"...the ugly truth behind the public history-making...Thomas and Henry locked in a struggle which, as each well knows, must end in the ritual death of one of them." (page 83)

The book purports to be taken from a recently discovered medieval Latin manuscript found in a family's private archives by a researcher looking for documents on Joan of Arc.  When translated, the manuscript proves to be William of Colchester's narrative of the life of Thomas Becket, as follows:

Henry the pagan takes Thomas the heretic as his adviser.  Henry also agrees to be initiated into the Cathar church for the political advantage it will give him in Aquitaine.  Thomas swears to be his man to death, and they exchange the Kiss of Peace.  The English think of Henry as the king come to die for them.  But "in the minds of the common people, since Saxon times, the King and his arch-priest were one, indivisible" (p 67), so Henry makes Thomas his archbishop in order to have him die in his place.  Thomas finally accepts the position, not without protest, but privately resists the king's intention.

After a couple of years of drought, bad harvests, and famine, in 1163 Henry decides to crown his son, young Henry.  If Thomas crowns him, his power will have fallen to the young king, and Thomas will be expected to die as a sacrifice to the old gods, to ensure future prosperity.  As Henry rides to London the populace adores him.  Then Thomas tells him the meaning behind the kiss they exchanged: Thomas is Henry's senior in the Cathar faith and his spiritual adviser; it was Thomas who gave Henry the kiss and not the reverse, as Henry thought.  Therefore Henry should be the one to die, which is what the people expect (hence their adoration), especially if young Henry is crowned.  Henry refuses to accept this.

The friendship between the two dies.  They fight over the Constitutions of Clarendon (Thomas wants to do his job as archbishop well, even though he doesn't care about the Catholic church), Henry tries to ruin Thomas by imposing fines on him for various actions during his time as Chancellor, Thomas flees across the Channel to France.  The quarrel drags along for years, there are various meetings with Louis VII and others, Thomas excommunicates people.  Henry also meets Thomas secretly, despite their quarrel, to visit a blind seer in a cave, a temple of his religion.  She predicts Henry's future woes, such as his sons rebelling against him, but he refuses to believe her.

Henry brings up the coronation of his son again.  In 1170 it will be ten times seven years since William Rufus died as a sacrifice, seven years since his last request for the coronation (seven being a sacred number).  Thomas will agree to crown the young king if he and the older Henry exchange the Kiss of Peace in public (thus placing the doom on Henry); the king refuses.  He decides to go ahead with the coronation anyway, with Roger of York officiating.

Thomas is called to judge himself by the Cathar authorities.  At this unusual trial, he judges himself guilty of breaking his oath to Henry, the oath of being his man unto death, and sentences himself to death.  He and Henry make up at Fréteval and plan how to carry out the sacrifice.  When Thomas returns to Canterbury the people know why and greet him with joy.  All goes as arranged, the knights being in on the plan as well, and Thomas is killed as the Divine Victim whose blood is shed for the land.
 
 

I suppose I'll begin with a few words on the book as a work of literature.  It's interesting for its interpretation of history, but it doesn't explore the characters' thoughts and feelings enough for my taste.  William will tell us what people think and feel, and sometimes we'll see it, but we never really feel their conflict or anguish.  And William himself doesn't do much but be Becket's Dr. Watson.  The few personal asides he makes are mostly snide comments about Catholic Christians or about the other chroniclers who totally misunderstand the meaning of the events they write about.  So we have an arrogant narrator telling a flat story.  The book was interesting enough for a single reading, but not engrossing enough to repeat the experience.  The author was a screenwriter; this might have made a better film than it did book.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book, to me, was the depiction of the religions, because religion, especially forms of gnosticism, has always been an interest of mine.  As I noted above, there are some discrepancies between what people are called and what they actually seem to practice.  Thomas and William are both supposedly Cathars, but they (especially William) express more than a few decidedly un-Cathar sentiments.  Henry's gods are supposedly "the dark gods under the hills, and the horned god of fertility, and the Sun which is also Mithra, and the Moon which rules the flux of all the world" (p 20), but he gives the impression of being more a follower of Mithra(s) than anything else.

I have just a few words about Henry, because his religious oddities are less blatant.  It's never really set out what he believes; he's just vaguely labeled "pagan," and there are plenty of variations of paganism.  However, at his first ever meeting with Thomas, he makes the Sign of the Lion, which William informs us is connected to Roman Mithraic practices.  (William, by the way, seems peculiarly well-informed about Mithraism.)  On the occasion of his secret meeting with the blind seer (in an underground cave/temple - like a Mithraic temple), he sees the figure of a horned man, "the god of his old religion, part bull, part man" (pp 147-148).  The bull naturally makes one think of Mithras, famously depicted killing a bull, but never, to my (limited, I'll admit) knowledge, shown as or connected with zooanthropomorphic figures.  If this figure hadn't been explicitly described as half bull, he could have been interpreted as the Celtic horned god Cernunnos, which would seem to fit better with Henry's avowed paganism.  The king's obsession with the divine victim, on the other hand, does seem definitely, non-Mithraically, pagan.  Whether this divine-victim paganism ever actually existed outside the minds of certain armchair anthropologists is a topic for another time.

It seems like it should have been easy to depict Catharism at least somewhat accurately, since it's a lot better documented than any paganism that might have been practiced in twelfth-century England.  Some aspects are indeed accurate, such as the Perfecti's practice of celibacy, while others appear to be tainted by - what else? - Mithraism, or are just plain wrong.  For example, William is always contrasting himself with the Christians, putting them down, saying he's not a Christian himself, etc., yet the Cathars called themselves the Good Christians, regarding Catholics as the ones who had gone astray.  Another strange thing is the importance placed upon the apocryphal Acts of John, "the rock upon which our faith is built" (p 19).  I've never heard of this book being used by the Cathars, who, like other Christians, relied on the canonical New Testament.  Frankly, I don't see why this would be the book to build a faith on.  There are a few passages that support Cathar ideas, but there are other books that do that as well, and most of this particular book is narrative.  It would be like building Catholicism on the Acts of the Apostles.

One of Catharism's salient aspects, and part of its attraction to women, was its egalitarian nature.  Men and women were considered equal, and Cathar women could hold more spiritual authority than Catholic women generally could.  Yet William says things like "she [Eleanor] could not have been privy to the mysteries of our faith, for these are revealed only to men" (p 20) and that he belongs to "a religion excluding women" (p 46).  Obviously this is not orthodox Catharism (if that's not an oxymoron), but it does resemble Mithraism, into whose mysteries only men could be initiated.  I have read that Mithraism influenced Manichaeism, which in turn influenced the development of Catharism (all three have roots in Zoroastrianism), but this is taking it a little far.

One final oddity is the oath that occurs in whole or in part several times throughout the book: "By God's Will, by the two faces of Mary, by the blood of the Bull and of the Son who died."  God's Will poses no problems.  I have been unable to find any explanation for the two faces of Mary.  As for the blood of the Bull, it seems another obvious Mithraic reference.  It's most interesting to see a Cathar talk about the blood of the Son who died, since the Cathars were docetists; that is, they believed Jesus was wholly and only divine, not at all human, and didn't actually die, an  idea which appears in the Acts of John, among other places.

I'm not sure if the author was having fun with alternate history, or if he really intended this to be taken as a serious interpretation of historical events.  If the former, I have no objection.  If the latter, it begins to push my crackpot buttons.  I find myself agreeing with one of the comments listed on the book jacket, from the Manchester Evening News: "If long-dead national leaders could issue writs for libel, Henry II and Thomas Becket would be seeking counsel's advice right now."  I'm not sure if that was intended as a compliment, though it seems to have been taken as such, since generally only complimentary comments are quoted on covers.

On the subject of cover quotes, the Coventry Evening Telegraph calls the book "a disturbing story that contains to much logic to dismiss." It's true that many historical events fit neatly into the book's interpretation, but they fit just as well into conventional history, and without the obstacles of questions like, is it really plausible that so many pagans and heretics were running around England undetected and unmentioned by any chronicler?  Besides these questions that rely more on what is reasonable than on what is recorded, there are some obvious factual inconsistencies between accepted history and this history given in this book.  Most of these could probably be eliminated by tweaking the story (it is a work of fiction, after all), but I'd like to mention a few things anyway.

If Becket was really a Perfect in the Cathar faith, he would have been a vegan, abstaining not only from meat but from eggs and milk products.  But, just to cite one example, his last meal was pheasant.

According to this narrative, the knights were no more violent than they needed to be, since everything was planned and they knew they would meet with no resistance.  In fact, they didn't even need to break into the archbishop's palace with the help of carpenters' tools that had been left lying around; instead, William let them in.  (Why even bother to enter the palace, since they'd already arranged for the cathedral?  For show, I suppose, to throw the Christians off the track.)  The knights didn't hurt anyone but their victim, and they didn't even argue with Thomas but just spoke ritual words.  This account of the martyrdom is where any pretense to historicity really begins to fall apart.  Everyone else's accounts of the carpenters' tools (some of which were actually left behind in the cathedral), the knights beating up some of the servants, and the argument and shoving match between Becket and FitzUrse are dismissed as pure invention.  How convenient.

I'm not going to go into depth on Margaret Murray's ideas here; I've got a separate page for that.  I'll just say that it seems obvious that she must be the original source for the idea of Becket as a Divine Victim.  (Note also the tiny Joan of Arc connection in the document's source.)  She also devotes a few pages in The God of the Witches to sacred round dances, citing among her examples the dance in the Acts of John.  The dance passage also happens to be the source of all the quotes from that book found in The Swords of December.  I suspect that the reason the Acts of John are brought to such prominence in this novel is because they enable another slight connection to Murray's work.
 

I've said enough now.  Here are some links:

A quick summary of what the Cathars and other heretics thought.
This one is more in depth, but it's also in French.
Some Cathar texts.
The Cathar church today.

Look through a temple of Mithras and get some background on the religion.
A couple of interesting scholarly articles on Mithraism.
Mithraism today.
 

A good book that touches on the Cathars, Mithras, Manichees, and how they're all connected to Zoroastrianism is In Search of Zarathustra by Paul Kriwaczek.  The author may not be an expert in the field, but he seems to know what he's talking about, and it's a good read.