730 CATHAR LITERATURE
from southern to northern France, Catalonia, and the whole of northern Italy,
with scattered communities from Lombardy down to Rome.
The spread of gnosticism in this area of western Europe also coincided in
twelfth-century Languedoc with the emergence of Kabbalism. The Sefer ha-
Bahir (Book of Bright Light) is, as Gershom Sholem demonstrates, an exam-
ple of gnostic Kabbalism as well as the most significant extant document of
medieval Jewish mysticism and symbolism. The many dissenting religious
movements in this area of southern France made it a new Alexandria, where,
as in the ancient hellenistic capital, diverse religions and philosophical move-
ments flourished, including neoplatonism, hermeticism, Judaism, Christian-
ity, and, a child of this diversity, gnosticism.
BOGOMIL ROOTS OF THE CATHARS
The legendary founder of Bogomil neomanichaeism was the tenth-century
Slavic priest Bogomil, also called Theophilos. The Bogomils, who owed many
ideas to the earlier Paulicians^2 in Armenia and the Near East, were the most
powerful sectarian movement in the history of the Balkans. Predominantly
Slavs with some Greek followers, they were a powerful force in Constantino-
ple, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, and especially in Serbia and Bosnia, where they
persisted for five centuries and for a period vied for dominance with ortho-
doxy. In the capital city of Constantinople the Bogomils were a powerful pop-
ulist movement that vigorously opposed Byzantine culture and theocracy.
They fell into obscurity in the fifteenth century with the Ottoman conquest of
Byzantium, but in their active years the Bogomils in the east, together with the
Cathars in the west, formed a network of dualist communities from the Black
Sea to the Atlantic.
- A Christian sect that appears in Armenia in the sixth century and was associated with Nesto-
rianism. This "heretical" sect favored Luke and the letters of Paul, hence the epithet Paulicians.
By the seventh century it had spread through the Byzantine Empire. After being persecuted by
the Byzantines, the Paulicians sided with the Muslims in their struggle against the Eastern
Roman Empire. In the mid-ninth century they had their own state at Tephike (in present-day
Turkey). In 871 the Byzantine emperor Basil I attacked them and they fled to Syria, and a cen-
tury later they were expelled from Syria and combined with the Bogomils, largely Slavs, who
were considered a barbaric menace to the Orthodox of Constantinople. After the eleventh cen-
tury the Paulicians disappeared as a separate identity, but as a sect, now merged with the Bo-
gomils, their missionaries emigrated to southwestern Europe, where they brought the essential
neomanichaean texts, in Latin translation, that became the basic scriptures of Catharism.