The Secrets of Rennes-le-Château
Massimo Polidoro
What if the Holy Grail, the San Greal, was not the legendary and
elusive cup that held the blood of Christ dying on the cross but was
itself a blood, or a bloodline, a "sang real," a "royal blood?" The
idea, suggested for the first time in Holy Blood and Holy Grail, a
1982 book by British journalists Henry Lincoln, Richard Leigh, and
Michael Baigent, is at the core of Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci
Code.
Lincoln and his colleagues suggested that the "royal blood" is that of
Jesus Christ, who did not die on the cross but survived the ordeal,
married Mary Magdalene, had a child, Sarah, and the bloodline secretly
survived and continued for 400 years, up to the Merovingian dynasty of
the Franks of dark-age Europe. Jesus died an old man in France, where
he fled with his family to escape prosecution from Peter and the
Apostoles, and was buried near a little town on the Pyrenees,
Rennes-le-Château.
This amazing story was supposedly kept secret for two millennia by the
Priory of Sion, a mysterious sect that is said to have also founded
the Order of the Templars. Notwithstanding the secrecy, clues to this
concealed story were scattered throughout the centuries by some
initiates belonging to the Priory, such as Leonardo da Vinci, [1]
Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Claude Debussy. This is how Lincoln and
friends have been able to reassemble the story, uncoding hidden names,
enigmas, wordplays, and hints hidden in various paintings.
But is this all true?
In order to better understand the story, I visited the remote town of
Rennes-le-Château (RLC) on the Pyrenees last July.
The Legendary Treasure
The story of the RLC myth starts in 1969, when Henry Lincoln read a
thriller by French author Gérard de Sède, titled Le trésor maudit (The
Cursed Treasure). In the fictional story, the treasure of the title
had been found around 1891 by the priest of RLC after he deciphered
some old documents hidden in the local church.
The priest was Bérenger Saunière, who had been the priest of RLC since
1885. RLC sits on top of a hill, about 40 kilometers from Carcassonne,
in France.
The church, dedicated to Mary Magdalene, was almost in ruins when
Saunière arrived in RLC. Having raised some money, the priest started
restoration around 1887. From here on, facts are few and fantasy
creeps in. According to legend, by moving a heavy stone that served as
the altar, Saunière found that one stone pillar supporting the slab
was hollow and contained four parchments. Two of them detailed a
genealogy, while the other two presented enigmatic writings that, once
deciphered by experts in Paris, allowed Saunière to obtain some very
strange messages.
One of the most important ones was the following: A Dagobert II Roi et
a Sion est ce tresor et il est la mort ("To King Dagobert II and to
Sion belongs this treasure, and he is dead there").
While in Paris, the priest bought reproductions of a few paintings,
including Nicholas Poussin's The Shepards of Arcadia. The painting,
dated 1640, shows some people standing close to a sarcophagus holding
the inscription: Et in Arcadia Ego ("And in Arcadia, I"). It was said
that the sarcophagus really existed near Rennes-le-Château and was
identified by matching the mountain profile on the painting with the
real one.
Meanwhile, work at the church continued, and another stone slab was
found under the floor, but only Saunière had access to it and could
see what was behind it. From that moment on, the priest began long and
secretive searches of the surrounding area, and after that, the
restorations started once again. This time, however, funds seemed
limitless, and Saunière used them to buy land and to build a number of
constructions around his parish church, including a bizarre "Tower of
Magdala" honoring Mary Magdalene. He also filled the church with
mysterious statues and had various Latin inscriptions written all
around the place, including one at the entrance of the church which
reads: Terribilis est locus iste ("This place is terrifying").
Where did Saunière's riches came from? According to Lincoln and
colleagues, Saunière found a treasure that included much more than
valuable antiquities. Buried in Rennes-le-Château were documents
confirming that Jesus Christ had come to live in France with his
family and that his child initiated a dynasty which eventually became
known as the Merovingian Kings of France.
One of the secret messages stated that the "treasure," (meaning the
secret of the bloodline) belonged to King Dagobert II, a Merovingian,
and to the Priory of Sion. "And he is dead there," then, may indicate
the presence of a sepulchre containing the body of Christ. Such a
tomb, it was reasoned, was the one painted by Poussin, since the
phrase Et in Arcadia ego could be anagrammatized: I! Tego arcana dei,
meaning: "Go away! I hold the secrets of God."
With such notions in hand, Saunière could have turned Christianity on
its head and inspired a whole new interpretation of world history. So
why not use it to blackmail the Vatican and obtain wealth by these
means?
Decoding the Enigma
But this, as I said, is the legendary version of the story. The facts
are quite different, and I had the opportunity to verify this during
my trip to RLC. The hollow pillar that contained the parchments, for
example, is still preserved in the museum of the village, and you can
see that it is not hollow at all but has only a very small hole (the
size of a CD box), where no parchments could be hidden. Saunière's
trip to Paris may be another invention, since no proof of it exists.
As to the sepulchre painted by Poussin, thanks to my colleague Mariano
Tomatis I was able to locate the exact spot where it was said to
exist. However, such a tomb did not exist when Poussin created his
painting in 1640, because the tomb was built in 1933. It is true that
it resembled the one in the painting, but it also resembled the dozens
of similar tombs scattered around the area. After continuous invasions
by treasure hunters, the tomb was destroyed in 1988. Furthermore, the
profile of the mountains in the painting bears only a slight
resemblance to similar mountains around the area.
Other enigmas have simpler solutions. The inscription that reads,
"This place is terrifying" actually is a biblical quotation (Genesis
28:17) meaning "This place is wonderful." (The complete phrase is:
"How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the House of God,
and this is the gate of Heaven."
Another inscription that appears at the base of a crucifix, "Christus
A.O.M.P.S. Defendit," had been translated by some as Christus Antiquus
Ordo Mysticusque Prioratus Sionis Defendit ("Christ defends the
ancient mystical order of the Priory of Sion"). In reality, that is a
common phrase used in some Catholic inscriptions, like the one in Rome
on Pope Sisto V's obelisk: Christus Ab Omni Malo Plebem Suam Defendat
("Christ defends his people against every evil").
While no documents and no secrets were discovered, however, it is true
that the priest found some valuable artifacts during restorations of
the church. He noted such a discovery in his notebooks and tried to
keep it secret in order to sell the objects and raise money. He also
started to excavate the church's surroundings, hoping to find more.
Is this, then, the true and only source of Saunière's wealth?
Actually, there was something else. Rumors had spread around of
Saunièr's spending attitudes, and the local Catholic bishop
investigated the matter, concluding that the priest had made his money
from "trafficking in Masses," a quite common wrongdoing among
nineteenth and early-twentieth-century priests. In the Catholic
Church, Masses can be celebrated for the benefit of a specific soul,
in the hope of helping a deceased loved one to ascend from Purgatory
into Heaven. Masses can also be said for a specific aim for the
benefit of living persons (for instance, for healing purposes). Prior
to Vatican II, priests received a stipend for each Mass they said.
"Trafficking in Masses" meant, in practice, that priests advertised
their willingness to celebrate a great number of Masses for both the
dead and the living. Advertising in this way was regarded as a kind of
unfair competition with other priests and was condemned by the Church.
The matter became even worse, of course, when priests failed to
celebrate the Masses requested, despite having received the
appropriate payment.
The bishop traced advertisements placed by Saunière in Catholic
magazines throughout France, and even abroad, and quickly determined
that he could not possibly have celebrated all the Masses he had
received payments for, thus in fact defrauding his "clients."
In 1909, the Bishop asked Saunière to leave RLC; the priest refused
and was suspended from his priestly duties and privileges, thus ending
his ecclesiastical career. He died in 1917 and left all his belongings
to his housekeeper, Marie Denarnaud.
The Would-be King
Now another question remains to be answered: Who invented such an
incredible story? As usually happens in every thriller, the culprit is
almost always the one who stands to gain from the crime. Though there
is no crime here, there could have been, and the perpetrator would
have been one Pierre Plantard.
Plantard was an anti-Semite and the leader of a minor occult,
right-wing organization known as Alpha Galates. His scheme was quite
ingenious and complex. He had the parchments made by an artist friend,
Philippe de Cherisey; then, he passed them on as real to Gérard de
Sède, to whom he also told the invented story of Saunière's findings.
Plantard also invented the Priory of Sion in 1956 and created fake
manuscripts and documents that linked the Priory to RLC and deposited
them at the National Library in Paris, where he suggested Lincoln and
friends go to look for important discoveries.
But why go to all this trouble? All this and more was necessary in
order to demonstrate not only that Plantard was the current Grand
Master of the elusive Priory but also that he was the last descendant
of the Merovingians. This meant that he was the current vessel of
Christ's holy blood and, above all, the heir to the throne of France
as its legitimate king.
The scheme did not work out, however; there were no descendants after
Dagobert II, and there were no living Merovingians pretenders to the
throne that fell with Louis XVI. Plantard's fake geneology quickly
dissolved under close scrutiny.
As Umberto Eco wrote in his novel Foucault's Pendulum, "Believe that
there is a secret and you will feel an initiate. It doesn't cost a
thing. Create an enormous hope that can never be eradicated because
there is no root. Ancestors that never were will never tell you that
you betrayed them. Create a truth with fuzzy edges: when someone tries
to define it, you repudiate him. Why go on writing novels? Rewrite
history." And this is exactly what Pierre Plantard and his followers
tried to do.
Content copyright by CSICOP or the respective copyright holders.
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And who would want to be associated with the blood line of Jesus but
the Antichrist!
End
times:
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