Western Daily Press Article

There's an article about me in today's edition of the Western Daily Press, on page 11 in Geoff Ward's Mysterious West section, complete with author mugshot (taken in Heidelberg Castle) and a shot of the cover of the Cathar book. It's funny, I go away to LA for two weeks, and while I'm gone, everything starts happening. Still, things happen for a reason...

Here's the article, minus the photos:

FILM-MAKER SEAN EXAMINES CULT OF THE CATHARS
10:07 - 25 March 2005 A Somerset film-maker's fascination with medieval mystery and mayhem has led to his fourth book on those turbulent times. After the Black Death, alchemists and the Knights Templar for the Pocket Essentials series, Sean Martin has now brought out a study of the Cathars, the heretical religious cult brutally liquidated by the Catholic Church in France and Italy in the 13th century. Sean, 38, of Brent Knoll, who took a history degree at university, said it was the "extreme world" of the Middle Ages that drew him to the period.
"Life was much more fragile and short then," he told me. "But there was a greater spiritual life, people were more certain in matters of faith and seemed to be in closer touch with God and the unseen things, myths, and so on.
"It has struck me also how much our modern world is a product of the Middle Ages.
The Middle East was no different then, at the time of the Crusades and the persecution of Muslims, than now. Western society directly resulted from changes around the time of the Cathars."
Sean has just been to Los Angeles for a preview of his second full-length film, The Notebooks Of Cornelius Crow, about a man who uncovers the secret meaning of the geometry of London's layout and architecture.
Crow leaves his findings in a series of cryptic notebooks which his protege, Jack Cade, must decipher before a mysterious organisation finds Cade and exacts an awful vengeance.
A DVD release and film festival screenings are expected in the UK this year, as well as a showing at the Cannes Film Festival. Sean's next Pocket project will be the Gnostics, another sect suppressed by the early Church, and he is also developing a novel, as well as writing poetry.

The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy Of The Middle Ages is published by Pocket Essentials at £9.99.