Key to the Sacred Pattern: The Untold Story of Rennes-le-Chateau (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "EVERYBODY loves a mystery story..." (more)
Key Phrases: Henri Buthion, David Wood, Priory of Sion (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Since 1972, Lincoln has made a career out of exposing the secret of a small village in the Pyrenees. The secret seems to have changed since Lincoln, a television writer, first began his investigation. Originally, it was about a lost treasure. In the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982), the secret was that Jesus survived the Crucifixion and escaped with Mary Magdalene to France, where they had children. Now the secret has something to do with what Lincoln calls "structured landscapes": equidistant geographical points that, when plotted on paper, form pentacles. Although he's not exactly sure what this means, he proposes that it proves the ancients had much more sophisticated measurement abilities than previously thought. If this were the whole book, readers, especially those not schooled in geometry, would lose interest fast. Fortunately, most of Lincoln's story is about how he came to uncover the mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau and some of the adventures and misadventures he's had along the way. Fans of the popular Holy Blood, Holy Grail will probably devour this, but others may think the real mystery is, How does Lincoln keep twisting the topic into new books? Ilene Cooper

Product Description

The mystery of Rennes-le-Château, the tiny village perched on a mountain top in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and the sudden, unexplained wealth of its flamboyant priest, Béranger Saunière, are explored in this highly entertaining book. Henry Lincoln sets down, for the first time, the dramatic story of his thirty years of delving into one of the strangest mysteries of modern times to show how the proofs finally lead to an astonishing revelation. Key to the Sacred Pattern takes us further into the hidden byways marked out by our ancestors and sets it upon provable and demonstrable foundations. The boundaries of the original riddle of Rennes-le-Château are extended, from the Pyrenees, to Britanny, and the Baltic Sea. Our ancestors were not, as we thought, primitive and unenlightened but far more gifted than we have ever imagined. Here is the lifting of the veil on a mysterious and dramatic legacy.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (November 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312214847
• ISBN-13: 978-0312214845
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,085,768 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Short, Enjoyable Read, March 19, 2000

By	Dan tdaxp "tdaxp" - See all my reviews

Even though this book is split into two sections, there are really three distinct parts.

In the first Henry Lincoln gives a "light" account of his adventures with Rennes-la-Chateau. For those who've read The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail it is fun to hear of his first trip to Rennes, or his first meetingwith Plantard.

The second part is a recounting of the "purely objective" parts of the mystery. It's all pentagons, but not as obsessive as THE TOMB OF GOD.

The third part is admitedly speculative. If you've read the "Affirmations" section of The Dilbert Future, it's like that. Saying that there is not satisfactory proof for the thesis, but that it is worth investigating, he describes the layout of Bornholm island, Brittany, and Norway. There are some weird coincidences, like the persistance of the name "Rennes" (or something similar) in all these locations, but nothing is proven.

The last ten pages, which are part of the third section, argues that the English system is ancient and based on the distance between the poles. It's weird, possible, and not proven.

If you've just heard about Rennes-la-Chateau this is not the book for you. If you've already read much of it, and want some less heavy information about it, The Key to the Sacred Patternis the book for you.

56 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nothing really new here ...., August 28, 2001

By	Jeff Nyman (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

In a lot of ways this book is really Henry Lincoln responding to the BBC2 television programme "History of a Mystery" which did much to disprove not only his own book ("Holy Blood, Holy Grail") but the derivative work "Tomb of God." This is also Lincoln's way to distance himself (only slightly, however) from the Priory of Sion story (which has very much been proven to be a hoax) and stick more with the geometry aspects of the story (which were really investigated first by David Wood in 1985).

This book is basically just Henry Lincoln setting down the events of his creation of the BBC "Chronicle" programs in the 1970s that opened up the alleged mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau to the European community. He wants to show the path he took to allow people to see that he was not "duped" as he has often been accused of and that the path he followed was logical. To a certain extent, it probably was logical. However, what Lincoln fails to acknowledge in this book (and all his other books) is that Jean Luc-Chaumeil, who does get mention in "Sacred Pattern," basically "ratted out" Pierre Plantard and the alleged Priory of Sion. Chaumeil's work has shown that the Priory was nothing more than a hoax that was started up by Pierre Plantard, who really was in a group of the same name that was started in 1956 by Andre Bonhomme. Thus, Lincoln was "duped." As was Gerard de Sede before him. He fell for the hoax, realized it, and then tried to latch on to another element of the "mystery" that seemed to have more promise and did not involve a "secret society." Lincoln also never mentions the massive contributions to the "mystery" by Jacques Riviere, Pierre Jarnac, and Rene Descadeillas. (He does briefly mention Descadeillas but then dismisses him without any explanation.) He also does not mention that he was presented with evidence from Jean Luc-Chaumeil before the publication of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" that showed the Priory of Sion was a hoax and that he ignored. Lincoln, in his more recent research, has only concentrated on the alleged geometric aspects of the so-called mystery and he has given up trying to promote the Priory of Sion. That is basically what this book is about: setting up his new element of mystery, the alleged odd geometry. (He also did this because his 1991 "The Holy Place" is largely out of print and thus many of his fans were not aware of the extent of his work in this regard.

All in all, this is a relatively okay book if you want to try to get a very chronological fashion of how certain events happened during the course of the research, which is important to determine the veracity of an independent researcher like Lincoln. However, there is absolutely nothing new in this book that you could not read in "The Holy Place" or in the books that were co-authored with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. I would definitely not recommend this book unless you feel you just have to read everything on the story or you feel you need a "blow-by-blow" account, as it were, of Lincoln's research pattern.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sensible account of an unsolved mystery re early humans., September 29, 1999

By A Customer

Did people whom we think of today as 'prehistoric' and even 'primitive' actually have a greater knowledge of mathematics, surveying and what are called 'correspondences' than we moderns? The 'sacred pattern' of the title is a bunch of circles, pentagons and hexagons and other symbolic figures which has been found writ at large - over some seven square miles - in the landscape of a small area of rural France. Henry Lincoln, infamous for his 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' now takes us on a sensible, believable journey of discovery. This account is fascinating reading: it is not wooly New Age stuff; Lincoln sticks to the very remarkable facts of the landscape, and arouses an astonishing number of questions about our early ancestors.