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232:, who had a connection with God through their spirits but still lived in this world (i.e. Credentes) and Hylics, people who lived only in the world of Matter and had no spiritual dimension to their existence at all. In practice this did not mean discrimination among the Cathars either between Perfecti and Credentes or between Cathars and non-Cathars. Indeed, evidence suggests that the non-Cathar (i.e. Catholic) population of the Languedoc viewed the Cathars among them with tolerance and in many cases, admiration. The sacking of
192:(Parfaits in French, Perfects in English). The Perfecti consisted of both men and women and traveled around the Languedoc in same-sex pairs administering to the community spiritually and as healers. The rest of the Cathar followers were referred to as Credentes, or Believers. These constituted the majority of the movement and were not expected to adopt the austere lifestyle of the Perfecti, who, as carriers of the
279:, the last major Cathar stronghold to resist the Crusaders before the movement was finally destroyed, the Perfecti present gave the Credentes the option to become Perfecti, thus condemning them to the stake, or to go free as part of the conditions of surrender agreed with the besieging forces. Twenty six Credentes came forward to do so, thus facing certain death rather than recant their faith.
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Credentes had the option of becoming
Perfecti after a long and arduous process of training, after which they were inducted into the Perfecti community. They were then expected to follow the rigid vows of the elite for the rest of their lives. At death, Credentes could also ask for the Consolamentum,
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and
Credentes were ones used by their persecutors, the religious and temporal authorities of the time. The Cathars themselves never referred to themselves as such, calling themselves only "Bons Hommes", "Bonnes Femmes" or "Bons Chrétiens" (i.e. "Good Men", "Good Women" and "Good Christians"). They
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being born into this world of suffering again and again until it had reached the state of inner purification which meant it could return. It was in this way that the
Cathars interpreted the idea of Eternal Life in Jesus Christ. They argued for a return to the essence of Christ's teaching, an
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were to move among the wider community. As the
Cathars built no churches or places of worship, preferring to hold their ceremonies in peoples' homes or natural places such as fields, caves or forests it was a particular honour to have the sacraments performed in one's own place of dwelling.
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of the Cathar community. This was a ceremony of purification of sins which was intended to enable the soul to pass into death in a higher spiritual state, thus enabling it to achieve a better incarnation in its next existence in this world or return to God.
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movement, a heretical sect which flourished in western Europe during the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Credentes constituted the main part of the Cathar community in the region. Although
Catharism sprang up in Spain, the
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As with their
Perfecti leaders, the Credentes underwent immense persecution at the hands of the Catholic Church and the temporal authorities of the day who invaded their regions through a
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at the time. Although largely wiped out by the mid 13th century, some isolated Cathar communities survived in the
Languedoc until the 14th century, most famously at the small village of
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The Cathar community was layered between the spiritual elite and the ordinary believers, much as other
Christian communities were. The elite were referred to by the Catholic Church as
224:. As the Cathars divided themselves among Perfecti and Credentes, with everyone else as non-Believers, the Valentinians divided the world into three categories:
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believed that all human beings contained within them an element of the Divine Light trapped in bodies of Matter by "the Prince of this world",
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An interesting feature of the structure of Cathar faith was its correspondence with that of the early
Christian Gnostic movement of Bishop
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Credentes vied for the honour of housing
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and Italy its main focus was in the southern region of France, particularly the area known as the
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embracing of the Apostolic ideal of human behaviour and rejected the established Church as "the
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ideas into its interpretation of Scripture. The terms Cathar, Catharism and even
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313:- the story of the last cathars 1290 - 1329. René Weis . Penguin Viking 2000.
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332:: A History of the Albigensian Crusade, Zoe Oldenbourg
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