Why The Rhedonian?

The Rhedonian explores the history, archaeology, esoterica, and mysteries of Rennes-les-Bains and Rennes-le-Château through original articles, research, textual analysis, and critical review.

The title Rhedonian is drawn from Henri Boudet’s use of the name Redones in La Vraie Langue Celtique. For Boudet, the name Rennes did not refer only to the Redones of Armorica, but also to a southern sacred landscape centred on Rennes-les-Bains. In his reading, Redones was no ordinary tribal name. It was bound to the idea of the cromlech: a circle, or system, of significant stones through which an ancient geography of memory, language, and knowledge had been preserved.

In Boudet’s account, Rennes-les-Bains becomes a kind of southern drunemeton: a learned and symbolic centre where stones, place-names, waters, and mountains retain the traces of an older sacred order. The word Redonestherefore carries more than an ethnic meaning. It evokes a terrain of “wise stones,” marked by monument, memory, intellectual authority, and religious inheritance.

The Rhedonian is a modern title inspired by that world. It does not claim to be Boudet’s own term, but a contemporary editorial name shaped from his vocabulary and vision. It suggests both the student of the Two Rennes and the reader who enters their layered landscape of history, archaeology, symbolism, and legend.

But The Rhedonian is also, in another sense, a reveue: a looking again.

The older French form reveue, related to revoir, carries the sense of seeing again, looking back, reviewing, re-examining, and returning to something with renewed attention. From this same family comes the English word review: not simply to repeat what has already been said, but to go over something again, to inspect it, assess it, compare it, criticise it, and reconsider it.

This is precisely the spirit in which The Rhedonian approaches the Affair of the Two Rennes.

The aim is not merely to retell the mystery, but to look again at its sources, its claims, its texts, its landscapes, and its inventions. Here, the materials of the Rennes Affair are revisited and re-evaluated: the writings of Henri Boudet, the life and legend of Bérenger Saunière, the archaeology and sacred geography of Rennes-les-Bains, the traditions surrounding the Two Rennes, and the later constructions of Pierre Plantard and Philippe de Chérisey. Their work, too, belongs to the field of review. Plantard and Chérisey did not simply invent in a vacuum. They selected, rearranged, disguised, amplified, encoded, distorted, and transformed older materials. Their writings therefore require careful examination: not credulous acceptance, but not careless dismissal either. They must be read critically, historically, symbolically, and sometimes poetically, as part of the long afterlife of the Rennes mystery.

The Rhedonian therefore seeks to reconsider, re-evaluate, analyse, assess, appraise, investigate, and take a wider view of the whole enigma. All available information — archival, historical, archaeological, literary, symbolic, esoteric, and speculative — may be brought back into view and examined afresh.

As a title, The Rhedonian names not only a subject, but a standpoint: that of the attentive reader, researcher, and explorer who approaches Rennes-les-Bains and Rennes-le-Château as places where text, topography, memory, myth, history, and invention converge.

From forgotten archives and local legends to Roman remains, sacred waters, coded writings, Priory documents, esoteric traditions, and the strange play of names, words, and places, this site explores the many layers through which the Rennes Affair continues to fascinate, perplex, and endure.

We invite you to discover — or rather, to rediscover — the mystery of the Two Rennes with a fresh eye.