ABSTRACT
For Roche this was a serious intellectual and, indeed, moral endeavour, but he had arrived at this interest by a route which had led him to identify powerfully with his subject. In 1950 he had established the Societe du Souvenir et des Etudes Cathares, significantly at the highly emotive site of Montsegur, creating a structure which complemented the bulletin founded two years before. He had already written two strongly pro-Cathar books, L'Eglise romane et les Cathares albigeois (1937) and Ie Catharisme (1938), while as early as 1899 he had founded a short-lived jourual, Ie Reveil des Albigeois, intended to promote a revival of interest in Cathar morality and beliefs. Moreover, after he had met the Austrian scientist, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of 'anthroposophy', and editor of another review, Die Gnosis, in 1922, he attempted to create an underpinning for his own life and interest in Catharism by adopting Steiner's philosophy that man's development of his intellect could ultimately lead to the rediscovery of the ability (which Steiner thought to be innate) to perceive and participate in spiritual things, partially lost because ofthe growth of material concerns.2 Like most proponents of a cause he was concerned, too, to establish its legitimacy through historical continuity and therefore envisaged a link from Gnosticism and Manichaeism through Catharism down to the Freemasons, in whose lodge at Carcassonne he played a prominent role. Indeed, for Roche, the Cathar treasure removed from M~:mtsegur during the siege of 1243-44 was not the Grail in the sense used in literature - a chalice or a stone - nor the more mundane precious metals and money which the sergeant, Imbert of Salles (who was one of the defenders of Montsegur), described to the inquisitors, but the ancient literature which, as heirs of the original dualists, the Cathars had a duty to protect.
