SIXTEEN
Rosslyn in the Languedoc
In southern France, at some stage during the twelfth century, evolved the Cathars, a Gnostic religious sect who set themselves up in the départements of the Aude and the Ariège. The word cathari in Greek means ‘purity’. Central to the Cathar faith was duality – the battle between good and evil on earth – a form of primitive Christianity which would inevitably bring it into conflict with the Roman Church. If God is all-powerful why do terrible things occur in the world? Orthodox Christianity accepts that in this manner is mankind, and its faith, tested. Dualism insists that good and evil are primary energies in opposition to each other, and that in the shifting balance between them, evil, more often than not, triumphs. From this viewpoint arises the concept of Satan having created the world.
The home base of the Cathars was the castle of Montségur, perched high on a ledge dramatically overlooking the surrounding landscape. When, in 1208, Pope Innocent III launched against them the only Crusade ever conducted on European soil, they were forcibly extracted from their formidable fortress and individually incinerated. However, the night before Montségur surrendered, so the story goes, four of the monks slipped away under cover of darkness with a great treasure. This treasure is believed by many to have been the Holy Grail, in whatever shape or form it then existed. The parallels with Rosslyn are already apparent.
Skip forward six centuries to 1885 and an impoverished cleric called Bérenger Saunière becomes priest to the 200 souls of Rennes-le-Château, south of Carcassonne in the Languedoc region, close to the French Pyrenees. Saunière’s career began on a poor stipend, yet a year later he came into a great fortune, reputed to have been a bribe from the Vatican in return for his silence. While renovating his church, it is said, he had come across a hidden parchment and codex hidden within a stone pillar. This document, it is alleged, connected Rennes-le-Château with the Holy Grail, the Ark of Noah, the Ark of the Covenant, the treasures of the Temple of Solomon, and, ultimately, Rosslyn.
For the past six years I have been in the habit of visiting friends who have a house on the Costa Brava coast of Catalonia, less than an hour’s drive from Perpignan on the French–Spanish Border, from which it takes a further two hours to reach Rennes-le-Château. On a visit to Perpignan in 1963, the Spanish painter Salvador Dali, born relatively nearby at Figueres, described the railway station there as the centre of the universe. Dali may have been onto something. As a surrealist, he was probably in on the joke too, and on my 2005 trip to the region, despite my reluctance to indulge myself in yet another flight of fancy relating to The Da Vinci Code, the urge to investigate the Bérenger Saunière connection with Rosslyn became irresistible.
‘Every eight years, the planet Venus forms a pentagram over Rennes-le-Château,’ I was told by a knowledgeable friend who accompanied me. ‘A pentagram is the geometric shape featured in the ancient rites of resurrection. Venus is Mary Magdalene’s star. It’s also the Morning Star, the star of Jesus.’ I attempted to nod in a suitably enthusiastic manner, not having a clue what she was talking about. ‘Are you also aware that the Roseline, “Le Serpent Rouge”, the North–South meridian that bisects Rennes-le-Château, if it is extended, also passes directly through Rosslyn Chapel?’ Again, I was lost for words. I had come to southern France to find out what I could about the Cathars. I had no idea that I would be entering into some vast interconnecting cosmic ground plan. ‘Did you remember to bring your sunglasses?’ I responded meekly.
The warmth of the Mediterranean sunshine was getting to me and I was beginning to enjoy myself. The pottier the invention, the more irresistible it becomes. And it is hard to find anything pottier than either the saga of Bérenger Saunière or the sublime surrealist invention of the Prieuré de Sion. Added to this, the scenery of the Languedoc, the region in which both Rennes-le-Château and Montségur are located, loosely described as the foothills of the Pyrenees, was rather more spectacular and seductive than I could ever have imagined. There is something inexplicably challenging about this landscape of remote villages and mountain fortresses. You can almost smell the conspiracy. Others too have felt this way.
Prompted by the young German historian Otto Rahn,1 who mysteriously died while off duty at Dachau Concentration Camp in 1938, Heinrich Himmler’s Nazi archaeologists, the Ahnenerbe-SS, searched the district for the vanished Cathar/Templar treasure during the Second World War, but none was found. What emerged instead, however, was the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s film Raiders of the Lost Ark. In The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, it is the authors’ contention that the treasure of Montségur, which in their analysis consists of scrolls outlining the genealogy of Jesus’s surviving family, was taken for safekeeping to the remote nearby village of Rennes-le-Château. In the late nineteenth century, the story continues, they were unearthed by Father Bérenger Saunière, who proceeded to blackmail the Vatican and, as a result, became fabulously rich.
Saunière was either an enigma, or a masterly practical joker. No one has so far been able to reveal where his sudden good fortune actually came from, only that he was suddenly rich enough to build houses and roads. Yet when he died he was penniless. Clandestine intrigues proliferate. Accused of illegally selling Masses, he was exonerated by the Vatican, but nevertheless it is hard not to believe that something unscrupulous must have been going on. In reality, the money could easily have come from his wealthy mistress, Marie Denarnaud, who lived until 1946; this would explain why, despite appearing weathly during life, Saunière died insolvent. However, Marie too was considered a bit weird and was once reported as having been seen burning franc notes in the garden. Just as well the Euro had not been invented.
One of the more bizarre theories attached to the Saunière saga surrounds his purchase of a copy of the seventeenth-century French artist Nicolas Poussin’s Les Bergers d’ Arcadie, the original of which hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. It shows three half-naked shepherds and a rather brazen shepherdess gathered around a tomb upon which is the inscription ‘ET IN ARCADIA EGO’, which translates as ‘I am also in Arcadia [paradise]’. In the background is a hilltop that closely resembles that of Rennes-le-Château. Nobody has suggested that Saunière, a local boy, might just have liked the view. What subsequently fuelled the speculation is that there is a similar tomb at Argues, only a few miles distance from Rennes-le-Château, which, when opened in the 1950s, was found to be empty.
Cathars, Templars, mystic messages from long ago. No wonder there are those who draw parallels with Rosslyn. Certainly the dusty little French hilltop town of Rennes-le-Château, with its terracotta roofs, is an equally atmospheric place. St Maria Magdalena, Saunière’s ornamented church; the Villa Bethania in which he lived; and La Tour Magdala, the small cliff-top tower he built in order to house his library, are certainly unusual. Over the porch lintel of the church is the inscription ‘Terribilis est locus iste’, meaning ‘This place is terrifying’. Once again, was this a reference to the village, to the inhabitants, or to the remoteness of the surrounding landscape? Did Father Saunière, who was after all a man of God, see himself as an outcast? Or was he simply a convert to surrealism and having a joke at everyone else’s expense?
I was not at all sure what I expected to find inside St Maria Magdalena. An early twentieth-century parody of Rosslyn Chapel, perhaps? Although on a significantly less ambitious and more spartan scale, this is exactly what I did find, with a seated demon at the door, a child swathed in tartan, Pontius Pilate wearing a veil, and images of virgins with skulls. Was Bérenger Saunière enjoying a monumental spoof? Or was there something deeply significant about all of this?
How wonderfully susceptible to invention is the human mind. In 1956, two Frenchmen, Pierre Plantard and André Bonhomme, launched an association called the Prieuré de Sion, claiming that it was of ancient provenance. None other than Godefroi de Bouillon, the Crusader who in 1097 was offered, but declined, the crown of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, was said to have been the founder. At the same time, Plantard produced a manuscript and documents to prove that Father Saunière had indeed discovered something when he renovated St Maria Magdalena at Rennes-le-Château, and what he had discovered were parchments relating to the Merovingian line of Frankish kings under the protection of the Prieuré de Sion.
Then, as so often happens when someone creates a canard, he went too far. Plantard produced a comprehensive list of the priory’s grand masters, which included the names of the great Renaissance painter and sculptor Leonardo da Vinci, the astrologer Michel de Notre-Dame (Nostradamus), the English scientist Isaac Newton, the writer Victor Hugo, the composer Claude Debussy and the surrealist film director Jean Cocteau, who had only recently died, but, had he lived, would no doubt have revelled in the accolade.2
The proposed goals of the Prieuré de Sion, Plantard announced, were the founding of a ‘Holy European Empire’ to become the next hyper-power dedicated to peace and prosperity, and the replacement of the Roman Catholic Church with an ecumenical messianic state. Derided by most, Plantard was nevertheless taken seriously by a small minority, including several writers of fiction. Pretty soon the Prieuré de Sion had gathered around it an enthusiastic cult following. It would seem that everyone, with the exception of the Catholic hierarchy, loves a wacky biblical intrigue. In 1991, Robert Plant, a member of the pop group Led Zeppelin, formed a breakaway band called the ‘Priory of Brion’, inspired by both the Prieuré de Sion and the controversial Monty Python film The Life of Brian.
Pierre Plantard died in Paris in 2000, but before that he had largely discredited himself by claiming that Roger-Patrice Pelat, a close friend of French president François Mitterrand, was at the centre of a financial scandal involving Pierre Bérégovoy, the French prime minister. Bérégovoy, claimed Plantard, was a former Grand Master of the Prieuré de Sion. As a consequence of this announcement, Pierre Plantard ended up in court, and when the judge ordered the police to conduct a search of his home, confessed to having made everything up, including the Prieuré de Sion. But who, in this complex world, can be certain he was telling the truth? Among the twenty-six names featured on Plantard’s first list of former Grand Masters of the Prieuré de Sion are those of Marie de Saint-Clair and Jean de Saint-Clair, both having strong cognate connections with the family of Rosslyn.
As we are told by its inventor and followers, the avowed purpose of the Prieuré de Sion, the secret and durable command module of the Knights Templar, has been, throughout the centuries, to protect the descendants and rightful heirs of the Merovingian dynasty, the bloodline of Christ, the Holy Grail of The Da Vinci Code. If that dynasty is indeed today vested in the royal family of Great Britain, and if there is, as some modern Templars insist, a genuine historic connection between the twelfth-century Templars, the Prieuré de Sion, and the St Clairs of Rosslyn, can it be only a coincidence that Commander Peter Loughborough, 7th Earl of Rosslyn, inheritor of the ancient Barony of Rosslyn and owner of Rosslyn Castle and Rosslyn Chapel, should, in the year 2000, have been given specific responsibility for the protection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II?