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+--- Thread: the cathar nymph and her victory over birth (/thread-1752.html)
the cathar nymph and her victory over birth - peteb - 03-04-2017
I was just reading about a religious group called Cathars. They were about at the time the VM was done and no doubt practiced plenty of art in their monasteries.
They called themselves Christians but their beliefs showed they were not.
A Cathar could draw a woman holding her uterus aloft. A Cathar might have thought that a victorious symbol.
RE: the cathar nymph and her victory over birth - Koen G - 03-04-2017
Hi Pete, welcome to the forum!
What you have is a hypothesis. When I read about the Cathars, I can see why you relate them to the VM, with their relatively positive attitude towards women, possible ties to Gnosticism and all that.
But there are some immediately apparent issues (from reading the Wiki). Firstly, Catharism was completely crushed by the early 14th century. Do you mean that the VM is a copy of an older Cathar document? That's possible, though it seems worth mentioning.
Most importantly though, you say that the Cathars were not Christians, from which I deduce that you want to account for the fact that the VM does not show many Christian elements, which is a good starting point for an investigation. The Cathars being labelled heretics by the Catholic Church does not mean that they were pagans though. It just means that they did not interpret the Bible in the exact way the Catholic church did. Differences included that the Cathars believed in reincarnation, with elements that remind of Gnosticism. They also believed that the god of the Old testament was a different entity than the one from the New Testament. Maintaining such beliefs was enough to be burnt at the stake during certain periods of the Inquisition.
What this means though, is that the Cathars would still have appeared very Christian to a modern viewer. The Bible was still the basis of their beliefs. From what I can tell, the Cross would have been omnipresent as well. I suspect that the deeper you dig into Catharism research, the more elements you will encounter that are not compatible with what we see in the VM. But you can always try
RE: the cathar nymph and her victory over birth - VViews - 03-04-2017
Hi PeteB,
Well, it sure is a surprise to see the Cathar approach resuscitated!
If you don't know what I'm referring to, check out this summary of the first iteration:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
There was also a second take on it more recently:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Also bear in mind that in the middle ages, women's reproductive anatomy was not understood the way it is today.
Here are a few medieval images of the womb from another thread:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
RE: the cathar nymph and her victory over birth - -JKP- - 03-04-2017
I suspect they knew more than we realize.
Even if they weren't allowed to dissect humans, they were regularly dissecting dogs and other animals at the medical schools, and butchers were opening up carcasses to anything that was eaten.
Reproductive anatomy wasn't well understood or documented, but I'm certain it must have been explored in some sense of the word. Part of the reason it wasn't documented was because of the prohibitions against discussing such things and... even if you got the information from looking at a horse, a pig, or a dog, if you diagrammed it, you might be accused of having looked inside a human.
RE: the cathar nymph and her victory over birth - peteb - 04-04-2017
(03-04-2017, 07:41 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Pete, welcome to the forum!
What you have is a hypothesis. When I read about the Cathars, I can see why you relate them to the VM, with their relatively positive attitude towards women, possible ties to Gnosticism and all that.
But there are some immediately apparent issues (from reading the Wiki). Firstly, Catharism was completely crushed by the early 14th century. Do you mean that the VM is a copy of an older Cathar document? That's possible, though it seems worth mentioning.
Most importantly though, you say that the Cathars were not Christians, from which I deduce that you want to account for the fact that the VM does not show many Christian elements, which is a good starting point for an investigation. The Cathars being labelled heretics by the Catholic Church does not mean that they were pagans though. It just means that they did not interpret the Bible in the exact way the Catholic church did. Differences included that the Cathars believed in reincarnation, with elements that remind of Gnosticism. They also believed that the god of the Old testament was a different entity than the one from the New Testament. Maintaining such beliefs was enough to be burnt at the stake during certain periods of the Inquisition.
What this means though, is that the Cathars would still have appeared very Christian to a modern viewer. The Bible was still the basis of their beliefs. From what I can tell, the Cross would have been omnipresent as well. I suspect that the deeper you dig into Catharism research, the more elements you will encounter that are not compatible with what we see in the VM. But you can always try
Thanks Koen, my read of Cathars is that they did not hold with the sanctity of life, argument enough for the inquisitors.
(03-04-2017, 08:28 AM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi PeteB,
Well, it sure is a surprise to see the Cathar approach resuscitated!
If you don't know what I'm referring to, check out this summary of the first iteration:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
There was also a second take on it more recently:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Also bear in mind that in the middle ages, women's reproductive anatomy was not understood the way it is today.
Here are a few medieval images of the womb from another thread:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Thanks VV, I've read St George and Stallings (part) and am going to put together a post on a blog I've been running for the past few years.
RE: the cathar nymph and her victory over birth - peteb - 04-04-2017
It seems that one of the problems is that the VM was written in the 15th century and the Cathars were dispersed during the 13 /14th centuries. My simple solution is someone in the 15th copied what somebody else wrote in the 13th.
Given that VM may be a Cathar scripture of sorts, the theory doesn't sound too far-fetched.
RE: the cathar nymph and her victory over birth - peteb - 04-04-2017
(03-04-2017, 02:09 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I suspect they knew more than we realize.
Even if they weren't allowed to dissect humans, they were regularly dissecting dogs and other animals at the medical schools, and butchers were opening up carcasses to anything that was eaten.
Reproductive anatomy wasn't well understood or documented, but I'm certain it must have been explored in some sense of the word. Part of the reason it wasn't documented was because of the prohibitions against discussing such things and... even if you got the information from looking at a horse, a pig, or a dog, if you diagrammed it, you might be accused of having looked inside a human.
The Spanish inquisitors would take a dim view indeed of an image of a woman holding aloft her reproductive organs, don't you think, JKP?
RE: the cathar nymph and her victory over birth - Koen G - 04-04-2017
Fact remains that from a modern perspective they were definitely Christians, and the bible, God and Jesus were at the centre of their beliefs. A pure Cathar work would never appear as secular as the VM does.
The first link provided by VViews cites the following passage from the Cathar version of baptism:
Quote:"If he is to receive the consolamentum forthwith, let him perform his melioramentum and take the Book from the hand of the elder. And let the elder exhort him and preach to him with suitable scriptural verses and in such words as are proper for the consolamentum. Let him speak thus:Etc etc etc
’Peter, you wish to receive the spiritual baptism by which the Holy Spirit is given in the Church of God, together with the Holy Prayer and the imposition of hands by Good Men. Of this baptism our Lord Jesus Christ says in the Gospel of St. Matthew to His disciples:
Quote:"Going therefore, teach ye all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world." [Matt. 28:19-20]
And in the Gospel of St. Mark, He says:
Quote:"Go ye into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be condemned." [Mark 16:15-16]
And in the Gospel of St. John, He says to to Nicodemus:
Quote:"Amen, amen, I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." [John 3:5]
And John the Baptist spoke of this baptism when he said,
Quote:"I baptize with water but He that shall come after me is mighter than I, the latchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to loose. He shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire." [John 1:26-27; Matt. 3:11]
And Jesus says in the Acts of the Apostles,
Quote:"For John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit." [Acts 1:5]
This holy baptism with the imposition of hands was instituted by Jesus Christ, according to that which St. Luke recounts, and He says that His friends shall perform it, as St. Mark relates,
Quote:"They shall lay their hands upon the sick and they shall recover." [Mark 16:18]
Also, the second article linked by VViews theorizes that the Cathars moved to the Americas where they lived "high up in the trees". Literally.
RE: the cathar nymph and her victory over birth - -JKP- - 04-04-2017
(04-04-2017, 12:48 AM)peteb Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Spanish inquisitors would take a dim view indeed of an image of a woman holding aloft her reproductive organs, don't you think, JKP?
Yes, probably so. Even the public at large would probably denounce it. Human anatomy was definitely one of those hush-hush topics and if it were explicitly expressed in a manuscript, it would no doubt be classed with manuscripts that dealt with "the black arts" (geomancy, kabbala, etc.) which were especially suppressed in the later 15th century.
Leonardo da Vinci somehow got away with an explicit drawing of coitus (and some anatomical drawings) but I don't know whether they were seen during his lifetime or discovered after he died.