The Count d’Antraigues, who, according to Sandri, had been entrusted with some documents, had been arrested by Napoléon Bonaparte’s General Bernadotte at Trieste after he had sort refuge from the French Revolution in Russian legation in Venice. His papers had been read by Bonaparte and they revealed his plans with Pichegru to restore the French monarchy (a cause also dear to Saunière). The Count d’Antraigues became a secret service agent first for the Russians and then for the British and was a leading figure in the French counter revolutionary movement. He may well have been the model for the fictional Scarlett Pimpernell. However he betrayed the Tsar in 1807 when Napoleon’s Army defeated the Russians at the battle of Friedland, an odd thing for a staunch royalist to do. He was however assassinated in Barnes, England probably by one of Napoleon’s agents.

Several other people are mentioned in this testimony by Sandri in particular Angélique Lenoir and Elizabeth Hautpoul. Angélique Lenoir had married Jean-Marie-Alexandre d’Hautpoul in 1781.

Perhaps one of the most interesting statements by Gino Sandri is about Béranger Saunière himself; He said:

“Béranger Saunière was in a place and he was used and handled by various networks to seek deposits”

 This statement from Sandri is highly significant.

There was a seemingly unwarranted and unprecedented interest in this area of France in the late 1960s with regard to treasure stories and this is when it first came to the attention of the French general public in a newspaper article followed by a TV programme made by Robert Charroux for the French TV company ORTF who had apparently even excavated the graveyard at Rennes le Chateau and who had quoted a journalistic source from the time of Saunière about a treasure of some kind around Rennes le Chateau. It is important to note here that when they interviewed people who knew Saunière most of the villagers spoke of Saunière and his wealth but never spoke of any parchments, therefore the parchments are perhaps a later addition to this story. Later in the 1970s, the English speaking world was introduced to the story by a series of TV programmes for the BBC called Chronicle, one programme being interrupted by a power cut during the miners strike but seemingly caused more public and lasting interest than the strike itself. Eventually this series of programmes led to a best selling and epoch defining book called ‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’ written by Richard Leigh with research done by Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln. The prime mover for the introduction to the English-speaking world had been Henry Lincoln who in a former role had been a scriptwriter for TV programmes such as ‘Dr Who’ and ‘Emergency Ward 10’. Lincoln is also the author of some other excellent books on Rennes le Chateau namely ‘The Holy Place’, ‘The Key to the Sacred Pattern’ and a joint effort with Danish author and broadcaster Erling Haagensen which describes a pattern in churches conforming to sacred geometry on the Baltic Island of Bornholm. These books are highly recommended reading for the truth seeker who wishes further, more detailed, insight into this story.

It was from these books describing the Priory of Sion that eventually Dan Brown took his inspiration for his best selling fictional thriller ‘The Da Vinci Code’ which was later to be made into a film starring Tom Hanks and the talented French actress Audrey Tautou and directed by academy award winning director Ron Howard. This book of fiction appeared to hit a zeitgeist that was totally unpredicted and surprised most of us and it has moved the story of Rennes le Chateau again back into the global eye. Brown’s suggestion is that a Secret Society, first introduced to the English speaking world by the BBC in their Chronicle TV series during the 1970s. This Secret Society was apparently known as the Prieure de Sion, and has allegedly controlled world affairs for two thousand years and that the Patron of Saunière’s church Mary Magdalene was in fact Jesus’ wife who bore children by him and started a bloodline that has been protected by this Secret Society. The reader will later discover that, true or not, this is merely scratching the surface and that the name of the most secret society may not be entirely correct and that this Priory[I14]  is merely a recently formed front. Indeed nobody was aware of the Priory of Sion before the 1960s, but everyone is aware of the Zionist political movement which does indeed have a stated desire to control the world from a Zionist state in the former Palestine.

It is perhaps worth a few sentences to dwell on this book of fiction for it seems that there are easily missed small hints in both the book and the film that Dan Brown and the screenwriter for the film that they may well have been aware of some deeper mystery. For example in the film when the Archbishop Aringarosa[I15]  goes to a secret meeting with the rest of the Opus Dei in an astronomical observatory in the Apennine mountains. Although it doesn’t say this is most likely the observatory at Trieste founded by the Empress Maria Teresa of Austria sister of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor.  

To construct a hoax with the small oddities included as we have seen so far would not just be a waste of time but would expose the hoax to possible discovery by increasing the chance of a mistake. Why make a hoax more complicated than it need be? Indeed the available confirmed facts are that we have evidence for the Secret Society in question merely registered in 1956 but starting life in 1901, but the general knowledge of this Society didn’t start to materialise until at best ten years later. Indeed the stated modus operendi of the Prieure de Sion from 1956 was to deal with housing claims, if this is true then one would scarcely feel that the name Priory of Sion would be appropriate.

One has to admire the hoaxers, if that’s what they were, for their staying power. One would normally expect a hoax to deliver its rewards much earlier than ten years. It seems they had no people dropping out of the scam or spilling the beans before they got their hoax going; Dedication indeed. One curious aspect surrounds what has been called the ‘Poussin Tomb’. The connection between Nicolas Poussin’s Les Bergere d’Arcadie and Rennes le Chateau was first revealed in 1964 and yet they did not reveal that a similar looking tomb had been at Les Pontils, close to Rennes le Chateau, until some eight years later. What kind of hoaxer reveals clues to their hoax in eight-year intervals?

 If you wish to hoax a person all you need is a powerful hook, tell them what they want to hear, and then any small detail you may wish to include would probably not ever be noticed or the hoax victim would uncritically fill in the gaps themselves. The point here is that there is no need for detail, when someone has a predefined belief then most will ignore any counter evidence they may be presented to them. One of the greatest hoaxes of all time was the Piltdown man hoax, all that was needed here was to construct something that people had been itching to discover and then you have a hoax that goes on un-investigated for forty years, academic dogma deterring any further investigation usually through intimidation until a rare, free thinking individual took another brave new look at the evidence. The lesson here is to continue to question everything and never to use your own data to prove your own data and always be suspicious of someone stepping out of the shadows and telling you precisely what you want to hear.

The story of Rennes le Chateau carries large amounts of minutiae that lend it the probability that, although some details (like names and identities) have most likely been concocted, even stolen, methods one would expect from a secret society anyway, the underlying story is superficially sound and has a vein of truth running through it or to be more accurate; the truth as they see it. If the hook was merely Bérenger Saunière and the parchments then there is ample evidence from other sources to suggest that there was a story here long before any supposed modern intervention. However there does appear to be a suggestion that some particular aspect of this story was being deliberately pushed into the public eye and that somebody somewhere wants this story out. There may even be some attempt to lead researchers down false trials. That it is obvious that this includes more than one person then this would mean some kind of co-ordinated effort by some kind of society and that this society seems to ‘hover’ in the shadows feeding information to any who would publish it, we are indeed talking about a ‘Secret Society’ here.

The reader may be amused at the way I have spelled out this obvious conclusion, but I do this because of the way detractors of this story seem to baulk at the idea that ‘Secret Societies’ even exist today and have existed for millennia and that a small number of people elevated to positions of power and influence can control the release of information or indeed suppress it should it suit some agenda they support. President John F Kennedy gave a speech to the press association in 1961 warning the world of the influence of secret societies, he was assassinated less than two years afterwards.

Yes even faced with overwhelming evidence academia somehow turn a blind eye to facts that are staring them in the face, facts that have been proven to be demonstrable again and again. That religious dogma can exist for millennia virtually unchanged are proven by example; that alternative beliefs violently suppressed by this same religious dogma may also exist for a similar length of time is possible and even probable, given what we know about the Holy Roman Church’s opposition to alternative beliefs. We know that the church eliminated other doctrines by force and intimidation and the use of the Inquisition is well known, particularly within the area of the Languedoc.

Is the Grail the hidden truth of these other beliefs? When the church controls everything and has been recorded as killing thousands in this area in the name of God then one should not be surprised to see an alternative belief driven underground and communicating in code and symbolism.

Several versions as to how these parchments were supposedly found by Saunière seem to exist. The story that Saunière found them in a cracked altar pillar on the renovation of his church seems to have come from the original ORTF programme and French author Gérard de Sède. Noel Corbu, who took ownership of Saunière’s Villa Bethania and who came from nearby Esperaza, had apparently started this. The story was then echoed in Gérard de Sède’s book called ‘Le Tresor Maudit’ – The Accursed Treasure who was first inspired to write about the Templars by a chance meeting with a former guard at the Castle at Gisors. What became clear is that de Sède was being fed information from another shadowy source and that he did not really understand what it was he was writing, the mediator for this information source seems to have been a man called Pierre Plantard de Saint Clair.

De Sède has been described as being genuinely surprised at what other people have uncovered using the information he himself had deposited. For example it appears that de Sède never noticed the original simple code in one of the parchments he himself had published in his book. It makes no logical sense that he should not even mention it and it is my belief that he had come to rely on some shadowy person or organisation feeding him the information to the extent that he never drew back and gave the nuances of the story he was reporting a single moment of individual thought. In one instance (explained by Henry Lincoln in his book ‘The Holy Place’) de Sède describes one of the ‘Stations of the Cross’ from the Church at Rennes le Chateau with a strange and unexplained caption underneath. De Sède clearly doesn’t understand what it is he’s put down here and it took Henry Lincoln to put an interpretation to it. Stories that de Sède practiced a form of literal art where stories were made to look real is unfounded and amounts to no more than a convenient guess by detractors, there is no evidence that any of these individuals practiced this art.

The style of the sentence is in ‘The Language of the Birds’ the changing of meaning by the use of phonetics or the sound of the word to make another word. But these Stations of the Cross in the church of Rennes le Chateau appear to be a direct copy of Stations of the Cross at the nearby Rochamador Church so is this church involved in the mystery also or is this measage spurious? This seems to indicate that the treasure mystery extends around Rennes le Chateau and is not exclusive to a single village or priest. We are of course largely unaware as to what Saunière’s church comprised of before his major renovation project. Architect Paul J Saussez has done a comprehensive study using Saunière’s notes as well as his architectural skill and has come up with some interesting conclusions on the original makeup of the church prior to Saunière.  Records show that the 11^th century building of Rennes le Chateau church and the presbytery had been in a semi-ruinous state from the 18^th century onwards, they wouldn’t be the first religious order to amplify a small legend into proportions sufficient to attract gullible and rich benefactors into making donations in the name of God. But the church peculiarities don’t seem to make a lot of sense, on the one hand we are continually being subjected to little hints and oddities that tend to keep the interest going and on the other hand we seem to have a lack of tangible evidence. That we are being lead is now becoming obvious, however even with this knowledge we cannot leave it alone, why are they doing this? Unless it is the authors of best selling paperbacks that are doing this leading and at the same time altering the church and its surroundings to suit the story in order to make money and additionally at the same time being extremely lucky, then who is keeping this mystery going and for what purpose?

Gérard de Sède quotes in one of his books that ‘The imaginary is something that tends to become true’ but is this de Sède making the imaginary come true or is it Béranger Saunière and Henry Boudet making the imaginary come true. This shadowy source of information later turned out to be this man who called himself Pierre Plantard de St Clair and assisted by Philippe de Chérisey, a disenfranchised Count who preferred to call himself Marquis who had been a former actor. However further detailed investigation into these two characters merely brings one to the conclusion that these two were also being used.

The story surrounding the parchments is inconsistent and it is certainly true that there is no direct evidence beyond hearsay that Saunière found any parchments at all. It would be easy to dismiss this as someone somewhere ‘Making the imaginary come true’ but as I have already said you can take Beringer Saunière and the parchments out of this story and you will still have a mystery. Patterns in the immediate landscape have been found however this phenomenon is not merely confined to the area around Rennes le Chateau. Numerous megaliths can be found throughout this area that is dominated by the Rennes le Chateau hilltop village. Saunière’s contemporary at Rennes les Bains Henry Boudet wrote about the Cromlech in a book called La Vraie Langue Celtique et le Cromleck de Rennes-les-Bains. These will prove to be the key to this mystery but first let us examine in detail the parchments supposedly found by Saunière.

To the left is one of the parchments that have been allegedly found by Beringer Saunière inside the cracked pillar. This parchment carries many tantalising clues including a triangle in the corner that resembles one from a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. The text reveals a code that is childishly simple as the relevant coded letters can be seen clearly raised above the body of text, which reveals the phrase:

“A dagobert II roi et a sion est ce tresor et il est la mort”

‘This treasure belongs to Dagobert II King and to Sion and it is [the] death[im16] .’

This parchment has been subject to much scrutiny and speculation. Superficially it consists of a passage from Luke 6:1-4 written in the Latin language but with a Greek text[I17]  called Uncial. The features are the small triangle in the top left hand corner with an m over it, and an ‘i’ or a ‘1’ inset, three dots over the first letter ‘e’ and PS with a spiral in the bottom right. In view that we know that the supposed forgers of this are alleged to have copied these from an original that, he said, has the two texts on either side, then we are to assume that alterations (sometimes not correct) may be present on this copy and probably most important the scale may not be correct. The passage translated from the Latin says:

On first examination of this it seems innocent enough, however now it has been highlighted one is first tempted to scrutinize what the passage is actually saying. In the actual text Jesus doesn’t actually answer the accusation of the Pharisees. He and the disciples are merely plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath but Jesus brings in David and ‘Shewbread’ into the conversation. He appears to be saying that He and the disciples are the priesthood and are entitled to eat this ‘Shewbread’, which He says is apparently, “only for the priesthood”. This Shewbread is only for the priesthood but surely corn is for everyone. Shewbread is translated Lechem hap pānīm a more accurate translation of this is “presence bread” or bread that is always in the presence of God. The Septuagint states that salt is mixed with frankincense (referred to as anamnesis) and is a memorial ritual (azkarah) the loaves having been laid out in groups of twelve in two piles on a table which is then offered to the altar of God. But according to the Book of Chronicles the Kohathite clan had the exclusive charge of baking this bread and setting it in order. Unleavened products were prohibited from the altar and leavened (risen) requires yeast to make it rise. Yeast is a fungus but another type of fungus may have been used here and the significance of this will become clearer later. It is possible that Shewbread is a kind of leavened bread and these cakes were carried into the inner temple and left for a week and only Jewish priests were allowed to eat these after they had been there a week, perhaps after a mold or fungus had formed on them. Then they were removed and eaten by the priests but only inside a holy place.  The cakes were shaped by three separate containers, one gold, another being used whilst the loaves were just dough, the other whilst the bread was in the oven in order to protect the shape. The Mishnah describes the loaves as 10 Etzba[i18]  long and 5 Etzba wide with rims/horns that were 7 Etzba long. The baking was always done inside the inner temple. According to the Talmud this bread is baked by the House of Garmu and the Talmud goes on to say that they had a secret method of baking this bread. The process was lost after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE which had stood since 516BCE.

With this it is worth mentioning here the heresy from this part of the Languedoc. The Cathari or The Albigensians.

It seems that the Lord’s Prayer, which is a well known feature of the Christian Faith, may well have initially come from the Cathars. In the Lord’s Prayer of course we have the line:

“Give us this day our daily bread”

However in the Cathar Faith this line is slightly different. From the Cathar ritual we have this:

“Panem nostrum supersubstancialem da nobis hodie.”

The Cathars we are told are decended from the Bogomils from a region in Bulgaria. It appears that the Bogomils gave the Cathars the quoted version of the Cyrillo-Methodian[I19]  translation of the New Testament and was subsequently translated into the Latin by the Cathars. It may be that John Wycliffe did not translate the Scriptures from the Vulgate, as the printed editions of his version later stated, but from this same Cyrillo-Methodian version.

Even today the Bulgarian version of the Lord’s Prayer reads “our daily [substantial] bread” which is much closer to the Greek original “τον̣ αρτον ημον τον επιουσιον” where the word “επιουσιον” means literally “suprasubstantial”. In other words, the Cyrillo-Methodian version is closer to the Greek original than the Vulgate used by Wycliffe which says “our daily quotitianum[I20]  bread”. In fact, the term “supersubstantialem” is used in the various Vulgate versions, in Matthew and in Luke (11:2-4), but it is practically excluded from the liturgical and sacramental practice used by the Catholic Church. What is more, to pronounce “suprasubstantial” [supersubstantialem] instead of “our daily bread” [panem nostrum quotidianum] in the Lord’s Prayer was considered a sure sign of heresy in the middle ages. According to Collectio Occitanica, the Inquisition records from Carcassonne, in Lombardy the heretical bishop from Toulouse Bernard Oliva, pronounced 'panem nostrum supersubstantialem'[I21]  when he said the Lord’s Prayer. [See Heresy and the English Reformation: Bogomil-Cathar Influence on Wycliffe by Georgi Vasilev]

So when we read again this piece of plain text from parchment 1 (The Dagobert parchment) we find a specific reference to eating not ordinary bread but Shewbread that had developed a mold and then only the priesthood, or a group who know how to prepare this, should be allowed to do eat Shewbread. One is reminded that wheat can be sometimes affected by a fungus called Ergot. Too much ingestion of Ergot will result in a condition known as “St Anthony’s Fire” [I22] which, because of bad storage of wheat, was very common in the middle ages and is extremely painful and usually results in death. Whilst Ergot contains no lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) it does contain ergotamine, which has been used to synthesize lysergic acid[I23] , and was used as the precursor for synthesis of LSD.

Moving back to the parchment it seems to set apart the words “Redis Bles Solis Sacerdotibus”, Repeat Wheat is only for the initiated. Apart from the word Sacerdotibus, this is not to be found in the original Vulgate text at all. Once again we have some further curiosities, ‘Bles’ is not actually a French word but may be slang and superficially at least ‘Blé’ is French for wheat[i24]  but not the word Bles and the plural for Blé is Blé as the plural for corn is corn. Then the text finishes with the Latin phrase “Solis Sacerdotibus” - “Only for the initiated”.

Redis[I25]  Bles can be translated as in a crude way as Repeat Corn and if one looks in the centre of the Dagobert text one sees the Latin word translated as corn is ‘SPICA’ just left of centre of the fourth line. We will find later that the star SPICA in the constellation of Virgo holds a special place in the heavens and this reference to this star constellation appears again and again in our story.

On the left is one interpretation of the clearly odd layout of the text. You will notice an irregular pentacle and right in the centre of this pentacle is the word SPICA.

According to some scholars the Temple of Thebes in Egypt was orientated towards the star SPICA as early as 3200BCE and other Temples orientated to this star can be found at Olympia, Athens and Ephesus. The Greek astronomer Hipparchos used Spica to furnish him with the data to discover the precession of the equinoxes; he made most of his observations at Lindos in Rhodes. The Sphinx is a depiction of Virgo and Leo[i26]  combined.

Is the eating of Shewbread a ceremony associated with the return of the star Spica? The star that during the current Astrological Age marks the Autumn Equinox. The rise of the Goddess or the Queen of Heaven.

The inclusion of French accentuated characters here complicates any direct translation from the Greek Uncial text in the parchment. On further examination of the text we find that the majority of the parchment text is not from the original Vulgate Latin text at all.

 One striking difference here is that the parchment text, although trying to describe King Dagobert, who is featured as a possible descendent from the Davidic bloodline, does not mention King David at all whereas the Vulgate text does. The simple appended code picks out the name Dagobert; this tends to suggest that the ‘Dagobert’, ‘Sion’ and ‘treasure’ references were put in later.

According to Wieland Willker, a German writer, the parchment text is from something called the Codex Bezae, a passage in Latin named after Theodore Beza, a French Calvinist theologian and scholar who apparently found the text in a monastery during the 17^th century. Beza actually has a statue dedicated to him in Geneva and is featured alongside William Farel, John Calvin and John Knox. As we can see this document seems to differ greatly from the Vulgate text translated by St Jerome in the 4^th century, and for reasons that I have been unable to grasp, Willker has declared that the parchment must therefore be a hoax because the only point of reference is that it came from a more recent text than St Jerome and as far as I can ascertain is that because this must have been written in the 1600 years since St Jerome it therefore has to be a fake. At the same time Willker fails to ascertain precisely when this original text found by Beza was first written and that this text could have been found by others long before Beza and he is simply not in a position to state that this is untrue. The assumption has been made that it was Antoine Bigou who wrote these parchments and as we have a positive date of 1581 or sooner for the origin of this type of Latin used then this is almost two centuries before Bigou. So Bigou could indeed have had a copy. I have not yet found anyone who can explain the chain of sound reasoning to me that it has to be a hoax because it didn’t come from St Jerome but I live in hope. However the Codex Bezae does have some links to French history as Theodore Beza apparently found it in the 16^th century in the monastic library of St Irenaeus at Lyon.

Lyon is a city that you are reminded was visited by Saunière on several occasions. It is now known that in 1900, Saunière attended at least three meetings of a Martinist lodge in Lyons. Pages of the Lodge minute book reveal his presence as an honourable guest:

Dans la registre de la Très Révérente Loge à l'Orient de Lyon "La haute Philospophie"... sur la liste le présent 'd'honneur' , L’Abbé Saunière 

Beza took his Codex to Cambridge, England where it has been since 1581. Scrivener published a complete text in 1864 and a copy appeared in 1899. There is no reason to believe that a copy of this could still not have been in Lyon in Saunière’s time. 

According to Jean-Luc Chaumeil the Codex was published in ‘Dictionaire de la Bible’ in Paris in 1895 which was published and edited by someone called F Vigouroux and from this Chaumeil concludes that it must-have-been Philippe de Chérisey, a Marquis from the town of Luc St Martin close to Rennes le Chateau who copied this parchment. Perhaps it would be prudent to point out at this stage that most of the anti-mystery story emanates from this single source – Jean Luc Chaumeil, a self proclaimed expert on the Solar Temple cult. We shall be discussing the life of these men in more detail in the next chapter. What is clear is that Philippe de Chérisey would not have gone into this degree of detail to hoax these parchments. It isn’t necessary to even include these parchments in the hoax and leaves himself wide open to mistakes and it certainly wasn’t necessary to write a forty page treatise in great detail in order to explain a document that is apparently nonsense, but more on this later. However it is interesting that in a letter from Philippe de Chérisey to Pierre Plantard, here de Chérisey is describing a burglary of his papers from Paris and that a person is writing to him claiming to be an ancestor of King Dagobert II. In the letter de Chérisey does say that these letters he is getting show the stupidity of humans as he manufactured this reference to King Dagobert. From this it is safe to assume that Philippe de Chérisey did indeed manufacture this reference to King Dagobert, Sion and treasure in the coded section of this parchment. However this does not mean he manufactured the entire parchment. It would be a simple exercise to take a copy and mask out the necessary letters and later draw them back in again but raised to make the Dagobert message.

But there are two encrypted parchments in this mystery and when the two texts are placed side by side and the difference in the formation of each letter are scrutinised it is as plain as day that they were written by two different people. According to Jean Luc Chaumeil, Philippe de Chérisey writes a 40 page treatise as to how he made up the second Shepherdess text. Why? - A simple statement from Philippe de Chérisey to the tune of ‘I done it and it is all nonsense’ would be sufficient, not 40 pages detailing every aspect of the construction of the eventual nonsense message being described in minute detail thank you very much. Indeed de Chérisey is unlikely to have been the author of the second parchment although he could have conceivably written the Dagobert parchment or at the very least altered it to include the King Dagobert reference.

One further aspect of this is the odd phrase sometimes rendered as ‘and he is there dead’. This is more likely to be ‘and it is death’ - or ‘it is the death card’ (directly known as LAMORT) which is from the Tarot of Marseilles and this card is numbered thirteen. The Tarot of Marseilles was written by a man who went by the name of Papus and we shall be discussing this enigmatic follower of esotericism later. In Tarot the appearance of the Death Card paradoxically does not mean Death per se but a change or to put it more succinctly:

A Transfiguration

The esteemed French researcher Pierre Jarnac, who apparently exchanged letters with Philippe de Chérisey, agrees that this suggestion of him writing a 40 page confession doesn’t hold water. He too asks the question as to why de Chérisey, a genuine French aristocrat would write the 40 page treatise currently held by Jean Luc Chaumeil called Stone & Paper giving details on how he was supposed to have concocted some text that was in the end meaningless anyway. Why bother?  Indeed a former close friend of Philippe de Chérisey thinks that the only victim of a de Chérisey prank is Jean Luc Chaumeil himself, who apparently continually pestered de Cheriséy to the point of being a nuisance. De Cheriséy gave Chaumeil what he wanted to hear and Chaumeil swallowed it hook line and sinker.

A further complication comes from Pierre Plantard himself in an interview he apparently made in 1989. In it he says that with regard to the “famous” parchments (he doesn’t specify which "famous" parchment) published by “a person” who claims authority on this matter (undoubtedly he is speaking of Gérard de Sède here) that it is a fabrication by Philippe de Chérisey for a film on Rennes ”similar” to that Jean Louis Fournier, based on a novel by J.M. Thimbaux called L’Or du Diable (The Devil’s Gold). He said that the original text is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in a book of Christian Antiquities. To date no such publication has come to the scrutiny of this author from the Bibliothèque Nationale or anywhere else. It does appear that Plantard was trying to discredit Gérard de Sède here and any admittance that parchments were both fakes would do this. But what about the letter from Philippe de Chérisey to Pierre Plantard which talks about Gérard de Sède being in possession of the facts of George Monti apparently obtained from the burglary and asking what they are to do about it? - Clearly de Chérisey was worried about this. It seems that de Sède was in possession of some documents he wasn’t supposed to have and Plantard may have wished to invalidate these documents in the aftermath of de Sède revelations in his books. Or the whole thing may have been stage managed for publicity, in the end it doesn’t really matter.

It is perhaps worth repeating here that a year earlier in 1988 Gérard de Sède wrote a book about the “impostures and fantasies of Rennes-le-Chateau”, he hadn’t been this unsure before. In it he tells us that ‘a pseudo-journalist – one Jean-Luc Chaumeil – went beyond a joke in publishing an article in Charivari relating the supposed discovery of Saunière’s treasure in Switzerland. Gérard de Sède later condemns Chaumeil as an “ignorant mystificator” but it should be noted however that de Sède himself was party to this deception. I must stress of course that this is all speculation and should be read with certain trepidation.

Who are we to believe here? - Perhaps no one. If this is your standard con then the main three players Philippe de Chérisey, Pierre Plantard and Gérard de Sède would hope to make money out of this but, with the possibly exception of Gérard de Sède, they failed. We appear to have two opposing groups at the centre of this apparent parchment hoax, Philippe de Chérisey and Pierre Plantard on one side and Gérard de Sède and Jean Luc Chaumeil on the other with Henry Lincoln, Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent coming in later and clearly upsetting the plan, at least with regard to the English speaking world. Remember of course that whilst the coded parchments are being labeled suspect here there are other genealogy parchments found that may be genuine, but are rarely discussed, the old theory here being that in order to draw attention away from a truth you submerge it in a sea of lies. But the current theory is dominated by the suggestion that the parchments (plural) were ‘fabricated’ by Philippe de Chérisey but Plantard emphatically says that the “the famous parchments published by a person” were intended to be a part of a film based on a novel called L’Or du Diable by J.M. Thibaux. It is worth noting that the French word for ‘fabricated’ can also mean ‘copied by hand’ from an original. Also making them for a film does not in any way invalidate them.

‘Rendre ou Rennes Au roi ou du Roi

les coffres ou dans la cave ou

l’avoir souterrain.

Return or Rennes King or of the Kings

coffer or in the cellar or

to have it underground.

Parallel this with

“This treasure belongs to Dagobert II and to Sion and he is there dead”  

which is likely 

Compare to a phrase ‘fabricated’ by Philippe de Chérisey.

The phrase ‘Redis Regis’ which appears on a tombstone associated with Marie de Hautpoul may also mean ‘Return to the King.’

Jacques Cholet says that Saunière entered some underground route to reach his treasure via the “tombstone of the Chevalier” and according to an enquiry made after Saunière’s death “The faithful walked on planks in the centre of the church, facing the altar”, Saunière having dug up the Nave. Cholet later says that he feels this is incorrect and many people think that this is Cholet saying that there was no passage but he goes on to say that Saunière had the tiled floor re-laid and the hole underneath had been blocked up, but Saunière had still managed to visit his treasure and Cholet surmises that once he had entered the underground chamber he had managed to discover another exit or entrance. Cholet related a story told to him that some people had followed Saunière into the cemetery where he suddenly he disappeared. The pursuers hid and awaited his return but he never emerged yet he said mass the following morning. Cholet thinks there is a Celtic Temple under the church and tales of Saunière caught rummaging amongst a barrel of gold coins was also related by him.        

It seems to be rather amusing that detractors to this story feel they are making some kind of new revelation with the suggestion that Philippe de Chérisey may have written the parchments but this whole thing had been discussed as long ago as the mid 1980s in the book ‘The Messianic Legacy’. In various publications and in particular one written by Lincoln alone called ‘The Key to the Sacred Pattern’ he describes his dealings with de Chérisey and the other player called Pierre Plantard de St Clair, whom are supposed members of the Secret Society mentioned earlier called ‘The Prieure de Sion’. In ‘The Messianic Legacy’ it describes a meeting Lincoln and the BBC held in the Art studio of Jean-Luc Chaumeil’s mother with Plantard and de Chérisey, where Plantard says that de Chérisey has “very good originals” [I27] of the parchments but it is clear that the ones produced at this meeting by de Chérisey are copies. As far as we know nobody, including Jean-Luc Chaumeil, has seen the original copies of these documents and it is distinctly possible that neither Plantard nor de Chérisey have ever seen the originals as Chaumeil has signally failed to produce them in the many years he has been involved in this. Plantard describes them to Henry Lincoln and the BBC; however at no point has de Chérisey admitted he wrote them from scratch. Another matter of importance to understand here is that we are not being told which parchment he is supposed to have altered. Several copies of the parchments apparently abound but we are told that these copies seen by Lincoln immediately before the interview with Plantard did not have the various marks normally associated with the parchments. Plantard said in a meeting dated 17^th May 1983 that Saunière had only found four parchments and hereby hangs a puzzle. The two genealogy lists already mentioned bearing the seal of Blanche de Castille and a Hautpoul testimony dating from 1695 and one coded parchment. Indeed according to Plantard in 1983 the fourth parchment found were two coded messages, passages that formed different sides of the same parchment paper and they somehow interacted with each other when held up to the light, but he changed his story in 1989. Again according to Plantard this fourth parchment “was the original on the basis of which the Philippe de Chérisey had devised the modified version”. Here Plantard makes a curious contradiction, on the one hand he says that the two coded text need to interact and then he declares that de Chérisey had made a copy of each side on two different sheets and not to scale. Why would de Chérisey do this if he were the author and had the originals? If the parchment needed to interact when held up to the light then the meaning, apparently concocted by de Chérisey anyway, would be lost if not directly copied. But why copy them anyway if you are not going to preserve the interactive meaning and you have the original? Precisely why would de Chérisey have any need to copy these parchments if he was the original author? According to Jean Luc Chaumeil he has the originals and what he describes as de Chérisey’s confession that he calls Stone and Paper but these must be mere copies of the originals as they are clearly on two separate sheets. To date Jean Luc Chaumeil has only produced copies of these parchments to the public. But all this is immaterial for it can be proven that de Chérisey could not have originated the Shepherdess parchment code as he did not know how to decrypt it correctly and also in his notes he failed to mention some critical aspects about it e.g. we still don’t know why he included the words Ad Genesareth in the parchment. It is perhaps worth noting at this point that in a conversation with Henry Lincoln, Philippe de Chérisey said that - picking a few sheets from his case he says

“I’m writing an explanation of the codes. I’ll send you a copy. You’ll be amused”.

Lincoln never saw this copy.[i28] 

Perhaps the new parchment that has been apparently written by de Chérisey is only the first Dagobert parchment with the childish encryption and he has amended what Cholet reported about the king and the underground possessions to a more specific reference to the Merovingian line of French kings and to Sion. It can be reported that not all esoteric secret societies are in collusion and could indeed be in direct conflict even though they may share a common secret. Is this a coded claim by the Priory of Sion for this treasure originally prescribed as the “baggage” of Blanche de Castille because they feel it should not belong to anyone but the descendants of the Merovingians? 

A writer who called himself Jean Delaude wrote in a set of documents deposited in the French National Library, a document published in Toulouse in 1977 called the Circle of Ulysses part of a set known as the Prieure documents. In this document Delaude mentions ‘Le Cercle du Lys’ a group of people dedicated to the reinstating of the Merovingian bloodline and he describes it having 350 members and gives the address of its headquarters as Admiral Mouchez Street in Paris.

This is the first indictation that the author Jean Delaude was indeed Philippe de Chérisey for Admiral Mouchez was a famous astronomer, navigator and cartographer. His name was Amédée Ernest Barthélemy Mouchez.  Amédée was of course the pseudonym adopted by Philippe de Chérisey perhaps as homage to this famous map maker. Mouchez was a member of the Académie des sciences and was commissioned to observe the transit of Venus from St. Paul Island in the Indian Ocean. A monument to Admiral Mouchez can be found in the port of Le Havre.

Admiral Mouchez was a cartographer who proposed international co-operation with the purpose of mapping of the stars.  

According to the Circle of Ulysses the head of ‘Le Cercle du Lys’ was described in this document as the Countess of Chambord who you will remember gave Saunière the money to renovate the church.    

Jean-Luc Chaumeil is now insisting that de Chérisey made up the whole thing and that he has his confession in this document called Stone and Paper that was indeed written by Philippe de Chérisey. This document held by Jean-Luc Chaumeil was apparently stolen according to Henry Lincoln and has never been given over for close examination; in fact everything Chaumeil has said has so far been taken on blind faith that he is telling the truth, a blind faith born entirely from the desire to make this whole thing easy on the understanding.

Jean Luc Chaumeil has now published a book and was released to French readers around the end of July 2006. The book is called Rennes-le-Château – Gisors – Le Testament du Prieuré de Sion (Le Crépuscule d’une Ténébreuse Affaire). Rennes le Chateau – Gisors – The Will of the Priory of Sion (The twilight of the Mysterious business) and is published by Pegase, the same publishers who produced the fake document that Chaumeil tried to sell to the BBC. If this is indeed ‘twilight of the mysterious business’ here it means that all the clues, from wherever and whenever they came even if this was the 1960s, are close to being solved and has nothing to do with Jean Luc Chaumeil’s ‘chance’ sudden revelation that has mysteriously coincided with Dan Brown’s phenomenally successful book of fiction – The Da Vinci Code. The words ‘Wagon’ and ‘Band’ seem to come to mind here.

Whilst it is entirely possible that de Chérisey could indeed have made up or more likely altered the Dagobert parchment for this ‘Cercle du Lys’ movement in Paris, if as reported by Plantard, it was on the back of the shepherdess text then this is unlikely. However the ‘photocopies’ in possession of Jean Luc Chaumeil are precisely that – They are copies, it actually says this on them and is annotated as such by Pierre Plantard. The Dagobert parchment in possession of Chaumeil carries Plantard’s signature written in red ink and has the name de Chérisey written on it split up halfway along a word and hyphenated in order to get it in. That this is addition of de Chérisey’s name was an afterthought is blatantly obvious. One of course questions whether Plantard did write de Chérisey’s name here, given Chaumeil’s history of faked documents. This was done after de Chérisey’s sudden death and perhaps Plantard is only guessing himself or perhaps he had suddenly remembered the fate of his former friend and mentor George Monti who was poisoned, and felt that he ought to distance himself from these parchments and the shadowy personages still operating behind this mystery.

If he had wanted to de Chérisey could have altered the shepherdess parchment to include the King Dagobert text and bring the Merovingians into the story on this one document. Philippe de Chérisey has admitted that he had altered a parchment and this has always been assumed to be the Shepherdess copy, but to alter this would be difficult, it would be easier to write it completely from the beginning. Could de Chérisey have merely altered the Dagobert copy with the childlike code of raised characters to include a reference to King Dagobert, Sion and treasure and the Merovingians? Indeed as we shall see, de Chérisey seems to be so far from the actual solution in this Stone and Paper document that we must draw the conclusion that the document held by Jean Luc Chaumeil is nothing more than de Chérisey’s original notes [I A29] of his attempts at a possible solution to the shepherdess code. De Chérisey even takes out an injunction preventing someone using his solution which he describes in an appendage in a note written to a British researcher as ‘Bergere pas de tentation etc. Many people have said that this is de Chérisey admitting to writing the original code but he says nothing of the sort, he is merely admitting to having the solution to the code and wishes to protect it from use by other authors like Gérard de Sède who appears to have taken possession of the Priory Documents illegally following a burglary at the Paris home of Philippe de Chérisey. The letter from de Chérisey to Plantard[I A30]  is now in the public domain that describes de Chérisey’s concern at losing some Priory documents in particular what he describes as ‘the file of George Monti’ and a contract that Pierre Plantard had with Rene Descadeillas regarding the rights to a book. 

As described in ‘The Key to the Sacred Pattern’, de Chérisey’s confession signature on this document ‘may have been’ later forged or indeed he may have decided to sign it in some kind of desperate attempt to discredit others who he appears to have fallen out with. I’ve merely touched the surface of this schism between the primary players but it can be read about in greater detail in ‘The Messianic Legacy’ and ‘The Key to the Sacred Pattern’. Until we are given access for close scrutiny of the Stone and Paper document we have to conclude that yet more devious escapades by this or these shadowy organisation(s) are still being played out. Given the devious activities surrounding this whole story and the magnitude of some of the revelations that have been aired then we are duty bound to postulate that, until given greater close examination, it may be the case that the Stone and Paper document has been forged to deflect further study. It has now been established by a graphologist that two different authors penned each coded parchments. There is little doubt the two encrypted documents were written by two different people.

Philippe de Chérisey died suddenly in July 1985 and is no longer able to defend accusations that he is the principle hoaxer of the whole story. Whilst it is true that de Chérisey described himself as the prankster this in no way proves that he wrote the whole thing and the evidence suggests that he didn’t write the Shepherdess parchment. Who did write it and when it was written is still a mystery and still an object of speculation but one must reiterate that this is simply too elaborate for the whole thing to be a hoax. What is occurring here is that a great deal of false claims and counter claims are being thrown up in order to confuse any investigation and the truth is being submerged in a sea of lies. It should be mentioned that the revelations from Jean-Luc Chaumeil have only appeared since the last of the three others involved in this mystery have died.

One story that requires some explanation by the ‘de-Chérisey-done-it’ fraternity we find here involves the tombstone of Marie de Blanchefort that Saunière is supposed to have defaced. Independent evidence has confirmed that the stone existed with the accompanying errors in 1905. It was confirmed by a visit from a scientific group from Carcasonne led by Elie Tisseyre and a reproduction can be seen today at the Société d’Etudes Scientifiques de l’Aude. It seems Philippe de Chérisey knew all about this drawing from the Société d’Etudes Scientifiques de l’Aude and allegedly instructed Gérard de Sède to copy it from the Société d’Etudes Scientifiques de l’Aude, adding the other headstone containing the phrase PS PRAECUM. De Chérisey talks about this phrase saying that it alludes to the opening lines of the Dagobert parchment by the words Sabbato secundo primo. He says:

This is nonsense and is completely at odds with other text found in the Dossiers Secret. Is de Chérisey simply guessing here or is he trying to link the Shepherdess parchment to the Dagobert parchment? Methinks the latter. But if he was the author of both parchments why not do this in a more obvious and succinct manner? Why this nebulous link to Sabbato secundo primo? It seems that de Chérisey doesn’t know the answer and is trying to link a document he altered to a document he found or was given but did not write himself.

What is clear is that de Chérisey, Plantard, de Sède and Jean-Luc Chaumeil have not been one hundred percent honest, open and forth coming in all this and why would they; they are after all a secret society. However neither has the ‘its-all-a-hoax’ fraternity been completely honest, their story shifts with each new piece of evidence and seems to rely exclusively on a predefined belief to carry them through. The story has become clouded and confused and perhaps this too is deliberate. It is my belief that Plantard and de Chérisey initially knew very little about any of this and de Chérisey’s so-called confession in the document Stone and Paper was merely his incomplete attempt to solve the clues of the large Shepherdess parchment himself. I believe that de Chérisey was shown the parchments by persons unknown or came into possession of them during the Priory of Sion’s stated activities drawn out in their 1956 constitution of historical research and attempted to solve the mystery himself. Testimony from those that knew them and old photographs show Plantard and de Chérisey searching the area of Rennes and Plantard bought land in the area around Rocco Negri, he even bought a burial plot in Rennes les Bains. If he had been privy to some ancient conspiracy to defraud they would not have needed to do this. They were carrying out the Priory of Sion’s statutes i.e. historical and esoteric research, but did they find something significant which raised a post WWII group playing esoteric games to another level which warranted the private intervention from another more secretive group? Some of de Chérisey’s comments in his book CIRCUIT show that he initially had only a superficial knowledge of this, he even said in circuit that the solution to a phrase ‘Cheval de dieu’ is a direct reference to Eugene Delacroix’s painting in the church of Saint Sulpice, this is contrary to what he then says in Stone and Paper. In the early stages de Chérisey did look like a man searching for an answer the same as everyone else.

His original treatment of the code in Circuit is so far off the mark that he couldn’t possibly be the original author. However during the writing of this book another revelation has appeared from out of the blue. There is a well documented flaw in the encoding and decoding process of the Shepherdess parchment. It was encoded using a 25 letter alphabet but decoded with a 26 letter alphabet, this causes errors in in Vigenere coding method. This wasn’t widely known in France as the error was first pointed out in Britain. Suddenly however (and only recently revealed) it seems de Chérisey knew all about the use of a 25-letter alphabet instead of a 26-letter alphabet, again the only source of this brand new ‘latter-day’ revelation is Jean-Luc Chaumeil. He apparently knew all about it but still made an error in his book Circuit and allowed Gérard de Sède to make the same error in his book and despite being at odds with de Sède, de Chérisey never pointed out his mistake nor did he make public the mistake in de Sède book – Why not? Jean Luc Chaumeil has apparently been sitting on this information since de Chérisey’s death in 1985 without, according to him, ever mentioning it. Seemingly waiting for Dan Brown's blockbuster. Even this story of not revealing anything until twenty years after the death of de Chérisey is not true, to long-term researchers of this mystery this de Chérisey knowing about the 25/26 letter information is new and one is immediately suspicious. Jean Luc Chaumeil says that he promised Philippe de Chérisey that he wouldn’t reveal the information until twenty years after his death, the fact that he has been talking about Stone and Paper for at least ten years after his death seems to have eluded the attention of Chaumeil. One wouldn’t dare suggest that the timing of this new book of his has more to do with the phenomenal success of Dan Brown’s book – The Da Vinci Code than any mutual deal made. One also wonders why Chaumeil, who has been showing this Stone and Paper document on TV programmes and has been revealing all kinds of pieces from the document, some of it laughable and clearly incorrect has now suddenly decided to put this piece out about the 25 letter code. Many authors have mentioned de Chérisey’s decryption anomaly but suddenly we get this one out of the blue for the very first time, the one piece that will counter the biggest argument against the suggestion that de Chérisey is the author.

It is rather fortunate that Jean Luc Chaumeil is still around twenty years after de Chérisey’s sudden and unexpected death so he can reveal the truth to the world and isn’t it lucky that the world is still interested enough after the staggering success of Dan Brown’s thriller so Chaumeil can sell a few books and educate the world into what really happened? Presumably he’ll be giving his expected royalties from the expected elevated post da Vinci Code book sales that he has gleaned from his privileged information as a confident of de Chérisey to charity – may I suggest a charity that supports research into the causes of de Chérisey’s sudden unexpected death. The fact is we are still awaiting Jean Luc Chaumeil to release this document for close public scrutiny, oh yes he talks about it but doesn’t offer it for examination by experts to see if it has been tampered with. Also may I remind Chaumeil that he has yet to produce the original parchments apparently fabricated by Philippe de Chérisey, for the ones he’s been showing so far has the word ‘photocopie’ written by Plantard not de Chérisey clearly written on the Chaumeil’s copy. I presume a faker would have kept his ORIGINAL draft; may we see this and have it independently examined please? One wonders why de Chérisey didn’t give Chaumeil the altered original parchments as well as the Stone and Paper document. It should be repeated that Jean Luc Chaumeil and Gérard de Sède has in the past tried to sell a fake document regarding this story to Henry Lincoln and the BBC. Shifting stories, sudden release of evidence not seen before, one is aware of the pungent aroma of a well-known scavenging rodent here.

It is clear that de Chérisey and Plantard were by and large merely guessing at the solution and being fed snippets of information from other sources. It is my opinion they, de Chérisey and Plantard, were originally nothing but treasure hunters carrying out the stated aim of the Priory of Sion who later acquired some real delusions of grandeur and who may have indeed found some documents (possibly the files of George Monti) or were being fed them from someone else like two starving people, but were initially no more into this mystery than anyone else. Plantard’s wartime activities may have made him an ideal target for others to use him to forward a specific timed pre-millennia agenda.

We too seem to be guessing here about de Chérisey but what are we to expect when dealing with a ‘Secret Society’. It is odd that we should have so much information at all and it really seems to indicate that this was a controlled release of information, probably through Plantard and de Chérisey either wittingly or unwittingly. Lincoln seems to hint that de Chérisey and particularly Plantard didn’t know some aspects of this. Indeed their apparent open readiness to divulge information is in itself suspicious and suggests that they themselves may have been fishing for information from Lincoln and co.

Let us for the sake of argument assume that the parchments were written by Philippe de Chérisey, what of it? Here’s the bottom line – So what? If the parchments yield new information that can be checked out it matters not a damn from whence they came. Whatever the origin of the parchments one fact is certain; they contain clues that need to be solved here and no attempt has been made to produce a tangible solution of the code released by Chaumeil or de Chérisey to the world. The simplicity and shall we say ‘corniness’ of Chaumeil’s so-called confession emanating from Stone and Paper is in stark contrast to the brilliance of the complex code that supposedly created it. It may be that the Priory of Sion was formed recently by a more secret society to push out some information into the public domain and then fade back into the shadows once this concept has been aired and there is some historical premise that this may have been the case and Philippe de Chérisey could indeed have been the designated prime source for this. It may even be that this group was looking for help in solving the clues themselves and decided to bring in more unwitting help from outside.

It was said that Pierre Plantard admitted to the scam under oath; this is not true, Plantard only relinquished his claim to be a descendant of the Merovingian kings he has never admitted that the whole Priory of Sion thing was a scam. Why should he? The Priory of Sion is/was a genuine organisation started and registered in 1956, it is not scam. Also as the Priory of Sion Grand Master in the mid 1980s he issued a communiqué to the POS members that should deny all knowledge of the Priory of Sion. He's merely following his own dictate. 

In their book ‘The Tomb of God’ written by Paul Schellenberger and Richard Andrews the authors declared, and rightly so, that it doesn’t matter when the parchments were made and even if this was indeed Philippe de Chérisey who made them up, if the solving of the clues leads to a discovery then it proves that de Chérisey or probably others were privy to some secret.

But if, as seems to be the suggestion, this whole affair is dangerous to the establishment it would be prudent for them to employ any means to play down the whole aspect of this. Indeed there are those who seem to take up their whole time rubbishing this, a concerted playing down of this mystery is in evidence. The fact is that none of this ‘it’s-all-a-hoax’ routine was being aired when these people; Plantard, de Sède and especially de Chérisey were still alive and able to counter anything that was being said using undisputable evidence or facts. We don’t get whole websites dedicated to rubbishing Bigfoot, or the Bermuda Triangle but we do get whole websites set up specifically to counter this story and their main tactic appears to be rubbishing the messenger with little or no reasoned argument or facts to counter the main argument. When one sees the consequences to certain authorities and groups should this be true then one can see why someone would want to rubbish this. 

Indeed one cannot escape the political overtones of this, little wonder that serious researchers are attacked at every instance. Persons reading this saying that in no way will we believers ever be convinced my advice to them is ‘Don’t bother then’ go away and revel in silence in your supreme knowledge but stop muddying the waters. Your over eagerness to intervene is showing, in fact you appear to be a little too eager.

It is the opinion of this author that de Chérisey ‘altered’ (the French use the word fabricated here) the Codex Bezae text to include a reference to Saint Dagobert but he did not (and could not) alter the shepherdess parchment. To simply alter this shepherdess document would be difficult; this document would need to be written from scratch and both parchments have quite distinct differences in the formation of the letters.

These two parchments were written by two different people.  

The historical validity or otherwise of the parchments is all smoke and mirrors, whilst people are thrashing out mute points as to whether men who are now dead and unable to defend themselves wrote the parchments or not. The main players in this Saunière, Boudet and the Rennes le Chateau church and other areas and the landscape geometry are being ignored. We know for instance that Vigouroux (who published the Codex Bezae in 1895) and Saunière have a direct connection. Vigouroux worked as a professor in the seminary of St Sulpice and as we have said Saunière placed the logo of the Sulpicians in his garden. It is unlikely that Saunière ever visited Paris without visiting the headquarters of his own society where he would have likely to have met Professor Vigouroux and been introduced to the Codex Bezae on or indeed more likely before 1895. We know for instance that Saunière may have visited Lyon on several occasions why Lyon and not Paris, with little or no good roads, only a railway system, he would need to travel through Paris to get to Lyon? 

The second Shepherdess parchment we have been speaking about is in some respects more interesting and yet easier to understand. It was said by Plantard that the two coded parchments are supposedly different sides of the same document. Unless they are supposed to interact in some way then this is unlikely, as it would make them difficult to read as parchment tends to be transparent and very old parchment rarely has writing on both sides.

This second parchment has been dismissed as a fake on the grounds that versions of this didn’t appear into the public domain until 1889. Why this should make any difference to its validity has again not been successfully explained to me. One could also say that as the Dead Sea Scrolls only came to light in 1949 then they must be declared to be fake on the grounds of their late arrival into the public domain alone. The 1889 date is when Wordsworth/White Oxford first published it in languages other than Latin. The Latin text may have been (and very likely was) in existence long before this but was only made public on this date. It has been claimed that we are dealing with a secret society that has claimed to run events for millennia and the detractors then expect this society to rely on releases of information into the public domain?  Indeed it seems that a good deal of this text is identical to an earlier publication in Greek from Leiden in 1633. What are writers doing concocting brand new biblical texts from scratch in the late 19^th century anyway? This claim of the text being written apparently from scratch in 1889 neither proves nor disproves anything, what we have here is yet another slight of hand by the detractors. In fact the 1889 publication from the two Englishmen Bishop John Wordsworth and Professor Henry Julian White is entitled Novuum Testamentum Latine Secundum Editionem Sancti Hieronymi i.e. the New Testament Second edition from a 17^th century Catholic Group the Sancti Hieronymi. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that the Sancti Hieronymi had copies of this document from the 17^th century.   

It was said that the original find was of four parchments but rather than simply say that the two parchments are part of the same document with two of the other three being the genealogies and the third a testimony from 1695, it is more likely that that only one coded parchment was found here; de Chérisey knew the original story or there being only four documents so why make two coded parchments knowing there were three more parchments making five in all. Neither of these coded parchments can be easily related or referenced to the other, apart from de Chérisey’s feeble attempt to reference the Dagobert document with Primo Secundo using PS. Other messages have been subtly included in the shepherdess text so why not include the Dagobert message also? This would not be difficult to do. Gino Sandri Secrétaire of the Priory of Sion said in the interview that the Abbé Saunière did discover parchments but that the parchments we have come to know were not those he discovered and that the encrypted parchments “were never for the general public” and that the “….papers were used as support with an exchange of messages coded between networks in action, even in competition.” According to Sandri they have nothing to do with treasure of some nature but that:

What Stone?

It was also said that the parchments were found in the alter pillar, what is clear is that it was not the one that once featured in the garden holding up the statue of the Virgin Mary as this pillar is neither hollow nor is it cracked. There is however a similar sized pillar in the churchyard of Rennes les Bains church perhaps this is the original cracked one of the pair. It is probably worth mentioning here that a cracked or broken pillar has some meaning in Masonic symbolism and I will deal with this concept later. Whilst on the subject of Freemasonry for those who think that this whole story has no significance they should take a walk around the church and churchyard of Rennes le Chateau and Rennes les Bains, enigmatic messages with Masonic overtones abound everywhere in the churchyard grounds and also in the churches themselves without a single mention of the Priory of Sion and there are even direct references to known Masonic lodges in the graveyard of Rennes les Bains. However whether this pillar found in the Rennes les Bains churchyard is the one in which Saunière found the parchments or not this proves or disproves absolutely nothing. The bottom line is that the parchments exist and that’s an undeniable fact and question of whether they are valid or not resides only in their eventual ability to yield a relevant solution by which it can be validated by it leading to a previously unknown discovery. It is foolhardy to simply declare on the strength of one man’s insistence that has a dubious past regarding fake documents that a man who is now dead and unable to defend himself made up the parchments and at the same time not bother to even see if decoding them will lead to a solution. That the validity of this will never be checked out on the premise of some Conspiracy Theory that de-Chérisey-done-it is frankly not the smartest way to deal with this.

This code of the second parchment allegedly found by Saunière is superficially more complicated than the first. The exact method of decryption can be found in detail in Henry Lincoln’s ‘The Holy Place’ I do not intend to repeat it here. It had been originally described in Philippe de Chérisey’s book CIRCUIT and Gérard de Sède had copied the various stages in his book Le Tresor Maudit. As we have said both had made a mistake that had to be corrected in order to work properly, a code so intrinsically meticulous in its nature that such a mistake would be unlikely if copied out by the original creator. All the time here we seem to drawing towards the conclusion that although it is clear that these people; Plantard, de Chérisey and de Sède did have delusions of grandeur they would not have the intellectual ammunition nor the time to implement every aspect of this mystery, the faultless error-free research required and the weaving of this into their agenda, and indeed it seems that initially they had no more idea of this story of Saunière than anyone else.  The ‘raison d’entre’ for these members of the Priory of Sion was research into esoteric and historical aspects of French history, perhaps they did actually find something that they didn’t quite understand. For unbiased research into these areas can lead one into areas one wouldn’t normally enter. Perhaps a copy of this shepherdess parchment came to light and they didn’t understand it. With regard to the Dagobert parchment de Chérisey in particular may have got involved in the Merovingian Society, this ‘Cercle du Lys’ that was based in Paris and may have altered the Dagobert parchment on their behalf.

A brief description of the encryption in the shepherdess parchment is that extraneous letters that do not appear to be in the Latin text break up the Uncial Latin text shown above and in principle these appear every seventh letter but there are exceptions to this rule. These letters, 140 of them, form the basis of the code. Out of these letters the phrase ‘AD GENES ARETH’ (Literally: towards Birth [of the] Earth). Perhaps more specifically it means the “Womb of the Earth” and maybe describing a specific place in France once described by Julius Caesar as being a place of worship by the Druids or this place may be in the holy land. Or perhaps the best interpretation of this phrase which as we shall see puts it firmly into the context of this book is the phrase “Middle Earth”[I A31] . This phrase in plain text seems to serve no purpose but must mean something as it would be easier to exclude this phrase altogether.

That this area in France carries not only remains of dinosaurs (there is a dinosaur museum at Esperaza) but also Neanderthal remains may have some significance here. However the phrase AD GENESARETH is usually made here to give it an acceptable biblical reference and it means ‘Towards Genesareth’. Genesareth is the old name for the Sea of Galilee or Lake Tiberias, very close to the town of Migdal that has close associations to the Magdalene and the Magdala tower and where ‘The Shepherds Tower’ was built in the 8^th century. This perhaps refers to an area of land on the shore of the Sea of Galilee extending from Khan Minyeh on the north to the steep hill behind Mejdel (Magdala) and known to the Arabs as El Ghuweir which is about 15 km south of Qumran and is very fertile. The word is mentioned twice in the bible:

Matthew 14:34;

“When they crossed over, they came to the land at Genesareth (gennesaret)”

Mark 6:53

“When they crossed over they came to the land at Gennesaret, and moored to the shore”

Both these passages deal with Jesus walking on water and the performance of miracles in the land of Gennesaret. This takes place after feeding the five thousand with specifically five loaves and two fish and they specifically mention looking up at the heavens whilst they did this. Here one is reminded that when Pisces (in Hebrew called House of fish) sets in the west Virgo (in Hebrew called House of bread) is rising in the east and vice versa. They specifically sat in groups of hundreds and in groups of fifty. When they had finished they had twelve baskets of broken pieces of bread and fish. One is reminded that there are 12 signs of the Zodiac. Both Gospel writers take great pains to record the numbers and superficially the numbers don’t seem to matter to this miracle there is some serious numerology and double meaning going on here and in other parts of the bible Pythagorean thought has been included in the some of the activities of Jesus. Jesus then sent the disciples away across the water towards the land of Genesareth. It is perhaps important to note that a similar incident occurs in Mark chapter 8 but the numbers are significantly different.

 The current research is yielding results about El Ghuweir as it possibly being the burial place for the females associated with Qumran home of the Essenes mentioned by Josephus and possibly the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.

These extraneous 12 letters spelling AD GENESARETH are removed from the middle section to leave 128 extraneous letters (or two sets of 64 letters). 

The parchment code requires two keys for Tableau de Vigenere technique for the decoding and both of these keys apparently come from the tombstone of Marie d’Blanchefort. The first is MORT EPEE. These two words could be extracted directly from the mistakes made on the tombstone (MORT being the capitals and EPEE being the small letters) that was observed in 1905 from tombstone text of Marie d’Ables de Negri d’Hautpoul, who apparently died in 1781. Even the phrase ‘MORT EPEE’ will stand alone and itself be shown to have its own significance later.

 The second stage of decipherment is achieved by substituting the letter with the letter that immediately precedes it in the alphabet. This process confirms that de Chérisey unlikely to have written the parchment encryption. The reason is because, as already mentioned, this process uses an alphabet with 25 letters only. Up to 150 years ago the French did not use the letter W in any writings. De Chérisey’s so-called confession and methodology description uses a 26-letter alphabet. If a 26-letter alphabet is used the resultant decryption has errors, this very late revelation from Jean Luc Chaumeil that de Chérisey knew about the use of a 25-letter alphabet is very suspicious, is he saying that de Chérisey knowingly allowed an error to persist? The inclusion by de Chérisey of this unusual use of an old alphabet is meticulous; one wonders why de Chérisey never mentioned it in his book Circuit where he seems to have mentioned a lot of other things.

Stage three uses the Tableau de Vigenere decryption again but this time uses the whole of the text on the tombstone as the key with the addition of the phrase PS PRAECUM to make up the 128 letter key required. The length of this key will make this code uncrackable without the key and this key is applied reversed. The next stage shifts the resultant letter back down the text by one letter. In ‘Le Tresor Maudit’ de Sède uses a two-letter shift here, which is incorrect but miraculously yields the correct answer in his book. De Chérisey, the supposed creator of this whom it is alleged was feeding information to de Sède, clearly had only a superficial knowledge as to how the encryption worked; he was therefore NOT the original author. The final stage five uses a complex technique called the “knights tour”. Here the text is split into two chessboards and arranged on the squares consisting of 64 squares each. On each board in turn the knight is moved so as to reach every square on the whole board in the minimum number of moves. As the knight moves the letter underneath at the start of the move is moved to the square the knight moves to. And de Chérisey alludes to this on page 131 in Circuit.

The final text can now be read, it says:

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

Jean-Luc Chaumeil maintains that de Chérisey gives the method of the encryption in this document called Stone and Paper that he has in his possession, strangely Chaumeil never mentions this 26 letter anomaly in the ten years he has been talking about Stone and Paper on TV broadcasts. De Chérisey does in fact mention that the final result is a direct anagram of the Hautpoul tombstone with the words PS PRAECUM removed. De Chérisey says:

“I would like to have the reader observe that a prodigious phenomenon occurs, which no logical brain has been able to explain: after composing text A with text B to obtain text C which, confronted with text D, gives text E, it so happens that text E is an anagram of text D” i.e. composed of the same letters”

And

“….wouldn’t it be prodigious if, at the end of all this work, we could but reconstitute the funerary text? Prodigious and perfectly stupid…May our reader rest assured: another text is to be discovered and it is an anagram of the tombstone”

And again

“Common opinion has it that Abbé Bigou, parish priest of RLC in 1781 and the author of the epitaph, also composed this amusement. Such is not our opinion: the anagram was composed in our time and concludes a signature which we shall discover when analysing the decoded text,”

Here we find de Chérisey talking around the solution. Paul J Saussez thinks that de Chérisey is saying that although he recognises that the former curé of Rennes le Chateau the Abbé Bigou composed the text on the tombstone, he de Chérisey, used the text and made up the parchment. But the sentences above don’t say this, de Chérisey says that it is “our opinion” that the parchment anagram has been composed in our time. This is merely a hint that he may have done it but it also can be taken at face value and that he indeed isn’t the composer but this mysterious ‘they’ who think it “not our opinion” seem to agree that it has been done recently by someone else. This document held by Jean-Luc Chaumeil that he calls Stone and Paper but what appears to me more likely to be de Chérisey’s notes on how he would solve the final clues. 

Philippe de Chérisey mentioned the final result of the decoded next in his book CIRCUIT and, as I’ve already mentioned, he even tried to protect his discovery from use by others through a lawyer. Why wouldn’t he welcome his creation to be spread as wide as possible? However he got the whole solution and the decryption method wrong and actually got three letters completely incorrect.

BERGE(S)E PAS DE TENTATION QUE POUSSIN TENIERS GARDENT LA CLEF (S)AX DCLX(H)XI PAR…..etc

However he somehow miraculously arrived at the right answer. How can the supposed composer of such a meticulous and clearly well thought out encryption method then make such a basic error? This, according to Jean Luc Chaumeil, is apparently after he mentions the use of a 25-letter alphabet. It is clear that the man who is supposed to have composed the whole original encryption who then it appears got his own code completely wrong cannot be the original composer of the original code.

In his book Circuit de Chérisey alludes to the painting of Heliodorus being chased from the Temple by the Horse of God CHEVAL DE DIEU painted by Eugene DeLACROIX in the Chapel of Angels at the Church of St Sulpice in Paris and according to de Chérisey this is his solution to the final text PAR LA CROIX ET CE CHEVAL DE DIEU. There are two problems with this; firstly this explanation differs dramatically from his solution in Stone and Paper and secondly; Why in Circuit is de Chérisey referring to a period when Delacroix painted his three paintings in St Sulpice when the French used a 26 letter alphabet and yet apparently goes to a lot of trouble encoding the text using a 25 letter alphabet?

One is again forced to make the conclusion that Philippe de Chérisey didn’t write the Shepherdess code, he was given the solution and a rough methodology of how tombstone letters become rearranged by someone else or got it from a document and de Chérisey decrypted it. On reaching the Shepherdess solution he then tried to protect it from use by other authors. His interpretation of the meaning of the final text is written in Stone and Paper, which is frankly too corny for de Chérisey in my opinion. Many detractors say this document is absolute proof that de Chérisey composed the parchment code but he merely says that he is the author of the solution, in other words he is the one who solved it; at no point does he say that he is the author of the original code for the shepherdess parchment.

Another thing to strike one after the decrypted text is revealed is that after a very complex process that is impossible to decrypt without prior knowledge of the method and most importantly – the keys, one is still left with a message that is still not entirely clear and even de Chérisey himself has been unable to decrypt this. He has changed his opinion as to its meaning on several occasions, is this behaviour of a man who wrote the whole thing in the first place?

 It is obvious someone knew the key and the method, however in order to encode this one only needs to work from the final solution ‘Bergere pas de Tentation etc….’ and one can see that the letters in the Knight’s Tour matrix would also form an anagram of the final solution and the Hautpoul Tombstone as the letters are not changed here just re-arranged in a precise pattern. A letter shift to the one below then a change of letters using a Vigenere table with the tombstone plus PS PRAECUM yields a now scrambled text. Here it would seem to be sufficient to stop as this would not need to be any more complex particularly since the final result is also a riddle, the letters have been displaced and the letters have been changed. However an analysis by a computer using a letter frequency analysis could still yield the final text at this stage, indeed the actual letters have only been changed by the letter shift, a childishly simple code. Our encoder now makes another letter shift opposite to the previous shift. This doesn’t cancel out the previous shift as the letters have been completely displaced by the use of the Vigenere table.  Then he uses the Vigenere table again this time using the mistakes which make up the word MORT EPEE as the key. Here for the first time the actual letters will be changed before they were merely scrambled. A shortened key on its own such as this is easily cracked but the subsequent further scrambling will prevent any analysis. The final result is 128 scrambled letters to which AD GENES ARETH is added making 140 letters in all and these are appended to the Latin Text at a rate of about one letter in every seventh. The encoder seems to have been aware of code cracking techniques and has taken steps to prevent this from being decrypted without the keys.  The placing of the final scrambled letters into the Latin words of a known parchment passage from John will have been difficult to if not impossible to achieve and it is more likely that the parchment had to be written from scratch.

De Sède wrote that Saunière had used the Army to decrypt this message; this is most definitely incorrect, no decryption method could have yielded a result without the key, de Sède clearly had the key also. The French had used the Vigenere Code to send their messages during the war with Britain in the 19^th century but Charles Babbage; the inventor of the world’s first computer, using nothing but cunning had been able to crack the code when the code maker only used a short repeated keyword like MORT EPEE. However it was found that the Vigenere method was still uncrackable without the aid of a number crunching computer if a long key the same length as the original text was used. This had been around 1850 but as we have seen the code Abbé Bigou is alleged by de Chérisey to have written it around 1781 or later mainly because of the key that was written upon the Marie de Blanchefort tombstone. Either the codemaker (Bigou?) knew the code was stronger if written using a full-length key or the code has been written after 1850 and Bigou wasn’t the author. To shift letters back and forth along the alphabet and to use the Knights Tour is actually an unnecessary complication especially since the final text is still not immediately understandable and clearly requires further inside knowledge to understand it, the whole process seems to be some kind of ritual. It is however perhaps worth mentioning here that a document apparently written by the Abbé Bigou has been found inside the Departmental Archives inside a page of a parochial book of Rennes le Chateau church from the 18^th century. It seems to say, and is repeated 7 times, “….us de galillée n’est point icy”. This is old French and means “’…us’ from Galillee is not here”, the word ‘us’ is not a French word and appears to be half a word – perhaps ‘Jesus’. There appears to be some connection from this to AD GENESARETH (Towards Galillee) here which is the rearrangement of the centre 12 letters made by Henry Lincoln. It will be shown later that Genesareth may be alluding to an area around the deserted village of Perillos way to the east of Rennes le Chateau, an area that may have been visited by Antoine Bigou on his way to exile in Spain during the French Revolution or it could be referring to an area described as the “Womb of the Earth” in a place that was once ruled under the Merovingians.

The final text translates as the now famous phrase:

BERGERE PAS DE TENTATION QUE POUSSIN TENIERS GARDENT LA CLEF PAX DCLXXXI PAR LA CROIX ET CE CHEVAL DE DIEU JACHEVE CE DAEMON DE GARDIEN A MIDI POMMES BLEUES

In English:

“Shepherdess No Temptation which Poussin Teniers guard the key Peace 681 by the cross and this house of God I achieve this daemon guardian at midday Blue Apples.”

The first thing that becomes immediately clear that this is fundamentally different from the final clue from the first parchment. Superficially it appears to be suggesting some kind of pattern, either on a document or a painting referenced or actually in the MIDI landscape itself, the area of this part of the Languedoc. There’s no mention of King Dagobert or the Merovingians or probably most significantly any treasure of any kind. The most significant phrase to the uninitiated here is the beginning. What is obvious is that the method of hiding the code is different; they are different in emphasis; even the handwriting is different and therefore these two documents were written by different people.

Shepherdess No temptation Poussin Teniers guard the key.

Once again I can cite de Chérisey’s lack of understanding as to what the final solution means. In his book CIRCUIT that he wrote in the early 1960s he says:

“But nothing can any longer stop Charlotte for whom the words jostle at the postillion gate. Poussin and Teniers are two painters who became famous by the Shepherds of Arcadia for one and the temptation of St Anthony for the other. The Shepherds is for Poussin as The Temptation is for Teniers. If they could guard their key is it that there no longer exists the lock, for this object and that parchments were not there prior to the revolution and had no provenance with Anton Bigou, But they were from 1861, the era of the third painter (Delacroix)” 

This is in direct conflict with what de Chérisey then says later in Stone and Paper. Why does the supposed creator of this hoax take great pains to include Poussin and Teniers in his hoax only to ignore them in the final solution? It is clear that de Chérisey is himself trying to look for a solution and keeps changing his mind. This is not the original author speaking here, however de Chérisey mentions something very significant here; the painter Eugene Delacroix who is tied with the Church of St Sulpice but more significantly the date 1861, which is 1681, the supposed start date of the Prieure de Sion, reversed. Delacroix’s painting of Liberty Leading the People is supposed to have inspired the character of Gavroche in Victor Hugo[I A32] ’s Les Misérables, now a very successful musical which features the European revolutions of 1848. It is important to note that the French were using the 26 letter alphabet at this time. Why then is de Chérisey’s Vigenere code using a 25 letter code? What for?

We are able to understand that the original codemaker, even if this is de Chérisey who concocted this over elaborate twenty year long hoax for no logical reason, is drawing us by use of the word Shepherdess to the seventeenth century painter Nicholas Poussin and his most famous painting, ‘Les Bergers d’Arcadie’ (The Shepherds of Arcadia) found in the Louvre Art museum in Paris. The other is also found easily for although Teniers (there’s two, elder and younger) painted over a thousand paintings between them there’s only two where St Anthony is NOT being tempted (hence “shepherdess no temptation”) by the devil and these are both St Anthony the Hermit and St Paul the Hermit being fed by Ravens. Interestingly Nazi Luftwaffe chief Herman Gœring once owned one of these paintings. The phrase PAR LA CROIX ET CE CHEVAL DE DIEU has a tenuous link with one of the paintings by Eugene Delacroix inasmuch as it is in the church of St Sulpice that contains the Rose Line Gnomon. But de Chérisey dismisses Poussin and Teniers completely even though he was supposed to have originally included them in his text.

For those who say that these words were included in order to match the letters to the original tombstone, one is reminded that the text is already possibly padded out with the phrase PS PRAECUM; it will be no greater effort to include these extra letters. No the original author needed to include these two seventeenth century painters and later we will see why. 

Somewhat significantly, a painting called the Temptation of St Anthony appears in the church of Notre Dame de Marseilles in Limoux about ten miles north of Rennes le Chateau and Henry Boudet at the end of La Vraie Langue Celtique… also mentioned this enigmatic church.