Author: Val Wineyard
Publisher: Published by the author 2010
Price: £19.90 Paperback
Isbn: 2951184557X

This book is clearly a labour of love, written by an enthusiast. It’s beautifully illustrated, with photographs, mostly in colour, on nearly every other page. The British author lives in the Languedoc, and has previously written about her own past lives there. In this book she tells the well-worn story of Rennes-le-Château and its priest Bérenger Saunière and reveals his secret: he was a Freemason. 

The first half of the book is packed with detail, including the complex inter-relationships of the various clergy in the Saunière story, some of it not usually found in English-language books on Rennes-le-Château and Saunière. 

At one point, Wineyard complains that her research was “hard work for French writers are inclined to jump around from one subject to another. It is rare for a French book to have an index.” She could have been describing her own book. 

It’s when she moves into exploring what happened after the crucifixion of Jesus that the book begins to unravel. Part of the problem is her indiscriminate use of speculative writers – Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, Knight & Lomas, Lynn Picknett, Laurence Gardner, Graham Phillips, and even a novel about Judas – as source material, but without ever citing a page number so you can check the context and evidence for these writers’ assertions, which in most cases she takes as fact. She does the same thing with websites, including Wikipedia, but often her “citations” just say “website on Sejanus”, “website about Pont-ius Pilate”, which is really not terribly helpful. 

There’s a fascinating (if true) but very long and complex discuss-ion of the family background of Pontius Pilate’s wife, as background to Wineyard’s claim that Pilate and his wife actively helped Jesus and Mary Magdalene escape to France: “Because Claudia Procula had estates and friends in Narbonne and Rennes-les-Bains, she and Pilate advised Mary Magdalene and Jesus to go there, and the group formed in Judea agreed to meet up again in southern Gaul.” She concludes that Jesus and Mary Magdalene lived in Rennes-les-Bains; that they set up the religion that later became Catharism; and that Jesus was probably buried at the little hamlet of St Salvayre near Alet-les-Bains, just north of Rennes-le-Château. 

Well, everybody’s got to be buried somewhere.