The Words Redis Blés which seem to have been inserted almost absentmindedly stand out conspicuously, particularly since they are not connected in any way with the Biblical text. Here again, I feel the author of this strange manuscript is trying to draw attention to the Blanchefort Grave located in the church yard of Rennes-le-Château. The words Reddis Regis appear on the cover stone while Blés is in my opinion a contraction of Ables, part of the name on the headstone proper wherein the lady in question is referred to as "Marie de Negre D’Arles". In fact her correct title was "Marie de Negrie d’Ables". Blés is also the French word for wheat or corn (actually the plural, wheats or corns) and it figures prominently in the Latin gospel text wherein the disciples were picking ears of corn, rubbing them in their hands and then eating them.  (Note that the same parable appears in Matthew 12, 1). Whoever prepared the manuscript wanted the reader to consult this headstone. It is also an interesting fact that the headstone was deliberately desecrated by Saunière on one dark night. A singular act which no self respecting priest would ever do. The inference is that he noticed something on this stone which he did not want anyone else to get hold of. Fortunately for us had it not been for the collecting passion of a gentleman by the name of Eugène Stublein whose hobby was the recording of graveyard inscriptions, we would be none the wiser as to her inscription today.

SION appears as a whole word formed by the truncation of text at the end of lines 11, 12, 13 and 14. There is some very special significance with this word. It crops up again and again almost everywhere you look. Also if you look at the section where this word is formed you can see on line 11 the letter group ONIS which again can be formed into the word SION and on line 14 the letter group SINON which can also be formed into SION.  

Additional codes appear in the form of superfluous letters, misspelled words, new words that have been added and others that have been left out. It is of course, conjecture to say that these elements constitute codes. The author of the manuscript may well have introduced them simply for the purpose of making the text illegible and placing as many obstacles in the path of the reader as was possible. In any event I'm sure that most people who have pored over this text will agree that it is an unholy mess requiring a considerable effort to unscramble. When you examine the text as a single entity you begin to realize the enormous project it must have represented to its author. To actually conceive the entire structure and then execute it with such precision must have taken a huge amount of time. Needless to say no one in his right mind goes to such lengths without a very good reason. Also if you think this manuscript is complicated, wait till you see manuscript 2, that is a masterpiece of encryption.

General Notes concerning this manuscript

The Dagobert message is easily found and what's more it is clearly understandable. That is to say it does not appear to be a coded cipher but plain English (or should I say plain French). This 'clear message' also speaks loudly of "TREASURE", something guaranteed to get the attention of the reader irrespective of whether he or she is the true and proper recipient. The inference therefore is that whatever secret may be contained in these parchments was not necessarily aimed at a specific person or group of people otherwise this message would have been a great deal more cryptic. However, the fact that the parchments were hidden inside the altar of a church is pretty strong evidence that they were intended for a man of the cloth and they were in all probability placed there by another man of the cloth. Who else would ever be able to gain access to such a sacred and inviolable part of a church, let alone have the audacity to hollow out stone pillars and hide things inside. Even a priest would receive strange looks from his parishioners if they saw him carrying out such irreverent activities. From a physical point of view, it is an act that would have taken Antoine Bigou quite some effort. The Altar was extremely heavy requiring the strength of at least two people to remove it from its supporting pillars. The hollowing out of the pillar would also have taken time and skill to accomplish. How did Bigou carry out this work? I provide what I believe is the explanation to this particular mystery in the pages on Boudet.

The conclusion I always come back to is that the author of the parchments wanted his message or secret to be passed on and that another priest should inherit this legacy. Although he must have been fairly sure that another priest would eventually get hold of the document he had to gamble on the fact that possibly someone other than a priest might accidentally stumble on to it. The hiding place of the parchments is also interesting from the point of view that the church, under different circumstances, may not have needed repairs carried out on the altar. In that case they may not have been found for perhaps hundreds of years, maybe never.  So, did the author hide them for his own benefit perhaps intending to return and reclaim his secret papers after the turmoil of the French revolution had died down or did he place them were another priest, sooner or later, was bound to find them? The documents may also have been placed there for someone specific who, for one reason or another, never showed up. Bear in mind that life expectancy during the French Revolution was not very long.   In any event he wanted to be sure that if things did go wrong then no matter what, the message would eventually be read and interpreted by a priest, who, although not the proper recipient, was nevertheless better than the message falling into civilian hands, so to speak. And so to avoid spilling the beans to an outsider he compromised by making part of the code simple to read (the attention getter, because even a priest I suppose,  needs to be alerted) and part rather more complicated. Again, the inference is that the more complicated part is decipherable but only by someone with specialized clerical knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the bible, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and all the other wealth of things a priest in those days needed to know. As most readers will realize such prerequisites exclude about 99% of the population today and perhaps as much as 99.99% then. Whether Saunière actually discovered a physical treasure or not we may never know. We do know that when replacing a cracked paving slab in front of the altar, the workmen unearthed a clay pot crammed full of gold coins and a few pieces of jewellery. Now we have some hint of a physical treasure. We do know for sure that from 1891 onwards Bérenger Saunière came into considerable wealth one way or the other. Wealth which is factually documented.

The question I ask myself is, if there is a hidden message in these manuscripts why is it that all the brain power of the most erudite minds in the world has failed to reveal the secret? Why has it eluded everyone for almost a hundred years? In the same breath, if these coded messages are so complicated that the most intelligent men and the best computer technology cannot crack them, then how on earth did a simple parish priest of 100 years ago get at the messages. One possible answer is that the majority of concealed information is not actually in the form of coded messages per se. There are messages for sure, but these are plain and simple. The secret of the parchments lies not in complexity but in the wealth of information and how it is unscrambled. Anyone who has carefully examined Parchments 1 and 2 will know just how much information is there to be found. I believe that Saunière chanced upon the solution in a sudden flash of inspiration. Bear in mind that he also had other manuscripts which we do not have the benefit of. In addition Saunière was born and bred in this part of the world and he knew every nook and cranny and every rock and boulder and that is a powerful advantage.

Another peculiarity of this manuscript is the composition of the lines of text. The author had the whole page to play around with but instead of using lines as we might, he has created some very short ones while others are longer. All the lines end at peculiar places making a very ragged right margin. It is certainly clear that he deliberately constructed the text in this way and no doubt he had some reason for doing so. Possibly the ragged outline of the right margin traces a path which when overlaid on an map provides a guide for the reader to follow.

The author also exercised a somewhat odd choice of Latin text.  He selected the first 4 verses of Luke 6. Nothing strange about that I hear you say.  Well, presumably he knew in advance what message he wanted to pass on (i.e. the Dagobert II message) and had it all clearly drafted out. Now the problem is to find suitable letters in the text corresponding to those in the message. If you read through the text and try to insert the letters of the message yourself you will see that the nearer you get to the bottom the more you begin to run out of suitable candidates. This is certainly one reason why he inserted the words Redis and Blés. He just did not have enough Latin characters to finish his message. I find it almost impossible to believe that he would not have made at least a rough draft of the whole text and would certainly have tried out his encoding technique in one or more practice attempts. Given such a complicated document with so many elements, no one, not even an outright expert would be capable of simply writing it straight off the bat without some preliminary practice. So here's the point I am trying to make,  having discovered in his draft that he is going to end up short of letters why not pick another text from the bible which will accommodate everything? I am convinced that the text itself is of extreme significance and holds some important clue. Probably the words Reddis and Blés were also carefully planned and deliberately inserted. As mentioned earlier this particular text is interesting for another reason. There are actually two similar accounts of the disciples eating ears of corn on the Sabbath. One appears in Matthew 12:1 and the other in Luke 6:1. Bear in mind also that he has altered the text almost out of all recognition. I feel sure it alludes to something or perhaps provides a reference which will jog someone’s memory. Also there is the possibility that his code needed specific letters and for this reason he had to change the text. Whatever message is contained in the manuscript it certainly jogged Saunière’s memory to the tune of many Millions of Pounds Sterling in today’s money.

Finally I would like to draw your attention to another interesting element of this parchment. If you look at the section containing the added words Redis and Bles you will see that the area created to the left of these words forms an almost perfect square.

There is another oddity associated with this part of the manuscript. If you slightly enlarge the square so that the projected lines from the pictogram and the cross above just touch it you obtain the following shape:-

The words Sion and Solis are automatically selected by this process. It is hard to imagine that such an occurrence is purely accidental.

Personal Theory of Map Co-ordinates

I have studied this parchment for many years and having used all the lateral thinking I posses I am constantly amazed at the wealth of different possibilities that emerge from such a short document. In my own mind I am quite convinced that the pictogram, Crosses and other marks on the manuscript are indeed markers or points that create bearings and which are to be used as an overlay for a map of the region. I am also convinced that this overlay represents only one of many and cannot be used in isolation. Over the next few pages I put forward some of my own ideas as to how one can obtain points of reference corresponding to the crosses, pictogram and Thetas and  I will try to explain my findings which in part, at least, seem to yield some interesting results.

If you look at the manuscript you will immediately notice the three crosses conspicuously embedded within the text.   Furthermore each cross has a letter positioned on either side of it.  The groups are, S-Q, S-M and I-I. Next, look at the peculiar mark at the bottom right of the manuscript:-

This sign  is also repeated on the Blanchefort Headstone and it clearly carries some major significance. To me it seems to be saying take the letter from in front of the S and place it in front of the P. Then it occurred to me that what it might be saying is take the last letter and move it back by one in the alphabet. By taking the second letter in each group and moving it one back in the alphabet you get S-P, S-L and I-H. If we can suppose for a minute that these are place names then those starting with an S are more than likely Saint-something-or-other. After scanning the map of the region these were the results I obtained:-

S-P

St. Papoul

St. Paulet

St. Pierre des Camps

S-L

St. Laurent de la Caberasse

St. Louis de Parahou

For the combination I-H I have to admit I was initially stumped. However based on the towns I had found I began to draw up my map. To do this I extended all the lines from the pictogram and connected all the crosses. I was also tempted to connect the two Thetas but for the moment I will ignore these.  Naturally the scale on the parchment is different to that of the map you will use but it's the angles that matter. If you click on the thumbnail below you will see how the arrangement of lines taken off the parchment appears:-

At this point it is interesting to note that there is a certain symmetry to the arrangement. An almost perfect parallelogram has been formed. After some trial and error I noticed that the line connecting St. Paulet and St. Louis de Parahou was a possible candidate. However in order to obtain the right correlation it is necessary to invert the line, that is to say the points S+P and S+L must change places with with each other. Only by following this arrangement do all the other reference points tie in. 

Although this procedure produces the desired results I was concerned that such a move was not strictly legitimate. Throughout the following sections virtually all my findings are based on information gleaned from the parchment itself. I felt sure therefore that it must also contain something which hints at such a move and finally it did  appear to me. If you connect the topmost point of the pictogram to the mid point of the P-S, it cuts the line S+P to S-L at almost the centre of the line and at a point where the letters A and F appear on the line. My reasoning was that the letters in the pictogram need to be inverted in order to obtain Alpha and Omega and also the letters P-S indicate a moving back process. This seems to indicate that this line, the only one cut more or less in half by the one connecting the pictogram to the P-S, should then be reversed. As a secondary confirmation you will notice that the line connecting the Thetas passes in between the letter F-A on the very first line of the parchment. The same letters appear reversed at the intersection point of line S-P to S-L. Hence the indication that the line should be reversed.

The line can now be placed on the map. It passes almost directly through Rennes-le-Château missing the church by just a few tens of metres.

Because the scale of the parchment is incorrect when compared to the map you are working from, each bearing line will require repositioning to accommodate enlargement of scale, making sure of course that the angles do not change in any way.

At this point it is necessary to flip the tracing over (left to right) so that the lines are now reversed:-

Finally you need to rotate it  through approximately 45 degrees. Actually by placing the points for St. Louis de Parahou and St. Papoul on the map the alignment is achieved automatically. If you are curious as to why all this was necessary, well, the answer boils down to simple trial and error.   From St. Louis de Parahou I marked off the bearing in the direction of the cross (I-H) which now extends in a NE direction.  Then from the cross (S-P) St. Paulet I marked off the bearing to the cross (I-H) in an approximate SW direction. I connected up these two lines which now gave me the completed triangle (S+P), (S+M), (I+H).

The line from St. Louis de Parahou passes directly across  a hill called the Pic d'Estelle with a height of 488m located about 4 Km south west of Mirepoix.  The intersection of the lines meet very close to the village of Coutens.