. Pope Innocent III's brutal Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29 against the powerful dualist Cathar movement pitted Northern France's Catholic nobility against the lesser nobility of the south who were tolerant and supportive of it.
As a pre-Christian faith deeply rooted in the ancient world and spread by Rome's legions through Mithraism to the four corners of the pagan Roman Empire, Catharism represented an old and powerful belief system which refused to be suppressed by the sterile and often contradictory doctrines of Rome's Christian Empire. As describe by Reverend V.A. Demant, Canon of London's St. Paul's Cathedral in a preface to a 1947 book on the subject titled The Arrow and the Sword, "To mention only its roots in Mithraism, its links with the Gnostics, its theological dualism, its asceticism, the ritual of life and death as cosmic mysteries, the appeal of the troubadours, Arthurian legends and the cult of the Holy Grail, the passions aroused for and against witchcraft, the intimate connection between sex and religion--all these things are sufficient testimony to the deep rooted vitality of a stream of religious consciousness which cannot be superciliously dismissed by rationalists and moralists."
Writing on the heels of World War II with Europe still in ruins from the rise of an irrational and immoral pagan faith called Nazism, Demant feared that such a vital apocalyptic belief system with its "robust religiousness" and commitment to a struggle against an evil material world was bound to rise again as it had so many times in the past. Yet he might not have been surprised to know that his own "Protestant" faith of which he was a senior officer as the Canon of St. Paul's, had its own roots in the same heresy. Now lost in the cross weaves of history, Britain's version of the heresy represented a new and far more dangerous version of life-denying Catharism than was ever imagined by the Templars, Bernard of Clairvaux or Jacques DeMolay.
A Grudge that lasted through the Centuries
Much has been speculated about the survival of the Templars following their dissolution in 1312. Today's popular fiction about their life as a secret society rests not on any particular historical accounting but mainly on 18th century Masonic myth-making and Sir Walter Scotts early 19thcentury stories that romanticized the Templar Knighthood.
The 18th century men of the Enlightenment found great interest in mystical illumination through Masonic rituals. To these men, the newly industrializing West needed a new prophetic tradition to anchor it in history. Rediscovery of the ancient world as a result of imperial interventions in the Near East and Egypt spawned a renewed interest in Renaissance Neo-Platonism and Cabbalism and their roots in a life-denying Gnostic creed. In fact, the very act of returning in victory to the origin of these Gnostic beliefs was in itself proof that they had been chosen to fulfill a cosmic cycle as prophesied by the ancients. Bestowing the Templars with occult mystical powers fit neatly into the early Romantic Movement and helped to promote Enlightenment thinking as part of God's plan for mankind. But the ravages of the Inquisition and the growing anger over a corrupt Roman Catholic Church were anything but myth to those living in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. As a military order of religious warriors responsible only to the Pope the Templars and their Cathar backers in France and England represented a powerful autonomous deep-state within medieval society. In many ways orthodox Christianity was no match for the life-denying dualist doctrine of the Cathars. Catharism's simple focus on the cosmic battle between a spiritual good and a material evil and its promise of a time-ending apocalypse in which the material world would be consumed in fire was an extreme seduction. Driven to ground by a corrupted Roman Catholic Church and greedy French King, "the heresy" appeared to have been trampled out by the middle of the 14th century. But with the onset of the Reformation in the early 16th century, Rome's authority faced a new challenge and as it spread to Ireland, the old Anglo/Norman warlords like the Fitzgeralds, would face their own apocalypse.
The Protestant Reformation represented a heresy that was at once secular and religious. Martin Luther and John Calvin confronted a Papacy that claimed a material domain as well as a spiritual one. In 1534 the English Parliament's Act of Supremacy solved that problem by declaring Henry VIII "Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England" and in 1559 his daughter Queen Elizabeth I became the Church's "Supreme Governor."
Cathar territory remained fertile ground for insurrection against the church and that insurrection came with the Protestant Reformation. The French Calvinist Huguenot movement of the late 16th century grew from exactly the same ground in France where 200 years earlier the Cathars had been brutally suppressed by the Papal Crusade. In England Queen Elizabeth I's deep-state, Sir Francis Walsingham, the Earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sydney found common cause with the Huguenots and supported them with soldiers, guns and money. Their armies waged holy war against the Papacy across Europe and in Catholic Ireland where they targeted the last visible threat to Elizabeth's supremacy at home, the Fitzgeralds.
16th Century deep-state competition
The Fitzgerald family had drawn their original power from France and Italy in the 11th century as the muscle for the Cather-friendly Anglo/Norman royals. They had clearly performed their duties well enough to be rewarded by their feudal lords with lands and titles but when they came to Ireland their paths diverged. Gerald of Wales makes clear in his book that by 1170 this family of Anglo/Norman Samurai was fed up with royal excess and wanted to strike out on their own under their own banner. But three centuries of the Fitzgerald family's immersion in Irish culture transformed them. Forsaking the English language, English customs and English law, the Anglo/Normans married the land and became "more Irish than the Irish themselves". Known as the "Old English" (Seanghaill), their ongoing intermarriage with Irish clans produced furious resentment from London while the coming of the Protestant Reformation produced outright hatred. Known for their love of Ireland and their willingness to renounce their loyalty to England, the Fitzgerald family were feared and hated as representatives of a Roman Catholic deep-state bent on reversing the Reformation. On the other hand the Sidney Circle represented a very old deep-state of its own; that "stream of religious consciousness," that had been suppressed for centuries, had risen in rebellion and was committed to ridding the world of evil.
The Sidney Circle and its primary operatives Francis Walsingham, Edmund Spencer, Sir Walter Raleigh and John Dee represented the militarized edge of Renaissance Neoplatonism, bent on establishing England not just as a global empire to rival Catholic Spain, but as a spiritual empire headed by Queen Elizabeth I that would cleanse the material world and restore its spiritual destiny.
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