Abbé Antoine Bigou (1719-1794)

Saunière’s predecessor as prête of Rennes-le-Château from 1776 to 1792. Bigou was the priest and confidant of the family Hautpoul de Blanchefort. On her deathbed, Marie de Blanchefort, allegedly confided her family’s secrets to him as she was the last member of the main branch of the Hautpoul family. Bigou is believed to be responsible for the enigmatic engraving of her horizontal (arcadia stone) and vertical tombstone and allegedly hid parchments, with clues to, her secret in the church at Rennes-le-Château, where Saunière later found them. Antoine Bigou is at the very root of what most people consider to be the mystery of Rennes-le-Château., 

Like Saunière, Antoine Bigou started his career in the Pays-de-Sault region, in the tiny village of Le Clat. This village lies close to Niort-de-Sault, the birthplace of Marie de Blanchefort.

In 1774, Bigou succeeded his oncle Jean Bigou as priest of Rennes-le-Château, which had by then become the home of de Hautpoul de Blanchefort family. Marie de Blanchefort died in 1781.

In August 1792, as a result of the French Revolution, a law was passed dictating that the clergy were to be made employees of the state, elected by their parish or bishopric, and the number of bishoprics was to be reduced. All priests and bishops were, to swear an oath of fidelity to the new order or face dismissal, deportation or death. A group of some 20 priests from the region of Alet-les-Bains fled to Spain headed by, Charles de la Cropte de Chanterac, the last bishop of Alet. At least 5 of them arrived in Terrassa, close to Sabadell and one in Llorena, both villages in northern Spain. One of them, whose presence in Spain is actually documented was François-Pierre Caneuille, the priest, of Rennes-les-Bains at the time., 

It is in this climate of unrest and revolt that Bigou had to hide his alleged secret. He was 73 when he left Rennes-le-Château and perhaps knew it was unlikely he would return. It is believed he covered the external entry of the church crypt with Marie de Nègre’s tomb and encoded a message in her tombstones. Additionally he is said to have left a parchment in the wooden baluster supporting the pulpit on which he indicated the location of the tomb and its special significance. It was this parchment, Abbé Saunière is said to have retrieved over 100 years later.

Before he left, Bigou wrote a peculiar page in the parish registry reading multiple time “Jesus de Gallilée n’est point icy” (Jesus of Galilee is not here). This phrase has led to much speculation as to what the priest meant. Veteran French researcher André Douzet has written some interesting articles about this.

A religious Spanish group claims to have Bigou’s diary in their possesion. Patrice Chaplin, in her book City of Secrets, claims that Bigou lived his last years and was buried in a forest near Bésalu in northern Spain. That last claim can’t be true.

Bigou signed over his possessions to the state before he left Rennes-le-Château in March 1793 (first document in this article). If he really went to Spain is a question that is impossible to answer. There is a chance that he didn’t leave France at all. Early 2009, an unknown French researcher found Bigou’s death certificate in the ancient church register of Collioure, a beautiful village on the Mediterranean shore. Antoine Bigou died on 21st March 1794 and was buried in the local cemetery. He was 75 years old.

,©2007-2009 rlcresearch.com, all rights reserved. Photo of Antoine Bigou’s Death Certificate Copyright Le Rendez-Vous des Chercheurs

Guillem de Gellone (755 – 814) in French, also known as William of Orange or William with the Short Nose, after a legend in which a Saracen cut off part of William’s nose in battle.

William’s mother was a daughter of Charles Martel, making William a cousin of Charlemagne, at whose court he spent his youth. His father Theodoric (Thierry IV) was the Count of Autun and Toulouse and is said to have been of Merovingian descent. He functioned as King of Septimania. William of Gellone is one of the pivotal characters in the controversial book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and the late Richard Leigh. In the book it is claimed that the Merovingian bloodline descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, making William a Jew of Royal Blood. Their main source of information was the book A Jewish Princedom in Feudal France (1972) by the American historian Arthur Zuckermann. Zuckermann claims that William was indeed of Jewish descent. Local folklore would indicate that he was of the House of David. William was said to have respected Sabbath even during battles, had the Lion of Judea in his Coat of Arms and spoke Arab and Hebrew fluently. This carries extreme relevance in relation to Lincoln, Baigent & Leigh’s theory that the Holy Grail represents the Holy Bloodline of family descendance from the biblical King David through Jesus and Mary Magdalene into the Royal French Merovingian Dynasty.

In 790, after his father had died, Charlemage confirmed William in descending his father as the second Count of Toulouse. He took up arms against the army of the Moor King Hisham I who had proclaimed Holy War against the Christians and penetrated the Languedoc as far as Narbonne. He is most famous for defeating the Arab forces in the area around Orange on 30th April 800. After many years of fighting, the Muslims retreated back into Spain, discouraged by Willliam’s attitude of never giving up. William ended his military career reconquering the territories around Barcelona in 803. Among the many titles he gathered was ‘Count of Orange’ (the first one) and ‘Count of Razès’, the area now know as Rennes-le-Château.

In 804 William founded what is now known as the Benedictine Abbey of Gellone in the French town of St. Guillem-le-Désert. He had been inspired to do so after he had found back his childhood friend, St. Benoît of Aniane, himself a vassal of Charlemagne. Initially, the Monastery was called Monastery of St. Crucis in Gellone, after a relic donated by Charlemagne containing a piece of the true cross which is still there today. In 806 William withdrew from civil and public life and entered the Monastery he had founded himself. According to Zuckermann, during this period of his life William was initiated in the ancient Jewish Kaballah and the rites of personal transmutation. He is said to have died in the Monastery on 28th May 814, before Charlemagne. That date is disputed by some scholars based on a document by Dhuoda, wife of Willam’s brother-in-law Bernhard of Barcelona. In her ‘Liber Manualis’ that she kept until 843 for the benefit of her son, she mentions all her deceased relatives. The most famous of all, William, isn’t mentioned, implying that he was alive at least until 843.

William was twice declared a saint, the last time by Pope Alexander II in 1066.

St. Guillem-le-Désert soon became an important place of pilgrimage. How important St. William became can be deducted from the fact that Count Raimbaut II visited St. William’s tomb before he left for the Holy Land as one of the leaders of the First Crusade in 1096.

Especially his victory in Orange made William subject of and in epic works like La Geste de Garin de Monglane, Dante’s Divina Commedia, Speculum Historiale by Vincent of Beauvais, and Willehalm, an unfinished epic romance by Wolfram von Eschenbach, better known for his most famous work Parzeval. Wolfram notably writes that the Grail castle was to be found in the Pyrenees, in the area that was owned by William of Gellone in the 9th century.

In his book Wolfram von Eschenbach und die Wirklichkeit des Grals, the Swiss scholar Werner Greub published the results of a life-long study into the works of his teacher Rudolf Steiner. Greub considered Von Eschenbach’s Parzifal as the only veritable Grail account. After long and meticulous research, Greub concluded that William of Gellone had been Von Eschenbach’s primary source of information. William was the character Wolfram had named Kyot de Provence. Von Eschenbach later dedicated his monumental work Willehalm to William of Gellone.

Some of Werner Greub’s research into the real life sites of the Grail as described by Wolfram von Eschenbach is available online in English on the Willehalm website.

Archaeologist Brigitte Gibrac-Lescure suggests that the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Rennes-le-Château might have been founded by Guilemme de Gelone in the IXth century judging from the similarities between the design of the Knight’s Stone, the Visigothic altar pillar and similar features in the Abbey of St. Guilhem-le-Désert.

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Images of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert

,©2007-2009 rlcresearch.com, all rights reserved. Photos copyright Frans and Corjan de Raaf