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Part 1

The Languedoc region of France is a strange part of the world. It’s been centuries since the Albigensian Crusade, but signs on the freeway constantly remind you you’re in "Cathar Country." A sign with a picture of a pig superimposed upon a family having a barbecue reads, "Demand pork in Cathar country - It’s part of a tradition of good taste" - never mind the fact that the Cathars were strict vegetarians. Pull into a roadside shop and you can get Cathar soap, Cathar letter openers, and even Cathar wine (to go with the pork, we presume.) There’s even a museum called the Catharama. The Cathars may have been wiped out by the Inquisition in the 13^th century, but they live on as a powerful source of tourism in this part of the world where seemingly nothing else of consequence has taken place in the intervening 700 years.

We’d come here on behalf of Fox TV to do a segment for their updated version of "In Search Of…", the show dealing with unsolved mysteries and unexplained phenomena. Our episode of the show was about secret societies, and we’d come to comment on the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau and the Priory of Sion. As Dagobert’s Revenge readers are undoubtedly aware, Rennes-le-Chateau is at the heart of all things Dagobertian.

It was in this village that a poor parish priest named Berenger Sauniere discovered 4 parchments that were to change his life, and the surrounding village, forever. Two of these parchments were genealogies of this magazine’s mascot, Dagobert II, the last of the Frankish dynasty of Priest-Kings known as the Merovingians. The other two contained ciphered messages which, when decoded, displayed the following:

"To Dagobert II, King, and to Sion belong this treasure and he is there dead."
 

and:

"Shepherdess - No temptation that Poussin and Teniers hold the key; Peace 681 by the cross and this horse of God I destroy this dæmon of the guardian at middayblue apples."

click image to enlarge

A Midi Pommes Bleues

(Blue Apples at Midday)
Photo taken at 12:45pm in the church at Rennes le Chateau

on 17 January 2005

.

After finding these parchments (click below images), this once-poor parish priest became suddenly and inexplicably wealthy, perhaps because of having found some buried treasure. He started hanging out with members of the Parisian upper-crust occult set, such as composer Claude Debussy and opera singer Emma Calve. He began redecorating his church and surrounding property in a most bizarre fashion, leaving behind strange clues in an effort to communicate to future generations the secret that he had learned from the parchments.

These clues, many involving the use of occult, qabalistic, alchemical, Masonic, and Templar-oriented symbolism, seem to indicate the involvement of a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, who were and are dedicated to the preservation and support of the Merovingian bloodline, which they claim, contrary to popular belief, has survived until the present day.

Sauniere’s clues lead to the unshakable conclusion that Jesus did not die on the cross, that he fled to France with his pregnant wife, Mary Magdalen, and that his descendants intermarried with local Visigothic royalty to eventually become the Merovingian dynasty. They also indicate that an artifact commonly known as the ’Holy Grail’ may be found there as well. These clues led us and a five-man Fox television crew out to Rennes-le-Chateau in October, of 2000.

After a lengthy overseas flight and an unpleasant encounter with local hospitality at Charles de Gaulle airport (named after a former President of France and suspected Grand Master of the Priory of Sion), we were driven to a nice little hotel right next to the village of Rennes-le-Chateau, an intimate "family-style" environment heavily saturated with motifs of seashells, mermaids, horse head busts, and bad taxidermy. We got the feeling that our hosts knew a lot more about the mystery of the nearby village then they let on, a feeling that was confirmed later when we found an empty bottle of "Berenger Sauniere" brand wine, with a picture of the priest on the label in the hotel dining room.

On the very first evening, the Fox crew took us to the church grounds to scout the location. Having both studied the subject of Rennes-le-Chateau with enthusiasm for a number of years, it would be an understatement to say that our first glimpse at this mysterious property was absolutely overwhelming. We’d heard Henry Lincoln talk about the "stunningly beautiful landscape" in his documentaries before, but the natural grandeur of the scenery is minisculed by the drab medium of videotape. We pulled up next to the Tour Magdala and clamored out of the car.

Immediately we noticed something that previous authors had not commented upon - a long, slender window with the bricks around it shaped like the Cross of Lorraine. Around the corner was another tiny window, and Tracy had the pleasure of climbing up the side of the tower in high-healed plastic boots in order to get a peek inside, but all she could see were some dusty old tables.

On the opposite side, protected by a thick fortress of bramble bushes was a crude Templar cross etched into the brick, probably by some modern graffiti artist. After that, we walked over to the Church, and for the first time laid eyes upon the House of God that hid so many terrible secrets. We searched for the curse that Sauniere had placed over the door, "This Place is Terrible", but unfortunately, it was covered with scaffolding. No one was there, though, so Tracy took the opportunity to climb all over the grotto, which held a tiny little statue of Mary Magdalen, and which, Boyd noted, was oddly made of coral.

The following morning, we were treated to a complete tour of the Sauniere domain by the current curators of the Church, an English lady named Jane. She was very knowledgeable about the layout and past history of the grounds, but not terribly interested in the theoretical implications of it, and she delighted in telling us all the details that Henry Lincoln and other researchers had gotten wrong. This was not discouraging to us in the least. For every fascinating, mysterious fact that turned out to be either made up or misinterpreted, we learned or discovered half a dozen true mysterious facts that have never been noted before in the genre literature.

We’d always read about the statement "This Place is Terrible" above the church door, which is a quote from Genesis, where Jacob falls asleep on a stone and has a vision of a ladder leading up to heaven, with angels ascending and descending.

This, of course, is the same Stone of Destiny brought to Scotland by Joseph of Arimathea, and became the stone upon which British monarchs are coronated, even today. What’s noteworthy is that beneath the words "This Place is Terrible" on the doorway, the sentence seems to be completed by the words, in Latin, "But this is the House of God and the Gateway to Heaven", making it not a curse but a statement upon the dual nature of divinity. There is also quite a bit of iconography etched over the doorway that has not been previously noted, including two Templar crosses, two Crosses of Lorraine, and the Masonic image of the Blazing Star that falls from the Heavens to enlighten mankind.

As soon as the door was opened, we were smacked in the face with the image of a horrible, grimacing demon, which we recognized to be our old friend Asmodeus, the diabolic statue that Sauniere had placed inside the door to hold up the holy water stoop and who according to qabalistic tradition, was the builder of Solomon’s Temple, the keeper of buried treasure, and "the destroyer ", as well as "Rex Mundi", the "Lord of the Earth."

Above the fountain are two fire-breathing salamanders, and above them, four ceramic statues of angels making the sign of the cross, with the caption "In Hoc Signo Vinces" - "In this sign you will conquer." The entire display then, can be taken to represent a "marriage" or "crossing" of the four elements.

Each element of this configuration represents one of the four primary elements of magic or alchemy:

• Asmodeus represents Earth

• the holy water represents water

• the salamanders represent fire

• the angels signify air

Across the hall from the demon stand statues of Christ kneeling before John the Baptist, a sorrowful look on his face, waiting to be blessed. As has been previously stated, all of these statues are looking at the floor, tiled in the black and white "Chessboard" style used by Templars and Freemasons to symbolize the co-equal powers of light and darkness.

Another noticeable variation from popular myth is that in the Station of the Cross with the black child wearing the supposed "Scottish kilt", he is actually wearing some kind of yellow and orange grass skirt.

The Station with Christ being placed inside the tomb, or perhaps, as many have claimed, being removed from the tomb, is indeed as peculiar-looking as people have said, and a few Stations previous, as Christ is hanging on the cross, a couple of red lightening bolts in the shape of Sig runes can be seen. Across the hall, there are two figures of Christ, seemingly identical in representation, and placed in such close proximity to one another that one could not help but notice the seeming redundancy. Both Christs are pointing skyward with their right forefinger, and are separated by a few feet, with one situated just above the other.

Closer inspection reveals that they aren’t identical, despite initial appearances. The one on the bottom holds a symbol of Papal authority in his left hand, and is surrounded by his chief disciples. The one above, whom the lower one points up towards, stands alone. His left hand is at his side pointing down, ala the Eliphas Levi etching of Baphomet. This Christ, placed as he is above the other, seems to indicate that he stands above the Christ of orthodox Christianity. And if one follows the path of his pointing finger, he seems to be pointing to a cupola affixed to the wall far above him. At the top of the cupola is the sign of the rosy cross.

The dual Christ-children, one held by Joseph, the other by Mary, which flank the altar, seem equally redundant. Joseph isn’t generally shown holding the baby Jesus. Is this a reference to Joseph’s patrimony, or to Christ’s reputed twin brother, Thomas? Or could it be something altogether different? Except for the inscriptions reading "St. Joseph" and "St. Virgin Mary", one could easily mistake this couple for Christ and Mary Magdalen. Is this meant to tell us that Christ and Mary had two sons, perhaps even twins? Wherever one encounters these dual sets of two, a coded story is told. Most often, the story echoes the thesis of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but often it hints at something more.

The statues of the 5 saints, whose initials spell out "G.R.A.A.L." (St. Germaine, St. Roch, St. Anthony d’Padoue, St. Anthony the Hermit and St. Luke) were certainly there, in the "M" shape that has been previously described by other authors. This letter "M" supposedly stands for Mary Magdalen. Upon the altar we see another image of Magdalen, kneeling in prayer before her trademark skull and a cross made from two wooden branches, out of which is growing a live branch. This, some say, represents the bloodline of Christ living on after his death. Above this scene is the depiction of a Holy chalice with a sunshine shape descending into it.

The sun is often used to represent the alchemical Philosopher’s Stone, and the Grail is often depicted as a stone inside of a cup. But the predominant symbol found in the church is not Christ, not Mary Magdalen, but the Rosy Cross. It’s everywhere - above Christ, above John the Baptist, even above Asmodeus. And it is above every station of the cross. It is depicted both as a red Christian cross, and as an equilateral Templar-type cross with a rose at the center. The only symbol that is more prevalent than the Rose Cross is one not commonly found in most Catholic churches - the Fleur-de-lys. The confessional is covered with stylized fleur-de-lys. Christ is crucified on a cross whose ends blossom out into fleur-de-lys. The ends of the rosy cross turn into fleur-de-lys.

A series of intersecting circles on the wall are decorated with the letters "S.M." (Saint Mary), and gold fleur-de-lys. This monarchist symbol is more prevalent here than any Christian symbol, and surprisingly, no previous researchers have seen fit to comment on it. This is odd, because surely this recurring motif is intended to indicate a connection between the Grail family and French royalty, and as such would represent a strong piece of circumstantial evidence in favor of the "Holy Blood, Holy Grail theory." Yet it seems to have gone unnoticed.

We were also surprised to learn that no one has ever commented on the fact that the church wall featured the telltale marking - a yellow stripe embedded in the foundation - which was used in those days to indicate that as early as the 8th century, someone of royal blood was interred inside the church. No one knows who, but this is a rather out-of-the-way spot for the final resting place of royalty. It’s strange that someone of importance was brought all the way to this obscure location, and stranger still that their name has been forgotten by history. And it’s yet another indication that this place was viewed to be important even in the distant past, centuries before the whole Sauniere affair.

The pews are all numbered, for the most part consecutively, except for a few anomalies. As we were ushered into the "Sauniere museum" next door, where certain relevant artifacts have been housed, we learned from Jane a little bit about this numbering system. It seems that only members of certain noble families in the area were allowed to attend this church, with the peasants being assigned to another across the way, and each attendant had an assigned seat number. These seat assignments would be changed every season, with a different section of the pews left clear each time.

Our tour guide believed that these sections were being left unused because Sauniere was digging under those particular areas at the time. We also learned that there seems to be a disagreement about which pillar Sauniere found the parchments in. One candidate, which she showed us, is a wooden pillar that’s hollow with a removable piece on top, then there’s the famous "Visigothic" pillar, which bears the words "MISSION 1891", the date that the town’s children were confirmed in the Catholic Church. This pillar had been holding up the altar, but Sauniere had it turned upside down so that it read "1681", and the words "Peace 681" were mysteriously mentioned in the parchments he found. Interestingly, 1891 is the same date that can be found etched next to an inscription on a rock at nearby "Lover’s Fountain" that reads "E. Calve", illustrated by a heart with an arrow through it.

Henry Lincoln believes that this is an artifact of Sauniere’s love relationship with Emma Calve, but our tour guild assured us that "there is absolutely no evidence that Calve and Sauniere ever knew each other!" Yet she also told us that there was no evidence for a connection between Rennes-le-Chateau and the Knights Templar, and considering the Templar imagery were had already seen, it was hard to take her dogged assertions too seriously.

Outside in the courtyard we got to see the very Visigothic pillar itself, now holding up a statue of Mary with the face painted blue, although which Mary is depicted may be open for debate. On top of her head is a crown made of towers, behind her head is a mirror, and above her head floats a tiny reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple. Because the name Magdala means "tower", we suggest that this is a statue of Magdalen, not the Virgin. Directly across from her is placed the "Calvaire", on top of which is a crucified Christ, with a big sunshine shape over his head and the letter "INRI."

It just so happens that at sundown every night, the real sun shines directly onto the sun shape behind Christ’s head and reflects onto the mirror behind Mary Magdalen’s head. Because the sun metaphorically represents the seed of God inseminating the Earth, we speculate that this represents the seed of Christ inseminating the Magdalen. It is on this same Calvaire that we find the words (in Latin) "Christ Defend - AOMPS", which Henry Lincoln says stands for "Ancient Mystical Order of the Priory of Sion."

Next, we visited the inside of the Tour Magdala, and walked up the 22 steps through the narrow stairway to the roof above with its 22 turrets. In the hallway, we were shown how one of the tiny square tiles on the tile floor was a different color from the rest, indicating that some of the treasure might be buried there. Outside, underneath the "Glass Tower" is another set of 22 steps leading down into a dark basement which we were not allowed to visit, and nearby, two sets of 11 stairs each leading down into the garden.

There Jane showed us a huge tunnel which someone had haphazardly dug underneath the foundation of the Tower. As we made out way into the graveyard, she pointed out that on the Skull & Crossbones above the gate (a Templar and Masonic symbol, by the way), the skull has 22 teeth.

Then, embossed onto the gate itself, we noticed another Masonic symbol: the winged hourglass, an emblem of fleeting time, and the temporary nature of our short lives. But unlike the angelic wings we usually see with this symbol, we noted that these wings were distinctly bat-like, emphasizing the demonic and infernal themes at Rennes-le-Chateau.

After the tour, we broke for lunch at the nearby "Le Pomme Bleu" restaurant, named after the "Blue Apples" reference in the Sauniere parchments. We sat outside and enjoyed some "Marie de Blanchefort" brand wine while looking across the fence at the Castle of Blanchefort which stands right next door. The Blancheforts were related by blood to the Merovingians, and one of the Blancheforts had been a Grand Master of the Knights Templar at one point. Furthermore, it was the gravestone of Marie de Blanchefort, once situated in Sauniere’s graveyard, that had at one time been inscribed with a coded cipher which contained the coded message "Et in Arcadia Ego"., which relates to the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery. Following lunch, it was time for our interviews.

The actual interviews were rather restricted in scope, the subject matter limited to the details of Sauniere’s life, his discovery, and his possible connection to the Priory of Sion. It was a bit frustrating, and yet even within this narrow context we were able to slip in a number of details that have seemingly escaped the notice of most researchers. For instance, many still dismiss the Priory of Sion as a mere hoax, yet it can be demonstrated that as early as the late 1940s the Priory was advocating a United Europe; and today the European Union is a reality (complete with an emerging single currency.) The emblem that the Priory suggested for a United Europe was a circle of stars - the very emblem that adorns the flag of today E.U. Coincidence?

The specific bloodline that the Priory was so obsessed with was that of Dagobert II and Godfroi de Boullion - a bloodline from which numerous U.S. Presidents have claimed descent (up to and including the Bush family.) While it is easily conceivable that any organization could construct for themselves a false pedigree by stringing together bits and pieces of past history, the main thrust of the Priory’s agenda in the 1940s involved developments that wouldn’t become part of history for nearly another half-century. In other words, it is impossible to ’fabricate’ what hasn’t yet happened.

Part of the interviews took place in front of the Tour Magdala, just as the sun was going down. And guess what drunk old lady paid us a visit? None other than the daughter-in-law of Neil Corbu, who had bought the Sauniere property from the housekeeper, Marie Deneraud. She stumbled up to us while we were getting ready to tape and slurred,

"Are you the Americans?! Yes, I’m sorry, but Martin will be absolutely unable to do an interview right now. Please understand, we’ve been tormented enough by reporters, who blow this story all out of proportion. It’s all because of that fool Henry Lincoln! I mean he’s just a journalist! The Visigoths had nothing to do with this place! If you lived here you would know! One of you should just do a documentary that demystifies all this rubbish, because that would be really interesting!

 

But you guys are just going to do what you want to do, I know! So I’m sorry but Martin will be absolutely unable to do an interview, and I don’t think I can fit one in until tomorrow, you see, I’m very sorry but I’m just bored with the whole thing, and I don’t want to talk about it...!"

And on and on like this for 45 minutes without taking a breath. The group listened politely, all the while wondering who on Earth this woman was. And too, who the fuck was Martin?

Following the interviews, Jane showed us to a room that most tourists don’t get to see: Sauniere’s sacristy. This is where Sauniere donned his robes prior to commencing services. It was a small room that featured a stained glass window depicting Christ on the cross, and was empty but for a table, a box of old candles, and a white robe adorned with blue silk Fleur-de-lys.

Toward the back wall was a wooden door, nailed permanently shut with an ancient rusted nail. It had been a closet, we were told, but the closet had featured a secret panel in the back that lead to Sauniere’s secret room. Jane had no idea how long the room had been sealed off, but with a little coaxing, saw no reason why we couldn’t pry out the nail and have a peek inside. So we pried out the nail, popped open the secret panel, and stepped inside Berenger Sauniere’s legendary treasure room.

We couldn’t help wondering who had last come into this place, or whether any of the writers who’d referred to this room had ever laid eyes upon it. The floor of the room was dirt. Whatever floorboards were once here had long since been torn up, and the dirt was soft from digging. A pile of rubble was heaped into one corner. From ground level, one could peer beneath the floor of the sacristy, but there was little to see except cobwebs and mounds of oxidized dirt that looked as though it hadn’t been disturbed for centuries.

The room was decaying, squalid, and entirely unimpressive, and yet would couldn’t lose sight of the fact that within this filthy cubicle with its peeling paint, a great treasure of some sort had at one time been secreted away. Were we standing in the same confines that once housed the treasure of the Cathars? The Templars? King Solomon’s Temple? Could it be that the Ark of the Covenant once rested in this very spot?

Whatever Sauniere had discovered had once, no doubt, been hidden here. Why else would a priest create a secret room that could only be accessed via a closet and secret panel? A secret room is testament to a secret. That secret had once come to rest within these very walls. And though it had long since been removed, we could feel its presence. Whatever it had been was still here, someplace. All the symbolism seemed to point to this. It was up to us, somehow, to grasp the esoteric meaning inherent in the symbolism … if we could.

Boyd also made another discovery while we were walking around in the graveyard. On Berenger Sauniere’s grave there was kind of a bust of him carved onto his tombstone, but it looked-like someone had chipped away at his face to make him look like a skeleton. We continued walking around, and on the other side of the graveyard - we couldn’t believe it - Boyd found, in a pile of rocks, the missing piece of Sauniere’s face! He held it up to the tombstone and it matched perfectly. If this is a clue of some sort, who left it? It is clear from the weathering on Sauniere’s face, and on the missing piece itself, that this was no recent alteration.

Could Sauniere himself have added this embellishment while he was still alive? There was no telling how many years this oddly-shaped piece of rock had laid at the other side of the cemetery until we happened upon it. Looking at old photos or footage of the stone bearing Sauniere’s profile was no help in making a determination, because except for a few hours each day when the position of the sun cast a harsh shadow, the alteration was so subtle as to be virtually imperceptible. Any person viewing the stone in the morning or afternoon could easily never have noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Later, we visited the occult bookstore next to the church and got some nifty stuff: medieval maps, Templar keychains, Rennes-le-Chateau cigarette lighters, a Henry Lincoln video: things of that nature We also got to meet the mayor of Rennes-le-Chateau, who welcomed us warmly and made the peculiar remark that "This place is the center point of the world." Center-point of the world is a very odd choice of words.

Every mythology or religious ideology has some specific geographical location they declare to be the "center-point of the world." At one time, Solomon’s Temple was claimed to be such a place. Heinrich Himmler maintained that his Grail castle, the Wewelsburg, was such a spot. And of course, for Islam, Mecca is the world’s center-point. Clearly, this was no ordinary small town Mayor. He obviously viewed Rennes-le-Chateau not as a mere township, but as a holy place.

A few minutes later, Graham Simmans, one of the authors of the book Rex Deus, came to talk to us. He came across as very knowledgeable and likable, with one noticeable affectation: his pants were unzipped, unbuckled, and hanging down to expose his underwear. Despite his eccentricity, he seemed to be doing some groundbreaking research into the Grail mystery. He’d just returned from Egypt, where he claims to have discovered the location to which the Grail family fled pursuant to the crucifixion.

This is a rather stunning piece of information, because just a few days before, we’d discovered the existence of a little-known painting by Nicholas Poussin entitled Flight to Egypt, and it depicted the holy family fleeing to Egypt following the crucifixion. To the best of our knowledge, no Grail researchers have even hinted that Christ’s family had gone to Egypt prior to leaving for France, and now this strange gentleman was confirming what we’d assumed was a wholly unique discovery.
 

Part 2

In our hotel that evening, we met some interesting characters. One was an old Flemish guy who was convinced that he had discovered the origin of all indo-European languages, and that it was - guess what? - Old Flemish. He’d discovered a book which is the oldest book ever written in Europe, and the title translates to "History of Atlant." He said that Atlant is the name of the place and that "Atlantis" really means "Atlantish" or somebody from Atlant. He showed us this book. There were indeed many recognizable words in there, and they were written in characters that were more than a little bit Runic.

We inquired as to the original meaning of the word "Cathari", and he explained that it was a conjunction of "cat" and "ari." "Ari", he told us, was the same as "Aryan", meaning "noble", "lofty one", "shining one." This much we know. So the Cathars were Aryans and Cats. Who then were the Cats? "Cats", he replied. "You know, cats." One of us made a meowing sound, almost as a joke. "Yes!", he exclaimed. "Cats, as in Catholic or Catalonia - cats!" The guy was totally brilliant, but who knows - he may well have been a nut.

The last few days of the trip we were left to our own devices, and were free to wander Rennes-le-Chateau at our leisure as the crew filmed additional location footage. Free from distractions, we began to notice aspects of some of the decorations that we hadn’t spotted the first time around. On that first day we’d barely glanced at the bas-relief of Mary Magdalen that adorned the altar For all intents and purposes, this seemed to be perhaps the most straight-forward picture in the whole place, and yet, there seems to be something strange about it. We are told that this piece was Sauniere’s pride and joy, and he even hand-painted it himself, taking great pains so that this "centerpiece" to his church would be perfect. And indeed, the priest did a masterful job on some parts of the painting.

The Magdalen is perfect, as is the sunset and foliage just behind her. Yet the interior of the cave in which she is kneeling is inexplicably blotchy and inconsistent in its coloring. It’s a mishmash of dark and light patches with messy lines running this way and that. It almost seems as though the apparently random smears of paint on the right side of the painting are echoing the curves and lines on the left side. And closer inspection seems to confirm this.

Although it is so incredibly subtle as to be virtually subliminal, it appears that the numerical 22 has been secretly embedded in the painting. We know that 22 is one of Sauniere’s secret codes, and we would see the number repeated profusely in the coming days, but this example of it is so excruciatingly understated that we wonder if perhaps we aren’t simply hallucinating. We scrutinized the painting more closely and almost immediately a tell-tale angle leapt out at us. It clearly seems to be part of a five-pointed star - a pentagram, such as Poussin and Cocteau also encoded into their work.

One side of the angle is delineated by the mouth of the cave, the other by the blanket wrapped around Mary’s hips. Extending the lines of the angle beyond the borders of the painting, it seems plain that the cross upon which the Magdalen gazes falls directly in what would be the center of the pentagram. So far as we’re aware , this would represent the first time anyone has ever demonstrated the use of pentagonal geometry actually within the Church of Rennes-le-Chateau, and not just as it applies to the local landscape.

The symbol is so central to the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau that it’s not at all surprising that Sauniere should employ it; what shocks us is that in all these years no one else has ever recognized that he had. As the days passed we were to discover that there was much at Rennes-le-Chateau that had gone unnoticed. And many of the people who write about this mystery had never even been here.

Symbolism is everywhere at Rennes-le-Chateau. It’s omnipresent. For the first few days the sheer volume of bizarre imagery is overwhelming. Everything seems to mean something, and although the symbolism is fairly straight-forward in most cases, there’s just so much of it that it becomes mind-numbing. It’s only after you’ve had the time to familiarize yourself with all the symbolism and digest it a bit that you begin to notice certain correspondences and seeming inter-relationships between various bits of imagery. For instance, certain incongruous bits of iconography inside the chapel seem to be echoed in the cemetery. This, in turn, leads you to something else yet again. Slowly, one becomes aware that a pattern is emerging. A story is being told not in the mere details of the symbolism, but in the correlations between those details.

One of the Rennes-le-Chateau mysteries that everyone refers to is the odd recurrence of the number 22. Inscriptions in the chapel are misspelled or presented with superfluous words so as to contain 22 letters, the tower has 22 cremulets, 22 steps leading up and down, and so on. Various authors refer to the obvious importance of the number, yet seem at a loss to divine its significance. They offer explanations such as "22 is a very important number in the occult", yet stop short of saying why it’s important in an occult context. We hypothesized that 22 didn’t refer to anything that actually numbered 22 (such as steps from point A to point B, etc.), but served as a starting point from which further decoding should proceed. Adding the digits together, as in numerology, results in 4.

The most obvious appearance of 4 in the chapel is the depiction of the four elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) just inside the door. These are the elements spelled out in Hebrew characters that comprise the Tetragrammaton, IHVH (Jehovah), and the fourth letter of the alphabet is D, the first letter of Dieu, the French word for God. This was far too simple an explanation - it had to be something else.

As our journey neared its end, it suddenly dawned on us that 22 was a coded reference to a strange pattern that recurs persistently throughout the domain. It refers to certain anomalies both inside the church and on the grounds surrounding it. We had noticed this strange pattern of anomalies from the very start, and had speculated on their possible meaning repeatedly; now it became evident that these unusual sets of symbols constituted a series of clues central to the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau.

Wherever we encountered these anomalies, a coded story was told. Collectively, these stories seem to relate much the same tale hypothesized by Henry Lincoln, though they also indicate that the scope of the whole saga extends way beyond anything previously hinted at. We had expected as much, and much of what we discovered seemed to confirm a number of theories we’d had that deviate radically from the common wisdom regarding this mystery. Unfortunately, it’s not possible for us to go into detail about our theories and discoveries at this time, as we intend to publish a book about this sometime in the coming year.

We were naturally excited about having broken the "22" code, but couldn’t shake the feeling that there must be something more to it - another layer of meaning that we were somehow missing. Given the whole dual vibe of this place, it seemed only natural to assume that the symbols we’d decoded contained a second, far more hidden meaning. Perhaps the sets of landmarks suggested by the pattern we’d discovered also indicated some sort of geometry, a schematic that would lead us to something more.

Enlarging an aerial photograph of Sauniere’s domain, we drew across it so as to intersect the first set of landmarks. A line through a second set of landmarks intersected the first at a location not terribly far away. Given the grand scale of the property’s layout and design, we’d assumed that the lines might possibly converge on some nearby mountaintop, but this was a mere stone’s throw away. Drawing a line through what seemed to be the third major set of landmarks yielded more than we dared expect. It intersected the first two lines in precisely the same spot.

Either our theory had yielded an abnormally large number of strange coincidences, or this could in fact represent the location where whatever Sauniere discovered lays buried. Could it be that we’ve actually located the resting place of Berenger Sauniere’s legendary treasure? Possibly. It is also possible that, as with so many other aspects of this mystery, when you think you’ve reached the end point, you discover all too soon that instead of finding some definitive answer, you’ve merely arrived at yet another clue in a long line of clues.

At any rate, we had come to Rennes-le-Chateau fully confident that we would discover much that had escaped the scrutiny of previous researchers, and indeed we had. Far too much, in fact, to fit within the confines of a short magazine article. The bits and pieces we’ve detailed here represent a small fraction of what we found at Rennes-le-Chateau, the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Not only did Rennes-le-Chateau live up to our expectations, it far exceeded them.

And in so doing, the place has become for us (as for the Mayor) the center point of the world.