Rennes-le-Château - A New Angle?

This post is concerned with two themes that intertwine: Rennes-le-Château and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.  The former is a village in the department of the Aude in France and the latter is a book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.  I will be looking at both of these in greater detail in later posts, but, firstly, let us look over the information pertinent to these subjects.

 Andrew Gough has summed it up on his website when he says that there is little new to the mystery (and no-so-cottage industry) that is the enigma of Rennes-le-Château.  However, Josh Kroeker has discovered something about certain works of Nicolas Poussin that, whether it belongs to the aforementioned mystery or to another riddle, does seem to be something overlooked by anyone else.

Tour Magdala

from Wikipedia Site for Rennes-le-Château 

The story goes, very loosely, like this.  Bérenger Saunière was a poor priest to the aforementioned village from 1885 to 1909.  He was responsible for commissioning quite a few buildings around the hamlet, which sounds quite pleasant and civic-minded of him.  The start of the legend is here, though.  Where did he get the money?  Whilst it is true that he was guilty of simony (that is, the selling of masses) it did not bring in enough to pay for all of the fancy new edifices popping up.  These include a (gaudy) revamp of his ancient church, l’eglise Ste. Marie-Madeleine (the Church of St. Mary-Magdalene), the Villa Bethania and le Tour Magdala.  The Villa Bethania is a large house that Saunière doesn’t live but uses to entertain guests at extravagant parties.  The Tour Magdala, which is a stubby, square tower perched right on the edge of the cliff that Rennes-le-Château stands on, seems to be a combination of study, library and look-out post.  What a country priest would want with something like this is beyond most people – and most certainly beyond me.  It did not help that Saunière himself was a bit – well, stroppy.  He never got on well with authority and, in some ways, one cannot help but think that the Catholic Church, with a rigid, hierarchical system that would be the pride of any army, was not an obvious career choice for him.  In those days (come to think of it, even now) the area into which he was born and in which he worked was isolated and choices were few.  It is, however, the money that is the mystery.  The money that no-one can account for, quite literally.

This, then, is the enigma.  It helps to create mythology (or doesn’t if one is a seeker after the truth) that the region has had a romantic and bloody past.  The Romans, the Visigoths, the Knights Templar and the Cathars, an heretical sect that the Vatican waged war upon, all lived and died there at one time or another.  It is a land utterly steeped in inscrutability and history.  I had the huge luck to go there, and the combination of black mountains, surprisingly lush greenery, scorching sunshine, astonishingly ancient, isolated settlements with plaster falling off and streets so narrow you wonder what the point is in having them at all turns out to make you feel in your skin that the land is clutching secrets in the very rocks.  No wonder, then, that the merest sniff of something different is enough to inflate any happenings there into the most mind-blowing and blasphemous epic of the age.

We move onto that book.  The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail basically guesses that the priest of a tiny village found documents that hinted at a link to the first royal dynasty of France – the Merovingians.  So far, so fairly unremarkable.  After all, there’s nothing particularly astonishing about linking to royalty from your own land.  Well, as many of you probably know, the guess turned into a leap – a leap of faith, ironically enough, and the leap was that the Merovingians were descended from Jesus Christ after he married Mary Magdalene and had children.  As for this rarefied line of holy offspring; I went off and opened a spreadsheet.  I assumed that for one couple, there would be two couples in the next generation, and so on.  I assumed that growth would be exponential (two, four, eight, sixteen… each generation doubles).  I also assumed that, unlike in the modern West, each generation could be expected to have children at the average age of fifteen.  By the time I had finished, the final sum looked like the kind of figure that astronomers work with.  It was (drum roll, please maestro) 1.09E+40.  If I remember aright, it is a one with forty decimal places after the dot.  Billions, in other words – the other words being squillions and such.  Not a particularly exclusive club then.  Now, my methods were quite a brief and slapdash approach to such statistics but, even including complex algorithms for variations in location, weather and age, we’re almost certainly looking at a million or so souls, possibly with the genes of God, walking our Earth today.  Nobody tell Richard Dawkins.

Okay, we have a very-well-off priest in the back of beyond holding loud parties in posh, new houses that he never lived in and the root of his wealth could be that he was blackmailing his employer with the information that children of their God were sharing the planet with them and, presumably, making the Catholic churches’ claim to be the one, reliable source on this planet of what God wants a bit shaky.  Where I fall out with this is that I am of the school that the so-called “historical” Jesus might not even have existed.  Even St. Paul seems to have treated Jesus as a purely incorporeal god similar to the other deities of the day.

What I will say in favour of The Holy Blood, though, is that it started many people on the road to thinking about the church, the Bible and claims related to them.  Rather than just accepting the story of Christ as it is taught by the Church, folk started to question, which, even by itself is a good thing in my opinion.  When I was much younger, I read this book when it first came out.  It made me look for conundra amongst the mundane and enlivened my life considerably.  Nowadays, especially in the wider world, the arcane lurks to surprise and, hopefully on occasion, delight us.