The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (80 page)

Looking at the code discovered in the parchment, Lincoln noted the phrase: “Poussin holds the key . . .” and, as we have seen, the actual tomb shown in Poussin’s painting was discovered in the area of Rennes-le-Chateau at nearby Arques. And in fact, the tomb, although it had no Latin inscription, was otherwise identical, even to the stone on which the shepherd in the painting is resting his foot.

Lincoln had not only noticed that there was a hidden pentagram in one of the parchments, but that there was something odd about the geometry of Poussin’s painting. He showed it to Professor Christopher Cornford, of the Royal College of Art, and Cornford not only agreed with him that there was a pentagram hidden in the painting, but that the structure was based on the Golden Section, a geometrical division much used in ancient times. (This is also known by the Greek letter phi, and is basically a way of dividing a line in such a ratio that the smaller part is to the greater as the greater is to the whole line – and in numerical terms equals 1.618.) What makes the Golden Section so important is that nature, for some odd reason, is using it all the time, from spiral seashells to spiral nebulae. It is present in the petal arrangements around the heads of flowers, and in the human body. And for some reason, when used in the divisions of a painting, it produces an oddly pleasing effect.

Now the pentagram is one of the most ancient magical symbols. And
the reason is almost certainly that it was associated with the planet Venus.

If we imagine the earth as the centre of the solar system (as the ancients believed it was) it becomes obvious that there will be moments when every planet will be “eclipsed” by the sun, when the sun comes between the planet and the earth. Mercury, for example, is “eclipsed” three times, and if we draw lines between these three points in the heavens, they form an irregular triangle. Mars is “eclipsed” four times, and the figure is an irregular rectangle. In fact, all the planets make irregular figures – except Venus. And this makes a regular pentagram or pentacle.

Now in writing a book called
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
I had concluded that astronomy is far, far older than we might imagine. There is even evidence that it dates back more than a hundred thousand years, to Neanderthal Man. And in their book
Hamlet’s Mill
George Santillana and Hertha von Dechend have demonstrated very clearly that the precession of the equinoxes – that apparent slow backward movement of the constellations, due to a slight wobble on the earth’s axis, which takes almost twenty-six thousand years to complete its cycle – was known to every major civilization of the ancient world. This admittedly sounds absurd, since it would seem to involve many centuries of close observation of the heavens. But Santillana and Dechend leave little doubt that it was so.

The implication is that the pentagram symbolizing Venus has been sacred for many thousands of years.

Now Lincoln also discovered the pentagram in the geometry of Rennes-le-Chateau.

When he looked at an ordnance survey map of Rennes-le-Chateau region, one thing was immediately obvious: that three of its key sites – Rennes, the Templar Chateau of Bezu, and the Blanchefort chateau – formed three points of a triangle. And all were on hilltops.

When Lincoln drew the triangle on his map, and proceeded to measure its lines, he received a surprise. It was a precise isosceles triangle, that is, with two sides exactly equal. With Bezu at the appex of the triangle, the lines from Bezu to Blanchefort, and from Bezu to Rennes-le-Chateau, were equal.

This could not be an accident. At some remote point in time, someone had observed that the three hilltops made a precise triangle, and in due course they had been chosen as part of a secret pattern.

Now Lincoln found himself wondering if, by any remote chance, there were two more hilltops which would form the rest of the pentagram. Of course, he felt that would be asking too much . . .

Yet when he studied the map, he was staggered to find that there were indeed two such hilltops, in precisely the right places. The eastern one was called La Soulane, and the western one Serre de Lauzet. And when the five hilltops were joined up on the map, they formed an exact pentacle.

This was obviously an amazing natural freak. But there was one more surprise to come. When Lincoln looked for the centre of the map, he found that it was marked by another hill, called La Pique.

Admittedly, although the summit of La Pique looked on the map like the dead centre, it was actually two hundred and fifty yards to the south east of centre. But that was to be expected. After all, this was not a man-made landscape. It was incredible enough that La Pique fell at the centre of the pentacle.

So this was the basic secret of Rennes-le-Chateau: that it was part of a sacred landscape. Perhaps this is why Rennes-le-Chateau was chosen by the Merovingian King Dagobert as his home (and explains why his son Sigisbert fled there after his father’s murder). The royal blood of the Merovingians was associated with a
magic
landscape.

The implication is that the goddess to whom the Rennes-le-Chateau “Temple” was originally dedicated was Venus, and explains why Mary Magdalen – who was identified with Venus in the Middle Ages – figures so largely in the area.

In other words, the whole area of Rennes-le-Chateau was regarded as sacred because of its geometry. At the centre of its landscape lay a natural pentagram.

That being so, it seems inevitable that in the Christian era, churches would be built so as to conform to this geometrical pattern. And in fact, an enthusiast named David Wood studied the map of the area, and quickly discovered that a precise circle could be drawn through five churches, including Rennes-le-Chateau, connected by a pentacular geometry. His book
Genisis
contains some remarkable insights into the geometry of the area, which Lincoln (who introduces the book) acknowledges to be remarkable. However, Lincoln – probably in common with most readers of the book – is unable to agree with Wood’s explanation of the mystery, which involves a super-race who came from Syrius 200,000 years ago, and became the gods of Ancient Egypt. Such speculations, while fascinating, are obviously unproven and unprovable.

But one interesting discovery made by David Wood – and accepted by Lincoln – is that the geometry of the Rennes-le-Chateau area is, incredibly, measured in English miles, not in kilometres. Lincoln argues
effectively that the kilometre (which is supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator) is a slipshod and meaningless measurement, and that the world would be better off to return to miles.

Equally controversial are the speculations contained in a book called
The Tomb of God
(1996) by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, whose geometrical constructions leave them to locate the tomb of Jesus at the foot of a mountain near Rennes-le-Chateau, and who are convinced that Saunière was murdered. But a BBC television programme about the book seemed to demonstrate that the BBC’s attitude to Rennes-le-Chateau had changed since Lincoln’s three programmes, and that they had become hard line skeptics.

What was certainly most absurd was the programme’s attempt to demonstrate that the Priory of Sion story, and the whole Rennes-le-Château affair, was a hoax that has now been exploded. For even if it could be demonstrated that Pierre Plantard, who claims to be a Merovingian descendant of Dagobert, was an imposter, the mystery of Saunière and his fortune would remain as baffling as ever.

Then where did that wealth come from? The answer is almost certainly: not from any hidden treasure but from the Priory of Sion – that is, from modern descendants of the Merovingians, particularly the house of Hapsburg in Austria. Andrews and Schellenberger (whose book is excellently researched, even if its conclusions seem dubious) produce evidence that Henri Boudet, the priest of nearby Rennes-les-Bains, was Saunière’s paymaster, and that he passed on sums like three and a half million gold francs to Saunière’s housekeeper Marie Denardaud, and seven and a half million to Bishop Bellard, who appointed Saunière to Rennes-le-Château. It seems clear that there were many other people in the secret.

As to Pierre Plantard, who seems to have given Lincoln the basic information that enabled him to solve the mystery of the parchments, the case against him has been laid out by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in a book called
The Templar Revelation
. Plantard came to prominence in occupied Paris in 1942 as the Grand Master of a quasi-Masonic order called The Order of Alpha-Galates, which was “markedly uncritical” of the Nazis. In fact, the Nazis seemed to approve of it. But then, they would; part of Himmler’s job was to establish that the Germans had a noble origin in the remote days of the Norse sagas, and to create a modern mystical order with its roots in the Aryan past. Pierre Plantard, whom Picknett and Prince describe as “a one-time draftsman for a stove-fitting firm, who allegedly had difficulty paying the rent from
time to time”, then changed his name to Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair and later played an important part in bringing about the return to power of General de Gaulle in 1958. From 1956, the Priory of Sion had been depositing “enigmatic documents” in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The implication was that these documents had been concocted as part of the “hoax”. In fact, Lincoln’s books
The Holy Place
and
Key to the Sacred Pattern
make it clear that there is no reason whatever for believing that the Priory of Sion is some kind of hoax or that Pierre Plantard is not exactly what he says he is.

On the other hand, it is necessary to admit that the BBC may have been justified in its negative attitude towards
The Tomb of God
by Andrews and Schellenberger. As already noted, their theory suggests that Jesus is buried at the foot of a mountain near Rennes-le-Chateau. They find all kinds of geometrical figures in Saunière’s parchments, then use these as a map to locate the “tomb of God”. They add the word “
sum
” (am) to “
et in Arcadia ego
”. to make an anagram that reads “I touch the tomb of God, Jesus” They suggest that the “blue apples” referred to in Saunière’s parchment are grapes, and that they symbolize the body of Jesus. The puzzling phrase “horse of God” they seem to think refers to a railway engine, and an important part in their argument is played by a railway line that was built in the 1870s. Finally they suggest that Saunière and his two fellow priests were murdered, for reasons they fail to make clear.

Another theory cited by Picknett and Prince holds that the tomb of Jesus is situated under the public toilet in Rennes-le-Chateau.

Henry Lincoln’s most powerful argument concerns the actual measurements of the earth. He mentions a remarkable book called
Historical Metrology
(1953) by a master engineer named A.E. Berriman, an incredibly erudite volume covering ancient Egypt, Babylon, Sumer, China, India, Persia and many other cultures, which begins with the question: “Was the earth measured in remote antiquity”?, and sets out to demonstrate that indeed it was. It argues that ancient weights and measures were derived from measuring the earth – which, of course, means that ancient people had already measured the earth.

The book must have struck Berriman’s contemporaries as hopelessly eccentric. He says that one measure was a fraction of the earth’s circumference, that a measure of land area (the acre) was based on a decimal fraction of the square of the earth’s radius, and that certain weights were based on the density of water and of gold. It sounds almost as if Berriman is positing the existence of some ancient civilization which vanished without a trace, except for these ancient measures.

In the last analysis, one of the most interesting things Lincoln has done, with his thirty-year investigation of Rennes-le-Chateau, is to demonstrate the existence of some ancient science of earth measurement. Since medieval times, this science seems to have been in the custody of the Church, and we must naturally suspect the involvement of the Templars. But Lincoln is inclined to believe that it may be far older even than that – dating back to the age of the megaliths.

Berriman seems to be making the same point in
Historical Metrology.
His argument, as noted above, is that prehistoric measurement was geodetic in origin – that is, was derived from the size of the earth.

One of his most powerful arguments occurs at the beginning of his first chapter.

He points out that although the Greeks did not know the size of the earth, the earth’s polar circumference happens to be precisely 216,000 Greek stade, or stadia. The Greek stade is 600 Greek feet, and the Greek foot is .15 longer than the British foot.

If we want to find out how many Greek stade there are to one degree of the earth’s circumference, we divide 216,000 by the 360 degrees in a circle. And the answer, significantly turns out to be 600 – the same as the number of feet in the stade.

If we then divide by 60 – to get the number of stade in one minute of the circumference – we get 10 stade.

And if we go further, and divide again by 60, to find the number of Greek feet in one second of the earth’s circumference, we see that it is precisely 100.

This simply cannot be chance. Distances do not normally work out in neat round figures. It is obvious (a) that the Greeks took their stade from someone else, and (b) that someone else knew the exact size of the earth.

Berriman is full of these puzzling facts – for example, that the area of the great bath of Mohenjo Daro, in the Indus Valley, is a hundred square yards.