FT266

It had been raining for weeks on end in the French Pyrenees, day after day of cold wind and grey skies. Still, even in these absolutely wretched conditions, the faithful gathered as usual on the morning of 21 June at the mountaintop castle of Montsegur to view the annual ‘solar phenomenon’ in the donjon tower room. Some 35 to 40 pilgrims from Argentina, England, Norway, Germany and other more exotic ports of call huddled in the pre-dawn darkness, praying that the clouds would part and allow a beam or two through. A local television crew from Toulouse was conducting vox-pop interviews, asking various members of the crowd whether they were there for religious or spiritual reasons, but no-one seemed to be able to give them a straightforward answer. Most folk looked cold and a little sleepy, but surprisingly no one seemed upset or particularly disappointed by the weather. There was a general feeling of camaraderie, a sense that having made the journey to this remote place it was enough to simply be there, regardless of the outcome. 

The fortress of Montsegur clings to a spur of rock 1,207m above the hills of Plantaurel on the northern face of the Saint Barthelemy massif, and thanks largely to its inaccessible location it was among the very last of the so-called ‘Cathar’ castles to fall to the crusaders. During a 10-month siege, the castle’s defenders, a core group of little more than 300 knights and men-at-arms, held at bay an army of up to 10,000 battle-hardened dogs of war. Despite the individual heroism, some might say fanaticism, of the defenders, the battle’s outcome was sadly inevitable. The beleaguered garrison capitulated in the spring of 1244, and after a brief ceasefire to allow the surviving heretics to celebrate the spring equinox, a date synonymous with the Cathar feast day of Bema, some 225 martyrs walked willingly into the fires kindled by their persecutors on the camp de cremat, the ‘field of the stake’, at the base of the mountain. The fall of Montsegur marked the end of any real political resistance to the patriarchal rule of the Holy Roman Church, and effectively rang the death knell for the mysterious dualist faith of old Occitania. The last of the Cathar perfecti, Guilhelm Belibaste, who perished at the hands of the Inquisition in 1321, prophesied before going to the stake that the “laurel will turn green again” after 700 years. Looking about, however, I couldn’t help but wonder if these diehards, including me, waiting on this windswept crag were really the only ones left. The last of the faithful… 

Finally, the clouds parted as if on cue, affording those assembled a brief glimpse of the curious spectacle that they had come from all four corners of the Earth to witness. At approximately 6.05am, the disc of the Sun appeared above the horizon and the first rays began to enter the east-facing arrow slits in the lower chamber of the donjon-keep, marking out a rectangle of light on the inner side of the west-facing slit in the opposite wall. As the Sun climbed higher, its rays intensified and the fiery colours visible within the west-facing balistraria seemed to deepen and brighten. By 6.10am, a second rectangle had appeared in the adjacent aperture while three more ghostly squares of light began to drift across the upper reaches of the chamber’s western wall. 

The yearly light show in the keep is one of the only ‘supernatural’ phenomena on this haunted Earth courteous enough to be not only repeatable, but also to stick to a regular schedule. Strangely, the report filed by the Groupe de Recherches Archéologique de Montsegur et Environs (GRAME), who conducted the definitive archæological survey of the area between 1964 and 1976, concludes only that “…the alleged solar phenomena in the donjon tower have not been scientifically documented, witnessed or verified.” Most of the folk assembled in the tower room on this particular chilly midsummer morning would undoubtedly have disagreed. 

All too many ‘supernatural’ events turn out on closer inspection to be the manifestation of purely natural forces. It follows that the castle’s nameless architects would have required both a profound understanding of the natural world and a firm grasp of the all-but-vanished art of siderial geography to have created this display. The intensity of the colours projected onto the inner surfaces of the castle’s arrow slits are in all probability achieved by making use of the density of the atmosphere as a natural prism. Air molecules in the atmosphere, while invisible to the naked eye, have relative substance and reflective qualities similar to more substantial objects on the Earth’s surface. At dawn on the Summer Solstice, the rays of the rising Sun have to pass through a greater amount of atmosphere before reaching the east-facing arrow slits than at any other time, filtering out all other parts of the light spectrum save for those jack-o’-lantern oranges and richly infernal reds exhibited in the donjon tower. It has been pointed out that the floorplan of the donjon-keep is reminiscent of the design of early pinhole cameras, a principle that was probably put into practice in Roman, Greek and possibly even Bronze Age temples long before it was first described by rogue Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in his ‘Ars Magna Lucis et Umbræ’ (1646). Other Gothic edifices such as Chartres Cathedral display similar features, although questions remain: why would anyone have bothered designing and building such an elaborate structure, and for what purpose might it have been intended? 

The castle is orientated towards the four points of the compass and built on such a strange plan that close study has led to the most unusual theories, including the notion that it was once a ‘solar temple’. There is no documentary proof however of any connection between Catharism and Sun worship, any more than there is with the megalith builders of New Grange, the mysterious Mayan architects of Chichen Itza, or the wholly fabulous civilisations of lost Atlantis and Lemuria. Moreover, the castle we see today cannot be as it was in 1204 when Raymonde de Perelha, at the request of the Esclarmonde de Foix, the venerable high priestess of the Cathar faith, first gave the orders to fortify the existing ruins of what may originally have been a pagan temple dedicated to the obscure Ibero-Gaulic moon goddess Belisenna. The immortal spirit of Esclarmonde is believed by some to still frequent the donjon-keep and is commonly conflated in popular mythology with both the keeper of the Holy Grail and the mythical ‘White Lady’ of the Pyrenees, queen of the færies and guardian of the doorway to the ‘otherworld’ (for more on the ‘White Lady’ of the Pyrenees see ‘The Dark Side of Lourdes’, FT222:32–38). 

In all likelihood, however, the yearly display in the tower room owes its origins to more earthly hands. The castle underwent a number of structural changes after the siege of 1244 when the fortress was granted to the de Levis family, who used it to garrison their troops. Some historians suggest that it was possibly rebuilt on its current alignment to commemorate the reign of the ‘Sun King’ – Louis XIV (1638–1715). In the absence of any firm archæological evidence for or against these views, the actual rationale behind the builders creating the phenomenon must perforce remain a mystery – at least for now. In the meantime, the enigmatic light show continues to manifest every year for approximately six days on either side of the solstice, weather allowing, with stubborn regularity. Indeed, you can practically set your watch by it… 

We stood in silence, gazing wide-eyed at the spectral display, knowing that we were receiving a garbled message from the other side of time whose true meaning would never be fully known to us. After reaching their apogee at approximately 6.20am, the lights in the keep began to fade. Jagged shadows encroached on the dimming rectangles, like the slowly closing bars of a port-cullis, until by 6.30 no trace of the fleeting phenomenon remained. 

A wizened old man with a grey beard who had been watching from the back of the chamber throughout finally broke the silence, asking in halting English whether we had ever been there for the winter solstice, when the rising sun shines through the longitudinal arrow slit in the north-eastern wall. I told him we hadn’t. Last winter, the conditions had been just too darned inclement, even for me. The old dude smiled and silently shook his head, venturing no further comment. 

As we made our way from the tower room we felt a hot gust of wind against our faces.

And, just like that, summer began…