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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), built over a cave that descends into the earth. The following photo of the cave is from
Torkain’s website at http://www.rennes-le-chateau.com/anglais/magdala.htm,
where additional photos are available.
Torkain reports that a dig there in August of 2003 turned up
nothing. Don’t dig in the obvious
places, say I, for surely they’ve all been cleaned out long ago, if there was
anything to clean out..
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It’s said (but disputed) that he had
made plans to build even further, including a second, larger tower, but died before
they could be realized. This strange
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The esplanade curving north from the Tour Magdala to the
left. The walkway ends in an Orangerie, a greenhouse where Saunière kept
exotic plants. |
Looking through the now skeletal Orangerie at the church on the
right and |
Especially with binoculars, one can
clearly see the Tour Magdala, for instance, from the odd plaza with the
griffin fountains Saunière played in as a child in the village of Montazels a few miles to the northwest (but not with the
fountains in it, apparently, for 1869, when Saunière was 17, is the year cited
by Frances M. Pearson in The Rennes Observer for the fountain’s
construction. Saunière’s father
Joseph may have had something to do with its construction, right outside his
front door, because as mayor twice of Montazels and related by marriage to the
mayor at the time of construction, he seems to have been very influential in
local politics. And if the father chose
the mythological details of this fountain, then this perhaps reveals something
important about this family. A family,
by the way, from which the adult Saunière estranged himself, refusing to pay
his share of his mother’s care, for instance, and embroiling himself in nasty
disputes with his siblings). It is
reported that Saunière grew up listening to tales of buried treasure common to
the area and loved nothing better than a treasure hunt. But, if the popular story is correct, as an
adult he seems to have gotten more than he as a child had bargained for in his
wildest dreams. As an adult, one
imagines, he must have occasionally stood up there on that Magdala
esplanade looking down on his relatively humble roots with a certain amazed
smile on his face.
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La Place Griffoul in Montazels, Saunière’s boyhood playground, presumably. Or did he prefer to spend his time indoors
reading about the Knights Templar, the Cathars, and other local ghosts? |
Saunière as a boy could see Rennes-le-Château off in the
distance, perhaps even from his bedroom window. The Montazels church is to the right of the
griffin fountain, so that too was a constant presence. |
But what was this Tower Magdala for, other than
for viewing the area? It was used as a
library, yes, but it doesn’t look like a library. What it looks like is a symbol of something, a sample of greater
splendor, say, a miniature of what Saunière was dreaming of. This is a tiny castle. A castle that suggests or leads to a larger
castle, perhaps a “castle-in-the-air” to those who have eyes to see, the castle
in which a lost monarch could feel at home, if Smith is right, or perhaps one
of the mansions referred to in “in my Father’s house there are many
mansions.” Or perhaps it’s meant as a
gateway to some sort of spiritual
There is a well-known notion that the
Gothic cathedrals were “books in stone,” and possibly even “alchemical books in
stone” (See Weidner and Bridges’ Monument to the End of Time). It would seem that Saunière’s entire estate, but especially his
tower, combine with his church to add up to some sort of non-verbal book. Which says, “let those who eyes to read,
read.”
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D
I G G I N G F O R T R U T H
O R T R E A S U R E? |
Many of
course insist that the source of Saunière’s wealth must have been nothing more
than buried treasure,
probably of ancient vintage, because he not only apparently went on frequent
treasure hunts, or what looked like treasure hunts, and dug secretly at
night in the church and the church’s cemetery, but also he may have left behind
what amounted to a treasure map in the decorations and designs of his church
and estate, which seem to contain coded references to local spots (brought to
our attention by De Sède), often natural, geological formations (like a huge
rock called “the Devil’s Armchair”) or megalithic markers. And Marie herself reportedly spoke in old
age of the villagers “walking on gold,” though they didn’t know it. “Walking on gold” is ambiguous language to
all but treasure hunters who take their “gold” literally. Thus some diggers have thought the basement
of the Tour Magdala contains a gateway to a network of tunnels laden
with treasure.
There is a cave opening there, but so far no one has reported
that it leads to anything revelatory.
Again, if somebody found something, would they announce it? [Well, the “Tomb Man” has! See Page 1 at the top.]
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In addition to the elaborate abstract decorations
on the church’s walls, there are representations of the 14 stations of the
cross and statues between, all of which are capable of orthodox
interpretation but many of which seem to hint at local spots, as though
amounting to a treasure map. Click Here to See
Plan of the Church
(mark this spot) |
Well, in
addition to the tunnels and caves still there, the idea that Saunière found buried
treasure gains credibility from the fact there was ample opportunity and
occasion for Celtic Druids, ancient Gauls, Visigoth royalty (after sacking
Rome, where at least part of the treasure of the Jerusalem Temple may have been
kept after the Romans’ sacking of Jerusalem), Merovingian aristocrats,
beleaguered Cathars and Knights Templar, Carolingian and Capetian kings, among
others, to have deposited treasure in this area, the wildest speculation
running to even the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant. The Nazis, inspired by the modern Cathar Otto
Rahn (1904-1938), dug in this general area for that reason, some saying that
they at least found gold, others saying they did not find what they were
looking for (for which Rahn may have been murdered, in either case). And the possibility of the Holy Grail’s being
here seems to be why Richard Wagner came here before writing Parsifal (if
that legend is credible). So, Grail or
This “Raiders” mentality adds an
element of the sort of danger that attends upon large-stake treasure hunts
where there’s a race to the treasure, and De Sède made much of this by devoting
his entire last chapter to an account of the deaths that made the treasure
“accursed,” to which, as I said earlier, he and other Priory members may have
added by assigning authorship of Priory documents to people murdered or
“accidentally” killed. (Chapter 9 of Secrets of Rennes-le-Chateau, by Lionel & Patricia
Fanthorpe, gives a rather blood-curdling account of these and other
murders, if you’re interested.)
Although the talk of material
treasure may have been mostly a cover for something less tangible but more
valuable, nevertheless treasure hunters of the materialistic sort abound in
this region, some seemingly desperate and dangerous. In this story, serious damage has been done
to important artifacts by their like, some even stolen, and people have been
threatened and maybe even killed. The
murder in Saunière’s time (1897) of a nearby fellow priest--Abbé Gélis of Coustaussa,
who had caches of gold hidden about--by someone he seems to have known, may or
may not be treasure related, for the murderer was never discovered, but it
certainly adds to the atmosphere of danger.
Incidentally, Saunière himself is
now a suspect in that case, though not at the time. Beyond this grisly and ambiguous episode,
several of the principal investigators of “the mystery” report attempts to
scare them off or interfere with or frustrate their investigations, which I
might dismiss as good detective story plotting had I not experienced something
like it myself on a rendezvous I planned with Marie de Blanchefort.
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M A R I E
D E B L A N C H E F O R T a.k.a. Marie de Négri d’Ables, Countess Hautpoul de Blanchefort |
Castle Blanchefort, its ruins situated on Mt. Blanchefort to the east of
Rennes-le-Château and across the road west from Mt. Cardou, is the castle in
the area Lincoln says was last to be inhabited by local, pre-Revolutionary
aristocrats (related to Plantard, Plantard tried to convince us) who supposedly
knew and kept the Secret and whose genealogy figures in the parchment and
cemetery codes. In fact, the parchments
are supposed to have been family documents of the Hautpoul-Blancheforts, whose family genealogy the
cemetery codes were deliberately meant to provide a key to. (It should be noted here that there is much
historical confusion caused by the fact that many families, in various parts of
France, used some variety of “Blanchefort” as their name, which has led the
authors of Rex Deus to state flatly that if there were local
Blancheforts, and there may not have been, they are not the ones pertinent to
this “mystery.” Nevertheless, there is a
mountain just east of Rennes-le-Chateauu called “
Taking off from the village of
Rennes-les-Bains one day in the summer of 2001 with the intent of climbing to
the ruins of Castle Blanchefort, I encountered, first, a kennel full of
snarling dogs at the entrance to the path, and then what appeared to be
deliberate, progressive roadblocks on a rather scary wooded path marked as
leading to the ruins. As that path
seemed to disappear on the other side of a small stream, I gave it up. The locals may just be having fun with
tourists, but this is precisely the kind of thing that creates “The Raiders of
the Lost
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The path to Chateau Blanchefort through
the woods from Rennes-les-Bains is not for the
faint-of-heart. There may be an easier route from the other
side. |
At any rate, is there a clear
connection between
Before we get into what the Knights
Templar were up to from the perspective of the Rennes investigators, we should note
that most professional historians do not think they were up to anything
special. Remarkably, the Saunière
Society on
According to the view of them
preferred by Rennes investigators, The Knights Templar
were originally commissioned by Pope Honorius II, supposedly in 1118 (and
officially proclaimed in 1120) but maybe earlier (because an earlier Pope,
Sylvester II, may have actually been the one who initiated the plan),
supposedly to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land but privately to dig around in
Jerusalem and see what they could find, probably following up on rumors or
deduced clues of important artifacts buried there (Bernard of Clairvaux and the
Count of Champagne being somehow involved in all this eventually, but Pope
Sylvester II’s tutelage at Islamic universities in Spain as a young man, where
ancient lore was taught, may have been the precipitating factor). Some think this was a typical pre-emptive
strike by the Vatican to find what they didn’t want others to find, but Lincoln
at first thought the Priory of Sion of the Twelfth Century, then known as the Ordre
de Sion, was behind it, and perhaps behind the Crusades as well (the first
regent of the captured Jerusalem being, perhaps, a descendent of the
Merovingians!). By the way, that there
was a documented Ordre de Sion, located on
Yes, there’s ambiguity in the nature
of Templar “treasure,” as with all the “treasures” in this case. The Templars behaved as though they had found
both a sizable material treasure and a Big Secret of less tangible
character (perhaps from esoteric Islam and/or cabalistic Judaism and/or the
Essenes) that gave them unusual powers, powers that put them in conflict with
subsequent popes, such as Clement V, who had been schemed into the papacy to do
the bidding of a French king, Philip IV.
Among other reasons for hating them, Philip was deeply in debt to the
Templars and ultimately destroyed them to avoid paying the debt. This drove Templar survivors underground and
abroad, apparently taking their treasure with them or hiding it, for the king
never found it. Rennes-le-Château has
long been favored as one of the possible hiding places. But the Templar flag (and later piratical
flag) of the Skull and Crossbones appeared as well on many ships that sailed
from France at the time of the massacre, and much speculation has centered on
where they landed, Scotland for sure, but maybe Nova Scotia, as well, well
ahead of Columbus.
Arguing on the side of the Templars’
most important “treasure” being some sort of “Great Truth,” possibly acquired
from Moslem mystics schooled in Hermetic lore, it may be significant that one
of the Templars’ specialties was building according to the principles of
“sacred geometry.” Some have even
wondered if the period of great Gothic cathedral building that followed in
their wake wasn’t directly attributable to them, since “Masonic” architectural
knowledge is one thing they were thought to have acquired in Jerusalem,
knowledge also considered part of the Hermetic/ Alchemical/ Pythagorean/
Cabalistic/ Gnostic inheritance passed on to the Masons (and which Knight &
Lomas in The Hiram Key and Uriel’s Machine argue came from a
pre-Celtic Neolithic culture in Western Europe that was largely wiped out in
Noah’s flood). And of course such
knowledge connects with all the sacred geometry seemingly found around
Rennes-le-Château.
At any rate, the last of the
Blancheforts, according to
So this gives us a Saunière who was
trying to transmit clues to initiates about his Big Secret but not this
clue. Why eliminate this clue? Was it too obvious? Or was it misleading? Or did it send the decoder off in a
direction Saunière thought not fruitful or not advisable? Or, if it was a planted clue, was it just a
teaser, meant to imply dark forces working against the Plantards?
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Headstone and slab on the tomb of Marie de Blanchefort, supposedly,
before Saunière effaced them. As an
example of the less difficult coding, the vertical columns on the slab on the
right, a strange combination of Latin words in the Greek alphabet, translate as “Et in Arcadia Ego” (maybe),
literally translated as “And in Arcadia I…” and usually taken to be Death’s
announcing his grim presence even in idyllic Arcadia, a clue that leads some
to the painter Poussin (about which more below) and others who used this
theme. |
On now to some of the
even more tenuous theories about what “the treasure” consisted of, but perhaps
“tenuous” only because they are more difficult to prove, for good reasons. “Treasure” that is, say, valuable knowledge
made even more valuable by having been kept secret over a long period of time
is less susceptible to empirical testing.
And some knowledge is simply knowledge of how to do
something, as much of a priest’s knowledge is how to conduct certain
rites. At any rate, if knowledge was
Saunière’s principal wealth, and “knowledge is power,” it’s then a question of what he did
with the knowledge. Was he
responsible with its use? And is there
any clue to its nature in what he did with it?
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T H E T O M B O F
JESUS |
Some think he did not behave
responsibly. Some think that while the
priest probably did find some buried treasure, his wealth mainly came
from blackmailing the
Catholic Church (or some other similarly interested party) with the
threat of exposing proof that Jesus was strictly human, married to Mary
Magdalene, and a father of children whose descendants became the Merovingian
kings, the first kings of
Whatever the case, this
bloodline of Jesus (the real Holy
Chalice), it is said, is alive today, the Secret of which has been maintained
by certain dynastic families (“Rex Deus”), of which Pierre Plantard tried to convince us he
was a part. (See Rex Deus, by Hopkins, Simmans & Wallace-Murphy,
which argues that these interlinked families all claim descent from the 24 High
Priests of the Temple of Jerusalem in the First Century AD, Jesus being one of
them, and that they have conspired together over the centuries to affect the
course of European history, such as in creating the Crusades, the Cistercians,
the Ordre de Sion, and the Knights Templar, as well as Gothic
architecture, modern banking and mercantile methods, the Italian Renaissance,
the Scottish Enlightenment, and many other features of a high
civilization. See also Laurence Gardner’s Bloodline
of the Holy Grail, which focuses on one particular strain of the Rex
Deus group of families).
Some credence is leant to this blood
line argument by the fact that, as said, the Merovingians seemingly claimed
Davidic descent, and there’s relevance to the area of the Languedoc in that
there are numerous ancient churches in this region which have stars of David
somewhere in their decoration (which may be another thing that accounts for the
Church’s centuries-long anti-Jewishness and repeated attempts to purge this
region of “heretics,” at times amounting to genocide). Perhaps the Holy Grail is nothing more than
the Gospel of Love Jesus passed on to his disciples, as some maintain, but
Lincoln’s first book presents the theory that the Holy Grail, conventionally the cup into which
the blood of Jesus was caught by Joseph of Arimathea when he was hanging on the
cross and maybe also the cup Jesus used for the first communion at The Last Supper,
is actually a metaphor for
the veins through which flow the blood of those descended from Jesus or the
womb of Mary Magdalene in which that descent had its beginning.
So it’s popular with some to think that Jesus is buried around
Rennes somewhere, which also gives those who think that Saunière got
rich blackmailing the church another good rationale for such blackmail. Some (see Andrews and Shellenberger’s The Tomb of God)
even think they know exactly where Jesus was buried—in Mt. (or Pêche) Cardou
(“Cardou” perhaps being a local corruption of “corps dieu,” meaning
“body of God”). Cardou is a mountain to
the east of Rennes-le-Château, across the road from
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There are signs of recent excavation on
Mt. or Pêche Cardou, as the temptation to dig up God becomes
irresistible. Also noted, on the day I visited, were a
goodly number of shotgun shells on the ground. |
Well, the knowledge of where Jesus is
buried would be pretty powerful “heretical” knowledge, all right, especially if
it and his theorized marriage to Mary Magdalene were confirmed by authentic
documents. The fact that Saunière was in 1910 tried for
simony (thought by True Believers to be at least partially trumped-up
charges by a new bishop who wasn’t in on the game, as the old one had been) and
suspended by his bishop from priestly duties indicates that the Church
certainly was unhappy with him.
Interestingly, he defied the Church at that time by refusing
reassignment and continuing to perform mass at an improvised altar outside his
guest house (as the villagers ignored the new priest). What happened after his suspension is subject
to debate. Lincoln says that in 1915 the
Vatican, which had always “seemed to treat Saunière with kid gloves,”
mysteriously annulled his suspension. If
For what it’s worth, let’s throw in a
couple of De Sède’s
stories that confirm the rogue priest image. These may be “made up,” but if so what point
was there in making them up, other than narrative enhancement?
Just before Saunière’s death by stroke in 1917, the
priest called in to administer “extreme unction” to Saunière refused to do so,
De Sède told Lincoln, upon hearing the dying man’s confession and was seen
hurriedly leaving with a horrified expression on his face! A tale of mere buried treasure surely
wouldn’t have had this effect. So did
Saunière tell his confessor about Jesus?
Or about Mary Magdalene? Or his
murder of Abbé Gélis? Etcetera, pick
your fantasy. Or was De Sède
embellishing the tale of this deathbed confession as someone embellished the
parchments?
Another element of the mystery is
that, although the dates may simply have been recorded wrong, Marie is said to
have ordered his casket a few days or, according to De Sède, months, before he
had his stroke on January 17!! Whatever
that implies, that he then died on January 22 gives us two magic numbers two
conjure with—17 and 22—both of which have special significance for the
esoterically-inclined.
[By the way, certain numbers, in themselves
or as geometric measures and degrees, really matter in this mystery,
to the delight of numerologists and mathematicians, but all the attention to
number is justified by the fact that number mattered even more to the
ancients whose esoterica is now called upon to explain the Rennes
mysteries. When the ancients discovered
how mathematical the universe is, how number seems to underlie everything in
creation, they came to the conclusion that number preceded creation and
determined the shape of things, as in a sense it might. When St. Bernard of Clairvaux asked himself
“What is God?,” he replied that “God is length, width, height, and depth.” In The Dimensions of Paradise, John
Mitchell summarizes the point this way: “Ancient science was based, like that
of today, on number, but whereas number is now used in the quantitative sense
for secular purposes, the ancients regarded numbers as symbols of the universe,
finding parallels between the inherent structure of number and all types of
form and motion….They inhabited a living universe, a creature of divine
fabrication, designed in accordance with reason and thus to some extent
comprehensible to the human mind.”
“Gematria” is the process of numerical analysis by which the
particular number of a thing is determined and that number’s symbolic value can
be determined in itself and by combination with other numbers through addition,
subtraction, multiplication, and division.
For example, the number “22” is important because ancient Hebrew, the
“holy” language man used, supposedly, to speak to God, had 22 letters in its
alphabet. And each Hebrew letter could
be assigned a numerical value that combined with other values to reveal divine
purpose, as certain rabbis did with interesting results. So, too, the relevance of all the pentagonal
geometry in the
However, if you consult enough guides to these
symbolic numbers, you will find that there are disagreements or variations, no
doubt partly because there are different traditions in different parts of the
world. In On Earth As It Is In
Heaven, for example, Greg Rigby reports that “In ancient
But others accept Marie’s premature
ordering of a coffin as fact and explain it by the fact that at his death it
was discovered that Saunière owned nothing, for everything had been put in
Marie’s name! That is, they think that,
financially insulated, she was either part of a plot to do him in or had reasons
of her own, although they are hard put to come up with a reason for such
actions except the conventional one of jealousy—there were insinuations of an
affair with Emma Calvé! Well, that Marie
did Saunière in or contributed to doing him in seems unlikely if it’s true, as
said, that she faithfully visited his grave on a daily basis and that 36 years
after Saunière’s death she had her grave put right next to his. That suggests the sort of serious love for a
man that a woman would not betray. But
of course the human heart is capable of incredible twists. At any rate, the possibility that “the
mystery” comes with an illicit and possibly “tragic” romance doesn’t hurt trade
either.
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The back of the Church of the Magdalene and
adjacent cemetery. Marie and Saunière are buried in
nondescript graves on the back wall below the Orangerie. |
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T W I N
S & D O U B L E S |
Back to “the burial of Jesus”
motif. Another question many are
interested in is--exactly what Jesus is buried here, if that’s the case
at all? This question is raised by
another, related motif popular among some investigators—that of the twin or double of Jesus—a
motif perhaps embodied by the odd statues of Joseph and Mary on either side of
the altar in the church dedicated to Mary Magdalene in Rennes-le-Château. Both Joseph and Mary are holding a baby
Jesus, or so it seems. That the babies
are twins or doubles is an alternate interpretation to the one I gave above,
although that Joseph and Mary represent a balanced gender relationship could be
complementary to the view proposed here if the two Jesuses are really Jesus and
his twin brother. The only problem with
this, of course, is that Joseph was supposedly not the father of Jesus.
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The
Church of the Magdalene features two baby Jesuses. |
Relief of Mary Magdalene beneath the altar, supposedly painted by
Saunière himself. |
So it is conjectured that the
Magdalen’s cloning altar, so to speak, refers either to a tradition that Jesus
had a twin or to a similar tradition that there were two Jesuses whose lives were confused and
conflated in the New Testament (“Jesus,” or actually “Yeshua,” being a common
name in those days). And so the “Jesus”
believed to be buried near Rennes-le-Château, if not “the real Jesus,” is
sometimes argued to be his twin or his double.
This motif partially stems from the
very contradictory
portraits of Jesus one finds in the New Testament, such as the contrast
between the Jesus who preaches brotherly love and forgiveness of enemies and
the warrior Jesus of the Book of Revelation who brings wrathful judgment to the
sinners of the earth. The latter Jesus
was the source of what is called “muscular Christianity,” which later was used
to rationalize the Crusaders’ attempts to “kick Moslem ass,” and here we go
again! That is, a schizoid Bible may be
responsible for this tradition of a double or twin Jesus. And note the echo of this in Leonardo’s and Poussin’s paintings of
“The Last Supper,” where the Jesus in the
center is doubled by the fifth man to his right.
In an interesting variation, P. Silvain’s Jesus-Christ Bar
Aba argues for a distinction between a “Celestial Jesus” and a
“Terrestrial Jesus,” insisting that there is overwhelming evidence that one of
the Jesuses, the one who escaped the crucifixion, is buried in an ancient Roman
mine in Alet-les-Bains,
a town just to the north of Rennes-le-Château on the road to Carcassonne(see map below), and a town whose ancient church has a
star of David prominently featured. And
so
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The
Rennes-le-Château area, also known as “Cathar Country” |
And now we have a third candidate for the burial
place of Jesus, this one with perhaps more physical proof to
substantiate its claims. André Douzet, in Sauniere’s
Model, tells us he has found a plaster model for what was to have
been a bronze cast of “The Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre” ordered by Saunière
not long before his death, a model of the true location of Christ’s tomb, not
far from Lyon, a city frequently visited by Saunière and where he actually
rented rooms, attended meetings of the Martinists, and visited goldsmiths, when
he wasn’t out in the countryside exploring an area perhaps historically
associated with the Hautpoul family.
Douzet believes that in researching areas around Perillos on the plateau
of Opoul, he has found the models for Saunière’s tower and some of the key
iconography in Saunière’s church, as well as actual treasure items! The details of Douzet’s account are
necessary reading, for this book points to the existence of something very rare
in this investigation—actual objects that support the idea of Saunière’s
Secret—although with the surprise that the objects of treasure, both physical
and spiritual/intellectual, are not in Rennes-le-Château.
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P O U S S
I N ’ S T O M B IN
A R C A D Y |
While on the subject of tombs, I should
mention that there is a huge amount of attention given to certain paintings of Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665), especially “The Shepherds of Arcadia,” which shows shepherds
pointing at an inscription--“Et
in Arcadia Ego”--on an above-ground
tomb, the very same inscription encoded on Marie de Blanchefort’s tombslab, as
mentioned above (which, remember, the debunkers think is a fake). A copy of this painting, according to De
Sède, was purchased by Saunière at the Louvre, along with others that were
relevant to understanding the Big Secret, when he was in
More stunning news, from De Sède (relayed from
Plantard?), was that
Poussin’s tomb was modeled on an actual tomb that existed on the south
side of a road leading east from Couiza (below Rennes-le-Château to the north)
to Arques, between Serres Castle and Arques Castle at Les Pontils, and that the
mountainous background on the right of Poussin’s painting matches exactly the
background of the tomb that existed near Rennes-le-Château. I
use the past tense because in 1988, after some numbskull treasure hunter used
explosives to force entry into the tomb, an enraged landowner finished the
destruction of the tomb that was causing tourists and treasure seekers to so
often disturb his peace! Or so the story
goes, for who’s to say this wasn’t a cover for other motives? At any rate, this tomb was more than once
broken into before this, the first time just after Henry Lincoln investigated
it. Obviously this tale has its farcical
elements as well.
Well, if Poussin’s painted tomb
and/or the local tomb are relevant, it seems they are to be taken, as
part of this “mystery,” as symbolic signposts to the real tomb of Jesus
(or his double or twin), not as the actual tomb. The local tomb was certainly close to
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Poussin’s “The Shepherds of x-rays, may be keys to a hidden geometry.
The mountains in the right background |
The tomb a few miles from
Rennes-le-Château, at Les Pontils, before it was dynamited by a treasure
hunter and then destroyed by the owner in 1988. Photo from Henry Lincoln’s Key to the
Sacred Pattern. For other photos, go to
http://smithpp0.tripod.com/psp/upg/uidx.html |
There
are two principal problems with this Poussin connection.
First, there is no record of
Poussin’s having visited or even come close to the Rennes-le-Château
region. He lived most of his life in
A
more serious problem is that the chronology seems not to fit.
The tomb that was supposedly Poussin’s model, a few miles to the east of
Rennes-le-Château, may not have existed in Poussin’s day. Author of a 1988 book, Les Archives de
Rennes-le-Château,
Pierre Jarnac reported that the eventual site of the “Poussin tomb” had
been a conventional grave site from 1903 on, containing deceased members of the
Galibert family, their remains being moved to Limoux when the property was sold
in 1921 to Emily Rivarès, a Frenchwoman from
It would be nice if we could at least
let this matter “rest in peace,” but
At any rate, since official records
do not seem to exist to corroborate the time of the tomb’s construction, and
the appearance of the tomb in photographs certainly makes it look older than a
mere 60 years or so, we are left with contradictory testimony and perhaps an
irresolvable ambiguity. Well, would it
help to do carbon-14 testing of what remains of the tomb? Or has all the debris been removed?
What does all this matter? The Poussin motif got going because Poussin is specifically
mentioned in the parchments Saunière found (according to De Sède), thus
accounting for Saunière’s purchasing of copies of paintings of Poussin and
others on his first visit to Paris. In one of the parchments, Poussin and
Teniers (another painter contemporary with Poussin) are said to “hold the key.” But are these Abbé Bigou’s or Marie de
Blanchefort’s words? Or just De
Chérisey’s or Plantard’s?
So why then, according to De Sède,
did Saunière later efface the inscription on the Marie de Blanchefort graveslab
which echoed the theme of one of Poussin’s most famous paintings--“Et in
At any rate, to continue with the deductions
following from examination of parchments and graveslabs, which has a certain
plausibility to it, since the parchments mention Poussin, it of course makes no
sense that they were created before his time and a great deal of sense that
they were created after his fame was secured, as presumably it was by 1781, when Marie de
Blanchefort died.
As for why Marie de Blanchefort or
Father Bigou would refer us to Poussin, it’s been plausibly argued that Poussin
was a member of a secret society (like the Priory of Sion or the Martinists)
which was connected to and supportive of the blood line claim of the
Merovingians and who thus colluded with the hidden royal family in passing down
the secrets of a “mystery” from generation to generation, secrets which might
include the location of the tomb of their ancestor, Jesus, and so Poussin
deliberately left a record of his secret knowledge in certain of his paintings
in which a tomb is pointed to (which in fact, the reasoning goes, points to the
Arcadian area of Rennes-le-Château, which it further makes sense for him to
have visited if he really had such knowledge.
But, in that age dangerous to “heretics,” not tell anyone except in
code?). The “Et in
There is also to deal with a
mysterious letter sent from an Abbé Fouquet to his brother, Nicholas, Superintendent
of Finances to the court of Louis XIV, that speaks of a meeting with Poussin in
Rome in 1656: “He and I discussed
certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in
detail…things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which
even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to
him, it is possible that nobody else will ever rediscover in the centuries to
come. And what is more, these are
things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of
better fortune nor be their equal.”
Whatever that means, it seems to have had quite an effect on the king,
who had Nicholas Fouquet arrested and imprisoned for the rest of his life (making
him the most likely candidate, say some, for “The Man in the Iron Mask”).
[Consider, however, the claim made in Nick Dear’s play Power that King Louis’ extreme displeasure with Fouquet was caused
by Fouquet’s throwing an extravagant party in 1661 that the young king did not
have the resources to match, and thus he ruined Fouquet and stole his life out
of pique and outrage. See the TLS,
It’s also deemed crucial to the Poussin
theory that these paintings appear to have a “sacred geometry” operating behind
the scenes, as established by art historians possessed of x-ray vision and good
with rulers and calculators. Much effort
and mathematical ingenuity have gone into showing that the same Golden Section
sacred geometry as appears in the Poussin painting is to be found in the
parchments (see above) and in the mathematically precise layout of the
Rennes-le-Château area, mathematics that were seemingly mimicked or alluded to
by Saunière in his building and laying out of his estate and the decorating of
his church. Lincoln has argued that
Saunière’s tower, for example, serves as the apex of a Pentacle of Mountains in
which five key mountaintops apparently form an exact pentagram of Golden
Section proportions, and that man-made structures on ancient holy sites form
other complex configurations!
All of this geometry, like the
pointing shepherds in the Poussin painting, is thought to “point” toward some
Great Truth it would profit us to know or to provide a sort of treasure map to
a Great Truth, so to speak. The
exquisite mathematics of Golden Section pentagrams and hexagrams themselves
have for millennia been thought to be emblems of the ultimate perfection that
exists behind the scenes of seemingly chaotic human experience. [Those who wish to pursue this could read Greg Rigby’s On Earth As It
Is In Heaven.]
Of course the orthodox say that what
is pointed to in such scenes as Poussin painted is how Christ’s redemptive
sacrifice saves us from death (memento mori being the theme), but if
what’s being pointed to, as Poussin’s shepherds point to that symbolic tomb, is
where the body of Jesus lies (or his twin or double), in the Arcadian region of
Rennes-le-Château, then obviously orthodox comforts are challenged.
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S A C R E
D G E O M E T R Y &
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And so another whole school of
thought is devoted to showing that Saunière was funded by secret organizations
who wished to share his esoteric, perhaps even magical, knowledge and encourage
him to pass it on to initiates. They
believed that he possessed special knowledge, not only of the humanity of
Jesus, but also of how to activate the special power to be derived from the
incredibly intricate sacred geometry that seems to characterize the location of
mountaintops and holy sites in the area and that somehow assists in instruction
in the Gnostic “Way.” The man-made sites
originally, it seems, were Megalithic/Druidic sites, most of which later had
churches or castles or calvaires placed on them in a way that maintained the
original mathematical precision of the layout, described by
Of course as soon as you mention
secret rituals in tree-encircled fields, the modern imagination is conditioned
to think of Satanic cults and sex orgies, and that no doubt accounts for the
most ridiculous of Henry Lincoln’s experiences.
When he made the mistake of agreeing to do a film on Rennes-le-Château
for a commercial film company, thinking they would give him more freedom to do
as he saw fit, instead he found himself trapped in the most farcical of
film-making events, climaxed by the director’s fabricating wild nude sex scenes
of a Satanic cult, supposedly presided over by Saunière, who was presented as
having run some sort of proto-New Age Playboy club in the Pyrenees. Mercifully, this film was abandoned when the
producer was suddenly struck down by a brain tumor, which is enough to make you
believe in a just God! But of course
this would just as easily lend itself to that theme park for heretics that may
be aborning here.
Back to reality, now (although I note
how relative the term “reality” has become!), it is plausibly argued that this
mathematical precision and the amazing geometry it forms, which has also been
rediscovered and elaborated upon in recent decades by professional civil
engineers, surveyors, and mapmakers whose “proofs” seem convincing but that I
have no way of checking, points to proof that the Gnostic tradition is correct in its
“heretical” version of Christianity.
Gnostic Christians saw themselves as the inheritors of ancient mystical
wisdom in which “salvation” is achieved only by special knowledge or “gnosis,”
among which is the knowledge of “sacred geometry.” This is a theory with some historical
validity and would also account for the Church’s hostility and desire to keep
Saunière quiet, if we give any credence to the blackmail hypothesis.
A Knights Templar Church in
Segovia (where the Arian Visigoths were pushed) may have been called “La
Iglesia de la Vera Cruz”—“the Church of the True Cross”—precisely because the Templars were part of this
Gnostic tradition that secretly maintained that the Catholic Church’s use of
the Cross as a redemptive symbol was not based on historical fact,
history’s truth being suppressed by the Church’s burning of Gnostic scripture
and Gnostic “heretics.” Jesus did not
die on the cross and was not a redeemer, say the Gnostics (some of whose
scripture was rediscovered a few decades ago in
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One of the best examples remaining of
octagonal Templar architecture is “The Church of the True Cross” in |
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The church within the church. One of the surprising things about the
Templar church is that it had its inner sanctum in a two-story octagonal
building within the larger, octagonal church.
The altar was upstairs, with benches around it for a select few,
probably the highest ranking members of this knightly order. |
The Church’s tendency through the
ages to punish, torture, and often have murdered those who disagreed with its
doctrine and its right to enforce the faith accounts, it is said, for the secrecy with which Gnostic
belief was maintained, as witnessed by the wholesale massacre of such
perhaps Gnostically-inclined groups as the Cathars (or Albigensians) and the
Knights Templar by the pope’s men.
Everywhere one drives in the Rennes-le-Château area, incidentally, one
sees signs announcing this as “Cathar Country,” and I even saw a Cathar
exhibition in a small museum in Arques featuring the Cathar castles perched
impossibly on the mountaintops in the region (see photos on Page 1). Some locals appear proud of having “heretics”
for ancestors! But were the Cathars
and/or Knights Templar really “Gnostically-inclined”? That’s still open to question. And open to question too is how this Gnostic
theory would generate wealth for Saunière, if one dismisses the blackmail
hypothesis.
Those who dismiss the blackmail
theory have their own theories, and one theory, as said, is that Saunière was funded by
Masons, Rosicrucians, and other secret inheritors of Gnosticism or
Gnostic-like beliefs (which might have included the Priory of Sion) to
establish some sort of physical record readable only by initiates, a sort of
map or book of this “gnosis” in the decorations of the Church and the design of
his “estate,” which point to and echo a larger design in the surrounding area
and which is characterized by symbolic numerology, phonic puns,
alchemical/Masonic imagery, and religious iconography that appears conventional
but often, in its detail, invites interpretation the reverse of the
conventional. Certainly the motto over
the door of the Church—“This place is terrible [or awesome]”—and the statue of
a devil that greets one upon entering the Church are suggestive of a religious
contrariness (though both are capable of orthodox interpretation). Then, too, Saunière’s trips to Paris and
elsewhere (if such occurred, for De Sède is the source here) seem to find him
visiting occult-minded people, which fin de siècle Paris was crawling
with, and perhaps even having an affair with the famous opera singer and
occultist, Emma Calvé. If Smith is right
that the Calvé connection was fictional, then what do we make of Lincoln’s
account of how on his first visit to Rennes he accidentally came across a protestation
of love to Emma in the form of an arrow-pierced heart with the name Calvé and
the year 1891 below it carved into a rock near Rennes-le-Château? No proof exists, however, that it was carved
by Saunière (So why was this carving amazingly erased by unknown parties
minutes after Henry Lincoln took a photograph of it and left the scene? Was Plantard or one of his men skulking in
the bushes? Who else could have done
this ludicrous thing?).
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And now we get into even thinner air,
occupied previously only by Jules Verne.
Still others believe that the intricate geometry of the area, echoing in
some respects what has been found at Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids and other
ancient sites, clearly points to friendly visitors from outer space in Megalithic times (or earlier), or
at least the presence in Europe of a Super Race from Atlantis or some other
Lost Civilization, who left clues in the geometry about sacred wisdom
left behind by them that is available to the intellectual elite (a version of
the Gnostic belief). Well, the idea of a
Lost Civilization of some sort, whether of aliens or of Homo sapiens sapiens, existing between 15,000 B.C. and 8,000 B.C.
is an increasingly plausible one, given what is being unearthed and deciphered
about the ancient civilizations of known
history, and the theory (see Finger
Prints of the Gods, by Graham Hancock and Uriel’s Machine by Knight & Lomas) that this Lost Civilization
is, after all, recorded in the mythology of ancient peoples, is also looking
better and better, but there’s still a long ways to go to prove its truth or
that Rennes-le-Château had any connection with it.
Most of this theory presents the Lost
Civilization as being so morally (as well as technologically) advanced that its
chief message was a civilizing one and ethically uplifting. But, not surprisingly, given the times we
live in and the realizations of modern astronomy, one branch of theory
ingeniously argues that the knowledge left behind by these superior beings
constituted a coded warning about an impending catastrophic collision with a
giant comet in the not-too-distant future (see Wood and Campbell’s Geneset: Target Earth)
or some other cosmic catastrophe such as radiation coming from deep space that
will bring Apocalypse Sooner or Later If Not Now.
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The
pentagram above is reproduced from Wood & Campbell’s Geneset: Target Earth. The authors think the sublime mathematics
of this unusual pentagram provide a sort of celestial calendar that clearly
signals the return to the solar system of a killer comet in 2085, a comet
variously named Set or The Serpent or Typhon that has had great destructive
or at least altering effects upon the earth in the past and will again. Those who placed this calendar here were
aliens who grafted their genes onto man, thus accounting for the startling
acceleration in evolution marked by the arrival of Homo sapiens. But
apparently it was assumed that our species would not be worthy of survival
unless it had the brains to figure this calendar out in time to avoid the
impending catastrophe! Risky
business!! |
The astrologically-inclined, on the other
hand, have found that the entire Zodiac has been reproduced on the ground in
the Rennes-le-Château area, on such a scale and with such precision that only
visitors from outer space could have done it, perhaps to clue their descendants
(they mated with earthlings!) to a way to escape an impending natural
apocalypse. Well, again, it is hard to
see how such knowledge of alien lore would generate wealth for Saunière.
If one sticks with the “superior
aliens” thesis, however, it makes some sense that the Church, and perhaps
others, would not want it known that Homo sapiens was not at the center
of the moral and spiritual universe, just as today various religious leaders
are not comfortable with the possibility of finding life on other planets, for
that upsets their egocentric and homocentric view of salvation. But would the Church have paid to suppress
that? Why wouldn’t they have tried to
keep Jules Verne quiet, then? And nip
Science Fiction in the bud?
But if the earth wasn’t
visited by superior aliens in ancient times, then the amazing mathematical
precision of the area’s complex “sacred geometry” and/or Zodiac planisphere,
not to mention that of Newgrange, Stonehenge, the pyramids, and other ancient
sites, argues for the
presence of mathematical genius in Homo sapiens long before conventional
history is ready to grant that.
Because it means that the likes of Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Hiram
Abif (the putative builder of Solomon’s temple), etc., were more the inheritors of ancient wisdom rather than
the creators of it. As the Hermetic
tradition has always insisted.
Although, according to The Hiram
Key, that wisdom may have come down in formulas which only mimic the
original wisdom but do not possess the same evoking powers, as may be the case
with Masonic ritual (See The Hiram Key by Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas for
an ingenious tracing of Masonic rituals back through Knights Templar and Jewish
ritual practices to a 16th Century B.C. Egyptian king-making
ceremony at the time of the Hyksos invasion.
The authors argue that the true wisdom and attendant magic was lost with
the murder of the Egyptian king in 1573 B.C. and that all the rituals derived
from it, beginning with Moses, ape and commemorate that murder but do not
contain the magical power of the original king-making. You’d first have to convince me that the
original really had any special power!).
Henry Lincoln, by the way, now
supports the view that a few of our ancient ancestors possessed mathematical
genius and a command of technology way beyond what was common in their
era. For the moment, he thinks it’s
either believe that or join the UFO club!
And recently he has gone far beyond Rennes-le-Château in his
explorations, finding evidence of incredibly sophisticated prehistoric geodesy
in
One way out of
If I had to choose, I
think I would prefer the thesis that the melting of the ice at the end of the
last ice age brought catastrophic flooding to much of the world and could very
well have wiped out great, possibly advanced civilizations that nevertheless
left traces of themselves and their Wisdom in the myths and esoteric traditions
of the ancient peoples who survived the flood.
After all, our oceans are mostly unexplored, and researchers in that
realm are beginning to turn up some interesting, suggestive artifacts. If you wish to pursue the “Lost Civilization”
premise, read Weidner and
Bridges’ Monument to the End of Time (although that will take you
to Peru rather than Rennes-le-Château) and Knight
& Lomas’ Uriel’s Machine,
and the following websites will direct you to other books on the subject-- http://www. robertbauval.com/main.html and http://www.grahamhancock.com.
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Many other explanations of Saunière’s
sudden wealth and what “knowledge” made it possible have been proposed, and
I’ll just conclude by mentioning the one which involves other priests in the area because it has a
certain down-to-earth quality to it which gets us back to the reality of the
area and the times. One of the things
that really strikes a contemporary reader is how much time these country
priests had on their hands. It’s amazing
what you can get up to in a small parish if there’s no TV to watch! And of course that also meant you had to
make up your own dramas. And sometimes
star in them!
How, for example, did the priest
mentioned above, Abbé
Gélis, manage to get himself murdered in tiny hilltop Coustaussa in
1897? And why did they afterwards find
that he had caches of gold stashed around?
Did his being a confidante of Saunière have anything to do with it?
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The within walking distance of Rennes-le-Château |
And then there’s Saunière’s first bishop, Mgr
Billard from
There are a number of other local
priests who seemed to be involved with Saunière in various ways, chief amongst
them being the Abbé Boudet
(1837-1915). Boudet’s fingerprints seem
to be on many pieces of evidence, such as the fact that he was the one who sent
Saunière to the bishop who sent him to Paris (again, all according to De Sède),
and because of the many oddities and puzzles found in Boudet’s church and the
cemetery behind. There are times when I
think we should be calling this “The Boudet Episode.” A
website that explores in some depth the idea that Boudet was the would-be
puppet-master behind Saunière is at
http://www.rennes-discovery.com/index.html.
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Boudet’s
church in Rennes-les-Bains and the cemetery behind it. No signs
of the flood of 1994 which may have messed up some key evidence. Nor of Boudet’s grave, which has been
moved elsewhere. |
Henri Boudet (1837-1915) was the priest of next door
Rennes-les-Bains (from 1872) who appears to have been Saunière’s mentor when
the young cleric was first appointed to Rennes-le-Château in 1885, and he
appears to have encouraged Saunière’s staunchly anti-republican views, opposed
to the day’s democratizing trends, and he was ahead of Saunière in his frequent
explorations of the area and collecting of artifacts. He seems also to have placed calvaires and
raised stones at strategic spots around Rennes-les-Bains, spots now used in
various geometric calculations. One
investigator even believes that Boudet was the one who introduced Marie and her
family to Saunière and who later had Marie spy on Saunière and arrange for all
his wealth to be put in her name as a means of controlling him. And although Boudet died about two years
before Saunière (dying what some think a suspicious death, it might be added),
Boudet may have contributed to Saunière’s death by instructing Marie to act if
Saunière got out of hand, from Boudet’s perspective, according to one plot
line! Boudet, by the way, was also
relieved of his priestly duties, in 1914, before his time was up, and thus,
like Saunière, seems to have run afoul of the same bishop.
This conspiratorial Boudet seems
far-fetched, but it may be the scholarly Boudet who really holds the key to
everything. Boudet self-published a
bizarre but very learned book, La Vraie Langue Celtique Et Le Cromleck De Rennes-les-Bains
(published in 1886, but completed in 1880), which, as its title suggests, has
two separate concerns, but one of them seems sensible, the other seems
loony. The book modestly proposes an
idea that now can be seen as the forerunner of today’s far more extravagant
geometric demonstrations, that the area contains a gigantic “cromleck,” a huge
circle of standing stones (placed there by the ancient Gauls, Boudet thought)
that stamped the entire area as a holy place.
But it also ridiculously insists that English was the planet’s
ur-language, a claim he must have known was absurd but by which he may have
meant to convey some sort of disguised and perhaps ironic truth (such as, it
has been proposed, that the English mile and other English units of measure are
much more ancient than thought and may have been used by whoever originated the
Holy Place as a kind of “sacred language”).
Boudet’s book is now seen as a mostly coded document full of phonic puns
and cartographic hints that are probably meant to point to and perhaps help
initiates understand “the mystery.” The obvious coding of Boudet’s book is one of the things that lends
credibility to the idea of coded documents and gravestones at
Rennes-le-Château. But the fact
that a modern edition of this book contains a preface by Plantard is not
comforting, although it may illustrate nothing more than Plantard’s skill in
grafting his Priory claims onto legitimate mysteries.
But maybe Boudet’s hints were
directed only at the mystery as he understood it and wished to see it
developed. In claiming the entire region
as an ancient holy temple, Boudet’s
goal may have been to create another
There may be some important clue in
the fact that although Boudet seems to have been influential at first in the
way Saunière went about the restoration of his church, as funded at first by
wealthy patrons perhaps steered that way by Boudet, a breach between Boudet and Saunière reportedly
developed in 1891, when Saunière’s discoveries, whatever they were, sent
him off in a direction Boudet apparently did not approve. The imagination can get a little over-heated
in forming reasons for this breach. If
Saunière was merely the pleasure-loving simoniac of the debunker’s case, then
Boudet might simply have disapproved of that, but, if, say, Saunière further
enriched himself by performing ancient mystical/magical rites in a hidden field
near no church for a very special and unorthodox clientele, then this area did
become a kind of ironic Lourdes, but not at all what either the Church or
Boudet would approve of! Or, more mundanely
and perhaps more humanly, it may simply have been that Saunière did not share
as Boudet expected him to, which would have been especially aggravating if
Boudet in fact led Saunière to the “treasure.”
And on and on go the theories that attempt to explain this strange
relationship, take your pick.
Certainly it can be said that any
ambition to create a second Lourdes has had ironic consequences in the long
run, whatever Saunière was doing, since the majority of the tourists who now
flock to this place are either secularists, some looking for that which will
debunk a faith they believe to be injurious to the progress of humanity, or
others wishing to heed whatever warnings of catastrophe they think are hinted
at here, and some, of a distinctly New Age cast of mind, looking for evidence
of the persistence of a mystical faith older and truer than institutional
Christianity. Among others.
If the priestly collusion theory is pushed far
enough, it takes us far away, to St. Sulpice in Paris, for one, where Saunière
supposedly went for help in decoding his parchments, and ultimately to the
possibility of a rogue element within the Catholic Church that Saunière
joined. Well, anyone who has studied the
history of the Church knows that hardly a century has passed without various
rogue elements cropping up, some of which settled into orders of nuns or monks
when the Church was wise enough to find a way to absorb the elements, others of
which became “heretical movements” subjected to Inquisition and/or “cleansing”
when such wisdom was lacking. Doctrinal
orthodoxy, either too insisted upon or too hypocritically ignored, always
inspires opposition, and that occurred with great frequency in the history of
the Church. So I wouldn’t rule out an intramural contest within
the Church as having some bearing on “the mystery.” One commentator even thinks Saunière joined a
bunch of priestly Freemasons (see Michael Gabriel’s The Holy Valley and the
Holy Mountain), and another thinks he was connected with the Martinists of
Whatever “deviltry” Saunière and
fellow priests might have been up to, if any, it all makes fascinating reading
and makes visiting the site an unusually absorbing experience. I’ve mentioned the possibilities this place
has as a theme park for the intellectually and spiritually curious (otherwise
known as “heretics”), and even the possibility that Saunière knew that that was
what he was constructing, but it’s startling to see that transformation
continue in ways Saunière would not have guessed. With tourists in increasing numbers, and
after hundreds of books and articles and over a hundred websites have brought
attention to Rennes-le-Château, a museum (opened in 1989) has been established just to the west
of the Church in the priest’s old presbytery that contains significant items of
“The Mystery of Rennes-le-Château,” as it is
commonly referred to, including Madame Tussaud-like wax figures of Saunière and
his first housekeeper, the mother of Marie, and side-by-side photographs of
Saunière and Marie looking the handsome couple that they were but also bearing
what one could imagine as guarded expressions.
Question: Were Saunière and Marie, from neighboring towns right next
door to each other, known to each other as children? Or was Saunière too senior?
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Above are wax figures of Saunière and
Marie’s mother in their kitchen in the Saunière presbytery/museum. One wonders why the museum put Marie’s
mother there rather than Marie herself. |
The museum contains many artifacts of
Saunière’s life, including his account books and his favorite vestments. |
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This inordinately long website has just scratched the surface of “The
Mystery of Rennes-le-Château” and reviewed but a few of the many theories and
speculations that have attempted to solve the puzzle of it. But the puzzle remains. It’s time now to summarize where we are
in our common quest for greater understanding. |
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Click here to go on to Page 6—SUMMING UP |