During my testing pilgrimage I tried to clear a path with the sword crossing the inextricable vegetation of the woods...
If you decide to set out on a quest for the truth about the Rennes-le-Château Affair be warned - you face a long and arduous journey. You will require courage, discipline and dedication. Your journey may take on a moral and spiritual significance for you, a pilgrimage if you will. A pilgrimage that will teach you about history, archaeology, esoterica, theology, palaeography, manuscript traditions, mathematics, puns and poetry. And you will find that the harder the journey intellectually and physically and the tougher the obstacles on/in your path, the more of an initiate researcher you will become.
During your pilgrimage you will endeavour to "...
clear a path with a sword through .... the inextricable vegetation ...", as the poet asserted in
Le Serpent Rouge. This physical and mental path is both a physical landscape as well as a mental landscape. Both are littered with intricate and complicated clues. You need to 'solve' them to move along your paths. Even then the clues can change and/or become dead-ends at any time during your journey.
The poets allusion to '
inextricable vegetation' means that the landscapes often feel as if you are fighting your way through a densely wooded forest, the riddles and puzzles will overwhelm & trap you becoming virtually impassable - like a fortress that has foiled one invader after another over hundreds of centuries!
Information learned will be difficult to unravel - like gnarled twisted branches - so involved and so intricate is the Affair. You will need strength and resilience to disentangle yourself!
The poet continues - to get through this dense forest follow the famous Parchments. These are your
Ariadne thread. Designed by the poet's
Friend, they are our '
ball of red thread' equivalent to that which was given to Theseus to help him escape the Labyrinth! The poet reiterates;
'
in desperation of finding my way again the parchments of this Friend were for me, the thread of Ariadne'.Ariadne, the famous Cretan Goddess who gave Theseus the ball of red thread which he unrolled behind him as as he penetrated further in to the labyrinth and when he had killed the Minotaur he followed his thread back in reverse which allowed him to find his way out.
Put the puzzle pieces and clues together in a logical way in order to arrive at the correct solution. Analyse what the puzzle pieces are, what exactly the Parchments are and what they encipher. Work out how to '
put them back together again'. You will need to take the plunge. Ponder the problem
using reasoning & study. Several different approaches may be required but which is best to solve the mystery? "Trial and error" approach? Or the puzzle-solving approach? For the puzzle-solvers among us we realise quickly that this is the real way forward. The trial-and-error approach works in Science but this approach is rarely concerned with
how many solutions exist to a problem and can even assume only one correct solution. Puzzle solving however makes no such assumption and is capable of locating
all possible solutions to a situation. In some ways this separates the rationalist who only looks for one answer .... whereas the poets among us see the 'bigger picture'.
Follow the Parchment thread - it is this that is the guide that will help keep you on track. Use the clews [clues] to create and maintain a record that tracks all the avenues available to explore and to solve. Then you can backtrack — reversing earlier decisions and trying alternatives if required. In this way you will cut through all the mystification and false trails deliberately laid to throw you off your precious track.
Once you adopt the correct approach and mind-set and if you make it through - according to our poet - you will have reached the residence of
the Sleeping BEAUTY - the QUEEN of a past realm. You will experience '
a sweet perfume rising towards you as it permeates the sepulchre"! You are inside a very important tomb. This past Queen, this female, this Sleeping Beauty with a sweet perfume - who is she? Literal or symbolic? This concealed and sacred knowledge about the Two Rennes is certainly not to be violated or tampered with!
You will do well to remember the admonishment given to us by Philippe de Chérisey, who is in fact our
Ariadne, who is the friend who designed the parchments, the friend of the poet Plantard [if indeed Plantard was the author of Le Serpent Rouge!]. Chérisey wrote; "
Dear Reader, to whom we tell everything, but who does not listen". Are there clews/clues to be heard as well as 'read'! Remember the phonetic play on the word
clew/clue - for this is also part of the Ariadne thread. It is the
langue des oiseaux - that secret language of bird speak, the language of the initiates - used by Boudet and Chérisey. [Read
HERE to 'see' and 'hear' this in action!]
Chérisey tells us that "
every precaution has been taken for thousands of years so that the treasure location is very obvious and very mundane at the same time, recognisable through a great number of landmarks, for which the reader will be thankful to us since we gave him the main ones". Chérisey includes those markers that have gone before but lead nowhere! Use intuition and intelligence to know which information is useful and which is not!
Is the idea of treasure the hook but the truth something else entirely?
We therefore invite you to rediscover with a fresh eye the mystery of Rennes-le-Château!