Cathar communities in Languedoc divided their members into two ranks, the credentes, ordinary believers who married, ate meat, and lived within feudal society, and the perfecti and perfectae, the good men and good women who had received the consolamentum and bound themselves to a rule of celibacy, vegetarianism, and non-violence. The consolamentum was a laying-on of hands, administered by an already-consoled perfectus or perfecta, that Cathars understood as the true baptism of the Holy Spirit, releasing the recipient from the taint of matter and the endless cycle of reincarnation into evil flesh. Most credentes received it only once, on their deathbed, in a practice called the endura, precisely so as to die in a state of purity before the discipline could be broken; a perfectus who received it earlier in life carried its obligations for the rest of their days.
The perfecti supported themselves by manual trades, most famously weaving, and travelled in pairs between believer households, preaching, blessing bread at a shared meal, and administering the rite to the dying. Their visible asceticism, and their refusal to swear oaths, which Catholic doctrine required and Cathar doctrine forbade as a corruption of the soul, was central to why sympathetic believers trusted them as a spiritual elite distinct from a corrupt and wealthy clergy. Cathars organised themselves into bishoprics, most prominently Albi, Toulouse, Carcassonne and the Agenais, each led by a bishop supported by an elder son and younger son who would succeed him, though how uniform this church structure really was across Languedoc, and how far it matches the picture drawn from later inquisitorial testimony, is itself disputed among historians.