eve_prime | A big dollop of Dark Age history (Reply)

So I want to summarize Kriwaczek's intriguing hypothesis about how the Cathars, in southwestern France, could have had a religion that came, in part, from the Zoroastrians. The hypothesis has some very interesting corollaries. I'll spare the general reader, but...

Things already known (at least by me):

The Cathars lived in Southwestern France and were one of the last of many groups practicing what the Catholic church called the "Great Heresy," the extremely pessimistic belief that there are, essentially, two Gods, one good and one evil, and the evil one is our creator, and that thus all life and the material world are evil and corrupt.

Southwestern France was also, not all that long before, the birthplace of the best of what we associate with medieval culture: chivalry, respect or veneration for women, a love of art, beauty, and music. (Today historians generally teach that these were imported from the more romantic of the Arab cultures, from contact through the Crusades.)

Prior to the Middle Ages, the previously existing Roman culture and local Romanized peoples had been violently disrupted by invading Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and other nomadic tribes, invading in waves from "the East." These various tribes were Germanic in their languages but were not just the German tribes described in Tacitus's Germania.

Centuries before this, Zoroaster (Zarathustra) taught a dualistic religion in Persia, with the world divided into good (Light) and evil (Dark). Persia is a very, very long way from Southwestern France, but both lands are populated by people speaking Indo-European languages (French and Provençal in the one, Persian/Iranian/Farsi in the other).

So in the Search for Zarathustra book, Kriwaczek passes along and further develops ideas he'd read in The Black Sea by Neal Ascherson. Here are the key points:

The original steppe people were the Scythians, as described in Herodotus, and these spoke an Iranian language. As Herodotus mentioned, horses were very important in this culture, and women had high status (e.g., Amazon warriors) compared with women in Roman society and Catholic Europe.

The Scythians were succeeded by the Sarmatians, another Iranian people, whose religion was in some degree Zoroastrian.

The Goths, a Germanic tribe from Scandinavia, migrated into the steppe and -- this is the somewhat speculative part -- formed a hybrid culture with the Sarmatians, with elements of both German and Iranian cultures.

The Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Alans, etc., were all Sarmatian tribes, introducing many elements into European culture that we have no clue came from so far away -- tastes in architecture and metal-work, the high status of horse-mounted warriors (chevaliers), a considerably greater regard for women than was practiced by the Romans, a love of elegance, etc. And, too, this dualistic thread in religion that could, under the right circumstances of economic decline and cultural pessimism, give birth to the version of the Great Heresy as practiced by the Cathars.

I think this is fascinating. He also suggests that maybe feudalism started when these nomads found that "herding" people worked even better than herding sheep. And the most thought-provoking speculation of all is that René Descartes' dualism, which has done so much harm in our own culture, what with his essential equation of "mind" with "good" and "body" with "evil," could be itself a secularized remnant of Cathar thought.

About the Heresy -- note that the Catholic Church ruthlessly killed as many Cathars as they could get their hands on, all in the name of making sure people understood that our physical existence is not inherently evil. Kriwaczek notes that in this regard, the 13th century was unpleasantly like the 20th.

By the way,