In June 1885 this small French village made the acquaintance of a new parish priest. At thirty three, the Cure' Sauniere was handsome, energetic and a poor choice for this small village, for he was more of a candidate for a larger parish than this out of the way hamlet. Sauniere was a native of the region having been born a few miles distance in the village of Montazels. From 1885 to 1891 he went hunting and fishing in the mountains streams of his boyhood. He also had average income for a priest of a small village. He read everything about the region and learned Greek and Hebrew. He employed a peasant girl for his housekeeper and she stayed with him up to his death. He befriended a pastor of a neighboring village by the name of Henri Boudet who taught him about the turbulent history of the region's past. For example, a few miles to the southeast of Rennes-le-Chateau, lies a peak called Bezu, with the ruins of a medieval fortress that was once a preceptory of the Knights Templar. On a third peak a mile or so east of Rennes-le-Chateau, stands the ruins of th chateau of Blanchefort, home of Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth grand master of the Knights Templar, who presided over the order in the middle of the twelfth century. Rennes-le-Chateau had been the ancient route of the pilgrims.The entire region was steeped in legends, and blood-soaked past.

For some time Sauniere had wanted to restore the old village church. It had been consecrated to Mary Magdalen in 1059, and it had been erected on a still older foundation of a Visigoth building dating around the sixth century.By the late nineteenth century it was in dire need of restoration. In 1891, Sauniere started restoration by borrowing a small sum of money from the village funds. In the course of his work he removed the altar stone, which rested on two Visigoth columns. One of these columns he (supposedly) discovered to be hollow and inside he found four parchments preserved in sealed wooden tubes. Two of these parchments seems to have been genealogies, one from 1244 and the other from 1644.The two other documents had been composed around 1780 by the Abbe Antoine Bigou, Sauniere's predecessor. The two parchments from Bijou's time would appear to be latin texts, excerpts from the New Testament. One of the parchments had its text running incoherently together, with no space between them, and a number of superfluous letters were inserted. The second document the lines are indiscriminately truncated, unevenly, sometimes in the middle of a word, while certain letters are raised above the others. These seems to be codes of some sort. Very complex, defying a computer.

The code goes like this. (Shepherdess no temptation that Poussin Tenniers hold the key; peace 681 by the cross and this horse of God I complete [or destroy] this daemon of the guradian at noon blue apples) In the second parchment, the raised letters, taken in sequence, spell out a coherent message: (To Dagobert II king and to sion belongs this treasure and he is there dead) Sauniere realized that he had come across some important documents, and brought his discovery to his superior, the Bishop of Carcassonne. Sauniere was immediately sent to Paris, with instruction to present the documents to certain ecclesiastical authorities. Sauniere spent three weeks in Paris, but what happened during the meetings with the ecclesiastic is unknown. What is known is that the provincial country priest was promptly and warmly welcomed into Hoffet's circle. Hoffet being Abbe Bieil, the ecclesiastic's uncle. During his stay in Paris, Sauniere spent a lot of time in the Louvre, and before his departure he purchased reproductions of three paintings, and one was "Les Bergers d'Acadie" by Nicolas Poussin.

On his return to Rennes-le-Chateau, Sauniere resumed his restoration of the village church.In the process he found a curiously carved flagstone dating from the seventh or eight century, and there may have been a crypt beneath it, a burial chamber, in which skeletons were said to have been found. Sauniere also embarked on another project. In the churchyard, stood the sepulchre of Marie, Marquise d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort. the headstone and flagstone marking her grave had been designed and installed by the Abbe Antoine Bigou, Sauniere predecessor of a century before, who had apparently composed two of the mysterious parchments.The headstone's inscription, which included a number of deliberate errors in spacing and spelling, was a perfect anagram for a message concealed in the parchments referring to Poussin and Teniers. If one rearranges the letters, they will form the cryptic statement quoted above, and the errors seem to have been contrived precisely to make them so. Not knowing that the inscription on the tomb had already been copied, Sauniere obliterated them. Nor was this the only curious behavior he demonstrated. With his faithful housekeeper, he began to make long journeys on foot about the countryside, collecting rocks of no apparent value or interest. He also embarked on an exchanged of letters with unknown correspondents throughout France as well as Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Spain. He took to collecting stacks of utterly worthless stamps. He opened certain shadowy transactions with various banks.In postage alone Sauniere was already spending a substantial sum of money, more than his previous income could possibly sustain. Then, in 1896, he began to spend in earnest on staggering and unprecedented scale. By the end of his life in 1917 his expenditure would amount to the equivalent of at least several million pounds.Some of his unexplained wealth was devoted to public works, a public road leading up to the village, and facilities for running water were provided. Other projects were more strange than necessity. A tower was built, the Tour Magdala, overlooking the sheer side of the mountain.An opulent house was built, called Villa Bethania, which Sauniere himself never occupied. And the church was not only redecorated, but finished in the most bizarre fashion. A latin inscription was incised in the porch lintel above the entrance: TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE (THIS PLACE IS TERRIBLE) Immediately inside the entrance a hideous statue was erected, a gaudy representation of the demon Asmodeus (see photo below), custodian of secrets, guardian of hidden treasures, and according to ancient Judaic legend, builder of Solomon's temple.

On the walls lurid, garishly painted plaques were installed depicting the Stations of the Cross, each was characterized by some odd inconsistency, some inexplicable added detail, some flagrant or subtle deviation from excepted Scriptural account. In Station VIII, for example, there is a child swathed in Scottish plaid. In Station XIV, which portrays Jesus's body being carried into the tomb, there is a background of dark nocturnal sky by dominated by a full moon. It is almost as if Sauniere were trying to intimate something. But what? That Jesus's burial occurred after nightfall, several hours later than the bible tells us it did? Or that the body is being carried out of the tomb, not into it? While engaged in this curious adornment Sauniere continued to spend extravagantly. He collected rare chine, precious fabrics, antique marbles. He created an orangery and a zoological garden. He assembled a magnificent library. Shortly before his death he was allegedly planning to build a massive Babel-like tower lined with books, from which he intended to preach. Nor was his parishioners neglected. Sauniere gave them banquets every chance he got, maintaining the life style of a medieval potentate presiding over his mountain domain. He received a number of distinguish guests. One was the French secretary of state for culture, several others were French notables. But the most august and important visitor to the small village priest was the Archduke Johann von Hapsburg, a cousin of Franz Josef, emperor of Austria. Bank statements revealed that Sauniere and the archduke had opened consecutive accounts on the same day and that the latter had turned over a substantial sum of money to the former. The ecclesiastical authorities at first turned a blind eye. When Sauniere's former superior at Carcassonne died, the new bishop attempted to call the priest to account. Sauniere responded with startling and brazen defiance. He refused to explain his wealth. He also refused to accept the transfer the bishop ordered. Lacking any more substantial charges, he, the bishop, accused him of simony, illicitly selling Masses, and a local tribunal suspended him. Sauniere appealed to the Vatican, which exonerated him. On January 17, 1917, Sauniere then in his sixty-fifth year suffered a sudden stroke. What makes Sauniere stroke on January 17 most suspicious is the fact that five days before, on Jan.12, his parishioners declared that he had seemed to be in fine health for a man his age. Yet on Jan 12th according to receipt Marie Denarnaud, his life-long companion had ordered a coffin for her master. On January 22 Sauniere died, and the following morning his body was placed upright in an armchair on the terrace of the Tour Magdala, clad in an ornate robe adorned with scarlet tassels. Present day residents of Rennes-le-Chateau are as mystified by it as everyone else. This is the general story published in France during the 1960's.

The first question that we must asked ourself is, what was the source of Sauniere sudden wealth? From where could such an amount of money come from In ancient times the region was regarded as a sacred site by the Celtic tribes, the Romans also thought of it as sacred for its therapeutics springs.it was in the beginning of the thirteenth century that, an army of northern knights descended on the Languedoc to stop the Cathars, also known as Albigensian, heresy and claim the riches of the region for themselves. During the Albigensian Crusade, Rennes-le-Chateau was captured and the following years its population was reduced by plagues and roving bandits Tales of fantastic treasures were mix with history of the time, and we are left to speculate on what is really truth or fiction. The Cathar heretics, for example, were said to possess something of fabulous and even sacred value, which, according to a number of legends, was the Holy Grail. These legends were the bases for Richard Wagner's opera. Parsifal. During the German occupation of 1940-45, a number of excavation was undertaken in the vicinity. What was the secret or treasure that Sauniere found in his village church? Was it more of a secret that had to be kept quite? Could it be that what he found was not as much booty as such but something that conventional Western religion wanted to silenced? If it wasn't gold or a treasure, could it have been an historical secret of importance for his time and also ours. This would explained the Churche's intense interest in the matter, the impunity with which Sauniere defied his bishop, and his exoneration by the Vatican. He received money from the Hapsburg, and his secret seems to be more religious than political. Could Sauniere have been blackmailing the Vatican, seeing that the institution was treating him with kid gloves, it seems likely that this was the case. But this is also speculation. What will we find when all this comes out in the open. What really is the truth and does it matter to anybody? We are nearly at the end of the twentieth century, will the church reveal what it knows about Jesus, the Knights Templar, Sauniere, and all the other little secrets it holds. Time will tell.... Text taken from Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln BIBLIOGRPHY Holy Blood, Holy Grail by M. Baigent, R. Leigh and H. Lincoln The Holy Place by Henry Lincoln Key To The Sacred Pattern by Henry Lincoln The Tomb Of God by R. Andrews & P. Schellenberger The Essene Odyssey by Hugh Schonfield Le Tresor Maudit by G. de Sede Massacre At Montsegur by Zoe Oldenbourg