Fiction as Persuasion

[JackS]

I suggested in previous posts that people are often persuaded by stories rather than being blasted by agit prop. I posted a couple of vegan oriented story podcasts which received some positive feedback. Here’s another. Did you know the Cathars were vegans? I live these days in the South of France in Cathar country. There are still powerful reminders here of how the Catholic Church attempted to wipe out the ‘sect’ for heresy.

The Living Cathars. Keeping the flame alive.

 

[Brian W]

The Cathars ate fish and there hadn't always been enmity between them and the Catholic church.

Similaries and differences between, and criticisms of, the Cathar Church, Catholic Church and Waldensian Church

In many respects Cathar parfaits resembled modern day vegans, except that they did eat fish. (The justification was that fish, as they believed, did not reproduce sexually and so could not imprison a soul as other animals could). That fish reproduced asexually was a genuine and widespread belief in the Middle Ages.

Cathars and local Catholics in the Languedoc seem to have lived happily together for over a century. We have no record of a single incident of friction between the two faiths before the early thirteenth century - indeed we know that Cathars and Catholics coexisted not just within the territories of the Counts of Toulouse and Foix, and of the Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne, but within each fief, each town and even within many families. It was surprisingly common for even Catholic priests to have become Cathar believers.

 

[JackS]

Thanks for the correction re fish. Must not have researched enough! The rather surreal element of this appears to be that the Cathars regarded fish as a kind of non-meat since (they believed?) fish don’t have sex like animals. Their veganism was a result of the belief that sex, itself, was an impure act! So you can;t est anything thst copulates. As to co-existence - there seems little doubt that persecution took place (on both sides) with terrible savagery over decades . But much of the history of the time was written, as usual, by the conquerors - the Catholic Church. Not good for historical exactitude! Anyway, my story is fiction. Either with veracity or with the the get out of jail card of it being a parallel reality!