the cathar nymph and her victory over birth

[peteb]

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.

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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:
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There was also a second take on it more recently:
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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:
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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.