Myth Hunters: The Priest, His Lover and the Holy Grail

The village.

1953. An ill elderly woman is dying.

He talks about what she said. Her lover had been Sauniere.

When the priest Sauniere got to the village it was poor and only had a population of about 300.

The church itself was in terrible shape. It was dedicated to Mary Magdalene. There was a cult to her in that area.

Some people believe that Mary arrived in that area. The Cathars are discussed briefly.

He mentions the Grail and the Templars. The Church oppressed the Cathars but their treasure was never found.

He did emply a housekeeper.

The bell ringer righted a wooden post and found that it contained a small bottle with a paper inside.

Another person talks about the document the bell-ringer found. The bell-ringer gave the paper to the priest who looked at it and supposedly found marks for treasure under the church and in the graveyard.

A pot full of gold and other objects was found and the priest took it from the workers. (The guy talking is related directly to the bell-ringer.)

The priest and his now lover examined a place which was supposedly called The Lord's Tomb. The priest kept a diary and records when he discovered the tomb. No one knows what if anything he actually found there.

The priest would leave for a while then come back. He continued his digging in the cemetery. He also started receiving around 150 letters a day. Whatever was going on he became very rich.

He had a lot of decorations made for the church and some of them were very strange. Some believe that at least some of them were clues to what he had found.

He had a villa built and gardens.

He had a tower built called the Tour Magdalene. He entertained guests with expensive wine and food. (Invoices exist to prove this happened.) He spent what in today's money would be several million pounds. (That would be around $4 million American dollars.)

A new Bishop was appointed and looked into Sauniere's spending. Sauniere refused to say where his money came from. Sauniere was removed from his post and banned from holding services. He set up his own altar elsewhere, still accepted worshippers and refused to leave his estate. He was put on trial in the Vatican but didn't attend it. He hired lawyers to represent him.

The trial lasted six years but he died of heart failure before the end. Some think he transferred all his wealth to his housekeeper/lover before his death so the Church couldn't get their hands on it.

This woman (when she was a child) actually met the housekeeper. The woman's father reached a deal with the housekeeper to run the estate. The housekeeper confirmed the discovery of treasure to the father.

Stories about the woman and the priest started to appear after her death. Corbu, the father, said the treasure had nothing to do with the Cathars or the Holy Grail. It had actually been a treasure that was to be used to pay the ransom for a future king that had been captured in the crusades. The priest and the housekeeper had supposedly found only a fraction of that treasure.

The housekeeper said that Sauniere, on his frequent trips was actually going abroad to sell pieces of the treasure. The housekeeper died before she could tell Corbu where the rest of the treasure was buried. Various treasure hunters arrived but found nothing.

A program was done in France about the whole affair with Corbu playing the part of the priest.

Further excavations to look for the treasure were banned in 1965.

A book was published that said there were actually two parchments that were found. One parchment was supposedly shown to a Bishop who told Sauniere to take it to a high Church authority in Paris. He did and supposedly returned rich. Supposedly the treasure was not actually physical.

This then lead to the story of the Priory of Sion and a decoded parchment. It supposedly said Mary Magdalene did flee to France and was pregnant with the child of Jesus. The Holy Grail was not a cup but a bloodline.

About a year later it was found that the parchments that were supposedly real and decoded were a complete hoax.

The hoax became the basis for the Da Vinci Code book. The treasure of the ransom mentioned earlier turned out to also not be true as the ransom had actually been paid so that couldn't have been 'the' treasure found by Sauniere.

Matters come back to the letters Sauniere was receiving. He was actually selling prayers to people. Thus, Sauniere's secret was that he was actually a crook. The finding of treasure was a hoax perpetuated by the housekeeper who had almost no money after the priest's death and needed someone to take care of her.

Corbu, meanwhile, used the legend to make money by building a hotel, etc, to attract visitors and treasure hunters.

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