The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (79 page)

Whether or not there is historical evidence for this theory, there is certainly evidence that this is the belief held by the Priory of Sion and by Saunière himself. He built himself a tower to house his library and called it the Magdala tower (Magdala being the name of the village from which Magdalene came). He called his house the Villa Bethania, after Bethany, the home of the other Mary, and the place from which two of the disciples fetch the ass on which Jesus rides into Jerusalem. Lincoln suggests that the man who provided the ass was Lazarus, and that it was all part of a carefully laid plan which would involve the false crucifixion.

There is a curious and baffling piece of evidence concerning Nicolas Poussin. In 1656 Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance, dispatched his younger brother Louis to Rome on a mission that involved a visit to Poussin. On 17 April Louis wrote Nicolas a letter commenting that Poussin had displayed “overwhelming joy” on receiving the letter Fouquet had sent him. It then goes on:

The comment about “advantages which kings would have great difficulty in obtaining (or drawing) from him” is fairly clearly a reference to Louis XIV. It looks as if Fouquet is involved in some interesting plot behind Louis’s back. Five years later Fouquet was arrested on vague charges of misappropriation of funds, and finally sentenced to life imprisonment. (One theory suggests that he was the Man in the Iron Mask.) Louis XIV went to great trouble to obtain the painting of the
Shepherds of Arcady
– which is also engraved on Poussin’s tomb – yet instead of placing it on display, kept it in his private apartments.

Let us then see if we can begin to piece together the basic outline of this incredibly complicated story. It begins with Jesus, who is alleged to have arranged his own crucifixion and subsequent “resurrection”, presumably with the aim of “creating faith” and establishing
Christianity. Whether or not this is true, we are invited to believe that the Merovingian dynasty believed that it was descended directly from Jesus.

When Dagobert was murdered the Church endorsed the regicide; Pepin the Short, first of the Carolingians, repaid the pope by taking an army to Italy, inflicting defeats on the pope’s enemies the Lombards, and handing over the captured territory, which became the basis of the Papal States. So the Merovingians came to regard themselves as the enemies of the Church of Rome. A secret society called the Priory of Sion was formed, with the object of placing the Merovingians back on the throne of France. It held some important sacred object – possibly the Grail, possibly some “incontrovertible proof” of the descent of the Merovingians from Jesus. Its secret password was probably the phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego”. In the twelfth century the Knights Templars became the military arm of this secret society – which means, presumably, that they shared the secret about the crucifixion – a secret, we must bear in mind, that could have undermined the foundations of the Catholic Church, which was founded upon the notion of the Vicarious Atonement. No crucifixion, no atonement, no Church . . .

The oddest aspect of the destruction of the Templars was the accusations of blasphemy and worship of demons. But if the Templars
did
possess this knowledge, then they
were
dangerous, both to the Church and to the State (
i.e.
, to the kings of France). There is also much historical evidence of a close alliance between the Templars and the Cathars. The Cathars gave large amounts of land to the Templars, and Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth Grand Master of the Templars, came of a Cathar family. Bertrand’s descendants fought besides the Cathars of Languedoc against the invaders who were sent by the pope to stamp out Catharism.

By the sixteenth century the Merovingians were represented by the house of Lorraine (which became Habsburg-Lorraine – so the Habsburgs were also Merovingians). They tried hard to depose the ruling house of Valois, but although they finally succeeded in bringing about their extinction, they had exhausted themselves in the process and had no eligible candidate to put forward. When Louis XIII died there was another determined attempt by the conspirators to prevent Louis XIV coming to the throne; but this again failed. (Readers who wish to study this historical aspect in more detail are recommended to read Lincoln’s fascinating book.)

The story of Fouquet’s downfall seems to suggest that he was hoping
to use the secret of the Priory of Sion to overthrow the king. It is not clear how Poussin was associated with the mystery, but he was presumably a member of the Priory, and was asked to encode its major secret – probably that of the “incontrovertible evidence”, or of the Grail – in his picture
The Shepherds of Arcady
. Lincoln argues that the painting embodies some secret geometry involving a pentagram which would enable the “treasure” to be located. King Louis’s interest in the painting suggests that he hoped to find the treasure first.

During the early years of Louis’s reign the Grand Master of the Priory was, according to the
Secret Dossiers
, a German minister named Johann Valentin Andreae; and this introduces an interesting new complication. Andreae is believed to have been the author of a curious work called
The Fama Fraternitas of the Worthy Order of the Rosy Cross
, published in 1614. This claimed that an ascetic called Christian Rosenkreuz, who lived to be 106, had spent his whole life in a search for occult wisdom, and had founded an order called the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, or Rosicrucians. He lay buried in a secret tomb for 120 years, surrounded by lighted candles, before a brother found the tomb. Now, anyone who wished to become party to this secret wisdom only had to make their interest known and they would be contacted . . . Many people published pamphlets announcing their desire to be initiated but (as far as is known) none of them was ever contacted. Two more Rosicrucian works were published, and scholarship has established that the author of the third of these,
The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz
, was Andreae. Rosicrucianism exerted a powerful influence on the minds of scholars and occultists in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Now, according to Lincoln’s sources, Andreae is revealed as a Grand Master of the Priory (twenty years after publication of the
Fama
), and we are apparently to assume that the Priory of Sion became closely identified with the Rosicrucians, and later with the various Masonic lodges.

Lincoln writes:

With the Revolution, these hopes evaporated. And for some reason the Abbé Antoine Bigou, the priest of Rennes-le-Château and confessor of the Blanchefort family (of which, we may recall, one member had been a Master of the Templars) felt that both he and the secret of Rennes-le-Château were in danger. Why is not clear – the sans-culottes could hardly kill every priest in France. Possibly he thought they had been betrayed or were likely to be. At all events, he went to the trouble of writing the two coded parchments and concealing them, together with the two genealogical tables, in the Visigothic pillar. We do not know what the two tables contained – perhaps the line of descent from Jesus down to the living members of the Priory of Sion. (According to Lincoln’s informant, M. Plantard, the Merovingian Pretender, they are now in a London bank vault.) Then Bigou fled to Spain, where he soon died.

So the scene was set for Saunière’s appearance nearly a century later, and for his discovery of the parchments. What happened then? Saunière went to Paris, and contacted the very person – Emile Hoffet – who was able to put him in touch with the modern Priory of Sion. The Priory may well have lost touch with the secrets of Rennes-le-Château, if Bigou had hidden the “treasure”, and so would have been delighted to see him. We must assume that Saunière accepted the “incontrovertible proof” that Jesus had not died on the cross but had founded a royal dynasty, and became a member of the Priory. He then returned to Rennes-le-Château, and used the knowledge he had gained – presumably from Debussy – to find the “treasure”. Those excursions in the area, when he claimed to have been collecting stones for a grotto, must have been part of the treasure-hunt. He found his “treasure”, and became a rich man. But we know that much of his money came from the Habsburg family – at one point he was accused of being an Austrian spy because he was being paid by the Habsburgs – but that some of it was paid to him by the Abbé Henri Boudet, curé of nearby Rennes-les-Bains. Boudet also passed on money to the Bishop of Carcassonne. It would seem, then, that Boudet too was a member of the Priory of Sion.

When Saunière died, after enjoying his new-found wealth for less than a quarter of a century, he shocked the priest who administered the final rites by admitting that he was not, in the strict sense of the word, a Christian. He had dropped hints to the same effect in the restorations in his church: the devil inside the door (Rex Mundi) – Asmodeus, the
legendary guardian of Solomon’s treasure – and many baffling touches in the tableau of the crucifixion, such as a money bag at the foot of the cross. Over the door he had inscribed the words
TERRIBILIS ST LOCUS ISTE
: this place is terrible. The words are from the dedicatory mass sung for new churches, and “terrible” here means “awe-inspiring”; but it still seems odd that Saunière should have chosen them for the motto of his church, seen immediately before the visitor encounters its “demon guardian”.

Lincoln seems to feel that the solution to the mystery of Saunière’s wealth is that it came from the Priory of Sion. But this is disputed by other writers. Brian Innes, who conducted a four-part investigation of the mystery in a magazine called
The Unexplained
in 1980, points out that quantities of gold have been found in the area. In 1645 a shepherd boy called Ignace Paris was executed for theft; he was in possession of gold coins, and claimed that he had found these after falling down a ravine and finding his way into a cave full of treasure. Innes says that more recently a slab of gold weighing nearly 45 lb has been found near Rennes-le-Château, made from fused Arab (or Crusader) coins, and that in 1928 the remains of a large gold statue were found in a hut on the edge of a stream that flows below the village.

In their book
The Holy Grail Revealed: The Real Secret of Rennes-le-Château
, Patricia and Lionel Fanthorpe also argue strongly that Saunière found real treasure, not merely some ancient secret. Yet they are also inclined to agree with Lincoln that there was also some “object” referred to as the Grail which could confer power on those who owned it: they compare it to the Ring of Power in Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
, and even suggest in one place, that it might be of “extra-terrestrial origin”, linking Rennes-le-Château with the “ancient astronaut” theories of Erich von Däniken.

None of the theories can provide a complete solution to the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, but on the whole Lincoln comes closest to it. For the twentieth-century reader, the notion that Jesus survived the crucifixion and founded a dynasty is not particularly “terrible”. Yet we can see that for Nicolas Poussin and Louis Fouquet this notion would have seemed hair-raising, a kind of spiritual dynamite, sufficient to undermine sixteen centuries of Christianity and the authority of the pope. Even for Saunière, living at the end of the skeptical nineteenth century, it must have seemed quite startling.

Is it likely that we shall ever get to the bottom of the mystery? It is well within the realms of possibility. Presumably the Priory of Sion knows precisely what Saunière found near Rennes-le-Château in the
hillside tomb or the old fortress, and its increasing tendency to “go public” may mean that we shall sooner or later be told the whole story. But even if that does not happen, the solution could still lie in the message on the second parchment – in solving the puzzle contained in Poussin and Teniers, in working out the meaning of “Peace 681” (which could refer to the year 1799, since Templar Freemasons dated the calender from the year 1118), the horse of God, the demon of the guardian at noon, and the blue apples. But whoever discovers the secret can be reasonably certain of one thing: that the treasure itself will be missing.

Postscript to Rennes-le-Château

Publication of
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
in 1982 created a sensation. Suddenly, the little village of Rennes-le-Château became famous, and busloads of tourists arrived every summer – some of them guided by Henry Lincoln himself.

Lincoln came to feel that an important part of the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau lay in the landscape itself.