Antonin Gadal

[Imhotep]

Antonin Gadal was a French mystic and historian who dedicated his life to study of the Cathars in the south of France, their spirituality, beliefs and ideology.

Gadal was born in 1877 in the Pyrenean town of Tarascon in Ariege region in the south of France, which was one of the centres of the heretical gnostic Christian movement known as the Cathars or the Albigensians in the 11th-12th Centuries. Another major Cathar centre, Montsegur, the castle where they made their last stand against the Crusaders, is not far away to the north-east.

Gadal grew up in a house next to the Tarasconian historian Adolphe Garrigou who specialised in the history of the Cathars (along with his son he is honoured by a plaque on the building he lived in in one of the squares in Tarascon). Garrigou saw himself as a preserver of the memory of the Christian sect and, seeing a kindred spirit in the young man took him under his wing as an inheritor of his knowledge. As an adult, Gadal worked as a schoolteacher but his fascination with the Cathars lead him to work for the Tourist Board Of Ussat Ornolac. In doing so he was able to explore the Pyrenean caves himself, which he believed were hiding places and sites of worship for the Cathars. Through his investigations he developed a detailed picture of what he believed were the inner mysteries of their faith. Otto Rahn, the Nazi historian and occultist, is believed to have approached him in his own quest for the secrets of the Cathars (Rahn believed that the Cathars were the trustees of the Holy Grail) but Gadal refused to co-operate with him.

Gadal's belief was that the spirituality of the Cathars traced back through various Gnostic beliefs (eg Manicheanism, Christian Gnosticism) to the most ancient sources of the Western Mystery Tradition - the Essenes, Hermeticism, the Egyptian Mysteries etc - but seen in a Christian context. He argued that in the Ariege basin, and particularly the Lombrives caves, Cathar Perfecti (the spiritual elite of the movement) underwent a three year period of initiation in which they experienced a transformation of the human soul, much like that experienced by Christ in the Gospels - Transfiguration, Death & Resurrection. Transformed by the Holy Spirit, the Perfecti then went out into the world, having 'died' to it, to spread the Cathar faith and minister to the Credentes, or Believers. Gadal's belief was that this process of Initiation was contained within the Christian message of the Gospels and the cycle of the Christ story.

Through his interest in the Gnostic Christianity of the Cathars and his belief in its connection with an ancient tradition, in his later years Gadal made contact with the leaders of the neo-Gnostic, Christian Rosicrucian movement the Lectorium Rosicrucianum - Jan van Rijckenborgh and Catharose de Petri. Gadal's theories and ideas subsequently became a very important element in the cosmology of the Lectorium and to this day members of the society embark on yearly pilgrimages to the Ariege and the Lombrives caves.

As well as his work in the Ariege region, Gadal travelled widely through Europe and the world lecturing on the Cathars, his findings and theories, many of which were rejected by academics as being too mystical or speculative. His books include The Inheritance Of The Cathars and On The Trail Of The Holy Grail, both printed by the Rosycross Press, the printing arm of the Lectorium. He died in 1962.