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Timble2 Imaginary person Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Total posts: 7110 Location: Practically in Narnia Age: 58 Gender: Female |
 Posted: 12-03-2003 14:05 Post subject: Simony... |
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I heard something simalar to Alan, that Saunière's money came from selling masses, apparently there're some newspaper ads, traceable back to him.
On the other hand he was also apparently a stamp collector, so some money may have come in that way.
Whatever, the truth it's created 21th century tourist attraction, and there's an book shop dedicated to the numerous books on the topic, plus the Cathars, Templar and general earth mysteries stuff.
Renne le Chateau is an attractive little hilltop village and the church and its small museum are worth visiting if you're in the region. The church is odd, possibly a bit tacky, but the devil holding up the holy water stoop must have scared generations of children.
I passed through on a walking trip last year starting off at Montsegur, where some of the last Cathar's were beseiged, and finally burned after they surrendered. The Languedoc region of France is worth a visit for Forteans wanting to visit the Cathar sites and other simply odd places like the Hermitage of St Anthony in the Gorge de Galmus (see simonsmith) where the buildings cling onto a sheer rock face and the a chapel built is build into a natural cleft in the rock.
Trying to attach a picture or two. |
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| Timble2 Imaginary person Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Total posts: 7110 Location: Practically in Narnia Age: 58 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 12-03-2003 14:13 Post subject: |
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| And the Hermitage of St Anthony |
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| many_angled_one Haunter of the Dark Joined: 18 Jan 2002 Total posts: 439 Location: Glasgow, Scotland Gender: Male |
| Posted: 12-03-2003 14:20 Post subject: |
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Father Saunieres money did not come in a lump sum I beleive. There were times he spent money like water and other times were he was really dirt poor, only to mysteriously become rich again some time later.
As best we can tell he received several influxes of cash. Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church paid him to keep quiet or not reveal certain documents he discovered or perhaps he could only get parts of the treasure and sell them from time to time when it was safe to do so.
Supposidly while renovating his chapel he came across certain documents, weither this is the "treasure" itself or clues to its whereabouts I dont know. I believe he spend some time thereafter wandering round the surrounding areas, as if looking for something. |
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| Anonymous |
| Posted: 12-03-2003 14:50 Post subject: Re: Almost totally off-subject... |
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| rynner wrote: |
..but on the same day I discovered this thread I also found a local website which appears to suggest that an area of Falmouth where I used to live a few years ago was once called Mount Sion
http://www.seaviewinn.co.uk
(Enter the site, click Local Pictures. For some reason the page URL doesn't seem to work.)
Although I have delved a bit into local history, this was news to me. |
humm never heard of that either..interesting ah..like the bit called Barbary hill.... |
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| many_angled_one Haunter of the Dark Joined: 18 Jan 2002 Total posts: 439 Location: Glasgow, Scotland Gender: Male |
| Posted: 13-03-2003 12:39 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | (the catholic church has never liked secrets) |
er... surely you mean "The Catholic church has never liked ANYBODY ELSE knowing or having secrets" |
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| butterfly27 Hanuman Joined: 28 Feb 2002 Total posts: 788 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 18-03-2003 14:20 Post subject: |
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This site offers information regarding a priest selling masses 25 years prior to Sauniere. There's also an index at the top of the page for accessing other info re Rennes-le-Chateau. The spelling is poor in places as its someone's translation from French. There are pics on the actual site.
Quote:
This story ressembles Rennes le Chateau's although it took place 25 years before it.
Louis de Coma was born in 1822 in Foix (Ariege) .He was from a very catholique family of nine children. His father,Bonnaventure was a famous architect.
Louis began religious studies at the seminary (Grand et Petit Séminaire).He was a smart pupil who worked hard.He did not want to be a simple country priest.In 1844 he enters the Jesuit Seminary in Saint Acheul in Amiens.
He was a teacher in several religious school in the south of France until 1855.During this year his father died and Louis came back to the family domain in Baulou,Ariège, 50kms far from Rennes le Chateau.
He was the leader of the "Association de la Bonne Mort"(Good Death association) ,which was affiliated to "la Compagnie de Jesus".Its aim was to help the faithful to prepare for their death and their departure towards paradise.This "preparation" consisted of sending gifts ,or going into retreat (for which people had to pay) ,and to confession.He also founded "L'oeuvre de Gethsemani" (The work of Gethsemani) which received payments for masses which were to be said for the dead:
An individual mass was 100f
A collective mass was 1f
He travelled through France to make people aware of the probleme of their death.He was helped by the Jesuits who went ahead of them in order to "prepare " the people for his coming.So he earned thousands of francs he gave to his superiors.Did he give them all of that money? No he did not.In 1860 ,like Berenger Sauniere ,he started to build a underground chapel,a grotto from which ran a spring ,a monastery,a church,a Way of the Cross.During the 20 years the work lasted he raised funds and tried to convince some monastic orders to settle in his monastery.
He received 4000 francs (golden value)from ....the Countess of Chambord. How did the Countess come to give money to this priest in Ariege ? Thanks to another priest,a teacher in Narbonne, Alfred Sauniere.
Unfortunately ,he cannot convince anyone to settle in his monastery.In 1879,Jules Ferry has "la Compagnie de Jesus" dissolved.But in 1885,monks of the congregation of the holy Ghost accept to come to the monastery.This did not stay there long because they had an argument with Louis de Coma.Then he made an apostolic school of the building .The cost of the buildings and the demands for masses was evaluated to 500.000 francs (golden value
But contrary to Berenger Sauniere,Louis de Coma always had a modest way of life.So a part of this money disapeared ...Is that the track of a new treasure?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------EDIT:can't get the link to work. EDIT AGAIN: works now!
Last edited by butterfly27 on 18-03-2003 16:14; edited 1 time in total |
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| JamesWhitehead Piffle Prospector Joined: 02 Aug 2001 Total posts: 5543 Location: Manchester, UK Gender: Male |
| Posted: 18-03-2003 15:38 Post subject: |
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This site:
http://www.rennes-discovery.com/Navigation.htm
has lots of stuff and is a good deal less wacky than many of the
published books. It does not seem to have been updated since
last November. There is also a section devoted to studies submitted
by other enthusiasts - some of them are very fringe.
The most intriguing thing was the Breaking News report some 18
months ago that a chest had been discovered in the foundations of
the Magdela Tower. It was to be ceremonially opened but the news
then seems to have fizzled out. Oh dear, it's back to the pentagons
on Poussin!  |
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| butterfly27 Hanuman Joined: 28 Feb 2002 Total posts: 788 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 18-03-2003 17:09 Post subject: |
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| James Whitehead wrote: |
The most intriguing thing was the Breaking News report some 18
months ago that a chest had been discovered in the foundations of
the Magdela Tower. It was to be ceremonially opened but the news
then seems to have fizzled out. Oh dear, it's back to the pentagons
on Poussin! |
I've checked out the site I posted a link to, James, and there's no mention of this chest. Yet the site seems to be updated quite regularly - there's even a webcam featuring today's date. French TV were at RlC last week apparently.
I've subscribed to the site so if there's any other news I'll post it here.
Strangely the sections concerning photos, diggings and secret societies were all unavailable. And sadly if you use the search option, it returns the results in French, even tho this site is the English version. |
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| Anonymous |
| Posted: 18-03-2003 18:32 Post subject: |
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I had a look at the site Susan posted a link to. I'll try and translate the stuff on the digs later, but in the meantime I scanned through it.
Unfortunately, it doesn't mention what was in the chest, but it does say a woman was sent to check on the contents. It wasn't clear whether she was a Vatican envoy or a professor of some sort. There was talk of her threatening to destroy documents, but it might have been said in jest. Oh, and a lot of comments on her phwoarness... |
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| Anonymous |
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| LaurenChurchill Pretty Good Old One
No I am NOT a yeti Joined: 29 Jan 2003 Total posts: 933 Location: Oz Age: 27 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 29-08-2003 11:19 Post subject: Christ's Relics in France |
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| Quote: | [B]The parish priest was intent on improving his little church. His was a poor community and there was little money for the necessities of life, never mind paint, plaster and ornaments. The priest, Abbe Berenger Sauniere, knew that whatever renovations needed to be done, he would have to do himself. The penniless priest set about his task in the summer of 1891.
One of the first things that Abbe did was to remove an altar stone that lay across two broad columns. One of them, he discpvered, was hollow and inside were four tubes containing parchments. Some were in code and to this day no one knows what was written on the documents. But they set the priest on a fabulous trail, an odyssey of mystery and adventure - a journey to a secret source of wealth.
Suddenly his Church of St Magdalene became filled with glittering ornaments and Rennes-le-Chateau, the village in which it nestles, became wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of its farmworker inhabitants. The priest's pay was six pounds a year |
can someone tell me how to insert words with accents and pound symbols etc.
| Quote: | [B]yet he spent an astonishing ten million pounds on his church, on the village, on missionary work - and on himself.
Father Berenger built a modern road up to the village. He piped in water. He hired craftsmen from all over Europe to redecorate the church in a lurid fashion, with hideous statues and gaudy plaques. He constructed a lavish villa for himself and his housekeeper, with a splendid wood-panelled study in a tower overlooking decorative gardens containing pretty orangery. He filled the villa with a collection of rare china, precious fabrics, antique marble and a magnificent library. |
I want  | Quote: | [B]He threw regular banquets for his parishoners and he gave cash handouts to the locals. He financed missionary work in Africa and he funded convents and monasteries.
Today the church and the villa still stand in the hamlet of Rennes-le-Chateau, huddled on the foothills of the Pyrenees in southern France. It is a tightly-knit community of form workers and grape pickers living in neat, white cottages. The thin mountain air is filled with the swish of scythes and the call of birds. Only the occasional visitor comes to investigate one of the most tantalising mysteries of all time.
What wonderful - or dreadful - secret did Father Berenger Sauniere uncover in his church a century and more before? Was it a hidden horde of plundered treasure? Was it the Holy Grail, the cup Christ drank from at the Last Supper? Or was it a secret so terrible that the Pope himself paid a fortune to keep it hidden forever?
Father Berenger never revealed where the village's sudden wealth came from. And the only person to share his secret, his housekeeper Marire, kept her silence to the grave.
The only clues to the mystery of Rennnes-le-Chateau are the constant flow of important guests, from Catholic Church officials to politicians, who visited the village after the priest's discovery. One of his most frequent visitors was the Archduke Johann von Habsburg, a cousin of the emperor of Austria-Hungary. It was subsequently found that Habsbirg and Sauniere had opened consequetively numbered bank accounts and that considerable sums of money had been transferred to the priest. In addition, this simple country priest had no fewer than seven bulging accounts in other banks across Europe.
Sauniere refused to accept either promotion or a transfer, and an attempt to have him thrown out of the church for illegally selling Masses was overruled by the Pope. In 1917, as Sauniere lay dying, a priest was called to hear his final confession - and was so shocked by what Sauniere told him that he refused to give him absolution.
Not even Sauniere's will threw any light on the mystery, for it showed him to be penniless. He had switched his wealth to his housekeeper Marie, who continued to live in comfort at the villa until 1946. In that year, the French government issued a new currency and, before the banks would exchange new Francs for old, everyone was obliged to declare exactly how they had obtained their money. Marie did not - and was seen in her garden burning bundles of the useless old notes. She chose to live in poverty rather than reveal her secret.
Eventually, Marie sold the villa so that she could live on the proceeds of the transaction. She promised the new owner, Noel Corbu, that she would tell him her secret before she died. But in 1953 she suffered a stroke which left her incapable of speech and she died unable or unwilling to communicate the answer to the puzzle.
So how was it that Berenger Sauniere, who earned only six pounds a year as a parish priest, was able to spend the fabulous sum of ten million pounds in 25 years?
The most extraordinary but widely circulated theory is that the priest discovered that Christ's crucifixion was an elaborate subterfuge and that the Catholic Church bought his silence. Several books have been written about this controversial theory. In them, it is supposed that the altar documents Sauniere discovered traced the family tree of an old French Royal dynasty - establishing descent from Christ.
It is claimed that, contrary to Christian belief, Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had children who married into European royalty. Far from being a poor carpenter, so the theory goes, Jesus was in reality an aristocrat and his miracles, simple magician's tricks. His crucifixion, ordered by the Romans who were worried about hid popularity, was faked. After sniffing opium on the cross, he was unconscious and appeared to be dead. This allowed him to 'rise from the dead' after being placed in the tomb.
Christ supposedly lived on in the Holy Land for another 40 years. But Mary, their children and several relatives took a ship to France. They landed in Marseilles and eventually settled in Rennes-le-Chateau. There the children met and married into the French nobility, principally the Merovingian dynasty which was based around Rennes.
Sauniere, it has been suggested, showed the newly discovered family tree to the wealthy descendents almost 2000 years later. They paid him millions to find out more and to keep his mouth shut until they could claim their lineage unchallenged. The Vatican, howeevr, countered by giving the priest money rather than allow the Bible story to be questioned.
This theory has been developed further by some researchers into the priest's secret. They claim that Christ's body was actually brought to France and buried, along with the family treasure and documentary evidence, beneath the so-called Eternal Spring in the nearby area known as Le Valdieu - the Vale of God. This peaceful valley is three miles from Rennes-le-Chateau and it is believed that the two places are linked by tunnels. The priest and the housekeeper used to go for long walks in the countryside and would return home lugging bags.
The Vale of Gad hides a secret even older than Father Berenger's mysterious discovery of 1891. A trail of ciphers and clues has led historians to a spring which pours from the earth there. The so-called Eternal Spring covered over by an arched wall when the water was diverted some 200 years ago. This was thought to have been the burial site of sacred relics or gold, brought to the area by the Visigoths, one of the Teutonic tribes that plundered the wealth of the Roman Empire.
In the 1960's an Englishwoman, Celia Brooke, come to Rennes and took on the task of looking after St Magdalene's Church. She raises new questions about the priest's wealth:
'Behind the altar there is a room where Sauniere used to lock himself away after services. No one would ever see Sauniere leave it, yet he would be spotted later on carrying heavy sacks. We have found a hidden passageway out of the church from this room. I believe he used it to make his way down to the Vale of God, probably by tunnel. But I ahve been here a quarter of a century and I still don' know the answer to the mystery. I don't think we ever will.'
Another Englishwoman, Patricia Logan, who settled in the Vale of God in 1982, discovered that her land enclosed the site of the original spring. At the time she moved to Farnce from her home town of York, she had no idea of the stories that one of the world's most mystifying fortunes could be buried in or around her back garden. patricia, who runs a guest house in the valley says:
'The legends talk of a man-made pool which hides an amazing treasure, and there is a man-made pool here. There have been all sorts of theories about what was hidden beneath it. Some people believe that it is treasure taken from the temple of Jerusalem thousands of years ago. Others think that it could be the Holy Grail from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and which was used to catch drops of his blood at the Crucifixion. Others even think that the 'riches' are the remains of Christ himself. I can't wait for the wall to crumble so I can dig beneath the foundations but I won't let bulldozers ruin the countryside. It is very strange to think that sometimes I might be standing on Christ's tomb. If this is his last resting place, it would make the priest's supposed grave robbery all the more horrifying. It could explain why he was refused the last rites.
Antoine Captier keeps Sauniere's correspondence and papers to this day. He thinks the key to the mystery might lie in a secret crypt deep beneath the church. Captier, a descendent of the priest's bell-ringer, says:
'In his diary of 21 September 1891 the Abbe refers to "the discovery of a tomb". This might refer to a crypt beneath the church but no one has found in scince. It as been said that the crypt contains tombstones which resemble those of the Merovingian kings - the French royal line supposed to descend from Christ. That might explain theories about a bloodline stretching to the present day.'
Antoine Captier believes the most likely explanation for the old priest's wealth is that he found some gold but supplemented it by selling Masses. Of the fake crucifixion theory, Captier says:
'Why should Christ's apparantdescendents want to keep such a proud claim quiet? Why wouldn't they investigate it themselves rather than leave it to Sauntiere, a parish priest with no apparent resources? Why should the Vatican accept that the family tree was anything but a medieval fargery? And why should so many important people allow themselves to be blackmailed by a simple country priest? Despite all the books written about Rennes-le-Chateau, no one has ever proved any of these theories.
I have grown up with this mystery. One day the answer will come out but only when the time is right. And that time is not now.'
One possible explanation for the merging of two mysteries about the hidden wealth of Rennes-le-Chateau and the Vale of God is that references to the Holy Grail are really a corruption of the French words 'sang real', meaning 'royal blood'. Was this, after al, what Father Berenger Sauniere discovered? That Christ's descendents came to France almost two millenia ago - and may, unknowingly, still be living in the region to this day?
None of these theories, however, explains why Sauniere's deathbed confession was so horrifying that he was refused the last rites. Local farmer Francois Sauzede has the last word. Tapping his stick on the sunbaked soil, he says:
'I have known since I was a child that the kay to power, riches and fame is buried here. That is the knowledge that my father and grandfather gave me. Everyone else in the village was brought up knowing it too. But just try finding out where or even what the secret is.' |
Righto. Now, speak. What are your opinions, ideas, points and/or unrelated bull that you want to tell us all?????
Last edited by LaurenChurchill on 29-08-2003 11:33; edited 1 time in total |
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| Jerry_B Great Old One Joined: 15 Apr 2002 Total posts: 8265 |
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| Anonymous |
| Posted: 29-08-2003 13:37 Post subject: |
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| It's also in the 'Big Book of Conspiracies' |
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| Anonymous |
| Posted: 29-08-2003 17:53 Post subject: |
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Here is a panoramic photo I took last week at Rennes Le Chateau. An appx 180 degree view.
You might have to scroll left and right to see it in full. This version is massively shrunk and compressed for the web. This image is appx 100 kb. The original is appx 100 MB.
Saunier's folly, the Magdalene Tower, is on the right of the picture. |
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| _schnor Stand back boy!
Joined: 14 Aug 2001 Total posts: 990 Location: Llangollen Gender: Male |
| Posted: 29-08-2003 19:39 Post subject: |
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| 3 Rennes Le Chateau threads merged |
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