Our quest led us off the broad road of the pilgrimage to Santiago and along the ‘diversion’ of Le Serpent Rouge. On this diversion, part Via Dolorosa, where the Stations of the Cross had at one time been symbolically added to the landscape, and part initiation, we searched for the secret place of the ‘lost queen’. Le Serpent Rouge points to a specific location in the hills around Blanchefort to find the ‘hidden rose’. It is time to consider this location, the goal of our journey.
Guided by the art and architecture of the churches of Saint-Sulpice in Paris and Sainte-Marie-Madeleine (Mary Magdalene) at Rennes-le-Château, we undertook a pilgrimage through the landscape. The theme that underlies both churches is that they are based on Solomon’s Temple, the first Temple of Jerusalem and the blueprint for all Masonic temples. The tradition of building in this manner is attributed to the Templars, who were once headquartered on the Temple Mount, where Solomon’s temple once stood, and had excavated beneath it for a number of years.
The wider landscape of Rennes-le-Château takes us through a recreation of Jerusalem, with place names such as ‘Jaffus’ and ‘Cardou’ representing the Jaffa Gate and the Cardo, Jerusalem’s main street in Roman times. Along this route we encounter the ‘Via Dolorosa’, locations matching those on the final route of Jesus, as seen in the Stations of the Cross and enacted in the Rose+Croix degrees of Freemasonry.
The journey along this route is contained within the grander scheme of a new and invisible Temple of Solomon, an area above ground that I refer to as the ‘invisible cathedral’, and this is where we shall begin. I have omitted some of the precise details to prevent vandalism or the unscrupulous exploitation of these sacred locations.
Solomon’s Temple returns us for a moment to our old friends the Templars, whose legacy can be seen across the region in the form of ruined Templar fortifications. They were known to have actively sought both learning and relics in Jerusalem and they are likely to have encountered both through physical excavation and exposure to Arabic knowledge. Expelled from Jerusalem following the end of Crusader rule, they gathered together the knowledge and material wealth that they had accrued and returned to the west, with many settling in the Languedoc, an area outside the kingdom of France and once known as Septimania. They were wealthy, powerful and secretive and the treasure they discovered on the Temple Mount is the stuff of legend. According to Sion,
‘Septimania, still independent, was to be the New Jerusalem set up by the Templars, who could not keep the Holy Land. The placing of the Temple loot here, including menorahs, stone tablets and bodies, is mirrored in an overground ‘Temple’ on the land.’
This hidden Temple and its mirror-image above ground would need to be in a location that the Templars could protect. They had secured the fortification at Le Bézu to the south of Blanchefort and Sion maintains they had other properties in Arques to the east. Interestingly, Sion also states that
‘The Templar preceptory was, for a time, located at the Château d’Hautpoul. The inner sanctum, the Rose+Croix Veritas, was located at Arques before it moved to a purpose-built structure overlooking the plateau and Le Cercle.’
Château d’Hautpoul is the old castle at Rennes-le-Château, from which the village is named. Arques lies to the east, beyond the tomb reputedly featured in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego. The ‘purpose-built structure’ is the Château des Templiers, which stands on the hill to the south of Rennes-les-Bains. It affords a view northward of the entire valley of Rennes-les-Bains, Valdieu (the Valley of God) and Rennes-le-Château.
If we were to step back and view the landscape from the hillside on Le Bézu at a specific point marked by a stone below the Château des Templiers itself, the greater ‘groundplan’ becomes apparent. We realize that our path in Le Serpent Rouge, both overground and underground, led us through an ‘invisible cathedral’.
The invisible cathedral is a recreation of the first Temple of Jerusalem and runs from east to west across the landscape. Part of Rennes-le-Château is the ‘doorway’, Blanchefort and Rennes-les-Bains are the gateway to the ‘inner sanctum’, while the Fauteuil du Diable (Devil’s Armchair) is the throne of Solomon and the nearby spring the baptismal font.
Standing in the shadow of the Templar ruin on Le Bézu and looking north it becomes obvious that the land has been rendered to convey the existence of this giant structure. The features and details can be located with the assistance of a map because some, such as the Devil’s Armchair, are now obscured by forestry.
According to Sion, the landscape Temple perceptible from Le Bézu ‘is mirrored in a Temple beneath the land’. As mentioned in the chapter on Landscape (Chapter 7), Henry Lincoln’s work explores the geometry of the landscape and includes a vast pentagram laid out across the mountain peaks. The pentagram was also identified with Poussin’s painting, which uses the shape in its structure. This painting was first associated with the Rennes-le-Château mystery through coded parchments that first appeared in Gérard de Sède’s The Accursed Treasure, and were then decoded for The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. One parchment contains the line: ‘Shepherdess, no temptation, Poussin and Teniers hold the key.’
While ‘Shepherdess’ points to Poussin’s work (also titled The Shepherds of Arcadia), the ‘no temptation’ surely refers to Teniers’ St Anthony and St Paul in the Desert, his sole depiction of St Anthony the Great, in which the hermit saint is depicted resisting temptation. This will be covered at length in Chapter 15, but in short it is a landscape painting with St Paul and St Anthony in the foreground in the respective roles of teacher and pupil, and a shepherdess in the background.
Sion provided me with the only accurate copy of this painting, the original of which has been in private hands since the 1920s. Two aspects of the painting relate to the hidden Temple. One is that the shepherdess in the background represents St Roseline and indicates the ‘Rose Line’ that runs a close parallel to the Paris Meridian. The second is that it provides a view from one corner of the Temple. The two paintings taken together give two corners of the hidden Temple. Regarding the tomb in the Poussin painting, Nic Haywood states:
‘The tomb itself, being constructed in accordance with the Golden Rule, may equally be a device indicative of a Temple structure.’
The invisible Temple of Solomon is a signpost toward the secret. At its heart is the inner sanctum or Holy of Holies, the sacred place that originally housed the Ark of the Covenant. I can find no evidence for the Ark being present in the landscape but the Holy of Holies is represented in the form of a mountain: Pech Cardou, opposite Blanchefort, across the River Sals.
Many of the mountains in the region are riddled with caverns and some, like Pech Bugurach, contain vast underground caves so it is likely that our second, subterranean, Temple is within this mountain. If it exists this Temple is the very centre of the mystery, the focus around which all else revolves in terms of the physical aspects of the mysteries of Rennes-le-Château and the Priory of Sion. It is both a place of initiation, and the last resting place of our ‘lost queen’. It forms the Holy of Holies in the new Temple of Solomon, at the heart of the New Jerusalem.
With this knowledge the urge might be to rush down to the region and discover all that can be revealed, but we are not dispassionate archaeologists cataloguing and emptying the sacred places of the dead to fill museums with ornaments. These are holy shrines and our quest is worth nothing if it is not truly a search for the sacred. The discovery and revelation of such places and the items within them must be done in a manner that ensures that they remain protected from looters of all kinds by honouring the spiritual importance of where they are located. It is my personal understanding that the objects in these places should not be removed; on the contrary, items taken previously should be returned.
The possibility of various hidden tombs existing in the area is very real. The presence of Templar ruins and the possibility of earlier refugees from the Holy Land fires the imagination with all manner of possibilities. But there seems to be one specific tomb in the area that we are being directed to – one that makes use of the natural caves and tunnels that riddle the valleys and mountains.
I have spoken to various researchers who claim to have located one or more tombs, including David Wood, Gérard Thome and of course Ben Hammott. Hammott’s find can be seen in the Bloodline movie. He claims to have discovered a tomb in the region and has provided footage of his find, showing a body beneath a Templar flag surrounded by objects and manuscripts.
I have some concerns with Hammott’s footage of the tomb in that it looks staged. The manner in which the contents have been laid out for the viewer looks suspicious, and the diversity of contents – from treasure to manuscripts and a Templar flag – are a Rennes-le-Château researcher’s wish list of discoveries. Add to this the lack of dust on any of the objects and the fact that the Templar flag has survived underground also make me question the age of the tomb. The Languedoc has a very damp climate, and I am reasonably sure that any cloth left in a tomb would degrade in a matter of decades, not centuries. I would also note that corpses tend to be buried inside a sarcophagus within a tomb, not left to rot on top.
There is a possibility that this is an earlier tomb that has been reused at a much later date; or that the body on display rests on an existing rose marble sarcophagus and not just on a rock. A body within the sarcophagus would be far more interesting but we will have to wait for professionals to get access before we can know for sure. In any case this may be one of the lesser ‘satellite’ tombs that are known to be later additions to an important site. Any great sacred site attracts smaller sites, as devotees seek to be buried near the focus of their devotion, and such is also to be expected of a major tomb at Rennes-le-Château. The original body in Hammott’s tomb could be of anyone from local nobility to an exiled Pope. Further burials may have been made here in recent years, accounting for the body on top of the tomb.
As for the principal tomb of which this may be a ‘satellite’, its whereabouts can be estimated, but without an obvious entrance it is impossible to gain access to it. To narrow our search we must look first at the supporting material.
During the filming of Bloodline I encountered a local researcher, Gérard Thome, who has spent many years exploring the region and has amassed a lot of evidence for the existence of a hidden temple in the landscape. He has discovered paintings and decoded some aspects of the church at Rennes-le-Château to support his theory. He is also in possession of a number of parchments that match in style the two parchments that Sion released in the 1970s (see page 289). These are likely to be from the same source that produced encoded documents during the 1960s and early 1970s. The parchments, mostly vellum and hide, have various maps of the region and encrypted text in the same biblical style as the others in existence. Thome himself claims to have stumbled across these at various points in his researches or had them left in his name at local shops by an unknown party. He may well be the unwitting benefactor of some of Sion’s archive that was stolen in the late 1970s from Paris and that has since surfaced in Spain.
Having briefly viewed some of the parchments I can state that phrases such as ‘come to the tomb’ are readily discernible, while crude maps of the landscape near Rennes-le-Château are easily identified. On one map a circle has been drawn at an identical location to one on a map published by Patricia Villiers-Stuart in the early 1980s. I recognized it instantly because Sion had provided me with a copy of Villiers-Stuart’s work early on in my investigation (see page 294). She had found the circle in the Poussin painting and transcribed it onto the landscape in the picture. The Villiers-Stuart design is a circle with twelve divisions representing the rose, as can be seen in the design of rose windows in many cathedrals across Europe.
What also surprised me about the information we were receiving was the potential scale of what was hidden beneath the mountains.
Based on his research, Thome has drawn up quite a detailed mythology of the hidden temple. He claims that there was a two-storey subterranean structure with two levels of crypts. He called it a ‘necropolis’ and gave detailed descriptions of its design based upon evidence he had found both in the parchments and local churches. However, Sion refused to acknowledge the structure as a necropolis, preferring to use the term ‘temple’. To me it resembled a temple of Mithras, a Persian god popular in the Roman Empire, and whose temples were typically underground.
At one point Thome produced a painting of the Crucifixion scene and indicated to us the landscape behind Jesus. In the centre of the landscape is a cutaway mountain with a temple hidden inside, although upon closer inspection the temple resembles the Islamic Dome of the Rock more than a Mithraic structure.
At the time Sion seemed willing to support Thome’s claims but, as I have said, they upheld the idea of a temple rather than a necropolis.
Sion also said that ‘the notion of a subterranean temple is by no means a new one’. The possibility of a structure existing inside a mountain is not unlikely. The landscape has limestone and granite in vast quantities. Over time water erodes the soft limestone, creating caverns and tunnels among the much harder granite. At least two of the mountains in the region have underground lakes, one of which is large enough to warrant having a rowing boat moored to its bank. Even the modest hill of Rennes-le-Château has a reservoir beneath the summit. This source of fresh water was used until relatively recently by those who lived here, and in prehistoric times both this and a good elevated defensive position overlooking the surrounding plains supported the thriving community that inhabited the plateau.
During my researches into the temple I discovered three entrances to the underground system and a further possible entrance that is now too small to pass through but affords a view of an underground tunnel wide enough to drive a car in. These are all situated in locations that fit crude maps of the tunnel system that were shown to me by Gérard Thome. I asked Sion if they intended someone to locate the temple as the entrances are sealed and require excavation.
‘[Father] Boudet [of neighbouring Rennes-les-Bains] did not do any of the digging himself, that is how things work. It is damp, wet, and not without pitfalls, there is one fast-flowing underground river to cross and a downward climb that is quite considerable. Very few would undertake that climb down in the dark.’
Toward the end of Le Serpent Rouge the narrator emerges from the underground ‘abyss’ (see page 168). His journey into the underworld resulted in him understanding the final truth, the existence of a real temple, and the real tomb of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Within the temple is the answer, the secret of the Priory of Sion and physical proof of the greatest lie in Western history. At this point in Le Serpent Rouge we are south of Rennes-les-Bains, beyond the Devil’s Armchair and near an area of land known as the Dead Man (L’Homme Mort). I found a route into the mountain close by but was unable to proceed very far as the cave I was in had become partially blocked. Visible beyond the collapse was a cave wide enough to drive a car through. As Sion confirmed,
‘There is an entrance very close to L’Homme Mort and likely the cave to which you refer. It is partially collapsed? It is an area well worth a visit in the spring when rainfall has minimized and the water table is less high. During the period 1992–5 this arm, this entrance, was a one-way ticket to certain death due to the terrible deluge of the time.’
As the exploration progressed I confirmed that there is a tunnel system beneath the mountain of Blanchefort. It runs north/south and originally had two entrances. The entrance in the area of L’Homme Mort was furthest from the site. The second entrance was a vertical shaft at the ruins of Blanchefort.
Sion provided very specific directions on where to excavate, but the route to the final resting place can no longer be navigated from this mountain. The entrances at Blanchefort and the Dead Man all lead to a single tunnel that takes you beneath the river, but in recent years a long section of this tunnel has completely collapsed. The route, formerly open, is now closed forever. I believe it to form a part of a larger underground complex of tunnels that radiate out from a central location. An obvious symbol for this would be the spider that appears on some of the Priory of Sion documents.
There were likely to be other entrances so I enquired further. The following is taken from an unofficial conversation I had with a French member of the Priory of Sion who chose to remain anonymous. I have since confirmed their membership through other Sion members. The clipped form of the sentences is due to my limited grasp of conversational French:
‘There are 12 tunnels. Only one is open at any time. The journey is an initiation. The road underground goes under a river. The ways in are seasonally open – in winter some are under snow and ice, some flood at certain times of the year.’
This account was supported by a later communication from Nic Haywood:
‘The “legend” of such a temple with its 12 gates, each opened – usually – by Mother Nature herself was extant a time long before Boudet appeared in the locale.’
Unfortunately, the three possible entrances that I initially identified are all now closed, two purposely by man and one by nature in the form of a collapsed tunnel. As two are accessed from churches in the area it is better not to reveal anything specific about their location, as vandalism and illegal excavations are rife in the region. This is not an attempt to appear obscure but simply to protect sacred places. One further location is said to exist beneath a private house and another is on private land, though I have only scant ideas about where it surfaces.
Nic Haywood told me that there were 12 entrances, which were intended to open in accordance with signs of the zodiac, and that beneath the ground the shape of a triangle is significant and linked to the tradition of ‘Black Madonnas’ in Christian art, so called from their typical dark hues. In past times the sites of three Black Madonnas forming a triangle pattern were a guide to an important location. The Black Madonnas themselves are thought to have first been introduced to France at the time of the Crusades and generally follow the form of a triangle. The idea being presented here is that there are three locations below ground, in the centre of which is the shrine that we are seeking.
According to Sion the temple itself once served as a place of initiation. The journey into the underworld has many alchemical and psychological interpretations and appears in many forms in literature, most notably Dante’s Inferno. One thinks of this as a journey of self-discovery into the depths of being.
The maze of tunnels may also replicate the use of the underground labyrinth, another well-known initiatory tool dating back at least as far as ancient Egypt. As a continuation of Le Serpent Rouge the tunnel labyrinth would serve as the final rite of initiation on the pilgrimage to the hidden temple.
The site itself is said to be of vast historical and religious importance and to have been in use as a temple since Celtic times. Many additional secrets and items are said to have been buried there over the centuries.
The use of the cave could well date back to the vast, thriving prehistoric community that once inhabited the area, and early pagan religions may have adopted it as a sacred place. There are said to be other caves in the area that have rough stone altars carved into them that date back to prehistory.
The tendency to rebuild structures on the foundations of a previous holy site dates back to Sumerian times, where the ruins of a temple would be built upon in the belief that the new temple would take on the spiritual energy previously imbued in the site. It is a tradition that underpins the choice of sites for many of today’s Christian churches and cathedrals.
As I understand it, knowledge of the location of this great sanctuary remained within the noble families descended from the Templars, such as the de Blancheforts, up until the French Revolution. At the time of the Revolution the threat of destruction forced the old families to entrust the secret to a predecessor of Saunière. Other heretical French priests at Rennes-le-Château also knew of its existence and it was rediscovered at the time of Saunière and Boudet. The latter was a well-placed member of one of Sion’s affiliate groups at this time and was responsible for disseminating the secret in a manner that future initiates could decode. Boudet published The True Language of the Celts and the Stone Circle of Rennes-les-Bains (see page 82) but this failed to have the desired effect so instead he oversaw the refurbishment of the church at Rennes-le-Château.
Sadly, Saunière’s own involvement seems to have been less than pious and we can only wonder at what priceless artefacts Saunière spirited away in order to fund his ostentatious lifestyle.
The main temple was most likely looted in part and it is possible that parts of any corpses there were removed and distributed as relics. Other items found their way into museums and private collections but I was also given the impression that wherever possible, removed items were acquired and returned by the Priory of Sion. As to the complete nature of what might be present in the temple, this will be considered in the next chapter on relics.
The opinion of Sion is that the Templars fashioned the landscape according to Solomon’s Temple and renamed some locations after places in Old Jerusalem. In doing so they had created an inverse or reflection of the city of Jerusalem with the concealed Temple at its heart. Here they stored the spoils of the Crusades but it also served as something far more important. They were recreating what they considered to be a New Jerusalem in the south of France.
This links to the apocalyptic aspect of the temple, a theme further considered later in this book, but for now it is worth remembering that this is the New Jerusalem of the Templars, with an invisible Temple above ground mirroring the hidden Temple below.
The idea of the hidden Temple is very attractive to researchers because it answers so many questions about Rennes-le-Château and the Priory of Sion. It would explain the source of Saunière’s wealth; provide a tomb that supports the bloodline theory, the legacy of the Templars’ treasure and the destination of the hidden pilgrimage. A temple, with bodies, treasure and so on is a fitting resolution to all these mysteries and in a way it is the only possible answer to all the threads of the Rennes-le-Château mystery apart from alchemy – but even that is present in the form of symbolic pilgrimage.
Also, it is not difficult to imagine why such a temple would be so important that it has been kept a secret throughout history.
If we are to believe the Priory of Sion they, and their numerous incarnations, are the guardians of the temple. They have used it as a place of initiation and ritual, seeding the degrees of Freemasonry and influencing other secret societies to ensure that the secret survives. There is an uneasy alliance with the Vatican to ensure that the evidence – the content of the tombs in this sacred place – are protected from the general public and defended from the profane until the time is right for release. When society is deemed capable of accepting the shock of what is enshrined there, and it will come as no great surprise, only then does the Catholic Church believe that it can withstand the revelation. Then will be the time for light to enter the sanctuary and for the truth to find its mirror.
What remains unclear is the exact identity of those who are buried in the temple. Le Serpent Rouge makes reference to Mary Magdalene, bodies (in the plural), and various accompanying objects. Some researchers, such as Gérard Thome, consider the temple to be the family tomb of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their two sons. The Priory of Sion refused to corroborate this claim directly but have referred to a ‘body of evidence’ on numerous occasions and its potential to upset the Vatican. In the light of this the Et in Arcadia Ego (Shepherds of Arcadia) painting may well depict that family, the bearded father in the foreground, his wife by his side and their two sons, now safely entombed in the Arcadia of the Languedoc. A perfect resting place kept secret through the ages.
The bodies, we are told, are mummified, protected over time from decomposition while radiating the perfume of the rose. These are possibly the greatest relics of all time. But can we trust them? Are they authentic or some random find by the Templars, pillaged a thousand years after the fact from a misidentified grave in the Holy Land?
Before we can even consider the identity of those in the tomb and the possible attendant objects we must look at the bigger picture of a medieval landscape littered with the remnants of the holy persons – from splinters of the True Cross to the four corpses of St Peter. We turn now to the problem of relics.