Antonin Gadal
The Work of a Man Inspired by the Spirit
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 Introduction  
 Preamble  
 Who Is Antonin Gadal?  
 The Source  
 The Doctrine  
 Pyrenean Catharism  
 The Catharism and Its Origins  
 The Mystery of the Caves  
   Antique Sanctuaries  
   A Bible for Mankind  
   Retreats, Caves, Caverns  
   Double Caves  
   Cave-Churches  
   Caves: Places of Initiation  
   The Cathars’ Cathedral.  
   An Underground Epic  
   A Peaceful Ending  
   A Moving Rediscovery  
   In Quest of the Spirit  
   Bethlehem  
   Death and Resurrection  
   A New Man  
   Becoming 'Perfect'  
   The New Vesture  
   The Path of the Stars  
   The Caves Speak…  
   The Spoulga of Bouan  
   Lux Lucet in Tenebris  
   Formation, Reformation, Transformation  
   The Dualism of the Cathars  
 The Grail in the Pyrenees  
 Grail, Cathars and Rosycross  
 Interesting Links  
 Contact  
 
Antique Sanctuaries


In the twelfth century, the Ariège Valley was still formed of a huge lake closed before Tarascon by a natural dam. Its waves beat the flanks of the ‘Cathar haven’, an impressive mountain massif with innumerable caves: Ussat, Ornolac and Bouan, the caves of Lombrives, Fontanet, Ramploques, the Hermit and many others.

Gadal focused all his attention on these caves. Not only was he the operator of the Lombrives cave, but he also owned many other caves (sixty altogether) in the nearby villages.

For Gadal, such caves, such ruins close to abysses, could only be sanctuaries of a prodigious antiquity. Right from the oldest times, they were already – he was certain of this – centres of initiation of the first druidic spirituality.

The Sabarthez had been used very early as an asylum for men, groups of men animated by a high spirituality and a great independence of spirit and who were looking for the silence and serenity of the mountains and the depths.

It is interesting to note that the Ariège valley – formerly occupied by a vast lake – has a strange wide-mouthed shape evoking an open cup, a Grail. That gigantic alchemical melting-pot, where telluric currents coming from the depths of the earth meet cosmic radiations, has produced along the centuries a great force of inspiration to which the souls thirsty for the Spirit were sensitive.




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