The Last Lady of Rennes

One thing is clear, Elisabeth Hautpoul-Rennes denied her immediate family (the bloodline) access to the family papers, which they never had. It is known that the will of Elisabeth was challenged. From all this, it may be inferred that she judged them unworthy. So they may have vindicated by letting the charitable ladies throw her body in a mass grave in Paris (a wonderful place to have a cadaver disappear). But is it true that she died at the ladies of Charity? A very cruel treatment, even before they read the will.

And now, let’s go back to our main topic: why, when she returned from Spain, Elisabeth, didn’t she rush to retrieve her belongings inside the church? The most plausible track of investigation is that the same Elisabeth hid or had someone to hide for her, and then she never went to collect her belongings on her return from Spain.

Was Elisabeth an ill and too-old woman? One can argue that perhaps Elisabeth suffered from depression, or maybe even from senile dementia, as she left the castle to decay. But her mother did the same until 1781, and his father abandoned the castle in 1756. Seeing the other castles in the surrounding area, it is not surprising to see how this decision to destroy their manors was common to all the aristocracy of the place. The castle on Montferrand was already in ruins in 1799; the castle of Blanchefort holds only memory. Montsegur only resists because it is a place of martyrdom. Maybe she was ill, but this did not prevent her from continuing her litigations, as well as quarreling with the nephews of Rennes les Bains because of an inheritance, and sadly to keep borrowing money. Even more impressive is that, in the meantime, she had enough charisma and authority to call the whole family to celebrate the Spring in ruined Montferrand in 1799.

A woman aged 81, burdened by debts, offered the castle for sale at auction and then, when 82, sued buyers for fraud, won the case, and was reintegrated into the castle, can not be the same woman who, some twenty years before, had forgotten to have a small hidden treasure just a few steps from home.

Those coins and jewels were to be bait for someone unlearned and greedy. Berenger Saunière’s portrait. If somebody had to do so to attract hype and curiosity around an ancient hermetic and forbidden alchemical tradition, Berenger Saunière was undoubtedly the person. But I am convinced that if he had been left alone, he would not be able to bundle all that mess. As we will see further on, he had probably been helped by someone to raise even more trouble and draw even more attention. But this was the attention that had to shut itself. Almost all historical documents in the story are fakes and not too artfully orchestrated. Or, even worse, they are conceivable to be faked. The result is to discredit the affair in the most demeaning way.

Who will have the tenacity to continue to dig out a story debased and ruined by lack of seriousness? Who will save the silent baby in the middle of a garbage dump? Few shall be those going further: the most stubborn and those who know what to look for. But none of these two categories knows “where” to look.

What happened from Saunière’s death on, we sadly know. Clouds of esoteric grasshoppers, the so-called para-masonic secret societies, were said to reach out to conquer the territory of Rennes le Château. Not only they invented documents anew, but also the tombstones of Marie de Blanchefort. Perhaps they have not invented them but spared no effort in giving the impression that they had designed and made them.

I can not but continue to ask myself ” why” they raged so much on the tombstones of a 67-year-old Marchioness. Why has Saunière emptied her grave, perhaps scattered the bones, broken the stele, and done away with the tombstone? Why this rage against this burial, helped by all these secret societies? Syllogistic reasoning might infer that these secret societies’ reason for existence is to destroy the memory of the burial of Marie and even to deny it to Elisabeth. All the Rennes le Château affair machine created to deny these women the right to be buried? You might think these secret societies are against the burial system of our European civilization in recent centuries. But it soon turns out they only pointed to these two women from the beginning.

The family Hautpoul disappears, and let’s do it. For an aristocratic family, graves represent their history, their line of descent from an ancestor. If the tomb of a great-grandmother is sacred to all of us, the noble should be even more. Imagine someone desecrates and destroys the tomb of one of your great-grandmothers, denies it to another, and you ignore it. Do you suffer, with resignation, these brutalities without even asking why? If any journalist or writer asks you for an interview to explain your reasons, you reply that you have no reasons to defend and nothing to say, that such is life, and we must submit to the nasty boys who want to play with your great-grandmother’s grave. And anyway, it does not concern you, so are things that happened long ago. And let them be written hundreds of books, with the most outlandish theories on the grave of your great-grandmother, and you do not react. This was the reaction of the family Hautpoul when the Rennes le Château affair became known worldwide.

Are they perhaps indignant on esotericism and hermeticism? It is hard to believe since during Saunière time, it was challenging to find a Masonic lodge in the Midi of France where there wasn’t enrolled a d’Hautpoul. Indeed, family members were among those who brought Freemasonry to France from Britain. A Hautpoul sustained the rise of the Martinist movement. But also, the members of the other families of  Razès didn’t stand aside, Marconis de Nègre, a descendant of Marie’s family, 1836, created the Rite of Memphis whose foundation myth speaks of an Egyptian sage named Ormus, who is converted to Christianity by St Mark (I wonder why it looks so similar to a legend that circulated in Venice on San Marco). According to this myth, Ormus’s disciples were the sole repositories of Egyptian wisdom until 1118 and then transmitted it to the Templars. Gold Rose-Cross and Priory of Sion were modeled on similar foundation myths.

In esoteric circles, nothing is more dangerous than a lone individual, independent and determined, who can not be controlled and on whom one cannot rely. Berenger Saunière very soon loses his independence and becomes a puppet in the hands of secret societies that provide him with the know-how to do the church’s symbolic remake, dig underground caverns and fill them with water, erect a tower Magdala, since in Hebrew Magdala means tower. They let him destroy the church, which is basically what they wanted. They likely start Saunière to Alchemy, the most harmless, and they probably even help him make gold.

Nevertheless, look at Sauniere’s picture to understand that this partnership could not last long. Saunière is a brave, daring, intelligent, and curious man who, unfortunately, begins to act independently. He’s not like Antoine Bigou. In 1895 he opened the grave of Marie de Blanchefort. That begins his end; he will not be forgiven, not for the desecration of the tomb itself but because he must not see what was inside.

There was nothing in there, not even a bone. The Marquise, there in that hole, has never been lying. That’s the pivot of the enigma. Nobody will ever accuse Saunière of desecration of the burial grave, an offense which, at the time, was a great crime. But only to the destruction of the stones. Saunière would quickly prove that, in that hole, there has never been a body. And the Hautpoul descendants, in charging him with this crime, would have risked too much. So they content themselves to ruin him financially for the rupture of the stones.

What definitely will ruin Saunière is his friendship with Boudet, the man who knows the stones in the Razés. They study and move stones in Rennes le Château and Rennes les Bains. When, at some point, Saunière orders a smelter to make a maquette or bronze plastic of the two Rennes territory, for his principals is too much. The abbot shall never be able to see the work carried out with the plastic summary of his research because he strangely suffered a stroke the same day he had to go to pick up the maquette from the smelter. Intriguingly, the map that should have appeared in the maquette is not a rendering of the area of the two Rennes. Indeed, it has never been understood to which territory it belongs.

Now to destroy all research made by Saunière, they only needed to lose the memory of the real tombstones of the Marquise. It is a pity not to know if those destroyed by Saunière were different from those he made. Who were the principals of Saunière? Who were in charge of these secret societies who tried to maneuver Sauniere? Almost certainly members of the d’Hautpoul family. At the end of the nineteenth century, it would not have been challenging to have Saunière keep quiet and silent forever if they had wanted to.

Who did hide the little treasure in the church? Almost certainly, Elisabeth, when she realized the Hautpoul, the bloodline, had become unworthy. It was necessary to find new heirs, less power-hungry and more spiritual; it was necessary to take the millenarian wisdom one’s way from the aristocracy and secret societies. Elisabeth and her mother were probably two women not subservient to power but to the spirit. Why did the nobles let decaying their castles? I do not know, but it is typical of the alchemists to abandon the places where they have worked. What did these secret societies, probably operated by Hautpoul, aim to do? To demolish the memory of Marie and Elisabeth. Actually… no, to ensure their memory to be eternal, instead. That curiosity about them never extinguished. In this sense, the d’Hautpoul family demonstrated the worth of the legacy.

Who had the original Marie de Blanchefort’s stele and tombstone carved? And who should that be but Elisabeth? Would you have accepted that the priest chose a tomb to his taste? Furthermore, offensive and extravagant, to offend your mother? How could have the last lady of Rennes allowed that? Why did Saunière break the stele and take away the tombstone? Perhaps because they were very similar to the fake later stones. Maybe because there was carved “Catin ” in the stele, the motto ” in arcadia ego “, and the octopus in the tombstone. It is a pity not to be sure of this. In theory, the original inscriptions should have been simple and not extravagant. A true initiate must never show off; instead, he/she is disguised in the ordinary, especially if she is a woman. But, in the case of ordinary gravestones, Saunière has had no reason to destroy them … unless he thought the soul of the Marquise was in the stones. This hypothesis, which now makes us smile, was instead an ancient belief and an alchemical axiom.

It must be said that those who have the little treasure hidden in the church wished this mystery not to fade into oblivion. This wish is immensely contrary to the tradition that requires a secret initiation instead. Thus it might be plausible that it was decided to flout the tradition even in burial symbolism.

And what about the drawings meaning to certify the burial stones’ trustworthiness? Two authors drew some sketches of them. The first is Eugène Stublein, (Pierres gravées de Languedoc, supposed re-edition of 1884 work, deposited 1966). Although the author has existed, probably in later times, someone else has used his name to publish the booklet, as the publication date would reveal. The second is Elie Tisseyre in an account of a trip to Rennes-le- Château on 26 June 1905. He only drew the stele since Saunière had restored only that. The ancient tombs were never deprived of the tombstone; if there was an engraved stele, there could be the tombstone too. Tisseyre was amazed by the neglected state of the tomb of the illustrious personage, as the same author defines Marie de Blanchefort. On the other hand, the oldest villagers, when they were interviewed in the 1960s, remembered a strange burial and in their eyes still had that enigmatic ” et in arcadia ego “; some even remembered the spider-octopus, others did not ( perhaps it was copied from a book by Le Cour during the forged papers period of production). So, whoever did publish that fake “Pierres gravées de Languedoc “, whoever he/she was, may have intended to restore the truth. More or less.

It is fair to say the error of breaking up the phrase “Requiescat in pace”, or rest in peace in Latin, into “requies catin pace” had already happened in other burial steles. Carving errors could be committed or done intentionally to fill the space homogeneously. Nevertheless, the stonemason possibly commissioned that fragmentation to point at “catin.” Much has been written about this word. I agree with Mariano Bizzarrri and Francesco Scurria, who, in their book “Sulle tracce del Graal”, On the Trail of the Grail, Roma 1995, mention the hypothesis that “catin” in French also means basin, cauldron (as well as “prostitute”, which in this case is nonsense. Even if “prostitute ” stands for our Alchemical Universal Dissolvent. And the goddess Aphrodite was defined as not very faithful precisely because she tended to join everyone and everything). In this story, which seems centered on a form of immortality, the term “cauldron” would be very appropriate. As I mentioned in my article The Dangerous Journey into the Gundestrup Cauldron, people who underwent some practices were called “cauldrons” (2). About the implications, on January 17, see my article Hans Memling’s Altarpiece with Boar and January 17 (3).

What has remained of Marie and Elisabeth? it is impossible to say in the present state of our knowledge. But a kite needs someone to hold the rope to which it is linked. Without an anchorage on the ground or in the ground, the kite will lose in the nothing of the sky.

What has remained of Rennes le Château mystery? Many stones are scattered around the area: Terminus, the god of stones scattered in the countryside. Oddly enough, the god who marked the boundaries cared for life, death, and burial. In the same way that the boundaries of a small village in the south of France are not confined to a small local area, but by now belong to the whole world, Macrobius, in his commentary on Scipio’s dream, said of human bodies: “the boundaries of a body are much more extensive than the body itself”. We will see in the following articles the works of Saunière and Boudet on the ground.

Another abbot of a monastery in the area, curiously aligned to the straight line at 0.00 degrees between Montsegur, Rennes le Château, and the nearby castle of Blanchefort seems to have had a similar fate to Berenger Sauniere. The abbot was Poycarpe de la Rivière and lived two centuries earlier. Contrary to Saunière, he left some books. We will see to translating and reading two of them.

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P.S: As for the legal battle to hide the documents that were supposed to demonstrate the noble origins of the D’Haupoul family, and which a special commission declared to be too crucial for the very security of the nation, allow me a conjecture: from personal experience, I might think that they wanted to hide the Jewish origins of the family. Perhaps a family that had followed the Visigoths first and the Merovingians later in crossing the Pyrenees. Origins that, at that time, were politically dangerous and unmentionable, instead very important from a sapiential point of view. Generally, it was the families who had a lot to protect that disguised themselves. For example, some Jewish families arrived in Venice, converted to Catholicism, and then disappeared with the archive fires at the end of the Serenissima. Later, taking advantage of the chaos of the Napoleonic wars, they moved to the mainland, in the retinue of adventurers attracted by the convent assets confiscated from the religious orders declared dissolved by Napoleon and the trick was done: not even the descendants ever knew, apart from a few to whom it had been directly disclosed. Returning to the D’Hautpouls, other origins could be Cathars, but almost all the nobility of the area were, and in any case, the problem was not seen by the mid-eighteenth century. Templars, Hospitallers, etc., all the families in the area had been. Ultimately, any European origin would no longer constitute a secret of such magnitude that it could not be revealed.

1. See also The Druidic Abbesses of Fontevraud and Remiremont. Part 1 ;
2.  The Dangerous Journey into the Gundestrup Cauldron;
3. Hans Memling’s Altarpiece with Boar and January 17 ;
4. See also Holbein Dead Christ Builds his Grave ,  Pompeii Mysteries Villa/ a Gentle Flowing with Mystica Vannus ,  Pherekydes of Syros and the Fountain of Time , , Rossetti and the Mystery of Platonic Love, part 1 , Dionysus, Universal Dissolvent and Kykeon ,  Merèlle, Ouspensky & Time out of Matter , Louis de Broglie and the Memory of an Immortal Particle  , Eros, Psyche & a New Alchemical Body , Fortunio Liceti and the Cranial Omo  ;