Medieval dualist heresy active in 11th-13th-century Western Europe, particularly in Languedoc (southern France, where they were called Albigenses after the city of Albi) and northern Italy. The name Cathari (from Greek katharos, pure) was a self-designation expressing their claim to purified Christian life. The Cathari were substantively Manichaean-revival dualist: they taught two equal eternal principles (the Good God of the Light, who is the God of the New Testament, and the Evil God of Darkness, who is the demiurgic creator of the material world and is identified with the God of the Old Testament); the material body is the prison of the divine soul; salvation is liberation of the soul from the body through ascetic life. The movement's principal distinctives included: (1) thoroughgoing dualism with rejection of the OT as the work of the evil principle; (2) strict asceticism for the perfecti (the elect, who received the consolamentum initiation and lived in strict celibacy, vegetarianism, and renunciation; ordinary believers, credentes, were not bound to the strict practices); (3) rejection of orthodox sacraments (the Cathari rejected Catholic baptism, the Mass, marriage, ordination, and the broader sacramental system); (4) denial of the incarnation in the orthodox sense (the Cathari typically held a docetic Christology denying that Christ took on real material flesh); (5) belief in reincarnation for those who failed to receive the consolamentum before death. The movement spread substantially in Languedoc and northern Italy through the 12th century; the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229, called by Pope Innocent III against the Languedoc Cathars) and the subsequent medieval Inquisition substantially suppressed the movement; by the early fourteenth century the Cathari had been substantially eliminated. The patriarchal-Reformed reader engages Catharism as the substantive medieval revival of Manichaean dualism and as a historic case of the recurring dualist temptation in Christian-adjacent religious life.