The Wayside Altar… and parallels with Perillos

 

Let us return to this small building, ordered by Saunière, which he made into his library and office… Following the serious incident of his refusal to let the firemen reach the water to extinguish a fire, the municipality withdraws from the priest the right to use the place.
It would have been necessary that the interior of this construction was suitably arranged to receive the racks with books and pieces of furniture required for his office. Knowing the tastes of Saunière, such an installation would have to be clean, of high standard and comfortable.
Logically, if the town hall of Rennes-le-Château retakes possession of the place, the site must be in a very good condition. Curiously, we then learn that the room becomes a “Wayside Altar”; it means that we need to imagine the site being used for funeral practices, the place where the body and/or its coffin will be located prior to its burial in the cemetery. Nothing, it seems, would be more probable, as the site is close to the entrance of the cemetery.
It is, nevertheless, intriguing to delve deeper into this question, as it will open up some intriguing possibilities.
To begin with: where does the word “Wayside Altar” come from in relationship to the use of the building by Saunière? In the French dictionary, the word “reposoir” is defined as: “furnishing of a funerarium, used to show the urns as well as a table on which to deposit the urn, bunches of flowers and photographs of the deceased person.” In short, a “Wayside Altar” is a religious-funerary construction.
It is entirely logical and possible that before Saunière’s alterations to the building, the site itself was a “Wayside Altar”, which he converted into a library and an office. This would mean that after the fire incident, the community merely restored the building to its original use. This assumption is not illogical, if we equally note that Saunière had a specific rapport with the worship of the dead: either merely by trying to say masses for the deceased, or even one step further, as alleged by Isaac ben Jacob, namely that Saunière and several of his colleagues had a particular “fascination” with magical rites involving the dead.

Funerary worship

Let us continue to read our dictionary. It explains that the Wayside Altar was there to deposit the urns of the deceased, after the incineration of the body. It is also equipped with certain features, such as a place to deposit the urn, the flowers, for the family to sit, even a small altar for religious focus, etc.
We can safely assume that at the time of Saunière, the cemetery of Rennes-le-Château was exclusively Christian… and that everyone was buried according to the Christian customs. But we know that there are funerary rites in which the body is not buried, but burnt – incinerated. This practice was widespread in pre-Christian times. We should actually say that in pre-Christian times, incineration was the normal practice. This is because the majority of people were assumed to return in a next life – to reincarnate – and that as a consequence maintaining the body of the deceased should not be encouraged. Only an elite, most often identified with the dignitaries and the aristocracy, were believed to reach the “Elysian Fields”, which was a divine abode from which the souls were no longer subject to the cycle of reincarnation. Hence, they were often buried, their last “mortal coil” preserved – and in some traditions subject to magical rites that would prevent the spirit from return to Earth. Later, the Christian doctrine, which stated that through the intervention of Jesus, the son of God, each believer would reach this divine abode, without passing through further incarnations. Hence, they adopted the practice of burial, rather than incineration.

A station for the dead

The “Wayside Altar” is the place where the body “rested” between death and its burial and/or its incineration. In the case of Rennes-le-Château, the Wayside Altar is just outside the cemetery, and next to the church. The villagers can therefore easily visit the deceased, and the road between the Wayside Altar, church and cemetery are a short distance.
We note that apparently at the time of Saunière, the Wayside Altar is apparently no longer used as such; it may have fallen into a complete ruin. But we do need to understand that a “Wayside Altar” is required ingredient of any village. Houses were often not large enough to accommodate the body of a deceased person and welcome people coming to pay their respects; sometimes, the body could not be kept in the house for hygienic reasons. Furthermore, not everyone dies in their own house. If someone died while on the road, his body had to be “stored” there, and asking a local family to surrender one room of their house so that a dead person whom they did not know could be placed there, is just not going work. In short: a “Wayside Altar” was a necessary ingredient in the life of any village. Small wonder then that French law states that the place where the body was deposited before and after placing the body in the coffin was called a “reposoir”.
Finally, we can add that the Egyptian temples had a “Wayside Altar” as well. That of Ramses III at Karnak was intended for the boats of the Theban triad: Amun, Mut and Khonsu. The structure was identical to others in the large Egyptian temples.

The imaginal history of a Wayside Altar

The history of the Wayside Altar is officially not available, but it is possible to make some logical conclusions. First of all, let us observe the site itself: the Wayside Altar is built on top of a cistern… and hence a site connected with water. This can be very significant, for it was said that the dead were often “washed” of their sins, which in many places meant that a tomb and a body was placed in close proximity, sometimes with water washing over the coffins of the deceased. At the same time, children that had not received baptism before dying, were often buried in a location where the water from a roof dripped on their resting place. Thus, we should note that on the other side of the repository, in the cemetery, the place where these infants were buried, did indeed receive water that dripped from the roof of the Wayside Altar.

Another observation: we note that the church and the Wayside Altar sit on top of a fault-line. The fault is known to represent the underworld, “hell”. The siting of this religious complex can therefore be logically explained. Let us assume that there was a pre-Christian settlement on the site. That the urns of the deceased would be buried in the chasm. If so, perhaps we can conclude that Saunière, in 1891, found the remains of such a construction, perhaps from Visigothic times. Let us note that such an assertion is not whimsical: we know that Rennes-le-Château’s location, sitting on top of a hill, would have attracted an early population, of which evidence has been found… and that such a population must have left traces… and corpses, or funerary deposits. The only “assumption” we are making here is that the cavity created by the fault was used in some religious fashions. And that one of the accesses to this underground network was done via the Wayside Altar.
In this imaginal history, we then see the arrival of the first Christians, who find the temple and its underground network. The temple is turned into a church, the access to the underworld masked by the installation of a “Wayside Altar”, with the area next to both being turned into the new place destined for the dead: the cemetery. A pagan sanctuary had thus been easily transformed into a purely “Christian” site, without leaving any traces.

Questions and parallels …

Few places have a “Wayside Altar”, yet Rennes-le-Château has a prominent one. As far as we know, none of the neighbouring villages had – or have – such a building. Why is Rennes-le-Château therefore the exception? Perhaps the answer is indeed simple: namely that the installation was done so as to obscure something which was there before… and we do note that even if this was not the case, Saunière would later discover that the site did indeed provide an entrance to the underground world… can we really assume he was the first person ever to discover this access? If so, how did he find out? Is it not more logical to assume that his keen eye saw something out of the ordinary, and then realised what it was: a blocked up entrance to the underground system, which was not merely the focus of his attention in this building, but also in the secret annex to the church, as well as in other locations of his estate.

Let us note that there is another village that is similar to Rennes-le-Château in this respect: the abandoned village of Perillos.
There as well, we see the old chapel of the local lords being turned into the village church.
There too, we see that the church is built on a fault-line.
There too, the site is connected with an underground necropolis, part of which seems to date from the early Christian times – if not before.
Then we note that there is at least one local lord of Perillos who radically alters the place, to erase all traces of its original orientation… as well as making sure that the original access to the network is now obscured.
There as well, the lords and the priest disappear, carrying with them the enigma of what was there before.

Question: it seems clear that Saunière, around 1891, had the chance, or the order, to find the access to the underground network of Rennes-le-Château, and that over the following years, he became an expert in such expeditions.
Did he talk about his discovery to his friends, such as two other priests, Boudet and Gélis? Both of these had had access to the files of the church of Perillos, of which they had been the vicar at the time of their posting in Durban. Did these two priests learn certain information about Perillos’ past during their posting there? Did they decide to use Saunière and his newfound expertise to find out whether he could apply his knowledge to Perillos, where it seems the same “events” had occurred than in Rennes-le-Château… and which Saunière had been able to uncover.

Several small details can be added to this:
The misfortune of Gélis and his horrible dead.
The financial pitfalls of Boudet, who is equally well-versed in religion, history, archaeology as well as geology, which could also allow him to understand certain details. To this, we add their membership of a secret society, the AA, which could have offered the necessary framework for these three priests to work in. In this imaginal scenario, did it make contact with Saunière, asking him to apply his knowledge to a new area, that of Perillos? Before becoming too caught up in the imaginal world, we do see a series of analogies between Saunière and his discoveries in Rennes-le-Château, and the problem of Perillos. So much so that perhaps we should wonder whether both are not part of the same problem… or share a common origin…

Filip Coppens & Andre Douzet