The sense of an eighteenth century retiring, yet combative, noblewoman to not die with her secrets: a portrait of Elisabeth d’Hautpoul, Lady of Rennes.
A woman who went totally unrecognized through Rennes le Chateau affair. Apparently solitary and unpopular, but there is no way to decipher the enigma if doggedly keeping to ignore Elisabeth d’Hautpoul presence. In fact, she was the closest person to the core of the mystery.We have already seen in my two previous articles on Rennes le Chateau enigma, that’s to say a title Italian Masonic Hermeticism, Initiation & Counter Initiation" that I strongly believe this strange story to have a place in this site. If you find the topic to discontinue the mainstream of my work, or may feel revulsion or strong disapproval with this tiny french village affair, you may leave the page. As you can guess from my introduction page, after all these years of studies and researches, I believe Alchemy being about the extraction of Spirit of Life and Souls from raw matter, and that’s not limited to minerals of rain-water. In my opinion Rennes le Chateau is the quintessential spot for enquiring about the extraction of Spirit of Life and Souls involving reigns other than mineral and vegetal.We are facing, I think for the first time in the history of Alchemy and Hermeticism, a family owned, as well as personal, mysteries of extraordinary interest. So the riddle is to be unraveled along with the lives of the protagonists.
As for the affairs, there are mainly two: an old one on the mystery of the aristocrat families of Razés, obscurely lost in very ancient times; and the catastrophic naivety of Berenger Saunière, which was typical of the turn of the twentieth century. Of course we can today research on the obscurity of the first (1), thanks to the catastrophic naivety of the second. I put the end of the old world in 1820. That’s to say Elisabeth d’Hautpoul-Rennes death year. Which, strangely enough, was also the boundary period between the old reliable Alchemic authors and the new  less reliable authors, more or less.So, I mean here to point at the two marchionesses Hautpoul Blanchefort to try to have some basic questions answered, and above all at the most neglected character, Elisabeth. I do not mean to disregard the important role of Marie Nègre d’Ables de Blanchefort, yet, in my opinion, we have to focus on Elisabeth, since she was the last to be there. I’m aware that many have tried to make these two women the most frightening element of Rennes le Chateau affair. In fact, when one is scared, doesn’t look into.
There are two fundamental questions able to unify these two main branches of the Rennes le Chateau affair, the old and the new. Who did hide the little treasure discovered by Berenger Saunière in the church. And what did Saunière discover when digging Marie Nègre d’Ables de Blanchefort grave up.I shall intentionally disregard all the para-masonic secret societies mushroomed on the affair after Saunière death. You know my opinion on secret societies at large: their unique purpose is the assumption of control of places and people. With para-mafioso results. This was what happened in Rennes le Chateau, both new and old. With the difference that, after Saunière death, these secret societies have demonstrated to be highly inconsistent and unable to give an answer to any question (A part from the great inventiveness in manufacturing and churning out fake documents). Is any of them able to know what Saunière actually found in the deep of the grave? Of course, they disregard the issue. They also state it was a secret society to have hidden the little treasure in the church to make Saunière to find it. But, why not to directly have him to become a member, instead? He surely couldn’t wait for that! Another little priest in search for career, money and supports. In my opinion, in this affair, existed one and only one secret society to be able to give the right answers, and also able to really frighten. In fact, Berenger Saunière paid bitterly his disobeying. Just to figure out the rank Elisabeth d’Hautpoul held in the family, there are two episodes; the first: her mother, Marie Nègre d’Ables de Blanchefort, entrusted her to face the rest of the family and sue them, against all pretensions to see the immensely important familiar documents inherited by Marie. Elisabeth endured a hard legal battle to preserve the documents integrity, winning the battle in the end, as the documents of d’Hautpoul family were decreed by a commission to be too important to the very security of the nation.
Marie de Blanchefort was a woman in her fifties, when abdicated this function to Elisabeth, and was a strong and reliable woman, who loved to manage the family businesses. The second: In the springtime of 1799, Elisabeth invited all her family to a strange celebration held at the already ruined Montferrand castle. Even Jean Joseph Ange d’Hautpoul-Felines, general and senator ( he died as an hero in the Eylau battle), attended to what had to be a ceremony of great significance, in fact was him to provide the evidence of the important event, writing in a letter: ” the whole of the family was there”. It was very strange that a general engaged in military napoleonic campaigns rushed to be present by the old and quirky aunt for a family party. Who among us would have done? Very likely, that was not a family party. Perhaps the researchers in hermeticism will have wide opened their eyes when reading the celebration’s year: 1799, the end of the century. Springtime. Who can discern, will have understood.
Most of the interpretations, and legends, around Rennes le Chateau affair were issued a century after Elisabeth’s death, and by people not familiar with aristocrat laws and customs, which were well different from the common people way of life. So, most of the neglected attention to Elisabeth was due to this late ignorance. For instance many moderns researchers find it difficult to believe not only that women could inherit and fully manage their inheritance, in 1781 (as well as in 1756, concerning the inheritance of Marie Nègre d’Ables de Blanchefort), but that an unmarried woman, among aristocracy, could enjoy an even greater prestige than a married woman. Contracting a marriage, in upper classes, were like moving a pawn on the economic and social chessboard. Elisabeth’s older sister, for instance, was called since her birth, in 1733, by the name of Marie d’Aussillon, as, when reached the age in 1752, should have married Joseph d’Hautpoul-Felines, of another branch of the family, lord of the lands of Aussillon, indeed. While Elisabeth, so lucky to have no living male brothers and the other sisters already married, didn’t need to marry to achieve acceptable sustenance and social prestige. In this way all the inheritance was in the family. In the same years even the king of France had several sisters unmarried in the court.it is also largely disregarded about the druidic influences still retained among the French aristocracy.
These influences are not just unique to a greater consideration of women, compared to Christianity, but regards the conservation from generation to generation of weird ritual practices.The lack of general historical knowledge has led to distortions about who might have hidden the glass phial inside the pillar in the church, as well as a small amount of gold coins and a few pieces of Visigoth jewelry. In my opinion this is not a question, is “the” central question, pivot of the whole Rennes le Chateau affair. Not of the enigma, though. As you can find in my previous article on the topic, after having found, or better having had someone to find for him, a strange glass phial badly hidden on the top of a pillar inside the village little church, Berenger Saunière got caught up by the enigma. Of course we don’t know the inner of the phial but, as said by Antoine Captier’s father, a dark powder and a roll of paper appeared to be the content at a first sight. I have already said about this powder and how this could be of alchemical relevance. Claire Corbu’s witnessed that the abbot, after the finding, used to melt gold ingots, and that gives even more value to my assumptions of a Berenger Saunière who has been taught how to make gold. I have also mentioned that this transmutation into gold is a forbidden practice. But sometimes this was to allure new followers. The gold coins and Visigoth jewelry, were apparently found by Saunière when digging the church up.Elisabeth d’Hautpoul-Rennes, or simply Dhaupoul, as she used to sign her many litigations against many of the people around her, was daughter of Jean Francois d’Hautpoul-Rennes, Knight Hospitaller Order of Malta. Since Elisabeth never got married and her unique male brother died child, she was also the last heir of the main branch of the d’Hautpoul family. After 1781, she remained the unique owner of the castle in Rennes le Chateau, as well as of the mysterious documents which her paternal grand-father passed directly to her mother Marie Nègre d’Ables de Blanchefort.
Marie Anne Elisabeth was born in 1735 in the village’s castle. In the parish archives her baptism was recorded on April 6 of the same year, and, since the newborn babies of the time were very soon baptized (maximum one week after birth), we can assume she was born in late March or at least the first few days of April. She was the second of four children and, as customary by french and italian aristocrats, she was just called with her third name, Elisabeth. So, who did hide the phial inside the pillar? Although there are neither documents nor witnesses, in almost all literature on the affair I have seen no doubts about Antoine Bigou (the abbot at Marie de Blanchefort’s death time) to do that. Modern people seem to forget that the Rennes le Chateau little church was in origin the private chapel of d’Hautpouls. There, in the crypt, they have their ancestors buried. In the presbytery François d’Hautpoul murdered, of had murdered, the preceptor of his wife Marie de Blanchefort. So the d’Hautpoul family treated the church as a private outbuilding of the castle. Of course the common inhabitants of the village were allowed to attend the sacred functions inside, but they were not allowed to feel the little church as their community church. The arrogance of aristocracy, before the revolution, reached the point of denying the common people to be humans, but rather treated them like animals. And this was obviously much stronger in small rural centers, where the gentleman was a small sovereign. The local clergy were contiguous with the aristocracy, but at a lower step. So Marie Nègre d’Ables de Blanchefort, and her daughter Elisabeth, felt certainly to be socially superior to Antoine Bigou, who was in a way compelled to obey to the authorities of the village: the two marchionesses.
Marie de Blanchefort after the marriage of her third daughter, Marie Gabrielle, (september 1756) remained alone in the castle together with Elisabeth. Her husband François d’Hautpoul, severely ill, was said the have abandoned the house the same day of Gabrielle’s marriage, retiring to Limoux, where he died not much later. Up to January 1781, Marie de Blanchefort was the Lady of the village, owner of the castle and all the lands around and the earnings from the lands, as well as, above all, owner of the ancient and enigmatic documents of her father in law. The inhabitants of Rennes feared her and there is no reason to suppose that abbot Bigou thought different. Very probably he was treated as the first and most important of her domestic helps. Don’t be amazed, a marchioness d’Hautpoul de Blanchefort, before the french revolution, could make tremble even a bishop.So to understand the customs of the times, there is a funny story about a Breton duchess who, in the same years of the dame de Blanchefort’s death, on her deathbed called for the bishop to give her the last rites. The bishop was so intimidated that, while he was blessing his illustrious host, was caught by a heart attack and died after falling over the duchess. The lady did not move and coldly intimated to the servants: “take this bishop off”. This anecdote is taken from “Histoire de la Révolution Française”( history of french revolution) by Jules Michelet, Paris 1848. An extremely interesting work (the full version is some 2000 pages in two books) that shall make you plunge in the social tragedy before and during the french revolution. Indispensable to understand the abyss among classes in the eighteenth century in France. Consequently we cannot in any way not only put Antoine Bigou above the two marchionesses, but not even remotely at the same level. In the previous century, in the same Rennes le Chateau, a marquis d’Hautpoul had a young shepherd murdered, because in the village he was said to have discovered a treasure in the deep of a cave. The boy was tortured to death and then the marquis had the killers murdered too. All that in the total indifference and impunity by the local judicial, as well as religious, authorities.Is it plausible that was Marie de Blanchefort to ask Bigou to hide the little treasure unbeknown to her daughter? When the same had entrusted to Elisabeth the management of the secret documents and authorized her to forbidden the access of the family documentation to her other daughters?
So, who was the original owner of the findings in the church? Was it plausible that a priest of a tiny village, surely coming from lower classes, had the culture, tradition, knowledge, wealth to be the owner of medieval gold coins, Visigoth jewelry and the esoterically hot glass phial with powder and papers? Unless he had stolen the whole from the Hautpoul castle or crypt, the answer can only be that he was ordered by one of the two marchionesses. In fact nothing strange happened during the Bigou service in Rennes le Chateau, except the unusual burial procedure for Marie de Blanchefort.The other supposition, that’s to say that Bigou must know everything since he was the confessor of the two marchionesses, is very weak. In fact are we so sure that the two women were so fervent catholic, and moreover that they, at a certain point of their lives, were willing to renounce their millenarian family knowledge?Let’s s open a parenthesis on Antoine Bigou: We know that Abbot Bigou made off during the revolution. Were only a few countryside priests who fled like the aristocrats, the majority of them remained close to people. But those in collusion with the powerful fled, and so did Bigou. There has been so much talking about Bigou belonging to some secret societies. Perhaps, but if he had stolen the documents, why not to hand them to his secret principals, instead of badly hide them in a decaying church a few steps away from d’Hautpoul marchionesses, in a time when only they were entitled to do restoration works to the church?
And, secondly, why a secret society must hide a little treasure in a church to make Berenger Saunière to find it, while they could directly have Saunière to become a member, instead? There was too much uncertainty on who would have found. In fact, as said above, the para-masonic secret societies generally look for the assumption of control of places and people.Was Elisabeth to order Bigou to keep out of sight her little treasure before fleeing to Spain during the revolution, or even before, when gangs of armed men already attacked the castles in isolated areas? Anyway, there is no rationality in this decision. In fact why to choose a church open to public use to hide something crucial? Was the area around Rennes le Chateau non enough provided with natural holes, caves and more suitable places? Anyway Bigou didn’t come back from Spain, where he died in 1794. Let aside, for a moment, this question and jump to the other, which will focus our attention on the strange treatments both mother and daughter suffered in their burial procedures. The penultimate Lady of Rennes had no funeral, but a furtive burial during a January night , with no one in the village to attend and testify. She had the burial of a criminal or a witch. Her gravestone was poorly and roughly sculptured, with insulting errors. In the end, after a century, Berenger Sauniere desecrated and destroyed her tomb. Even stranger was the civil burial procedures. In fact Antoine Bigou himself wrote up the death certificate of Marie, the same night of her death, and deposited it in the same night in the village hall. They could not follow the normal practices in which a civil death certificate could be issued only by a civil officer, not a priest. As a priest should have just to write down on funeral and burial in the archives of the parish. But, strangely enough, this didn’t happen. Did Elisabeth really endure with resignation all this? A woman used to quarrel and to open lawsuits as her favorite pastime ? And what about the puzzling lack of interest of the other heirs of Marie de Blanchefort?
Nevertheless the grandchildren of those heirs denounced Sauniere for the destruction of Marie’s Stele. We know that the abbot was condemned not only to restore the stele but to pay a tremendous amount of money to d’Hautpouls, which ruined it economically. There is no mention of the tombstone, however, which was no longer restored. Strange that those grandchildren had not denounced Saunière for the more serious crime of desecration of the grave. Yet in 1895 of the bones of Marie (dead in 1781) something had to be remained. I Remember that in venetian land in the end of the 1990’s were found skeletons of French soldiers, dead during the Napoleonic campaign of 1797, buried in a mass grave on the bare ground. The other inhabitants of Rennes le Chateau, in fact, did not protest the rupture of steles ( that Sauniere did not break, but simply shifted. He broke only the one of the Marquise ) but for the storage and movement of their relatives bones. While the Hautpoul were only interested in the stele. And not even in the Tombstone. Elisabeth, last Lady of Rennes, went to worse. She had neither burial nor funeral, nor death certificate. We are not even sure of her place of death, whether in Paris, in Spain or in Rennes. Oddly, the Hautpoul family provided a date for her death: May 20 1820. This absolute disregard for Elisabeth last moments is really disconcerting. The Hautpoul family was so important that the whole area was defined as ” Pays Hautpoulois”, or Hautpouls country. Elisabeth was, in a sense, the “chief” of this family, being the last heir of the main branch. In fact the whole family attended to the celebration in 1799, but the same family was elusive on her death, and above all not provided her with a grave. Maybe, burdened with debts, or perhaps been robbed by the servants, despite the 52,000 gold florins obtained 4 years before from the sale of the castle, she could have had no money to provide for herself. Strange indifference for this poor old woman, since in the family they were all waiting for the papers guarded by Elisabeth. Were even they too poor to provide a burial accommodation for their extravagant aunt?
Odd again, since one of the men attending the ceremony in 1799 would later become Bishop of Cahors (Paul Louis Joseph d’Hautpoul 1764-1849) and another tutor of the son of the duke of Chambord (Marie Constant Fidele Henri Amand d’Hautpoul 1780-1853). I don’t mention Alphonse Henri d’Hautpoul (1789- 1865) First Minister of France. One thing is clear, Elisabeth Hautpoul-Rennes denied her immediate family (the bloodline) the access to the family papers, which they never had. In fact it is known that the will of Elisabeth was challenged. From all this it may be inferred that Elisabeth judged them unworthy. So they may have vindicated letting the charitable ladies to threw her body in a mass grave in Paris ( wonderful place to have a cadaver to 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 back to our main topic: why, once come back from Spain, Elisabeth didn’t rush to retrieve her belongings inside the church? In fact 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. But why? It is a nonsense, in fact Elisabeth, with the revolution, suffered a confiscation of all her property, except the castle and small plots of land around that did not provided a sufficient sustenance. In fact she reduced the servitude to two persons and let the castle without any maintenance, bringing to live on the south round tower. Oddly enough, on the tower which locals called ” the alchemist’s tower”.Was Elisabeth a ill and too old woman? One can argue that perhaps Elisabeth was suffering from depression, 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 were in fact 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 amazing is that in the meantime she had enough charisma and authority as to call the whole family to celebrate on the 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. Evidently those coins and jewels were to serve as bait for someone unlearned and very greedy. Berenger Saunière’s portrait. If somebody had to do so to attract hype and curiosity around an ancient hermetic and alchemical forbidden tradition, Berenger Saunière was certainly just the person. But I am convinced that, if he had been left alone, would not be able to bundle all that mess. He had probably been helped by someone, as we will see further on, to raise even more trouble in order to draw even more attention. But this was an attention that had to shut itself. In fact, almost all historical documents in the story are fakes, and not too artfully orchestrated though. Or, even worse, they are conceivable to be fakes. The obtained result is to throw discredit on the whole 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 fallen in the middle of a garbage dump? Few shall be those who are 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 Chateau. 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 give the impression that they had designed and made them.I can not but continue to ask myself ” why” they all raged so much on the tombstones of a 67 years old Marchioness?
Why has Sauniere 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? A 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 Chateau affair machine created to deny these women right to be buried? You might think that these secret societies are against the system of burial of our European civilization in recent centuries. But it soon turns out from the beginning that they only pointed to these two women.The family Hautpoul disappears and let do. 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, for the noble should be even more. Imagine, someone desecrates and destroys the tomb of one of your great-grandmothers and denies it to another, and you ignores it. Do you suffer, with resignation these brutalities and 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 a long time 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 Chateau affair became world wide known. Are they perhaps indignant on esotericism and hermeticism? It is hard to believe, since during Saunière time it was difficult to find a Masonic lodge in the Midi of France where there wasn’t enrolled a d’Hautpoul on. Indeed, it even seems that members of the family & were among those who have brought the Freemasonry in France from Britain. A Hautpoul sustained the rise of 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, in 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, Ormuz 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. Nothing, in esoteric circles, is more dangerous than a lone individual, independent and determined, who can not be controlled and on whom one cannot rely on. Berenger Sauniere very soon loses its independence and becomes a puppet in the hands of some secret societies that provide him with the know-how to do the symbolic remake of the church, to 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. Very likely they start Saunière to Alchemy, the most harmless, and they probably even help him to make gold.
Nevertheless just look at a Sauniere’s picture to understand that this partnership could not last long. Saunière is a brave man, daring, intelligent and curious and unfortunately begins to act independently. He’s not like Antoine Bigou. In 1895 he opens 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. In fact, 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 easy proved 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.
Together they begin to study and move stones in the territory of Rennes le Chateau 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 ( the one on the picture is the plastic mould), because he strangely suffered a stroke the same day he had to go to pick up the maquette from smelter. Now to destroy all researches 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 made by him.Who were the principals of Saunière? Who were in charge of these secret societies who tried to maneuver Sauniere? Almost certainly members of d’Hautpoul family. Back at the end of the nineteenth century it would not have been difficult to have Saunière to keep quiet and silent for ever. 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, 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 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 have worked.
What did these secret societies, probably operated by Hautpoul, aim to? 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 worthy 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 took away the tombstone? Perhaps because they were very similar to the fake later stones. Maybe because there really was carved “Catin ” in the stele, as well as the motto ” in arcadia ego ” together with the octopus in the tombstone. It is a pity not to be sure of this. In theory, the original inscriptions should have been very simple and not at all extravagant. In fact, a true initiate must never show off, but rather 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 as well as 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 , instead, requires a secret initiation. Thus it might be plausible that it was decided to flout the tradition even in burial symbolism.
And what about the drawings meaning to certificate the burial stones trustworthiness? Actually 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 really 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- Chateau, on 26 June 1905. He only drew the stele, since Saunière had restored only that. Now, the ancient tombs were never deprived of the tombstone, if there was an engraved stele there could be the tombstone too. In fact Tisseyre was amazed by 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 1960 ‘s, 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, perhaps, who 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 to break 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 maybe it was done on purpose to homogeneously fill the space. Nevertheless the possibility exists that the stonemason has been 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 a nonsense. Even if “prostitute “stands for our Alchemical Universal Dissolvent). In this story, which seems centered on a form of immortality, the term “cauldron” would be very appropriate. In fact, as I mentioned in my article "The Dangerous Journey into the Gundestrup Cauldron" people who underwent some practices were called “cauldrons”.
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 Chateau mystery? Many stones scattered around the area. As Terminus, the god of stones scattered in the countryside. The god who, oddly enough, in addition of marking the boundaries, also took care of life, death and burial. We will see in next 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 Chateau 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 translate and read two of them.