Mysteries of Rennes-le-Château and the Prieure du Sion

Here are the basic outlines of the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. It was clear that Berenger Sauniere, the parish priest of the small village during the late 19th and early 20th century, had been receiving vast sums of money to refurbish the local church and also to build many structures in the area, such as his Tower of the Magdalene (Tour Magdala).

Sauniere died in 1917, leaving the secret of where he got his fabulous wealth to his housekeeper, Marie Dernaud, who promised to reveal it on her deathbed -- but sadly she had a stroke which left her paralyzed and unable to speak before her death in 1953.

Speculation was rife on the source of the parish priest's money. Was it the lost treasure of the Templars or the Cathars in the area? Might it have been buried Visigothic gold? Or was he blackmailing the Church with some terrible secret? The evidence that points to the last possibility is that Sauniere's confession before his death was so shocking that the priest who heard it denied him absolution and last rites.

The mystery is rendered greater by a series of parchments found by the cleric in 1891, which contained an easily discovered cipher. They were apparently written by his predecessor, Abbe Antoine Bigou, confessor to Marie d'Hautpoul, in 1781. (The same cipher appears on her tombstone.) The parchments were, on the face of it, Latin transcriptions of passages from the Gospels, but they contained deeper mysteries. Sauniere also appears to have left certain other "clues" in the highly unusual redesign of his church and of the other structures in the area. Hidden within those Latin parchments was a message in French:

"THIS TREASURE BELONGS TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION AND HE IS THERE DEAD."

Within the second parchment was an even stranger message:

SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION THAT POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE KEY PEACE 681 BY THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE THIS DAEMON GUARDIAN AT MIDDAY BLUE APPLES.

A third cipher that appears, not in the documents, but at Shugborough Hall's Shepherd Monument, is the curious "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M" which has never been translated.

There is a famous painting by Poussin entitled "Les Bergers D'Arcadie" (the Arcadian shepherds) which shows them around a tomb containing the mysterious inscription "Et in Arcadia Ego..." This tomb appears to be a virtual replica of one not too dissimilar to it right outside of Rennes-le-Château. Three intrepid historians searched far and away for others to help decipher the puzzle. Suffice to say, Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh did a masterful job of "unearthing" the Merovingian monarch Dagobert and tied together many mysteries of history with a fantastic thesis that can be stated as thus: Jesus and Mary Magdalene, legitimate nobility from the Judaic Houses of Benjamin and David, married and sired heirs. Jesus did not die on the cross but went either to England or India.

The Magdalene's heirs married into the Visigoth families of the time and gave birth to the sacred Merovingian ruling family. The Visigoths of the area might have themselves been descended from the House of Benjamin, which had fled to the Arcadia region of Greece, and thence north into France, a thousand years earlier.

The Merovingians were not wiped out by the Carolingian usurpers, and their lineage survives in some of the other royal families of Europe; apparently the goal of the secret society entitled the Prieure du Sion is a Merovingian restoration in France.

Nothing is as it seems with the Rennes mystery. But in the hands of Leigh, Lincoln, and Baigent, it seems to encompass myriads of others -- the dissolution of the Templars, the downfall of the Cathars, the bizarre Rosicrucian manifesto, and other political intrigues of French history. For it seems that Sion has a grievance against the Church, who betrayed the Merovingian dynasty and crowned its destroyers. If Sauniere was an agent of Sion, it might explain why he was denied absolution. (by Steve Mizrach)