Review of Fire and the Light, Cathars, and the True Teachings of Christ

I have finished reading Fire and the Light: A Novel of the Cathars and the Lost Teachings of Christ by Glen Craney. I gave it a 4-star review because it was too depressing at times and didn't give enough of the true teachings, especially teachings about the sun. Craney does hint at it a few times, but nothing in depth. Also, at one point he has the Templar hero discover the ancient scroll containing the lost Gospel of Love. In it, the Apostle James supposedly says that Paul is misleading the early Christians into believing Jesus as the only Son of God and not as one representative of the Christ. Nothing can be further from the truth.

St. Paul has been accused of perverting the original Essene Christianity, which recognized the Christ in the Sun and taught that we could be saved through Jesus’ secret teachings. However, it was not Paul but Peter and later church leaders who substituted this with the historical Christianity, which condemned sun worship and taught that we could be saved only by Jesus’ death on the cross. If you read Paul’s epistles, this would seem to be the case. However, the truth of the matter is that after Paul’s death, the leaders of the Catholic Church rewrote most of the epistles to conform to their doctrine of atonement as opposed to Paul’s Essene doctrine of At-One-Ment. A distinguished Dutch scholar, Van Manen, to whom had been assigned the writing of an article on Paul in Hastings’ Dictionary, after much careful research and consultation with other scholars, repudiated the genuineness of the epistles traditionally ascribed to Paul. In other words, their authorship was forged. Van Manen stated emphatically that the Paulinism of the lost Acts of Paul and of the canonical Epistles of Paul, is not the “theology” of the historical Paul. George Mead wrote that this conclusion was of tremendous importance, since it was not the opinion of an isolated scholar, but the outcome of the studies of a school.

Clement of Alexandria recorded that Paul, before going to Rome, said that he would bring to the brethren the Gnosis, or tradition of the hidden mysteries, as the fulfillment of the blessings of Christ, who, Clement says, reveals the secret knowledge and trains the Gnostic by mysteries, that is, revelations made in the state of trance. Such a state can be attained through deep meditation, chanting and sungazing.

Unfortunately, Paul was arrested in Rome and a few years later executed. His true teachings on the mysteries of the sun were lost for several centuries until they were resurrected in Armenia and Syria during the late seventh century by the Paulicians. They were so named because their teachings were the Gnostic mysteries handed down from Saint Paul. A medieval Armenian source describes an Armenian sun cult whose adherents were known as Arevorti, sons (children) of the sun.

The Paulicians were persecuted and diminished in the ninth century, but in the tenth century, a new Gnostic movement, the Bogomils, arose in Bulgaria, which carried many of the same beliefs and practices of the Paulicians, including sun worship. They rejected infant baptism, because they believed that baptism occurred not through the agency of water or oil but through penance, prayers and chanting of hymns. The Bogomils also rejected the eucharist as a pagan blood sacrifice and the doctrine of Mary being the Mother of God. The Bogomils believed that salvation was to be found only in Jesus’ secret teachings. This meant a life of asceticism. They taught that each person should assume responsibility for his or her spiritual destiny in community with others and realize the birth of Christ in their hearts.

At the beginning of the 12^th century, Byzantium started to persecute the Bogomils. Many were killed, but some fled to Italy, southern France and elsewhere. One Bogomil bishop who fled to Southern France, Guilhabert de Castres, taught Esclarmonde de Foix the mysteries and initiated her as a Perfect. This is described in the novel. By the middle of the 12^th century, Gnostic schools like the Knights Templars and Cathars had sprung up and spread throughout Western Europe. These were the Western European counterparts of the East European Bogomils.

The Cathars “pure ones” and the Knights Templars were concentrated in the Languedoc and Midi regions of Southern France. The Cathars claimed to possess the Book of Love (AMOR) the original initiatory version of the Book of John (the only gospel the Cathars read) which likely contained the solar mysteries. It taught that a spark or tiny sun of the Christ Light dwelt in mans heart and it revealed how to nurture it like a seed of divinity so that it blossomed into the rose of original rose-cross mystery school. This teaching, which reputedly could transform a human into a divine being, once belonged to Thutmose III, Akhenaton (see my book Pharaoh of the Sun), Moses, Solomon, Jesus, and John the Divine. It was reputed to be able to dissolve all hatred, anger and jealousy from the hearts of men.

The Cathars believed man entered the kingdom of God through his soul. The pineal was considered by Descartes to be the seat of the soul. The process of doing this was called ascending. The initiate would prepare for baptism through a voluntary renunciation of the flesh and attachment to the things of this world. This was called repentence by John the Baptist, Jesus and Paul. In Greek it is metanoia, meaning “to turn around.” In other words, to turn your back on the world.

The Cathars believed that the key to this divine transformation was the correct understanding of the symbolism of the Eucharist, that is, the bread and wine and the Holy Grail. The light of the sun is the bread; its warmth is the wine. The Holy Grail is the brain’s third ventricle or cavity containing the pineal and pituitary glands. This secret of communion, known to the Cathars as the consolamentum (with the sun in the mind), was kept hidden from the uninitiated.

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov has this to say about communion. “Bread and wine are solar symbols. It is not a question of the physical reality of bread and wine, but of the two properties of the sun: light and heat, which combine together to create life. But the heat is love, the light, wisdom. And so we can see that [the Christ through] Jesus meant that if we ate his flesh: wisdom, and drank his blood: love, we would have eternal life.

“For two thousand years, now, Christians have been eating wagon-loads of hosts and drinking barrels of wine without ever attaining everlasting life and even, sadly enough, without being in any way the better for it. The only way to attain eternal life is to eat the light and drink the warmth of Christ, the Spirit of the sun.”

Communion is a two way street. We receive God’s light or wisdom and God’s warmth or love. But we also return something to God through our eyes, which are the windows of our souls. We send to God our thoughts, prayers and affirmations. And these thought, prayers and affirmations are multiplied by the power of the sun and broadcast to the world where they can effect change. That’s why we should only have positive thoughts when we Sungaze. And we should always end with an outpouring of gratitude.

The Cathars believed that the solar elements of the Eucharist transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ within themselves. Transubstantiation comes from the Latin trans, across, and substantia, substance. This substance turned men into gods, as described by Jesus in his statement: “Is it not written in your law? ‘I said ye are Gods.’”

This substance, the transmuted elements, caught by the Holy Grail (the third ventricle), is what the Hindus call Amrita, the elixir of immortality and the Greeks called Ambrosia, the nectar of the gods.

William Henry, in Mary Magdalene, the Illuminator, wrote “All the occult mysteries speak of a key that is required to unlock mystical secrets of enlightenment. Specifically, the lost secret of the Templars… is about building a better human through the release of secretions from the astounding manufacturing plant of spiritual oils, the human brain. This oil or essence was the key secret of Mary Magdalene and the Essenes recovered by the Templars from between the temples. The skull [specifically the third ventricle] is… the Cup of Life, the Grail, that catches these secretions from the brain… The Templars’ ultimate objective was to restore true Gnostic monotheism to the world, uniting Christianity, Judaism and Islam in a New Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The ‘new’ humans that inhabited this New Jerusalem (or New Atlantis) would know and embody the secret of the Kingdom of Heaven within the brain and its capability of producing… the elixir of life, the Sacred Soma, the tonic of immortality, for these terms all refer to the cosmic esse or brain substance.” It was also called Christos (anointing oil) by the Essenes.