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The secrets of Rennes-le-Chateau
Skeptical Inquirer, Nov-Dec, 2004 by 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-Chateau.
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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 conceded 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-Chateau (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 Gerard de Sede, titled Le tresor 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 Berenger Sauniere, 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 Sauniere 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, Sauniere 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 Sauniere 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-Chateau 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 Sauniere 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 Sauniere 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 Sauniere's riches came from? According to Lincoln and colleagues, Sauniere found a treasure that included much more than valuable antiquities. Buried in Rennes-le-Chateau 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, Sauniere 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?
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