Chapter 11
In This Chapter
● Seeking the origin of The Da Vinci Code's grail
● Discovering the Priory of Sion
● Examining mysterious Rennes-le-Chateau in France
The legends of the Templars are inextricably tied to faith, power, treasure, mystery, and secrecy. Historians, archeologists, theologians, Freemasons, and barking-mad nutcases have all had their various takes on what the Knights Templar may have known and possessed, where they hid it, and whether it still exists, whatever it is. Or was. Or might have been.
For centuries, the myth was simply that the Templars had a vast treasure, and that they managed to get it out of France before their mass arrests in 1307 and hide it somewhere. (We discuss most of these theories in Chapter 7.) But throughout the last half of the 20th century, a new notion began to appear in some corners of speculative research. For hundreds of years, the Templars had been linked with, among other revered, mythical objects, the Holy Grail. This new theory came at the Grail legend with a different take: that maybe the Grail wasn’t a cup, a goblet, or a “thing” after all. Perhaps the Grail was an idea. Perhaps the Grail itself was something that had to be hidden away, not because it was a priceless relic, but because it was a truth that would shock Christians and Christianity. And perhaps it had to be hidden during the volatile times of the Templars because it amounted to heresy, and people got burned to a crispy crunch for such things.
These various disparate theories of the Templar and Holy Grail myths, a strange secret society, all collided in the obscure and mysterious French village of Rennes-le-Chateau before they became the basis of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code.
Holy Couple: The Search for the Bloodline of Christ
If you are part of the tiny handful of folks who hasn’t read The Da Vinci Code, allow us to spoil the ending for you. The “shocking” revelation of the book is that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that they had a daughter together, and that, after the death of Christ, his wife and child were secretly taken out of Jerusalem for their protection to the south of France. Further, for their own motives, early leaders of the Catholic Church eliminated any scriptural mention of such a marriage, and worse, to hide their tracks, spread the propaganda that Mary Magdalene was, in fact, a prostitute. In Chapter 13, we look in detail at this part of the legend in particular, but we give you the short version here.
The biblical account of Mary Magdalene
Mary Magdalene has had a troubled past in Christian interpretation of the Bible over the centuries. Unfortunately for the sake of clarity, there were too many Marys populating the New Testament. Apart from Christ’s mother,
Mary, there is Mary of Bethany (the sister of Lazarus and Martha, who appears in Luke 10:38-42 and John 11:1-2), and Mary Magdalene who is described in Luke 8:2 and even several lesser Marys, such as Mary the mother of James and Joseph and an early follower of Jesus. Jesus casts out demons from Mary Magdalene, healing her “evil spirits and infirmities,” and she goes with him and the disciples to Jerusalem. She has also been identified by various scholars as the “woman with the alabaster box” who anoints Jesus’s head with oil just before his arrest.
Mary Magdalene is present at the crucifixion, and she is the one who discovers the empty tomb, where Christ appears to her. She’s also present at the resurrection. Many have claimed that the wedding at Cana, when Jesus turned water into wine, was, in fact, the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Some have also claimed that, in Christ’s time, it would have been almost unheard of for a Jewish man of his age to have been unmarried (unlike today, when at 33, millions of men of every faith are just starting to think about moving out of their parents’ basement).
In the end, the theory comes down to the supposition that Mary Magdalene would not have been present at so many important points in the story of Jesus unless they had been married. The problem has always been, and will always be, that such a theory can’t be proved. There is no biblical passage, no Gnostic document, no Dead Sea Scroll, no chiseled inscription, no nothing that even remotely hints that Jesus and Mary were married. However, for some who use a peculiar brand of circular logic, lack of proof is enough “proof” that the evidence has been destroyed.
The legend
This notion of a marriage between Mary and Jesus is not a new one. In spite of the frenzy of The Da Vinci Code, it has been around for centuries. The story goes that, because Jesus had been arrested by the Romans, Jerusalem was too dangerous for Mary, his wife, which admittedly makes sense. Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy friend of the family who had provided his own tomb for Jesus’s body after the crucifixion, took Mary, who was pregnant, and fled to the south of France, possibly stopping first in the Jewish community of the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. There, she had the child of Christ. (As we discuss in Chapter 10, Joseph of Arimathea got around. The English think he went to Glastonbury, too.)
Eventually, so the tale continues, Jesus and Mary’s daughter Sarah married into the family that would eventually become the Merovingian line of French kings, who ruled between the fifth and eighth centuries. These “divinely descended” kings, included the great Clovis I, who is considered to be the founder of France, the first king to successfully unite the nation of Gaul.
Further “proof” of a connection to Mary Magdalene cited by some authors is the very name Merovingian itself. It has long been established that the origin of the name comes from Merovech, the father of Childeric I, founder of the legendary dynasty of Frankish kings in the fifth century. Margaret Starbird contends that it is derived from the roots mer (Mary) and vin (vine, as in the dynastic vine of the line of David, a metaphor used a few times in the Bible).
We both speak French, and to our ears, mer has always meant “sea,” and vin has always meant “wine,” two things that go great together. But we digress.
Because centuries of dynastic families, from the Seljuq Turks to the Tudors and Plantagenets and the Capetians of France, have almost uniformly followed the grand old tradition of taking their dynastic name from their founding father, we tend to side with the Encyclopedia Britannica on this one.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail: The Legend Rediscovered
In 1982, three authors co-wrote a book that brought the Mary Magdalene story to a modern audience, with a few twists. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln published The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (or its simpler U.S. title, Holy Blood, Holy Grail), based on a documentary film made by Lincoln. In the book, they told the tale of Mary Magdalene’s flight from Jerusalem to the south of France, and the fate of her supposed offspring.
Here are some of the claims they make:
● The term Holy Grail in French is San Greal. But by moving the space between the words by one character, it spells Sang Real, meaning “Royal Blood” in medieval French.
As interesting a word game as that may be, it is just that: a word game, like attaching a solemn, historical, ecclesiastical significance to the fact that god is dog spelled backwards. There is no instance, before Baigent et al that anyone else ever spelled San Greal as Sang Real.
● Jesus and his followers staged the crucifixion and the resurrection, and Christ lived to a ripe old age outside of the Holy Land — a recycling of the worn (and discredited) theory of the 1965 Hugh Schonfield book, The Passover Plot.
● A secret society, known as the Priory of Sion, was created in A.D. 1099 to protect the secret of the bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalene, a royal lineage that leads all the way back to the Old Testament’s King David.
● The Priory of Sion formed the Knights Templar as a military and financial wing.
● The Catholic Church killed off the Knights Templar and other groups like the Cathars to thwart the Priory’s plan to restore Christ and Mary Magdalene’s bloodline as the hereditary head of the Church, as opposed to the apostolic succession of Peter, through whom the popes claimed their authority.
● The Priory’s ultimate aim was to restore the Merovingian dynasty to the throne of France, and eventually to place them on the thrones of all the kingdoms of Europe. Finally, they would make a Merovingian the King of Israel.
● The modern-day mystery of the Priory was centered around a small town in southwestern France called Rennes-le-Chateau, and the strange activities of a certain Catholic priest in the late 1800s. Father Berenger Sauniere had inexplicably become very wealthy, and the book alleged that he had found documents in the little town’s church that led to a treasure, as well as a secret he used to blackmail the Vatican.
● A 1640 painting, The Arcadian Shepherds, by Nicolas Poussin, was said to contain a Latin phrase that was an anagram for “Begone! I keep God’s secrets.” It was further speculated that a tomb depicted in the painting was located in the hills near Rennes-le-Chateau, that it contained the bones of Jesus or some other important religious figure, or perhaps buried treasure, and that this was the secret that Father Sauniere discovered, the secret of the Priory of Sion.
● Sauniere made extensive alterations to the church in Rennes-le-Chateau, along with several suspiciously expensive construction projects that contained strange details that referenced Mary Magdalene.
The “married Messiah” part of the tale was not new. It was a common legend in France for centuries, and William E. Phipps had recently (in 1970) published a book called Was Jesus Married? The Distortion of Sexuality in the Christian Tradition. It was the Priory of Sion wrinkle that charted new territory. The authors claimed their hypothesis was based on new evidence. But that evidence had come from none other than a member of the Priory of Sion. In the following section, we examine the many claims made in Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
The Priory of Sion
Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln based their theories principally on a book published in France in the 1960s, LOr de Rennes (The Gold of Rennes, later republished under the title Le Tresur Maudit de Rennes-le-Chateau) by Gerard de Sede, along with a tale told to them by a Frenchman named Pierre Plantard.
As we discuss in Chapter 7, there is a long tradition among so-called secret societies of inventing mythical and ancient pedigrees for themselves. The Priory of Sion was no different. While certain documents claimed that the Priory was a thousand years old, it was actually started in 1956, in the French town of Annemasse, to promote the cause of cheap government housing. Really.
French law required that all clubs and associations had to be registered with the government, so the Priory sent in the appropriate forms listing Pierre Plantard, Andre Bonhomme, Jean Delaval, and Armand Defago as officers. Its purported purpose was for the “education and mutual aid” of its members, with its headquarters in Plantard’s apartment. But Plantard had bigger dreams for the Priory, hoping it would become an influential association of men dedicated to reviving chivalric virtues and restoring the monarchy. Oh, and there was one other trifling item on his agenda: He wanted to become the King of France.
Plantard claimed that he was a descendant of the Merovingian kings, and therefore, according to Holy Blood, Holy Grail, that made him related to Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and even the Old Testament’s King David. Of course, it should be noted here that, according to Jewish history and tradition, Zerubbabel, who led the Jews back to Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity, was the end of the Davidic line, regardless of the claims of Jesus being of the House of David in the New Testament.
The “Secret Parchments"
The proof of the existence of the Priory of Sion initially came from a series of documents “discovered” in 1975 in the Bibliotheque Nationale, the national archives of France, located in Paris. Of course, “discovered” is a strong word, since Plantard had planted the documents there himself in the 1960s.
Four documents were said to have been found by Father Sauniere inside of a hollow column in the church, sealed in wooden tubes. One document was a small parchment, written in medieval Latin, that contained a secret code. When deciphered, the message read, "A Dagobert II Roi et a Sion est ce tresor, et il est la mort” (To King Dagobert II and to Sion does this treasure belong, and he is there dead). The first clue that the message was, perhaps, a modern one is that the decoded message was in modern French, deciphered from a supposedly medieval Latin source.
Les Dossiers Secret
Another document was described as the “Secret Dossiers,” which listed a continuous lineup of “Grand Masters” of the Priory of Sion going back to A.D. 1188. Along with a sprinkling of templar Grand Masters, it included some stellar names:
● Leonardo Da Vinci (Italian painter, sculptor, scientist, inventor; the original Renaissance man)
● Victor Hugo (French author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables)
● Isaac Newton (renowned English scientist of the Enlightenment)
● Claude Debussy (French classical composer)
● Jean Cocteau (20th-century French artist, surrealist, poet, and filmmaker)
Another of the documents contained a list of the descendants of the Merovingian line since King Dagobert II’s assassination in 679. History says his son Sigebert IV died at the same time, but the parchment claims he actually fled to Rennes-le-Chateau, and became known as the “Plant-Ard,” from whence Pierre Plantard’s family name descended. It further alleged that this bloodline produced the Blancheford family, of which a Grand Master of the Templars, Bertrand de Blancheford, was a member, along with none other than Pope Clement V. Godfroi de Bouillon, first Christian protector of Jerusalem, was also said to be a descendant.
Rennes-le-Chateau
The picturesque village of Renne-le-Chateau is in a beautiful location, albeit off the beaten path. It sits in the Pyrenees, right in the middle of Templar territory, along with a region once populated by Cathars. It’s surrounded by castle ruins and other evidence of long-forgotten battles and the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade. In the 1950s, getting to Rennes-le-Chateau was difficult, and not many tourists came to wander its charming, medieval streets. A local hotel owner, Noel Corbu, wanted to change that. What the town needed to beef up its economy was a surefire tourist trap. So he invented one.
Corbu spread the rumor that a 19th-century priest in the village, Father Berenger Sauniere, had discovered certain parchments during a remodeling of the church in 1892. The parchments apparently detailed the secret location of a buried treasure. According to Corbu’s rumor, Sauniere had found a secret cache of cash, or at least a vast store of some kind of treasure. And thus, the first mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau was born. Of course, Corbu had an inside track on the story, or so he said — he had bought Sauniere’s home, the Villa Bethanie, and opened it as the Hotel de la Tour in May of 1955. His tall tale first appeared in a series of articles in the regional newspaper La Depeche Du Midi in 1956.
Father Sauniere and the treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau
In 1897, the little parish priest really did suddenly embark on a major redecoration of the church, seemingly — at first — with no visible source of income. Then, between 1901 and 1905, the truth was that Sauniere did go on a building spree, constructing an estate, a gothic-styled tower with a breathtaking view that served as his private library (the Tour Magdala), as well as gardens and terraces. So where did he get the money? Did he find buried treasure?
The rumor that he had excavated under the church altar and found skeletons and gold was just that — a rumor, made up as the tales of the priest were further embellished over the years. The truth was far duller. It seems that the late 1800s were volatile politically in France, and there was a growing conflict between the Catholic Church and the government. Sauniere was a reluctant priest, but a rabid, pro-monarchial, anti-republican firebrand, and there was a strong desire among Catholics at the time for France to shuck off its republic and return to having a king. Sauniere found a way to capitalize on that sentiment. He began to “sell” masses, meaning, for a donation, he would offer up the Sunday Mass for God to wipe out the republic and bring back a monarchy. These days, it may be difficult to imagine that such a scheme would make much more than pocket change. Au contraire.
Sauniere took out ads in religious magazines and journals all over France, like Semaine Religieuse, La Croix, Leclair, L’Express du Midi, L’Univers, and Le Telegramme. His moneymaking scheme actually created an embarrassing problem for him. Priests were allowed to say no more than three masses a day, and Sauniere received literally thousands of paid requests, far more than he could ever honor. He was literally “trafficking” in masses.
Over the years, the priest made lots of money with this method, as well as having what appeared to have been an affair with a wealthy lady in town. These were the real sources of income he used to redecorate the church and build a house and the Magdalene Tower. There has never been any proof that Sauniere found a treasure, and the “millions of francs” that he was said to have had in his possession have never been substantiated.
It took 25 years, but the Church finally caught on to (or got fed up with) Sauniere’s side business. He was dismissed as a priest in 1911 and died in 1917. By every bit of evidence that exists, including his failed attempts to borrow against his house in 1913, along with his will, he died in poverty — scarcely the life of a man who amassed millions.
Blackmail?
Another rumor was that part of what Sauniere discovered were documents that “proved” Jesus was not divine, and that he and his followers had staged the crucifixion and resurrection. Indeed, Holy Blood, Holy Grail speculates that Jesus was crucified on “private property” where it would have been simple to stage a phony crucifixion, and that perhaps even Pontius Pilate was a willing accomplice. Sauniere supposedly used this blockbuster information to blackmail the Vatican into paying him millions in hush money.
What makes this contention curious is that the same people who trot out this concept adhere to the notion that the Jesus/Mary bloodline was “divine,” without seeing any contradiction.
The strange church in Rennes-le-Chateau
The village church was consecrated in A.D. 1059 and is dedicated to Mary Magdalene. In spite of the provable hoaxes involved in this story, the church really does have some oddities installed by Sauniere.
The inscription over the church door reads, “Terribilis Est Locus Iste,” which generally gets translated by tourists, tour guides, and authors of sensational books as “How terrible is this place!” But it is actually taken from a line in Genesis 28:17, after Jacob awakens from his dream in which he saw a ladder rising to heaven: “How awesome is this place! This is the house of God, and the gate of heaven, and it will be called the palace of God.” Awesome, not terrible.
Gerard de Sede claimed in his writings that Sauniere made alterations to the church worth “millions of francs.” Other researchers have studied the work and come up with a figure one-fiftieth of de Sede’s estimation. Several of the “mysterious” statues and decorations that are supposedly one of a kind and bizarre were actually manufactured of plaster; some of them match others provided to several churches in the region. Sauniere ordered them plain and painted them himself.
Outlandish claims have been made concerning some of the statuary, especially the Stations of the Cross, including that the priest added details that point to Freemasonry, Mary Magdalene worship, and other curiosities. Upon actually examining them, some of these suggestions seem to be figments of the imagination. For instance, a child is seen watching as Christ passes by with the Cross. The blanket wrapped around the child’s backside is clearly a Hebrew-style cloth pattern, but some have said it is “plaid” and, therefore, alludes to Scottish Freemasonry!
Nevertheless, the strangest addition Sauniere made was a large statue of a demon that greets visitors as they enter the church. It is supposedly Asmodeus, a demon who appears in several non-biblical Jewish stories of the Book of Tobit. Some legends claim that he was a demon who was tricked by King Solomon into helping to build the Temple in Jerusalem. That’s what tourists are told. But the Asmodeus association was first made by none other than Pierre Plantard, and not before, in order to make the tenuous link to Solomon’s Temple, the Templars, and maybe even the Freemasons. Others have interpreted the image of the Devil as Sauniere’s swipe at the French Republic, while the baptismal font opposite showing Christ’s baptism symbolized the French Monarchy.
Another whopper is the supposed tomb of Sigebert IV within the church. There is no evidence whatsoever that the son of King Dagobert II survived his documented death in 679, and “secretly” fled to Rennes-le-Chateau. No evidence except the word of Pierre Plantard. No one had ever heard such a legend until he came along.
There are also several references to Mary Magdalene in Sauniere’s new decor. A Latin inscription had been painted under the altar that has since been defaced by vandals. It read JESUMEDELA VULNERUMSPES UNA POENITENTIUM PER MAGDALENAE LACRYMAS PECCATA NOSTRA DILUAS (JESUS, YOU REMEDY AGAINST OUR PAINS AND ONLY HOPE FOR OUR REPENTANCE, IT IS THANKS TO MAGDALENE’S TEARS THAT YOU WASH OUR SINS AWAY). Some researchers have said that the Latin is poorly constructed and contains deliberate errors that a Catholic priest like Sauniere would not have made. Perhaps. But there is nothing especially odd about the church being decorated with paintings and quotations dealing with Mary Magdalene — it has been dedicated to her for 1,000 years. She’s a popular saint throughout the entire region.
The peculiar Pierre Plantard
Pierre Plantard had a mighty unusual methodology for an aspiring king. Between 1937 and 1945, during World War II, he engaged in a series of schemes that caught the attention of Paris police. He was accused on several occasions of inventing phony anit-Semitic and anti-Masonic organizations, dedicated to the “purification” of France. They seem to have existed largely to scam money from their members. A police report issued on May 9, 1941, by Paris police while under the occupation of Nazi troops stated:
La Renovation Nationale Fran^aise seems to be a “phantom” group whose existence is purely a figment of the imagination of M. Plantard. Plantard claims 3,245 members, whereas this organization currently only has four members (the executive committee).
It was the sort of outlandish claim that he would use again and again. Plantard couldn’t stay out of trouble, doing jail time in 1953 for “abuse of trust,” and again between 1956 and 1957 for the “corruption of minors.” In the 1960s, he met up with French author Gerard de Sede, and began feeding him outrageous claims about the Priory — that it was connected to the Knights Templar, that it was protecting the bloodline of Christ and Mary, and that he was, himself, descended from France’s King Dagobert II, the last of the Merovingian kings.
The perfect marriage of a man and a myth
Plantard came to Rennes-le-Chateau like hundreds of others did in the 1950s — in search of hidden treasure. Treasure hunters, drawn by Corbu’s phony story about Father Sauniere’s buried gold, came from all over Europe with shovels and metal detectors and started to dig in the hills around the village. The garden on the old estate of Sauniere was dug up, rocks from his terrace were chipped out and stolen, the church was ransacked, and even the occasional dynamite explosion rocked the countryside as the searchers blew up possible hiding places.
The town archives of Rennes-le-Chateau burned to the ground in 1961, and suddenly the Priory of Sion hoaxers had a fortuitous opportunity. If no documents could be accessed about the early history of the village, they could simply make it up.
Philippe de Cherisey
Plantard and his friends began to design an elaborate hoax, centered around Corbu’s phony rumors about Sauniere, and tying it to the tale of the Priory of Sion. Plantard constructed an increasingly complex story. He made the acquaintance of an odd character named Philippe de Cherisey, who was a part-time actor with a fascination for surrealism and esoteric puzzles.
They deposited a series of phony documents in Paris’ Bibliotheque Nationale in the mid-1960s, and sent author Gerard de Sede to go look for them in 1975. These became the basis for de Sede’s original book about the mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau, which led to Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln’s subsequent, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and an avalanche of others, including Picknett and Prince’s more skeptical The Templar Revelation. The documents were purported to be copies of parchments that Sauniere had supposedly found in his church. The peculiarity that they were mere photocopies instead of the real thing was easy to explain — the archives of their village had burned down, but, so the tale went, the Mayor had made copies of the documents Father Sauniere had supposedly found in his church. It is important to understand that no original documents have ever been produced, only copies and transcriptions. So, the entire “proof” of the existence of the Priory of Sion has been based on two Xerox copies.
De Cherisey is believed to have been the source of the coded Latin parchment. Investigations revealed that the document was a modern forgery, and had been poorly copied from a Latin text of Luke 6 known as the Codex Bezae. De Cherisey had no knowledge of Latin, which explains the errors in the text. The larger document was copied from a modern Latin Vulgate text of John 12 from 1889, and not from a medieval source.
The most important part of the Rennes-le-Chateau tale centers around these so-called parchments that Father Sauniere found while renovating his church. The truth is that Noel Corbu invented the story of the parchments to begin with, and Philippe de Cherisey drew them. In 1974, de Cherisey admitted it in writing when he was embroiled in a dispute with Gerard de Sede over being paid for his artwork he had created — the parchments!
The priory exposed
Over the years, every piece of so-called evidence of the existence of the Priory of Sion has been debunked, and many through the admission of the original pranksters. In the 1990s, both Plantard and de Cherisey went on the warpath against the original author who told their story, Gerard de Sede. They both fessed up and gave their original phony documents and written confessions to French author Jean-Luc Chaumeil.
The funniest aspect of this long, complex hoax is that Pierre Plantard himself, source of the Priory of Sion information, ridiculed the Jesus/Mary-bloodline aspect of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. He made no such claim himself that he was descended from Christ’s bloodline, only that he was related to King Dagobert II, the last of the Merovingian kings. Of course, given his antiSemitic writings during World War II, it’s probable that Plantard would have rejected the notion that he was descended from a Jew, no matter how divine the Jew may have been. Over the years, Plantard insisted on several name changes. Pierre of France had a noble, kingly feel to it. His later nom de hoax, Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, was a transparently silly attempt to tie in with the Scottish Templars and Freemasons (see Chapter 7 for a discussion of the many Saint Clairs and the myths that surround them).
In 1993, Pierre Plantard inserted himself into an unrelated, sensational case involving financial fraud. It was a notorious investigation in France that had nothing to do with the Priory of Sion, involving French millionaire Roger Patrice Pelat and his influential friends in the government. Plantard voluntarily came forward and testified that Pelat was, in reality, a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. The suspicious judge, Thierry Jean Pierre, had Plantard investigated, discovering his loopy contention that he was the rightful King of France. Eventually, he confessed under oath that the entire story of the
Priory of Sion had been an elaborate hoax that he had spent almost 40 years fueling. Plantard was rebuked by the judge for playing games with France’s judicial system, and he vanished into obscurity. He died in 2000 without ever getting the chance to place his backside on the purple cushion of the throne of France.
Was any of it real?
There actually was an Abbey of St. Mary of Mount Zion in the 12th century in Jerusalem. It was a small monastery of Augustinean monks (known as canons), whose order was created in 1143 by papal decree of Pope Celestine II. It was built over the ruins of an earlier Byzantine church, the Hagia Zion, but was destroyed by Muslims in 1219. But there is absolutely no connection between the abbey and the Priory of Sion.
Alas, the Priory of Sion in Holy Blood, Holy Grail was nothing but a figment of Plantard’s imagination. Many other books have been published basing their “research” on the accounts related by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, including The Da Vinci Code. In fact, an entire industry has grown up around the mystery of Sauniere, Mary Magdalene, and this enigmatic little village in the Pyrenees. But they’re constructing their premise on what has been proved to be the sandy foundation of an elaborate hoax.
Meanwhile, the tale is told and retold to the tourists. More than 100,000 came to the village in 2006 alone, and frankly, the villagers are sick to death of it. But the truth is, there were no Sauniere parchments, and there is no mystery in Rennes-le-Chateau.