Club meeting at Ashmores

11th November 2021 Don’t take dynamite to Rhedae! – Clive Rees

Clive started with a thought on conspiracy theory: Imagine a barn door, an arrow suddenly sticks in this door, then someone paints a target around the arrow at the centre!  His slide presentation started with a beautiful picture of Carcassonne, which is very similar to what Rhedae looked like originally and it is said that when the Visigoths sacked Rome they returned to Rhedae to hide their plunder and gold. This led to the place being demolished (probably in search of the treasure?) and it was renamed as Rennes Le Chateau, a town of 30 000 originally about 20 mile south of Carcassonne, 4Km south of Couiza.

There then came the priest called Berenger Sauniere who spent millions of Francs restoring the village….but no one knew where he got the money from?!

The next slide showed a notice as you enter the village today, basically saying: no excavation in this area by Law! Then a picture os Berenger and his ‘house maid/servant’ who both worked tirelessly renovating the church of St. Mary Magdalene, installing a new floor, stained glass windows and several statues by commissioned prestigious Sculptor and painter Giscard of Toulouse. Saunière built a grand estate between the years 1898-1905 that also involved buying several plots of land. This included the Renaissance-style Villa Bethania, the Tour Magdala (a Tower that he used as his personal library) connected to an orangery by a belvedere with rooms underneath, a garden with a pool and a cage for monkeys – all in the name of his maidservant, Marie Dénarnaud.

For preaching anti-republican sermons from his pulpit during the elections of October 1885, Saunière was suspended by the French Minister of Religion, so he resumed lessons in the seminary of Narbonne. On returning to the village, further work and excavations took place and centered on parchments he is said to have found hidden in the old altar of his church, relating to the treasure of Blanche of Castile, the putative source of his income. He took the parchments to Paris for translation & continued digging down 3 metres in the graveyard (at night!) and also found some steps around the pulpit leading to a crypt, where apparently he found a casket of gold coins.  The villages objected to this continued excavations and locked him out with a steel door topped with a 22 toothed skull and crossbones (apparently a theme emerged with ‘22’ & ‘17’as repeated numbers, as in the 22 castellation’s on the Magdala Tower)

Dan Brown got his inspiration for the Da Vinci Code from all the mysteries surrounding this village and character (Blue apples that appear at the church on the 17^th January each year.) The Monsignor from Carcassonne was his protector and when he passed on, his replacement starting asking questions and when Berenger finally passed on he was refused a reading of the last rites. No one really knows from where he got his money, theories are: 1. Hush money from the Vatican 2. Visigoth treasure 3. Knights Templar…..the mystery remains, attracting thousands of tourists each year.

This was followed by a vote of thanks from Alan F. thanking Clive for his fascinating story, delivered in his inimitable, and entertaining style and members joined with a show of their appreciation.                   AR