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Saint-Sulpice and the Rose Line. My travels Saint Sulpice church line roses

How much I needed to see in Paris! Everyone has their own quirks. One of my quirks was to go through places from the book of my favorite writer Dan Brown, “The Da Vinci Code”. I am not one of the 60% of people who believe after reading the book that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene. I don’t want to look for discrepancies between the book and reality. I just love this author, and while exploring Paris, I remember the texts of my favorite books. Guides, before conducting a tour of Notre Dame Cathedral, warn that despite the similarity of historical narratives, the heroes of V. Hugo’s book are fictional. When the tour ends, someone always asks to show where Quasimodo lived.
Robert Langdon, the hero of The Da Vinci Code, stayed at the Ritz Hotel. The hotel is located on Place Vendôme, which is a rectangular square in the north of the Tuileries Gardens and east of the Church of the Madeleine. The bronze twisted column in the center of the square was built in 1810 by Napoleon in honor of the victory of the French army at Austerlitz.

The square faces the windows of expensive hotels, apartments and shops, including the main boutiques of Cartier, Chanel and Bulgari. Including the Ritz Hotel.

This luxury hotel was built at the end of the nineteenth century and opened in 1910. It has since enchanted many writers and artists: it inspired Proust, Coco Chanel lived here for over 30 years, and Ernest Hemingway declared it a paradise. Princess Diana left here, never to return to this world.
In The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon wakes up in the Ritz Hotel, with frescoed walls, ornate Renaissance style, Louis XVI gilded wood chairs, and a huge four-poster bed.
Dan Brown probably has a lot of envious people, as they begin to delve into the details and are surprised that a university professor ends up in the Ritz, the smallest room of which costs € 650 per night.
In The Da Vinci Code, the killer traveled to Saint-Sulpice to find the keystone hidden in the church.
Someone strives to visit this church, wanting to visit the second largest cathedral in Paris, someone - to look at one of the centers of development of the plot of the work "The Da Vinci Code", someone - to see the French meridian. What is this amazing place that combines dozens of attractions? This is the French church of Saint-Sulpice.

Saint-Sulpice is one of the largest churches in Paris. But it was also one of the least visited by tourists. Its reputation is unimportant - an ugly church. There is even a name for the style - Saint-Sulpice. Because of the book, the number of visitors increased sharply, perhaps even too much: the parish priest was tired of seeing “pilgrims in search of truth” in the parish. You won't find a granite floor or pagan temple crypt here, but the seventeenth-century(!) church is worth a visit.

Due to the constant change of construction projects and other troubles, the church turned out to be asymmetrical; the twin towers differ in both size and appearance. They have a height difference of more than five meters.

Standing in front of the Church of Saint-Sulpice, you can’t help but remember how important this church was for how many famous authors. Three musketeers walked along the streets not far from the building. In 20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne described the shells in this Cathedral: “Works of art stood side by side with works of nature. Algae, shells and other gifts of ocean fauna and flora, collected, undoubtedly, by the hand of Captain Nemo, occupied a prominent place in his collection. In the middle of the salon, a fountain flowed from a giant tridacna, illuminated from below by electricity. The edges of the sharply ribbed shell of this gigantic bivalve were gracefully jagged. The shell reached six meters in circumference. Therefore, this specimen was larger in size than the beautiful tridacni presented by the Venetian Republic to Francis I and which served as crypts in the Parisian Church of St. Sulpice.”
Indeed, upon entering Saint-Sulpice you can see the original crypts, made from natural shells, given to Francis I by the Republic of Venice.

And above the entrance is the best of all organs in France, created back in the eighteenth century.

If you go into the chapel, you can admire Delacroix’s frescoes “The Battle of Jacob with the Angel”, “Saint Michel Slaying the Demon” and “Heliodorus from the Temple”.

From Dan Brown's book:
“The Church of Saint-Sulpice was, not without reason, considered the most eccentric historical building in Paris. Built on the ruins of an ancient temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis, in an architectural sense it was a smaller copy of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral. This sanctuary was visited by many celebrities - Baptists, the Marquis de Sade, the poet Baudelaire, and the wedding of Victor Hugo took place here. The church school contained documents indicating the far from orthodox views of many of its parishioners, and it once served as a meeting place for various secret societies.
... Unlike the welcoming Notre-Dame Cathedral with its colorful frescoes, gilded altar trim and elaborate wood carvings, it was cool and austere, and Saint-Sulpice was reminiscent of Spanish cathedrals in decoration. The lack of decor visually enlarged the space. Silas stared in surprise at the wooden ribs of the ceiling supports, and it seemed to him that he found himself under a huge ancient ship turned upside down.

... Saint-Sulpice, like most churches of its time, was built in the shape of a giant Latin cross. Its elongated central part, the nave, led to the main altar, where it intersected with the second, shorter part, known as the transept, or transverse nave of the Gothic cathedral. This intersection was located exactly under the center of the dome and was considered, as it were, the heart of the church... its most sacred and mystical part.

In the semi-darkness, a thin polished copper strip, soldered into the gray granite slab of the floor, gleamed faintly... a golden line on which divisions were applied, like on a ruler. Gnomon. This is the name of the sundial indicator column; pagans used it as an astronomical instrument. And from all over the world tourists, scientists, historians and pagans came to the Church of Saint-Sulpice, especially to gaze at this famous line. Rose Line.

The strip divided the altar in two, then crossed the entire width of the church and ended in the northern corner of the transept, at the base of a completely unexpected structure here.
Colossal ancient Egyptian obelisk.

Here the Rose Line, gleaming in the darkness, made a vertical turn at an angle of ninety degrees, ran across the “face” of the obelisk, rose a good thirty-three feet to the end of its pyramidal top, and there finally disappeared from view.
... A copper strip embedded in the stone divided the sanctuary exactly along the axis - from north to south. It formed the semblance of an ancient sundial, it was the remnant of a pagan temple that once stood in the same place. The sun's rays entering the hole in the southern wall moved along this line, marking the time from solstice to solstice.
The strip running from north to south was called the Rose Line. For centuries, the symbol of the Rose has been associated with maps and guides to travelers. Rose's compass, depicted on almost every map, marked where north, east, south and west were. Originally known as the compass rose, it indicated the direction of thirty-two winds, including eight major, eight half-winds, and sixteen quaternary winds. Depicted as a circle in the diagram, these thirty-two compass needles exactly matched the traditional image of a rose flower with thirty-two petals. To this day, this main navigational instrument is known as the Rose compass, where the north direction is always indicated by an arrowhead. This symbol was also called fleur-de-lis.
On the globe, the Rose line was also called the meridian, or longitude - it was an imaginary line drawn from the North Pole to the South Pole. And there were countless numbers of these Rose lines, since from any point on the globe it was possible to draw a line of longitude connecting the North and South Poles. The ancient navigators argued about only one thing: which of these lines could be called the Rose line, in other words, zero longitude, in order to then count other longitudes from it.
Now the prime meridian is located in London, Greenwich.
But he wasn't always there.
Long before the adoption of the prime meridian at Greenwich, zero longitude passed through Paris, exactly through the premises of the Church of Saint-Sulpice. And the copper strip mounted in the floor served as evidence of this, a reminder that it was here that the earth’s main meridian once lay. And although in 1888 Greenwich took this honor from Paris, the original, very first line of the Rose has been preserved to this day.”

And the true story is this: in 1727, the priest Saint-Sulpice demanded that a gnomon be installed in the church (an astronomical instrument, a vertical object that allows the angular height of the sun to be determined by the shortest length of its shadow (at noon), in order to accurately determine the time of the equinox and, therefore, , Easter. A meridian was laid along the floor of the church, which was never called the “Rose Line,” and in 1743 an 11-meter obelisk appeared.

This gnomon was also used for scientific research, and its rational use is said to have saved the church from destruction during the French Revolution.
The line means the Paris Meridian, which stretches through the city from north to south through the Paris Observatory, through the Luxembourg Gardens, and passes near the Louvre.

The Paris meridian is a visible line. If you look under your feet while walking around Paris, you can see the meridian: along its entire length, 135 bronze medallions of Arago are built into the pavement. The medallions are the smallest monument in Paris, created in honor of the French astronomer François Jean Dominique Arago, who more accurately determined the position of the meridian in 1806. Such a monument to the astronomer was created by the Dutchman Jan Dibbets in 1994. The medallions have a diameter of 12 cm, the inscription Arago and north-south indicators.

I love Brown. It is rare that someone manages to bring their fiction so close to reality that after the release of the book and film, some medallions were stolen from the pavement of Paris.

The letters P and S on the windows at either end of Saint-Sulpice are St. Peter and St. Sulpice, the two patrons of the church, not the Priory of Sion.
The brotherhood in the film claims that its members included some major historical figures, including Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton.
The reality is different: it is the “1901 Law Association” created in 1956. Its founder, accused of fraud, admitted before a French court in 1992 that he created this secret society from scratch, which was supposed to place a descendant of the Merovingians on the throne of France.
In The Da Vinci Code, the story begins in the grand gallery of the Louvre, Jacques Saunière is found dead next to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. So, to be continued.

SECRETS OF THE CHURCH OF SAINT-SULPICE - II, or the Rose Line exists! November 20th, 2015

http://www.liveinternet.ru/users/myparis/post233142706/

DEAR FRIENDS! HERE IN PARIS, in the city, which essentially occupies a small area, there are still many unsolved mysteries, secrets and mysteries preserved to this day - secrets that are still seriously protected from the uninitiated. IN first part In this new cycle, we touched upon the secrets of Saint-Sulpice, which are located outside this one of the most mysterious temples in Paris. Now it’s the turn to open the doors to the temple, and with them, to reveal those secrets that are still hidden inside; secrets that even Dan Brown doesn't know about.

It is extremely difficult for anyone who comes to Saint-Sulpice for the first time to resist the temptation to immediately start looking for the famous gnomon, instead of first of all looking around, looking around and starting to explore the temple in order, without haste and fuss. Meanwhile, in the bustle and haste, details inevitably disappear - and it is in them that the Truth lies!.. For example, few will see that on that stained glass window in the previous photo, the letters M and A are intertwined - it is officially considered that they mean Ave, Maria - a rather strange explanation, since monograms often contained names, but not lengthy phrases. The attentive reader will recall that the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, often signed the MA monogram, but does it have anything to do with this temple?

Knowledge is truly power, because it allows you to restore the entire chain. It is worth remembering that Marie Antoinette was the wife of the one whose great-grandmother laid the first stone in the construction of this temple, but about whom you will hardly find the slightest mention in the temple itself. Both women are united not only by family ties, but also by the fact that both were from Austria - a country where not only most of the kings of France, but also Emperor Napoleon I found their spouses.

Almost everyone saw this gnomon pedestal with broken letters, and the most curious know that in the place of the broken one in the past there was some kind of counter-revolutionary text, which the revolutionaries allegedly did not like. Meanwhile, few people know what text was actually written on the pedestal, and most importantly, why, for almost three hundred years since the revolution, this original text has not yet been restored?..

Finally, she is the same, famous and legendary, ROSE LINE- it was she who was sung in his novel by Dan Brown, and it is she who is the most important and most carefully kept secret of the Church of Saint-Sulpice. The principle of the gnomon’s operation has already been described in literature for thousands of years; I will only say that the ray of light that at the appointed hour slides precisely along this line - a copper strip driven between the marble slabs - enters the temple from the window that is visible as a bright spot in the back plan. More precisely, it is from that small window that is barely visible as a dark speck on the right against the background of the window itself - the window, by the way, can be seen better in the very first picture.

If you lower your eyes, you can take a closer look at the Rose Line itself - the same Parisian meridian that still runs not only through the Church of Saint-Sulpice, but also passes through the Louvre and through many churches throughout France. The top photo clearly shows how chaotically and haphazardly the marble slabs are laid on the floor of the temple - such anarchic order you won't see in any church in Paris. It is worth noting that these marble slabs are already about four hundred years old, and during all this time all sorts of feet have walked on them, including the feet of Napoleon Bonaparte.

A little to the side, to the left of the copper strip, you can see another line drawn along the marble slabs. Few people know that this is exactly the very first, and now officially considered erroneous, Parisian meridian.

A careful look will easily notice that among all the church slabs worn out by time and feet only one stands out for its not yet erased shine - it’s easy to guess that it was changed not so long ago, and why do you think?.. According to loud official explanations, the shooting of that scene from the movie THE DA VINCI CODE, in in which the monk Silos breaks open the marble slabs of the Line of the Rose in order to get out what has been stored under them for centuries. It is much more politically correct, as they said in the Council of Deputies, when the right find is found by the right person and at the right non-film time. And for Dan Brown and all the filmmakers, for the right hint, there is no doubt that God himself will reward him, isn’t it?

The top photos show the same stained glass window that appeared in Dan Brown's novel THE DA VINCI CODE, with the Latin letters P and S intertwined in a monogram. According to the writer, this monogram means the secret society of the Priory of Sion, or in French - Prieuré de Sion, however, it is official explanations assure that all this is not so, and that monogram in fact means only the names of Peter and Sulpicius, i.e. saints to whom this church is dedicated.

Few people know that the Priory of Sion means a monastic order (i.e., priory) dedicated to Zion - a mountain in Jerusalem that is a symbol of the entire Promised Land, a landmark for the return of all the lost.

One of the photos shows that the same stained glass window with the PS monogram is located exactly on the same side of the temple as the gnomon. It is possible that this monogram is a guide for the seeker, showing him the place where to look?..

This video shows the same scene in Saint-Sulpice - note that to the right of the gnomon, under which Silas is breaking the marble floor, there is a confessional booth curtained with red cloth.

The Rose Line is the mystical name of the meridian, which has the scientific definition of “prime meridian”. The term is also used in reference to the supposed dynasty of successors of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Robert Langdon and Lee Teabing explain the concept to Sophie Neveu during their stay at Chateau Villette. The places visited by the heroes of the novel are located on different Rose Lines. One is in the UK, the second is in France. In Paris, the line passes through the Louvre and then through the gnomon in the Church of Saint-Sulpice. When Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu go to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, they think they are on another line and that the name of the chapel is an abbreviation of this name (Rosslyn from Rose line). To understand what the Rose Line is, we must imagine imagine the Earth as a central point surrounded by twelve zodiacal signs, just as the zodiacal constellations surround the earth's orbit in space.

As we gradually unravel the secret keys and codes of the Priory of Sion, we will discover that there is a fixed North-South line called the Rose Line, which simultaneously serves as both a navigational map and a solar calendar.

It is this principle that underlies the famous solar gnomon in the Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice, where Silas comes in search of the keystone. In this church, at noon on the day of the winter solstice, a ray of sunlight, penetrating through the lens in the window of the southern transverse nave, slides along the bronze strip of the gnomon, marked with divisions, and then passes along the floor of the church and rests on the marble obelisk in the northern transverse nave. (See Saint-Sulpice.)

The compass rose symbol was invented for navigational purposes to help sailors. The long ends of this eight-pointed star point to the north, south, east and west, and the small ends mark the middle directions. The north direction of the compass rose is usually indicated by the fleur-de-lis symbol. This is the heraldic symbol of the royal dynasty. In the Middle Ages, the northern direction was also called septentrion, after the number of seven stars in the Big Dipper, which points to the North Star. Since then, the image of the bear has been present in the myths of King Arthur and the Holy Grail and in the ciphers of the Priory of Sion as a symbol of the guardian or guardian. The North Star is also called Stella maris, or Star of the Sea, and is associated with the image of the Virgin Mary.

It is therefore perhaps no coincidence that the Line de la Rose, which crosses France from Dunkirk in the north through Amiens, Saint-Sulpice in Paris, Bourges at its epicenter, then through Carcassonne and ending in the south in the Spanish city of Barcelona, is marked by a large number of cathedrals and churches of the Virgin Mary, and almost each has a solar meridian, similar to the Parisian one in the Church of Saint-Sulpice.

The same symbols are found in the text of the mysterious poem of the Priory of Sion “The Red Serpent”. In it you can find hints about how and why this solar meridian appeared in the Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice.

At the end of the 17th century, new scientific and technological inventions allowed astronomers to more accurately calculate the location of the prime meridian, which made it possible to abandon outdated methods. In 1672, the construction of the Paris Observatory was completed. It was erected on the site of the new Parisian prime meridian, which called into question the significance of the gnomon of the Church of Saint-Sulpice.

See also: Gnomon in Saint-Sulpice, Priory of Sion, Saint-Sulpice.

ROSLYN CHAPEL

The last place where Sophie Neveu discovers information about her family was found thanks to a poetic line from her grandfather Jacques Saunière: “The Grail awaits you under ancient Roslyn.” Together with Robert Langdon, Sophie travels to Scotland, where she makes an amazing discovery. Contrary to popular belief, Roslyn Chapel was not built by the Templars. The poor knights of Solomon's Temple have nothing to do with this famous building. Roslyn Chapel was erected in the 15th century at the expense of Sir William St. Clair, Earl of Roslin and Orkney. The Order of the Knights Templar was destroyed a century before the first stone of the future Cathedral of Codes was laid in Scotland. The only thing that somehow connects Roslin Chapel with the Templars is that the Templar headquarters in Scotland were located only a few miles from Roslin Castle, and also that the St. Clair clan testified against them when In 1309, a group of Knights Templar were put on trial at Edinburgh's Holyrood Castle.

Rosslyn Chapel is located a few miles south of the Scottish capital. Roslin himself made headlines recently when the legendary sheep Dolly was cloned at the Roslin Institute. The chapel is a world-famous historic building that has inspired famous poets such as Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. In addition, it is a functioning church with a large congregation, where services are held weekly.

The church in its current form bears little resemblance to the magnificent cathedral that was planned to be built. Its more correct name is “Collegiate Community of Clergy of St. Matthew.” It is believed that the Saint Clair clan, who founded Roslyn Chapel, foresaw that over time it would turn into an impressive spiritual center. Roslyn Castle once housed a medieval scriptorium where books from continental Europe were translated and copied by hand. The carved decorations inside the chapel partly imitate exquisite miniatures of medieval books of hours and bestiaries. Fairy-tale creatures like dragons, unicorns, goblin, lions and monkeys coexist here with saints, knights, queens, medieval musicians and biblical characters.

The name of the chapel does not at all go back to the phrase Rose Line, as stated in the novel “The Da Vinci Code”. In fact, it is made up of two Celtic words - ross (mountain, hill) and lynn (water). That is, in the literal sense, Roslin means “hill by the river.” The name suits the area perfectly, where the River Esk curves around the high mountain on which Roslyn Castle stands.

Over the past few years, a number of books on so-called alternative history have appeared, in which hypotheses about Roslyn Chapel are presented, each more interesting than the other. It has been suggested that the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail and the secret lost gospels of Christ, the Templar treasures, as well as the embalmed head of Jesus Christ are hidden somewhere in the church. Some authors claim that the chapel is literally stuffed with ciphers and symbols of the secret teachings of the Templars, as well as symbols of the brotherhood of free masons. Locals often joke that they wouldn’t be surprised if one day someone claims that the Loch Ness monster and the Roswell UFO are also hidden somewhere under the chapel. There is a local legend that Roslyn contains a great treasure, but this refers not to the chapel, but to the castle. This treasure is supposedly worth several million dollars, and is guarded by a dark knight and a white ghost lady.

Indeed, a secret room under Roslyn still exists. This is the crypt of the Saint Clair family. Here lie the ashes of many generations of Scottish knights, buried in armor and with weapons. The entrance to the tomb is often mentioned in ancient chronicles and is located under cubic stone blocks in the floor of the northern side aisle.

It is prohibited to excavate the Saint Clair family tomb, since Roslyn is a working church and is a rather dilapidated structure that has not been properly cared for for a long time. In addition, there is no exact evidence that some kind of “secret treasure” is hidden under it. Any excavations inside the building will inevitably lead to its collapse.

Is there really a magical line between Roslyn and Glastonbury, as the author of The Da Vinci Code claims? These two points on the map can be connected using a ruler. The only more or less significant thing on this line is the M5 and M6 motorways. You won't see any Solomon's Star on the floor of the temple - this detail is entirely Dan Brown's responsibility. Any divine geometry in the architectural structure of Rosslyn Chapel does not originate from Solomon's Temple or "Templar masonry", but rather follows the east choir of Glasgow Cathedral, the architecture of which is in many ways similar to that of the chapel. You won't find any Boaz or Jachin columns here, although there are three columns inside, including the famous Pillar of the Journeyman. Legend says that it was carved from stone by a certain young apprentice, who modeled it on a magnificent column he saw in a dream. His mentor, a master mason who studied his craft in Rome, was filled with envy. He was so angry that he hit his student with such force that he took his life.

There are a huge number of carvings on any part of the surface of Roslyn Chapel, but cryptologists have only been studying them for the last few years. The fact is that not every “code” can actually turn out to be a code. Deciphering the codes does not mean that the entrance to the Saint-Clair family crypt will be found, since its location is well known. There is an assumption that the carvings on the stone cubes somehow correspond to the notes of a medieval song, since each arch is crowned by a stone angel playing a 15th-century musical instrument.

The name Saint-Clair, mentioned in the "Secret Files" of the Priory of Sion, is associated with the Saint-Clairs and Roslyn only through the appearance of the book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail". Marie de Saint-Clair is a fictitious, fictitious name; it is never mentioned in historical documents. That is, such a woman never actually existed.

Roslyn Chapel is a truly magical place. This is a real treasure trove of medieval images, giving us the opportunity to understand the thinking of scientists, aristocrats and artists of the Middle Ages. The Saint Clairs of Roslyn were Scottish nobles, associates of William Wallace and King Robert the Bruce. This was a rich and influential family, close to the Scottish royal court. They also served as Scottish envoys to France.

Roslyn Chapel was built during the period of the greatest power of the Saint Clairs. This beautiful temple is full of many miracles and things whose meaning we have yet to unravel.

See also: "Secret Files", Templars, Priory of Sion.

DIVINE GEOMETRY

Divine geometry is the art of transmitting divine wisdom from generation to generation with the help of geometric shapes that serve as symbols. It is also an art form that has been used for many centuries, and a special language of communication between the bearers of the secrets and those who will be initiated into them. Divine geometry was considered the property of only a select few, a matter that is not understandable to every mere mortal, something like a rapprochement between the sublime and the earthly.

For thousands of years, this secret language was used, which was so loved by Greek philosophers and mathematicians, especially Plato and Pythagoras. Much of Plato's dialogue Timaeus is devoted to a treatise on divine geometry. It also contains a description of the mysterious island - Atlantis - and a lot of symbolism, which literally permeates this work. The ancient Greeks attributed special properties and saw great value in the so-called Platonic solids, endowing them with meaning and defining, within the framework of this meaning, their relationship to the divine and the environment to the world.

A classic example of the use of divine geometry is Kabbalism - a philosophical and religious-mystical Jewish teaching that claims to understand the divine essence. “Kabbalah” in Hebrew means “discovery,” and this discovery involved a select group of Jews who learned a form of secret language known only to initiates.

The idea of divine geometry figures prominently in The Da Vinci Code, both in Langdon's story of Solomon's Temple, built on knowledge of the laws of divine geometry, and in the pose taken by the dying Jacques Saunière. As a symbologist, Langdon had solid knowledge in this area.

See also: Fibonacci Sequence, Golden Ratio, Golden Rectangle, Pentagram.

JACQUES SAUNIERE

Jacques Saunière - curator of the Louvre and Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. His murder sets Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu on a wild adventure to decipher the symbols in order to unravel the secrets of the Priory of Sion before Opus Dei does.

In giving his hero the name Saunière, the author was probably inspired by the mystery surrounding the mysterious priest named Bérenger Saunière, who in June 1885 received a parish at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in the village of Rennes-le-Château.

For the first six years of his service, the young and attractive priest Saunière led a modest life typical of a rural outback, hunting and fishing and studying the history of his native land, which Abbot Henri Boudet, a priest from the neighboring village of Rennes-les-Bains, told him about. Saunière hired a village girl named Marie Derarneau as his maid, who soon became devoted to him and inherited his property and secrets.

In 1891, inspired by Boudet's romantic tales of local history, Saunière founded a foundation to carry out a rather modest reconstruction of the church, built back in 1059 on the ruins of an old Visigothic sanctuary from the 6th century. While renovating the altar, he allegedly found four ancient manuscripts hidden in the Visigothic columns supporting the altar stone. These mysterious manuscripts have never been seen in person, but two of them are believed to contain genealogical tables dating back to 1244 and 1644. And the other two are encrypted documents compiled in the 1780s by Antoine Bigou, Saunière's predecessor as rector of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene.

When the documents were deciphered, it turned out that they contained some mysterious messages. Saunière allegedly suspected that he had discovered something very important, and talked about it with the Bishop of Carcassonne, who immediately advised the young curate to take the finds to Abbot Biel and Emile Offay from the Parisian Seminary of Saint-Sulpice so that they could carefully study them. During his stay in the capital, Saunière visited the Louvre, where he acquired reproductions of paintings by Poussin and Teniers. These artists had some connection to the deciphered documents.

Upon Saunière's return to Rennes-le-Chateau, his behavior became even more strange. First of all, he continued the restoration of the church, excavating the ancient pavement and clearing the inscriptions on the gravestones of the cemetery. Then he began to take long walks around the outskirts of the village in the company of Marie Derarno, collecting an impressive collection of stones that were of no value. Soon after, he began an extensive correspondence with virtually every country in Europe and opened bank accounts in strategic locations in the south of France.

Later, in 1896, Saunière began spending impressive sums on restoring and decorating his church with mysterious symbolism, and also built a new road and installed running water for the villagers. He also built a mansion, which he called Villa Bethany, in which he almost never lived. The villa building had a complex, elegant design. For example, it had a crenellated turret, called Tur-Mag-dala. It was built onto the mountainside, giving the opportunity to admire the picturesque panorama of the valley below.

There is evidence that this considered poor priest from a provincial parish spent several million dollars over the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1917.

Saunière's enormous spending supposedly attracted the attention of local church authorities, who demanded to know where the wealth came from. When Saunière refused to reveal the origins of his fortune, the local bishop accused him of illegally performing church rituals and embezzling money. A church tribunal removed Saunière from his post as rector of the village parish. Saunière appealed directly to the Vatican, which overturned the tribunal's decision and returned the priest to his place and rank.

In January 1917, Saunière suffered a stroke from which he never recovered. The day he fell ill mysteriously coincided with an important holiday for the members of the Priory of Sion - the holiday of the Church of Saint-Sulpice, which is - well, just mystical! - coincides with the date inscribed on one of the gravestones in the cemetery.

They say that the priest who came to confess the dying man refused to accept words of repentance, and on January 22 Saunière died without confession.

Villa Bethany is mentioned in the Secret Files as the arch, or mother-house, of the twenty-seven commanders of the Priory of Sion, who lived throughout France. Moreover, Pierre Plantard, Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, hinted that Rennes-le-Château is the secret place where the archives of the Priory are kept. The truth of this rumor is supported by the fact that Plantard purchased real estate in Rennes-le-Chateau.

Rumors that Saunière allegedly found a treasure do not subside a hundred years after his death, and treasure hunters continue to comb the area to this day. Nothing significant has yet been discovered, and the mystery of Saunière’s discovery still remains unsolved.

See also: Pierre Plantard, Priory of Sion, Saint-Sulpice.

SHEKHINA

This word is used in his lecture by Robert Langdon, who researched the role of sex as a path to God. Langdon tries to explain to Sophie Neve the essence of the ritual of hierogamy, in which her grandfather Jacques Saunière participated.

In the Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Bible, this term refers to signs of the presence of God among people. Nevertheless, medieval Jewish theologians and philosophers, in order to avoid the incorrect anthropomorphic interpretation of the idea, which arose due to the specific use of the word “hierogamy” in the Talmud and Midrash, where it is absolutely clear that this concept is not identical with God, introduced into use a female image - the shekinah - whose role was insignificant.

This separate entity, in turn, began to be used in some Kabbalistic treatises and teachings in the meaning of “wife of God,” giving this image much greater significance. In Kabbalism, the shekinah can be reunited with God only by observing all the divine commandments, thereby ushering in a new messianic age.

SILAS

Silas is a member of the Catholic organization Opus Dei, confident that he is doing God's will by committing atrocities as described in The Da Vinci Code. He pacifies the flesh, wears the so-called belt of humility and scourges himself until he bleeds. His name does not carry any hidden meaning, but it brings to mind Saint Silas, a companion of Saint Peter, mentioned in Acts (15:22) among the “men who rule among the brethren.”