A small village in the hills of southern France, located between the walled medieval city of Carcassonne to the north and the slopes of the eastern Pyrenees to the south, Rennes-le-Château was of little interest to anyone but its inhabitants until the early 1950s, when a promoter named Noel Corbu opened a restaurant in the Tour Magdala, a nineteenth-century stone building erected by a former parish priest of the village, Bérenger Saunière. Saunière earned local notoriety by his spending habits, which he financed by performing masses for money, a practice illegal under canon law that finally got him suspended by the local bishiop in 1911. Looking for publicity to attract customers to his new restaurant, Corbu heard old stories about hidden treasures from the Albigensian Crusade. He joined these tales to accounts of the free-spending Saunière to create a romantic tale about the priest’s discovery of buried treasure while restoring the old parish church in the village, and talked a magazine, La Dépêche du Midi, into carrying an article repeating his claims in 1956.
One of the people who heard the treasure story was an acquaintance of Corbu’s, Pierre Plantard, who happened to be the head of a very small secret society called the Prieuré de Sion or Priory of Zion. Plantard had founded the Priory himself in 1956, but like most secret societies it claimed links to the distant past, and Corbu’s story apparently struck Plantard as the perfect framework for a manufactured history. Corbu’s story became central to Plantard’s disinformation campaign, which was taken up by a group of British writers and turned, with substantial additions, into the bestselling book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982). Other researchers have disputed this and argued instead that the treasure of Rennes-le-Château was the Ark of the Covenant, an extraterrestrial artifact, a coded message warning that the Earth would be struck in 2012 by a giant comet, or any of a dozen other things. The entire landscape around Rennes-le-Château has been combed for clues and turned into the background for a burgeoning subgenre in the alternative realities publishing industry.
Ironically, the entire Bérenger Saunière story had been effectively debunked by French researchers by the time The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail reached the bookstands. Church records and Saunière’s own papers show that the vast majority of the stories circulated about Rennes-le-Château and Saunière are sheer invention, based on the modest reality of an eccentric parish priest.
SEE ALSO:
- Cathars
- Ark of the Covenant
- Christian origins
- Earth Changes
- Extraterrestrials
- Priory of Sion
- Disinformation
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006