My tenure for writing for this trestleboard is nearing it’s end, yet my Masonic research will continue, and I suspect there might be a few that read this column that would like to continue to follow along. By the end of the year I’ll have www.mastermasonmichael.com up and running as a place I can publish my occasional articles.

While I’m really trying to focus the Scottish Rite degrees and their origination, in that research I came across an absolutely fascinating bit of information that could prove to provide another fruitful area of research. I have long been interested in Rennes-le-Chateau in France. I was first exposed to Rennes-le-Chateau through Henry Lincoln and Michael Baigent’s book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” which presents a theory that Jesus did not die on the cross but rather was snuck into France where he lived out the rest of his life at Rennes-le-Chateau. There is a statue of an older Jesus at the entrance to the town. The Catholic church in the tiny mountain town was unassuming until a priest took it over named Berenger Sauniere (11 April 1852 – 22 January 1917) who made a discovery (we don’t know what that discovery was) that made the church fabulously wealthy. The church contains the bizarre sculptures and is steeped in esoteric messages and codes. Sauniere oversaw the church from 1885-1909 when he was re-assigned by the Bishop, but he refused to leave Rennes-le-Chateau and stayed there without pay from the church until he died in 1917.

Well it turns out researchers have found evidence they believe points to Sauniere being a Martinist and...drum roll...a member of a Masonic society. It has been argued that some of the duality Sauniere introduced in his church (the inversions in the Fresco, the black and white checkerboard tiles in the church floor, etc.), are Masonic in nature. Any Masonic influence was speculative until April 2007. In that month, Antoine Captier, grandson of Sauniere’s bell ringer and keeper of most of the Abbe’s archives, first showed a Masonic collar that had once belonged to the priest. It had been lying in his attic for a very long time and it had been shown to a number of researchers in private

already. Captier is widely seen as the most serious and trustworthy of the French Rennes-le-Chateau researchers. The discovery proves that Sauniere was a member of a Masonic society, which will shed a whole new light on parts of the mystery. The church actively disapproved of anything Masonic in Sauniere’s time. Bishop Billard, who is considered to have been an important protector of Sauniere even launched an anti-masonic mission. Societe Perillos discovered that Billard was perhaps not as anti-Masonic as he appears. The Masonic Collar was identified as belonging to the Scottish Rite of the 18 degree Chevalier Rose Croix (Knight of the Rosy Cross). Normally a jewel would be present at the bottom of the collar. On this collar there wasn’t one, meaning either it was lost or Sauneire was a member of a society that didn’t carry a jewel on their Sautoirs, like the Elus Cohen.

In 1900, Berenger Sauniere attended at least three meetings of a Martinist lodge in Lyon. The Martinists are a Masonic order that developed out of the Elus Cohen, founded by Marintez de Pasqually in the second half of the 18th century. As a symbol, the Martinists use a Star of David made up of a white and a black triangle or two interlaced white triangles (a Merkaba). In the pages of the Lodge Minutes book of the Martinist Order of Lyon it says: Dans La registre de la Tres Reverente Logo A l’Orient de-Lyon “La Haute Philospophie” ...sur la liste le present d’honneur l’Abbe Sauniere. Since only Martinists were invited to visit other Martinist Lodge’s meetings there seems little doubt that Sauniere was indeed a member of a Martinist order. This also ties in well with the fact that the clergy was very well represented in the order even though officially the Vatican and indeed the Diocese of Carcassonne actively condemned Masonic activities of it’s priests.

In their book “le secret de l’Abbe Gelis”, the authors claim they were presented with a membership document of a certain ‘Order of Alet’ carrying the names and signatures of both Berenger Sauniere and Antoine Gelis. The document was dated 1886. This very secretive Order alleegedly, p proagated a mix of Visigoth and Cathar doctrines. The authors were thwn around two secret underground locations near Coustaussa and Rennes-lesBains where this Order held it’s gatherings.

So here we are once again, right in the middle of this mysterious time period of the 1800’s, wherein I believe a destruction of our history was continuing and secret groups of learned men were forming to try to preserve knowledge that was being systematically lost. I can’t wait to see where this line or research might lead. I am certainly going to be taking a closer look at the book I have on Rennes-le-Chataeau which has lots of clear images of the iconography inside the church. What did Sauniere discover that made the church so wealthy? What secrets was he privy too that he hid in the new artwork he had made?

ref.: https://www.renneslechateau.nl/2007/12/15/freemasonry/ Michael McKeown