WEB OF GOLD. The Secret History of a Sacred Treasure. Guy Patton and Robin Mackness. Sidgwick & Jackson. 2000. ISBN 0 283 063440. 331pp. Hardcover £17.99.

Six years ago, I was writing a movie script with Columba Powell backed by the European Script Fund: a ludibrium on the theme of René Daumal’s “mountain that cannot not exist” (Mt Analogue), the pioneers of cinema and the story of Simon Magus and his eternal consort, Helen. In pursuit of a cosmic humour suitable for Olympian leisure – as well as our “lost film of the Resurrection” – we headed off for a fortnight’s dip into the “deep delvèd earth” of Languedoc’s Corbières region. We required a physical location for a metaphysical idea: the mountain where time and space dissolve in an epiphany of spirit, love and laughter. We found it. A ruined castle, at the time unknown to tourism, high in the hot serrated mountains: Auriac – from the Latin, a place of gold. Perfect. We had our centre and did not err. From this point, our imaginations radiated a great pentagram of happy alignments: all part of our geophysical plot, all part of our geometrical joke and the greatest film never made. Happy were we because the gold we sought flowed from the Golden Age, “when gold was nothing; no more than the sand beneath your feet.”
    Alas! Others have sought here for that other gold. No wonder local legends have declared that the Devil protects its hidden treasure! Of course he does; he knows his own. Robin Mackness, one of the authors of this book, was lucky to escape with his life. A photo shows his bullet-riddled BMW after French security services arrested him on suspicion of exporting bullion.
    Guy Patton, the co-author, tried to explain to Mackness why this may have happened. It was all to do with ‘Nazi gold’ – looted or dug from the body of the Corbières (perhaps). Perhaps the citizens of Oradour sur Glane paid the SS’s price for a Resistance attempt to halt the gold’s abduction. Perhaps this was treasure looted from the Jerusalem Temple in AD70; perhaps it was Visigothic treasure secreted long ago; perhaps it was the ‘lost treasure’ of the Cathars; perhaps it was the lost treasure of the Templars; perhaps it was that sought by Scottish Rite Freemasons, Martinists, Napoleon, the SS – and our own Bro Michael Baigent (The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail. 1982). Perhaps Berenger Saunière found part – or all – of it, and paid for his Pyrenean paradise a century ago.
    Perhaps you should buy this book. I did, and do not regret it. I read Web of Gold at speed in two enjoyable sittings. Fascinating it is – but is it all true?
    One photograph speaks volumes. François Mitterand – a man who the book shows had interesting wartime links to the Catholic ultra-right and the Vichy régime – is shown touring the battlements of Saunière’s pacific villa at Rennes le Château, his presidential face – as ever – giving nothing away. We do not get to the bottom of this great mystery, but we have much evidence and sufficient clues presented to us (and well presented in the main – though the medieval part of the story is often second-hand and shop-soiled at best) to see that people of sound mind have believed in a treasure-mystery for centuries.
    Back in ’94, Columba and I sought a fiction. Outside of our script, we never saw the name ‘Auriac’ – until, that is, we read p.63 of this book: “In 746, the mines at Auriac were exploited jointly by the monks of the Abbey of St Martin d’Albières and the Lords of Rennes.” Well exploited too. The hamlet of Auriac is now on the tourist’s official itinerary of “Cathar Castles”. Publicity ruins most ruins.
    I have lived and loved in Languedoc and have oft drunk of her gold: given freely, without a shot being fired; fit for a king and unseen by the world. ‘Lost Gold’ indeed.
    Tobias Churton