The Buried Sanctuary of Rennes-les-Bains: Archaeology, Myth, and the Transformation of a Roman Healing Cult

Part I – Archaeology, History, and Rediscovery

Abstract

This study examines the evidence for a buried Roman sanctuary beneath the modern spa-village of Rennes-les-Bains (Aude, France) and traces how the material record, filtered through early modern antiquarianism and nineteenth-century clerical imagination, generated the complex mythography that later inspired the Priory of Sion corpus. Drawing on eyewitness accounts from M. A. Cumenge (1862), Dr Jean Gourdon (1874), Dr Paul Courrent, and Abbé Henri Boudet, the essay reconstructs the archaeological landscape and analyses how it was re-read as a site of resurrection and cosmic geometry.

Introduction

The name Rennes-les-Bains evokes, for both archaeologists and esotericists, an interlacing of material ruin and mythic residue. Nestled in the upper valley of the Sals River, the village overlays a dense palimpsest of Roman thermal architecture, medieval abandonment, and modern speculation. Beneath its streets lie the vestiges of a fanumor healing temple; above ground circulate stories of a buried goddess, a perfumed tomb, and an encoded “cromlech.” The problem addressed here is twofold: first, to determine what the archaeological testimony actually reveals; and second, to understand how those remains became the substrate for modern myth-making.

The Archaeological Record of Rennes-les-Bains

The earliest systematic observation comes from M. A. Cumenge, whose 1862 report in the Bulletin de la Société Littéraire et Scientifique de Castres described a field of ruins at “the Temple of Rennes.” ¹ He recorded paving slabs fifty centimetres thick, walls, and “various votive altars” at roughly 1.5 metres below the surface, accompanied by marble fragments—arms and hands—interpreted as relics of a fertility cult. Cumenge noted an arm “holding an egg” and another entwined with a serpent, concluding that “Aesculapius was still the god people came to implore in Rennes.” ² A decade later Dr Jean Gourdon published Stations thermales de l’Aude (1874), refining Cumenge’s observations. ³ He localised the finds to “the last house of the village of Bains, to the south,” and catalogued fragments of capitals, cornices, antefixes, and three sculpted limbs—the hand with an egg, a hand with a serpent in a patera, and a hand grasping a cloth. He also transcribed a marble cippus inscribed POMPEIVS QVARTVS P.A.M.SVO., understood as a donor’s dedication rather than a tomb. ⁴ Gourdon inferred a destroyed temple of Aesculapius or Hygieia, razed by fire and buried beneath later soils.Later witnesses corroborated this. Dr Paul Courrent in the early twentieth century mentioned the same pieces displayed in the Fleury family’s cabinet of curiosities, adding that Marius Cathala, a respected archaeologist, believed the statue to which the “hand with the egg” belonged still lay in the courtyard of the Hôtel Chaluleau. ⁵ In 1910, Henri Rouzaud, visiting the aged parish priest Henri Boudet, recorded that the latter “had seen the foundations and the large base stones of this temple when the houses were built … at the house of the blacksmith at the crossing leading to Rennes-le-Château.” ⁶ Together these accounts delineate a coherent archaeological zone—the southern end of the village around Maison Chaluleau, Bain-Fort, and the road to Le Cercle—containing continuous Roman strata.

Topography and the Temple Beneath the Village

The topographical indications converge on the carrefour—the junction of the Roman cardo maximus and decumanus maximus—which the nineteenth-century street plan still followed. The Maison Chaluleau occupies precisely this intersection. Repairs made there in 1928 exposed “large block foundations” that Rouzaud identified as Roman, perhaps the podium of a temple fifteen metres high. ⁷ The artefactual assemblage—architectural marble, votive limbs, inscriptions, and an ash layer—fits the typology of a healing sanctuary common in southern Gaul. Temples to Aesculapius or Hygieia often adjoined mineral springs, containing pools, cryptoporticoes, and votive pits where body-part ex-votos were deposited. Comparable complexes at Les Fumades and Allègre-les-Fumades confirm this cultic model. ⁸ The “hand with an egg” and “hand with a serpent” are iconographic signatures of rebirth and cure; the egg symbolises potential life, the serpent regeneration through shedding. The ash and charred debris noted by Gourdon suggest catastrophic burning—almost certainly the Saracen incursionsof the 720s when Al-Samh ibn Mālik advanced up the Aude valley. Charles Martel’s counter-campaign of 737 is recorded as devastating the region, leaving archaeological silence thereafter. The destruction horizon observed beneath Rennes-les-Bains thus anchors the site’s demise in that mid-eighth-century conflagration.

Abandonment and Rediscovery

After this destruction, the archaeological record falls silent for nearly six centuries. No Carolingian or Romanesque strata have been identified in the valley. Habitation re-emerges only in the thirteenth century, when monastic records mention Balnea Reginae—Rennes-les-Bains—as a modest thermal dependency of Alet. This long hiatus transformed the lower terraces into a palimpsest of absence. When Catel published his Mémoires de l’Histoire du Languedoc (1633), he already described ancient marble built into village walls and cited the lost Pompeius Quartus inscription then visible in the church. ⁹ By the time of Abbé Delmas (1709), the ruins were romanticised as the “tomb of a great Roman,” speculatively linked to Pompey the Great himself or someone associated with him. ¹⁰ Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landowners such as Paul Urbain de Fleury collected fragments, forming the nucleus of local “museums” that fascinated visitors like Courrent and Rouzaud. Thus, by Boudet’s lifetime, the buried sanctuary had become simultaneously an archaeological reality and a mythic siteof memory—a literal substructure around which clerical imagination could build theology.

Abbé Henri Boudet and the Re-Sacralisation of the Ruins

When Henri Boudet arrived as parish priest in 1872, he inherited both the Roman debris and the task of reconciling antiquity with faith. His La Vraie Langue Celtique (1886) describes two concentric “cromlechs” encircling Rennes-les-Bains, the smaller centred near Le Cercle—exactly where the Roman remains lay. ¹¹ Boudet’s “cromlech” is not a prehistoric monument but a theological metaphor: the outer circle encompasses humanity, the inner encircles the tomb of resurrection. The Pierre du Trou—the “Stone with a Hole”—stands as the world’s axis, uniting heaven and earth. His geomantic mapping converts the Roman plan (a circular sanctuary at the hydrological centre) into a Christian cosmogram. The buried temple becomes the spiritual navel of the world, the locus of rebirth through Christ. To the empiricist Rouzaud he could describe it simply as “the ancient Roman temple whose base stones I have seen”; to the exegetical reader of his book it symbolised the mysterium resurrectionis. Boudet’s ideas fused local archaeology with cosmic allegory: the circular plan of the sanctuary, the dual springs hot and cold, the buried statue of a goddess—all were recast as typological figures of the Resurrection. In effect, he re-sacralised archaeology.

Conclusion to Part I

By 1910, when Rouzaud wrote his notes, the essential facts were fixed: under the southern houses of Rennes-les-Bains lay the podium and debris of a Roman healing temple; it had perished in fire, been forgotten for centuries, and rediscovered through the building of modern dwellings. Yet through Boudet’s theology this physical ruin had already become a theological topos, a place where the material and the metaphysical interlocked. The stage was thus set for the twentieth-century transformation of that buried sanctuary into a symbolic “tomb of the goddess,” a “White Queen,” or even the “sepulchre of Christ.” Part II will trace that metamorphosis through the writings of Philippe de Chérisey, Nicolas Beaucéan, Anne-Léa Hisler, and Pierre Plantard, showing how the forgotten temple beneath the carrefourof Rennes-les-Bains became the epicentre of France’s most elaborate modern myth.

Notes

M. A. Cumenge, “Voyage à Rennes-les-Bains,” Bulletin de la Société Littéraire et Scientifique de Castres, 1862, pp. 334–342.
Ibid., p. 338.
J. Gourdon, Stations thermales de l’Aude, Carcassonne, 1874.
Ibid., pp. 72–74.
P. Courrent, “Notes archéologiques sur Rennes-les-Bains,” unpublished ms., c. 1900 (cited in Cathala, 1931).
H. Rouzaud, Carnet de voyage, 2 Sept. 1910 (Narbonne Arch. Com. notes).
Ibid.
Compare: J.-C. Balmelle, Les sanctuaires thermaux de la Gaule romaine, Paris 1983.
G. Catel, Mémoires de l’Histoire du Languedoc, Toulouse 1633, pp. 512–513.
Abbé Delmas, Mémoire sur Rennes-les-Bains, 1709 (ms.).
H. Boudet, La Vraie Langue Celtique et le Cromleck de Rennes-les-Bains, Carcassonne 1886.

The Buried Sanctuary of Rennes-les-Bains: Archaeology, Myth, and the Transformation of a Roman Healing Cult

Part II – From Sacred Topography to Esoteric Myth

From Archaeology to Allegory: The Afterlife of the Temple

By the early twentieth century the buried Roman temple beneath Rennes-les-Bains was a fact of local archaeology. Yet through the writings of Boudet and his circle it acquired a second life—as allegory. The transition from antiquarian fact to symbolic myth occurred through three overlapping developments:

the fusion of Christian cosmology with ancient topography;
the romantic revival of “sacred geography” in France; and
the re-reading of Rennes-les-Bains through esoteric literature.

Boudet’s cromlech already provided the grammar for such transformation. His two concentric circles, the smaller embracing a tomb, echo the cosmic architectures of Roman and early Christian sanctuaries alike. The priest’s insistence that he had “seen the foundations” of the ancient temple lent his geometric theology a tangible archaeological anchor. Later writers would treat that testimony as evidence not merely of antiquity but of continuity—a buried chain linking pagan healing cults to Christian resurrection, and by extension to the secret wisdom of initiates.

The Priory Narratives and the “White Queen”

The next decisive stage came with the appearance, during the mid-twentieth century, of documents and novels associated with the Priory of Sionmilieu: the works of Nicolas Beaucéan, Anne-Léa Hisler, Philippe de Chérisey, and Pierre Plantard. Each re-cast the Rennes-les-Bains ruins into mythic form.

Nicolas Beaucéan and the Transformation of the Goddess

Beaucéan’s Au Pays de la Reine Blanche (early 1960s) repeats, almost verbatim, Gourdon’s 1874 statement about “a marble statue over two metres high representing Isis,” explicitly citing the physician’s book. ¹ He merges the archaeological report with a new allegory: the “White Queen” (Reine Blanche) whose body, once bathed in the spa, lies now beneath “the earth of a hotel courtyard.” The hotel is none other than Maison Chaluleau—the locus of Cumenge’s and Gourdon’s finds. The Roman statue becomes a metaphor for a buried feminine principle, conflating Isis, Venus, and the Christian Mary. Beaucéan’s linguistic play—Rennes/Reine—exemplifies the langue des oiseauxbeloved of occult writers. The confusion of “Queen” with “Rennes” allows the buried marble to stand both for the ancient temple and for the feminine divinity hidden beneath the Christian church.

Anne-Léa Hisler’s Trésor au Pays de la Reine Blanche

Plantard’s first wife, Anne-Léa Hisler, produced a variant text in which the narrative becomes explicit: “The thirst for mystery was about to be further disappointed when the Reine Blanche reappeared no longer in a bath, but under the earth of a hotel courtyard.” ² Here the buried goddess emerges literally from the soil of the Chaluleau courtyard. The phrasing fuses archaeological discovery with mystical resurrection—an echo of Boudet’s “tomb of resurrection” reinterpreted as the sepulchre of the goddess.

Philippe de Chérisey and Circuit: Rewriting the Temple

Philippe de Chérisey’s posthumously published novel Circuit (written c. 1968–1971) gives the fullest literary transmutation of the Rennes-les-Bains archaeology. In the dialogues between “Critias” and his interlocutors, Chérisey enumerates the relics of the lost temple: “a statue of Isis, alias the Venus d’Ille… an arm holding a towel, a hand holding an egg, not counting the charnel-house under the grand square.” ³ The inventory reproduces Gourdon’s artefacts verbatim, embedding them in a mythic account of a “pagan temple fifteen metres high that Charles Martel burned in 737.” The conflagration corresponds precisely to the ash horizon observed by Gourdon and Delmas—a historical catastrophe transformed into legend. Chérisey’s prose oscillates between parody and revelation. His “charnel-house beneath the grand square” echoes the archaeological observation that a large substructure exists under the place des Deux Rennes, probably the remains of the temple’s cryptoporticus. But in Circuit it becomes a metaphysical underworld, a descent into the tomb of Isis—the same movement described in the poem Le Serpent Rougewhere the narrator approaches “the emanations of perfume which permeate the sepulchre.”

Pierre Plantard and the Roman Tomb of Pompey

Plantard’s private correspondence of the 1970s completes the chain of transpositions.⁴ Writing to a researcher, he situates on his “property of Roc Nègre” a “Roman tomb (50–48 BC) called the Tomb of Gnaius Pompey,” located “between two belfries—those of Rennes-les-Bains and Rennes-le-Château.” This recasts Abbé Delmas’s eighteenth-century conjecture about Pompeius Quartus into a royal, almost messianic legend: the “grand Romain” becomes Pompey the Great, whose tomb secretly marks the meridian geometry of the Priory’s maps. By synchronising Delmas’s tombe du grand Romain with the supposed Roman mine “dating from 70 BC,” Plantard ties the material landscape of Rennes to the founding myths of Rome and Christianity alike. The precision of “70 BC” functions symbolically, not archaeologically: it is the era of Pompey’s campaigns in Spain and Gaul, and therefore the plausible horizon for the first Roman presence in the valley. In Plantard’s narrative, the burial of Pompey—or of a Christic substitute—under the Rennes plateau supplies the ultimate translatio sacri: the movement of sacred kingship from Rome to Gaul.

The Cosmic Plan: Zodiac and Sacred Geography

The “zodiacal” schemes drawn across the Rennes landscape—lines of 0° du Bélier and 27° du Capricorne connecting the bell towers, the ligne du 27 degrés Capricorne, and the “clocher-à-clocher” axis—derive ultimately from the geometry of the Roman temple itself. Roman sanctuaries of healing were often astrally oriented, their cellae aligned with solstitial sunrise or equinoctial points. The circular plan inferred from the Puits du Cercle legend would have lent itself to zodiacal division. Thus, what later esoteric cartographers traced on maps may preserve a distorted memory of genuine cosmic architecture. In Boudet’s schema the concentric cromlechsrepresent macro- and microcosm; in Chérisey’s, the same geometry becomes the route of initiatory descent. Both depend on the underlying Roman principle that health arises from harmony between human body and celestial order. The myth of the “zodiac of Rennes” is therefore less invention than survival—an echo of the cosmic design once built into the stone of the temple.

Archaeology, Myth, and Cultural Memory

When the evidence is layered chronologically, a striking continuity emerges:

Epoch	Reality on the ground	Interpretive frame
1st c. BC–8th c. AD	Roman spa-temple, Aesculapian cult, destroyed by fire	Healing, fertility, cosmic harmony
17th–19th c.	Rediscovery of marbles; antiquarian curiosity	Classical heritage, local pride
19th–early 20th c.	Boudet’s cromlech, Rouzaud’s notes	Christian typology, resurrection
Mid–late 20th c.	Priory documents, Chérisey, Plantard	Esoteric lineage, buried goddess, Christic tomb

Each stage preserves material facts—the location, the marble limbs, the ash—but transforms their meaning to suit the spiritual vocabulary of its age. What began as a Roman sanctuary becomes, successively, a Christian metaphor, an occult cosmogram, and finally a modern myth of revelation.

Conclusion

Beneath the modern village of Rennes-les-Bains lies, by every credible testimony, the podium of a Roman healing sanctuary destroyed in the early medieval period and forgotten until the seventeenth century. Its rediscovery by nineteenth-century physicians and priests offered a rare convergence of archaeology and theology. The material—the marble hand, the serpent, the egg, the circular well—embodied precisely those symbols that Christian and esoteric imagination would seize upon: regeneration, wisdom, resurrection. Abbé Boudet’s theological geometry transformed the buried temple into the spiritual centre of his cromlech; later writers transmuted that centre into the perfumed tomb of Isis, the White Queen, or the Magdalene. The Priory authors, Plantard foremost, superimposed on it the grids of meridian, zodiac, and royal bloodline. Each layer of interpretation re-sacralised the same stones.The Rennes-les-Bains tradition thus demonstrates how archaeological reality and mythic imagination are not opposites but successive modes of meaning. A Roman sanctuary to healing gods became a Christian symbol of resurrection, then a modern cipher of hidden gnosis. In the end the mystery of Rennes is less about what lies buried than about how generations of seekers have read the silence of those buried stones.

Notes

N. Beaucéan, Au Pays de la Reine Blanche (ms., 1960s), citing J. Gourdon, Stations thermales de l’Aude(Carcassonne 1874).
A.-L. Hisler, Trésor au Pays de la Reine Blanche: Histoire et légende de Rennes-les-Bains (Paris 1960s).
Ph. de Chérisey, Circuit, chaps. XIV–XV (posth. ed. Paris 1984).
P. Plantard, letter to a researcher, c. 1979 – 1980 (priv. arch.).

References / Bibliography

Balmelle, J.-C. Les sanctuaires thermaux de la Gaule romaine. Paris: CNRS, 1983.
Beaucéan, N. Au Pays de la Reine Blanche. Ms., c. 1960s.
Boudet, H. La Vraie Langue Celtique et le Cromleck de Rennes-les-Bains. Carcassonne, 1886.
Catel, G. Mémoires de l’Histoire du Languedoc. Toulouse, 1633.
Chérisey, Ph. de. Circuit. Paris, 1984 (posthumous).
Courrent, P. “Notes archéologiques sur Rennes-les-Bains.” Ms., c. 1900.
Cumenge, M. A. “Voyage à Rennes-les-Bains.” Bull. Soc. Lit. et Sci. de Castres, 1862.
Delmas, Abbé. Mémoire sur Rennes-les-Bains. Ms., 1709.
Gourdon, J. Stations thermales de l’Aude. Carcassonne, 1874.
Hisler, A.-L. Trésor au Pays de la Reine Blanche. Paris, 1960s.
Plantard, P. Letter to researcher, c. 1979.
Rouzaud, H. Carnet de voyage, 2 Sept. 1910 (Narbonne Arch. Com.).