Raymond VI, Comte de Toulouse, one of the
most ardent of the Albigense _Credentes_, had his harem.[220] The
Albigensian movement has been falsely represented as a protest merely
against the tyranny of the Church of Rome; in reality it was a rising
against the fundamental doctrines of Christianity--more than this,
against all principles of religion and morality. For whilst some of the
sect openly declared that the Jewish law was preferable to that of the
Christians,[221] to others the God of the Old Testament was as abhorrent
as the "false Christ" who suffered at Golgotha; the old hatred of the
Gnostics and Manicheans for the demiurgus lived again in these rebels
against the social order. Forerunners of the seventeenth-century
Libertines and eighteenth-century Illuminati, the Albigense nobles,
under the pretext of fighting the priesthood, strove to throw off all
the restraints the Church imposed.

Inevitably the disorders that took place throughout the South of France
led to reprisals, and the Albigenses were suppressed with all the
cruelty of the age--a fact which has afforded historians the opportunity
to exalt them as noble martyrs, victims of ecclesiastical despotism. But
again, as in the case of the Templars, the fact that they were
persecuted does not prove them innocent of the crimes laid to their
charge.

Satanism

At the beginning of the fourteenth century another development of
Dualism, far more horrible than the Manichean heresy of the Albigenses,
began to make itself felt. This was the cult of Satanism, or black
magic. The subject is one that must be approached with extreme caution,
owing to the fact that on one hand much that has been written about it
is the result of mediaeval superstition, which sees in every departure
from the Roman Catholic Faith the direct intervention of the Evil One,
whilst on the other hand the conspiracy of history, which denies _in
toto_ the existence of the Occult Power, discredits all revelations on
this question, from whatever source they emanate, as the outcome of
hysterical imagination.[222] This is rendered all the easier since the
subject by its amazing extravagance lends itself to ridicule.

It is, however, idle to deny that the cult of evil has always existed;
the invocation of the powers of darkness was practised in the earliest
days of the human race and, after the Christian era, found its
expression, as we have seen, in the Cainites, the Euchites, and the
Lu