François Bérenger Saunière (1852-1917) was a priest in the French village of Rennes-le-Château, in the Aude region, officially from 1885 to 1909 (when he was transferred to another village by his bishop, which he declined and subsequently resigned) and after 1909, until his death in 1917, in the role of Free Priest (a priest working independently without a parish).
He would be unknown today if not for the fact that he is a central figure in many of the conspiracy theories surrounding Rennes-le-Château.
Supporters of the various conspiracy theories of Rennes-le-Château believe that while renovating his parish church in 1891, Saunière found ancient documents relating to a great historical secret. These theories allege that, through his possession of these documents, Saunière was somehow able to obtain much more wealth than would be expected of a parish priest. The documents were allegedly discovered in a "hollow visigothic pillar" according to the book Le Trésor Maudit by Gerard de Sede.
Later on I will show you how these documents will be used to decode the Shugborough inscription. So please bear with me as I devote more time in discussing these very important documents.
In 1946, Noël Corbu purchased the estate that Saunière had constructed and whose title deeds he had placed in the name of his housekeeper, Marie Dénarnaud. Corbu began to circulate the rumours of the priest's extraordinary wealth.
Corbu was later to meet Pierre Plantard, who became considerably attracted to the now developing myths and rumours surrounding Saunière. Pierre Plantard began writing a manuscript and produced fake parchments (admittedly forged by his friend, Philippe de Cherisey) of the ones that Saunière had supposedly discovered whilst renovating his church.
Plantard’s faking of these documents is the reason why some people have completely dismissed the existence of the original parchments altogether.
The two parchments (one small, one large) are written in Latin bearing uncials copied from the Merovingian period.
The text in the small parchment is from Luke chapter 6 while the text in the large parchment is from John chapter 12. The Latin texts in both parchments contain numerous spelling mistakes.
Philippe de Chérisey’s admission of forgery simply tells us that the documents they presented to the public are mere copies of the original parchments found by Berenger Sauniere. Also, it must have been an accurate copy of the original since the numerous spelling mistakes were retained and not corrected in the forged documents.
The parchments were, on the face of it, Latin transcriptions of passages from the Gospels; but they contained deeper mysteries and coded messages.
The code in the large parchment is only decipherable through the use of the knight's tour - a logic puzzle wherein one 'jumps' a knight to every square on a chess board, once and only once. It is a puzzle which has only one solution - as does the code. For this code to produce the desired hidden message, one has to purposely misspell some words in the passages of the Gospel used to hide the message.
The Knight's Tour is a grid of numbers that specify the sequence of movements of a chess knight across the grid. The letters of the message to be transposed are plugged into the checkerboard in numeric order of locations. Many different Knight's Tours can be devised, and other algorithms can be used to generate the checkerboard numeric sequence.
The decoding of the hidden message in the large parchment which also uses the Viginère Table technique, involves a process whereby the letter W has to be omitted, giving the impression that the code was created before the 18th century when the letter W was not used in the French alphabet. This means also that the Latin Bible used and quoted in the two parchments, must have been from earlier versions which existed before the 18th century.
The hidden message coded in the large parchment is as follows:
BERGERE PAS DE TENTATION QUE POUSSIN TENIERS GARDENT LE CLEF PAX DCLXXXI PAR LE CROIX ET CE CHEVAL DE DIEU J'ACHEVE CE DAEMON DE GARDIEN A MIDI POMMES BLEUES
The code of the small parchment can be easily broken when letters higher than the rest of the text are identified and arranged in order.
The hidden message coded in the small parchment is as follows:
A DAGOBERT II ROI ET A SION EST CE TRESOR ET IL EST LA MORT
