The Mouth of Truth?

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The Gold of the Dead: An Interview with I. B. Jacob about his fascinating investigation

26 October, 2026
Johan, editor-in-chief
MEDIA, UPDATES, NEWS

Interview with Isaac Ben Jacob Around the book Rennes-le-Château: The Gold of the Dead and the True Priory of Sion

I. A researcher facing the mystery

1. Isaac Ben Jacob, thank you for agreeing to this interview and for sharing your insights with the readers of La Gazette de Rennes-le-Château. When we presented your book. Rennes-le-Château: L'Or des Morts et le veritable Prieure de Sion (Rennes-le-Château: The Gold of the Dead and the True Priory of Sion), we published your biography. Today, we would like to delve deeper: to better understand your research journey, your connection to Rennes-le-Château, to Abbé Bérenger Saunière, and to the Priory of Sion.

Isaac Ben Jacob – My journey to Rennes-le-Château didn't begin in the Razès region. but in books. In the late 1990s, my days were entirely devoted to the study of the Torah and the Tanakh, to Judaism and Christianity, to the knowledge of the divine as approached by Jewish masters, and to the major works of Jewish and German scholars on biblical manuscripts. There, I learned a discipline that has never left me: reading a text literally. word by word. weighing every variation, every silence, every correction by the scribe.

At the same time, I was exploring seemingly disparate fields: the civilization of the ancient Maya and Mesoamerica, the mechanics of their calendar, their conception of the divine and the architecture of the universe. Psychoanalysis also greatly occupied my attention, Freud and Jung in particular, because it teaches that what is left unsaid often speaks louder, and more evocatively, than what is said. These three schools of thought –exegesis, the anthropology of religions. and depth reading –converged much later, upon examining the crossed-out words in a draft by Abbé Saunière.

In addition to that, I had a profession: I was a journalist. Investigation became second nature to me. I approach each subject like an archaeologist, in successive layers, isolating eras, people, and environments, so as never to make History say what it did not say.

It was with this method that I encountered Rennes-le-Château, then Bérenger Saunière – whom I never considered a mere treasure hunter, but a man to be understood – and finally the Priory of Sion, whose true lineage had to be uncovered beneath the embellishments that had covered it. This investigation has now culminated in *Rennes-le-Château: The Gold of the Dead and the True Priory of Sion*, published by L'Harmattan in the “Travaux” series of the “Historiques” collection, reserved for scholarly studies.

2. Before we delve into the main course. let's remember that you have published several works, including *La Torah Hachem*, recently featured in our pages. To give you some context for your career as an author and researcher, could you please present your bibliography?

IBJ – A significant portion of my research has remained. until now, in my files: exegeses of the Torah and the Tanakh, countless commentaries on Scripture, works on the origins of humanity, on psychoanalysis, on Mesopotamia and on Mesoamerica. This is the foundation upon which everything else has been built.

I started writing very early: I began my first book at seventeen. I won't reveal the title; it belongs to my youth. I conceived a book for a general audience, in the vein of Robert Charroux – those who knew him will understand – slipping in more sensitive information in allegorical form, with the idea that certain initiates would recognize it and contact me. Readers, however, read it for what it was on the surface: a book full of mysteries, lively and enjoyable to read. It sold very well, was reprinted several times, and regularly went out of print.

Next came *The Rise: Sauniere's Magical Workings and the Penitential Movement in Europe*, written in 2007-2008 and published in the United States by Adventures Unlimited Press. This was, I believe, the first book to take the Rennes-le-Château affair out of its local and regional context and place it squarely within the realm of geopolitics. It addressed questions that research at the time was still largely neglecting. It is, in a way. the precursor to *The Gold of the Dead*: broader in its international scope, but more concise regarding the specifics of Rennes-le-Château.

It was never published in French, and not for lack of a publisher. The articles I published at the time on the Cult of the Dead, notably in La Gazette Rennes-le-Château and in several now-defunct journals. provoked strikingly intense reactions in France. Online forums were ablaze. It seemed that many readers were discovering in these pages a truth that touched them very deeply, almost a religious unease. The subject, it is true, is not trivial: it challenges each of us to examine our relationship with death and our dead. I therefore chose to reserve this work for the American public, who were expecting it from a geopolitical perspective and who were looking for something other than the gold of Rennes.

After these publications, I took a period of silence, a time for research, and this silence lasted about twenty years. I returned to writing in 2026 with *La Torah Hachem – Le Midrash de la Splendeur* (The Torah Hashem – The Midrash of Splendor), published by Verone Editions with a preface by Alain Juillet, which received a “Coup de cœur” (Editor's Choice) award from FNAC [note: popular European retail chain specialising in cultural and electronic products] and was included in *Les Choix du Crocodile* (The Crocodile's Choices) in *La Lettre du Crocodile* (The Crocodile's Letter). Of all my books, this is the most important, and undoubtedly the most inspired. It is also the one that will be most useful to those who walk the path of righteousness and truth. Now comes *Rennes-le-Château L'Or des morts le veritable Prieure de Sion* (Rennes-le-Chateau: The Gold of the Dead and the True Priory of Sion) , which will be published on 29 October by L'Harmattan, with a preface by Jean-Pierre Giudicelli de Cressac Bachelerie.

3. To begin with, how long have you been interested in this case, and under what circumstances did you discover it?

IBJ – It all started in the late 1990s. with a conversation. A friend, Daniel Castille, told me one day about the Rennes-le-Château affair. At the time, I only knew what one knows about a subject only superficially, which is to say, very little. Daniel, on the other hand. had studied it closely and had just devoted a book to it, Le Diable Mérovingien, published by Ramuel in 1998: an investigation that takes the reader from Stenay. the Devil's town, to Rennes-le-Château. the land of Asmodeus, and that questions the rightful place of the Merovingians, guardians of terrible places.

He asked me to look into it, and he uttered a phrase I've never forgotten: “It's a myth, a myth in the noblest sense, in the ancient sense of the term – and I love myths!” That sentence changed everything. By linking Rennes-le-Château to a myth like that of Orpheus, Daniel made It understand that there was infinitely more to it than a matter of a hoard, more than a treasure “as big as a football field,” according to the image circulating at the time among some researchers.

A myth, in the ancient sense. is a story that reveals the truth beneath a veil of wonder. Orpheus descends to the Underworld to bring back Eurydice: this is already a story of passage between the living and the dead. I didn't know it yet, but all my future work lay in this intuition. Daniel Castille, moreover, never ceased to guide my thinking; his knowledge of Gnosticism and the Crista was invaluable to me until the completion of this book.

4. What was your view of the case at that time, And how has it evolved over more than twenty years of research?

IBJ – Initially, I had no thesis to defend. no preconceived ideas, no desire to see or believe anything in this myth. I approached it like a journalist seizing a new subject, or rather like a war correspondent seeking to capture the essence of things, the subject as it unfolds. without taking sides. This detachment proved my greatest asset. It shielded me from the passions that were then stirring the small world of Rennes-le-Château.

Then my gaze shifted, in stages. I first understood that the treasure was not a buried hoard of gold – Gérard de Sède had, moreover, sensed this, I will return to it. The burials, the gifts, the rites led me to what I call the Cult of the Dead: a very ancient economy of salvation for the deceased, originating in Chaldea and Egypt, perpetuated under a Christian guise by discreet religious brotherhoods and networks.

Then, the affair took on a new dimension. What seemed like a village drama turned out to be a complex issue where European interests, lineages, allegiances, and powers intersected. This is the era of The Rise.

Finally, in recent years. I have returned to the primary sources: Saunière's account books. municipal council minutes, the Hautpoul wills, the archives of Limoux and Prouilhe, and that handwritten draft of the speech of 6 June, 1897, which Johan Netchacovitch gave me and which I was able to transcribe in its entirety. My earlier intuitions have found their confirmation there.

Over the past twenty years, my perspective has shifted from myth to document, without ever losing sight of the truth the myth contained. Hindsight has guided me, luck has sometimes been on my side – one must acknowledge that – and it is this combination that has allowed me to bring the investigation to its conclusion.

II. Forgotten Figures and New Paths: The Gold of the Dead

5. Among the many qualities of your work, one of the most striking is undoubtedly its ability to exhume historical figures relegated to the margins of memory: Saints Abdon and Sennen, Venantius Fortunatus, Felix Lajard, the prophet Mani, or even Tobit and his book. Each of these names seems to open a door to a buried world. a tradition, a gesture, a belief. Which one – or which ones – would you like to highlight to introduce your research and guide our readers into this territory where history meets enigma?

IBJ – I work like an archaeologist. I unearth information layer by layer, in strata, in order to isolate eras. people. profiles, and stories. This method prevents mixing everything together. It requires placing each element in its context, not to rewrite history, but to understand it and present it as it was.

Each of the names you mention is a gateway. Abdon and Sennen open the road leading from Babylon to the Pyrenees via the Via Domitia. Felix Lajard provides the key to the Tau. Venantius Fortunatus teaches the art of double-speak. The Book of Tobit lays out the framework of a ritual. There is yet another figure, whom I will save for a future work: his story deserves a book of its own.

But if only one person could be highlighted, it would be Bérenger Saunière himself. Everyone talks about Rennes-le-Château, and very few have been interested in the psychology of its priest. People project his obsessions, his theories, his dreams of treasure onto it. The man himself remains in the shadows.

But this man was unusual. The son of a man from Montazels, he had received a basic education in Hebrew at the seminary, a rare thing for a country priest. An ardent royalist, he thundered against the Republic from the pulpit as early as 1885 and was subsequently deprived of his salary. He knew he possessed an uncommon knowledge of religion and history, and he felt confined in this village that Bishop Billard called “his pampa.” His ambitions were great, and his parish far too small for them.

The draft of his 1897 speech reveals him in all his nakedness, in both his strength and his torment. In the spoken version, his adversaries are “unfortunate souls led astray by treacherous counsel.” In the crossed-out words, they are “wretches,” “minions” of hell. The wonders of his church. he initially owed “a little, but very little” to his parishioners, before crossing out that “very little.” And the motto he proclaims before his bishop is Virgil's: audaces fortuna juvat, fortune favors the bold.

He was neither a swindler nor a forger. Nor was he the kind. charitable priest, entirely devoted to serving the poor. He was a high-flying religious figure who had other priorities than charity: acquiring spiritual, religious, and perhaps even political power through religion. At the end of my investigation, he appears to me as the last high priest of a thousand-year-old cult. This is the man you must meet before looking for his gold.

6. With remarkable coherence, you manage to connect episodes from Saunière's life that were thought to be scattered: his refusal to access the cistern in the Calvary garden during the village fire, the chalice offered to Abbé Grassaud, the pilgrimage to Arles-sur-Tech, the proposed retirement home for elderly priests, and even the confession made to Abbé Rivière on his deathbed – whether authentic or not. These fragments, which so many authors have left adrift like isolated enigmas, find in your work a place, a meaning, a direction. Without revealing the essence of your discoveries, could you nevertheless guide our readers toward this new path you are opening. this driving force that runs through your work and sheds new light on the mystery of Rennes-le-Château?

IBJ – the masters of Kabbalah, since Isaac Luria, have taught that the world is like a broken vessel: the light has scattered into fragments, and humanity's task is to gather them together. A human life obeys the same law. Behind the scattered pieces, there is always coherence. There is logic beneath the apparent illogic, and order beneath the disorder.

That is why this enigma cannot be solved by picking out a symbol here and there, or a phrase detached from its text, to construct a solution. One must take everything, or take nothing. My work consisted of understanding Bérenger Saunière in his entirety, and it is from this demanding approach that the research has borne fruit.

The thread that connects the fragments you mention is that of penitential brotherhoods and the care of the dead. Saunière had his own rites, inherited from his peers and from discreet religious circles whose existence is well documented. He left their traces, and he engraved them in broad daylight. On the pillar of his church, one reads “PENANCE, PENANCE.” Beneath the high altar, at the foot of a Magdalene meditating before a skull, he had inscribed: “Jesus, remedy for wounds, only hope of penitents.”

Follow this thread. and the fragments will fall into place. The chalice offered to Abbé Grassaud, parish priest of Amelie-les-Bains. looks towards Roussillon and its confraternities. The pilgrimage to Arles-sur-Tech leads to the tomb of Saints Abdon and Sennen and its supposedly miraculous water. The cistern, off-limits to firefighters. raises the question of the water's purpose, what it was used for. The retirement home for elderly priests invites us to wonder for whom it was truly intended. As for the absolution refused at the dying man's bedside, it hints at what a priest might have heard that day.

Bérenger speaks to us, and quite simply. You just have to listen to him.

III. The Priory of Sion Revisited

7. The second part of the title has already caused a stir in the literary world and. beyond, in several discreet – sometimes secret – circles that follow your work with keen interest. It will undoubtedly pique the curiosity of our readers. Indeed. you reveal the true lineage of the Priory of Sion, far removed from the fantasies propagated by Pierre Plantard and his few confidants, Philippe de Chérisey or Gino Sandri. By relying on original, verified documents and restoring their context with remarkable precision, you trace the authentic origins of the PS. Without giving away your discoveries, would you be willing to present a new historical fact, a cornerstone that would allow our readers to grasp the true scope of your research?

IBJ – Since we have to talk about it, let's talk about Pierre Plantard. He has undoubtedly placed himself in the spiritual lineage of Eugène Vintras.

Vintras was born in Bayeux in 1807, an illegitimate child, placed in a foundling home at a young age. In 1839, he became a visionary to whom, he claimed, Saint Joseph and then the Archangel Michael appeared. He proclaimed himself Elijah returned and announced the reign of the Paraclete. He founded the Work of Mercy, celebrated masses during which the consecrated hosts bled. and placed his prophetic abilities at the service of Naundorff, the self-proclaimed Louis XVII. His legacy passed to Abbé Boullan, and then, through a process of influence, to the Gnostic Church, which established itself right outside Rennes-le-Château.

Plantard borrows its places and symbols from this movement. There is Sion-Vaudernont, the Lorraine hill where the Baillard brothers had embraced Vintrasism. There is also the reuse of Vintrasian symbols and talismans, even on the so-called Coume-Sourde slab, whose inscription “IN MEDIO LINEA UBI M SECAT LINEA PARVA” corresponds to one of Vintras's hosts. Plantard thus follows in the footsteps of a secret order that, in truth, has nothing to do with the Merovingians. It has everything to do, however, with a transnational organization whose branches extend as far as Poland, with the followers of Towiański, and even as far as Russia.

Here is the cornerstone I propose to your readers. In Plantard's mythology, the head of the Priory bears the title of “Nautonier” (Nautical Master). Now, among the Khlysty, those Russian flagellants descended from the old Bogomil dualism, each community is called korabl, the “ship,” and the one who coordinates the whole is the pilot, the nautonier, of the vessel. This term is not merely an embellishment: it reveals a lineage.

What I show in the book is that there were two Priories. The first, of French obedience, is rooted in the penitential confraternities of Normandy and the Razès region. It identifies itself with the symbol of Constantine and is committed to the independence of France; its influence extends from Bayeux Cathedral to the church of Rennes-le-Château. The second, of Germanic obedience, is transnational and radically dualistic. Plantard drew from one of them, and his deception succeeded because it rested on a kernel of truth, displaced and distorted.

One point is important to me and I urge every reader to take it to heart. Among the currents encountered along these paths are deviant Kabbalistic movements, Sabbatean and Frankist, which claimed Jewish origins. They have nothing in common with Judaism: Judaism fought against them, and they betrayed it. The two should never be confused.

IV. Gérard de Sède, a re-evaluated role

8. In the history of Rennes-le-Château, one writer is often relegated to the background. reduced to the role of a mere scribe; the discovery of the contract for *L'Or de Rennes*, moreover, granted him only a third of the royalties. Our readers will recognize Gérard de Sède. Yet you restore to him a far more essential, almost structuring, role. Could you explain to our readers the reasoning that leads you to reassess his role in this way, and to understand why his presence in this affair far exceeds the function long attributed to him?

IBJ – Relegating Gérard de Sède to the role of mere scribe is one of the most persistent misconceptions in this case. It is undoubtedly due to his discretion. De Sède was less talkative than others, and he knew perfectly well what he was doing.

His role was not to embody the affair, but to launch it, to set a myth in motion. For this, a man well-versed, everything suggests, in the techniques of ciphers, coding, forgery and discreet transmissions was needed, a man capable of depositing in a popular book keys that only a few would know how to turn.

Read again *The Gold of Rennes*. It was he who wrote, as early as 1967, that “the gold of Rennes is the gold of the dead,” and he repeats it. It is also he who warns: “Never forget that when you lift the veil of myths, it is always History that you end up finding.” The man who writes these lines knows a great deal, and he says more than we thought.

As for the third of the royalties granted to him by the contract, he doesn't grasp its true significance: he grasps its discretion. Gérard de Sède still has much to tell us, and the bulk of what he knew remains to be discovered – far more than we imagine.

V. Rites, talismans and future prospects regarding the Gold of the Dead

9. As for the subtitle – An Investigation into the Magical Rites and Enigmatic “Talisman” of a Religious Network – we will leave it to our readers to discover its full significance, as it sheds new light on the singular fortune of Abbé Bérenger Saunière. To conclude this interview, allow us one last question: what can you reveal, without giving away your future research. about what is still in the works? To what – or to whom – do these upcoming discoveries relate, and what new piece of the puzzle is. in your opinion. about to emerge?

IBJ – I am aware of the political dimension of this affair, and the time has come to make it known. The evidence I am gathering is substantial.

Rennes-le-Château is a case with a double meaning. It is local, rooted in the upper Aude valley, in its villages. its families, its cemeteries. It is also the center of an international web. The threads were pulled from the end of the 19th century by powers that extended far beyond the horizon of the Razès: the insistent visit of an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat to Couiza, the discreet investigation carried out in 1930 on behalf of Alfonso XIII, who in exile chose the title of Duke of Toledo, the covetousness that surrounded an object that I call the Crista.

Understanding this web opens up immense perspectives: firstly in geopolitics, because we see at work, over the long term, lineages. obediences and networks that ignore borders; secondly on the religious level; and finally on the sociological level, because these networks have shaped loyalties, solidarities and silences that still last.

It is to this reading that I now dedicate my work. The next piece of the puzzle will not come from a cellar or a pillar: it will come from chancelleries, dynasties, and their archives. Readers of La Gazette will, I hope, be among the first to discover it.

Isaac Ben Jacob, we sincerely thank you for sharing your knowledge, your rigor, and your unique perspective with the readers of La Gazette de Rennes-le-Château. Your contribution sheds further light on this region where history, memory, and mystery intersect.

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