Rennes-le-Château

Rennes-le-Château
Rennes-le-Château
	Location of
Country	France
Arrondissement	Limoux
Canton	Couiza
Time zone	UTC+01:00 (CET)
• Summer (DST)	UTC+02:00 (CEST)
INSEE/Postal code	11309 /

Rennes-le-Château is a medieval castle village and a commune in the Aude département, in the Languedoc area in southern France. In the foothills of the French Pyrenees, it is an area known for its towering mountains, deep gorges, forests, caves, wild remote plateaus and access to the Mediterranean. Starting in the 1950s, the area also became famous for local rumours about the existence of a hidden treasure discovered in a church. This story, though since proven false, was enhanced and expanded by various hoaxsters, and captured the public imagination. The stories have grown over the decades, to the point where the area is now most famous for being cited in a number of conspiracy theories. The most famous of these is a hoax involving the fraudulent Priory of Sion, which formed the basis for hypotheses in such bestselling books as Holy Blood Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code.

History of the village

This predominantly rural area has a very rich history, with castles, cathedrals, vineyards and museums. Mountains frame both ends of the region — the Cevennes to the northeast and the Pyrenees to the south. The area is known for beautiful scenery, with jagged ridges, deep river canyons and rocky limestone plateaus, with large caves underneath.

Over the centuries religious and political conflicts have caused much havoc in the area. The ruined castles which cling precariously to hilltops played a leading role in the struggles between the Catholic church and the Cathars at the beginning of the 13th century. Other castles guarded the volatile border with Spain. Whole communities were wiped out during the campaigns of the Catholic authorities to rid the area of the Cathar heretics during the Albigensian Crusades and again when Protestants fought for religious freedom against the French monarchy.

Church of Mary Magdalene

Some architecture in the area dates back a thousand years, such as the church in the Rennes-le-Chateau parish, which was dedicated to Mary Magdalene in 1059. It was renovated in the late 1800s by the local priest, Berenger Sauniere, though the source of his funds at the time was controversial (see below) and some of the additions to the church appeared unusual. One of the new features added to the church was an inscription above the front door, which said, Teribilis es locus iste. Inside the church, one of the added figures was of the demon Asmodeus. Sauniere also funded the construction of another structure dedicated to Mary Magdalene, a tower on the side of a nearby mountain.

One speculative translation of the church's latin inscription is that the church contains something dreadful. However, another translation of Terribilis est locus iste would read: "Awesome is this place," based on the first part of the introit of the mass Terribilis for the dedication of a church, which is itself based on Gen. 28:17. The word Terribilis would be used not in the context of describing something dreadful, but rather as something awesome or great. The Latin phrase continues as :hic domus Dei est, et porta coeli, translated to English as: "This is the House of God, and the gate of Heaven." It in a way tells the visitor to be awed and tremble before the presence of this house of God.^{[citation needed]}

Modern fame

Though initially a tiny unknown village, as of 2006 the area received 100,000 tourists each year. Much of the modern reputation of Rennes-le-Château rises from rumours dating from the mid-1950s concerning a local 19th-century priest. Father Bérenger Saunière had mysteriously acquired and spent large sums of money during his tenure, and the source of the wealth had long been a topic of conversation and rumour within the village. In the 1950s, these rumours were given wide local circulation by Noël Corbu, a local man who had opened a restaurant in Saunière's former estate (L'Hotel de la Tour), and hoped to use the stories to attract business.

From that point on Rennes-le-Château became the centre of conspiracy theories claiming that Saunière uncovered hidden treasure and/or secrets about the history of the Church, which could potentially threaten the foundations of Catholicism. The area has become the focus of increasingly sensational claims including the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, the Rex Deus, the Holy Grail, the treasures of the Temple of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant, ley lines, and sacred geometry alignments. The speculation moved from local to national importance when it was incorporated by Pierre Plantard into his apocryphal history of the Priory of Sion. This led to series of BBC Two documentaries in the 1970s by Henry Lincoln and the 1982 book The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, which in turn influenced Dan Brown's bestselling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. As a result, the tiny village of only a few score residents now attracts a flood of visitors who look for hidden treasures and evidence of conspiracy.

The Saunière story

The story began when Noël Corbu wanted to attract visitors to his local hotel in Rennes-le-Château, by spreading the claim that Saunière became rich when he found a royal treasure inside one of the pillars in his church. In 1956, the first newspapers started printing this story. This ignited a flame: visitors with shovels flooded the town and Corbu got what he wanted. However, this also attracted a number of persons such as Pierre Plantard. His childhood dream was to play a vital role in the history of France, so he and some friends concocted an elaborate hoax. It involved planting fabricated documents in France's Bibliothèque nationale de France, to imply that Plantard was a descendant of a French royal dynasty, which would somehow mean that he was supposed to be declared King of France. The fabricated documents also mention the ancient "Priory of Sion", which was supposedly a thousand years old, but was in fact the name of an organization that Plantard founded himself in 1956 with three of his friends.

No serious journalists who investigated the story found it plausible enough to write about, so Plantard asked his friend, Gérard de Sède, to write a book to give more credence to the story. L’Or de Rennes (the Gold of Rennes, later published as Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château) came out in 1967 and was an instant success. The book presented (forged) Latin documents by Plantard's group, alleging that these were medieval documents which had been found by Saunière in the 19th century. One of the documents had multiple encrypted references to the Priory of Sion, thereby attempting to "prove" that the society was older than its actual creation date of 1956.

In 1969, an actor and science-fiction writer by the name of Henry Lincoln read the book, dug deeper, and wrote his own books on the subject, pointing out his "discovery" of hidden codes in the parchments. One of the codes involved a series of raised letters in the Latin message, which when read off separately, spelled out in French: a dagobert ii roi et a sion est ce tresor et il est la mort. (translation: This treasure belongs to King Dagobert II and to Sion, and he is there dead.). Lincoln created a series of BBC Two documentaries in the 1970s about the subject, and then in 1982, co-wrote Holy Blood – Holy Grail with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. Their book expanded upon the Rennes-le-Château story to further imply that Plantard was connected not just to royal ancestry, but actually descended from Jesus Christ. This torch was then picked up and carried further in 2003 in Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, though Brown's book never mentioned Rennes-le-Château by name.

Saunière's renovations

The extraordinary popularity of The Da Vinci Code has reignited the interest of tourists, who come to the village to see sites associated with Saunière and Rennes-le-Château, even though the village is officially not part of "The Da Vinci Code trail". The pillar where Sauniere was said to have found the documents is on display in the village's "Sauniere Museum," where visitors are told that the "visigothic pillar" was never hollow, nor can it be established that the pillar was actually "visigothic". Instead, the pillar was set up by Saunière in 1891 as part of his Shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes.

Even the claim that the pillar originated from Saunière's church cannot be substantiated.

Skeptical views

Almost all historians reject the conspiracies as nothing more than fantasy.^{[citation needed]} The stories of Saunière's "mysteries" were based on nothing more than a minor scandal involving the sale of masses, which eventually led to the disgrace of both Saunière and his bishop. His "wealth" was short-lived and he died relatively poor. Published by French Editions Belisane from the early 1980s onwards, the evidence for this ranged from the archives in the possession of Antoine Captier, which includes Saunière's correspondence and notebooks, and the minutes of the ecumenical trial between Saunière and his bishop between 1910–1911 which are located in the Carcassonne Bishopric.

As for the relationship with the fictional Priory of Sion and Plantard's hoax, multiple factors disproved those theories as well. Philippe de Chérisey – who helped Plantard with his fraud – admitted having fabricated the historical documents. The supposed "medieval" documents were shown to have been written in modern French. Gérard de Sède, another of the conspirators who had written the book Le Tresor Maudit, also wrote a book denouncing the fraud, and this was further confirmed by his son.