Blind Spot: The Beloved Disciple and the Authorship of John

This Blind Spot will indeed be a companion piece of sorts with the last piece on the Man in the Iron Mask, for again we will be examining a historically unidentified person, someone whose identity has been much debated, with assorted likely suspects having been put forward by scholars. But additionally it will serve as a clarification of sorts to a statement I made more than once in my series on the Priory of Sion and Rennes-le-Château. In that series, I suggested that Mary Magdalene was considered a “beloved disciple.” In truth, there is a figure who only appears in the Gospel of John who is known by that moniker and is described in every appearance as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” but is never overtly identified by name. The notion that Mary Magdalene was the beloved disciple is a common and an intriguing one, but it is by no means widely accepted. For one thing, a key passage in the Gospel of John featuring the Beloved Disciple appears to indicate that they are two different people: Mary Magdalene sees the stone has been rolled away from Christ’s tomb and goes to tell Simon Peter and the Beloved disciple, who then race to the tomb and enter. But those in the Magdelene camp feel the text itself cannot be relied upon, pointing out there appears to have been a campaign to besmirch the reputation of the Magdalene, portraying her as a prostitute when there is no evidence for this present in the Gospels. They suggest that her name may have been redacted, calling her instead “the disciple whom Jesus loved” so as not to admit Jesus’s relationship with her. You may recall this theory in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which makes much of the fact that apocryphal texts, such as the Gospel of Mary, mention how much Jesus loved her. Now some believe this text actually refers to his mother Mary, but there are further mentions in the Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi, for example the Gospel of Phillip, that indicate Christ’s love for Mary Magdalene more specifically, and how he loved her more than the other disciples and would “kiss her often on her mouth.” But contrary to what Brown claims in his novel, these texts are not the oldest known sources of information on the subject; rather they have been shown to be far less reliable as they are centuries older than the canonical gospels, being composed hundreds of years later even than John, which at around 120 CE was written at the greatest historical distance from the events it describes. So let us consider further the evidence in the Gospel of John as well as the most widely held theories on the Beloved Disciple’s identity in order to reach a fuller understanding.

Holy Women at Christ's Tomb by Annibale Carracci c. 1590s, via Wikimedia Commons

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There are actually a number of places in the Gospel of John in which an unnamed disciple appears. Although not explicitly identified as the disciple whom Jesus loved, many still take these as further appearances of the Beloved Disciple. The first is in Chapter 1, verse 35, which mentions two disciples of John the Baptist who become the disciples of Jesus. If this is indeed the first mention of the Beloved Disciple, then it makes him (or her) one of the first to follow Jesus. Then much later in the book, Chapter 18, verse 15, after Jesus is arrested, the narrator relates that Simon Peter and “another disciple” followed. This other, unnamed disciple knows the high priest and gains admittance to his court, and afterwards is able to get Simon Peter in as well. Speculation that this also is the Beloved Disciple, mainly because of this conspicuous anonymity, has led to much theorizing regarding his or her identity and connection to the high priest. Those on Team Magdelene might suggest that, rather than a poor prostitute, she was actually a woman of wealth, for as it indicates in Luke 8, she appeared to be funding Christ’s ministry with her own money. Therefore, as a woman of means, perhaps high-born, the high priest may have recognized her. Others have taken this passage to suggest that the Beloved Disciple was himself a priest, but more on that later.

The first time the Gospel of John refers to the Beloved Disciple overtly is in Chapter 13, verse 23, when during the Last Supper, he or she is laying his or her head lovingly upon his chest. Clearly this sounds affectionate, almost approaching intimacy, so many have looked at it as further proof for Mary Magdalene’s candidacy, while others have even suggested that there is some homoeroticism present in Christ’s relationship with this disciple. Without endorsing either theory, for the sake of clarity and brevity, I will be using male pronouns when referring to the unknown disciple from here on, as most scholarship and theories hold the character to be a man. In this scene, we again find Simon Peter present. Jesus has announced that one of his followers will betray him, and Simon Peter, seemingly in deference to the intimacy of the Beloved Disciple’s position with Jesus, suggests with a beckoning motion that he ask Christ who this betrayer will be, whereupon Jesus identifies Judas Iscariot. After this encounter, and Simon Peter’s following Jesus to the court of the high priest, where a disciple who may be the same man manages to gain them entrance, we find the Beloved Disciple present at the crucifixion, in Chapter 19, verse 26, when Jesus commends his mother into the Beloved Disciple’s care. And finally, after the problematic detail of the Magdalene seeing the tomb had been opened and fetching the Beloved Disciple, indicating they were different people, we have the moment with this Disciple whom Jesus loved, in the company of Simon Peter yet again, runs to the tomb. The Beloved Disciple outruns Peter, arriving first to see the discarded linens, but does not enter, leaving Simon Peter to investigate further.

The Beloved Disciple arrives at the Sepulchre before Peter; by James Tissot ca. 1886–94, via Wikimedia Commons

Now there is one final mention of the Beloved Disciple, and it is a doozy. In the final chapter of the book as we have received it, a further encounter with Christ is described. Out on Peter’s boat, fishing, the Beloved Disciple sees and recognizes Christ on shore. In this scene, on shore, Christ tasks Simon Peter with caring for his flock, essentially raising him up as the chief disciple. Peter asks about the Beloved Disciple, and Jesus asks what it would matter to him if he had the Beloved Disciple live until the Second Coming. This causes the disciples to suspect that Jesus has granted the Beloved Disciple immortality, but the narrator of the Gospel dispels this notion, indicating that it had been more of a rhetorical question. Then, in the very next verse, he identifies himself, saying it is this Beloved Disciple who testifies to these things…essentially saying “That’s me! I’m the Disciple whom Jesus loved!” So the question of the identity of the Beloved Disciple has long been tied up with questions of the authorship of the Gospel of John.

Although the gospels don’t name their authors, they received their names through tradition, as their original audiences were familiar with their origin. Therefore, it has always been assumed that John’s gospel was written by someone named John. The traditional view is that the author of the Gospel of John is John the Apostle, sometimes referred to with his brother as a son of Zebedee. In truth, however, the name translated first in Greek and eventually into English as John was an extremely common Palestinian name, such that the authorship of this gospel is a matter of debate. And it has been pointed out that the Sons of Zebedee were present in the boat on the Sea of Tiberius in Chapter 21 and appear to be separate people from the unnamed Beloved Disciple, whose anonymity had been so carefully cultivated throughout the book. This would therefore rule out John the Apostle. But there is no shortage of Johns to choose from. There is John Mark, but he is usually credited with writing the Gospel of Mark. There is John the Baptist, but he is referred to explicitly by the narrator rather than coyly, as the Beloved Disciple always is. Other candidates include John of Patmos and the more obscure John the Presbyter, all of whom vie for credit not only for the composition of the this gospel, but also the Epistles of John and the Book of Revelation—the so-called Johannine works. Then there is the notion, as previously stated, that this John was some unknown priest, for if he is the same unnamed disciple who entered the high priest’s court, he appears to have had connections, and this background would jibe well with the literary quality of the gospel, which does not seem to have been composed by an uneducated common man. But there is another theory that casts a wrench into the workings of any theory identifying these men with the Beloved Disciple. This being that Chapter 21 of the Gospel of John was a later addition to the book, and that its identification of the author with the Beloved Disciple is inaccurate. Many scholars point to the end of the previous chapter as evidence that this was the true original end of the book, for it concludes with a literary embellishment indicating that Jesus had performed many other works that the book had not mentioned, a flourish that is repeated again at the end of the next chapter which it is argued was appended to clarify certain doctrinal points—such as that Peter was the true head of the church, or perhaps that the Beloved Disciple certainly wasn’t a woman with whom Jesus was romantically involved.

Saint John the Evangelist, by Domenichino c. 1624-29, via Wikimedia Commons

So the search for the Beloved Disciple continues. If his identity is not tied up with the John who wrote the book, then who was he? There have been manifold further theories. It has been pointed out that we have names for all Twelve Apostles, and even from the Book of Acts for disciples who were recommended to replace Judas, Joseph Barsabbas and Matthias, because they had followed Jesus from the beginning. Indeed, beyond the Twelve, there were at least 72 other followers during Jesus’s lifetime who might have been referred to as disciples, according to Luke 10:1. There was Nicodemus, who had asked Pilate for Christ’s body, and Joseph of Arimathea, who had donated his own tomb for his burial. Either of these figures might easily be considered candidates.

Then there is the intriguing idea supported by James Tabor that the Beloved Disciple was loved by Jesus as a brother. Some traditions, supported by scriptural passages suggest that Mary had multiple sons after Jesus: James, Joseph, Simon and Jude. These would in effect be Jesus’s half-brothers, and of them, James is the most well-known. Again, we have some confusion among characters with similar names, as James the brother of Christ is often identified with another character, James the Less (as in the younger brother?) and confused with two Apostles named James, one a son of Zebedee like John, the other a son of Alphaeus. Tabor’s theory looks at the crucifixion scene, when Jesus tells his mother to look at the Beloved Disciple and says “behold your son,” telling the Beloved Disciple likewise, “behold your mother,” and he see a literal statement that the Beloved Disciple is another son of Mary.

Another candidate with a strong case is a follower of Christ not traditionally considered a disciple: Lazarus. Scholars in the 20th century have developed his candidacy quite convincingly. Floyd Filson, in a 1949 paper for the Journal of Biblical Literature, outlines this theory with powerful clarity. Earlier in the Gospel of John, the narrator makes it abundantly clear that Jesus loved Lazarus, including no less than three indications of his love for him (Filson 85). This adds weight and pathos to Jesus’s grief and the subsequent miracle he performs. Then, when the Beloved Disciple sees the discarded linens at the tomb, he is the first to believe Christ is resurrected, which is a far less dramatic assumption coming from one who has himself been resurrected (Filson 86). And finally, this theory does not shrink from the last chapter that identifies the author as the Beloved Disciple, suggesting that the events of the gospel all take place near Bethany, where Lazarus lived, making him a natural candidate for authorship as well (Filson 86-87). And the principal scene in the final chapter, in which the other disciples believe that Jesus is suggesting the Beloved Disciple might live forever, is further illuminated by the idea that the Beloved Disciple had already been raised from the dead (Filson 86).

Christ Raises Lazarus from his Tomb (etching) via Wellcome Collection

Among all of these competing theories is yet another, that the Beloved Disciple is not a real person whose identity can be uncovered, but rather a literary trope, a figure in more than one sense. Perhaps, some scholars have suggested, the Beloved Disciple is not named because he is not a man as much as he is an idea. By this reading, he is almost always presented as a contrast to Simon Peter, a character famous for his ambivalence and failings. At the Last Supper, The Beloved Disciple asks Christ directly what Simon Peter is too timid to ask. While they both follow Christ after his arrest, the Beloved Disciple resourcefully enters the high priest’s court while Simon Peter waits at the gate and later denies his devotion to Christ. While Peter is too afraid to witness Christ’s death, the Beloved Disciple bravely attends the crucifixion. In the race to the tomb, the Beloved Disciple arrives first and is first to believe in the resurrection. And at the Sea of Tiberius, the Beloved Disciple is the first to recognize the risen Christ. If one were to read this character as symbolic, then he might represent a model for devotion and faith, juxtaposed by Simon Peter’s weaknesses. But several of the ideas we have discussed—that the gospels have been redacted, that a new ending may have been tacked onto John to rewrite the origins of the book, and that major passages may be rather more symbolic than literal—lead to some big questions. If this gospel might be doctored, and if we are meant to read it as allegorical, with fictional characters representing ideals and abstractions, what does this mean for scriptural literalists? What does this say about the literal interpretation of other books in the bible? Perhaps the lesson here is that we should not be analyzing them as primary historical sources, searching for verifiable facts in them. Perhaps, as has been suggested of other portions of scripture, it is more useful to think of them as mythology and folklore.

Jesus and John at the Last Supper, by Valentin de Boulogne c. 17th century, via Wikimedia Commons

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Works Cited

Filson, Floyd V. “Who Was the Beloved Disciple?” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 68, no. 2, 1949, pp. 83–88. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3261994.

Eustache Dauger, the Secret Prisoner in the Velveteen Mask (aka The Man in the Iron Mask)

It began as a rumor bandied about in the court of King Louis XIV. In 1711, the Duchess of Lorraine, Elizabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans, a busybody sister-in-law of the king, wrote to her aunt, Sophia of the Palatinate, former Electress of Hanover, sharing a juicy bit of gossip concerning a secret prisoner of state that had been incarcerated at the Bastille for years. What made the story so titillating was the detail that the prisoner had been masked and was guarded at all times by musketeers who had been ordered to immediately kill the man if he ever attempted to unmask himself. Elizabeth-Charlotte speculated that the prisoner was an English nobleman who had been arrested as part of a plot against William III, but as the rumor passed on and the legend began to build, that part of it fell by the wayside. Among those to take up the rumor and add to it was Voltaire, who in 1738 began to claim that he had some knowledge of the prisoner, and that during visits to the Bastille had spoken at length with his captors. In Voltaire’s version, the prisoner had been made to wear a mask forged of iron for the intriguing reason that he looked so astonishingly similar to the king. Eventually, the myth grew to include some kinship beyond mere resemblance, suggesting that the iron-masked prisoner was indeed the identical twin of the king and thus a threat to his rule, a tale immortalized by the great novelist Alexandre Dumas. But long before Dumas made popular fiction of this legend, contemporary documents had begun to surface and efforts were made to uncover the truth behind this legend. These investigations would eventually reveal that the prisoner’s mask was not made of iron at all, and indeed, we would eventually be able to match a name to this figure… but surprisingly, this would not clear up the mystery surrounding him.

The first clues as to the identity of the man behind the mask came in 1769, when a Jesuit who had formerly served as the chaplain at the Bastille turned up the journal of the former second-in-command at the Bastille. An entry in said journal for September 18, 1698, spoke of the arrival of Bénigne d'Auvergne de Saint-Mars, the new governor of the Bastille, and of an old, masked prisoner he brought with him. Then in another entry five years later, the same officer recorded the death of that mystery prisoner, noting that during his imprisonment there he had been “always masked with…black velvet” and that he had been buried under the name “Marchiel.” Thus the detail of the iron mask was among the first fictions dispelled by primary source material, and the first clue to his identity revealed! The name Marchiel led to the first theory of the prisoner’s identity: Count Ercole Antonio Matthioli, an Italian minister to the Duke of Mantua. According to a 1687 Dutch article of uncertain authenticity that just happened to appear after the revelation of the name Marchiel, Matthioli had been kidnapped in 1679 by French authorities for some intrigue having to do with King Louis XIV’s acquisition of the city of Casale, and had been imprisoned under Saint-Mars’s care first at Pignerol and afterward at the island of Sainte-Marguerite. Proponents of the theory that Matthioli was the masked prisoner tracked down the parish death records of the masked man and discovered that the journal entry had misspelled the name as Marchiel, that it was actually “Marchioly,” which was indeed very close to Matthioli.

Historical reconstruction of the Bastille in 1420, via Wikimedia Commons

Historians pushing the Matthioli thesis eventually got hold of a wealth of primary source material in the form of correspondence between the masked prisoner’s custodian, Saint-Mars, and the marquee de Louvois, the war secretary, letters that discussed in detail how the prisoner was to be treated. Those in the Matthioli camp published much of this material, as it appeared to prove their claims that Matthioli had been imprisoned at Pignerol; however, it also proved to be the undoing of their thesis, as these letters showed that the man who would eventually be explicitly identified as the masked prisoner had been arrested and sent to Saint-Mars’s garrison at Pignerol in 1669, a decade before Matthioli’s supposed kidnapping. Furthermore, they showed that Matthioli had not been taken by Saint-Mars to his subsequent stations at Sainte-Marguerite island and the Bastille, as had the masked prisoner, and that Matthioli had actually died in 1694, almost a decade before the man in the velveteen mask had expired at the Bastille. And finally, this correspondence clearly provided a name that was far different from that under which the prisoner had been buried. The masked man had been called Eustache Dauger.

This name thereafter led historical detectives down another path. Eustache Dauger de Cavoye had been born into a prominent family, his father a captain of a musketeer company and his mother a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of France, Anne of Austria. Seeming to have disappeared from history after his military service, some 20th century historians came to the conclusion that the young man had settled into a depraved lifestyle and began trafficking in aphrodisiacs and so-called “inheritance powders,” a euphemism for poison, suggesting that he eventually found himself embroiled in the Affair of the Poisons, or the Chambre Ardent Affair. This was a massive scandal involving not only the widespread sale of poisons but also apparent devil worship ceremonies and infant sacrifice that involved King Louis XIV’s own mistress, an embarrassment that caused him to draw a veil of secrecy over the testimony and prosecution of those involved. Some historians went out on a limb suggesting the masked prisoner Eustache Dauger had been arrested for his part in this madness. To prove it, they pored over the surviving proceedings of the Chambre Ardent and indeed discovered a mention of a surgeon named d’Auger. However, this too, like the Matthioli thesis, failed to hold up under scrutiny, for other records showed that, though indeed this young man Eustache Dauger de Cavoye ended up in prison, he had not been secreted away at Pignerol but rather openly imprisoned at Saint-Lazare in 1668, where he would die in the 1680s.

What these theories failed to consider were the strange conditions of the masked man’s imprisonment, which the letters of war secretary Louvois and the jailer Saint-Mars make exceedingly clear. Why would there have to be so much secrecy surrounding the imprisonment of the Italian count Matthioli or the corrupt youth de Cavoye? That is the question that must be answered for any theory to hold water. Eustache Dauger appeared to be deemed a dangerous man for the secrets he held. And what’s more than that, he appears to have been not a nobleman or a well-bred bourgeoisie, but rather a lowly valet, a manservant.

Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars, governor of the Pignerol prison, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1669, then Captain de Saint-Mars served as commander of the prison within the French outpost of Pignerol in the Italian Alps, or as the Italians call it, Pinerolo in Piedmont. His only prisoner there was a man also deemed to be dangerous for the secrets he held: Nicolas Fouquet, former Superintendent of Finance who had been very publicly tried for corruption and sentenced to perpetual exile. Therefore, it seems that Pignerol was the place where Louis XIV customarily sent prisoners he felt must at all costs be sequestered from any contact with the outside world. Thus it was likely no surprise when the war secretary Louvois wrote to Saint Mars about the imminent arrival of a prisoner who must be kept completely isolated, in a special cell that commanded no view of any area where people might pass, behind a number of locked doors so that no guards could hear him speak. Saint-Mars was to personally attend to Dauger’s physical needs and to advise the prisoner that if he were to ever speak of anything other than his basic necessities, he would be immediately killed. Another dangerous political prisoner, Saint-Mars might have assumed, but perhaps he was surprised then when Louvois informed him that Dauger was just a valet and therefore required few creature comforts in his accommodations.

The precautions taken against the revelation of whatever secrets this valet held were truly extraordinary. He appears to have been arrested on secret orders and transported in hugger-mugger to the prison. He was only allowed to hear the mass said on Sundays for the other prisoner, Fouquet, if he were kept hidden away and precautions were taken to prevent him from speaking to anyone. A year after Louvois sent Dauger to Pignerol, he replaced the entire garrison, except for Saint-Mars and his staff, who remained the custodians of Fouquet and Dauger. In 1671, another political prisoner arrived, the count de Lauzun. Now with two noblemen in his charge, he had the unpleasant task of finding them valets, since apparently the nobility always required servants, even when in prison. Fouquet already had two valets, but when Lauzun required one, Saint-Mars asked the war secretary’s permission to simply have Eustache Dauger serve him, since Dauger had been a valet previous to his incarceration. Louvois forbade it, for fear that Dauger would by some indiscretion share the mysterious secret to which he was privy. Strangely, though, when one of Fouquet’s manservants died in 1674, the war secretary finally relented and said that Dauger could serve as a valet to the former Superintendent of Finance. Perhaps this seemed more acceptable, since Fouquet himself was feared to hold dangerous secrets and as he had been exiled for life, would never be able to share with anyone whatever further secrets he might learn from Dauger. Oddly, however, in 1679, the king relented in his strictness with Nicolas Fouquet and allowed him to have visits from his fellow prisoner, the count de Lauzun, and even to receive visits from his family. Before this, however, the war secretary wrote directly to Fouquet to receive assurances that Fouquet had learned nothing from Dauger of “what he knew” and “what he had seen…in his past life.” Whether or not Fouquet had admitted to learning Dauger’s secrets, he was permitted his visitations, provided that Dauger would never be present when anyone visited.

Pignerol, 1661, via Wikimedia Commons

When Nicolas Fouquet died in 1680, Saint-Mars discovered something problematic. The former Superintendent of Finance and the count de Lauzun had somehow managed to open up a passage between their separate chambers, which meant that not only Fouquet’s other valet but also the count had likely been in private with Eustache Dauger and may have been told whatever secrets he held. In order to somehow mitigate this breach, Saint-Mars locked the two valets up in the lower tower and lied to Lauzun, telling the count that the valets had been freed. Eventually, the count de Lauzun himself would be freed and restored to his former position, but the “men of the lower tower” remained in Saint-Mars’s charge and would until their deaths, kept in the utmost secrecy and not allowed to speak with anyone, even each other. Saint-Mars took them along with him when he received command of another frontier fortress to the northwest, where Fouquet’s other valet—an innocent man whose only crime was to have been in the presence of men with secrets—eventually died in 1687. Thereafter, Saint-Mars took his last remaining charge, the mysterious Eustache Dauger, with him to Sainte-Marguerite when he was promoted to governor of the island. Yet his orders still stood that no one was to speak to or even see the face of this Eustache Dauger, so he had the prisoner transported in a covered sedan chair carried by eight porters, a sight that inspired many rumors in Sainte-Marguerite. Once installed in his cell, however, which adjoined Saint-Mars’s own chambers so that no one else would have access to the poor, aging valet, he was not seen again until Saint-Mars’s further promotion to the governorship of the Bastille, the famous fortress in Paris. This time, however, instead of drawing more attention to his prisoner with the sedan, he simply elected to cover his face with a mask of black velvet, and thus the legend was born.

So who was this Eustache Dauger? Was “Dauger” a false name? Or was the name under which he was buried, “Marchiel” or “Marchioly,” the false name? Was he indeed a mere valet? Whom, then, had he formerly served? And what possible secrets could this poor manservant have been privy to that might have warranted such extraordinary precautions? The Matthioli theory further collapses when one considers that Matthioli’s imprisonment by the French had been no real secret. And even if it had been, there would have been no clear reason to mask him, since he would not have been a recognizable figure. Furthermore, had it been necessary to treat his incarceration so secretively, why bury him under so similar a name? Then there is the detail that the war secretary, Louvois, had left the name of the prisoner blank until after his secretaries had transcribed his dictation, only writing the name Eustache Dauger onto the missives before sending them to Saint-Mars. This would indicate that Dauger was the prisoner’s true name, held as a privileged secret, while the name under which he had been buried was the pseudonym. And this Eustache Dauger would seem to have genuinely been a valet in his former life, since even Vouloi’s earliest letters referred to him as such. Otherwise, it would have been foolishness to have him serve Fouquet in the same capacity.

So we are left with the final questions of whose valet this Dauger actually was, and what secrets he might have harbored. Andrew Lang, writing in 1903, suggested based on the timing of his arrest that Dauger may have been the notorious valet of Roux de Marcilly, a theory that proves to be one of the only explanations with some legs. Therefore let us examine it. This version starts with the negotiations of a secret treaty. For years, Charles the II, King of England, and Louis XIV, who were closely related as first cousins, had sought a closer alliance between the respective countries. Eventually this turned into earnest negotiations for the so-called Secret Treaty of Dover, which would see English ships and soldiers furnished for France’s planned conquest of the Dutch Republic in exchange for Charles receiving a substantial secret pension, provided he publicly convert to Roman Catholicism and restore the church’s power in England. It was during these lofty dealings that a suspected plot came to light, masterminded by a French Huguenot, and therefore a Protestant naturally predisposed against such a consolidation of papist power. Little is actually known about this Huguenot, Roux de Marcilly. Through a series of letters, he appears to have plotted with Charles II himself to form a league of Protestant nations against France and Louis XIV, thereby stemming the spread of Roman Catholicism. There is some doubt about Charles II’s genuine involvement in this plot, whether he really was tempted to turn against his cousin, perhaps because he was loathe to convert as Louis’s secret treaty required him to do, or whether he was humoring Marcilly while informing on him to Louis. Either way, Louis had the plotter kidnapped in Switzerland and tortured in the Bastille. He was accused of plotting the assassination of Louis XIV, but no evidence for such a plot existed, so they trotted out an old rape charge that may have been trumped up and sentenced him to death by the Catherine wheel for that. So awful and painful a death was execution by the breaking wheel, which involved having one’s bones smashed one by one and being slowly bludgeoned to death, that in his cell, Marcilly attempted to end his own life by cutting himself with a piece of broken glass. However, his guards caught him and cauterized his self-inflicted wounds with hot pokers so that he would survive to be shattered on the wheel.

A depiction of torture victims being broken on the wheel, via Wikimedia Commons

As Lang outlines in his essays “The Valet’s Tragedy” and “The Valet’s Master,” during his torture, Roux de Marcilly gave up his own valet, a man named Martin, as a co-conspirator. On the surface of it, this may seem absurd. When being tortured, one is compelled to give a name, and what better name than your lowly manservant, about whose life you may care little? And besides, whatever part Marcilly’s valet may have had in these matters was likely only performed in service to Marcilly, so he could hardly be considered a real player. Nevertheless, French authorities do appear to have been concerned about what the valet knew. After tracking him down in England, they questioned him, and Martin insisted he knew nothing, expressing reticence about accompanying them back to France for fear that “he would be kept in prison to make him divulge what he did not know.” Thereafter, however, the valet appears to have coyly intimated that he knew very much, perhaps because he enjoyed the attention, or perhaps in order to mock the French authorities because he felt himself safe in England. Unfortunately, the French thereafter asked Charles to surrender the man to their custody, and if we accept Lang’s thesis, which works well chronologically with Eustache Dauger’s arrest in Dunkirk in 1669, Charles gave up the valet, who was somehow—and here things turn vague—taken to Dunkirk (perhaps by a kidnapping similar to his master’s?) where he was arrested and given the prison pseudonym Eustache Dauger. In this scenario, which I find the most compelling, Dauger’s secret had to do with the existence of the Secret Treaty, about which his master clearly had information, or perhaps had something to do with Charles II’s intrigues. Nevertheless, there remain problems. If these were his secrets, then after a few short years, they would have been valueless and posed no further danger. And why keep him under lock and key for so long when they might easily have had him killed as they had his master? And why the great pains taken to conceal his identity and face? And if Dauger was a pseudonym for Martin, then why bury him under a third name?

Some of these questions can be answered with the sad assertion that this valet was merely a victim of bureaucracy and paranoia. There may have been reason to lock him away at the time, and thereafter it was only the perpetual, dogged enforcement of old and obsolete orders that kept him in captivity. However, the consistent inquiries about the prisoner in letters between Louvois and Saint-Mars indicate that even many years after Dauger’s incarceration, the king, or at least his ministers, remained concerned about what secrets the man harbored. Another explanation may be that, after allowing Dauger to serve as Nicolas Fouquet’s valet while at Pignerol, there was the further concern that Dauger, as well as the other valet, knew Fouquet’s secrets. As the Superintendent of Finance, Fouquet had once been among the most powerful men in France. Many, including Fouquet himself, believed that Louis XIV would eventually grow bored with the affairs of state and appoint Fouquet Prime Minister to rule France while Louis devoted himself to pleasure. Indeed, during his frequent meetings to go over ledgers with Louis, Fouquet appears to have exaggerated certain difficulties in the financial management of the state, perhaps in an effort to further persuade the monarch that he would not want to deal with these matters himself. However, Louis had other ideas about his kingship, and he had others whispering in his ears about Fouquet’s use of crown monies, suggesting that the Superintendent of Finance lived far too lavish a lifestyle for his own fortune to allow and that he must have been making personal use of royal funds. Indeed, Fouquet had built himself an ostentatious estate, and one day, after throwing the king a grand party, Louis, angry at the grandiose display of wealth, decided on moving against Fouquet. After arranging his arrest, Louis had him charged with various complicated crimes amounting essentially to financial chicanery, or more precisely, malversation, or corruption of office. It was a sensational trial, and with Fouquet’s many connections and allies, he managed to avoid a death sentence. Evidence turned up papers that came to the king’s attention, revealing letters from great ladies that Fouquet had seduced and accounts of the many men who were indebted to Fouquet’s generosity. The fact of the matter was that so long as Fouquet was alive, he posed a threat to the crown, so Louis had him shunted off to perpetual exile and received regular reports about anything his jailer might discover of his secrets.

Portrait of Nicolas Fouquet, via Wikimedia Commons

Clearly then, the valet Eustache Dauger may have been a supremely unlucky commoner. Having served one master that had dangerous secrets, he was then, while in prison, made to serve another master who held great secrets. And therefore he could never be allowed to leave. But this is strange logic, when one breaks it down, for the count de Lauzun surely also had opportunity to learn both the secrets of Fouquet as well as whatever secrets Dauger held, having excavated a passage between his cell and Fouquet’s and essentially had a shared chamber with them for years. Yet he was allowed to return to society. And even accepting this narrative, we still have no good explanation for why his face had to be obscured, unless it be a non-explanation, such as Louvois was being overly cautious by ordering that precautions should be taken to ensure that no one lay eyes on him, or that, in saying none should see him, Louvois actually had only meant that he should not be permitted to signal to others or have visitors and Saint-Mars had merely misconstrued the instructions to mean his face could not be seen. This is the crux of the mystery, I think: the mask and its true purpose. And this is what has led to the wildest speculation and the most outlandish theories. For example, novelist Marcel Pagnol, in the 1960s, combined the old myth about Louis XIV’s twin brother with Andrew Lang’s thesis to claim that the valet Martin involved in the plot against Louis was actually James de la Cloche, and rather than being an illegitimate son of Charles the II as many believed, he was Louis’s twin. Thus the fiction lived on.

And in a remarkable connection to our last two episodes, there is the titillating theory that Fouquet’s secret was the same as Bérenger Saunière’s secret. After all, there is an argument to be made that Fouquet’s life had been saved by the Catholic agents of a secret society, the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, or Company of the Blessed Sacrament, with which he had been involved. Perhaps they, like the supposed Priory of Sion, served as custodians of the Rennes-le-Château secret. And how would Fouquet have become an initiate? Well, he once received a letter from his brother, who had spoken to the painter Nicolas Poussin. An odd passage of the letter cryptically states:

He and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail — things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will ever discover in the centuries to come. And what is more, these are things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their equal.

And so we return to the spiraling conspiracy theory of Rennes-le-Château, which has led some addle-pated mystics to conclude that, directed by Poussin’s painting, the secret Bérenger Saunière really found there was alchemical in nature, the Philosopher’s Stone, which of course could make one rich but could also make one immortal. Then Fouquet’s secret was rather more a mystical one as well, and perhaps, after all, he did not die when the records state he did, but rather lived on, eternally young, a fact that had to be hidden by a velvet mask, for Fouquet would indeed have been recognizable and the fact that he hadn’t aged would certainly cause a sensation…. But such musings should be taken for what they are: fantasy. Remember that the masked prisoner was described as old when he arrived at the Bastille, and he died within a few years. So all we are left with, after all, are some possible suspects based on circumstantial evidence… sometimes less than that: mere coincidence! In truth, it appears that only a handful of men in 17th century France knew the identity and story of the masked prisoner, and they appear to have taken the knowledge with them to their graves. Therefore, that flimsy mask of velvet may as well have been an iron lockbox, concealing forever the answer to a riddle that has enthralled the world ever since.

An anonymous 1789 print depicting The Man in the Iron Mask, via Wikimedia Commons

Works Cited

Martin, Ronald. “On the Trail of the Iron Mask: The State of the Question.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, vol. 19, 1992, pp. 89-98. Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015054071587;view=1up;seq=107.

Blind Spot: The Secret of Rennes-le-Château and Abbé Saunière’s Riches

François-Bérenger Saunière a staunch anti-Republican from a family of monarchists, received his appointment to the parish at Rennes-le-Château on June 1st, 1885, and within a couple years, he had begun to work on renovating the old tumbledown church, starting with its altar, which is said to have rested on Visigothic stone pillars, one of which was hollow and contained the notorious cipher parchments, according to Plantard’s hoax. But it does appear that Saunière had taken to exploring the grounds of his church and that he had indeed discovered at least some artifacts of interest, such as the ancient carved stone depicting a soldier and child on horseback that some have taken as proof for the survival of the Merovingian line, another thread exploited by Plantard in his masterful hoax. By 1897, we begin to see signs of Saunière’s penury having unaccountably abated, as he began to spend money on decorating his church, with statuary and other artwork that many would eventually puzzle over. In 1899, his mysterious influx of money could not be denied, for he bought land surrounding the church—all in his housekeeper’s name, Marie Dénarnaud—and began to build an ostentatious estate, a grand tower, a fine promenade, and even greenhouses for the growing of oranges. He died of a heart attack in 1917, and today, thanks to the bestsellers of Henry Lincoln and Dan Brown, the mystery of his sudden wealth endures, drawing far more visitors to his parish today than it ever received during his own life. But is there a genuine mystery here? Is this a story of hidden treasure or conspiratorial intrigue or revelatory discoveries?

Many in the past and even today scrutinize the chapel’s decorations for clues as to the nature of Saunière’s secret, believing them unusual and therefore suspecting that the parish priest had been sending coded messages through them. Henry Lincoln and those who persist in giving weight to his theories see much in them. The church’s dedication to Mary Magdalene, for example, is seen as evidence of Lincoln’s grail theories, but really the Magdelene is an important figure from the Gospels, a beloved disciple, so is there any real difference here than if the church had been dedicated to any other disciple? As I’ve already talked about extensively, people tend to see what they want to see: with little effort, statues of Joseph and Mary cradling the Christ Child become, in the eye of the credulous beholder, statues of Jesus and the Magdalene holding their child; and the landscape in the back of a painting of Mary Magdalene can be construed, with some imagination, as corresponding to imagery in a painting by Teniers, taking one down that old hoax path once again; and statues of different saints in the church’s nave can be viewed as being placed in such a way that the first letters of their names spell out the word graal, or grail, though you have to go looking for the L elsewhere in the church, among the bas-reliefs rather than statues in niches. And not only do some read into the artworks too deeply, looking for what they want to see, but also they misread them. Many consider the inscription over the chapel’s entrance to be unusual, Terribilis Est Locus, translated as “This place is terrible,” but a better translation may be “This place is awesome,” for it appears to be taken from Genesis, chapter 28, when Jacob, realizing God was in a certain place, declared, “How dreadful is this place!” Therefore, taken in this way, it’s actually quite a natural inscription for a church, where the awe-inspiring presence of God is mean to be felt and feared. One statue in particular at Rennes-le-Château especially troubles and mystifies: a devilish depiction of the demon Asmodeus kneeling beneath a baptismal font greets you as you enter. Some take this as a confirmation of the secrets of the church, for Asmodeus is a guardian of secrets and, more specifically, of the treasure of Solomon’s Temple. But a simpler explanation is that Saunière saw it as representing the Republicanism he detested. In an anti-Republican sermon he gave, his sentiments are clear: “The Republicans, now there’s the devil to be conquered and who needs to bend its knee under the weight of Religion and baptisms.”

The statue of Asmodeus at Rennes-le-Château, via Blogodisea

If the church and its decorations are not the cryptic clues that many take them for—and why would they be? If Saunière had a secret, why would he be coyly broadcasting it with such hints?—then we must turn to logic and reason out how he may have found himself so suddenly in money. The implication of Henry Lincoln’s theories, in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, is that, rather than stumbling across a genuine treasure, Saunière discovered a secret that earned him money. By Lincoln’s reckoning, it was a secret about Christ that would shake the church to its foundations, and therefore Saunière must have blackmailed the Vatican for the money he came into. But if one looks at Saunière’s life, there are problems with this theory even above and beyond all the issues I reviewed in the last episode. In 1908, Bishop de Beauséjour, a bureaucrat, took an interest in Saunière and his unaccountable wealth and began to investigate him. By 1915, he had stripped Saunière of his title under accusations of trafficking in masses. This certainly doesn’t sound like a church that had been brought to heel by the dangerous secrets Saunière held.

So if the money did not come from a mysterious secret with which Saunière blackmailed the church… must it have come from treasure? Henry Lincoln and others have been led to believe that it was a Templar treasure. The Templars, of course, had amassed great fortune and perhaps many priceless relics, whether it be during their mysterious years excavating the tunnels beneath the Temple Mount, throughout their many conquests during the Crusades, or simply as the guardians of the wealth of others. This was, after all, the likeliest reason for their suppression: the seizure and redistribution of their wealth. The connection to Rennes-le-Château appeared to be through the family of Bertrand de Blanchefort, onetime Grandmaster of the order. There is a Château de Blanchefort in the area, and there had been some nobility with the title of Blanchefort that featured in the region’s history: for example, the tombstone of a Marchioness of Blanchefort took center stage in the Plantard hoax, a forged etching of it being used as the key to solve the apocryphal Saunière ciphers. And this with the fact that some of the names on the list of Priory of Sion leaders had been associated with the Templars and the notion that nearby Château de Bezu had been a Templar stronghold after their suppression led Henry Lincoln to believe Saunière had found a Templar treasure. However, more legitimate scholarship tells us that Lincoln yet again made an unsupported leap in linking Bertrand de Blanchefort to Château de Blanchefort and the Marchioness of Blanchefort supposedly buried at Rennes-le-Château, as it appears the only genuine connection between them is the name. And furthermore, his assertion that Château de Bezu was a Templar stronghold appears to be just as unfounded.  

But even dismissing the Templar connection, there are still likely narratives supporting the presence of a treasure. When Catholic Crusaders came through the region in the 13th century to stamp out the gnostic Cathar heretics, it was said that some escaped with the so-called “treasures of their faith,” whatever those were. Of course, that theory resembles the Templar theory in its reliance on speculation, so let us turn to a theory that requires fewer suppositions. We know that Saunière explored the grounds of his church extensively, digging beneath and even disturbing some of the tombs in the cemetery. Could he have found gold, as the legend so often says? Or if not gold, perhaps some precious relic that he sold to the church through some intermediary? In excavating beneath his church, he lifted a flagstone that was in reality a valuable artifact—the carving of the soldier with the child on horseback that Lincoln and others have made much of, which some historians suggest is only a depiction of a Carolingian boar hunt—and it is frequently said that beneath this, he found some old coins and a chalice that he gave to his friend, another priest in a nearby parish, Amélie-les-Bains. The chalice remains there today… but it appears to be a 19th century item that merely mimics the medieval style, so perhaps it was just something Saunière picked up for him in a gift shop. Still, could it be that this was the moment of his discovery? He is said to have told the workers helping him that the coins were medallions of little value and to have sent them home. Perhaps seeing this small bit of treasure, he immediately dispatched them so he could investigate himself, and perhaps he went on to discover more than one cache of coins. As previously discussed, the region had been a stronghold of the Visigoths, who had sacked Rome. Whether or not they carried off the treasures of King Solomon that Romans had earlier taken from the Holy Land, surely they carried off some treasure. This remains, at least it seems to me, a distinct possibility.

The Knights Stone artifact, via Rennes-le-Château Research and Resource

But there is one last treasure theory that we should consider, and this one may indeed lead us to a better understanding of the entire legend. This was the original treasure legend, offered when in 1956 one Noël Corbu first shared the mystery of Abbé Saunière’s wealth to a wider audience in an interview with the newspaper, La Dépêche du Midi (Putnam and Wood 19). Corbu had heard the story of Saunière’s mysterious wealth from Marie Dénarnaud, Saunière’s housekeeper and sole heir. According to Corbu, Dénarnaud had confided to him that Saunière had discovered the treasure of Louis VIII’s wife, Blanche de Castile, an amount of about 18 million francs that was still hidden away somewhere in Rennes-le-Château. The problem is that there is no evidence that any such treasure ever belonged to this this historical figure, let alone that it would have been secreted away in this little mountain village. In truth, Noël Corbu, a businessman, had purchased the lavish estate that Saunière had left behind, Villa Bethania, and sought to make of it a hotel. But Rennes-le-Château was such an isolated place, he didn’t know how he could drum up enough guests to turn a profit. To him, then, the local legend about the priest and his mysterious wealth was a godsend. He cooked up a completely fabricated hidden treasure story, disseminated it through the newspapers, and watched with satisfaction as reservations began to pour in.

Thus even at its very beginnings, the legend of treasure at Rennes-le-Château is steeped in hoax and false history. While the notion that Saunière found some Visigothic artifacts of value beneath his church is certainly plausible, the absolute swamp of fabrication and fantasy that surrounds every part of this mystery makes it difficult to give any theory much credence. So perhaps, then, we should apply the rule of Occam’s Razor to cut through the baloney. What is the simplest and least complicated explanation for his wealth? Well, Saunière was a charming man and does appear to have accepted gifts from wealthy women. Moreover, during the last decade of his life, as Bishop de Beauséjour investigated him, charges of trafficking in masses led to the loss of his title. It appears that Saunière was collecting payment for prayers on a large scale. Bishop de Beauséjour found advertisements that Saunière had placed in Catholic magazines all over France and concluded that he could not possibly have said all the masses for which he had accepted payment. So there you have it; evidence of the source of his wealth, and ill-gotten at that. But could he have possibly amassed great riches this way? In truth, Saunière might not have been so rich as he seemed. Judging from the money he spent does not necessarily give an accurate representation of the money he had, for at the time of his death, as his ecclesiastical trial continued, Saunière was deeply in debt (Putnam and Wood 18).

In the end, like many true historical mysteries, it really depends on what you want to believe. If you have the heart of an adventurer, you may ignore the evidence that suggests the priest was just a charlatan in favor of the idea that there is gold in those hills. And if you’re of a skeptical mind, you dismiss it as fanciful garbage. As we have seen so many times, it is in these intersections of fact and myth, in these areas where faith conflicts with reason, that historical blind spots endure.

Works Cited

Putnam, Bill and John Edwin Wood. "Unravelling the Da Vinci Code." History Today, vol. 55, no. 1, Jan. 2005, pp. 18-20. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=15581603&site=ehost-live.

The Priory of Sion and the Quest for the Holy Grail, or Lincoln's Links and Plantard's Plans

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Damsel of the Sanct Grael, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1969, while on holiday in rural France, Henry Lincoln, an actor and writer for British television who had recently penned some scripts for Doctor Who, happened to read a fascinating little memoir in French, half travel guide and half buried treasure mystery, called in translation The Gold of Rennes, or The Cursed Treasure of  Rennes-le-Château, by Gérard de Sède. Thus was he initiated into a mystery that had long fascinated many in France, though few knew of it beyond that country’s borders.

The mystery of Rennes-le-Château, a sleepy little hilltop town in the Languedoc region of southern France between the Cevennes and Pyrenees Mountains, revolves around a priest named Bérenger Saunière, who began in 1885 to serve as the priest of the church at Rennes-le-Château, which was dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Saunière was poor, as was his church, which was in need of repair, but somehow, within twenty years, he managed to come into great wealth and rebuilt the church as well as his own estate in a lavish manner. The mystery, then, was and still remains the source of Bérenger Saunière’s fortune, which has never been satisfactorily explained and thus has spawned many a legend. According to Gérard de Sède’s book, Saunière discovered four parchments in a hollow pillar while restoring his church. Two of these were genealogies, and the other two were ciphers. Saunière took the parchments to Paris, where he had them deciphered and then promptly bought some reproductions of certain paintings from the Louvre, paintings that were somehow important to the secret he possessed: among them The Shepherds of Arcadia by Nicholas Poussin as well as a painting by David Teniers, the Younger, featuring St. Anthony. These elements of the mystery would be much dwelt upon by Henry Lincoln, but what he found truly tantalizing about Gérard de Sède’s book was that the author claimed to have somehow come into possession of Saunière’s parchment ciphers and even reproduced them, and Lincoln managed quite easily to crack the simplest of them, which after its decipherment reads: “To King Dagobert II and to Sion belongs this treasure, and he is dead there.” This corresponded well with the coy intimations de Sède makes throughout his work, involving the Merovingian kings of ancient France, a rather mysterious dynasty claiming descent from ancient Troy, priest-kings with long hair said to be divinely chosen to rule the Franks. Establishing a holy empire in partnership with the Roman Catholic Church, the Merovingian King Clovis on the church’s behalf suppressed the heretical Visigoths who had previously sacked Rome and perhaps carried off the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem, driving them back to their strongholds in the Razés, the region where today stands Rennes-le-Château. According to the narrative de Sède pushed somewhat coquettishly, when the Merovingian King Dagobert II was assassinated, his son Sigisbert IV survived, smuggled to the Languedoc where he would assume a false identity as the Count of Rhedae, called Plantard, a part of the story supposedly supported by a relief sculpture at Rennes-le-Château of a soldier carrying a child on horseback. Thus the decoded cipher—a treasure, the Visigoth booty from Rome, belonging to King Dagobert II—and the further suggestions of dynastic intrigue and the survival of the Merovingian line, along with the unanswered questions—what was the significance of this “Sion” to whom the treasure also belonged? and what could it mean that “he is dead there” when Dagobert II was known to be buried elsewhere?—were enough to draw Henry Lincoln headlong into the rabbit hole.

The small parchment easily decoded by Lincoln, via Rennes-le-Château Research and Resource

Lincoln managed to convince the BBC to produce a series of documentaries on the mystery for the television program Chronicle. As he began to write the first of these programs, The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem (1972), he contacted Gérard de Sède hoping to examine his research materials, including photographs of the parchments to which he had claimed to have access. De Sède obliged, and Lincoln began to suspect the author of harboring some secret knowledge about which he was less than forthcoming. When Lincoln asked why he had not published the solution to the simple cipher in his book, de Sède answered, “We thought it might interest someone like you to find it for yourself.” Just who the other half of this “we” was remained a mystery, although Lincoln had his first clue when he noticed the name Plantard stamped on the back of certain items among de Sède’s materials. Subsequently, as Lincoln and his team sought further documentation from de Sède and presumably from his secret collaborators, they were directed to the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, where catalogued in a specific place they found a treasure trove of historical documents pertinent to the mystery, collected under the melodramatic title, the Secret Dossier. In the dossier was one work called The Merovingian Treasure at Rennes-le-Château by one Antoine the Hermit, detailing much of the legend of Bérenger Saunière as Gérard de Sède had it. Then there was Engraved Stones of the Languedoc by Joseph Cortauly, which included drawings of tombstones from the Rennes-le-Château churchyard, a work that would prove necessary to decode the larger of the two parchments said to have been found in the pillar by Saunière. And finally, there were the works of Henri Lobineau, one a Merovingian genealogy that traced the royal line all the way to an extant family by the familiar name of Plantard, and specifically to one Pierre Plantard. The other was Lobineau’s “Secret Files,” newspaper cuttings hinting at people being murdered over the secret at Rennes-le-Château, further genealogies and coats of arms, and official looking documents. On the first page of this work appeared a dedication, “To Monsignor the Count of Rhedae, Duke of Razès, the legitimate descendant of Clovis I, King of France, most serene child of the ‘King and Saint’ Dagobert II.”

The cover page of Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau, via Just Some Info

One drawing of a tombstone in Engraved Stones of the Languedoc in particular caught Lincoln’s eye as being unusual in that it seemed composed of both Latin and Greek letters, which upon closer examination appeared to say “Et In Arcadia Ego,” or “Even in Arcadia, I Am There,” a phrase or theme treated by numerous artists having to do with the idea that even in a paradise, death is present—a natural enough inscription for a tombstone. But Lincoln saw a link to Nicolas Poussin, whose painting Et In Arcadia Ego, sometimes called The Shepherds of Arcadia, was already part of the Bérenger Saunière legend, being one of the paintings he bought reproductions of after having the parchments decoded. And further adding to the mystique of the drawing was the fact that the tombstone the drawing depicted had supposedly been chiseled away by Saunière, as though he were trying to destroy an important clue. Luckily for Lincoln and his partners, the inscription had been rendered, along with the inscription of a headstone that was now entirely missing, and preserved for them in the Secret Dossier. The importance of these tombstones was confirmed when, during the filming of his first documentary, Gérard de Sède contacted him and gave him the solution to the  more complex cipher of the two parchments said to have been discovered by Saunière in the pillar. It turned out that the text of the headstone had been the key. The parchment code itself, embedded in the Latin text of a passage from the Gospel of John, was far more complicated than the first code, which even Lincoln described as being as simple as something a schoolboy might have created. This greater parchment code’s decipherment was therefore surpassingly, almost comically complicated. I’ll spare you the tedious details of this convoluted process. Decoded, it read: shepherdess no temptation poussin teniers hold the key peace 681 by the cross and this horse of God I destroy this demon guardian at midday blue apples.

The alleged tombstones said to be the key to the greater parchment cipher, via Rhedesium.

One can only imagine the exhilaration felt by Lincoln, with all signs pointing to him being on the trail of a genuine solution to the mystery. Most of the decoded message seemed meaningless, and even today its meaning remains much debated, but further mention of Poussin and Teniers, the two painters whose works it was said Saunière bought reproductions of after solving the cipher himself, sent Lincoln on a quest to find the hidden meaning in their works. He determined that the phrase “shepherdess no temptation” referred to Teniers’s one painting of St. Anthony that was NOT focused on his temptation, St. Anthony and St. Paul in the Desert, in which can be seen a shepherdess in the background. Frustrated at the lack of significant seeming clues in this painting, though, he instead focused on Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia, which did feature a shepherdess, but more importantly featured the phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego” that had been on the tombstone that served as the key to the parchment code. The painting features a group of shepherds pointing at a tomb where the phrase is inscribed, and according to most art historians, beyond the significance of the phrase as symbolic of death’s ubiquity, the work depicts the legendary invention of painting as one of the shepherds can either be seen as tracing the words or tracing his own shadow with his finger, the act that led to the conception of painting. Lincoln, however, believed there was far more to the painting, and yet again, he was led to believe by Gérard de Sède, who sent him a photograph of and directions to an actual stone landmark in the Languedoc that resembled the tomb in the painting. After tracking down this landmark, Lincoln came to believe that the landscape featured in the painting behind the tomb was in reality a depiction of the view behind this stone box in the neighborhood of Rennes-le-Château, despite historians’ assertions that Poussin had never visited the region. Was the resemblance convincing, or was Lincoln seeing what he wanted to see? Well, Lincoln certainly seems to suffer from confirmation bias. In a textbook example of apophenia, the perception of connections between unrelated things and meaning in the meaningless—another perfect example of which we just explored in our look at the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe—he began to assert there were unusual and symbolically significant geometrical patterns in the painting. While it is true that Poussin’s work is often governed by the artistic and geometrical principle of the golden ratio, as are the works of many painters of his period, Lincoln believed that geometrical patterns matching others that he perceived in the coded parchments were present, eventually leading him to believe that, when extended beyond the borders of the painting, they represented a pentacle, or pentagram, and that this perfect geometrical design could be drawn on a map of the Languedoc region simply by connecting various landmarks. None of this brought him tangibly closer to any solution to the riddles he had begun seeing everywhere, but it did send him in new directions, searching for occult and religious angles on the mystery.

Poussin's The Shepherds of Arcadia, with a photo of the stone tomb near Arques that Lincoln believed was depicted in it and a diagram of the geometric patterns he believes are present in the painting. 

Among the secret files of Henri Lobineau in the Bibliotèque Nationale was a table purporting to be a list of the leaders of an organization and the years during which they served. The organization was called the Priory of Sion, or the Order of the True Rose-Cross, and it served as the explanation of many cryptic mentions of the word Sion and the initials P and S in the documents Lincoln had been studying. The names of its grand masters or “helmsmen” included a veritable who’s who of storied alchemists and famous artists: Nicolas Flamel, Leonardo Da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy, and Jean Cocteau. Lincoln himself admits this Dramatis Personae is too fanciful to be believed, but instead of doubting it, he insists on keeping an open mind and investigating the Priory’s existence further. And indeed, he did find a document from the 12th century showing the existence of an organization with a similar name, the Order of Sion. Then he made something of a precipitous leap in reasoning. This sounded like a secret society, and many secret societies were rumored to have been associated with the Knights Templar, and some of the names on the list were said to have been Templars. Therefore, the Priory of Sion was the secret society that originated the Templars, and the lost treasure of the Templars may actually be the treasure secreted somewhere around Rennes-le-Château, as twelve Templars were said to have escaped their order’s destruction and taken refuge in nearby Château de Bézu. Now the unsupported connections he makes here are typical of Lincoln and his work; he makes an interesting and seemingly feasible speculation, but then without seeking confirmation or evidence, he then takes the premise as a given and uses it as a stepping stone to reach his next conclusion. For example, at one point in his documentaries, he makes reference to a memorial cross at Rennes-le-Château and its  inscription of “Christus A.O.M.P.S. Defendit,” stating categorically that it can only mean “Christus Antiquus Ordo Mysticusque Prioratus Sionis Defendit, or “Christ defends the ancient mystical order of the Priory of Sion.” In point of fact, however, this inscription is actually a relatively common one, meaning “Christus Ab Omni Malo Plebem Suam Defendat” or “Christ defends his people against every evil.” This pretty much sums up the historical rigor of Henry Lincoln’s work, so it’s no surprise that he ended up tapping into the common conspiracy view of history, in which there is a long tradition of belief that the Templars persisted after their suppression, hiding among other secret societies like the Freemasons. It all makes for a wild and sprawling tale, to be certain, and it expands the lore of Rennes-le-Château to epic proportions… but it’s not historical research so much as it is unfettered conjecture.

By the third documentary in his series, Shadow of the Templars (1979), after exhausting nearly all the avenues of inquiry he had taken from the Secret Dossier and concluding that the Priory of Sion existed even to present day and was dedicated to preserving the Merovingian dynasty and restoring it to power, Lincoln interviewed the mysterious man behind some of Gérard de Sède’s sources, Pierre Plantard, who appeared to be a member of the Priory and the true descendant of the Merovingian line. Plantard was coy but revealing in his interview, indicating that the Priory of Sion did exist, and confirming that it existed to protect and promote the Merovingian bloodline as the true rulers of France. Moreover, he hinted playfully that the true treasure of Rennes-le-Château may not have been gold but rather this powerful secret, knowledge of which earned Saunière a fortune in hush money: that pure-blooded Merovingians still survived, prepared to revive their claim to a throne that no longer existed. The notion of the real treasure being a secret jibed well with Lincoln’s idea that the surviving Templars had carried the treasure to the Languedoc after their escape, for a few men could not possibly have carried vast stores of gold but could easily carry a secret. So Lincoln took this notion and ran with it. The problem was that he rightly didn’t believe the secret Plantard offered was really that explosive. So what if the Merovingians had survived? They were one dynasty among many, none of which would be granted any power in modern-day democratic France regardless of how dramatically they revealed themselves. Therefore, there had to be some deeper secret to the bloodline of the Merovingians, he reasoned, something warranting their continuous preservation through the centuries by a powerful secret society. What he settled on would serve as the basis of his 1982 bestseller, Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov's Appearance of Jesus Christ to Maria Magdalena, a depiction of Christ telling the Magdalene not to touch him after his resurrection, via Wikimedia Commons

The theory advanced by Henry Lincoln and his co-authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh completely turned the story of the life of Jesus Christ and the Easter story on its head. They hypothesized that the appellation “Christ” actually indicated that Jesus was a literal king of the house of David, making the sign King of the Jews atop the cross rather more a literal designation than a mockery of him. And they further suggested that Mary Magdalene, his “beloved disciple,” who tradition tells us was a reformed prostitute, was actually his wife and mother of his children. Their theory goes on to propose that his crucifixion was a sham, and thus his resurrection was just a matter of him revealing himself after his death had been faked. As they reimagined things, Mary Magdalene, either alone or with Jesus, took the offspring of Christ to ancient Gaul, before it became France, where she might find refuge with the Jews already in exile there. This accorded well with Mary Magadelene’s place in the Grail Romances as the figure who brought the Holy Grail to Europe, and indeed rewrote the whole idea of what the Holy Grail, the cup that caught the blood of Christ, actually was, suggesting that the original word in the earliest iterations of the tale, “sangraal,” had been erroneously divided into “san graal,” or holy grail, when it should have been divided as “sang raal,” or blood royal. Thus Mary Magdalene had smuggled the bloodline of Jesus into ancient France, where his descendants established themselves as the holy long-haired priest-kings of the Merovingian dynasty, a paradigm shifting secret guarded ever since the Middle Ages by the Priory of Sion and the Templars and discovered by Bérenger Saunière at Rennes-le-Château, where the church had been dedicated to Mary Magdalene.

Now even disregarding the fact that no concrete evidence is offered to support this alternative reading of biblical and European history, there are both logical and historical objections to the wild assertions it relies on. For example, there is no historical consensus on the identity of Mary Magdalene. Lincoln et al. would have you believe that she was the victim of a smear campaign to rewrite her character as a fallen woman when actually she was Jesus’s longsuffering wife, again an assertion with little support. Meanwhile other historians, namely Robert Sheaffer, have suggested that there never was a Mary Magdalene. Citing Roman philosopher Celsus’s accusations that Jesus had propagated the myth of his immaculate conception to cover for the fact that his mother, Mary, had been impregnated by a Roman soldier and thus driven away by her carpenter husband as an adulteress to bear her child in shame, he raises the possibility that the name Mary Magdalene was a corruption of Miriam m’qadella, referring to Mary by her occupation as a dresser of women’s hair, making the accusations of Mary Magdalene’s harlotry rather more a condemnation of Mother Mary’s sexual dalliances. And true historians could go on refuting almost every element of Lincoln’s mammoth pseudo-history, pointing out such simple omissions as the fact that no signs of the activities of the Priory of Sion or their grand masters’ involvement in it has ever been turned up, even though many of them were remarkably famous figures, their lives studied and written about extensively. Or the facts that Bérenger Saunière likely never found any mysterious parchments, as the recess in the hollow pillar preserved at Rennes-le-Château was not large enough to hold them, and that he could not have bought reproductions of a Poussin or any other paintings from the Louvre, which didn’t sell such things at the time. The thing is, historians don’t need to do this, because even before Henry Lincoln ever read about the mystery and began his decades long freefall down its rabbit hole, it had been revealed to be a hoax.

A cheeky-looking Pierre Plantard, via La Roche Aux Loups

As it turns out, Gérard de Sède hadn’t written his influential book so much as edited and punched up a manuscript by the supposedly Merovingian pretender Pierre Plantard. And in 1967, during a dispute over the royalties for de Sède’s book, Plantard revealed that the parchments he’d provided had been forgeries, their ciphers designed by his partner Philippe de Chérisey. The two of them had become intrigued by the mystery of Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château and had dreamed up a scheme that today might be called an alternate reality game. Indeed, Plantard had forged all of the documents in the so-called Secret Dossier and planted them in the Bibliotèque Nationale, where there is no official record of the documents’ registration. Why de Sède continued to play along with Plantard’s game while feeding the clues to Lincoln, I don’t really understand, unless at some point, once Plantard had learned of this new potential promulgator of his lies, he had begun writing directly to Lincoln as Gérard de Sède. It would not be a stretch considering his history of composing forgeries under pseudonyms.

The dubious character of Pierre Plantard is plain to see. At 17 years old, in 1937, Plantard became involved in right-wing politics, attempting to form an anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic organization whose goal was to purify France in response to the rise of a socialist and Jewish prime minister, Léon Blum. His endeavors resulted in the formation of the group Alpha Galates, some of the publications of which indicate his interest in the occult, especially in the ideas of Paul Le Cour, who promoted a spiritual tradition supposedly originating in Atlantis, which looked forward to a coming Age of Aquarius. Some symbols from Le Cour’s work, notably the octopus, would later appear in some drawings among Plantard’s forgeries. Demonstrating his anti-Semitism, in 1940, Plantard wrote to the head of the Nazi puppet regime at Vichy to warn of Jewish-Masonic conspiracies, and in the 1950s, he served a couple of prison terms totaling 18 months for misappropriation of property and corrupting minors. After the longer of his prison terms, in 1956, again still much influenced by the writings of Le Cour, he registered a new organization called the Priory of Sion with statutes very similar to those of Alpha Galates. It was sometime after this that he and his friend the artist Philippe de Chérisey became enamored with the mystery of  Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château, visited the village and eventually forged and planted false documents in the Bibliotèque Nationale intended to document and therefore legitimize Pierre Plantard’s little right-wing society, the Priory of Sion, as well as his descent from the Merovingian kings and claim as the rightful ruler of France, all of which has been proven to be meticulously orchestrated hogwash. It appears to be nothing but an ironic twist that Henry Lincoln veered off the trail Plantard had prepared for him and asserted that Plantard was actually of the bloodline of Christ, suggesting this anti-Semite was actually a Jew.

So the matter appeared to have been settled. It was all a hoax. Perhaps the greatest modern hoax since Leo Taxil’s publications about devil-worshipping Palladian Freemasons, but a hoax nonetheless. Yet as we have seen before, in the anti-Semitic myths of the blood libel and the Protocols of Zion, as well as in such articles of religious faith as the Shroud of Turin, even when historical and scientific evidence demonstrate the falseness of something, that won’t necessarily dissuade true believers. And just so, there remain today many treasure hunters skulking about Rennes-le-Château as well as pseudo-historians who believe Christ himself might be buried somewhere near Bérenger Saunière’s church. And most still rely on Lincoln’s geometry in Poussin’s paintings and other clues originating from Plantard’s forged documents, rationalizing that though he may have faked them all, perhaps he was an initiate with access to secret truth after all. But one can doubt or believe anything based on such logic. As Umberto Eco puts it in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum, which many believe was inspired at least in part by Henry Lincoln’s conspiracy addled views of history, “…the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

The Marian Apparition of Guadalupe and Her Fantastical Portrait

Legends of Marian Apparitions, or the earthly visitations of Mary, mother of Christ, stretch all the way back to the 1st century, CE, and have always been associated with the Spanish-speaking world. According to Catholic lore, in 40 CE, St. James was on a mission in Spain, and Mary appeared to him atop a stone pillar, carried by angels and holding a statue of herself and the Christ child. This was while Mary was still alive! She encouraged James in his ministry and requested that he build her a chapel on the spot, which he did, and today there stands on that spot a great basilica, Nuestra Senora del Pilar, or Our Lady of the Pillar. This tradition of Marian apparitions appearing and asking that a church be built would continue through the ages, and the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which also begins in the Old World, in Spain, would have many similarities to this original legend. The original image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have been a statue carved by St. Luke himself, one of many so-called Black Madonnas, or statues of Mary and the Christ child depicting them with dark skin. According to the legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe, this statue of St. Luke’s was venerated by Pope Gregory around the end of the 6th and beginning of the 7th century, and believing the statue had miraculously helped Rome survive famine and rampant disease, Pope Gregory gave it to his special friend, Leander, Archbishop of Seville. When Seville fell to the moors in 712, some priests took the statue to Extremadura and buried it near the Guadalupe River, where it was stayed for over 600 years. The legend has it that in 1325 CE, Mary appeared to a shepherd and told him to dig in his field, where he found the statue. The Spanish Virgin of Guadalupe endures to this day at the Guadalupe Monastery in Extremadura, the simple statue now clothed in ornate gold vestments that are quite a sight to see.

About 160 years later, a boy would be born in the Extremadura region of Spain, and he would grow up hearing the story of this Marian apparition and venerating this Black Madonna. His name was Hernán Cortés, and as a man, he would become a Conquistador, a conqueror of foreign lands for the Spanish Empire, best known for his conquest of the Aztecs in what is today Mexico. After the long siege of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, in 1521 Cortés renamed it Mexico City and began to remake it as a European city, destroying the pagan temples of the Aztecs and raising other buildings in their place. Believing that the conversion of the natives to Catholicism was essential to the success of their colonial venture, he sent for Dominican and Franciscan friars who arrived in 1524 and began the difficult task of proselytizing the resistant indigenous population.

Portrait of Hernán Cortés, via Wikimedia Commons

It was in this context that the most influential story of a Marian apparition in history emerged and aided in the conversion of great multitudes to the Catholic faith. This story comes to us from a document believed by many to have been composed in the Nahuatl language by a native man who born in the midst of the Spanish conquest of his people and thereafter educated by the Franciscan friars Cortés had brought to evangelize the natives: Don Antonio Valeriano. This document, the Nican Mopohua, was widely printed in tracts in the mid-17th century, but there is one version in the New York Public Library’s collection believed by many to date much earlier, and to perhaps even be in Valeriano’s own hand. The Nican Mopohua, which loosely translates to “here it is told,” relates the story of one Juan Diego, a simple farmer who in 1531, a decade after the fall of Tenochtitlán, passed a hill called Tepeyac that was shaped like a nose protruding from a face. Drawn by the beautiful strains of a song to its summit, he there encountered a luminous figure around whom the rocks and foliage of the hill appeared transfigured with preternaturally brilliant color like precious stones. She introduced herself to Juan Diego as “the perfect, ever-virgin, holy Mary, mother of the one great god of truth who gives us life, the inventor and creator of people, the owner and lord…of the earth” and requested that her sacred house be built upon the hill Tepeyac. On this errand, Juan Diego sought the audience of the Archbishop of Mexico City, Juan de Zumárraga, who after hearing the story dismissed the farmer incredulously. Juan Diego then returned to the hill Tepeyac, and finding Mary still there, begged her to send someone else, but again she dispatched him with her message. This time when Juan Diego spoke with Zumárraga, the Archbishop asked for a sign.

Thereafter relating this request to the apparition of Mary, who seems to have stuck around quite patiently, she bade Juan Diego to return the next day for a sign. But Juan Diego’s uncle was gravely ill the next day, and Juan Diego could not go to the hill as he had to fetch a priest. However, as Juan Diego passed by the hill on a road, the Marian apparition actually came walking down the hill to him asking why he hadn’t come. When Juan Diego explained, she assured him that his uncle was well, and later he discovered that Mary had actually appeared to his uncle and healed him at the same time that she came to him on the road! After assuring him of his uncle’s health, she instructed him to climb the hill, gather the flowers he found there, and take them to the Archbishop. Now this was December, and the hill quite rocky, so it was inexplicable that Juan Diego found there an abundance of flowers the like of which he’d never seen before, all of preternaturally vivid color. Juan Diego pulled his cloak around in front of him and gathered many flowers in it. This cloak was called a tilma, and was made of ayate, or roughly-woven agave fiber. A practical garment, it was commonly used as a blanket to keep one warm when sleeping outdoors and also to carry items to and from market, as Juan Diego used it when he carried the flowers to Archbishop Zumárraga. Upon releasing the tilma’s burden, the Archbishop was surprised to see a pile of gorgeous Castilian roses, but this was not the true sign that Mary had given, for miraculously, where the flowers had come into contact with the cloth, an image of the Virgin Mary had been formed. There she stood, cloaked, her hands pressed together as if in prayer, her head bowed, and her face, dark of skin, looking very much like a mestiza, the offspring of a Spaniard and an indigenous person.  Thereafter, the Ayate of Juan Diego with its image of Mary, became the central miracle of Latin America and the driving force behind the conversion of the native peoples to Catholicism. A church was indeed built on hill Tepeyac, and today the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe (a name that the Marian apparition apparently chose for herself, thus identifying her with the apparition of Extremadura) is the most visited pilgrimage site in the world, receiving as many as 20 million believers and tourists a year, many of whom approach on their knees. The famous tilma with its breathtaking image is there displayed for all to admire.

Juan Diego by Miguel Cabrera, via Wikimedia Commons

Among the many supernatural properties attributed to the Guadalupe tilma is that the material should not have survived so long. Agave fiber cloth is known to be more fragile than other cloth and usually does not age as well because parasites are known to more aggressively feed on such fabrics. For example, paintings known to have been made on ayate canvases are recorded to have not lasted 10 years, even under glass, and yet for its first 120 years, the Guadalupe tilma wasn’t even protected by glass. During this time, a great many candles were likely burned near it, exposing it to damaging smoke, and countless people touched it directly with their naked hands, yet not only has its fabric not deteriorated, but its color hasn’t even faded! And the tilma has survived more than just time. In 1791, while polishing its frame, a worker spilled nitric acid down the side of the image… and yet the colors do not even appear to have faded where the acid touched them, and some even believe the stain from this accident is inexplicably fading. Similarly, in 1921, a dissident laid a bouquet full of dynamite at the altar in front of the framed tilma, and when it detonated, the blast crumbled the marble steps at the altar, destroyed metal candle sticks, bent a big metal cross, and even reportedly shattered windows in nearby houses… and yet the image and the glass that protected it remained unscathed.

In the 1750s, an artist named Miguel Cabrera examined the tilma and painted copies of the image. It was his opinion that no artist in his right mind would have chosen this particular ayate as a canvas, as seams are traditionally hidden in painting canvases, but the tilma has a prominent seam right down the middle. Moreover, he believed that no human artist could reproduce that manifold techniques he saw at work in the image, which included the weaving of pigmented dust into the very fabric—a technique unfamiliar to him—and all on fabric that looked like it had received no imprimatur or preparation layer treating the fabric to better receive paint. Rather, the tilma’s weave is open and see through, and remarkably, the many knots and imperfections in the fabric have been perfectly used to create volume in the image, for example in Mary’s lips and nose. Many agree that this is a masterful artistic accomplishment bordering on uncanny, as the canvas and the image would have had to have been planned flawlessly to take advantage of these textures.

And the unusual claims don’t end there. The Guadalupe tilma, like the Turin shroud, has been the object of much study, resulting in much apparent mystery. In 1936, Nobel Prize winning chemist Richard Kuhn examined two colored fibers and said he couldn’t determine the origin of their pigments, claiming they weren’t animal, vegetable, or mineral. In 1946, a Dr. Tortolero of the Institute of Biology studied the image under a microscope and asserted that there was no indications of any brushstrokes. Then in the 1980s, Professors Jodie B. Smith and Philip Serna Callahan used infrared photography to analyze the image, claiming to confirm what many had already asserted: the fabric has received no preparation and there are no brushstrokes, as though it were created all at once, instantaneously. Considering the fact that details of the image can be seen even on the reverse side of the fabric, it would even appear that there is not more than one layer of pigment present. And so on, the attribution of sensationally complicated, essentially humanly impossible, design details continues. Some say constellations can be matched up with the star field on her cloak and other points in the painting, supposedly reproducing the constellations in their position at the time that Mary made her appearance. However, these constellations could not be matched until they were considered in reverse, as though seen not from earth but from beyond. Furthermore, mathematicians have claimed to find perfect geometrical shapes on the tilma, corresponding to the so-called golden ratio, and one claimed that he was able to decipher actual musical notes encoded into the image, resulting in so-called celestial music. And Peruvian engineer José Tonsmann, building on previous theories, claims to have discovered through digital image processing that images of figures, corresponding supposedly to Juan Diego and the Bishop Zumárraga, appear reflected in Mary’s eyes just as they would be in real human eyes.

The figures some see in Our Lady's eyes, with emphasis and color added, via Infallible Catholic

This cavalcade of supernatural claims does much to wear down one’s skepticism, but of course, there is good reason to consider the tilma’s origin story dubious and to hold all of these fantastical assertions suspect. First, the simple fact that Cortés and his Franciscans were actively seeking ways to encourage the conversion of the indigenous peoples and that the story that eventually emerged was strikingly similar and indeed directly connected to a Marian legend from Cortés’s home in the Extremadura region of Spain is suspicious in the extreme. There is still some controversy over the authorship of the Nican Mopohua, as well as debate over the embellishments and additions it may have seen through the years. In this context, the fact that the image appears to be that of a mestiza Mary might be seen as a purposeful manipulation on the part of ecclesiastical authorities to appeal to the native population of the newly established Mexico City, and to the mixed race generations to come. Moreover, a common effect of colonialism was something that has been called syncretism, when conquerors grafted their culture onto the existing culture. Some, for example, skeptic Brian Dunning, have pointed out that previous to Spanish conquest, Tepeyac Hill had been home to an Aztec temple to a virgin goddess called Tonantzin. Thus, when Cortés called for the destruction of Aztec temples and the raising of Catholic temples in their place, dedicating this site to a comparable figure might have made the pill a bit easier to swallow. And of course, Cortés would have thought of his own beloved Lady of Guadalupe.

Some, including Dunning, have even suggested that the farmer Juan Diego may have been a complete fabrication, as Archbishop Zumárraga, who wrote prolifically, did not leave a clear record of him or his miraculous tilma. In fact, there appears to be actual documentary evidence that the image was painted by a young native artist around 1555, as the following year, in sworn reports to the church authored by Franciscans who were concerned about the widespread worship of the image, which to some smacked of a reversion to paganism, they declared the image had been “painted yesteryear” by “the Indian painter Marcos,” referring to a known Aztec painter named Marcos Cipac de Aquinas, who had studied under Franciscans. In its omission of any mention of Juan Diego, this evidence indicates that even 25 years after the supposed apparition, the legend had yet to take its final shape. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church canonized Juan Diego as a saint in 2002, based in large part on the appearance of the Codex Escalada, a pictorial depiction of the Juan Diego legend rendered on deerskin and conveniently dated to indicate its historicity. As Dunning has pointed out, just the perfectly timed appearance of this artifact makes it entirely dubious.  

The Codex Escalada, via Wikimedia Commons

Okay, a believer might protest, but what about the strange properties of the image itself. Well, yes, there are many, but can you trust the sources that tout them? In point of fact, much like the study of the Shroud of Turin, many choose to ignore scientific analyses that don’t agree with their conclusions. For example, another noted skeptic, Joe Nickell, has written at length about studies that have indeed detected evidence of craftsmanship and artistry in the image. One, for example, actually did find that there are indications of layers of paint after all and of brushstrokes, as infrared photography has revealed previous versions of the hands in different positions, and it is apparent that pigment was applied more heavily to areas where the ayate canvas had imperfections in the texture of its weave. As for the scientists that claimed there had been no imprimatur and could find no earthly equivalent for the pigments used… well, other studies have found that there does appear to have been a primer applied to the canvas and that the pigments were composed of common materials, such as pine soot. Most point to the work of Professors Smith and Callahan in confirming these implausible claims, yet they ignore other findings these same researchers published, such as that several elements of the image appear to have been added at a later date, such as the rays of the sun, the moon beneath Mary’s feet, and the star field pattern on her cloak. So much for the constellation patterns as viewed from space, and the sacred geometry and celestial music as well as the images in her eyes can very easily be explained as what happens when otherwise smart people stare for too long at something, searching for hidden meaning. Inevitably, they will find it.

And today, the legend of Our Lady of Guadalupe has moved from pious myth to fake news, as numerous hoax articles circulate online only to be debunked but rise again as some credulous blogger or another copies and pastes them. They frequently bring up some of the claims I’ve already addressed but then take it further, saying that NASA scientists have determined that the image is alive, that it holds a standard human body temperature of 98.6 degree Fahrenheit and that its pupils dilate in response to light. Clearly the bit about the eyes is a corruption of Tonsmann’s claims about the images he thinks he sees in them, but I have no idea where the body temperature stuff comes from. As for the appeal to the authority of NASA, this is a recurrent element I’ve seen in a lot of my research. I see some of Tonsmann’s digital image processing techniques compared to techniques used by NASA, and while that may be true, there is no indication that Tonsmann himself was ever associated with that agency, and in fact, while some sources call him simply an “engineer,” others admit he’s actually just an ophthalmologist! Then there are Professors Jody B. Smith and Philip Serna Callahan, who many sources say are both “experts on painting and members of NASA,” as though it’s a club. Well, first of all, I’m not sure why NASA would need experts on painting, but more to the point, none of my further research could confirm that either of them were associated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Callahan’s obituary makes no mention of the organization, and by all indications his field of expertise was actually entemology, with research applications in agriculture. It looks like he may have had some experience in infrared radiation, but I see no indication of being an expert in painting. As for his partner in the study of the tilma, Jody B. Smith appears to have been “a professor of aesthetics and philosophy” at some unverified college in Pensacola called in most sources “College Pensacola,” which might be Pensacola State College, or maybe Pensacola Christian College…I don’t know. Now a Professor of Philosophy might know a bit more about paintings, but could hardly be called an expert and certainly could not have been an expert in infrared photography. So as far as I can tell, no one associated with NASA ever studied the tilma. Why would they? It has nothing to do with aeronautics and space, unless you’re trying to match up constellations to the stars painted on it.

Fake news post, via Snopes

In the end, compared to the Shroud of Turin, there is far more convincing evidence in this case that there is nothing supernatural about the Guadalupe tilma and the image on it. And unlike the shroud, which seems to become more genuinely mysterious the more one looks into it, the more closely that one scrutinizes the ayate of Juan Diego, the more one see things that aren’t really there.