The Atlantis Blueprint (31 page)

Saunière took the parchments to his bishop, who was intrigued enough to send him to Paris to consult with various scholars. There he went along to the church of St Sulpice, and talked with its director, Abbé Bieil. He also met Bieil’s nephew, a young trainee priest named Emile Hoffet, who was involved in a circle of ‘occultists’ who flourished in Paris in
the 1890s (some of whom Huysmans portrayed in his ‘Satanist’ novel
Là Bas).
Hoffet introduced Saunière to a circle of writers and artists that included the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, and the composer Claude Debussy. Saunière also – probably through Debussy – met the famous soprano Emma Calvé, and probably became her lover (he was far from ascetic).

Before leaving Paris, Saunière visited the Louvre and bought reproductions of three paintings, one of which was Nicholas Poussin’s
Les Bergers d’Arcadie
–
‘The Shepherds of Arcadia’
– which shows three shepherds and a shepherdess standing in front of a tomb on which are carved the words ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, usually translated ‘I (death) am also in Arcadia’.

Back in Rennes-le-Château, three weeks later, he hired workmen to raise a stone slab set in the floor in front of the altar – it dated from around the time of Dagobert II. They discovered two skeletons and ‘a pot of worthless medallions’. Saunière sent his helpers away, and spent the evening in the church alone. He then committed an odd piece of vandalism on a grave in the churchyard – that of a distinguished lady named Marie de Blanchefort – and obliterated its two inscriptions.

He was unaware that the inscriptions had already been published in a little book by a local antiquary. One contains the words ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ (in a mixture of Greek and Latin letters) on either side. The other is curious in that it contains four unexplained lower-case letters, three e’s, two p’s and four capitals, TMRO. From the small letters only one word can be formed –
épée,
‘sword’ – while from the capitals the only word that emerges is
MORT,
‘death’.
Epée
proved to be the ‘key word’ to decipher the second parchment Saunière had found in the column.

And suddenly Saunière was rich. He constructed a public road to replace the dirt road to the village, as well as a water tower. And he built himself a villa with a garden, and a Gothic

The ‘obliterated’ tombstone.

tower to house his library. Distinguished visitors came regularly, including Emma Calvé and the Austrian Archduke Johann von Habsburg, the cousin of Emperor Franz-Josef. His many guests were superbly fed and wined by his young peasant housekeeper, Marie Denarnaud.

A new – and less friendly – bishop became curious about the source of Saunière’s wealth. When Saunière refused to divulge its source – saying merely that it was from a wealthy penitent who insisted on anonymity – the bishop ordered Saunière’s transfer to another parish. Saunière refused to be transferred, and another priest was appointed in his place. (Oddly enough, when the bishop took his complaint to Rome, the Pope found in Saunière’s favour…) In 1905 the French government – which was anticlerical – began to make his life uncomfortable by accusing him of being an Austrian spy. It seems that part of his regular income came from Austria.

In 1917, Saunière died of cirrhosis of the liver; he was sixty-five. The priest who attended his deathbed is said to
have been so shocked at his final confession that he refused to administer extreme unction.

His housekeeper lived on in the villa, and died in 1953. She had sold the villa in 1946; she told its purchaser that one day she would tell him a secret that would make him rich and powerful, but a stroke left her speechless.

This was the remarkable story that Henry Lincoln had read in Gérard de Sède’s book. There were obviously many questions. Had Saunière found some of the treasure of the Cathars who died at Montségur? Or had he learned some secret that led certain wealthy patrons to wish to silence him with large sums of money? Was he a blackmailer, or simply a member of a small group who shared some closely guarded secret? There was yet another possibility – that the treasure might have been that of the Templars, the medieval order of knights who possessed immense wealth and influence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and was destroyed virtually overnight.

The Templars are so called because their original headquarters was in the basement of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (or rather, the remains of the Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in
AD
70, only four years after Herod had rebuilt it). Jerusalem fell to Christian knights in 1099, as a result of the First Crusade. Twenty years later, nine French knights from the area of Troyes approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, and told him they had sworn to protect the roads and make them safe for Christian pilgrims; they asked if they could establish a home on the Temple Mount, and Baldwin gave them a plot of land that included the Temple’s ‘basement’, which they turned into a stable.

Oddly enough, the nine knights showed no sign of organising themselves to protect pilgrims (and in any case nine men would hardly have formed an effective patrol). Instead they spent the next seven years excavating their ‘stable’, and scarcely ever ventured outside. They were obviously looking for something. One of their tunnels was found by Israeli archaeologists in the 1970s.

But searching for what? When the Romans destroyed the Temple in
AD
70, they had carried off its treasures. Could the remains of that treasure have been concealed under the Temple? Or were they looking for something else?

In
The Sign and the Seal
(1992),5 Graham Hancock has an interesting speculation. As we saw in the last chapter, the Ethiopians claimed that the Ark of the Covenant had been taken to their country in the time of King Solomon, in the tenth century
BC,
but the truth is probably that it vanished from the Temple in the reign of a king named Manasseh (687–642
BC),
who, according to the Bible, ‘did evil in the sight of the Lord’ and introduced a graven image into the Temple.

With remarkable detective work, Hancock traced the purported route of the Ark from Jerusalem to a church in Axum, in Ethiopia. The priests in charge of the Ark’ have consistently refused to allow it to be examined, but a recent book alleges that they have admitted that what they guard is actually a box that houses post-Christian copies of the Tables of the Law brought down by Moses from Sinai.
⁶

Hancock’s suggestion is that the Templars were searching for the Ark, which legend declared had been hidden in a secret room below its sacred chamber when Babylonians burst into Solomon’s Temple in 587
BC
to destroy it and drag the Jews into their Babylonian captivity.

Why would the nine knights have wanted the Ark? Presumably because, in that age of faith, when holy relics were venerated (and brought immense wealth to the church or abbey that possessed them), the ownership of the world’s holiest object would make the order that possessed it the most powerful in the world.

Whatever they were searching for, the knights do not seem to have found it. In 1126, seven years after starting their excavations, Hugh de Payens, their leader, returned to France. It looked as if the attempt to found an order had been a failure.

Then a rescuer appeared. Bernard of Clairvaux, later St Bernard, was a Cistercian and one of France’s most powerful
churchmen, even though he firmly refused to be promoted above the rank of abbot. He was also the nephew of one of the knights, André de Montbard, who had accompanied Payens back to France. Two years later, a synod was convened in the town of Troyes, whose purpose was to persuade the Church to back the founding of the Order of Knights Templar. This came about in 1128, when the ‘Order of the Poor Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon’ was founded and made answerable only to the Pope. And with the support of St Bernard, recruits and money poured in, until the Templars became the richest order in Europe.

What happened? An association that is about to dissolve itself in 1126 becomes rich and powerful in a few years. What did Hugh de Payens and André de Montbard say to St Bernard to enlist such support? Was it simply a friendly act on behalf of his uncle? Or did the knights tell Bernard of important and fascinating discoveries they had made under the Temple?

Hancock hazards the interesting guess that the knights had something to offer Bernard in return for his support: Gothic architecture. Before that time, the major style of church architecture was Romanesque, a style with rounded arches supported on short, thick pillars. This was for purely practical reasons. The sheer weight of the ceilings and upper levels of a church meant that the weight pushed downward on the pillars and tended to make the walls bulge outward so that they often collapsed. Then architects solved the problem. Ceilings were made thinner and supported on ‘ribs’, and the arches were made narrower and higher – typically Gothic. The first abbey to use this new Gothic style was St Denis in Paris, under a great innovator, Abbot Suger. The thinner walls – supported by flying buttresses – allowed more space for windows, one of the most famous examples being the stained glass of Chartres, built later in the century (with the active encouragement of St Bernard).

Hancock wonders if it is possible that the Templars learned the secret of Gothic architecture in the vaults of Solomon’s

Temple. This is not, of course, to suggest that Solomon’s Temple was built in the Gothic style, but the Temple was famous for its beauty and harmony, and the knights may have stumbled upon some of the essential principles of Gothic architecture while they were there.

However, there is a problem of dating. According to
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
architects began to solve the problem of the arches in 1120, when the nine knights had been excavating for only two years. This does not invalidate the theory – St Denis, the first Gothic abbey, was not started until 1140. And as Rand pointed out, the decline of Gothic architecture in the next few centuries was as obvious and inexplicable as the decline of pyramid building in the centuries immediately after the Giza pyramids had been built. The implication would be that in both cases, some tremendous injection of energy and inspiration created almost superhuman works of architecture and then ran out of steam.

Hancock has another, equally fascinating theory. The town of Troyes, in which the Templars received the support of the Church, was the home of the author Chrétien de Troyes, the poet who, between 1165 and 1182, was responsible for the first great literary treatments of the legend of King Arthur. He was the first to write about the Holy Grail – Hancock goes as far as to say that he invented the Holy Grail. Hancock suggests that the idea arose from the stories of the Ark of the Covenant, which Chrétien may have heard direct from Templar knights, and he cites the scholar Helen Adolf, who thought that another early Grail chronicler, Wolfram von Eschenbach, who wrote
Parzifal,
derived his version of the Grail – a stone – from the
Kebra Nagast
of Abyssinia
.
It is a fascinating idea, but seems to be contradicted by the opinion of various scholars, to the effect that stories of the Grail had been sung by minstrels long before Chrétien wrote them down.
⁷

Why does this matter? It is important to bear in mind that the Templars were not simply seeking power – they soon
acquired it in abundance
—
but that they began with a search for some mystery object, possibly the Ark, and that the Templar order was thereafter associated with the notion of a mystery, a belief that has persisted down to modern times.

The Second Crusade was initiated by Bernard of Clairvaux after the fall of Edessa in 1144, but it ended in failure; the Moslems under Saladin were to recapture Jerusalem in 1187. During the next century, seven more crusades failed to restore power to the Christians. The fall of Acre in 1291 completed their defeat, and the Knights Templar lost their raison d’être.

But they did not lose their power
—
or their wealth (based partly on exemption from taxes). With a new Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, they licked their wounds on the island of Cyprus and wondered what to do next. The problem was that Cyprus was insecure, with the Moslems raiding Limassol and taking captives who had to be ransomed. The Templars considered returning to France, but there were problems. King Philip the Fair (1265—1314) was in conflict with Pope Boniface VIII, and since the Templars regarded the Pope as their master, their return to France would be unwelcome to the king.

In fact, the whole order was unwelcome to the king, who felt they were
—
like their papal master
—
arrogant nuisances (this may have been because he had once applied to join them, and been rejected). When the Pope threatened to depose Philip, the king denounced Boniface as a heretic, and finally had him taken prisoner in his own house; Boniface died soon after being rescued.

When his successor, Boniface IX, showed signs of taking up the struggle where Boniface VIII left off, Philip arranged to have him poisoned, then had his own candidate, Archbishop Bertrand de Gotte of Bordeaux, placed on the papal throne. Philip laid down a number of preconditions for supporting Bertrand’s candidacy, one being that the new Pope should move the seat of the papacy to France. Another precondition was held in reserve and has never been revealed. Most scholars have concluded that the secret clause included a stipulation
that the Pope should not oppose his plan to arrest the Templars and seize their money.