Long before modern discussions of the prison planet theory, there were the Cathars, a spiritual movement that existed mainly in southern France between the 11th and 13th centuries. They were declared heretics and brutally exterminated by the Catholic Church during the Albigensian Crusade, but their core beliefs are deeply relevant to what we now call the prison planet theory.
The Cathars believed that humans were immortal souls trapped by the devil in physical bodies and the goal of life was to free oneself from attachment to those bodies and the physical world. The Cathars believed that the material world was created by an evil or false god, not the true source of light or spirit. To them, the physical universe was not a divine creation but a trap for the soul. They taught that the god who made the physical world was a deceiver: a lower, corrupt being who trapped divine souls in bodies of flesh.
According to them, the purpose of life was to serve the good by serving others and escape from the cycle of rebirth and death to our original home.
They viewed human life as a cycle of reincarnation in which souls were repeatedly imprisoned in physical forms, unable to return to the pure spiritual realm until they awakened to the truth. This awakening involved rejecting the material world, refusing to take part in any kind of violence, and avoiding participation in the systems that maintained the corruption of the material world and the enslavement of the soul, including the Church and warfare. The cathars had strict rules for fasting and they refused to eat meat and other animal products.
When you look at this belief system, it is strikingly similar to what many now call the prison planet theory. The Cathars saw Earth as a kind of spiritual prison ruled by a false creator. They believed that after death, souls could be deceived and recycled back into new bodies. They also warned that religious institutions were being used as instruments of control by the same dark power that ruled this world.
This was not an idea born out of internet speculation or modern conspiracy theories. It was a worldview that emerged almost a thousand years ago, long before social media, UFO culture, or New Age spirituality. The Cathars were describing a metaphysical system of enslavement that modern findings from past life regression, alien abduction research and remote viewing now confirm to be true about our reality.
The Catholic Church's response to the Cathars was total annihilation. Entire towns were wiped out and their writings were destroyed. If their ideas were merely harmless superstition, such extreme measures would not have been necessary. This suggests that what the Cathars were saying challenged the very foundation of the control system of their time.
You can see the same control system in place today in real life but also online on places like Reddit: many people have said have personally told me that they were banned on other subreddits, ridiculed, gaslighted, and called crazy for simply mentioning the prison planet theory. So when people today talk about Earth being a kind of spiritual prison or energy farm, it is not necessarily a new theory. Nowadays we just have way more details and way more sources to work with.
You can find more information about the Cathars on the internet, but this is a nutshell summary of their beliefs. The Cathars were one of the first groups in recorded history to say openly that the god of this world is not the true god, and that escaping the cycle of reincarnation is the only real path to freedom.
