GoKawiilThis series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.
Believe that there is a secret and you will feel an initiate. It doesn’t cost a thing. Create an enormous hope that can never be eradicated because there is no root. Ancestors that never were will never tell you that you betrayed them. Create a truth with fuzzy edges; when someone tries to define it, you repudiate him. Why go on writing novels? Rewrite history. — Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
Before all of the conspiracies, there was just a village.
Rennes-le-Château sits perched atop a 300-meter-high promontory in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. It has today a permanent population of fewer than 100 souls, who are clustered together on a plateau approximately 200 meters long by 100 meters wide. The only way to reach the village is by walking, cycling, or driving up a single narrow, twisting four-kilometer road that leaves from the closest neighboring town of Couiza (population 1100) and terminates here. But if there is only one physical road to Rennes-le-Château, there are a thousand or more imaginative ones. It is the Rome of the conspiratorial view of history, the place to which all conspiracy theories seem to lead sooner or later. Once you reach the village, whether in person or merely in spirit, there is literally nowhere else to go.
It may feel like a place out of myth, but it is not one without a website. During the high season, at least half of the single access road’s traffic consists of tourist buses. Their windows act as frames for the portraits of their eager passengers, visions of arcane mysteries swirling almost visibly around their heads like halos or thought bubbles, placed there by the guide at the front of the bus who knows perfectly well what stories she needs to recite to butter her bread. When the visitors pour out of their buses at the top of the hill, the villagers greet them with a smile, if sometimes a weary one. Whatever its drawbacks, living in one of the world’s most unlikely tourist traps is an undeniable improvement over the farming or mining by which their parents or grandparents made a living.
Rennes-le-Château owes its place on so many package-tour itineraries to the insatiability of the human appetite to believe weird shit. For every man, woman, and child who lives in the village today, there have been six or seven books published that prominently feature it. If we wind up nuclear-bombing or fossil-fueling or populist-politicking our way back to the Stone Age in the near future, there will still be some of us sitting around in our caves after the apocalypse, prattling on about Mary Magdalene and holy bloodlines and Knights Templar — always Knights Templar — to distract from the wolves howling in the lonely desolation outside. For a really good sinister conspiracy theory is counterintuitively cozy, what with the way it collapses the amorphous mass of real history, where cause and effect are as muddled as are heroes and villains, into a comforting clockwork mechanism of cogs in cogs. Small wonder that pseudo-history tends to thrive best when real life seems most vexed and confusing.
Rennes-le-Château lies within Occitania, the most southeasterly of the eighteen administrative regions of modern-day France. But for centuries the largest portion of this region, including the one that contains our village, was known as the Languedoc, a name by which it is still colloquially referred to this day. The Languedoc has long been characterized by a stubborn independent streak and an uneasy relationship with the powers that be in far-off Paris. To this day, some of the locals there prefer to speak their own language of Occitan, a direct descendant of the Latin spoken by the Romans who first settled here a century before the birth of Jesus Christ, rather than the language spoken by the rest of France.
Humans have been living in the Languedoc for hundreds of thousands of years; prehistoric cave dwellings have been found in many of the cliff faces that dot this craggy region. When the Romans arrived circa 120 BC, they brought with them bureaucracy, literacy, and in time Christianity in return for the ores and minerals of which the earth of the Languedoc is rich, from iron to copper, lead to gold. They may have built a village on the promontory where Rennes-le-Château stands today, or a villa, or a temple, or a fortress, or most probably nothing at all.
The Romans were eventually displaced by the Visigoths, who were on a tear after sacking Rome itself in AD 410. They evolved a civilization far more sophisticated than their barbarous reputation. Once the most febrile stage of their conquering was over, the Languedoc came to mark the northernmost part of their empire, which otherwise filled most of the Iberian Peninsula to the south. Further north was the burgeoning kingdom of the Franks, the forefather of the nation we know as France.
Some have connected our promontory with a major regional center of the Visigoths, which appears in some of the scant surviving records from the period under the name of Rhedae. But this idea appears to be, like so much about the story of Rennes-le-Château, an example of wishful thinking. Rhedae was supposed to have had a population of up to 30,000 people, meaning it would have had to have sprawled well beyond the promontory itself. Yet there is no trace in the surrounding countryside of the debris a settlement of that size should have left behind. Coins, jewelry, and axe blades should have been regularly churned to the surface by the farmers who have worked the land around here for centuries — not to mention the thousands of amateur archeologists who have descended on the area since Rennes-le-Château became such a nexus of conspiracy theories.
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