Crossword-Solution: CATHAR 6 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 11

Traps set and failed; but, oh, so delicious anyhow, these attempts to send him flying off to Hell where he belonged: a Cathar or a Manichee.

This being so, it is of the deepest interest to study the Cathar cult, since through its rites we can get a glimpse of those of the primitive church, about which want of documents leaves us too often in the dark." The central Cathar rite was _consolamentum_, or baptism with spirit and fire.

Just as at the third scrutiny the early catechumen passed a last examination in the Gospels, Creed and Lord's Prayer, so after their year of abstinence the credens receives creed and prayer; the allocution with which the elder "handed on" this prayer is preserved, and of it the Abbé Guiraud remarks that, if it were not in a Cathar ritual, one might believe it to be of Catholic origin.

Thus the Cathar ritual, like that of the Armenian dissenters (see PAULICIANS), reflects an age when priestly ordination was not yet differentiated from confirmation.

Some Gnostics sprinkled the heads of the dying with oil and water to render them invisible to the powers of darkness; but in the East generally, where the need to compete with the Cathar sacrament of _Consolatio_ was less acutely felt, extreme unction is unknown.