A member of a medieval sect seeking to achieve a life of great purity. Cathars believed in a ‘dualist’ heresy. Their basic belief was that if God, being wholly good, had alone created the world it would have been impossible for evil to exist within it, and that another, diabolical, creative force must have taken part. They held that the material world and all within it were irredeemably evil. The heresy originated in Bulgaria and appeared in western Europe in the 1140s. In southern France the followers of this Christian heresy were called Albigensians.