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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 PAGE 5 PUZZLING PIECES OF THE STORY |
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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 Page 6—Summing
Up Page 7—Links
& Sources All pages are best viewed by monitors set to
1024 X 768 resolution. |
Okay, let’s recapitulate now and then
go on to look more specifically at some of the pieces of the puzzle. The bibliography on this subject is growing
huge (and the websites multiply), and I can only review and point to a few of
the English-language books that offer interesting theories that attempt to
solve these puzzles.
The modern story, then, as put
together by Corbu, De Sède, Plantard, and Lincoln et al, among others, with the initial debunking counterpoint from
Charroux, Cholet, and Descadeillas, among others, begins in 1891 or soon after
with Bérenger
Saunière, the poor priest of Rennes-le-Château, suddenly spending huge
sums of money, after supposedly discovering some strange, coded parchments while
trying to renovate his dilapidated church and thereafter digging in the
cemetery and elsewhere and going on surreptitious hunting expeditions in the
surrounding countryside and bringing back “rocks.” Putting two and two together, it’s assumed by
many that the parchments were treasure maps of some sort and the “rocks”
disguised treasure in some way.
Exactly where in the church Saunière
found the parchments (if
indeed he did!) is a subject for debate.
The “Visigoth” stone altar pillar in which it was first said he found
them turns out not to be hollow (and maybe not even Visigoth), so it
couldn’t have been there. A wooden newel
post or balustrade, indeed hollow, is now promoted in the Saunière museum behind
the church as the hiding place. Locals have contributed stories that provide
further variations but still focused on the discovery of documents. Obviously there could be deliberate
misdirection here, for a number of reasons, and Saunière himself is not above
suspicion of deliberately concocting various “mysteries” to take the eye off
the mystery that mattered, if there was one.
Whatever, supposedly there were four
ancient parchments relating to the local aristocrats, the Hautpoul/Blanchefort
family, and their inheritance. The debunkers believe that Plantard’s Priory
conspirators either made the parchments up entirely or copied them from other
sources (in which case, Saunière could have been one of the sources). Indeed, De Chérisey has confessed as much,
but remember the point that hoaxers of the secret
agent kind are to be least trusted when admitting to a hoax. Hoax or genuine, what did the parchments
look like and what are some of the way they have been decoded?
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O D E D P A R C H M E N T S &
T R E A S U R E M A P S |
Of the four parchments of the popular story
(some versions count more, some less, depending upon how they are divided up),
two were genealogies (parchment 1 supposedly dating from 1244 and testifying to
Merovingian descent & parchment 2 covering 1244 to 1644 and testifying to
the continuance of that descent), and one was a family testament containing a
“state secret” (parchment 3 supposedly dating from 1695). Parchment 4 contained
coded biblical texts on front and back (often referred to as Parchment 1 and
Parchment 2 because those are the only ones published) but were shown to
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Above, the Dagobert Parchment, so-called because its code refers
to the last Merovingian king, Dagobert II, assassinated in 679 A.D. when he
was betrayed by the Church with whom a predecessor king, Clovis I, had made a
deal. Were the Merovingians direct descendants of Christ? Did the son of Dagobert escape to continue
the line? Below
is the bottom part of the message usually cut off from published
versions. Note that the same device
appears in the message on the right but upside down:
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Above, the Poussin-Blue Apples
parchment, which I so call because of the way it has been decoded (see below)
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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 that a strange
device appearing at the end of the document has been cut off in most
published versions, the same device that appears near the end of the message
on the back of that parchment but
upside down. Campbell further
compares the two devices to show that they could not have been written by the
same person, thus calling into question De Chérisey’s claim that he forged
them both. The device on the left
below is usually cut off of the message on the front of Parchment 4; the one
on the right below, from the message on the back of Parchment 4, Campbell
turned right side up so that the two could be compared in the same
position. The lettering and
handwriting are quite different. |
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A reminder about those “blue apples,”
however, insofar as they are apparitions associated with Saunière's church (an argument
has been made that they refer to a phenomenon to be seen at St. Sulpice in
An even more interesting phenomenon
is the way pentagonal geometry keeps showing up all over the place, in
documents, paintings, ground measurements, etc. As below:
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Illustrated above is
what Henry Lincoln calls “the geometric substructure of the parchment.” Supposedly this echoes the pentagonal geometry
that has been found all over the Rennes-le-Château region, in both natural
and man-made features of the landscape.
Note the “P S” signature at the bottom right, which the Priory wants
everyone to believe stands for “Priory of Sion.” |
The
closest Henry Lincoln ever got to the original parchments, by the way, was in viewing photographs
of them shown him by one of Plantard’s men, which revealed that the parchments
shown in De Sède’s book had been somewhat decoratively doctored in places to
make them more theatrical! Although the
message part was unaltered, Lincoln said, this doctoring of the originals
suggested that the Priory was both conscious of the need to interest the
sensationalist media but at the same time was naïve or careless about the consequences
of such doctoring, for it may have unnecessarily thrown them into
suspicion. However well deserved the
suspicion is!
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Whatever the “treasure” was that the
parchments apparently led him to, in the popular story, whether it was gold
and/or other valuable artifacts (including even more ancient documents) or
special mystical knowledge or the use of one of those in some way that made
money for him or whatever, Saunière apparently shared the wealth and the secret
of its source with, among a few others possibly, his “housekeeper” and
“companion,” Marie
Dénarnaud, 15 years younger and no doubt
a nubile young miss when she first went to work for the thirty-something Father
Saunière. Marie was
from the nearby village of Esperaza, just
southwest of and these days almost joined with Montazels,
Saunière’s hometown, and both just below Rennes-le-Château to the northwest of
it. For a priest’s housekeeper,
Marie reportedly lived a life of relative opulence and high fashion through
most of her 30 years with Saunière (although there’s some disagreement over how
many years she spent with him) and most of the 36 years she outlived him, though
the story has it that she lived penuriously at the end when she felt forced to
burn her money rather than answer questions about it when France changed its
currency after WWII.
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Marie Dénarnaud and Bérenger Saunière
are now enshrined as a romantic couple in the museum his
presbytery has been converted into. These photos have since been moved to a
different spot and are in a different relationship in the display they are a
part of. |
At the end Marie subsisted on money
from the sale of Saunière’s guest house, the Villa Bethania, to Noël Corbu,
whose family took care of her in her old age and who turned the Villa into the
aforementioned Hotel la Tour. She died
by stroke in 1953 without revealing the Secret to Corbu, although it is said,
by De Sède, that she had promised to and struggled on her deathbed to do
so. A dramatic scene, indeed! Masterpiece Theatre! Regardless, Marie apparently left
instructions that she was to be buried next to Saunière, and no woman climbs
into a man's grave unless she thinks she is "married" to him, in one
way or another.
Because the Saunière Secret may have
nothing to do with the Priory Secret, and the Priory has more and more come
under suspicion, investigators
who sense that there’s a worthy mystery here anyway have looked beyond Priory
motivations for linking of “the mystery” to other possible Secrets. What else could it be? Is following the money trail of any help?
Assuming that knowing the total of
Saunière’s expenditures would give us a clue as to how much income he needed to
at least break even and that knowing that would also tell us if even excessive
trafficking in masses could afford the expenditure or that other sources of
income would be needed, how
did Saunière spend his money and how much did he spend altogether, never mind
what’s on record?. To begin with
personal expenses, he supposedly spent huge amounts on lavish living and
entertaining, but do these amounts ever get figured into the debunkers’
calculations? I don’t think so. Because, for the most part, he didn’t keep
records of this sort of spending. Lots
of money also went to Marie, seemingly, and all the property was apparently put
in her name, so one of the curiosities of the debunkers’ case is that, despite
having references to Marie’s lavish spending, estimates of Saunière’s income
and expenditure never seem to factor in the sizable amount he must have given
Marie. Saunière also spent much on
improving the village and on travel, and at least some
of this does not seem to have been reported.
Saunière’s spending, therefore, seems to be mostly “off the books,”
which the notion that he had bank accounts in several European cities
supports. What is recorded about his spending, apparently, is that much of the
recorded part, according to both the evidence of our tourists’ senses and his
account books, went into restoration of his church and the buying of property
and construction of his estate. Although
some wealthy people clearly contributed to church restoration, perhaps for the
usual pious reasons (but also perhaps because they were paying for special
masses, according to the debunkers, but that could have been a cover for
blackmail or sponsorship in any event, and, if so, what was that about?),
Saunière seemingly spent well beyond such contributions on his various building
projects and on his flamboyant and gaudy restoration of and mysteriously coded
redecorating of his church. (I should note
that the debunkers, who tend to take things at face value, don’t see any codes
in that church other than conventional orthodox symbolism, just as their
calculations of how much he spent is considerably less than most
estimates. Although I’m unable to arrive
at an independent evaluation of his wealth, because so much of it seems to have
been “off the books,” my own sense of Saunière’s character is that he was
definitely not a man to be taken at face value.
He may have had nothing to do with the or a Priory, but he definitely
had something weird going on that he took great pains to disguise, but
seemingly in a way he knew the like-minded {initiates?} would see through.).
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The entry door to Saunière’s restored
church, with perching doves at the corners facing east and west. A Latin motto over the door reads “Terrible
[or Awesome] is this place,” and a devil poised perhaps to play chess with
Jesus awaits just inside that door |
Just outside the church door is a statue of the |
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H E C H U R C H O F
M A R Y M A G D A L E N E |
The church of “
Saunière multiplied the emphasis on
the Magdalen here several times over by naming a tower he had built after her
birthplace (supposedly), Magdala (from "Migdala," which is Hebrew for
"tower"), by constructing a grotto with a statuette of her (since
stolen) in it, and by naming a guest house he had built after her residence in
a Jerusalem suburb (Bethania). [Van
Buren speculates that the Tower Magdala and the Villa Bethania mark the periods
of the Magdalen’s life before and after repentance, as she lived in Magdala
before and Bethania after. If so, what then did Saunière
mean by associating his phallic tower with the unrepentant Magdalen and his
nesty guest house, where Marie eventually lived, with the repentant Magdalen?]. In addition, Douzet’s book, Sauniere’s Model and the Secret of Rennes-le-Château,
presents evidence that Saunière traveled often to regions to the east and
northeast of
What
is the meaning of Saunière’s fascination with Mary Magdalene?
[He’s not alone, by the way. Time
magazine, of July 11, 2003, contains a substantial treatment of the many views
of Mary Magdalene over the centuries, an article that was inspired by the bestseller
success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.]
A vigorous and generally feminist
school of interpretation argues that this fascination reinforces and is the key
to a strong and persistent reference to Goddess worship and evidence of an anti-patriarchal bent
in many of the clues to “the mystery.”
This alone, some argue, might account for the
Let’s
consider a variation on that. Lincoln
informs us that Mary Magdalene’s celestial representative, astrologically
speaking, was the planet
Venus, the consequence of the ancient habit (Hermetic in origin?) of
trying to make sense of things by connecting the celestial with the earthly
with the logic of “as
above, so below.” That is,
following this long-established logic, celibate Church fathers peddling
chastity, and connecting heaven with earth, associated the celestial sex bomb,
Venus, with the earthly one, the Magdalen, the “fallen woman.” Both known for their dance with the Devil, a
dance purely in the minds of the Church's holy perverts, for they were just doing
what was "natural."
I speak
figuratively of a dance in the case of Venus.
A surprising wrinkle, which Church fathers may or may not have realized,
although it was known by astrologers from ancient times—namely, that pentagonal geometry reflects the
orbital path of the planet Venus through the heavens as seen from Earth,
the only planet to have such a pattern (a pattern that takes 8 years to
complete, leading John Pollard to note that “8” is the number of Paradise,
which is a good way to describe the heavenly dance of “The Venus
Pentagon.” As for how far back in time
the orbital path of Venus was known, check out Knight & Lomas’ Uriel’s Machine, which traces Masonic
ritual back to an advanced pre-Druid, Neolithic culture that built monuments
like Newgrange in Ireland that were precise calculators of Venus’s orbit). This knowledge of Venus’s orbit may help to
make sense of the finding (by Lincoln and others) of various juxtapositions and
overlappings of hexagrams and pentagrams on the ground in the Rennes-le-Château
area. For, according to ancient
Indo-European symbolism, the five-pointed pentagram symbolizes the female (a head, two arms, and
two legs) and the six-pointed hexagram symbolizes the male (a head, two arms,
two legs, and a penis). The Star of David, banner of perhaps the first
exclusively patriarchal religion, is six-sided.
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Using as markers churches, castles, calvaires, tops of
mountains, and megaliths, as pinpointed on official surveyor maps,
investigators have found a number of exact circular, triangular, pentagonal,
and hexagonal formations in the Rennes-le-Château region. Above is one from Henry Lincoln called “The
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What is suggested by the occurrence
of “simultaneous” or “juxtaposed” hexagrams and pentagrams on the ground in the
Rennes-le-Château area (as above) is the interconnectedness and interdependency of male and female. Not only was such
symbolism often an integral part of ancient “pagan” worship, centered on
life-affirming fertility rituals, this might also explain why both Joseph and Mary appear as statues
within Saunière’s church to each side of the altar and why both are presented
as nurturing parents of a baby Jesus—perhaps they’re there to represent this
fruitful gender relationship principle, as Saunière echoed for his own
syncretic purposes the ancient pagan ideas. Could this also be why Marie, perhaps
following the instructions of her long-dead love, had herself buried right next
to Saunière, the pentagram
lying down with the hexagram, so to speak, to fulfill the symbolism of
regeneration through the mystic marriage of male and female? Except the “regeneration” they may have been
hoping for was “the resurrection.”
Incidentally,
many of the schools of interpretation here, pagan and not, orthodox or heretic,
seem to convene on the idea of a quest for immortality. The ancient torment of impending death is the
motive of motives, the prime mover in all things human.
If pentagram and pentagon are sexually
related, then Saunière may have been attempting with such symbolism the same
sort of balancing of his patriarchal Church with a female principle that other priests
attempted through the centuries and still do attempt with “Mariolatry,” the
elevation of the Virgin Mary to a central figure of worship. As the Catholic
Church replaced “pagan” religions that worshipped a Great Mother, the
patriarchy politically but ambivalently substituted the Virgin Mary for the
Great Mother, often bowing to Her popularity among the people by allowing
festivals and iconography that celebrated Her, but at the same time insisting
that She be kept out of the all-male Triune godhead. Some popes have even encouraged worship of the
Virgin, though perhaps with trepidation and mixed motives, for there are many
churches in Catholic lands where the Virgin Mary seems to be far more important
to worshippers than the male trinity.
Whatever, right outside the entry to
his church, and just steps away from the grotto that once contained a statuette
of the Magdalen, Saunière in 1891 had a statue of the Lourdes Virgin (supposedly) placed on an
upside-down “Visigoth” pillar he had taken from his church (the same
pillar in which it was said at first that the parchments were found). Given how many reversals of themes and
iconographic details various commentators have uncovered in his church
decoration and in other clues, it’s fair to ask what exactly Saunière was
trying to reverse in this case? What,
specifically, is accomplished by putting the Virgin on a reversed
“Visigoth” pillar?
Or is this not the Mary we think it
is? De
Sède argued that Saunière’s putting on the pillar under the statue the words
“Pénitence, Pénitence” refers us to a Virgin Mary “who in 1846 appeared in
tears to two young shepherds at La Salette near Grenoble”(126), for that Mary
is reported to have said exactly those words, whereas the Lourdes Virgin
reportedly said, in 1858, “I am the immaculate conception.” The Salette Mary went on to prophesy a widespread war that would
be stopped only by the restoration of the monarchy, which would seem to be an
obvious exercise in Catholic occultism to achieve political aims, and that would
square with Saunière’s public persona as a rabid monarchist. De Sède further thought the Salette Mary’s
weeping connected with the motif of the weeping Magdalene, which he associated
with “a spring called The Well of the Magdalene” that “weeps” just where the
Sals River connects with the Blanque River near Rennes-les-Bains.
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The directly across from it. |
The sunburst calvaire on the left, with
an inscription from the anthem for the coronation of a king, on the way to
the man-made grotto where a statuette of the Magdalen used to reside and
which John Pollard thinks marks the entrance to Saunière’s treasure trove. |
Incidentally, note that Saunière
dedicated this statue of the Virgin on June 21 of 1891, which is the summer
solstice. One finds solar imagery and
symbolism, with frequent allusion to solstices,
all over the place here, but it can be given orthodox
interpretation. Smith thinks this refers
merely to the Sun-Rising Christ-King every French monarch symbolically was
acknowledged to be on the day of his coronation. The Gnostics, however, know that it refers
to the “dawn” of understanding that comes to the adept at the end of “The
Way.” Could be both. Or something else. END TOP
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Solar symbols figure prominently in Saunière’s vestments and crosses
and sacred heart symbols, including the large sunburst calvaire outside his
church that the |
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Some have speculated that what Saunière was
about was a sly substitution of one Mary for another Mary, for he may have been
among those who thought the apparition appearing at Lourdes or Salette (and
elsewhere) was really the Great Mother, the Venus, the Magdalen, the Bride of
Jesus, mistaken as the Virgin Mary, and that the real center of his subversive
religion was Mary Magdalene, Maternal Source of the Merovingians (supposedly)
and the first to acknowledge the true Christ (radiantly emerged from the
darkness of the tomb). That would amount
to a reversal of history and of a celibate Church that Saunière perhaps thought
overemphasized sexual purity. Was that
the reversal he was cluing us to?
Well, Saunière certainly did put the
Magdalen’s name on everything, and the Magdalen seemed to be the object of his
constant quest outside of
If that’s the case, one might also
make a case for his accepting the view that the Virgin Mary was another “fallen woman,”
a woman who, after all, did not have her husband’s child, according to the
myth. In which case Saunière wasn’t
subverting an impossibly “pure” Mary with another, more human Mary but rather
suggesting that “the virgin” and “the whore” are one and the same woman. This would also put him in step with all
those pagan religions that celebrated the ever-renewing virginity of their
fertile Mother Goddesses, an interpretation very popular with some contemporary
feminists as well, of course.
That is, this Saunière, of
this version of the popular story, may have been a subversive but he was no
atheist or agnostic. He was a man who thought he had found the True Cross, the real
Christianity, a more life-affirming version of it, in the same way the old
“pagan” religions had been life-affirming by worshipping the Great Earth Mother
and the gift of the Sun and the balanced relationship between Mother Earth and
Father Sun. And damn any theology that
said otherwise! (André Douzet argues for
Saunière’s connections with Martinists in Lyon, another esoteric society with
assumptions at odds with the modern Church but focused on Christ nevertheless. Saunière may not have been interested in
throwing over Christ but in seeing Christ in more human terms. An idea that could lend some credence to the
notion some have that what he found was evidence of Christ’s humanity and
possibly even marriage to the Magdalene).
This further suggests a way to
reconcile Saunière’s supposed subversion with his reputation as a
right-winger. Is it possible that he saw
a Church that was compromising with Republican
That is, Sauniere’s subversion may
have been to the right of his Church, not to its left, and he would not have
thought of it as “subversion” at all but as a calling back of a wayward Church
to its roots. The confusion may stem
from the fact that he may indeed have been interested in all the same ancient,
esoteric material that anti-Church subversives of the “heretic” tradition were
interested in, but this material can just as easily lend itself to defending
the ur-Church as to attacking it. T. S.
Eliot, for example, used to point to the anthropological discoveries of a
pattern of crucifixion and resurrection among pagan gods as proof that
Christianity was right, all the pagan religions simply being foreshadowings of
the True Religion to come. It just took
a while to get it right. So too with
the entire Hermetic, Alchemical, Gnostic tradition, from this point of
view. It was all heading toward the
True Cross and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, if it were just "corrected"
a bit!
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T H E V I L L A
B E T H A N I A |
We need to grant that what Saunière did
with his wealth may not tell us anything about how he acquired it or what it
was, but we also need to cover the possibility that they are intimately
connected, that, in short,
he was not a frivolous man but a man who would use at least part of his money
to make an important statement.
As appears to be the case in that so much was spent on the complete
makeover of a church and the creation of a considerable “estate” around the
church that somehow “speaks” of a grand vision, one that he wished to share
with those qualified, perhaps even in a participatory way, in keeping with his
being a ritual-performing priest.
As said, this estate included the
architecturally out-of-place, two-story “Villa Bethania,” a separate guest house next to the
church and presbytery for Saunière’s many, often famous guests (such as, reportedly,
the opera diva Emma Calvé, Claude Debussy, the French secretary of state for
culture, and the Archduke Johann von Hapsburg, cousin of the emperor of
Austria, Franz Joseph). Smith thinks this
clientele was invented by Corbu and/or the Priory conspirators, which opens up
the possibility that Saunière boarded simony-abettors there instead, but,
regardless, how many priests have you heard of, especially of small village
parishes, having guest houses built with their own money? Or was that not perhaps its original
purpose? Smith thinks this fervid
monarchist may have built it as a refuge for “the Grand Monarch-in-hiding”
until the time was ripe to reestablish the monarchy (which, incidentally, could
just as likely be of Rex Deus or Merovingian descent, especially if the
subversive Saunière and the right-wing Saunière were the same person). But in that case, the True Believers want to
know, who did he think was the monarch-in-hiding? Emma Calvé?
Of course if Marie Dénarnaud was his unmarried consort, there’s
some difficulty in imagining the likes of Emma Calvé being welcomed here! Or was their mystic marriage an “open” one?
At any rate, Saunière’s naming the
Villa “Bethania” reminds us that the Church then thought it likely, as some
scholars do now, that Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene were the same person
(and although apparently the Vatican has recently backed off from the
identification, what matters is what Saunière thought was the case). As Van Buren suggests, Mary could have been from
the town of “Magdala” and also, perhaps after her repentance, lived in a house
in “Bethany,” a suburb of Jerusalem, a house to which Jesus seems to have
frequently repaired (her brother was Lazarus!). What matters of course is what Saunière
thought was the case, and it appears that in naming his guest house he meant to
put the stamp of the Magdalen on another key part of his “theme park,” which I
show again below: END
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Above is the museum’s model of the west part of Saunière’s
“theme park.” Note that both formal
walkways, to the side and in front of the Villa, are suggestive of solar
symbolism as well. Today this pattern
is obscured because overgrown with trees and bushes. Presumably, a model of his estate that
Saunière himself had commissioned just before he died has recently been
discovered that reveals that he was just getting started in his building
plans! Corbu’s son-in-law questions
this, however. |
So, according to the popular story,
he used the Villa as a guest house for VIPs.
While it’s reported that Saunière often made secretive trips outside
A good argument against the notion
that Saunière was just selling buried treasure to his VIPs is that it seems
unlikely that such wealthy and influential people would have visited
At any rate, the Villa Bethania
apparently lost its magic after Saunière’s death, perhaps because Marie lacked
priestly credentials or expertise. The
wealth he gave her, presumably converted into cash, lasted a long time, it
appears, but although she apparently possessed the Secret of its source she
seemingly didn’t possess the activating magic or the will to use it. When, according to the story, she burned her
money after WWII and sold the Villa to the aforementioned Nöel Corbu, Corbu
tried to restore the magic in a way by telling Saunière’s romantic story to the
hotel’s guests and eventually to the press.
After going through at least one more owner as a hotel, the Villa is now
part of a Saunière museum.
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Is the name, evoking Mary of may have been the same person. |
The Villa Bethania, no longer a guest house nor a hotel, but open to visitors to the museum. |
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According to the story, Saunière, acting like the Lord of Something, also paid for significant improvements to the town and festivities for the villagers, and, adjacent to the church, as part of his “theme park,” the building of zoological gardens, formal gardens, two greenhouses, fountains, a grotto, and a rare-book and special collection library in the form of the castellated Tower of Magdala (see above), bu