The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  There is a curious and baffling piece of evidence concerning Nicolas Poussin. In 1656 Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance, dispatched his younger brother Louis to Rome on a mission that involved a visit to Poussin. On 17 April Louis wrote Nicolas a letter commenting that Poussin had displayed “overwhelming joy” on receiving the letter Fouquet had sent him. It then goes on:

  He and I have planned certain things of which in a little while I shall be able to inform you fully; things which will give you, through M. Poussin, advantages which kings would have great difficulty in obtaining from him, and which, according to what he says, no one in the world will ever retrieve in centuries to come; and, furthermore, it would be achieved without much expense and could even turn to profit, and they are matters so difficult to enquire into that nothing on earth at the present time could bring a greater fortune nor perhaps ever its equal . . .

  The comment about “advantages which kings would have great difficulty in obtaining (or drawing) from him” is fairly clearly a reference to Louis XIV. It looks as if Fouquet is involved in some interesting plot behind Louis’s back. Five years later Fouquet was arrested on vague charges of misappropriation of funds, and finally sentenced to life imprisonment. (One theory suggests that he was the Man in the Iron Mask.) Louis XIV went to great trouble to obtain the painting of the Shepherds of Arcady – which is also engraved on Poussin’s tomb – yet instead of placing it on display, kept it in his private apartments.

  Let us then see if we can begin to piece together the basic outline of this incredibly complicated story. It begins with Jesus, who is alleged to have arranged his own crucifixion and subsequent “resurrection”, presumably with the aim of “creating faith” and establishing Christianity. Whether or not this is true, we are invited to believe that the Merovingian dynasty believed that it was descended directly from Jesus.

  When Dagobert was murdered the Church endorsed the regicide; Pepin the Short, first of the Carolingians, repaid the pope by taking an army to Italy, inflicting defeats on the pope’s enemies the Lombards, and handing over the captured territory, which became the basis of the Papal States. So the Merovingians came to regard themselves as the enemies of the Church of Rome. A secret society called the Priory of Sion was formed, with the object of placing the Merovingians back on the throne of France. It held some important sacred object – possibly the Grail, possibly some “incontrovertible proof” of the descent of the Merovingians from Jesus. Its secret password was probably the phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego”. In the twelfth century the Knights Templars became the military arm of this secret society – which means, presumably, that they shared the secret about the crucifixion – a secret, we must bear in mind, that could have undermined the foundations of the Catholic Church, which was founded upon the notion of the Vicarious Atonement. No crucifixion, no atonement, no Church . . .

  The oddest aspect of the destruction of the Templars was the accusations of blasphemy and worship of demons. But if the Templars did possess this knowledge, then they were dangerous, both to the Church and to the State (i.e., to the kings of France). There is also much historical evidence of a close alliance between the Templars and the Cathars. The Cathars gave large amounts of land to the Templars, and Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth Grand Master of the Templars, came of a Cathar family. Bertrand’s descendants fought besides the Cathars of Languedoc against the invaders who were sent by the pope to stamp out Catharism.

  By the sixteenth century the Merovingians were represented by the house of Lorraine (which became Habsburg-Lorraine – so the Habsburgs were also Merovingians). They tried hard to depose the ruling house of Valois, but although they finally succeeded in bringing about their extinction, they had exhausted themselves in the process and had no eligible candidate to put forward. When Louis XIII died there was another determined attempt by the conspirators to prevent Louis XIV coming to the throne; but this again failed. (Readers who wish to study this historical aspect in more detail are recommended to read Lincoln’s fascinating book.)

  The story of Fouquet’s downfall seems to suggest that he was hoping to use the secret of the Priory of Sion to overthrow the king. It is not clear how Poussin was associated with the mystery, but he was presumably a member of the Priory, and was asked to encode its major secret – probably that of the “incontrovertible evidence”, or of the Grail – in his picture The Shepherds of Arcady. Lincoln argues that the painting embodies some secret geometry involving a pentagram which would enable the “treasure” to be located. King Louis’s interest in the painting suggests that he hoped to find the treasure first.

  During the early years of Louis’s reign the Grand Master of the Priory was, according to the Secret Dossiers, a German minister named Johann Valentin Andreae; and this introduces an interesting new complication. Andreae is believed to have been the author of a curious work called The Fama Fraternitas of the Worthy Order of the Rosy Cross, published in 1614. This claimed that an ascetic called Christian Rosenkreuz, who lived to be 106, had spent his whole life in a search for occult wisdom, and had founded an order called the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, or Rosicrucians. He lay buried in a secret tomb for 120 years, surrounded by lighted candles, before a brother found the tomb. Now, anyone who wished to become party to this secret wisdom only had to make their interest known and they would be contacted . . . Many people published pamphlets announcing their desire to be initiated but (as far as is known) none of them was ever contacted. Two more Rosicrucian works were published, and scholarship has established that the author of the third of these, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, was Andreae. Rosicrucianism exerted a powerful influence on the minds of scholars and occultists in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Now, according to Lincoln’s sources, Andreae is revealed as a Grand Master of the Priory (twenty years after publication of the Fama), and we are apparently to assume that the Priory of Sion became closely identified with the Rosicrucians, and later with the various Masonic lodges.

  Lincoln writes:

  It was in the eighteenth century, however, that the Merovingian bloodline probably came closest to the realisation of its objectives. By virtue of its intermarriage with the Habsburgs, the house of Lorraine had actually acquired the throne of Austria, the Holy Roman Empire. When Marie Antoinette, daughter of François de Lorraine, became queen of France, the throne of France, too, was only a generation or so away. Had not the French Revolution intervened, the house of Habsburg-Lorraine might well, by the early 1800s, have been on its way to establishing dominion all over Europe.

  With the Revolution, these hopes evaporated. And for some reason the Abbé Antoine Bigou, the priest of Rennes-le-Château and confessor of the Blanchefort family (of which, we may recall, one member had been a Master of the Templars) felt that both he and the secret of Rennes-le-Château were in danger. Why is not clear – the sans-culottes could hardly kill every priest in France. Possibly he thought they had been betrayed or were likely to be. At all events, he went to the trouble of writing the two coded parchments and concealing them, together with the two genealogical tables, in the Visigothic pillar. We do not know what the two tables contained – perhaps the line of descent from Jesus down to the living members of the Priory of Sion. (According to Lincoln’s informant, M. Plantard, the Merovingian Pretender, they are now in a London bank vault.) Then Bigou fled to Spain, where he soon died.

  So the scene was set for Saunière’s appearance nearly a century later, and for his discovery of the parchments. What happened then? Saunière went to Paris, and contacted the very person – Emile Hoffet – who was able to put him in touch with the modern Priory of Sion. The Priory may well have lost touch with the secrets of Rennes-le-Château, if Bigou had hidden the “treasure”, and so would have been delighted to see him. We must assume that Saunière accepted the “incontrovertible proof” that Jesus had not died on the cross but had founded a royal dynasty, and became a member of the Priory. He then returned to Rennes-le-Châte
au, and used the knowledge he had gained – presumably from Debussy – to find the “treasure”. Those excursions in the area, when he claimed to have been collecting stones for a grotto, must have been part of the treasure-hunt. He found his “treasure”, and became a rich man. But we know that much of his money came from the Habsburg family – at one point he was accused of being an Austrian spy because he was being paid by the Habsburgs – but that some of it was paid to him by the Abbé Henri Boudet, curé of nearby Rennes-les-Bains. Boudet also passed on money to the Bishop of Carcassonne. It would seem, then, that Boudet too was a member of the Priory of Sion.

  When Saunière died, after enjoying his new-found wealth for less than a quarter of a century, he shocked the priest who administered the final rites by admitting that he was not, in the strict sense of the word, a Christian. He had dropped hints to the same effect in the restorations in his church: the devil inside the door (Rex Mundi) – Asmodeus, the legendary guardian of Solomon’s treasure – and many baffling touches in the tableau of the crucifixion, such as a money bag at the foot of the cross. Over the door he had inscribed the words TERRIBILIS ST LOCUS ISTE: this place is terrible. The words are from the dedicatory mass sung for new churches, and “terrible” here means “awe-inspiring”; but it still seems odd that Saunière should have chosen them for the motto of his church, seen immediately before the visitor encounters its “demon guardian”.

  Lincoln seems to feel that the solution to the mystery of Saunière’s wealth is that it came from the Priory of Sion. But this is disputed by other writers. Brian Innes, who conducted a four-part investigation of the mystery in a magazine called The Unexplained in 1980, points out that quantities of gold have been found in the area. In 1645 a shepherd boy called Ignace Paris was executed for theft; he was in possession of gold coins, and claimed that he had found these after falling down a ravine and finding his way into a cave full of treasure. Innes says that more recently a slab of gold weighing nearly 45 lb has been found near Rennes-le-Château, made from fused Arab (or Crusader) coins, and that in 1928 the remains of a large gold statue were found in a hut on the edge of a stream that flows below the village.

  In their book The Holy Grail Revealed: The Real Secret of Rennes-le-Château, Patricia and Lionel Fanthorpe also argue strongly that Saunière found real treasure, not merely some ancient secret. Yet they are also inclined to agree with Lincoln that there was also some “object” referred to as the Grail which could confer power on those who owned it: they compare it to the Ring of Power in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and even suggest in one place, that it might be of “extra-terrestrial origin”, linking Rennes-le-Château with the “ancient astronaut” theories of Erich von Däniken.

  None of the theories can provide a complete solution to the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, but on the whole Lincoln comes closest to it. For the twentieth-century reader, the notion that Jesus survived the crucifixion and founded a dynasty is not particularly “terrible”. Yet we can see that for Nicolas Poussin and Louis Fouquet this notion would have seemed hair-raising, a kind of spiritual dynamite, sufficient to undermine sixteen centuries of Christianity and the authority of the pope. Even for Saunière, living at the end of the skeptical nineteenth century, it must have seemed quite startling.

  Is it likely that we shall ever get to the bottom of the mystery? It is well within the realms of possibility. Presumably the Priory of Sion knows precisely what Saunière found near Rennes-le-Château in the hillside tomb or the old fortress, and its increasing tendency to “go public” may mean that we shall sooner or later be told the whole story. But even if that does not happen, the solution could still lie in the message on the second parchment – in solving the puzzle contained in Poussin and Teniers, in working out the meaning of “Peace 681” (which could refer to the year 1799, since Templar Freemasons dated the calender from the year 1118), the horse of God, the demon of the guardian at noon, and the blue apples. But whoever discovers the secret can be reasonably certain of one thing: that the treasure itself will be missing.

  Postscript to Rennes-le-Château

  Publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982 created a sensation. Suddenly, the little village of Rennes-le-Château became famous, and busloads of tourists arrived every summer – some of them guided by Henry Lincoln himself.

  Lincoln came to feel that an important part of the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau lay in the landscape itself.

  Looking at the code discovered in the parchment, Lincoln noted the phrase: “Poussin holds the key . . .” and, as we have seen, the actual tomb shown in Poussin’s painting was discovered in the area of Rennes-le-Chateau at nearby Arques. And in fact, the tomb, although it had no Latin inscription, was otherwise identical, even to the stone on which the shepherd in the painting is resting his foot.

  Lincoln had not only noticed that there was a hidden pentagram in one of the parchments, but that there was something odd about the geometry of Poussin’s painting. He showed it to Professor Christopher Cornford, of the Royal College of Art, and Cornford not only agreed with him that there was a pentagram hidden in the painting, but that the structure was based on the Golden Section, a geometrical division much used in ancient times. (This is also known by the Greek letter phi, and is basically a way of dividing a line in such a ratio that the smaller part is to the greater as the greater is to the whole line – and in numerical terms equals 1.618.) What makes the Golden Section so important is that nature, for some odd reason, is using it all the time, from spiral seashells to spiral nebulae. It is present in the petal arrangements around the heads of flowers, and in the human body. And for some reason, when used in the divisions of a painting, it produces an oddly pleasing effect.

  Now the pentagram is one of the most ancient magical symbols. And the reason is almost certainly that it was associated with the planet Venus.

  If we imagine the earth as the centre of the solar system (as the ancients believed it was) it becomes obvious that there will be moments when every planet will be “eclipsed” by the sun, when the sun comes between the planet and the earth. Mercury, for example, is “eclipsed” three times, and if we draw lines between these three points in the heavens, they form an irregular triangle. Mars is “eclipsed” four times, and the figure is an irregular rectangle. In fact, all the planets make irregular figures – except Venus. And this makes a regular pentagram or pentacle.

  Now in writing a book called From Atlantis to the Sphinx I had concluded that astronomy is far, far older than we might imagine. There is even evidence that it dates back more than a hundred thousand years, to Neanderthal Man. And in their book Hamlet’s Mill George Santillana and Hertha von Dechend have demonstrated very clearly that the precession of the equinoxes – that apparent slow backward movement of the constellations, due to a slight wobble on the earth’s axis, which takes almost twenty-six thousand years to complete its cycle – was known to every major civilization of the ancient world. This admittedly sounds absurd, since it would seem to involve many centuries of close observation of the heavens. But Santillana and Dechend leave little doubt that it was so.

  The implication is that the pentagram symbolizing Venus has been sacred for many thousands of years.

  Now Lincoln also discovered the pentagram in the geometry of Rennes-le-Chateau.

  When he looked at an ordnance survey map of Rennes-le-Chateau region, one thing was immediately obvious: that three of its key sites – Rennes, the Templar Chateau of Bezu, and the Blanchefort chateau – formed three points of a triangle. And all were on hilltops.

  When Lincoln drew the triangle on his map, and proceeded to measure its lines, he received a surprise. It was a precise isosceles triangle, that is, with two sides exactly equal. With Bezu at the appex of the triangle, the lines from Bezu to Blanchefort, and from Bezu to Rennes-le-Chateau, were equal.

  This could not be an accident. At some remote point in time, someone had observed that the three hilltops made a precise triangle, and in due course
they had been chosen as part of a secret pattern.

  Now Lincoln found himself wondering if, by any remote chance, there were two more hilltops which would form the rest of the pentagram. Of course, he felt that would be asking too much . . .

  Yet when he studied the map, he was staggered to find that there were indeed two such hilltops, in precisely the right places. The eastern one was called La Soulane, and the western one Serre de Lauzet. And when the five hilltops were joined up on the map, they formed an exact pentacle.

  This was obviously an amazing natural freak. But there was one more surprise to come. When Lincoln looked for the centre of the map, he found that it was marked by another hill, called La Pique.

  Admittedly, although the summit of La Pique looked on the map like the dead centre, it was actually two hundred and fifty yards to the south east of centre. But that was to be expected. After all, this was not a man-made landscape. It was incredible enough that La Pique fell at the centre of the pentacle.

  So this was the basic secret of Rennes-le-Chateau: that it was part of a sacred landscape. Perhaps this is why Rennes-le-Chateau was chosen by the Merovingian King Dagobert as his home (and explains why his son Sigisbert fled there after his father’s murder). The royal blood of the Merovingians was associated with a magic landscape.

  The implication is that the goddess to whom the Rennes-le-Chateau “Temple” was originally dedicated was Venus, and explains why Mary Magdalen – who was identified with Venus in the Middle Ages – figures so largely in the area.

  In other words, the whole area of Rennes-le-Chateau was regarded as sacred because of its geometry. At the centre of its landscape lay a natural pentagram.

  That being so, it seems inevitable that in the Christian era, churches would be built so as to conform to this geometrical pattern. And in fact, an enthusiast named David Wood studied the map of the area, and quickly discovered that a precise circle could be drawn through five churches, including Rennes-le-Chateau, connected by a pentacular geometry. His book Genisis contains some remarkable insights into the geometry of the area, which Lincoln (who introduces the book) acknowledges to be remarkable. However, Lincoln – probably in common with most readers of the book – is unable to agree with Wood’s explanation of the mystery, which involves a super-race who came from Syrius 200,000 years ago, and became the gods of Ancient Egypt. Such speculations, while fascinating, are obviously unproven and unprovable.