De Rougement, Swiss-born, was of French Catholic upbringing. In this country today, he would logically be a culture hero of the educated Christian right, certainly in all matters relating to love and marriage—a central concern for him was the rising rate of divorce and the weakening of traditional family structure. Theologically cultivated, he had a deep knowledge of medieval legend and myth. He believed that the story of Tristan and Iseult was the governing myth of Western society, reaching its artistic fulfillment in Wagner’s opera but living on more than vestigially in the novels, plays, and movies of the first half of the 20th Century, and constituting a social root system for our mores and manners of romance. Mind you, he disapproved, but felt that an empathetic understanding was necessary for us to keep track of ourselves. An interesting thing about the tale is that though it is of Celtic culture and northern setting (Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany—it belongs to the Arthurian cycle), only one of the five 12th-Century romances that tell it, that of Thomas of England, is British (writing in French, however); the rest are Provençal or German. It’s not quite a case of rival north/south versions like its cousins, the Grail romances (Glastonbury vs. Montsalvat), which were Wagner’s sources for Lohengrin and Parsifal, but it is the peculiarity that explains de Rougemont’s involvement with the story, and the series of connections he made from Provençal materials to Tristan und Isolde, via the Matter of Britain. “My central purpose,” he wrote, “was to describe the inescapable conflict in the West between passion and marriage.”

I am persuaded that, for artistic purposes, the chain of connections de Rougemont forged, beginning with the sung poetry of the troubadours in the south of what is now France (the Languedoc) in the early 12th Century to the Courts of Love, to the Cathar Heresy a little later in the same region, then to the original written versions of the legend (de Rougemont terms the romances “novels”), and on to the revision by Gottfried of Strasbourg (c. 1200) that was Wagner’s direct source, hangs together in outline, if not in all interpretive detail. Its key component is Catharist dualism. In that belief system (often called “Neo-Manichaean”), the material world is inherently evil, the creation of Satan. Man lives fallen in darkness, trapped in the body. Only if he ascends to God’s Heaven will he find the light and be reunited with his soul. But the only route to the light is through death. Here on earth, bound in matter, the best one can do is to prepare for the journey through a life of strict purification.

The Cathars were a true counterchurch. Closely related to the Bogomils of Bulgaria and surrounding lands, they had been practicing their faith in secret for an indeterminate time before emerging in force in the Languedoc and the Rhineland in the mid-12th Century. Considering themselves the true Christians and orthodox Roman Catholicism a perversion of Christ’s teachings, they rejected the Catholic sacraments, most importantly that of marriage (to procreate was to further extend worldly existence and the reign of Satan). Most of the church’s received members, though, the “Believers,” were allowed to marry—otherwise, after all, there would have been no little Cathars to carry on the tradition—and women had equal status with men. It was only a small minority of the faith’s followers who, through a rigorous process of austerity, prayer, an oath of chastity, and the acceptance of dualism in its absolute form, were initiated into the class of The Perfect via a ceremony called the Consolamentum. So widespread and powerful did Catharism become that the Church, under Pope Innocent the 3rd, launched a horrendous Crusade to exterminate it and, with the aid of the Inquisition, founded for this purpose, largely succeeded. In de Rougemont’s accounting, however, the Cathars’ beliefs endured, though often subliminally, in enough artistic hearts and minds to carry them forward in the culture for some four hundred years, till the myth was taken up by Richard Wagner in the 1850s. ^(I)