Bloodline, the movie. Hidden treasure in southern France.

I just read Joan Norton's review of the movie on her blog, Mary Magdalene Within. The movie is a documentary following a man's journey through the mysteries surrounding Rennes-le-Chateau, a tiny village on a mountaintop in southern France. He claims to have found a hidden underground chamber containing a corpse and several historic items.

This particular little mountaintop has been an important place in history since the Romans. The stories echoing among these hills have threads to all major movements for the last two thousand years. The hills and mountains are perforated with grottoes and ravines, underground rivers and caves, all covered in vegetation that is hard to penetrate.
On my trip to the area a year ago, I wanted to walk the hills, singing like Maria von Trapp, only to get myself entangled in brambles and brush. The vegetation, which looks very friendly from a distance, is so dense that even a good machete wouldn't do you much good. So these researchers must have hiked the mountainside for years, to stumble upon this find.

Rennes-le-Chateau is one of five mountains surrounding another hill jutting sharply up in the center of the landscape. La Pique is a narrow ridge, which is also hard to get to the top of, unless you follow the long path around it. The five mountains mark the five points of a pentagonal star, the footprint of the path of Venus, seen from the Earth. Legends say there was a temple dedicated to Venus on this ridge, built long before the Romans. The priests of the temple knew how to communicate with Venus, using the surrounding landscape to gather energy and information. If a vortex is created by the movement of the planet, and it points down to a specific spot on the earth, there were technicians of old who knew how to work with the energy generated.
The Romans wanted to know how, but never got hold of the knowledge. The Catholic church, which in effect is an extension of the Roman Empire, never got hold of it either. But in the attempts to shield knowledge, important items were hidden away. And the caves and grottoes of the area gave them ample opportunities to do so.

What treasures are we talking about? The presence of Mary Magdalene is apparent in local legends. More obscure legends says that the Lord was buried in the area. Newer stories talks about the Knights Templar and the treasure they brought from Jerusalem. The Jewish settlement in Narbonne knew all about their activities. Did the Prince of Narbonne supply them with information about the Temple Mount, the basement of King Salomon's Temple? Did he send them out to rescue important artifacts that otherwise would have fallen in wrong hands? The tales say the "things" the Templars brought back went through the Languedoc area on their way to Paris. Were some very secret and very important items hidden securely in a forgotten valley? How about the Visigoths who also inhabited these hills and forests? Or the Celts? They all had treasure that was mentioned in documents. These objects are not accounted for any longer. But in several places it is hinted, that they might be buried between five mountain tops in the Languedoc.

I look forward to see the movie when it comes to Chicago. If someone was looking for treasure or hidden items, the landscape south of Carcassonne around Rennes-le-Chateau holds enough secrets to satisfy even Indiana Jones.

Wencke.