The Rennes le Chateau Hoax Riddle
By the 1950s events had conspired against Harold T Wilkins. For the past twenty years he had attempted to cultivate the release of the real story of the lost Temple Treasure but it had come to naught. The world he had known had passed.
He decided to leave for posterity the final part to the grand riddle. This part would be the direct pointers to Lord George Anson and his map.
Like the rest of the world, versions of the story were being told on the continent. Knowing all the related stories and using his network of contacts a location was selected; Rennes le Chateau.
Wilkins was assisted by another associate who used the pseudonym ‘S.Roux’ and Phillipe de Cherisey. Secondary to them were Noel Corbu and Gerard de Sede. Pierre Plantard was a useful face but duped more often than not about what was really going on. Where else do you think they got most of the details? The story of Rennes le Chateau didn’t exist prior to the 1950s.
What is now known is that Rennes le Chateau was just another place searched as it seemed to conform with certain of the known clues and directions to the treasure, clues that as you now know were already well in circulation. Sauniere had come to Rennes le Chateau in 1885 and did his own low level search like so many others all over the world trying to follow the clues.
In the mess that the myth of Rennes le Chateau has become one could dismiss the whole thing as a fraud perpetrated by a group of French associates in the 1950s for their own gain.
In reality the story of Rennes le Chateau is that of it being just another hoax/riddle. To begin to unlock this particular hoax/riddle all you need to do is to remember to seek the clues hidden in plain sight.
At Rennes Le Chateau
It should be no surprise that versions of the story of the lost treasure can be found on the continent; they are found appearing all over the world.
A real directional monument to the treasure was the headstone of Marie de Negri d’Ables Hautpoul, Dame d’Hautpoul de Blanchefort who died in 1781. An Abbé Bigou buried her.
Anyone who knows anything about Lord George Anson and the treasure can just look at it and see a version of the navigational data to use for the monument map appearing as bold as brass monkeys on it. Can you?
The epitaph on her headstone was depicted in a pamphlet published in 1906 titled ‘Excursion du 25 June 1905 A Rennes le Chateau’ by Elie Tisseyre. This is the illustration of the headstone from that pamphlet. It is meant to say ‘Here lies the noble Marie de Nègre D’Arles, La Dame d’Hautpoul de Blanchefort, aged sixty seven, died 17 January 1781, May she rest in peace’. The spacing of the words and letters is noticeably odd, Hautpoul is spelt Haupoul and the Roman numeral date reads as ‘1681’ but has the letter ‘O’ in it. Many publications about the mystery of Rennes le Chateau can’t seem to make their minds up about which way Hautpoul should be spelt. The problem is compounded by the French convention of accepting both Hautpoul and Haupoul as the correct spelling. This is a leftover from the days when a scribe, listening to an oral deposition, transcribed the name as they heard it being pronounced. Both forms, Hautpoul and Haupoul could refer to the same person.
The person who put the headstone there and allowed it to be inscribed ‘badly’ is known. He was a predecessor of Sauniere, a priest called Abbé Bigou (1719-1794). It is quite evident from the level of the headstone’s codes that Bigou was not just repeating them unaware of what they actually were. He ministered to Marie de Hautpoul and buried her when she died 17th January 1781. He was the source of the clues and he fled to Spain in 1792 due to the French Revolution. Holy places of worship and priests were not excluded from the murderous rampaging of the new Republic if they did not adhere to the new order dictating that the clergy were to be made employees of the State. All priests and Bishops had to swear an allegiance to the new order under threat of dismissal, deportation or death. Bigou, who had no wish to become part of this new republic, knew if he stayed he would not remain unscathed. Bigou was a Royalist therefore had no option but to flee the country. In 1792, aged 73, he fled to Sabadell in Spain where he died aged 75 having never returned to Rennes le Chateau.
These directions can even be dated. They must at least be post 1748 when the Shepherd’s Monument was constructed because they give the clues to find it and coded navigational instructions for its use as a map. They are probably post 1762 (after Lord George Anson’s death) and, given the date they were permanently recorded on the Hautpoul headstone (1781), had their origin in this twenty year period. There would be no need for codes to find the map and its directions whilst Lord George Anson was still alive, he was after all the treasure’s living guardian.
Sauniere was a Freemason and rather a worldly priest. He did like money, luxury and sensuality, which proved to be his downfall. He was charged with simony, the trafficking of masses for money to keep his lifestyle going. Sauniere’s involvement in all this was that of wayward priest and Freemason who was attempting to follow the coded clues for the lost treasure left on Hautpoul’s headstone and conduct his own low level search.
The reports of financial transactions with and visitations by Archduke Johann von Habsburg do indicate a higher level of involvement with others privy to a Masonic insider’s knowledge of the treasure. The Archduke was there at Rennes le Chateau sniffing around in the hope of finding the missing family fortune that was spirited from their grasp by Ubilla all those years ago. The Habsburgs weren’t the only family of faded royals looking for this treasure either. The Bourbons, the other royal family involved when Ubilla and the treasure went missing were on the case also. The website of the ‘Societe Perillos’ references a 1970 article by an A M F Guy appearing in a 1970 publication named “l’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux’,
“Here is a fact about which I was recently informed and which I give for what it is worth. It appears that the case of Father Saunière has aroused, after the death of the priest, the curiosity of certain high-placed people in Spanish society. As they could not openly make inquiries in our country [France], they progressed with great caution via intermediaries and those that were not compromised. These events have remained shrouded in absolute secrecy. They go back forty years. Remains to be explained how the history of the treasure of Rennes – for it is of course about that which this is all about – could have created interest in a foreign country more than a half century ago, father Saunière having died, I believed, around 1920.”
This is then linked to a similar article in “L’independent” on the 22 March 1980 which is said to basically repeat the above story but adds that a report of matter had been commissioned but was never forwarded to the principals due to the collapse of the Spanish monarchy in 1931. Refugees of the Spanish civil war brought this report to France and though searched for by the Germans during the Second World War was never found. Nevertheless Sauniere and his search was the factual skeleton upon which Harold T Wilkins sewed the skin of the modern Rennes le Chateau myth.
The mistake made by all that has caused the mystery of Rennes le Chateau is simply the result of flawed logic that assumes because the codes and clues are found there this means the treasure is to be found there also.
Behind Rennes le Chateau
The story of Rennes le Chateau won’t be repeated here. You all know that Sauniere was supposed to find some parchments that looked like this;
These were decoded to give this message in french;
BERGERE PAS DE TENTATION QUE POUSSIN TENIERS GARDENT LA CLEF PAX DCLXXXI PAR LA CROIX ET CE CHEVAL DE DIEU J’ACHEVE CE DAEMON DE GARDIEN A MIDI POMMES BLEUES
and in English;
SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION THAT POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE KEY PEACE 681 BY THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE (or I DESTROY) THIS DAEMON GUARDIAN AT MIDDAY BLUE APPLES.
Also for some reason not fully explained Sauniere is said to have known that Poussin’s painting ‘Shepherds of Arcadia’ and a Teniers’ painting about St Anthony were important.
It gets suggested that the above message is given by ‘decoding’ Hautpoul’s gravestones as it can be anagrammed from the 128 letters produced by adding the 119 letters used on the headstone’s epitaph to the 9 ‘key’ letters of P S P R A E C U M indicated by the double-headed arrow on an illustration of the grave slab of Marie de Hautpoul that appeared in fake pamphlet called, ‘Pierres Gravees du Languedoc’. The name of Eugene Stublein was used for the ‘author’ of this pamphlet. Eugene Stublein was a real astronomer and meteorologist who had a history of publishing minor works in history and antiquity. On the bottom left of the slab image is supposed to be his signature but this bears no resemblance to Eugene Stublein’s real signature. This little problem tends to get removed from copies of the slab’s illustration. Something else that also gets removed is the roman numerals LIXLIXL in the lower right hand side. Do you recognise those roman numerals as a clue to Harold T Wilkins’ involvement in all this? Put them into arabic numerals and you’ll recognise them.
Harold T Wilkins died in 1960 so was no longer around to provide further input. As a homage to him all his work was taken over and cranked into high gear by de Cherisey and one Robert Charroux.
De Cherisey and Charroux, aided by de Sede, went on to expand the story by fabricating a number of self supporting documents. By 1965 the tactic employed was to have de Cherisey doctor up some pamphlet or booklet and anonymously submit the result to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the hope cataloguing would import a gloss of authenticity to the information. You can see all the telltale signs again of the hoax riddle; the standard methodology of mixing details of real personages, dates and events within a web of fabrication to give the overall construct the appearance of fact.
De Cherisey even produced some fake genealogies that made Plantard a direct descendant of a Merovingian king, Dagobert II.
Off on many tangents
In 1967 de Sede published the book ‘L’or de Rennes ou la vie insolite de Berenger Sauniere, Cure de Rennes le Chateau’. Shortened now to ‘Le Tresor Maudit de Rennes le Chateau’ (The Accursed Treasure of Rennes le Chateau) this is the book where the expanded story of Rennes le Chateau, including clues to the alleged treasure were given to the world.
The number of persons who to this day continue to devote time and effort to solve the mystery of Rennes le Chateau are legion. This is in part confirmed by Plantard himself, who, though being being used himself as part of the hoax/riddle, was constant in maintaining throughout it all that what is taken to be the parchments found by Sauniere were actually modern day constructs by de Cherisey that were based on something else. The ‘something else’ he was referring to was what was supplied to the ring leaders de Cherisey and Charroux by Wilkins.
The clues everyone was drip fed centered around references to some paintings that were inferred as being important; ‘The Shepherds of Arcadia II’ and a Teniers painting whose subject was St Anthony. The sleight of hand that is used to pass this information in the story by them is so subtle it can be overlooked. The ‘Shepherdess’ message only gives the names Poussin and Teniers so you just get told via the story’s narrative that Sauniere obtained copies of ‘The Shepherds of Arcadia II’ and ‘The Temptation of St Anthony’.
The story also says that the Hautpoul headstone is decoded via anagramming to produce the ‘Shepherdess’ message. The ‘Shepherdess’ message is not decoded from the Hautpoul headstone at all because anagramming is not decoding. Any anagramming here was the re-assemblage of an already known message using the letters from the headstone along with an extra 9 key letters, ACEMPPRSU. These were supplied in the story by the inclusion of the slab image in the fake Stublein pamphlet and arranged as PS PRAECUM. The phrase ‘ET IN ARCADIA EGO’ in Greek style letters on the slab image were included to further suggest the theme painting ‘The Shepherds of Arcadia’. Only via the story’s narrative is it identified which of Poussin’s two executions of the subject is to be utilized, ‘The Shepherds of Arcadia II’.
The supposed ‘decoding’ of the message using the ‘Knight’s Tour’ decoding method (a tortuous exercise based on the movement of a Knight around a chessboard on which the letters are placed) was just window dressing as they had to write the message first before they could so elaborately encode it to produce the pretend ‘decoding’.
Look to the words ‘Agee soix’, ‘Ante sept’ which are quite plainly in Latin and French on the Hautpoul headstone. They are being spaced to indicate a bearing, as ‘agee’ is short for ‘apogee’ alluding to height or latitude with ‘ante’ (as in before) alluding to depth or longitude. Part of the reason why Rennes le Chateau was then thought to be the correct location was that someone at some stage also suspected that a number code was being used on the Hautpoul headstone. By multiplying the factors of ‘soix’ (6) and ‘sept’ (7) the result gives 42, the latitude of Rennes le Chateau. It might not be obvious why the latitudinal co-ordinate of 42º (the latitude for Rennes le Chateau is actually closer to 43º) is important for the story but there is a reason. The Paris Observatory is 2º15´E of Greenwich and Rennes le Chateau is located on this longitude but that is not the answer.
Theories now speculate that the treasure is; the tomb of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of (actually written by) Jesus, Mary Magdalene’s tomb, the Holy Grail, some type of proof that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and produced offspring, some other type of proof that Mary should be worshipped instead of Jesus or a hoard of Merovingian gold. Anyone wishing to explore this subject today is faced with reports about religious fanatics, shadowy political groups, intelligence agencies, fraudsters (titular and monetary), treasure hunters and various assorted nuts.
It is nearly all but forgotten that it was originally said to be the lost treasure of the Temple of Solomon. You’ll find this little detail that everyone seems to ignore in ‘Le Tresor Maudit’.
Le Coq in the Garden of Eden
Supporting a lot of the flawed logic is the fact that the geographic location of Rennes le Chateau does seem to be indicated by part of the code on the Hautpoul headstone.
De Sede himself gives a clue to this. In ‘Le Tresor Maudit’ a reference is made to the book titled ‘La Vraie Langue Celtique et le Cromleck de Rennes -les-Bains’ (The True Celtic Language and The Stone Circles of Rennes-les-Bains). Published by Abbe Henri Boudet, priest of Rennes-le Bains (the neighbouring town to Rennes-le Chateau) in 1886, this book is endlessly dissected by Rennes le Chateau enthusiasts for clues to the treasure due to its strange nature and the language contained in it. The first part of the book is where Boudet propounds a theory that after the event of Genesis mankind spoke one universal language that was confounded during the episode of the Tower of Babel. He proposes this original language still existed and could be found in the language of the Celts and in the common English language.
Though sounding a bit bizarre today, it was really only a clever twist on a theory some 18th century scholars held and tried to linguistically prove; that Hebrew was mankind’s original language. Boudet goes about proving his theory by disassembling a French word into phonetic parts that are matched to complete English words. The English words are assembled to show the French word’s roots.
For example, when speaking of the town Roquefort, Boudet wrote;
“It is divided into two parts, in which one is called Roquefort and the other, much larger, is called Buillac. Rich in flocks of sheep, grazing unceasingly in the meadows of the hill of Garrabell, -gare, rough wool, -bell, bell, – Buillac still raises a large number of bulls and horses, -bull, bull, -hack, horse.”
Somewhat like Latcham’s book in Spanish, Boudet’s humorous exercise of English punning is a joke played on the non English speakers. Few would ever realize for example the word ‘hack’ for ‘horses’ could never have come from the Garden of Eden because it was just a slang term originating from the London suburb of Hackney where horses were stabled. To emphasize the whole thing was a joke, Boudet utilised trompe le oeil in the illustrations his brother Edmond Boudet drew for the book. In the section dealing with standing stones Boudet writes about some that stood upon a local mountain called Cugulhou,
“It is useless to insist on the assertions of the inhabitants of the country, on the Greek crosses, for even the name Cugulhou casts light on the subject. These rocks are the true menhirs but ugly ones not having the usual shape of the other standing stones, to cock, to raise up, to stand up, – ugly, ugly, deformed, awful, – to hew, to shape.”
By turning the accompanying illustration of the menhirs 90º anticlockwise, you can indeed see how Edmond has made them to cock, to raise up, to stand up, – ugly, ugly, deformed, awful, – to hew, to shape.
There is no signals or codes within these crazy writings, it is indeed all just a humorous joke written by a priest who must have had too much time (and altar wine) on his hands.
In the book however is map drawn by Edmond that marks the position of groups of standing stones in the area.
If bearings are shot between the groups of stones marked on the map the angles produced will be rather familiar, 36, 72 & 108. The reason being is that the standing stones, like similar formations the world over (e.g. Stonehenge), are actually megalithic observatories that mark the position of astronomic events. At Rennes le Chateau, which is at 42 degrees north latitude, the sun and moon conjunct every year at the summer solstice. The ‘Sacred Geometry’ of what appear to be pentacle shaped alignments can then be found everywhere there as many have discovered in the placement of buildings and features.