If we are to take the view that there may be more to the Rennes-le-Chateux mystery than the hoax, or the various hoaxes built upon hoaxes, that there may be something lying underneath this which to some at some point was treated with some sincerity or earnestness, then we might choose as a starting place a mountain in the Rennes-le-Chateaux region called Mount Cardou. The authors of The Tomb of God felt that they had been lead to this place by following various clues in various parchments, and, flying in the face of probability, they proposed that it might be the burial place of Christ. The “Arcadia” of “Et in Arcadia Ego” became for them “Arca Dia”, a divine tomb, and Cardou became Car Dieu, with the “car” being of the etymological family of Latin carne, “flesh”. If you were to view that as a somewhat preposterous leap of faith, I would sympathize, but how about if we rewind to before that leap and remember that Christians have long had traditions of mythologizing sites to link them to the crucifixion without in any way claiming them to be the literal site of the tomb? Such  a site is known as a Calvary, from the Latin for “skull”, calva, and it may consist of anything from a small wayside shrine up to an artificial mound or even a whole church.

And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left. Luke 23:33

So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called the place of a skull, which is called in Hebrew Gol'gotha. John 19:17

It is thought that the little hill at the site where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is located may have been observed from a distance to look like a skull. The tomb where Jesus’s body was placed, and from within which he was resurrected, was said to be located a stone’s throw from here. If some other hill were to be seen as representing Calvary, then an extension of this would lead to an assumed location nearby of the divine tomb. 

Closely connected with the idea of a Calvary are the traditions of the Stations of the Cross. These are fourteen events traditionally seen as having lead up to the placing of Christ’s body in the tomb, such as Christ carrying the cross, and being helped in doing so by Simon of Cyrene, falling three times, his face being wiped by Veronica with her veil, being put up on the cross, and so on. I have walked up a hill in Provence – I forget the name now – where there were fourteen crosses placed along the ascending route representing these fourteen stations, and this is apparently traditional. The people who placed these crosses on this hill did not for a moment think that those events had actually happened there, nor that the actual tomb was located nearby.

But there is another, intriguing, and indeed brilliant clue that links Mount Cardou in the Rennes-le-Chateux region with Golgotha/Calvary. This was sleuthed out by Henry Lincoln and is detailed in his book The Holy Place.

If you’ve read about the Rennes-le-Chateaux mystery, you’ll know that the local Priest Sauniere, after coming into a fortune, redecorated the interior of the church in an elaborate and sometimes bizarre manner. As in all Catholic churches, there are representations of the fourteen Stations of the Cross.

Lincoln looked at some of the anomalies in these images and came to a fascinating conclusion, based on viewing them as visual puns. In Station VI there is a soldier in the top left hand corner who holds his shield up against the sky and half obscures a tower, while the main part of the picture shows ‘Veronica with the cloth’, Veronica au lin. In French ‘high shield’ is haut bouclier, and ‘half tower’ is demi tour. Simon of Cyrene is also in the image but he “is not looking at the scene before him; his gaze is fixed upward and outward towards something else”. In French ‘Simon is looking’ is Simon regarde.

Lincoln put these together as sounds true to French pronunciation, where haut bouclier becomes au bout clier (‘at the bottom of the enclosure’); demi tour is ‘half a turn’; Veronica au lin is sonically the same as vers haut nid kaolin (‘towards the high china clay peak’) and Simon regarde is cime on regarde ­– ‘the crest one is looking at’. Mount Cardou nearby is composed of China Clay, Lincoln tells us, and so he finds the instruction: At the bottom of the enclosure, make a half turn towards Cardou. One is looking at the crest.

Lincoln then tells us that this “makes absolute sense on the ground”. Walking into the church’s cemetery by the only entry, it is indeed possible to go to the bottom of the enclosure, make a half turn, and find oneself looking at Mount Cardou. How on Earth did Sauniere come up with this encoded message? And how on Earth did Lincoln work it out? It seems exceptionally insightful, and yet Lincoln didn’t really know what to do with it. He added: “There may be other elements which, when defined, could augment the message” such as “the background dome, for example.” Perhaps he got stuck here because he was looking for another visual pun. The fact is, however, that there is a view of Cardou where it looks like a large white dome – a skull, a Calvary, Golgotha.

So Sauniere’s message in his Stations of the Cross is even more brilliant for using the context of the thing it wants to draw attention to, for the Stations show the journey to Calvary and on to the tomb.

Countless paintings of the Crucifixion show a skull at the bottom of the cross, referring to the site of Golgotha. Has anyone suggested that the skull placed on top of the tomb in Poussin’s first Shepherds refers to the same thing, thereby identifying the tomb with the Holy Sepulchre? After all, Poussin did produce paintings of lamentations over the body of the dead Christ. Below are his Descent from the Cross and Lamentation over Christ.

Here below are just three of the multitude of examples in which a skull is shown at the base of the cross of the Crucifixion. On the left is that of Mantegna, the central painting is that of Titian, and on the right it a detail of that of Gerard David.

Bearing this placement of the skull at the bottom of the cross in mind, we may then recall three things. Sauniere's bookplate places the crucifix onto the Seal of Solomon, the Seal of Solomon is placed on the map of France, and the central vertical axis of that pattern, the Prime Meridian, takes in Mount Cardou as it ventures through the southern part of France.

So Cardou is doubly appropriate to be mythologized in this way. The question then is this: Do Poussin's Shepherds of Arcadia paintings refer to such a mythologising? The skull is shown above the tomb in the first of these two paintings, but in the second above the tomb there is only a mountain. But look closer. I don't know if anyone has noticed this before, but in the mountain above the tomb there is a simulacra of a skull-like face.

 
And I'm tempted to say this represents my last word on the matter. There are many beautiful
paintings in the world - recently Raphael's Galatea struck me dumb, and Poussin's Parnassus also charmed me -
I wouldn't want to get stuck on just a couple of paintings, the same old paintings, buried treasure/secrets or not.

And it is when one gets overly caught up in the various theories, forgetting that art is supposed to be appreciated
for its beauty, it is then that the moral of those Et In Arcadia paintings becomes pertinent - a reminder of mortality, i.e.
don't waste your time digging over and over the various theories. Open your eyes to other beauties. Let the Muses
sing new songs in you. Arcadia lives through her poets and painters, her musicians and sculptors. Put another way, the Classical Tradition makes sense from the inside.