Monthly Archives: February 2022

Prometheus’s dream: the comprehension of nature – talk by Sergi Grau Torras at ‘The golden thread of the free mind’

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Classical mythology recounts that Prometheus, son of the god Iapetus and the nymph Clymene, created humankind from clay in order to repopulate the Earth. Having done this, he realised that humanity was defenceless against nature and wild animals, so he decided to climb Mount Olympus to steal fire from the gods and to give it to the human population so that this population might reap its benefits. His act, however, aroused the wrath of Zeus, who punished Prometheus by chaining him up forevermore; he was nevertheless set free by Heracles.

The versions of the myth transmitted by ancient witnesses, from those of Hesiod to Aesop and Aeschylus, for instance, contain Continue reading

Catharism a refuge for women – talk by Gwendoline Hancke at ‘The golden thread of the free mind’

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To bring up ‘a free space’ for women in medieval society of Southern France, might at first sight seem to be a paradox or even an anachronism. In the Languedoc of the 13th century however, women of all social classes moved in social and religious structures that were dominated by men.

Yet, through their prestige in the Cathar teachings and their priestly role in religious life, women could in a modest way open the gates of that male domination. Precisely because the Cathar religion was so deeply rooted in Continue reading

On the wings of love – talk by Maria Bartels at the Symposium ‘The golden thread of the free mind’

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In the castles of the Occitan nobility and in the houses of the Cathar faithful, in the hymns and the poetry of the troubadours and in the sermons of the “perfects”, there was a word that was perhaps at the very heart of Occitan culture and society in the 12th and 13th centuries: amor.

However, two distinct Greek concepts underlie the Latin term amor: eros and agape, concepts that originally had nothing what­ soever to do with each other and which are, in fact, opposed to each other. What worlds are concealed behind them, and in what way do they form the basis for Catharism and the fin’amor? How did these two kinds of love come together in the Occitania of those days? And how can they still come together in our own souls? Continue reading

Freedom of conscience in Occitan Catharism – talk by Eduard Berga Salomó at the Symposium ‘The golden thread of the free mind’

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The history of the human being is the history of the conquest of freedom. Freedom as a species, in prehistoric times; freedom as a people in the first civilizations; individual freedom in our Christian era.

Christianity has paved the way for individual freedom in the West by offering everyone the possibility of receiving the Spirit in their own inner being, through the baptism of the Paraclete and through the formation of Continue reading