The Cathars · the medieval echo

A dualist movement in Languedoc in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with a two-principle cosmology, an elite of perfecti, and a rejection of the material world — destroyed by the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition that followed it.

Whether they descend from Bogomil and ultimately Manichaean transmission, or arose independently from the same New Testament pressures, is genuinely unsettled — a second instance of the same "which way does the wire run" problem this whole wing is about.