"The ideas of courtly love first appeared in the lyric poetry composed by the troubadours of Southern France. In Occitania, many of these wandering minstrels were also Cathar. Speculatively, the Occitanian troubadour ideas of love and relations with women grew spontaneously out of the environment supplied by the region in the eleventh and twelfth centuries."
     - "Searching For A Cathar Feminism, 1100-1300"

"For the first time people wrote extensively about love; courtly love, fine love, adulterous love, the love of the troubadours, and they went a long way into things. The troubadours for example were people who wrote about 'tremendous', 'inaccessible' love and respect for the lady. For the first time the lady is elevated to the level of the man and this is the most important thing in the culture and is perhaps the most symbolic thing about the cultural effervescence of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries."
     - Gerard Zucherro, Rosamonda

"The effects of this love were not purely emotional and physical; it improved a man in every way. By developing the idea that a noble could not be a perfect knight unless he loved a woman the Cathar troubadours laid the foundation of courtly chivalry. Women were bound to enjoy a more elevated position in society. Although she could not fight herself, she could make a man a better warrior. The women of Occitania were accorded a great deal more respect than was common, and in this way did there exist an ideological, courtly, and chivalric kind of feminism."
     - "Searching For A Cathar Feminism, 1100-1300"

The joyous love songs of the troubadours were often heard during Cathars worship but that one may have influenced the other is only a matter of speculation.

"The name troubadour itself (Provencal, trobador) has been traced with reasonable assurance from the Arabic root TRB (Ta-Ra B = 'music, song'), plus -ador, the usual Spanish agential suffix (as, for instance, in conquist-ador); so that Ta Ra B-ador would have meant originally simply 'song- or mustic-maker'.
     - Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

"The troubadours resembled Arab singer, not only in sentiment and character, but also in the very forms of their minstrelsy. Certain titles which these Provencal singers gave to their songs are but translation from Arabic titles."
     - Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs

"...Simultaneously with the rise, at the opening of the twelfth century, of this elite tradition of Arabized European poetry, the 'cult of the dame', likewise 'following the Arab precedent', also suddenly appears. Thus we know have evidence of an unbroken, though variously modified, aristocratic tradition of mystically toned erotic lore, extending from India not only eastward as far as to Lady Murasaki's sentimental Fujiwara court in Kyoto, but also westward into Europe..."
     - Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

"I have found the lever and seen that latch of that cave; occasionally reached even the crystalline bed. In fact, I have danced up to it and back frequently and rather well; yet never have known rest upon it...My eyes I have feasted richly on those gleaming walls, and with upturned gaze to the medallion, vault, and keystone, full eagerly have I destroyed my sight on the ornaments up there, they are so bespangled with Excellence. The little sun giving windows often have sent their rays into my heart."
     - Gottfried von Strassborg, Tristan

"...Whereas according to the Gnostic-Manichaean view nature is corrupt and the lure of the senses to be repudiated, in the poetry of the troubadours, in the Tristan story, and in Gottfried's work above all, nature in its noblest moment - the realization of love - is an end and glory in itself; and the senses, ennobled and refined by courtesy and art, temperance, loyalty and courage, are the guides to this realization. Like a flower potential in its seed, the blossom of the realization of love is potential in every hear (or, at least, every noble heart) and requires only proper cultivation to be fostered to maturity. Hence, if the courtly cult of amor is to be cataloged according to its heresy, it should be indexed rather as Pelagian and as Gnostic or Manichaean, for...Pelagius and his followers absolutely rejected the doctrine of our inheritance of the sin of Adam and Eve, and taught that we have finally no need of supernatural grace, since our nature itself is full of grace; no need for a miraculous redemption, but only of awakening and maturation; and that, though the Christian is advantaged by the model and teaching of Christ; every man if finally (and must be) the author and means of his own fulfillment."
     - Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

"Another phenomenon that, though apparently chiefly literary, also probably comprised an initiatory organization is the Fedeli d'Amore. Representatives of the movement are documented in the thirteenth century in Provence and Italy as well as in France and Belgium. The Fedeli d'Amore constituted a secret and spiritual militia, devoted to the cult of the 'One Woman' and to initiation into the mystery of 'Love'. They all used a 'hidden language' (parlar cruz) so that their doctrine should not be accessible to 'la gente grosa', to use the expression of one of the most famous Fedeli, Francesco da Barberino (1264-1384)."

"'Woman' symbolizes the transcendent intellect, Wisdom. Love of a woman awakens the adept from the lethargy into which the Christian world had fallen because of the spiritual unworthiness of the pope. In the writings of the Fedeli d'Amore we find allusions to a 'widow who is no widow'; this is Madonna Intelligenza, who was left a widow because her husband, the pope, died to spiritual life by devoting himself entirely to things temporal."
     - Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation

Hyperlinks

·The Dish of the Last Supper
·The Mysteries of Sirius