A wonderful foray in to the world of Rennes-le-Chateau.
Just as Christianity was invented out of nothing and became true to many, so those opposed to it as falsifying of history are trying to invent something to replace Christianity, something they think is better, truer, and more honest, especially in its understanding of who Jesus and the cast of characters around him were. This new but old religion (which might still be called Christianity if it can sufficiently infiltrate the Church) is partially a reinvention or reimagining of a set of ideas about life that predated Christianity and/or rivalled it through the centuries, something which it is imagined began with the Egyptians and other “Ancients” and then was preserved by the Hermeticists, the Pythagoreans, the Alchemists, the Knights Templar, the Cathars, various occultists, and other “heretics” over millennia, as filtered through Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Arabic, and Medieval cultures. The problem is that as that list of progenitors suggests, the movement comes down already riven with schisms and contradictions, and the political/religious extreme right, sometimes “heretical” from too much belief (from the Vatican’s point of view), can use the same material to promote their causes, and frequently have to violent ends. The Christianity the “heretics” on the Right want to replace is one they see as too tolerant and too accommodating, whereas the “heretics” on the Left think it not tolerating and accommodating enough, and of course both Extreme Left and Extreme Right tend to see its opposite as engaged in a vast conspiracy to rule the world.
Now it seems our contemporaries in these causes have been using the French village of Rennes-le Château (RLC, for short) to further ideologies of both Left (“unbelievers”) and Right (“superbelievers”), largely because RLC is thought, under the aegis of several rogue priests in the area in the 19th and 20th centuries, to have been somehow connected to and fostering of this largely secret agenda (but not secret to the Vatican), which they have left mysterious clues to in various forms, and, here’s the problem, clues ambiguous enough to give encouragement to both extremes of Left and Right. All the fun is in trying to identify and read those clues as we contribute, wittingly or not, to the new imagining of an old idea, one that could support either ideological extreme. A huge boost was given to this game with the publication of The Da Vinci Code, which also illustrates how fiction in itself can be a code, as were all the stories of the search for the Holy Grail in the Middle Ages, referring to something really going on at the moment. It doesn’t seem to matter, by the way, that all of this may be off the track of what the real Saunière was up to; what seems to matter is what is made of what he was up to. Christ knows!
In the account below, which attempts to sift through all the fraudulence, hoaxing, disinformation, and political paranoia that has accreted around “the Mystery of Rennes-le-Château,” it will be assumed that Saunière was indeed up to something unusual and something a tad “unorthodox,” even if everything else that followed was “invented” in an effort to make it “true.”
Saunière and his creation of a weird estate in this unusual location is the one solid thing in all that follows.
