My
favorite example of a seriously
weird church.
It was built at the end of the
19th century by
Beranger Sauniere, the
parish priest of
Rennes-le-Chateau in southern
France. Sauniere had been
dirt poor for a long time, but within the space of a few years, he suddenly became
extremely wealthy and started building
churches like
crazy, clear up 'til his
death in 1917.
Mystery #1: Where did he get all the
money? Well, he told his
housekeeper,
Marie Dernaud, but she died of a
stroke without ever letting the
secret slip. In the absence of
real evidence,
speculation abounds: he found the
lost treasure of the
Knights Templar; he found a buried
stash of
Visigoth gold; he
blackmailed or simply performed a
valuable service for the royal
von Hapsburgs; he was
blackmailing the
Vatican; he rediscovered the secrets of
alchemy...
Sauniere claimed to have
discovered some
coded
parchments in 1891. Though they appeared to be simple
transcriptions of the
Latin Gospels, certain
letters were
highlighted to make another set of mostly-nonsensical
messages in
French; for example:
"This treasure belongs to Dagobert II King and to Sion and he is there dead." and
"Shepherdess no temptation that Poussin Teniers hold the key peace 681 by the cross and this horse of God I complete this daemon guardian at noon blue apples." Was it
pure nonsense, or did it contain the key to the
mystery?
No one can say for sure.
Even creepier: the
priest who heard Sauniere's final
confession found it so
shocking that he refused to grant
absolution or give the
last rites.
Of course, the church itself is
Weird City. The
Stations of the Cross are far from
standard issue: one shows a
Scotsman in
kilts watching the
crucifixion, and another seems to depict a group of men
stealing
Jesus' body from the
tomb in the dead of night. Next to the
entrance to the
sanctuary stands the
statue of a
flat-out terrifying demon, and carved over the church's
front door are the words "
THIS PLACE IS ACCURSED".
The Church of
Mary Magdalene is considered a
genuine tourist attraction in
Europe, but those of us stuck in the
colonies don't often hear of it.
Coincidence? You be the judge...Research from "Everything is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups" by Robert Anton Wilson, published by HarperCollins, 1998, pp.109-110.