Mount Bugarach is located in the Languedoc region of southern France near the Pyrenees Mountains and the presently well-known community of Rennes-le-Chateau. The area is steeped in the legends and mysteries of Mary Magdalene.
Église Sainte Marie-Madeleine
From wikipedia
François-Bérenger Saunière (11 April 1852 – 22 January 1917) was a French Catholic priest in the village of Rennes-le-Château, in the Aude region. He was a central figure in the conspiracy theories surrounding the village, which form the basis of several documentaries and books such as the 1982 The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. Elements of these theories were later used by Dan Brown in his best-selling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, in which the fictional character Jacques Saunière is named after the priest.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail claimed that Saunière possibly found evidence that Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene were married, and produced offspring that eventually became the Merovingian dynasty. The authors speculated that Saunière engaged in financial transactions with a man they claimed was Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, and Saunière could have been the representative of the Priory of Sion, and his income could have originated from the Vatican “which might have been subjected to high-level political blackmail by both Sion and the Habsburgs”. The book was an international bestseller, inspiring Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code.
Burgess claims to have found the treasure of Bérenger Saunière: several mummified corpses (one of which is allegedly Mary Magdalene) in three underground tombs created by the Knights Templar under the orders of the Priory of Sion.
Pierre Plantard claimed that the Merovingians were descended from the Tribe of Benjamin, the Jesus bloodline hypothesis found in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail instead hypothesized that the Merovingians were descended from both the Benjamin line and the Davidic line of the Tribe of Judah, as embodied in the child of Mary Magdalen by virtue of a dynastic marriage.
From Wikipedia:
Archaeologist Paul Bahn considered the various hypotheses pertaining to the village of Rennes-le-Château as “beloved of occultists and ‘aficionados’ of the Unexplained”. He groups the mysteries of Rennes-le-Château with those of the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and ancient astronauts as being sources of “ill-informed and lunatic books”.
