arrivals and researches

 Margaret and John (Matthews) are back and Jean and John (Harris) cooked dinner to celebrate - Spag Bol and cake, we all wolfed it - that was the day before yesterday.

Yesterday Angela arrived for the weekend.

J and J (Harris) leave this morning for frozen Blighty, but heres hoping they'll be back.

Meantime, Jamsie of St Ferriol and I have been attending to the important things; a conference organised by le Collectif International de Recherches sur le Catharisme et les Dissidences (CIRCAED) at the Chateau de Carcassonne.
You are probably aware that the burning issue de nos jours is whether or not the Cathars actually existed. Local scholarship is divided into those that think they were a later construct using possibly erroneous info. and those who still contend they were a prelapsarian band of happy wanderers based in large chateaux and murdered by the Catholics.

Here is yesterday morning in Esperaza under a tremendous moon (looking like a Van Gogh, no?) followed by sunrise at Carcassonne -

 and here are some of the three owls in the stained glass version of the rod of Jesse in Carcassonne Cathedral where we whiled away half an hour before the conference began; empty space, quite beautiful.

 Anyone out there have a clue why owls should be included in the glass? The best I can do is a confusion between hibou and hebreu... very long shot. There's Isaiah13:21 ( and their houses will be full of owls) and other texts where they represent desolation and mourning but why??
Below is a nice snap of  Pete Biller delivering his key-note address and being filmed doing it.

Prof Biller is of York University. He talked about Robert Moores' book The War on Heresy which has rather put the cat among the pigeons (at least in Carcassonne) He was followed by David Zbiral from the University Masaryk de Brno of the Check Republic who read his paper on the Liber de Duobus Principiis and the Florence ritual ... and the rest, I'm sure the agenda is on line if you are  interested.