The Words Rex Mundi were inserted into the text of
Parchment 2 in the form of minute letters. In fact they are easily missed unless you make
a conscious effort to find them. On their own the two words mean 'King of the World' which
I suppose from a religious standpoint could loosely be interpreted as a reference to God or Christ. As separate words however,
a whole host of new meanings are introduced.
Rex
Ruler, King or Prince.
A priest officiating at sacrifices
A despot or tyrant
Used in conjunction with a name such Rex Deorum - Jupiter,
Rex Stygius - Pluto
A member of the Royal family
A rich man or a patron
A head, chief or leader
Used in conjunction with the name of river to denote the 'Main
or Chief' river
Mundus - i
Toilet things, Adornment, The universe, The world, Harmony of
the universe, Mankind
Although there are innumerable
meanings in the Latin and these may be combined in any number of ways, I am
doubtful that this code would be as simple as this.
It is not inconceivable that the author had the
intention of providing clues to landmarks or direction indicators with these codes.
Given the fact that there are so many and that individually they are too short to be
deciphered by conventional means, the likelihood that they are landmarks is quite high.
Also the layout of the letters on the manuscript is arranged in such a way that one is
almost forced to join them up to see what happens. It is worth keeping in mind that
Saunière himself was given to wandering the hills and mountains for days at a time in the
years following his discovery of the parchments. Was he just out walking or was he looking
for something or checking geographical features perhaps? He apparently gathered stones of
all kinds while on these forays and he eventually used a good few of them to build a small
grotto. His fascination with stones caused the villagers to ask what he was up to,
to which he simply replied that he liked stones.
If one assumes that 'Rex Mundi' is a landmark then it
could refer to something prominent such a hill, a peak or a river. From an encoding
point of view the author would want to include several uses for each code. First the
literal meaning of his words, then the more obscure meaning, the arrangement of the
letters on the page and finally a numerical significance. You can see that 8 letters
can actually provide a great deal of information.
Having studied maps of the region for many years one
begins to see some of the possibilities the author of these codes may have been
playing around with. Apart from being devilishly cunning and highly knowledgeable,
he was a man who enjoyed the "Jeu de Mots" and the "Rebus" that is to
say the playing around with the sounds of words, punning. When you know several
languages (and Antoine Bigou most certainly spoke Greek and Latin fluently, probably spoke
Languedocien fluently, maybe Spanish, he certainly knew English and he may also have had
some knowledge of Arabic) it would be almost impossible to use a word without its sound
providing a wealth of meanings in the other languages. This in itself provides a tool for
encoding messages. You simply write a word which has meanings in many languages. Only if
you know the other languages can you get at what he had in mind. Having laid down
this hypothesis I believe that Rex Mundi was the authors way of indicating a landmark.
What can be deduced? Mundi in French is Monde and Rex is Roi or Royal. Put them together
and you get MondeRoyal or half French and half Spanish, Mondereal. If read quickly it sounds
like the word 'Montreal'. Not more than a few kilometres south west of Carcassonne
is a small town by the name of Montreal and there is also a château in the region,
Montreal-de-Sos about 24Km to the SW of Foix.
There is still information to be gleaned from this
code. If you examine the words REX MUNDI you will see that you can extract the Roman
numerals XMDI. The trick, as I discovered, is to use these numbers in the right
order. This turns out to be (1000-10) - (500-1) which gives the result 491. On the map,
the only point within a reasonable distance from Montreal is a small village
called CorbiJres which can
be found about 9 Km south east of Mirepoix. It has a marked height of 491m.
As with so much in this manuscript it is hard to ever know whether an idea
is correct or not. In this case I am heartened by the fact the number 491
can also be obtained from another source. If you recall the large encoded
message "Bergere pas de Tentation..." you will remember the
enigmatic section PAX DCLXXXI, " Peace 681". The meaning of this
has defied the efforts of all who have studied it. Well, here is a possible
solution.
The number DCLXXXI is actually incorrect. You
must take the X which forms part of the word PAX and add it to the number.
This now becomes DCLXXXXI. Now carry out the following arithmentic:-
500 - 100 = 400
50+10+10+10+10+1 = 91
400+91 = 491
And here is the number 491 again. A good sign
that we might be on the right trail.
From here one must return to the
Parchment. At its base you will see the words Jésu Medèla
Vulnérum. Each word
contains an accented letter. On line 10 you will see the same accented letters repeated.
In order to obtain bearings you need to join up these marked letters in the
correct order. The combinations are
many but for the moment the ones that yield the best results are lines from the
second
P of Medèla to each of the accented letters on
line 10.
So far all you have are two points on the map,
Montreal and the hill with a height of 491m at Corbiéres. What you need is an origin and unfortunately it is neither of the
points just found. This origin I discovered during the examination of Code 6 and it turned
out to be a landmark called the Fontaine Salée which is the source of the river Sals. To find it on your map look for
Rennes-les-Bains.
Slightly south east is a village called
Fourtou and
then if you look a short distance due east and a little south you will see the Fontaine
Salée marked.
The true test now is to see if any of the bearing
lines obtained by connecting up all the accented letters match up with anything on the
map. Initially I was trying to match known landmarks and place names and although the
lines were close, there were no cigars. Then while absentmindedly positioning the lines
this way and that I noticed a perfect match and it was one I really did not expect.
Place the è of Medèla
on the Fontaine Salée. Now
place the line that runs from the è of Medèla
to last accented e on line 10 so that it passes directly through Montreal. You will
see that the line joining the middle e on line 10 passes right through the hill
marked as 491m (Corbiéres). Also if you look at the section on Code 6 you will
notice that the bearing obtained from that code runs from the Fontaine
Salée and passes
through the hill at 491m. While this of course could be the merest coincidence
there is also a strong probability that the points of contact are genuine.
As with everything connected with this manuscript, it
is impossible to simply say "Ah this must be the answer". After studying the
information further another possibility caught my attention. By rearranging the letters of
REX MUNDI you can obtain the word RUINE and the letters XMD. The surplus letters
just happen to be Roman numerals. As you can see, these numerals can be made to provide
many possible number combinations. Of these two seemed to be reasonable from the point of
view of a geographical height. They were 510 and 490. The inference from the rearrangement
of letters is that either at the indicated height or very close to it is a ruin. After
studying an area of 10Km square around Rennes-le-Château I found only one height of 490m
with nothing in the vicinity. However the height of 510m threw up something very
interesting. On a 1:25000 scale map of the region there are two points with similar
heights, one of 509m and the other of 510m. What is particularly interesting is that there
are ruins near both of them and what is more interesting still is that the ruin next to
the 509m height is called "Barthas" while the one beside the 510m height is
called "Barthès". Coincidences do happen that's for sure, but this
one is just great!
