Holy Blood, Holy Grail (2 page)

Transmission was postponed to the spring of the following year.

The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem? was screened in February 1972, and provoked a very strong reaction. I knew that I had found a subject of consuming interest not merely to myself, but to a very large viewing public. Further research would not be self-indulgence. At some time there would have to be a follow-up film. By 1974 I had a mass of new material and Paul assigned Roy Davies to produce my second “Chronicle’ film, The Priest, the Painter and the Devil. Again the reaction of the public proved how much the story had caught the popular imagination. But by now it had grown so complex, so far reaching in its ramifications, that I knew the detailed research was rapidly exceeding the capabilities of any one person. There were too many different leads to follow. The more I pursued one line of investigation, the more conscious I became of the mass of material being neglected. It was at this daunting juncture that Chance, which had first tossed the story so casually into my lap, now made sure that the work would not become bogged down.

In 1975, at a summer school where we were both lecturing on aspects of literature, I had the great good fortune to meet Richard Leigh.

Richard is a novelist and short-story writer with post-graduate degrees in Comparative Literature and a deep knowledge of history, philosophy, psychology and esoterica. He had been working for some years as a university lecturer in the United States, Canada and Britain.

Between our summer-school talks we spent many hours discussing subjects of mutual interest. I mentioned the Knights Templar, who had assumed an important role in the background to the mystery of Rennes-leChateau.

To my delight, I found that this shadowy order of medieval

warrior-monks had already awakened Richard’s profound interest, and he had done considerable research into their history. At one stroke months of work which I had seen stretching ahead of me became unnecessary. Richard could answer most of my queries, and was as

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intrigued as I was by some of the apparent anomalies I had unearthed.

More importantly, he too saw the fascination and sensed the

significance of the whole research project on which I had embarked. He offered to help me with the aspect involving the Templars. And he brought in Michael Baigent, a psychology graduate who had recently abandoned a successful career in photo-journalism to devote his time to researching the Templars for a film project he had in mind.

Had I set out to search for them, I could not have found two better qualified and more congenial partners with whom to form a team. After years of solitary labour the impetus brought to the project by two fresh brains was exhilarating. The first tangible result of our collaboration was the third “Chronicle’ film on Rennes-leChateau, The Shadow of the Templars, which was produced by Roy Davies in 1979.

The work which we did on that film at last brought us face to face with the underlying foundations upon which the entire mystery of Rennes-leChateau had been built. But the film could only hint at what we were beginning to discern. Beneath the surface was something more startling, more significant and more immediately relevant than we could have believed possible when we began our work on the “intriguing little mystery’ of what a French priest might have found in a mountain village.

In 1972 I closed my first film with the words, “Something extraordinary is waiting to be found .. . and in the not too distant future, it will be.”

This book explains what that ‘something’ is and how extraordinary the discovering has been.

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H.L. January 17th, 1981 Map 1 The Major Sites of Investigation in France

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RENNES LE-CHATEAU

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One The Mystery

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1 Village of Mystery

At the start of our search we did not know precisely what we were looking for or, for that matter, looking at. We had no theories and no hypotheses, we had set out to prove nothing. On the contrary, we were simply trying to find an explanation for a curious little enigma of the late nineteenth century. The conclusions we eventually reached were not postulated in advance. We were led to them, step by step, as if the evidence we accumulated had a mind of its own, was directing us of its own accord.

We believed at first that we were dealing with a strictly local mystery an intriguing mystery certainly, but a mystery of essentially minor significance, confined to a village in the south of France. We believed at first that the mystery, although it involved many fascinating historical strands, was primarily of academic interest. We believed that our investigation might help to illumine certain aspects of Western history, but we never dreamed that it might entail re-writing them. Still less did we dream that whatever we discovered could be of any real contemporary relevance and explosive contemporary relevance at that.

Our quest began -for it was indeed a quest with a more or less straightforward story. At first glance this story was not markedly different from numerous other “treasure stories’ or “unsolved mysteries’ which abound in the history and folklore of almost every rural region. A version of it had been publici sed in France, where it attracted considerable interest but was not to our knowledge at the time accorded any inordinate consequence. As we subsequently learned, there were a number of errors in this version. For the moment, however, we must recount the tale as it was published during the 1960s,

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and as we first came to know of it.” Rennes-leChateau and Berenger Sauniere

On June 1st, 1885 the tiny French village of Rennes-leChateau received a new parish priest. The cure’s name was Berenger Sauniere.z He was a robust, handsome, energetic and, it would seem, highly intelligent man aged thirty-three. In seminary school not long before he had seemed destined for a promising clerical career. Certainly he had seemed destined for something more important than a remote village in the eastern foothills of the

Pyrenees. Yet at some point he seems to have incurred the displeasure of his superiors.

What precisely he did, if anything, remains unclear, but it soon thwarted all prospects of advancement. And it was perhaps to rid themselves of him that’ his superiors sent him to the parish of Rennes-leChateau.

At the time Rennes-leChateau housed only two hundred people. It was a tiny hamlet perched on a steep mountaintop, approximately twenty-five miles from

Carcassonne.

To another man, the place might have constituted exile a life sentence in a remote provincial backwater, far from the civilised amenities of the age, far from any stimulus for an eager and inquiring mind. No doubt it was a blow to Sauniere’s ambition.

Nevertheless there were certain compensations. Sauniere was a native of the region, having been born and raised only a few miles distant, in the village of Montazels.

Whatever its deficiencies, therefore, Rennes-leChateau must have been very like home, with all the comforts of childhood familiarity.

Between 1885 and 1891 Sauniere’s income averaged, in francs, the equivalent of six pounds sterling per year -hardly opulence, but pretty much what one would expect for a rural cure in late nineteenth-century France. Together with gratuities provided by his parishioners, it appears to have been sufficient for survival, if not for any extravagance.

During those six years Sauniere seems to have led a pleasant enough life, and a placid one.

He hunted and fished in the mountains and streams of his boyhood. He read voraciously, perfected his Latin, learned Greek, embarked on the study of

Hebrew. He employed, as housekeeper and servant, an eighteen-year old peasant girl named Marie Denarnaud, who was to be his lifelong

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companion and confidante. He paid frequent visits to his friend, the Abbe Henri Boudet, cure-of the neighbouring village of

Rennes-les-Bains. And under Boudet’s tutelage he immersed himself in the turbulent history of the region a history whose residues were constantly present around him.

A few miles to the south-east of Rennes-leChateau, for example, looms another peak, called Bezu, surmounted by the ruins of a medieval fortress, which was once a preceptory of the Knights Templar. On a third peak, a mile or so east of Rennes-leChateau, stand the ruins of the chateau of

Blanchefort, ancestral home of Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who presided over that famous order in the mid-twelfth century. Rennes-leChateau and its environs had been on the ancient pilgrim route, which ran from Northern Europe to Santiago de

Compastela in Spain. And the entire region was steeped in evocative legends, in echoes of a rich, dramatic and often bloodsoaked past, For some time Sauniere had wanted to restore the village church of Rennes-leChateau. Consecrated to the Magdalene in 1059, this dilapidated edifice stood on the foundations of a still older Visigoth structure dating from the sixth century. By the late nineteenth century it was, not surprisingly, in a state of almost hopeless disrepair.

In 1891, encouraged by his friend Boudet, Sauniere embarked on a modest restoration, borrowing a small sum from the village funds. In the course of his endeavours he removed the altar-stone, which rested on two archaic

Visigoth columns.

One of these columns proved to be hollow. Inside

the cure found four parchments preserved in sealed wooden tubes. Two of these parchments are said to have comprised genealogies, one dating from 1244, the other from 1644. The two remaining documents had apparently been composed in the 1780s by one of Sauniere’s predecessors as cure of

Rennes-leChateau, the Abbe Antoine Bigou. Bigou had also been personal chaplain to the noble Blanchefort family who, on the eve of the French

Revolution, were still among the most prominent local landowners.

The two parchments from Bigou’s time would appear to be pious Latin texts, excerpts from the New Testament. At least ostensibly. But on one of the parchments the words are run incoherently together, with no

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space between them, and a number of utterly superfluous letters have been inserted. And on the second parchment lines are indiscriminately truncated unevenly, sometimes in the middle of a word while certain letters are conspicuously raised above the others. In reality these parchments comprise a sequence of ingenious ciphers or codes. Some of them are fantastically complex and unpredictable, defying even a computer, and insoluble without the requisite key. The following decipherment has appeared in French works devoted to

Rennes-leChateau, and in two of our films on the subject made for the BBC.

BERG ERE PAS DE TENTATION QUE POUSSIN TENIERS GAR DENT LA CLEF PAX

DCLXXXI PAR

LA CROIX ET CE CHEVAL DE DIEU J’ACHEVE CE DAEMON DE GARDIEN A MIDI POM MES

BLEUES

(SHEPHERDESS, NO TEMPTATION. THAT POUSSIN, TENIERS, HOLD THE KEY; PEACE

681. BY THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD, I COMPLETE or DESTROY THIS

DAEMON OF THE GUARDIAN AT NOON. BLUE APPLES.)

But if some of the ciphers are daunting in their complexity, others are patently, even flagrantly obvious. In the second parchment, for instance, the raised letters, taken in sequence, spell out a coherent message.

A DAGO BERT II ROI ET A SION EST CE TRES OR ET IL EST LA MORT.

(TO DAGO BERT II, KING, AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS

THERE

DEAD.)

Although this particular message must have been discernible to Sauniere, it is doubtful that he could have deciphered the more intricate codes.

Nevertheless, he realised he had stumbled upon something of consequence and, with the consent of the village mayor, brought his discovery to his superior, the bishop of Carcassonne. How much the bishop understood is unclear, but Sauniere was immediately dispatched to Paris at the bishop’s expense with instructions to present himself and the parchments to certain important ecclesiastic authorities. Chief among these were the Abbe

Bieil, Director General of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, and Bieil’s nephew, Emile Hoffet.

At the time Hoffet was training for the priesthood.

Although still in his early twenties, he had already established an

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impressive reputation for scholarship, especially in linguistics, cryptography and palaeography. Despite his pastoral vocation, he was known to be immersed in esoteric thought, and maintained cordial relations with the various occult-oriented groups, sects and secret societies which were proliferating in the French capital. This had brought him into contact with an illustrious cultural circle, which included such literary figures as Stephane Mallarme and Maurice Maeterlinck, as well as the composer Claude Debussy. He also knew Emma Calve, who, at the time of

Sauniere’s appearance, had just returned from triumphant performances in

London and Windsor.

As a diva, Emma Calve was the Maria Callas of her age.

At the same time she was a high priestess of Parisian esoteric sub-culture, and sustained amorous liaisons with a number of influential occultists.

Having presented himself to Bieil and Hoffet, Sauniere spent three weeks in

Paris. What transpired during his meetings with the ecclesiastics is unknown. What is known is that the provincial country priest was promptly and warmly welcomed into Hoffet’s distinguished circle. It has even been asserted that he became Emma Calves lover. Contemporary gossips spoke of an affair between them, and one acquaintance of the singer described her as being “obsessed’ with the cure. In any case there is no question but that they enjoyed a close enduring friendship. In the years that followed she visited him frequently in the vicinity of Rennes-leChateau, where, until recently, one could still find romantic hearts carved into the rocks of the mountainside, bearing their initials.