Abbé Jean Bigou (1702-1776)

Curé of Rennes-le-Château from 1736 to 1774. He was succeeded by his nephew Antoine Bigou. We know him from the parish registers that mention his name at the deaths of Joseph d’Hautpoul de Rennes and François d’Hautpoul de Blanchefort (+1753), Seigneur de Rennes.

Jean Bigou’s relation with François d’Hautpoul went a lot further than just being a priest. He accompanied d’Hautpoul on various trips and helped him when he had to speak justice, sometimes functioning as an attorney and administrator.

In the back of the church, behind the statue of St. Antoine de Padoue there is a door leading to the Sacristie of the Eglise Marie-Madeleine. Inside the small room is large wood paneled wardrobe where Abbé Saunière kept his chasubles for the mass. There is a simple bare wooden floor. In the recess behind the first door of the closet there is a mirror with a text over it:

DA, DOMINE VIRTUTEM MANIBUS MEIS,
AD ABSTERGENDAM OMNEM MACULAM:
UT SINE POLLUTIONE MENTIS ET CORPORIS
VALEAM TIBI SERVIRE.

“Give virtue to my hands, O Lord, that being cleansed from all stain I might serve you with purity of mind and body.” It was put there by Saunière.

The most beautiful feature of the Sacristie is the stained glass window that is considered to be one of the most beautiful features of the entire church. Since the Sacristie is closed to the public, few have personally seen this masterfully crafted window. It depicts Jesus on the cross with Mary Magdalene praying at his feet. She is not praying to the lord but clearly looking in the direction of Mary who is standing on his left. There is a third figure on the right but is not immediately clear who that is. He is a young man that is not carrying any symbols that we can easily identify him with. It could be Joseph of Arimathea but it cannot be established with any certainty. Jesus and Mary Magdalene have red hair which is quite unusual. The window was made by Henri Fleur of Bordeaux in 1896. His signature is clearly visible on a stone in the left corner. Finally, a number of roman numbers are depicted that have let to many a treasure seeker calculating clues.

In the wood paneling of the wardrobe is a secret wooden door that leads to the ‘isoloir’, the small half-circle shaped outcropping that is more obviously visible on the outside than on the inside. It is a very small and simple room without the beautiful finishings that are so typical of the rest of the church. There’s an unconfirmed story that once, an anchoress lived in this little outcropping. Anchoresses were saintly figures living a lonely existence in these kinds of recluses. The best know is probably Hildegard von Bingen. Who the anchoress was and if she indeed ever was is another mystery.

In the solitary, there is no lighting, the floor is the natural rock just like outside. Furthermore the floor of the secret room is not leveled out with the Sacristie. There is a very small window that lets hardly any light in and very little ventilation. Saunière apparently used it as a library. It makes you wonder what he put in this room, concealed behind two doors in a private part of his church.

Architect Paul Saussez has demonstrated that this little room was most probably built over one of the entries to the crypt below.

If Saunière’s ex-libris is superimposed over the garden, the cross points to this secret room as described by Klaas van Urk in his book The Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant.

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One of the first renovations Saunière undertook was the replacement of the old altar. The altar he installed and that we can still see in the Eglise Madeleine today was produced by Maison Monna of Toulouse and cost 770FF. The altar was paid for by Madame Cavailhé de Coursan. The old altar was transported to the presbytery. It would later serve in his personal chapel at Villa Bethania after his suspension by Mgr. Beauséjour. The old altar was already devoted to Mary Magdalene, as can be seen on an early picture of it in the Abbé’s private chapel in the winter garden.

On his new altar, Saunière had a bas relief sculpted of Mary Magdalene in a grotto with the usual props. Until halfway the 1980s, the church of Puichéric had a stained glass window almost identical to the scene on Saunière’s altar as you can see from the great photo by André Goudonnet of that window in 1982.

There are however a number of diversions on the bas relief from the stained glass window and the other similar known depictions of Mary-Magdalene that were added by Saunière.

Originally, at the base of the altar, a phrase was inscribed:

JESU MEDELA VULNERUM SPES UNA POENITENTIUM PER MAGDALENAE LACRYMAS PECCATA NOSTRA DILUAS.

It is bad Latin for Jesus, you remedy against our pains and only hope for our repentance, it is thanks to Magdalene’s tears that you wash our sins away. This sentence is pure heresy and must have raised many an eyebrow when it was first put on display. The power to wash away our sins is directly linked to Magdalene’s tears here rather than to the blood of Jesus or his death on the cross. The scene was painted by Saunière himself, with the help of his good friend Abbé Eugène Grassaud. Today, the inscription is no longer there. An exact copy of this sentence however, features at the bottom of what is known as the Grand Parchment.

At the left side of the scene, what appears to be two buildings are painted. People have concluded they are the Tour Magdala and the Chateâu Hautpoul, but that is far from certain. You might as well say that they are the letters J and M for Jesus and Mary or the ruines of the Château de Coustaussa as is claimed by others. If they have been indeed been meant to show the silhouet of the Rennes-le-Château hilltop in the distance, there would be a remarkable similarity with the view from the Grotte du Fournet, dite the La Magdeleine, the grotto in the Vallée des Couleurs that is known in folklore as the burial site of the Magdalene.

Another oddity is the way Mary Magdalene has crossed her fingers in the esoteric symbol of the XXX, indicating that she knows of a great secret (in the masonic meaning of the symbol). There are a couple of other Mary Magdalene statues that have crossed fingers like that. One is in the Provence near St. Maximin La Saint-Baume and the other one close to Rennes-le-Château in the church of Belpech. The strangely crossed fingers are also found in some enigmatic paintings of great artists that are sometimes associated with the enigma. The most bizar story is without a doubt the story of Jean Cocteau’s death. Jean Cocteau, painter, writer, performer and according to Les Dossiers Secrets alleged Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion. He died an unsuspicious death from a heart attack in 1963. Being a national celebrity, he was placed on the bier and an army of photographers was allowed to shoot him one last time. Jean Brunelin, a well-known French photograper with a great interest in the enigma noticed the peculiar way Cocteau’s fingers were crossed and photographed them. Much to his surprise, when he compared his photos with those of his colleagues shot earlier, he discovered that the hands were folded ‘the normal way’. In other word: someone had purposely forced the deceased’ fingers into this unnatural shape, damaging the corpse. What was so important about the position of a dead man’s fingers that someone violated his deathbed?

The information about Jean Cocteau in this paragraph is based on an article that appeared in Les Carnets Secrets Magazine no.5, 2006. More about the Altar and its possible relic is described in this article from 18th January 2008.

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Around 1965 Henry Buthion (who had just bought the Villa Bethania from Noel Corbu) and his friend Jean Pellet found a piece of paper with some scribblings in Abbé’s Saunière’s handwriting inside his personal altar in the housechapel. It was hidden there in a piece of hollow bamboo sealed with wax behind a loose tile. The little note was wrapped in a newspaper from 1907 and contained a silly poem reading:

Sot Pecheur a l’embouchure du Rhone, son poisson sur le gril deux fois retourna. Un malin survint et XXV fois le gouta. Cuit, il ne lui resta que l’arete. Un ange veillait et en fit un peigne d’or. B.S. Cur.

which translates as:

Stupid fisherman at the mouth of the Rhone, he turned his fish on the grill twice. A devil popped up and tasted it 25 times. Cooked, all that remained was the bone. An angel watched and made a golden comb. B.S. Cur.

The original unfortunately got lost in a fire. The poem seems to link to a local fable called La Légende du Peigne d’Or (Legend of the Golden Comb).

French researcher Patrick Mensior has done an elaborate analysis in his book: l’extrordinaire secret des prêtres de Rennes-le-Château

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Impressive and well-preserved fortification close to Perillos, built in 1497 by Ferdinand the Catholic of Aragon.

After the Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed, it came into French hands and was the home of Vauban. The castle, and the route it protects before that played a strategic role in a large number of wars thought the centuries, ranging from Hannibal to the 30-year war. The kings of Aragon feature in the Perillos mystery these days, but already in the 1960’s, French adventurer and writer André Malraux tried to get the building plans, specifically to get information about the subterranean waterways and chambers of the fort. According to a local of Opoul-Perillos, the wood that was used for the fort came from Perillos. The area never recovered and changed into the wasteland we know today.

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