Author: Isaac Ben Jacob and Sarah Fishberg
Publisher: Frontier Publishing, 2009
Price: £11.99 (paperback)
Isbn: 9781931882873

The thesis of The Rise is that strange death rituals practised by the ancient Chaldeans (and apparently by Tobit in the apocry­phal biblical book) were taken up by the Manicheans in the early centuries of Christianity, and then by the 10th–12th century Bogomils in Bulgaria and the 12th–13th century Cathars in southern France, and eventually by Abbé Bérenger Saunière in Rennes-le-Château a century ago, making him fabulously rich.

It’s an interesting theory, and the pseudonymous authors provide a lot of footnoted sources. The problem is, these rarely supp­ort any of the claims in the text.

The progression from Chald­eans to Saunière is led by assert­ions rather than evidence. It’s an old scholarly adage that theory should come from data and not the other way around, but unfortunately this book falls into the trap of so many speculative history books in coming up with a fascinating idea then selecting a lot of very circumstantial evid­ence to support it.

The authors need to be able to show clear links at every step of the way over two millennia; they don’t.

They write as if every death rite in history (including the Cathar consolamentum) is their ancient Chaldean rite; as if every heretical religion (including the Waldensians and the Cathars) is the same heresy; and as if every occurrence of any vaguely similar symbol over many centuries (the Tau cross, the Chi Rho, the ankh, the IHS monogram and others) must mean the same thing.

By their own logic, the CND, Sixties hippies with the peace symbol and every parish church today that has IHS on its altar cloth, must all be followers of the Chaldean-Manichaean-Cathar-Saunière death ritual cult.

They also show little comprehension of Catholicism, several times speaking of saints being worshipped rather than venerated – a subtle but vital distinction.

Perhaps their oddest claim is that the scattered remnants of the Cathars, instead of fading away or drifting back into the Catholic Church, deliberately infiltrated the Church, becoming the Franciscan and Dominican Orders. (As, in reality, the Dominicans were created to defeat the Cathars, this theory holds no water what­soever). By this means, the authors say, the Chaldean death rite was brought into the heart of the Catholic Church.

Over and over again the reader cries: “Evidence?” but to no avail. The authors argue their case in such an opaque manner that frequently I had to read paragraphs several times to try to understand how they were connecting A and B to get to C – and was still none the wiser. This may, in part, be due to the translation, which is stodgy, with no feel for the subtleties of English syntax, and often grammat­ically confused.

A further problem is that the authors, being French, use almost wholly French sources, and so miss much recent English-language scholarship.

And so a book about mediæval death rituals doesn’t refer to Paul Binski’s authoritative Medieval Death, and a book about the Manicheans and the Cathars doesn’t refer to Yuri Stoyanov’s essential work on dualist religions, The Other God, or to several other important works on the Cathars.

Nearly everything they say about the Cathars is taken from works vehemently opposed to them, and therefore untrust­worthy as sources. They quote stories about Saints Dominic and Francis from The Golden Legend as if this were a factual source rather than a collection of hagio­graphic fables. In other words, they have scant regard for any sort of historical methodology.

In its final chapter, the book degenerates into incoherence, with scattered ideas, disjointed argument, no attempt to gather together the threads into any sort of conclusion, and astonishing speculation about what Saunière got up to as “a practising magic­ian in a heretical cult”.

This book has been widely discussed in advance on various esoteric forums for over a year; it’s a great shame it doesn’t live up to its publicity.

The mediæval cult of the dead is a fascinating subject, but this book adds nothing but fog to any understanding of it.