Tuesday, December 07, 2010

The imaginary is something that tends to become true

The man who started the ball rolling with one of the most popular memes of the conspiracy sub-cultures wrote one final book.

Gérard de Sède "Rennes-le-Château: the dossier, the impostures, the fantasies, the hypotheses” (tr. Roger Kersey)
If anyone wants to read a summing up of this widely covered field, I would recommend this book. The first edition was 1988, but we now have an English translation available.

His original book, “Le trésoir maudit de Rennes-le-Château” (translated as "The Accursed Treasure of Rennes-le-Château") published in 1967, fell right into the meme-field then current (Morning of the Magicians, Erich von Daniken, etc), but although it had the air of journalism, it seems a good idea to bear in mind that de Sède had belonged to a Surrealist group called La Main à Plume back in the 1940s.

The Dossier section reiterates the various strands of the story.

Section Two covers the impostures and fantasies, referring to the activities of M. Pierre Plantard, Henri Lobineau, the Merovingian tale, the affair of the Red Serpent, all the way to “The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail” (Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln), "Genisis" (David Woods’ thick felt tip lines drawn on small scale maps to produce patterns) and The Temple of The Stars. He seems fair in his assessments, and writes amusingly.

The third Section covers some more reasonable hypotheses to explain the odd events surrounding Abbé Bérenger: the selling of Masses, treasure, forged documents, etc., but he settles for a version which implicates occult groups of the turn of the century, Rosy-Cross and Freemasonic, as well as fairly sinister sounding groups inside the Catholic Church, like the Sodalitium Pianum (no-one expects the SP!). And what do we know of George Monti (the ‘serial esoteric society joiner’) and his links to (infiltration of?) the OTO and other groups.

All very intriguing.
"The imaginary is something that tends to become true." André Breton

No comments:

Webring

Member of the NEW TRAJECTORIES webring