Path of Cathari

The Roads

A Sabbat adaptation of the Road of Sin

Nickname: Albigensians

The Path of Cathari is ironically named. It draws its technical and spiritual terminology from the so-called Albigensian heresy of the Middle Ages. The path claims to accept one of the core consepts of the mortal Albigensians and then, heretically, twists it to its own ends.

The Catharist/Albigensian Heresy: The Catharist Heresy was a Medieval flowering of a much older set of spiritual and religious beliefs. Mortal scholars trace the heresy's development from Persian Manicheanism to Bulgarian Bogomilism to the more familiar Catharist Heresy of Languedoc. Manicheanism was a revival of much older Zoroastrian beliefs. The Manicheans believed that the Holy Spirit appeared in the shape of an angel to a Persian prince named Mani. The spirit said that he was the last in a long line of prophets (including Zoroaster and Jesus). Oddly enough, this is similar to what the angel of Gabriel would tell the Prophet Muhammad a scant few centuries later.

The Manicheans married Gnostic tradition with zoroastrian myth. God 9as both the Tetragrammaton IHVH or "Jaweh" and the Lord of Light "Ahura Mazda") stood against Sakhlas (the Lord of Darkness, Satan, the Ahriman). The Lord of Darkness created the physical world and God stood outside it, in the spiritual world. God was being tortured by the darkness. Thus, the manicheanists said, those who followed God must suffer, too. They rejected the flesh - total celibacy, poverty and vegetarianism. Those who were holy transcended to be with god, and the weak were doomed to suffer and reincarnate until they too achieved holiness.