This essay is about some linkages between religions and between sects or “heresies” within religions. Thus the title is a pun, hinting at interconnections.

This started with reading about the Cathars (Albigenses) in the “Holy Blood – Holy Grail” book. They were a sect of “heretics”, put down in a bloody purge in Southern France (Languedoc) in the 6th or 7th century. They had no set dogma (unlike Catholics, but like Quakers and Unitarian), practised meditation (like Gnostics and Quakers), considered Jesus relatively unimportant and probably wholly human (like Unitarians and Arians), were dualistic, i.e. making good and evil, God and the Devil, light and dark equally powerful (like Zoroastrians, Manicheans and Gnostics), believed that the world was created by an evil spirit, Rex Mundi (like the Gnostic demiurge), believed in the equality of women (like Quakers, Bahais, and Druids; the latter had priestesses), and studied the Kabbalah (like Jewish mystics).

I share most of these beliefs; I am not sure about dualism, but I vibrate to “Rosemary’s Baby” and especially “The Son of Rosemary”, in which the Devil speaks of playing a game of Superchess with God, and the Devil wins in a gruesome way. (I don’t believe in the author’s ending that it was all a dream.)

Somehow I feel that if the sects named above all got together across history and geography (time and space), they would almost have the whole truth. But they also need Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, as well in Amerindian native beliefs and even Wicca.