Cathars believed human spirits were the sexless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god, destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the consolamentum, a form of baptism performed when death is imminent, when they would return to the good God. Cathars believed that the good God was the God of the New Testament, creator of the spiritual realm, whereas the evil God was the God of the Old Testament, creator of the physical world whom many Cathars identified as Satan. The Catholic church asserted this was antithetical to monotheism, a fundamental principle that there is only one God, who created all things visible and invisible. The idea of two gods or deistic principles, one good and the other evil, was a point of criticism asserted by the Catholic church against Cathar beliefs. In Cathar texts, the terms Good Men ( Bons Hommes), Good Women ( Bonnes Femmes), or Good Christians ( Bons ChrГ©tiens) are the common terms of self-identification. Though the term Cathar ( / Л€ k Г¦ Оё Й‘Лђ r/) has been used for centuries to identify the movement, whether it identified itself with the name is debated.

Д¬atharism was greatly influenced by the Bogomils of the First Bulgarian Empire, and may have also had roots in the Paulician movement in Armenia and eastern Byzantine Anatolia through Paulicians resettled in Thrace ( Philipoupolis). The Catholic Church denounced its practices, including the consolamentum ritual by which Cathar individuals were baptised and raised to the status of ' Perfect'. Catharism was initially taught by ascetic leaders who set few guidelines and so some Catharist practices and beliefs varied by region and over time. The belief may have originated in the Byzantine Empire. The adherents were sometimes referred to as Albigensians, after the city Albi in southern France where the movement first took hold. Catharism arrived in Western Europe in the Languedoc region of France in the 11th century. Followers were described as Cathars and referred to themselves as Good Christians, and are now mainly remembered for a prolonged period of religious persecution by the Catholic Church, which did not recognize their unorthodox Christianity. Catharism ( / Л€ k Г¦ Оё Й™r ЙЄ z Й™m/ from the Greek: ОєО±ОёО±ПЃОїОЇ, katharoi, 'the pure ') was a Christian dualist or Gnostic movement between the 12th and 14th centuries which thrived in Southern Europe, particularly in northern Italy and southern France.

Crusader kings 2 religion id