Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1570s, "religious puritan" (implied in Catharism), from Medieval Latin Cathari "the Pure," name taken by Novatians and other Christian sects, from New Testament Greek katharezein "to make clean," from Greek katheros "pure." Related: Catharist.
Wikipedia
A Cathar is a name given to a Christian religious movement with dualistic and gnostic elements that appeared in the Languedoc region of France and other parts of Europe in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries.
Cathar may also refer to:
- Cathar (planet), the fictional homeworld of the cat-like species in the Star Wars galaxy
- Cathar (race), a fictional race of cat-like humanoids in the Star Wars galaxy
Usage examples of "cathar".
They are stored with all the other lost myths the world has known in the Cathar castle of Krak Herrenium.
Christ appears, moreover, an original Cathar tradition which does not have any counterpart in the Bogomil doctrines.
This was originally a Bogomil text and was not completely accepted by either all Bogomils or all Cathars.
The Cathars were an offshoot of the Bogomils, an heretical movement that first flowered in the Balkans in the mid-tenth century, but which remained influential in the area until after the Cathars met their doom.
Many Cathar sects entertained rather more orthodox ideas about John, and there are even signs that the Bogomils in the Balkans held rites on his feast day, 24 June.
Although the precise details vary, it is the common Gnostic belief that reached as far as the medieval Cathars, and which underlines the hermetic cosmology that is the basis of Western occultism, running through alchemy to the hermeticism of the Renaissance.
South of France, although any records confirming this would have been destroyed during the systematic devastation of the Languedocian culture that accompanied the Cathar crusade.
It was all very beautiful, but one comes in time to regard mortal glamours rather as the Cathars regarded them, snares of the Devil to hide the blemishes beneath, to make us love a world which will defile and betray us.
Now, mind you, the bougres were simply Bogomils, Cathars of Bulgarian origin.