798 EPILOGUE
in 1334 the inquisitor became Pope Benedict XII. Every word of his interroga-
tions was stored in the Vatican. In the last years, after modern historians
pressed the Vatican successfully for the publication of the Fournier Register, a
slew of remarkable historical studies on the politics and religion of the
Cathars have appeared. They include the classic Montaillous: The Promised
Land of Error by Le Roy Ladurie, The Perfect Heresy: Revolutionary Life and
Death of the Medieval Cathars (2000) by Stephen O'Shea, The Cathars and
the Albigensian Crusade (2001) by Michael Costen, and a retelling of events
revealed in the Fournier's interrogations, The Good Men: A Novel of Heresy
(2002) by Charmaigne Craig, who traces three generations of a Montaillou
family in her novel of misery, love, and trial within doomed walls.
The pained but extraordinary history of the gnostic speculation, with its
external misadventures with church and civil powers that it rejected and its
spirit-filled solitude of shining darkness, is every year a more articulate mem-
ory in books and images. The energy of discovery, as vital as that generated by
archaeological and old temple finds, is apparent, from the Pays cathare (Cathar
Land) signs that have popped up all over southern France to the growing band
of serious thinkers and creative writers who have assumed the gnostic experi-
ence as their intellectual heritage.
DISCOVERING THE BOOK OF THE MIND
The gnostics endured. The many schools of gnosticism are of supreme inter-
est. Now the loot at Nag Hammadi has given us works of Sethians as well as
Valentinians, the latter including the Gospel of Truth, possibly by Valentinos
himself. Other major finds from the Egyptian earth are the Gospel of Thomas,
those wisdom sayings of Jesus that are now increasingly printed as and called
the Fifth Gospel, and the non-Christian Sethian works the Three Steles of
Seth, the Paraphrase of Shem, and the Foreigner/Allogenes. The Sethians, like
the Essenes before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, were largely un-
known except through commentators and opponents.
Whatever the school, there are general principles that go through all the
gnostic teachings. We are confined to the earthly cycles of birth and death in a
materialist universe, captive in the innermost dungeon that is the earth. We
are remnants of spirit fallen into bodies, but bodies that retain a tiny element
of salvation in them. That salvific hope is precisely the spark, the light of the
spirit in the darkness of the flesh, but it remains unconscious and unknown
until gnosis, a secret, revelatory knowledge, can extricate its light from cosmic