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W e l c o m e T o
T H E R E N N E S – L E - C H Â T E A U
T H E M E P A R K
A SUMMARY
WITH QUESTIONS FOR QUESTERS,
beginning
with:
Why would Abbé Saunière
(above), the poor, right-wing priest in
Rennes-le-Château at the
turn of the 19th & 20th Centuries,
upon becoming suddenly and
mysteriously rich,
spend
his money on creating a Disney World for Heretics?
Is it because:
“The imaginary is
something that tends to become true.”
---Andrė Breton
As quoted by Gėrard de Sède in
“The Accursed Treasure”
{NOTE: "BREAKING NEWS" HAS MOVED
TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE}.
THE
Above is the area known as the
Languedoc-Roussillon, in Southern France on the Mediterranean side,
in the foothills of the Pyrenees, just north
of Spain. This area was once part of a Visigoth kingdom,
after the Visigoths sacked Rome and
pushed the Romans out of much of southern Gaul.
Eventually the Arian Visigoths were
forced to retreat into Spain by the by then Catholic Franks,
but they may have left something
important behind. Or somebody else
did. Or not.
|
PAGES (Just click on the page you wish to go
to): Page 1—Abandon All Hope: Introduction to a
Hermeneutical Hell Page 2—“The Saunière Episode” Who Wrote It? Page 3—The Plantard Subplot Page 4—The Lincoln Story & Its Aftermath Page 5— Puzzling Pieces of the Story The
Parchments--Mary Magdalene & Marie Dénarnaud–The Church of St. Madeleine—The Villa Bethania--The
Tour Magdala--Marie de Blanchefort—Abbé Bigou---Knights Templar---Jesus at
RLC---Numerology & Sacred Geometry---Poussin’s Tomb—The Holy
Temple---Lost Civilizations & Aliens---Other Priests-Abbé Boudet) Page 6—Summing Up:
The Battle of the Books (you
might want to start here if you wish to
understand first the basis
for the analysis in the rest of the chapters) Page 7—Links & Sources |
|
|
by R.
F. Dietrich |
Above, built by the Abbé Saunière over a cave that descends into the earth, is the Tour Magdala [Mary Magdalene is associated in many old paintings and church iconography with towers supposedly because the town she's from, "Magdala" or Migdala," means "tower" in Ancient Hebrew, but of course this has taken on religious connotation as well, as the watch tower of the faith from which shines the beacon of hope through repentance (supposedly Mary’s claim to sainthood, but this seems to be based on a misunderstanding of her role in the New Testament). Of course it might have just been a nickname for a tall woman or a woman who stood out and led the way! Her name could be translated as “Mary the Great.” At any rate, the number of the Magdalene’s Feast Day, July 22, |
|
Above is
the devilish fellow who greets you just inside the door of the Church of the
Magdalene in Rennes-le-Château, bearing the holy water stoup and four angels
making the sign of the cross. Is this devil the Cathar’s Rex Mundi, Evil Lord
of the Earth? Or Asmodeus, custodian of secrets and hidden treasures, who
points the way with four fingers on his knee? Or Eurynomous, Prince of Death and
“Lord of the Flies”? Or the Great
Satan that Father Saunière thought was Republican France? Or just the devil who made him do it? [Actually, the close-up photo of the
demon at the top of this page is from 1994, after which this statue was
vandalized and the head replaced by one that looks rather different and has
the eyes looking in a different direction. Vandalism is a recurrent problem in the
RLC area, from both "Questers" and "Anti-Questers." And
violence is not unheard of, including murder, including of two and possibly
three priests who were close to the principal, Abbé Saunière. Saunière himself (above) has come under
suspicion for at least one of those murders, and some think all three! If his own suspicious death didn’t just
add a fourth to the list of murdered priests!] |
is often repeated in the geometric layouts of
Saunière’s mysterious realm, seemingly instances of many other tributes to
her (Although lately there is a claim of finding a document in Saunière’s
handwriting that explains his loss of faith as being due to his discovery
that Jesus did not die on the cross but lived for 22 days after that, so
here’s another possibility for Saunière’s fascination with that number]. Saunière’s Note the built-in, twin-crossed
"Cross of |
|
|
PAGE ONE Y E
W H O E N T E R H E R E Introduction
to a Hermeneutical Hell “The truth is an ambition that is beyond
us.” --Peter Ustinov "The facts are that there are no
facts." –Henry Lincoln |
Theme parks are supposed to be fun, not a place where you abandon all hope. Well, Rennes-le-Château (or “RLC” for short) is fun, perhaps more fun than you’ve ever had, if you’re the right sort. But you just need to be warned that this is one theme park where you’ll find yourself hugely entertained one minute and in complete despair the next because as in Hell there seems to be no way out. Too much fun!
For this is about a mystery that gets more
mysterious the more answers to it there are, as the mystery cell-divides
into an endless number of mysteries!
Largely because the cancer of Postmodern Relativity has come here to
metastasize in the most spectacular of ways, making it a supreme emblem of our
time! Appropriately enough here, in
And with the publication of Dan Brown's popular thriller The Da Vinci Code, so obviously borrowed from the RLC caper, however fictionalized, a more virulent strain of the plague has been introduced, as the notorious factual "inaccuracies" of this novel, taken literally by the literal-minded, now threaten to make nonsense of the whole enterprise, causing the amusing speculation that Dan Brown is a double agent, secretly working for the Vatican in its wish to discredit the investigation of "the Mystery," and even more ironically for Opus Dei in causing scrutiny that ends in TIME magazine’s running a story (April 24, 2006) that pretty much absolves the organization of the sort of villainy imagined in the novel. But TIME, as with almost all the news media and History Channel accounts you’ve seen on this, misses the point. Brown’s unspoken assumption in the novel is that since religious zealotry of the sort found in Opus Dei often, historically, became murderous, his villain thus has plausibility. Such plausibility is all that is required of the novelist, and one must grant that the frequently murderous history of the Church not only justifies that generally and in the long run, but also that, even today and more specifically, there have been, in fact, certain murders associated with modern Vatican bank scandals, not yet solved, really, that seem to have Opus Dei connections (albeit supposedly through some group called “P2”). And there are lots of people, including Catholics, who think John Paul I was murdered, just as he was about to investigate these scandals. If so, by whom?
As for Brown’s villain being an albino, check history for how often “pure white” as a symbolic color, connoting “the obsessively puritanical” (i.e., the obsessively ideological), has been associated with religious fanaticism, long before it became associated with racism. {And for fictional accounts of the Church’s use of “hit men” over the centuries to enforce such “purity” (“purity of thought,” of course) and a characterization of popes and cardinals as essentially Mafioso dons in drag running a protection racket (buy our dogma and we’ll save you from Hell), see Thomas Gifford’s Assassini and Juan Gomez-Jurado’s God’s Spy}. Of course sometimes those opposed to Catholic dogma were also obsessive in this way, as were the Cathar “heretics” who dressed in all white. It’s called “advertising.” See how “pure” I am. The difference, of course, is that the Cathars did not persecute, torture, murder, and rob “unbelievers.”
APPROACHES TO
“THE MYSTERY”
Dan Brown’s thriller employs the most popular interpretation of “the mystery,” that it involved a no-longer secret organization called “The Priory of Sion” and their determined preservation of a suppressed truth that Mary Magdalene was wife of Jesus, mother of his child (whose bloodline continues), and that Mary was appointed by Jesus as head of his church, for centuries kept a secret because Mary’s Church was a “hunted” church whose apostolic succession “by blood” was perceived as a threat by the Gentile Catholic Church and its supposedly celibate priesthood. The supposed connection between the priest Saunière and the Priory of Sion is that the parchments he supposedly found in 1891, when decoded, supposedly support both the claims of Mary Magdalene enthusiasts and the original claim (later revised) of Pierre Plantard, the presumed head of the Priory when this all came to light, in the 1960s and 70s, either to a claim to the throne of France (and perhaps to the throne of a United States of Europe) through Merovingian descent or at least to a recognition of his “holy blood” received as a direct descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. A Pax Plantard was to be the outcome, apparently. Financial gain, at any rate, did not seem to be the Priory’s primary motive. (And, as said, Plantard later recanted part of this ).
But it should be noted at the outset that there are many other ways to approach the facts of the case, the many approaches having in common only that they begin with the belief that a poor French priest named Saunière suddenly and mysteriously got wealthy, more or less, beginning in or around 1891, by:
Ø Either uncovering, in his renovation of his 11th Century church in Rennes-le-Château dedicated to Mary Magdalene, long-lost, coded documents, supposedly in parchment form (the copies are shown below), that constituted a treasure map or were marketable in some way.
Ø And/or a long-hidden treasure that he at least partially “fenced,” while giving some objects of antiquity away to friends.
Ø Or, alternatively, that he got wealthy in some other, partially obscure fashion that had nothing to do with those particular documents and/or such treasure mentioned above, such as: by simony? patronage? occult practices? bribery? document trafficking? or some combination, etc.?
Ø In any case, leading mysteriously to unusual wealth, unusual building projects, and secretive travel. The one fact that cannot be denied is the strange estate he left behind.
It is factual, at least, that, with initial, substantial funding from a family of monarchist pretenders, Saunière did renovate his decaying and storm-wracked church in a wholesale manner, changing a relatively plain church into a rather gaudy church that calls attention to itself, did find something of value in his reconstruction of and/or digging around in his church (and adjacent cemetery), became relatively wealthy (although not necessarily from what he found locally), bought property around his church, developed it at considerable expense, and built a curiously symbol-ridden, mathematically-precise, luxurious, and ostentatious estate rather unbecoming of a priest, that he put this estate in the name of his younger “servant” Marie Dénarnaud, and that with Marie he lived high on the hog, possibly falling victim to over-indulgence (gout, stroke, etc.) in 1917, although some suspect his death had other, unnatural causes. Marie lived until 1950, at which time she joined Saunière in his gravebed!
It also seems factual that Saunière underwent a considerable personality change in, say, the last 15 years of his life, becoming much more secretive and guarded and, some say, even depressed and paranoid. He was under investigation by his bishop, for one thing, and, after refusing to leave RLC at the bishop’s orders (although he traveled secretively throughout this period), eventually was suspended from his duties as priest, which he performed anyway in defiance on a make-shift altar outside the church, to which the village people came in preference to the newly assigned priest’s sanctioned ritual performances in the church. But he seemingly ended the beneficiary of a change in popes (his fortune seemed to rise and fall and rise again with changes in popes), which inspired him to return to making Big Plans shortly before he died, including plans for the building of an even larger tower than the Tour Magdala he built in the 1890s. However, that the three priests of churches close to him (Fathers Gélis, Boudet, and Rescanières) seem to have been murdered, in 1897 for the first and in 1916 for the other two, may have qualified any sense of returning good fortune he may have had. Where those murders warnings to him? He himself died in the year following the 1916 deaths. Or was he implicated in the murders? Or what?
But as the Priory of Sion eventually came under suspicion as fraudulent (and some have no doubt about this fraudulence because it was confessed to, while others see both the fraudulence and the confession of it as a screen or red herring), other approaches to the mystery have flourished as well:
For an approach that ignores the Priory of Sion and the discovery of coded “parchments” relating to the Priory, one might read another thriller, by Steve Berry, The Templar Legacy, which focuses on the priest and presents an altogether different theory as to what he discovered, involving popular conceptions of the Templar and their lost treasure. This represents a whole genre of works that bypass the Priory and Pierre Plantard, who are thought to have grafted their own, invented mystery onto the genuine mystery of Saunière.
Another approach follows from the strong possibility that Saunière, during his short exile from RLC after his initial appointment there, was introduced to certain important and powerful people by his younger brother Alfred, also a priest, who arranged for him to be sent back to RLC to find something that was crucial to these people and that they knew or at least suspected was there (something that would legitimize their monarchist claims, perhaps, or de-legitimize somebody else’s?). Giving credence to this, in non-fiction attempts to get at Saunière’s secret, is Jean Luc Robin’s Rennes-le-Château: Saunière’s Secret, which presents the Habsburg’s struggle to maintain their royal prerogatives, abetted by royalists in the Vatican, as likely playing a role (with brother Alfred figuring in as a go-between in some fashion). It’s known that Saunière had visits from a member of the Habsburg family (the Villa Bethania guesthouse perhaps being built for such VIP visitors) and had a bank account in Budapest, the Habsburg’s seat of power, and the only question may be whether the money put into it was hush money or money for loyal services rendered. Robin’s untimely death in 2008 just as he was about to resume caretaker status of Saunière’s domain may have forestalled or delayed a seemingly very fruitful avenue of research.
A book that provides an interesting answer to Robin’s speculations about the Budapest bank account is Gérard de Sède’s 1988 Rennes-le-Château: The dossier, the impostures, the fantasies, the hypotheses, a second thought on the subject by the man who started it all in 1967 with his sensational book The Accursed Treasure {first published as The Gold of Rennes), which introduced us to the theme of danger in the RLC area, frequently buttressed in the years since by amazingly violent occurrences to people involved and a constant vandalism, often of a symbolic nature (as I write this, news has come in that the Black Madonna of Notre Dame de Marceille in Limoux, next door to where Saunière went to school as a child, has been decapitated and the head stolen! These Black Madonnas, in this and other churches, are thought to have originally represented Mary Magdalene or, if they’re really old, Venus or Isis. There’s even an apocryphal gospel that insists that The Virgin Mary was black, and a case has been made that Mary Magdalene was at least “dark-skinned.”). De Sède’s final guess was that Sauniere was “only a cog in the machinery of forged documents” that involved a behind-the-scenes power struggle and that “the Merovingian romance” was an allegory pointing to more current pretenders to various thrones, the Habsburgs among them. Just as the original Grail romances, set in the past, were code for what was going on at the moment, and similar to “the Merovingian romance” in focusing on a lost king and an afflicted kingdom.
And there are other theories, the most intriguing perhaps being ones that involve areas to the east of RLC—Rennes-les-Bains and Perillos—and southeast to Gerona in Spain, that will be picked up later. But let’s for now stick with the interpretation that has had the most play, the one that has related the priest’s discovery of coded “parchments” to the Priory of Sion, codes which seem to have been planted by the Priory itself, according to one dénouement.
DECODING THE MESSAGES
This “mystery” would probably never have reached global proportions without Henry Lincoln. Lincoln, a writer and documentarian for the BBC, on vacation in France in 1969, accidentally came across Gérard de Sède’s The Accursed Treasure (1967), which contained copies of the coded “parchments” Saunière supposedly found in his church, copies given to De Sède by The Priory of Sion (Plantard alone or Plantard et al?). Lincoln’s deciphering of the code on one of the two messages reported but not deciphered by De Sède led to Lincoln’s being inspired to investigate further, arriving at a decoding of the other message, and eventually to his narrating three BBC-TV programs, increasingly popular, that dramatized and exposed “The Mystery of Rennes-le-Château” and ultimately to Lincoln’s taking on co-authors to write world-shaking books on the subject.
As told most notably in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982), by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln (henceforth referred to as HBHG), “The Mystery” they reported was created, apparently (get used to seeing that word, along with “ostensibly,” “supposedly,” “seemingly,” etc.!) in or around 1891 in Rennes-le-Château, a mountaintop village in southern France with a perhaps exotic past (Although others are convinced that the discovery must have occurred a few years earlier: see Picknett & Prince’s The Sion Revelation). That year Bérenger Saunière, its poor, ostensibly right-wing priest (“right-wing” in France then meaning, in reaction against the consequences of the French Revolution, “anti-Republican,” meaning “anti-democratic,” meaning “pro-monarchy”), supposedly discovered in or around his church a number of historically significant items, most notably four old parchments, supposedly deposited there in the 1780s (or no later than 1791) by a priest named Bigou. Two of the parchments supposedly contained genealogies (dating from 1244 and 1644) proving royal descent of once local aristocrats from Merovingian King Dagobert II, the Merovingians being the first kings of the Franks (“priest-kings” or “sorcerer-kings,” by reputation) and supposedly divinely appointed, perhaps even divinely descended (by their own accounts), from King David originally and then, eventually, from Jesus and Mary Magdalene through intermarriage. The Merovingians ruled the Franks (apparently more ceremoniously than actually) until Dagobert was betrayed by the Church (with whom a predecessor king, Clovis I, had made a pact) and assassinated in 679 A.D by, it’s said, one of the Church’s agents, possibly because the Church feared the development of an apostolic succession that was not theirs and, arguably, more valid than theirs because based on “blood.” Or so the story goes.
As for the third and fourth “parchments,” there is disagreement or at least confusion. All the parchments were supposedly composed or transcribed by Abbé Bigou in the 1780s (or no later than 1791, when he took off for Spain), Bigou being then the priest of what became Saunière’s church, at the behest of local aristocrats he served in the troubled times leading up to the French Revolution and perhaps also in reaction to the lack of male heirs among them. But the 3rd & 4th parchments are presented by HBHG as containing seemingly pious excerpts from the Latin New Testament that are actually coded messages. Some confusion has entered this account by others identifying the third "parchment" as a civil document of some sort (the will of local aristocrat Henri d’Hautpoul dated 1695? Or 1644?), and the fourth had seemingly coded messages on front and back (reproduced separately below), but which were never presented in that front-and-back form, which thus, as some have argued, may have removed certain key spatial relationships necessary to a complete understanding of the codes, especially if the “parchments” were transparent to some degree. Confusion thus begins with the question of whether the coded messages were on separate parchments (3 and 4) or on the front and back of a single parchment (parchment 4). But if it’s understood that the 4 parchments were attached to the will of Henri d’Hautpoul before being removed to be hidden in the church (as asserted on pp. 216-18 of Picknett and Prince’s The Sion Revelation), that eliminates the possibility that the will was one of the 4 parchments. Most of this information, however, comes from a document called the Dossiers Secret that seems to have been planted in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris by the Priory of Sion, along with other documents of a suspect nature, all pseudonymous or with faked authorship. One can make a good case, however, that these were part of a deliberation disinformation campaign by unseen forces (Synarchist?) that used The Priory as it had used many other organizations over the centuries (see Picknett & Prince’s The Sion Revelation). [Perhaps another source of confusion about the parchments should be cited: “The Cholet Report” of 1967, which specifically mentioned only 3 parchments, and this from a professional archeologist, Jacques Cholet, a Parisian who had actually been given permission to dig in and around the church of RLC, the only one who has done such extensive digging. However, André Douzet argues that as a quite different version of a Cholet Report has been found, the “official” report is possibly another instance of deliberation misdirection.]
Regardless, although the first of the “parchment” messages (often referred to as the Dagobert message) was easily decoded (Lincoln’s ability to do so is what first got him intrigued), the second of the "parchment" messages (sometimes referred to as the Blue Apples message for its strange, concluding reference to “blue apples” or as the Shepherdess Cipher because it begins with “Shepherdess”) seems to depend for deciphering of its very complex code (based on knights’ moves in chess) on an understanding of another coded message in the headstone and/or graveslab of Marie de Négri D’Ablès, Marquise d'Hauptpol de Blanchfort (died January 17, 1781), although Filip Coppens suggests that the lady wasn’t actually buried beneath these stones, their purpose being rather to mask steps leading down into a crypt (as Saunière discovered). Whether the lady was buried there or not, the headstone and graveslab, supposedly once in the cemetery behind Saunière's church, were supposedly effaced by him after a supposed trip to Paris to get the parchment messages decoded by experts at St. Sulpice, messages also supposedly created by the priest Bigou, who served the noble family of Blanchfort/Hauptpoul prior to the French Revolution. For more on this headstone/graveslab and this family, see www.rennes-discovery.com/Blanche2.htm and www.rennes-discovery.com/Blanche1.htm (and Berry’s The Templar Legacy also has a lot to say about Bigou and the aristocratic family he served, by the way), but see below for images of copies of the headstone/graveslab that were fortuitously made (supposedly) by a collector of gravestones named Stüblein before Saunière rubbed them out (except that the Stüblein book, Pierres Gravées du Languedoc, cannot be found and is not listed in his works! We know of this mostly because it was referred to in the Dossiers Secrets; it is also reportedly listed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, but the book is missing there as well!). A further complication is that there are two different versions of the sketch of the gravestone, another having been made by a visiting scientific society in June of 1905, so which is correct? Whatever, numerous errors in the inscriptions on these stones were supposedly made deliberately to call attention to and make possible a code, which when deciphered arrives at the word “mortpee” (death by sword?), the key word necessary to unscrambling the code in the “Shepherdess Cipher” below.
One other new wrinkle: If things aren’t confusing enough, here’s another version: Geoffrey Morgan argues in The Secret Church: The Treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau (2006) that the graveslab was actually the bottom side of the altar slab in the church that Saunière replaced after storm damage forced him to make repairs, the slab having no relation to Marie de Négri D’Ablès’ headstone. But since Morgan goes on to argue that Nicholas Poussin in the 1640s not only authored the parchment messages but also the inscriptions on the slab and placed them where Saunière found them, a notion not supported in the Dossiers Secrets or anywhere else except by remote inference and an obscure logic, a lot of unproven assumptions have to be accepted before this version can be considered viable. Yet it does raise some interesting questions and explains some anomalies, such as:
The Putative Gravestones of Marie de Négri D’Ablès, Dame D’Hautpoul de Blanchefort
(The “slab” is on the right and interestingly contains no reference to her,
nor is it stylistically the same as the headstone on the left.)
Of course the connection is that Abbé Bigou was also, supposedly, according to the popular story (contradicted by Morgan above) the creator or at least passer on of the “parchments,” it’s being logical then to assume that on the headstone/graveslab of the woman (whether buried beneath them or elsewhere) who gave him either the documents or the knowledge to create them he provided the key necessary to cracking the code of the second of the coded messages on the parchments. Thus even if it cannot be proved that the first of the coded messages in the parchments dates from Bigou’s time, it would seem logical that the second message does because interpretation of the message obviously depends upon seeing the key for interpretation provided in the 18th C. tombstone/graveslab, which themselves may have disappeared but the decoder key at least provided by the historically-verifiable Bigou, who can be imagined to have appropriate motives.
But, setting aside the facts that the vanished parchments cannot be dated and that the gravestones cannot be proven to have existed other than through Stüblein’s missing book and its sole referencing in the Dossiers Secrets, there is a problem with chronology here caused by the reference in the second message to “blue apples,” which has been interpreted as a phenomenon of blue spots of light projecting onto the wall opposite through the Lazarus stained-glass window in Saunière’s church at noon on January 17 (also, “coincidentally,” the death date of Marie in 1781 and the feast day of St. Sulpice in Paris). This blue spotting occurs thanks to Saunière’s installation of that window in 1887, thus calling into question the idea that the “blue apples” phenomenon occurred in Bigou’s day. If there did not exist in Bigou’s day a stained-glass window in the same spot that produced more or less the same “blue apples” phenomenon, then this reference appears to have been a slip up on someone’s part (deliberate or not), someone who lived after Saunière’s installation of the window, a forger who was inventing the connection. Unless of course the “blue apples” refers to something entirely different! Furthermore, it is reported that something similar occurs at St. Sulpice, not to mention other churches with stained-glass windows. But since the phenomenon is reportedly not restricted to January 17th in the case of Saunière’s church, and that spots of other colors appear as well, this makes for a highly suspect detail. But, again, one that may have been intended to be suspect, and thus our Hermeneutical Hell.
Although apparently no one
involved in the RLC mystery as it developed from the 1950s on and who is still alive has ever seen them in
their parchment form (if such exists, for nobody knows where they are, those
claiming to have seen the passages now being dead), below are coded biblical
passages in Latin from which the “messages,” in French, have been derived,
passages alluding, in the case of the simplest decoded message, to a story from
all three of the synoptic Gospels telling the parable of the ears of corn
picked on the Sabbath day. See Matthew
12: 1-8 and Luke 6:1-4, in which Jesus takes some Pharisees to task for being
too literal-minded in their application of scriptural law to Sabbath
observations, Jesus arguing again as he stated more explicitly in Mark 2: 25-28
that “the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” This has been
taken to mean that the spirit of the law should prevail over its letter, or
that genuine spiritual action should trump mere ritual observance. In putting all the emphasis on the decoding,
the decoders often tend to overlook or not sufficiently take note of the anti-priestly
character of this biblical passage.
Jesus is quoted elsewhere as saying that he came to fulfill the
prophets, not destroy them, and inasmuch as the biblical prophets were often in
conflict with the Jerusalem priesthood, this can and has been taken as a
statement of the right of individuals to their own path to spiritual
enlightenment, outside "The Temple" and its priests, the path the
ruggedly individualistic prophets took.
Naturally, priests dispute this interpretation or dispute that it
applies to Christian priests. And so why
would the priest Bigou have selected such an anti-priestly passage to carry the
coded message (assuming that he made
the choice)? And why would the priest
Saunière continue with it? Unless, the
reasoning goes, they were secret heretics and anti-clerical clerics! It’s been known to happen.
The passage on the left below, leading to the so-called Dagobert message, is coded by a simple device of raised letters, as Henry Lincoln was the first to note when he encountered it in 1969 in reading Gėrard de Sède’s The Accursed Treasure, where it was first published (after being handed to de Sède by the Priory of Sion) but, surprisingly, not decoded. The passage on the right below, leading to the Blue Apples message, is coded by a far more complicated method which it is possible not to understand even after it has been explained to you (see, for examples, Tim Axon's explanation of "The Shepherdess Cipher" in the February 2005 issue of The Rennes Alchemist or see www.rennes-discovery.com/Blanche2. htm or see Mariano Tomatis Antoniono’s explanation on his website www.Rennes-le-Chateau.it/Rennes-le-Chateau.php?sezione=english or in The Rennes Observer of Spring 2007.) [NOTE: The Blue Apples message is sometimes also referred to as “The Shepherdess Cipher” because it begins with the word “Shepherdess,” followed by a reference to Poussin that invokes a famous painting of his, Les Bergers d’Arcadie (sometimes also referred to by the Latin inscription on the tombstone the shepherds point to, Et in Arcadia Ego), that includes a mysterious shepherdess. See http://et-in-arcadia-ego.mezzo-mondo.com/et-in-arcadia-ego.html for more on this and a conventional summarizing of the story, which includes a reference to an above-ground tomb near RLC (now demolished) that is identical to the one in Poussin’s painting. Morgan (see above), who assigns authorship of the coded passages and the slab inscription to Poussin, also thinks Poussin had the Pontils tomb built that he later painted. Art historians find no evidence that Poussin was ever in this region, but of course if Poussin was here on a secret mission, that would be the point of there being no record of it. The French king, Louis XIV, was certainly very interested in knowing what Poussin knew, possibly because, as Morgan argues, what he knew was a secret leading to a great power that was divulged to him by the Barberini family in Rome.].
The Blue Apples or Shepherdess message on
the right below is from the Latin version of a visit by Jesus to Mary
Magdalene, Martha, and Lazarus at
DAGOBERT MESSAGE BLUE APPLES MESSAGE OR SHERHERDESS CIPHER
|
DECODED: "To Dagobert II, King, and To Sion belong this
treasure and he is there dead." |
DECODED: "Shepherdess—No temptation that Poussin
and Teniers hold the key; Peace 681 By the cross
and this horse of God I destroy this daemon
of the guardian at noon blue apples." |
|
Below is a comparison of
the handwriting of the portion typically cut-off from the passage on the left
above with the similar part of the passage on the right above but inverted
for comparison's sake. Research by Ian
Campbell, as published in The Rennes
Observer of July, 2003, following the model found in Stanley James’ The Treasure Maps of Rennes le Chateau,
reveals (supposedly) that a strange device appearing at the end of the
document on the left has been cut off in most published versions, the same
device that appears near the end of the other message but upside down. These
were obviously written by two different people. It doesn’t take a handwriting expert,
however, to see that the
two documents were written by two different people, which confounds many
theories about their origin.
Further questions are raised by the
possibility that all or at least most
of the letters were traced!
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In Holy Blood, Holy Grail and elsewhere, decoding of the one on the left (with the raised letters) reduces the message to a French sentence, usually translated as: "To Dagobert II, King, and To Sion belong this treasure and he is there dead." The "Sion" is presumed to refer to "The Priory of Sion," a semi-secret organization founded either in the 12th C. or in the 20th C. or somewhere in between, depending upon whose argument you believe (and Pierre Plantard himself significantly changed the dates mid-way through the game, from the 12th C. to the 17th C.). The Da Vinci Code presents the Priory as ancient, founded in Jerusalem during the First Crusade, almost concurrent with the founding of the Knights Templar, thus leading to the theory that the Templars were the military wing of the Priory, before they split at Gisors in 1188 (an account that the authors of HBHG also seem to find fairly credible). Decoding of the one on the right has given us, after translation from the French: "Shepherdess—No temptation that Poussin and Teniers hold the key; Peace 681 By the cross and this horse of God I destroy this daemon of the guardian at noon blue apples."
In addition to there being
different interpretations of these translations, additional interpretations
derive from disputes
about translation, which lead in different directions. For examples, see http://gazette.portail-Rennes-le-Chateau.com/neymanenglish
or http://home.tiscali.be/rlcbooks/. (For a website that deals expertly with all
the facts of and speculations about the case and provides views of the key
documents and artifacts, please see www.rlcresearch.com.)
Whatever,
that handwriting
analysis suggests strongly that the 
two
messages were written or transcribed by different people itself raises
questions, for both sides in the debate over their authenticity claim a single
author for both, the chief candidates being either an 18th C. priest
named Bigou (as
claimed by the popular story) or (as claimed by debunkers of the popular story)
a 20th C. forger, surrealist poet, pataphysician, and radio and film
personality (pictured to the left) named Phillipe De Chérisey (long-time friend of Pierre Plantard
and putative member of "The Priory of Sion," which injected itself
into the "mystery" beginning in the 1950s {although unnoticed until
the 1960s and, mostly, 1970s} for seemingly political reasons, and then found
itself used fictionally in