The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy (Yale Nota Bene)

The Catholic and Orthodox Churches regarded dualism as a heresy that had been transmitted in secrecy from late Antiquity; dualist heretics believed that it was Christianity as it was intended before the Church corrupted it. In this complete reworking of the author's previous work ( The Hidden Tradition in Europe 1994), Stoyanov widens the scope to trace the transmission of the movement through Egypt and the Near East and to examine the growing development between magic and heresy. Dualists believed that behind the known public God there was another with power over the world to come; Stoyanov searches for the identity of this god through the ancient beliefs of the Near East, through Byzantium and the Crusades to Catharism in Languedoc, culminating in the fall of Montsegur.