The Rennes-le-Château Mystery

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Mysterious Coded Documents, Buried Treasure, Abbé Saunier, Curé of Rennes, and the mysterious deaths of priests in the Aude.

Rennes-le-Château is a small village perched on a hilltop near Couiza in the Aude departement of the Languedoc-Roussillon.  It has become world famous in the last few years following the publication of a series of books dealing with a mystery concerning a nineteenth century priest who lived in the village.

At the heart of the mystery is the fact that the priest (abbé Bérenger Saunière) suddenly become immensely rich during the 1880s.   There are a few interesting aspects of the mystery, such as where his money came from, but improbable theories have been built on a few known facts and shorn up by mass of demonstrable falsehoods.  Over the last twenty years a series of best-selling books have been published, each proposing a more fantastic theory than its predecessors.

Saunier probably made his money by robbing ancient graves. (One of the few reliable facts about Rennes-le-Château is that it was once a large Visigothic city with a population of 20,000 or even 30,000, so it is is not impossible that he found a trove of treasure, perhaps while restoring his Church). Although Saunier probably made his money by robbing graves or selling masses, much more popular theories are that he:

• discovered a cache of treasure from Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem..
• discovered a cache of treasure hidden by the Cathars who escaped from Montsegùr in 1244.
• discovered a cache treasure buried by the Knights Templar.
• discovered a cache of treasure of the Lords of Rennes.
• Discovered a cache of treasure from the Kingdom of Majorca.
• Discovered some hidden item of great value (such as the Holy Grail or Charlemagne's sword).
• discovered documents so damaging to the Roman Church that the Vatican paid a fortune to suppress them.

Many of the theories revolve around a theory that the artist Nicholas Poussin was party to some great secret, and that he encoded information about it in his paintings - notably the painting known as the Shepherds in Arcadia. According to some the painting was done in the Languedoc, with Rennes-le-Château in the background.