The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (26 page)

Over the doorway to the church there is a Latin inscription: “Terribilis est locus iste,” which means “This place is terrible.” The inscription serves as a warning to the visitor who is next greeted by a statue of the pagan Middle Eastern demon Asmodeus, who reputedly built the Temple of Solomon and is regarded as a keeper of secrets and a guardian of treasure—not a typical feature in a Christian church. Another statue is of the Virgin Mary, with the word
MISSION
on the pedestal; the letters
are separated are to spell
MIS
SION
, possibly referring to the Prieuré de Sion. The altar has two Jesus children facing each other, which could be a reference to the Cathar dualistic belief or, according to one Gnostic author, a reference to the idea that Jesus had a twin. Saunière’s church also had a very unusual set of depictions of the Stations of the Cross. One station had Marie looking into a cave. Was he telling us that Marie knew where the Merovingian treasure was secured? Another station featured a child dressed in Scottish plaid. Was Father Saunière leaving his own message that something from Jerusalem was being guarded and that someone in Scotland might be an heir to such secrets?

Saunière also built a home for himself, which he dubbed the Villa Bethania. Its cost in today’s terms would be close to five hundred thousand dollars, and it was considered the greatest house in the area. The name itself might be another clue. In Aramaic,
beth
translates to “house” and
ania
to “sky” or “heaven.” The close friend of Jesus, Lazarus, who was miraculously rescued from the tomb, lived at his own home in Bethany with Martha. Martha is one of the followers who allegedly went to France with the fleeing companions of Jesus. Saunière left the house, and his secrets, to his housekeeper. Father Saunière’s church and home hold only clues—he personally did not reveal much to anyone. His own superiors demanded to know the source of his wealth, and he refused to tell them. When the new bishop of Carcassonne suspended him, the Vatican interceded and reinstated him. He also flaunted his new lifestyle by living openly with his housekeeper. The Church made threats but did nothing. Someone else may have made threats that were taken more seriously.

A priest in the nearby village of Coustaussa, the curé Gellis, was killed in his presbytery in 1893. His murder was brutal (he was finished off with an ax), and he was then laid out “solemnly and respectfully.” Even though he kept great sums of money that belonged to the Church, they were left untouched. Only a locked deed box had been broken into. It was not the only mysterious death in the area before or after Saunière’s own mysterious death. Abbé Boudet, a close friend of Saunière and an expert in Celtic stone structures helped him decipher some of the local monuments. How much Saunière shared with Boudet is unknown, but Boudet was healthy when he was visited by “sinister strangers” and died within hours of their departure.
⁷
In modern times three additional bodies were removed from the ground outside of Saunière’s home.

Saunière’s death was also very suspicious. He had been active and healthy on January 12, when his housekeeper ordered his coffin and paid for it in advance. Then, on the feast day of Saint Sulpice, he suffered a stroke. The date of January 17 is interesting because it is the same date as that on the tombstone of the marquise d’Hautpoul de Blanchefort, which Saunière had obliterated. Saint Sulpice is also the place where Father Saunière went to research whatever he found in the altar columns. Before his death he called for a local priest to hear his last confession. Father Rivière is said to have been shocked by what he heard, refused Saunière the last sacrament, and became ill immediately afterward. He did not go back to work for months. On January 23, Saunière died.

The housekeeper, Marie Dénarnaud, lived on for years after Saunière’s death. The source of her wealth, of course, was considered to be the treasure found by Saunière. In 1946 the French government ordered that all old currency be replaced with new currency as part of the rebuilding of its financial system after the occupation by the Germans. Marie was seen burning large denominations of currency. She did not want to explain its source. Without money, she sold the Villa Bethania, the house that she inherited from Saunière, to a friend. She told her friend and close companion that she would reveal her secret to the buyer when she was near death. To the buyer, Noël Corbu, she said, “My friend you walk on gold, but you do not know it.” Marie also told him that what she would reveal would make him a “powerful” man. A mysterious choice of words, points out one writer—she did not say “rich.” She later suffered a stroke and was unable to speak. She went to her grave, allegedly, without making any revelation. Corbu himself died in 1968 in a suspicious car accident.
⁸

The mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau and the source of Father Saunière’s sudden wealth have been the subject of many theories. The source of the buried treasure alone could point in several directions. Might it be the loot of ancient Celts who raided Europe and then retired to France? Or the treasure of barbarian Visigoths who raided Rome and then settled
in the Rennes-le-Chateau area? Or is it Cathar treasure brought to safety at the last minute by a handful of survivors and hidden in caves?

The involvement of the Bishop of Carcassonne, the director of Saint Sulpice in Paris, and later the intercession by the Vatican on behalf of a less than orthodox priest point to a greater secret. What could have been unearthed in a tiny mountain village to bring such great attention to the village of Rennes-le-Chateau?

The Merovingian Dynasty and the Family of Jesus

Dagobert II was the last of the kings of Merovingian France.
⁹
When Merovingian power was being challenged after his father’s death, Dagobert was sent to live in a monastery in Slane in Ireland. He married a Celtic princess, Mathilde, in
A.D.
666; she died giving birth to his third daughter. In
A.D.
670 he married again. His second wife was Giselle de Razes, the daughter of the count of Razes and granddaughter to the Visigothic king. The wedding was celebrated at Rennes-le-Chateau, her home and the capital of her fiefdom. The Visigoths are the first people after the Gaulish Celts who shared their territory with the exiles of the Holy Lands. The Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus may have married into Visigothic families—the name “Razes” recalls an Aramaic word
razi
meaning “my secret.” Today there remain several villages in the surrounding area with Razes in the name. The Visigoths invaded the south of France during the fall of Rome. They were followed by the Merovingians, whose rule of France was lost to the Carolingians after the death of Dagobert II.

The
Life of Wilfred,
written in the eighth century, is one source that mentions Dagobert II; outside that we see little reference to him. According to
The Merovingian Kingdoms,
“The general silence of the sources … suggests that the episode was one over which Merovingians and Carolingians both wished to draw a veil.”
¹⁰
If Zion and Dagobert shared a treasure, it could be theorized that it was the loot from the Temple of Solomon. The thesis of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail—
whether they shared a secret as well—is that the family of Jesus, exiled to France, had heirs and a dynasty that survived the centuries.

The Carolingians had planned for the Merovingian dynasty to end with Dagobert II. On December 23, 674, he was murdered while hunting in the forest surrounding his northern seat of power at Stenay. A son of Dagobert II could legitimately claim power because he was in a more direct line in the bloodline of kings. The veil drawn by the usurpers was not pierced until the seventeenth century when more evidence of the life of Dagobert II surfaced.

As far-fetched as both the existence and the significance of such genealogies seems today, there is a good body of evidence that shows how much value was placed in such records. The Gospel of Matthew set great store on tracing the genealogy of Jesus back to David.
¹¹
It was the basis of his kingship and his fulfillment of the prophecies. The Old Testament, too, shows genealogies that stretched from Adam to Noah and to Abraham and David. Eusebius records that the family of Jesus expounded his genealogy in the same chapter where he tells of Herod’s exile to France.
¹²
The Romans searched for these genealogies, but we have no record that they found them. They wanted to lay hands on them to destroy any claims to a throne that could be based on their existence.

Another early historian, Hegesippus, writing of the family of Jesus, says that surviving relatives accused the Roman rulers of ferreting out, capturing, and killing the heirs in the Davidic line as well as destroying the genealogies of Jewish nobles.
¹³
Clearly, the genealogies held great importance. They appear to be missing, and at the same time there is no record of their destruction. We can easily make a case that these historic documents were hidden. Did Saunière find them?

Saunière left the world only clues to a great mystery. One clue to the nature of the treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau was found on the gravestone that Saunière eradicated. “Reddis Regis Cellis Arcis” read the grave marker, which translates loosely to “At Royal Reddis, the cave of the fortress.” According to
Holy Blood, Holy Grail,
Reddis (or Rhedae) was the name the Celts had given to what would later become Rennes-le-Chateau. The root
rede
also has the meaning “to guard.” This marker may alternatively be translated as meaning “the Caves [at Arques] Guard the Ruler.”

The south of France is full of caves and man-made tunnels as well as
legends of hidden treasure. It would be possible that the source of Saunière’s wealth was something that anyone in the vicinity could have stumbled across. He was only twenty miles from the fortress of Montsegur, from which the Cathar treasure might have been saved at the last moment. The author Jean Blum reports on one cache of gold being found and taken to a jeweler. The jeweler had trouble in determining just what purity the gold was because the objects contained added minerals he had never seen present in gold jewelry. He gave a bracelet to his son, who was an atomic engineer. The son determined that the element added to the gold was cobalt. Since cobalt was added only to African gold, Blum deduces that it was part of the stolen treasures of Solomon.

While any explorer or treasure seeker could have stumbled across such a cache, only Saunière had access to the altar stone and the genealogies and coded tombstone that directed him to the treasure—a treasure possibly owned by Zion and by the Merovingian king Dagobert II. The Frankish Merovingians were part of the huge barbarian wave that was being pushed westward by the Huns from Central Asia. Their history and roots are shrouded in legend. The Merovingian kings have their own telling of the story of their descent from King Clodio. After the king had impregnated his queen, she went swimming in the ocean. There she came upon a sea creature, who impregnated her a second time. The sea creature was a “Quinotaur”; of such a beast we have no description.
¹⁴
To the queen a child was born, who carried the blood of kings and the blood of a sea beast. He was named Merovee, which, like the name Mary, has connotations related to the sea.

The legend could be a literary device to explain the intermingling of two great powers. Just as Jesus was the descendant of the priest Aaron and the king David, Merovee, too, had great and powerful ancestors—one a king, who in Europe before the French Revolution would typically claim to rule by divine right, and the other a supernatural creature. As a result of this unusual bloodline, the Merovingians claimed the ability to heal by the “laying on of hands,” a power that the Essenes were reputed to command, as did Jesus, whose healing is recorded in the Gospels. Merovingians also believed that their power resided in their hair, which could never be cut. In the case of Samson, too, his hair was the source of
his power. When the once long-haired Spartans defeated the Argives in 564
B.C.
, they forced the Argives to cut their hair in recognition of the fact that the Argives no longer had a claim to the Peloponnesos. Hair also featured significantly for James, the brother of Jesus, who was regarded as holy by Eusebius because “no razor touched his head.” We remember also that the words
caesar
and
czar
are derived from the German for “kaiser,” meaning crown of hair. The Merovingians, then, were like Jesus, priest-kings with both supernatural ability and a royal blood-line stemming from earthly kings.

The grandson of Merovee, the half-man, half-fish founder of the dynasty, was Clovis, the conqueror of the Visigoths.
¹⁵
The comparison with Jesus holds no further coincidence with this brutal ruler. He did not lack in imagination as he plotted to consolidate his role as king of France. He told the son of another king, Sigibert, to murder his father, which the son, Cholderic, did. Cholderic then showed Clovis a chest of gold coins he had taken from his father. While Cholderic bent over the chest, Clovis split his head with an ax. Another minor king was beheaded alongside his son for challenging Clovis.

History tells us that Clovis converted to Catholicism to appease his wife, but a more likely reason was that the diabolical Clovis needed a strong ally and the Roman Church proved such a powerful friend and provided justification for attacking the neighboring Visigoths. Marriage had given him Burgundy. Once an Arian, he stated, “It grieves me that these Arians should hold a part of Gaul.”
¹⁶
With support, he soon extended France to its historical limits. After the death of Clovis his kingdom was again divided, among his four sons.