The Mystery of Rennes le Chateau

One of my favorite stories is that of "The Mystery of Rennes le Chateau," popularized in the 1980's by the book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail."

In the late nineteenth century, in a tiny village called Rennes le Chateau located in the mountainous region of the south of France, the local pastor, named Sauniere, while renovating the church, discovered secret parchments concealed under the altar there. The parchments are said to have consisted of genealogies and of copies of Latin scripture containing ciphers, codes. One of the more easily recognizable and decipherable codes referred to a treasure and to Dagobert II (a Merovingian King who ruled in France in the 7th century, who had married a Visigoth wife of royal lineage at the church in Rennes le Chateau and who supposedly had amassed a treasure in the vicinity of Rennes le Chateau, a treasure that may have included the legendary lost treasure of the temple of Jerusalem). The treasure of Jerusalem was originally taken from Palestine by the Romans when the Romans sacked Jerusalem in the first century, and then later taken from the Romans by the Visigoths when the Visigoths sacked Rome in the fifth century.

Sauniere took the cryptic parchments to a group of ecclesiastical authorities at San Sulpice in Paris. San Sulpice was a center of the Catholic modernist movement which involved applying rigorous modern research methods to the Bible and that resulted in a great many doubts cast on the legitimacy of the Bible. Not long after Sauniere returned to Rennes le Chateau from Paris, he began to spend enormous sums of money, renovating his church (that he also decorated with unorthodox symbolism), building a new road and modern facilities for Rennes le Chateau, in all spending the equivalent of several million dollars. Did the money come from the discovery of a treasure in the vicinity of Rennes le Chateau? That’s part of the mystery. When Sauniere was in his sixties he suffered a stroke which occurred curiously enough on the day that is celebrated as the feast day of Saint Sulpice, which was where Sauniere originally took the coded parchments. He died soon after and never revealed where his money came from.

According to the story, the "treasure" that Sauniere discovered had to do with a "secret." The secret, among other things, had to do with the fact that Jesus sired a bloodline that migrated to France and intermarried with French nobility, creating the Merovingian royal line that was eventually deposed (in part with the collusion of the Roman Church).

The story explores the history of the order of the Knights Templar, founded at the end of the eleventh century when the Franks conquered Palestine and Jerusalem. The Templars may have uncovered some secrets in their excavations on the temple mount where they were headquartered in Jerusalem. The story speculates the Templars were expressly sent to Jerusalem for the purpose of uncovering certain secrets there, sent by a secret society later referred to as the Priory of Sion. According to the story, one of the aims of the Priory of Sion was to restore to power the Merovingian royal line. The Templars, among other things, served as protectors of the bloodline. The bloodline was symbolically referred to as "the holy grail" in the so-called "grail romances" that became popular in Europe.

Jerusalem fell to the Muslims after only about a century of occupation by the franks, supposedly due to the ineptitude (or treason) of the grand master of the Templars. The Templars only survived for about one more century after that when, by order of the king of France in collusion with the pope, the Templars were arrested on Friday October the 13th 1307. Some Templars were tortured and murdered. The Templar order was officially dissolved, although it may have survived in some form in Scotland. The treasure that the Templars had supposedly amassed mysteriously disappeared. The Priory of Sion meanwhile went on to become instrumental in the creation and dissemination of Freemasonry in Europe and was behind several failed attempts to restore the bloodline to power in France.

The story examines how the Roman Church opposed alternative forms of Christianity. The so-called Albigensian Crusade is an example of how the Roman Church murderously opposed those who had unorthodox beliefs. In the thirteenth century, the Cathars in the temperate Languedoc region of the south of France did not adhere to Roman Christianity and so the Pope ordered a Crusade against them, resulting in the slaughter of a large population and the destruction of their culture which was one of the more advanced in Europe at the time. When the crusaders laid siege to the last Cathar stronghold (of Montsegir), the so-called "Cathar treasure" was safely smuggled out before Montsegir fell to the crusaders. That treasure may have included "the holy grail."

The story explores how the Roman Church distorted the true history of Jesus, how the formation of popular Christianity involved deifying Jesus and appropriating preexisting elements of other pagan religions (like Mithraism), and how the political side of the life of Jesus (and the zealots that constituted his entourage, their opposition to Roman rule) was historically obscured in order for Christianity to appeal to a Roman audience.

The story speculates that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, who may have also been Mary of Bethany, and that Lazarus may have been Jesus’ brother-in-law as well as the author of the fourth Gospel.

Regardless of whether the story is historically accurate, it remains one of my favorite mysteries.