Flicker (67 page)

“So you don't think doctrine had anything to do with the persecution.”

“Doctrine was a weapon of propaganda. It gave you a cover story. Church always had to have a cover story to knock off its opposition. But what you're essentially dealing with here is a power play of major dimensions.”

I asked the question that was at the top of my private agenda. “Do you think any of the Cathars might have survived?”

“Of course it's pretty near impossible to wipe out an idea. But the church came damn close. Went after the Albigenses as if they were the devil's own brood. Which in the eyes of the church they were. Of course, for the Cathars the vice was versa. They regarded the Church of Rome as evil incarnate. In their eyes, the god of the popes was the Great Beast in disguise. Now that's a sure prescription for a battle to the death, isn't it? No room for compromise on either side. The pope's goal was total extermination, a final solution if there ever was one. But how do you kill fond memories and old allegiances? You come across stories about Cathars hiding out among the Moors in Spain. Some of the Templars were said to have taken refuge in other knightly orders, like the Hospitalers. Rumors like that kept the Inquisition in business for the next couple centuries. You can still find a few small congregations practicing Cathars in the south of France. People in that area have an ethnic loyalty to the tradition. Very unlikely any of them represent a direct descent from the original Albigenses. Probably later revivals.”

I asked if he'd ever heard of a St. Arnaud. He frowned, reached for an old leather volume in his bookcase—it was a hagiography—and thumbed through. “Nope. No such entry. You got the name right?”

“I came across mention of him as a Cathar saint.”

“Anybody can call anybody a saint. But heretic saints have no status in the eyes of the church.”

“And here in the United States … have you ever come across any Cathar sects?”

That produced a quizzical squint, then a raspy laugh. “Now that you bring it up …” He'd been poking around his cluttered office picking out books to loan me, about a half dozen so far. Now he returned to the search, clambering atop a teetering foot ladder to investigate a high corner shelf. He brought back a small, yellowed pamphlet. “Surviving Cathars, that's what you're interested in?”

The document he handed me was a cheap pulp publication with a florid cover. The title read “The Passion of Abraxas: An Account by His Suffering Servants of Their History and Teachings.” On the back, there was an address: “The Chapel of the Albigensi Fellowship, Hermosa Beach, California.” I looked across to him for clarification.

“When it comes to religion, Jonny, Los Angeles is the elephants' graveyard. These folks asked me to come lecture once. Must be eight years ago. Queer old couple, name of Bird … something like that. Well along in years, the both of them. I have no idea if they're still around. Probably are. There's something about religious imbecility, seems to keep the tissues supple.”

“And did you?” I asked.

“Did I what?”

“Lecture for them?”

“Christ no! I was, at the time, a respectable scholar. Meaning I was a pompous, tight-assed pedant. But I did pay a visit, just out of curiosity. They turned out to be nice enough. Spooky, but nice. Gave me a lovely vegetarian meal. Gooseberry soup. I still remember.”

“Are you recommending I look them up?”

“You asked if there were any surviving Cathars. Here's your chance to find out.”

There was a sparkle in his one surviving eye that suggested mischief. “Oh, come on. These are just some local cranks.” He continued giving me a playful sort of stare. “Aren't they … ?”

“This much I'll tell you. The evening turned out to be a rare and memorable experience.”

“How so?”

“You ever hear of oral history?”

“Sure.”

“Well, that's what happened. A lesson in oral history. An eyewitness account.”

“Of what?”

“The Albigensian Crusade.”

The teasing stare continued for another several silent seconds. Then he burst out in a blustery laugh. “Listen here, Jonny. This ain't Oxford, and it ain't Cambridge. Thank God! This is the land of the swamiburger and Aimee Semple McPherson. We've got our own native ways to study history. Be brave. Take a chance. What the hell, you might get a bowl of gooseberry soup out of it.”

The name was Feather, not Bird. The Reverend Cecil Feather and wife. That much I found out by calling the number listed for the Chapel of the Albigensi Fellowship. It was still there at the same address in Hermosa Beach. An impressively cultivated English accent answered the phone, a quiet-voiced woman who informed me that there would be a lecture by the Reverend Feather at the Saturday afternoon
consolamentum.
She added, as if I would understand, that she expected a “connection” to take place at that time. Yes, all these events were open to the public. I was welcome to attend.

Not that I hastened to do so. The wicked twinkle in Faustus' eye when he mentioned the group left me believing he might be putting me on. The pamphlet he loaned me made the Albigensi Fellowship sound too much like the items one finds listed in the Religious Directory of
The Los Angeles Times
alongside Applied Mindism and the Temple of Colonic Irrigation. It read like a slightly more accessible version of Father Rosenzweig's turgid disquisition, filled with the same arcane references to aeons and pleromas and voids. Reverend Feather's prose sported a kind of mid-Victorian fruitiness that did wonders at frustrating the most minimal understanding; but for that matter, nothing I'd yet read in the way of Cathar theology was any less impenetrable. Dr. Byx had said the teachings of his church were “veiled.” That was putting it mildly. The Cathars specialized in maniacally extrapolating involuted cosmic systems jam-packed with celestial entities. The main purpose of these madly subtle discriminations seemed to be putting as much distance as possible between the physical and the spiritual, a sort of metaphysical apartheid. That left their doctrines all but totally sealed in obscurity, at least to my metaphysically underdeveloped mind. And the obscurity tunneled centuries into the past.

In itself, the story of the Albigensian Crusade took me back seven
centuries. But the Albigenses, I soon learned, were only the last in a long line of Cathars, the final phase in a heresy that extended to the earliest days of the Christian church. The shadowy figure of Simon Magus was usually named as the first of the Christian Cathars—or Gnostics as they were more often called in those times. But even he may have been a latecomer. Hadn't Dr. Byx said that his faith was “older than Christ”? It might be so. In some accounts, the Cathars were traced back to the dawn of civilization. I was coming to recognize, with a sense of creepy discomfort, how narrow is the fringe of time on which most of us live out our lives and think our thoughts. There are others—like Brother Justin, Dr. Byx, Max Castle—whose lives belong to an immensely larger dimension, a secret history in which our century is only the last page in an enormous volume unknown to the world at large. I felt like an ant crawling over the hide of an elephant, unaware that the few scant inches of terrain beneath my feet are part of some greater life whose goals and purposes I couldn't imagine. Did I really think a group of religious crackpots in a California beach town was going to illuminate my way in this fog?

I was even less prepared to think so after I made the mistake of mentioning the Albigensi Fellowship to Brother Justin on one of my visits to St. James School. Had he, I wondered, ever heard of the Reverend Feather? He squinted at me inquisitively as if the name sounded familiar. “You don't seem to be the only Cathars in the area,” I explained. And I showed him the pamphlet Faustus had lent me.

He took it, turned it over, and then, quite spontaneously, erupted into laughter. Making no comment, he handed the pamphlet back, turned, and left the room choking with hilarity. Later that day, at lunch, I caught a glimpse of Sister Helena looking across at me from another table. She was trying, not very successfully, to hold in an explosive giggle. I turned away, blushing, yet at the same time resentful. Who were these people to bully me in this way? What gave Cathars at Zuma Beach the right to treat Cathars at Hermosa Beach with such dismissive contempt?

Still, I might have been persuaded to forget the Reverend Feather if my relations with Brother Justin had turned out to be as rewarding as I'd hoped. But that was hardly the case. When it came to finding out anything about the Orphans of the Storm, the old fellow was proving to be a slippery customer—but in ways that kept me so intrigued that I often didn't realize until several sessions were behind us that I'd learned nothing I didn't already know from my reading.
Or, more often, I came away knowing less. Brother Justin had a positive gift for obfuscation. He would let me ramble on, then vaguely and somewhat condescendingly agree … but not quite. “Yes,” he would say, “I suppose one might put it that way, though it rather misses the main point.” Or, “That is more or less correct.” Or, “That is at best a rough approximation.” Sometimes he would give me two or three readings of a metaphor or symbol, but without taking sides. The black bird, for example. It came out as the first, then the second, then the third person of the Holy Trinity. But later Brother Justin seemed to reject the whole idea of the Trinity as “ridiculously crude.” God, he assured me, had nothing to do with “persons,” but with something called “emanations,” of which I eventually tallied up a grand total of more than fifty, each more obscure than the last. Was the black bird then the symbol of an “emanation”? To which the only answer I received was another question. “Ah, but if so, which one, eh?”

On another occasion, the black bird was identified with Abraxas, one of the holy names of the Cathar Godhead, which, I was cautioned, must not be confused with God in any of His persons, emanations, or hypostases.

“Hypostases?” I asked, fishing for clarification.

Brother Justin waved me off. “This we will speak of in its proper time.” But we never did.

The notes I took on these discussions brimmed with phrases like “uncertain at this point,” “this matter much in dispute,” “ambiguous meaning.” My confusion mounted as I learned that the Cathars of the crusade descended through many sects that could be traced back and back. On each of these Brother Justin was happy to offer me books and articles from his library. There were nights when I found myself delving into the histories of ancient cults that once flourished in lands I never heard of. The Ophites of Hyrcania, the Phibriotes of Cappadocia, the Shiite Gnostics of Seljuk Iconium. Who the hell were these people? And why should I be sitting here to all hours with the roar of a twentieth-century Los Angeles freeway in my ears, losing sleep, trying to understand their differing interpretations of the sixteenth emanation of the androgynous demiurges? Still I soldiered on, looking for just the right piece of information that would make Max Castle and Simon Dunkle part of the enigmatic religious fabric that Brother Justin was unfurling before me an inch at a time. Trusting as I was by nature, it only gradually dawned upon me as
the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months that Brother Justin had no serious intention of clarifying anything for me. The man was giving me the metaphysical runaround. At which point I could see no reason why I shouldn't be willing to fritter away an hour or two with the Cathars across town.

The Chapel of the Albigensi Fellowship proved not at all easy to locate. After a long drive on a warm evening, I spent nearly an hour searching for the address I'd noted down. Hermosa Beach was one of those down-on-its-luck coastal towns that spends most of the year hoping the teenagers will show up during the holidays to stage a few orgies and incidentally buy some beer and hot dogs. I spent the better part of an hour cruising one of its seedier ocean-front neighborhoods where nobody was doing very much to maintain property values. The address I had for the chapel belonged to a thrift store. “Aunt Natalie's Antiques and Collectibles” was trying hard to pass itself off as Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, but most of what it displayed behind the sunbleached chintz curtains of its front window looked like little better than you might find at the Salvation Army.

I walked past the store three or four times before I caught sight of a faded hand-lettered sign propped in a rear corner of the window. It informed me that the chapel I was seeking was at the rear, meaning down a driveway, around the back of the store. There, behind a high wooden gate, I discovered a small, neatly kept garden and at its center a structure one could find no place but in southern California: a small wood-frame bungalow sagging beneath a mock-Gothic facade done in cheesy synthetic stone siding. There was a pathetically stunted turret set slightly askew on the roof; at each corner it sported hand-painted gargoyles that might have been rendered by a Disney Studios reject. A glassed-in notice case beside the gate announced not very encouragingly that the Reverend Cecil Feather was Grand Archon of the Fellowship and Natalie Feather its Mater Suprema.

Almost instinctively I found myself edging back toward the street to make my getaway. Too late. A bell attached to the gate tinkled when I entered and I was spotted. A tall, white-haired woman with an extraordinarily thrusting overbite appeared at the entrance of the chapel. She was wearing an ankle-length, silver-fringed white gown that would have made Ginger Rogers look overdressed when she went flying down to Rio. She greeted me with a broad smile that revealed a mouthful of long, misaligned teeth. “Have you come for
the lecture?” she called across the garden. It was the voice I'd heard on the telephone, throaty, well-modulated, and very, very English.

“Yes …” I said, because what else could I say at that point? I'd apparently interrupted the proceedings. From inside the darkened chapel, curious faces were turned in my direction.