|
|
The story of the tiny southern France village Rennes Les Chateau is one of the most often told stories as far as mysterious places in Europe are concerned. Several hundreds book have been published on this village with 40 inhabitants. Treasure hunters dug so many holes the mayor had to impose a strict ban for safety reasons. For esoteric circles it is the center of Europe. Every year several 10000 visitors come to this place. The reason for all this are rumours of a French priest making the most extraordinary find some 100 years ago.
The story is linked to the so-called “Priory of Sion” which became very popular by Dan Browns novel “The Da Vinci code” published in 2003.
I will describe the facts of this story more verbose than usual because they became known to a wider audience just in recent years by books debunking Mr. Browns description. The large economic success of Mr. Browns book caused fact books to be written. Among the first was Dan Burstein’s “Secrets of the code”. It is a collection of many different accounts by many authors. More structured and in my opinion giving more and better facts per page are more recent works like the French “Code da Vinci: L’enquête” by Etchegoin and Lenoir (2004) as well as the German “Der wahre Sakrileg” (2006). Sooner or later probably there will be english versions of these works.
Like many treasure stories very few facts are known. Unlike most stories it is sure that authors even faked evidence to make the story appear more interesting. Nevertheless there is still a large community of esoteric circles who ignore the facts – at least the unpleasant ones - and insist to believe. This is an interesting example of a myth that became detached from the facts so it will probably live forever. Every year sees new books and even conferences take place at Rennes. These people even started to look out for hidden “clues” in the church. Do you really think that a man who found a fortune will leave clues at a public place? So some lucky person unrelated to him will get it all? This happens only in novels, no matter how scientific they try to appear. However, once you accept the idea of “hidden clues” you can always find some. Always. This also happened in Rennes. Be it the interior of the Church or some clay model of the landscape ordered by Sauniere before he died, there are always people who believe in these clues. Even though it can be proved that these items were mass products.
The Rennes Les Chateau story became part of the background of two well-known books. “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” by Lincoln, Baigent, Leigh and “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown. Though these authors most probably knew about the faked elements of the story they used it for their books. This shows that authors who work at the treshold of fact and fiction are tempted to keep alive even faked stories and so make the live more difficult for those who want to discover the truth. See chapter “Hype authors” for more on this topic.
|
