Crusade Against the Grail - Rennes-le-Chateau Research and ...

REPANSE DE SCHOYE 109
summit of the Tabor, transformed herself into a white dove and flew to the
mountains of Asia. Esclarmonde did not die. She continues to live in Earthly
Paradise.
. . . Ethnise, where the Tigris flows out of Paradise.
WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH
My shepherd of the Tabor was relating timeless wisdom. Don't elves play in
the moonlight around the crystal clear springs in their native Pyrenees? Don't the
oak trees on the Tabor speak to the shepherds, who are so far from God's world, by
rustling their leaves? The guaranteed-authentic story that the ninety-year-old
peasant of Ornolac told me shows that the grandchildren of the Druids and bards,
of the Cathars and troubadours, are today's mystics and poets. He asserted that he
saw a snake on the Tabor that bit its tail and shook itself as it formed a circle at the
abyss of the Sabarthes toward the snow-covered summit of Montcalm's peak.
Today, Pyrenean peasants still idealize the world that surrounds them and
consider it enchanted. The Cathars and the troubadours are long dead, but can the
human desire for Paradise and God ever be extinguished? Three times the Tabor
was cursed and three times it burned in flames. Six hundred years later, a day
worker from the town of Ornolac pretends to have seen the symbol of eternity: a
snake that bites its tail.
Esclarmonde did not die, a shepherd told me on the Pathway of the Cathars.
She continues to live. . . .
According to Wolfram, the Grail Queen Repanse de Schoye was an aunt of
Parsifal. Esclarmonde married the Viscount Jordan de Lille y Gimoez, who was in
a way the stepbrother of Trencavel, given that the Houses of Carcassonne and
Comminges were united in the tenth century under the scepter of Asnar, a
Cantabrian prince. For this reason, the coats of arms of Carcassonne and
Comminges were identical.
At the death of Jordan (circa 1204), Esclarmonde renounced her inheritance,
divided it between her six sons who were of age, and returned to her mountainous
homeland. After receiving the consola-mentum at the hands of the Son of
Belissena Guilhabert de Castres, she established her residence in the Castellar de
Pamier, a place that her brother Raimon-Roger (the Raimon Drut of the
troubadours) gave her