There was an interesting discussion just under a week ago on this sub about early and less mainstream forms of Christianity in the Roman era and Middle Ages, and it made me think of something.
I know Cathars believed that the world was created by the God of the Old Testament, who they considered evil (they thought the God of the New Testament was the true God) and the aim of Catharism, they believed, was to escape the material world. But what did Cathars think of other plants and animals?
Rainier Sacchoni, the Italian self-confessed ex-'Cathar' turned Dominican inquisitor of Lombardy, said of the Lombardan Cathars in his Liber de duobus principiis of 1250:
All Cathars believe that the devil made the world and everything in it, and that all the sacraments of the church, both that of baptism by water, which is material, and the others, do not help us to salvation, and are not true sacraments of Christ and his church but devilish frauds of a church of the wicked; they regard as mortal sins reproductive sex, the consumption of its fruits, meat, eggs and cheese, and the swearing of oaths; they deny purgatory.
This text went on to be the most influential text on the Cathar heresy of the middle ages and influencing all historiography since. Sacchoni writes copiously on the beliefs of Cathars but does not shed light further on what Cathars might have believed beyond the material world was 'wicked', in particular that of the results of reproduction (meat, eggs, etc). Curiously fish are often excluded in these lists as apparently fish 'self reproduced' and did not copulate. As a consequence these Cathar heretics were reputed to only eat bread, fruits and vegetables.
You can read the tract yourself online in R.I. Moore's translation The Birth of Popular Heresy (Uni. Toronto, 1975).
However, there isn't much evidence for this from the mouths of most accused heretics in extant inquisition registers. Which begs the question of how much medieval polemical tracts against heresy were meant more for preaching orthodoxy and less for illuminating the beliefs of 'enemies of the faith'.
To wit, Rainier Sacchoni goes on:
The Cathars, who behave more like apes than men, have four sacraments, which are false, silly, unlawful, sacrilegious: the laying-on of hands, the blessing of bread, penance and ordination, and I will deal with them in that order.
The irony of inquisition records like that of the famous inquisition by Bishop Jacques Fournier in the Pyrenees mountains in 1294-34 (published famously in the 1970's as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error or more recently retitled as Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324) is that the term Cathar does not appear in the hand of Fournier nor the testimony of the deponents themselves. But there is a lot of eating meat, eggs, milk and cheese, and lots of fornication. And a whole diverse world of beliefs among the villagers themselves which we don't yet fully comprehend.