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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 6 Summing Up: The |
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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: The Page 7—Links & Sources |
The fascination in all of this for me
personally is in how it illustrates the postmodernist case for our being at the
mercy of language, ironically invented as a liberating device but ending more
as an imprisoner of man, whose "manacles," said William Blake, are
"mind-forged." My only hope
is that greater awareness of this fact will somehow eventually lead to some
measure of release from the manacles, for otherwise we seem fated to play out
the self-destructive destinies we've programmed in to our controlling
myths.
The RLC caper is
magnificently illustrative of the imprisonment. All of its ultimate references are to
ancient days and the origins of the imprisonment. With a priest at the center of the story, its
most obvious reference is to the centuries in which a "primitive" and
more democratic Christianity mutated into an hierarchical and imperial Church
(and which did the priest Saunière truly represent, as a consequence of his
supposed digging up of the past?), but also to antecedents in Egyptian,
Sumerian, and other ancient cultures, with the most probing analyses even
drilling back into prehistory, mostly imagined. At all levels of history and prehistory we
find men binding themselves with the myths they create to explain the world,
the repercussions of which are never-ending, as reflected by the incredible
variety of historical subject matter to be found in all that's been written
about Rennes-le-Château as all the past seems to have come to bear on this
little village. In earlier pages I've
alluded to as much of this historical analysis as possible, mostly by sending
you to the books that expound it, “pagan” included, but
here I'll narrow the focus to just the Christian "battle of the
books."
From the beginning of the
Christian world, it seems, there was a "battle of the books," which
at all times in all cultures is always a battle between a relatively few
creative and strong-minded individuals, the principal myth-makers, who
interpret the events of history in a way that shapes a certain political agenda
for their time. This battle is always
primarily about power, though it is often disguised as a battle about
"truth" or the well-being of “the people,” and power is always about
who gets to do what to whom, with economics always at its root.
Now the battles among the myth-makers
of the early Christian centuries had many sides, so any reduction of this
complexity to just two sides—orthodox and not orthodox--is an
oversimplification, but it is in the nature of summaries to oversimplify, by
virtue of their brevity, and so all I can do is urge you to be mindful of that
as you read my dramatization of the relevant great conflicts of the past.
The principal battle in
the first four or five centuries of the Christian Era was between Pauline
Christianity and various non-Pauline versions, some of which preceded the
Pauline version, some of which were reactions against it. Laudable as it may have been to extend the
franchise of “salvation” to the Gentile world (however nonsensical the notion
of “salvation”), Paul's motives for doing that were more political than
not. There were simply a lot more
Gentiles than Jews, as Saul of Tarsus well knew, and the Gentiles had more
power, as they proved when the Romans harassed and persecuted the Jews in
Palestine for decades and then, in 70 A.D., evicted the Jews from Palestine. Saul/Paul was no fool. His disappointment and anger at being kicked
out of the original Jewish Christian church by James (the brother of Jesus) was
soon replaced by a determination to build a stronger church that would replace
the establishment church. With Paul you
never go wrong in reading everything he does in terms of seeking strength and
eschewing weakness. And his great
revelation on the road to Damascus was in his sudden realization of how he
could make weakness into strength, as he became the principal exponent of
"spiritual power" (which he probably learned much about from the
inefficacy of his persecution of the original Christians). James & Co. then did him a favor in
giving him the boot, for Paul learned from that where the votes are. Not in championing a Jewish Messiah but a
"catholic" (i.e., “universal”) Messiah. And so from almost day one the religion that
was supposed to bind people together (the roots of the word
"religion" refer to "that which binds"), Pauline
Christianity became a religion that divides--the sheep from the goats, to use
its traditional pastoral language, or the "saved" from the
"damned." The
"damned" were those who did not see things Paul's way or do them
Paul's way. The popes are the true
inheritors of Paul, whether they are the true inheritors of Christ or not, for
they have all agreed with Paul: "My way or the highway." Benedict XVI will frequently remind us of
that.
But the chief battle in
the long run was not between Pauline Christianity and Jamesian Christianity,
for the latter did not last long, and indeed both had more in common than not
in their emphasis upon ritual and sacramental salvation. The principal battle was between a Pauline
vision of Christianity that inevitably led to a bureaucratic, priest-oriented
organization that "saved" (promised immortality in Heaven)
principally through belief in "Christ Crucified" and observation of
the attendant sacraments and a "Gnostic" version that put the
emphasis upon the individual's ability to achieve union with God through
knowing how to live, no crucifixion or priest necessary. Buttressing the latter was a notion that the
best way to proceed in life was to live as Jesus did, according to the
principle of "brotherly love," never mind any sacraments. Now it's probably the case that the
revolutionary "ethics" of Jesus were given lip-service by all sides,
but that seems to have been truer of the Church that didn't hesitate to
militarize whenever it needed to. So,
never mind the ethic of "brotherly love," it was "magic"
the Church primarily wanted from Jesus, a miraculous reversal of the laws of
nature, most particularly the law of death.
Paul thought Jesus obliged by transubstantiating on the altars of his
churches into the elixir of everlasting life.
The Gnostics didn't buy all that and got away with their theological
disagreement until Constantine, desperate for political unity in a shaky
Empire, forced a theological unity that favored the Paulines, and then, with
the Empire's backing, came the Christian persecutions, murders, and
book-burnings of people who suddenly found themselves declared
"heretics." Many more “pagans” and “heretics” were henceforth persecuted
and killed by Christians than Christians by “pagans” and “heretics” in previous
years. But the lesson of all
suppressions, never learned by the suppressors, it seems, is that the blood of
martyrs is the best fertilizing agent for recurrent rebellion. The history of the Roman Catholic Church is
the history of a body that had constantly to kill and burn to maintain itself,
until finally the Protestant resistance grew too large to conquer. And now this is all being played out again
around little old Rennes-le-Château in a new "battle of the books,"
although the spotlight has temporarily been stolen by The Da Vinci Code, which has inspired its own battle of the
books. Amusingly, the attackers of
this work of fiction imagine that they are countering falsehood with truth, but
it's really a battle of the fictions.
Which narrative shall prevail?
In case I have obscured my
point in dealing with all the detail of the
I'll conclude now by going over the
principal arguments and issues being debated in the battle of the books of the RLC
caper, to make it as clear as I can how hot the Hermeneutical Hell is in which
they have landed us:
Let’s begin by summing up the debunkers’ case. The debunkers, Paul Smith being chief amongst them until Putnam &
Wood put together a more coherent and credible case, want to believe that it is
“all myth,” by which they mean that everything has been made up, and therefore
we should all leave Rennes-le-Château alone because there’s nothing of value
here to investigate. Go home, all you
mystery-mongers!
There are many problems with this view, starting with the fact that all of our ruling myths have been “made up.” And that “might makes right” is the profoundest, unacknowledged belief of all such rules.
But a principal problem specific to this case is that the debunkers can’t make up their minds as to who the central myth-maker was, who perpetrated what they perceive as a hoax. Sometimes they want Saunière to be the principal hoaxer, sometimes Marie Dénarnaud, sometimes Corbu, sometimes Plantard and the Priory (with variations on how that came about), and sometimes all of the above. It doesn’t seem to matter to the debunkers who the hoaxer is, really, only that everybody understands that it is all a hoax and so we should stop looking into it. Go home, all you mystery-mongers!
Unfortunately,
the debunkers can’t make a case of the sort that would stand up in a court of
law or that would pass the empirical test in a science lab (despite Putnam
& Woods’ use of computers to test the probabilities of the proposed
geometries in the Rennes area, for probabilities are not certainties, and one
wonders about the software programs that produced these results – “garbage in,
garbage out,” is an old truism of computer programming). As is often the case with the True Believers
as well, the debunkers’ evidence is mostly of the hearsay and circumstantial
sort, very incomplete and full of gaps (which they try to paper over with
assurances that the gaps don’t matter), and often based on dubious documents
and questionable testimony, and although at times their case seems well-argued,
at other times it seems as gullible in its approach and attitudes as that of
those they accuse of being “mystery-mongers.”
Most importantly, they cite “history” without realizing that it’s precisely
the biased history of the past that is being called into question, and they
don’t seem to be aware of how much of history that they take for granted has
undergone considerable revision in recent years as previous academic
“authorities” have been shown to have been wrong or at least distorting in
their accounts of history. Further,
they seem unwilling to consider the possibility that in a case where they
themselves insist that doctoring and planting of documents is commonplace, the
documents they rely on may just as easily have been doctored or
planted. And, strangely, they don’t seem
to notice that much of the testimony they rely on comes from the same people
they declare to be charlatans and frauds, most notably De Chérisey and
Chaumeil. They call the True Believers
“dupes,” but how is anyone who these days relies upon “official” documents
(easily forged) and unsubstantiated testimony or testimony from unreliable
witnesses less of a dupe?
If the
intent of the debunkers is to get Rennes-le-Château removed from the conspiracy
buff list, then those of the Paul Smith variety have chosen the wrong
strategy. Their zeal and at times
bullying methods make one suspect ulterior motives. What is up with all this vigorous debunking,
which has sometimes degenerated into name-calling? Why do they want the mystery-mongers to go
away? Isn’t this the sort of tactic one
hears is used by Opus Dei? Or name your favorite right-wing conspiracy
group.
Another
issue is signaled by Paul Smith’s tendency to dismiss all the interest in RLC
as inspired by “New Age Christianity” (see
http://priory-of-sion.com/dvc/newage.html), the attempt by people disillusioned
with orthodox, patriarchal Christianity to change Christianity to something he
thinks is just faddishly feminist and historically bogus, with its attempt to
restore Mary Magdalene to what they believe is her rightful primacy in a True
Church. While I have no particular
enthusiasm for the “New Age” and agree that even if there is a bloodline from
Jesus and Mary Magdalene extant today, it matters not for “blood” is no
guarantee of wisdom or anything else, but Smith does not grasp that the
orthodoxy he defends has its roots in what amounts to a “New Age” movement in
the first century C.E., which successfully did to the pagan religions of its
day what today’s “New Age” movement is trying to do to orthodox
Christianity. He calls the whole idea of
Mary Magdalene’s being the intended “Pope” of the ur-church
“pseudo-historical,” but that would be an excellent word to characterize the
New Testament as well, not to mention the entire Bible, for there is even less
scientific proof for the divinity of Jesus than for the Magdalene thesis. It is crystal clear by now that the Bible is
mostly fiction and essentially a series of political spin jobs by people driven
to establish or maintain their power.
So Smith’s dismissal of the “New Age” movement is just the pot calling
the kettle black.
In short, if we have a Hermeneutical Hell here,
and we do, the debunkers have made as large a contribution as the True
Believers through their questionable methods and their unexamined biases. All of which adds up to the realization, perhaps first stated by G. K.
Chesterton, that, to paraphrase, we do not live in an age that believes in
Nothing, we live in an age that believes in Everything!
Is there a way out? Well, nothing has even the remotest chance of
getting settled until serious digs in numerous places by professional and
neutral archaeologists take place. And I
wouldn’t confine them to the obvious places, since it’s likely they were
cleaned out long ago (as, for example, Torkain reports that nothing was found
under the Tour Magdala during an
attenuated August 2003 dig). It’s
rumored that some digs may be in the offing, after scientific scanning of the
mountain has suggested that another, older church lies beneath Saunière’s
church (a Sixth Century Visigoth church, tradition says), and that huge,
perhaps royal graves lie below that.
We’ll see. Putnam & Wood
claim that digs by professionals have turned up no evidence of RLC ever being
much larger than its present size, but that’s a very large area to dig up, and
I question how thorough the dig has been, since others have attested to finding
relevant artifacts. Perhaps another dig
should be at the Perillos site Douzet says he has located as the model for
“Saunière’s model.” Seems far-fetched,
but who knows? In addition to digs,
expert evaluation of the handwritings involved, those on the parchments and
those of Bigou, De Chérisey, Plantard, etc., are a necessity. Whatever, the only possible way to stop the
spread of the cancer of Postmodern Relativity is to find more “objects” that
“speak” for themselves and that assert a reality exterior to the linguistic
maze with no exit that all current investigations have landed us in.
However, one troubling aspect of any
dig that may ensue is that when some joker reported that the Vatican has
insisted that it be allowed to confiscate or destroy anything found that might
compromise the faith, the joke reminded us of the Church’s long history of
suppressing truth, in this century illustrated by the Church’s brazen twisting
of the Fatima prophecy and censoring of the lady who was its source, and so, we
rightly ask, why wouldn’t it be capable of archaeological censorship as
well? It was Pope Leo X who spoke for
the Church in all ages: “It has served us well, this myth of Christ.” And they are not going to give up easily
what has served them so well.
It’s probably too much to hope for,
but what is needed now, in addition to scientific digs, is a serious,
systematic, patient scholarly effort to investigate and weigh the merits of
each piece of evidence, discarding or at least calling into question the contradictory
and the bogus, and to put the pieces of the puzzle together, if possible. Putnam & Wood probably think they have
done that, and certainly they have gone further than most and are to be thanked
and encouraged. But as I was reading
their account, many questions occurred to me that did not get answered,
questions that came partly out of the gaps in their and my and everybody else’s
knowledge of this affair and partly out of my awareness of facts or theories
skipped over. What is needed is an international meeting where
everybody sits down and asks questions of the evidence. All the
evidence, not just the parts that suit one’s particular thesis. There’s a Saunière Society that does meet,
and a Rennes Group and a Cercle Alpheus as well, each with worthwhile
publications, and these days both Henry Lincoln and Jean Luc Robin (alas, now
dead) are happy to answer the questions of anyone who visits the café at the
entrance to Sauniere’s garden, but these are small groups limited to
like-minded people. And even if all
interested parties were to sit down and peacefully discuss their differences,
it’s possible that we would soon see the demon of Postmodern Relativity again
assert itself, leaving us no wiser, as it became clear that no agreement can be
reached over the validity of certain evidence.
Will the Shroud of
However, it needs to be said that
from the point of view of a scientifically-inclined secularist like myself
(secularist by default), the competing claims to a “true church” and to a true
apostolic succession between the Catholic Church and a Gnostic or Celtic Church
are hardly a matter for melodrama, for declaring one good and the other
evil. For a secularist, both claims to
divine right are equally preposterous and equally without contemporary
validity, and the world would be better off if both were dropped. Putting aside the questions of whether Jesus
was in any sense divine or of how trustworthy the New Testament is as history,
the belief that Jesus gave Peter the Keys to the Kingdom is no guarantee that
those "keys" weren’t lost or tossed out by subsequent popes. The history of that Church, in fact, suggests
strongly that they were tossed out, at least by the Fourth Century, and
never recovered! On the other hand, the
belief that Jesus had children (or a child) whose descendants are still with us
is no guarantee that possessing the blood of Jesus lends one any special wisdom
or ability. A pox on both their houses!
That last
point, the questioning of the bloodline of Jesus as “holy,” even if it does
exist, deserves more emphasis to counteract an impression Henry Lincoln and his
co-authors left at the end of HBHG. In
the original, 1982 book the authors speak of “an intensifying quest for
meaning, for emotional fulfillment, for a spiritual dimension to our lives, for
something in which genuinely to believe.
There is a longing for a renewed sense of the sacred that amounts, in
effect, to a full-scale religious revival . . . . There is also a desire for a true ‘leader’ –
not a führer, but a species of wise and benign spiritual figure, a
“priest-king” in whom mankind can safely repose its trust . . . . Such an atmosphere would seem eminently
conducive to the Prieuré de Sion’s objectives . . . . How might the advent of Jesus’ lineal
descendant be interpreted? To a
receptive audience, it might be a kind of Second Coming.” End of HBHG! If you read the concluding argument of the
1982 HBHG (386-7) about the possible benefits of a benevolent Priory of Sion,
responding to the religious needs of a despairing, cynical, materialist
civilization by offering a “priest-king” as messiah, you see how even the best
intentioned of men can fall under the spell of this unwelcome idea of a
Messiah. Or did. I sense that twenty-five years later Henry
Lincoln at least, if not Baigent and Leigh, is pretty much disillusioned with
the possibility of a supra-national, constitutional monarchy overseeing a
United States of Europe in Messiah fashion, but, if so, I wish he would thus
make this clearer to the world at large, for the original language of HBHG is
still being read as “gospel.” This
longing for the return of a sacred dimension to life is quite understandable,
and it’s a credit to Henry Lincoln’s noble soul that he chooses this outcome as
the preferred solution to “The Mystery of Rennes-le-Château,” but history
strongly suggests we’re more likely to find “some rough beast slouching toward
Bethlehem to be born” than any benevolent Messiah. That there is a Habsburg at the center of Opus Dei is enough to give me the
shivers and should give everyone great pause.
And Zot save us from the Pierre Plantards of this world. So enough of “holy blood.” There
is no such thing.
Furthermore, although in reading history one
may be inclined to root for underdog “heretics” against an all-too-often
oppressive, power-crazed, ignorant Church, it must be admitted that there are
just as many unattractive features in the beliefs of the “heretics” in this case
as in the Church that persecuted them.
For example, the extreme asceticism of the leading Cathars always gives
me pause, for this is the defining characteristic of obsessive Puritans, who,
like the Wahhabis of
And I’m no happier about the Cathars’
Gnostic/Manichean view of reality, which imposes a melodrama of good and evil
upon the world and from which cockamamie notions of being able to “purify” the
world of evil derives. Nothing and no
one is good or evil in themselves, and everyone and everything has the
potential for evil. The potential for evil cannot be separated out from
the potential for good, no matter how many torture racks are used or bonfires are
lit. Furthermore, the only way to be possessed by
the Devil is by believing that he exists. In fact, believing that he exists and acting
accordingly is precisely what the possession consists of. People who believe this invariably behave
crazily. One hears that John Paul II
performed three exorcisms!
So, insofar as these life-hating
Cathar “heretics” would have imposed a Puritanical regimen as oppressive as
that they opposed, I can’t wish that they had won their struggle with the
Church, however much the Church must be condemned for its attempt at genocide
and its general oppressiveness and corruption.
But insofar as these “heretics,” or some of them, were preserving
ancient Wisdom of a liberating, peace-making, civilizing nature, Wisdom that
was being suppressed by a Church interested only in preserving its worldly
power at the expense of the rest of humanity, then hooray for the
“heretics.” There’s some evidence that
in periods when this Gnostic view of things had some sway in the world, certain
regions of Europe, such as parts of the Languedoc before the massacre of the
Cathars, enjoyed a higher level of civilization than regions not possessed of
their view, such as that of the Catholics who massacred them, and that
encourages one to believe that the “heretical” tradition had more benefit to
offer than not. Gnosticism at least
eliminates the need for priests, and that in itself might be civilizing. But it’s possible that this higher
civilization was an accident of history, of tolerant, talented spirits leading
the way in a few places, so that it wasn’t the beliefs of the Cathars that
mattered but the way individuals were led to practice their beliefs. What if the leaders of the Cathars had been
Osama bin Ladens or Taliban? The more likely reason for this flowering of
civilization in medieval
Another turn-off, for me, is in the spiritual snobbery that
pervades so much of the thinking on all sides.
The Church is not the only one with hierarchical or elitist
notions. The Cathars, Knights Templars,
and all the various mystical/ Hermetic/ alchemical/ Gnostic/ Masonic societies
possibly connected to this are characterized by notions of some souls being
superior to others or of some being more worthy of whatever salvation or
survival is the goal. Although there
may be some attempt these days to democratize the thing, by getting “the
Secret” out to the world at large, the assumption of all those secret societies
posited as relevant to the Rennes mystery is that only a few can or should be
“saved.” A pox on that too!
As for the
Alchemical/Hermetic/Gnostic tradition that many wish to see as
Rennes-le-Chateau’s principal reference, I congratulate researchers on their
rediscovery of the tradition and think it’s well worth pursuing
Despite my despair at ever finding a
way out of the RLC mystery and mystification, my sympathies are obviously with
those who think the “treasure” worth seeking at Rennes-le-Château, if there
is any, is of an intellectual or spiritual sort, whatever else is
there. The Quest for Knowledge is what
may save us, if there’s any chance at all.
I nod to the spirit of Gnosticism for its promotion of knowledge as the
only possible path to a better future, however bogus its claims for a sure-fire
formula for success may be. And while
granting that Rennes-le-Château usefully serves many as a kind of Rorschach ink
blot, therapeutically lending them the images they need to survive in an
increasingly lunatic world, I hang on to the increasingly desperate hope that
there is an objective truth buried there that if learned can help us grow up as
a species. Even if the truth is the
realization of nada.
But so far we are finding not so much
“the truth” but what people involved over the centuries thought was the
truth and acted on, including this century. That in itself is a kind of reality, and I
concur with Henry Lincoln that it is valuable in itself to know this reality,
even if it is not the great revelation we would like. It makes its contribution to the history of
belief.
There are two kinds of skeptics—those
with “vision” and those without. Our
world is more than what it appears to our limited senses, and it requires
imagination to see behind appearances, as, say, Einstein did. True, some acts of imagination produce
hallucinations, and there’s plenty of that here, but that’s one of the risks
one must take in the attempt to see life more clearly and certainly to try to
understand something like Rennes-le-Château, which seems to encapsulate so much
of human history, including its popular delusions. Well, sometimes delusions are all there are, and that in itself
needs seeing clearly, if it comes to that.
One final point. It was the fabulous wealth imagined for Abbé
Saunière that got all this started.
Granted that the exact extent of Saunière’s wealth is still subject to debate,
and even if it was somewhat greater than Paul Smith is willing to concede, for
the reasons mentioned above, a more important consideration, perhaps, is that the extent of Saunière’s wealth
may not be the key to this. While many theories provide plausible
explanations of the kind of Secret and valuable knowledge that might be
available in the Rennes-le-Chateau region, few give plausible explanations of
how Saunière could possibly have drawn sufficient wealth from such knowledge. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that in
striving to solve the mystery of the clue that first got everybody’s attention,
of how Saunière became so rich (if he did), investigators have accidentally
stumbled across mysteries that may or may not be related to the original mystery
but certainly do not provide answers to the source of the man’s
wealth. All well and good, I say. Saunière himself may have stumbled across
knowledge that had no sale value and may have been intellectually curious
enough to value it for its own sake. Did
he not collect rare books? {His library
has been variously dispersed, one hears, and a valuable task now would be the
locating and cataloguing of it. One of
the things he collected, we know, is postcards of the region. An excellent reason for collecting such
things, by the way, is as aids to mapping the place, to supplement what he
could see from his tower.} Or he may
have simply valued what he found as a priest, as someone curious about
ancient rites and how to perform them, which may have also brought wealth if he
then performed such rites for a wealthy coterie. Or his focus may have been on finding a
rationalization for his secret love affair with Marie, the wealth coming from
treasure accidentally stumbled upon as he quested for that Mary Magdalene whose
story provided an alternate Christianity in which priests need not be
celibate. And in all or any of these, he
might have found sponsorship from people who were interested in uncovering the
same truths, but for their own reasons.
Well, whether it’s true or not that
Saunière welcomed multiple truths, there’s no reason why we questers for the
truth (or truths) of the mystery (or mysteries) of Rennes-le-Château shouldn’t
welcome everything that can be proved and damn the money motive. In short, it may be that although there are
many parts to the mystery, only one of those parts made money for Saunière, or
maybe none. Whether or not Saunière
pursued them for their own sakes, should we not?
However, it’s now time to recommend reading Humberto Eco’s Foucault’s
Pendulum, which is a fictionalized account of the sort of fever that
consumes people so desperate for meaning that they insist upon imposing meaning
where none is to be found, even to the death, a cautionary tale for anyone who
gets too caught up in “The Mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau” and its inevitable
association with secret societies and their obsessions. Yet there’s a skepticism that goes too far,
that denies meaning on principle, thus sometimes missing it where it
does exist! Either way, there are traps
all around here.
With the hazards of entering this
theme park well in mind then, I’ve endeavored in this website to dramatize
Belief and Disbelief in “The Mystery of Rennes-le-Château” and to put major
theories together in a way that suggests connections and paths to further
exploration. I conclude by inviting
anyone who finds an error of fact in what I’ve written here to contact me via
email at dietrich@cas.usf.edu. As long as it’s understood that assertions
and inferences and unsupported testimony are not the same as facts, and that
all too often “the facts” come in more than one version.
If you’re just getting started on
Rennes-le-Château, I recommend that you first familiarize yourself in more
detail with the popular version, which, after all, may succeed in creating the
reality it describes, if it doesn’t already exist. That is one of the meanings of the passage
quoted at the top from André Breton--"The imaginary is something
that tends to become true." History is replete
with examples of world views (the Christian, for example) that have first
existed in somebody’s head before they existed in the external world, and
Rennes-le-Château could follow that course.
If I had to bet on one thing, I would bet that Pierre Plantard, after
serious exercising of his imagination, was simply trying to make something
happen that he thought would be beneficial to a Europe that was lost in a
murderous chaos most of the 20th Century and under great stress and
strain the rest of the time. Ironically,
the EU as it is developing is not entirely unlike what he had in mind, although
sans monarch, of course. So much so that a True Believer in the Priory
might be inspired to ask--has the Priory abandoned
Then, after reading the popular
version, so hopeful for the future in a facing of the truth about the awful
fakery of our past, read the debunkers to find out which reality you think the
world would be better believing in.
Which illusions are more or less destructive?
Among books to read, you might as well
start with those that made the popular version popular (although there’s
something to be said for reading first the book that got Lincoln
interested—Gerard de Sède’s The Accursed Treasure—now available in
English). Henry Lincoln’s Key to the
Sacred Pattern (1998,
For a bibliography and a link to the
online Rennes bookstore Atelier Empreinte (recently sold in early 2004) to buy
books and videos from, I recommend going to perhaps the most useful of the many
websites
devoted to Rennes-le-Château, started by “Torkain” (Frederic Fons) in 1997, but
in 2004 taken over by Nicolas Miécret: http://www.rennes-le-chateau.com/default-uk.htm. Although this site seems to be in some sort
of transitional state at the moment, there you may find links to other sites,
which will lead to further links, perhaps ad infinitum. And, supposedly, periodic updates by email,
if you sign up for them, although this seems to be in abeyance at the
moment. Torkain also offers a CD-ROM, which contains many
pictures and much interesting information, such as a plan of the church and
(apparently) the summary of Saunière’s accounts prepared for his trial. Torkain says that “obviously, these figures
are wrong,” which cryptic comment may mean that Torkain thinks Saunière was
lying to cover up, but Torkain’s comment might also suggest that this is
testimony to contradict the idea of Saunière’s possessing great wealth, in
which case Torkian doesn’t provide a good reason for their being wrong. He just remarks that “at that time a castle
and 380 hectares were 100,000 golden francs.”
His apparent point is that since Saunière’s estate was no castle, it
must have cost less. Well, how many
castles were for sale at that time and what kind of shape were they in? Might it have been easier and cheaper to buy
a crumbling castle in those days of Republican triumph than to buy the things
Saunière bought or possessed? Is a
castle really to be equated to or measured against Saunière’s estate?
And, while on the subject, Paul
Smith’s insistence that the bank Saunière applied to for a loan in 1913 valued
the priest’s estate at only 18,000 francs merely raises questions. First, how much is 18,000 francs in today’s
dollars and pounds? (In a footnote,
Putnam & Wood recommend using a multiplier of 7, which suggests this is
equivalent to 125,000 pounds and $230,000).
Secondly, how much would you
have offered for that estate in 1913, on the eve of WWI? This is a very peculiar estate, and it apparently did not include the church
and cemetery. What did it include? Looked at
through a banker’s eyes, there wasn’t a lot to it, and what there was would not
have attracted the usual clientele. If
Saunière's main wealth was in "treasure," then obviously he couldn't
declare any of that as collateral.
Perhaps he was having trouble fencing stuff. Thirdly, if Saunière had put most of his
property in Marie’s name, as seems to be the case, then there wasn’t much of
his personal estate to offer as collateral, and if the 18,000 francs did not include what Marie owned, then maybe
it wasn’t so bad an offer. So that bank
evaluation needs a lot of
clarification before one can accept it as proof of how little Saunière’s estate
was worth at that point. And why was it
that not long after he stopped trying to sell it? It appears that his circumstances had
sufficiently changed to warrant hanging on to it. How so?
Even Putnam & Wood seemed to agree that however financially strained
Saunière was, he never stopped spending, and rather lavishly at times, almost
up to the end.
Paul Smith’s website, devoted to
debunking the popular version, is at http://priory-of-sion.com, and should
not be missed, whatever its flaws and however oddly and rudely he conducts his
argument with True Believers (this site has changed a bit in tone recently, by
the way, so perhaps he's "reformed").
And on Page 7 is a bibliography of French sources that seem to have
significantly influenced Paul Smith.
Also recommended (by Smith) is the 1996 “History of a Mystery” by BBC-2,
although it seems impossible to find these days. But the best debunking account is clearly
Putnam & Wood’s Rennes-le-Château:
The Mystery Solved. Which of course
solved nothing.
Whatever path you take, I wish you the best of luck and would like to hear from you if
you come up with something new. A person
named Hannah Johnson has announced that, for her dissertation at
See Torkain’s website at http://www.rennes-le-chateau.com/anglais/magdala.htm
for the following and other relevant photos:
The
Tour Magdala and its Esplanade from Below:
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