“…Velay had a temple dedicated to Apollo, which was famous for the oracles it rendered; it was near the frontier of Auvergne on the summit of a rock on which later was built the castle of Polignac.”
-from Histoire de l’Eglise d’Auvergne, vol.I, by Lambert Elizabeth d’Aubert comte de Résie (1855).
In remote times, the land of Auvergne was the seat of the Gallo-Romans, peoples who
—like the Hellenistic Egyptians—revered a pantheon of syncretistic gods. Tradition relates that the most prominent of these supernal powers was a
His sanctum sanctorum was picturesquely situated on the summit of what Godfrey’s Almanack has called “the Olympus of France”: the Puy de Dome. Like other holy sites in the Roman Empire, the Gaulish temple of Mercury—with its votives, sacristans, and priests —was a fully functioning complex, attracting pilgrims from far and wide.
In the third century AD, this tabernacle was destroyed by the Germanic warlord Chrocus, but the memory of its grandeur and mystic ceremonials withstood the metamorphoses of political and religious regimes, surviving in the minds of Christian historiographers and their feudal seigneurs.
These men, eager to liken themselves to their pagan forefathers—as the humanists of Renaissance Florence were wont to do—saw traces of polytheistic Gaul in everything, but one site
In his Dialogo Pio et Speculativo (1560), Gabriel Simeoni, a Tuscan writer who visited the citadel in the 1500s, claimed that Polignac was home to a “Temple of Apollo” that was “still completely intact in the castle of Polignac”. Lauding the structure’s strength and nobility, Simeoni suggested that it was a reflection of the “most noble lords of Polignac”, a “precious gift” that had been allocated to them, and them alone.
To support the claim that Polignac had been the site of an ancient oracle, many writers and antiquaries pointed to the aristocratic family’s key heirloom, a giant mask supposedly used to conceal the hiding spaces of priestly ventriloquists while they were whispering Apollo’s ex-cathedra answers to inquiring pilgrims. “It is conjectured,” penned Sabine Baring-Gould in the Book of the Cevennes (1907), “that a colossal mask of stone, with open mouth, represents the bearded head of a local Apollo, and that priests concealed in the subterranean chamber uttered oracles which were made to issue from the mouth.”
Located in a nearby cistern, this
A few nineteenth-century historians, such as Jean Lebeuf, Francisque Mandet, and Prosper Mérimée, denied that the mask had any link to Apollo. Citing Mérimée and Lebeuf,
The truth, he asserted, was that Polignac’s medieval-era castellans, all of whom originally bore the surname Podemniaco, had seized relics from the ruins of Ruessium (modern-day Puy-en-Velay) and displayed them in the castle’s walls, as was the fashion at the time.
Over the ages, to
This reputation-building was no vain undertaking; it clearly worked. Scions of the Polignac family have held high-level diplomatic and ecclesiastical positions in France since the 1700s. Additionally, a direct descendant of the noble house, and one of the wealthiest persons in the world, now sits on the Monegasque throne.
The myth of the
“The building is of such antiquity,” he wrote, “and the situation so romantic, that all the feudal ages pass in review in one’s imagination, by a sort of magic influence; you recognize it for the residence of a lordly baron, who, in an age more distant and more respectable, though perhaps equally barbarous, was the patriot defender of his country against the invasion and tyranny of Rome.”
For those who were au fait with Gaul’s storied past and its real, but long-gone monuments, such as the Temple of Mercury, the Apollo at Polignac thesis must have seemed more than plausible. Essentially, their overeagerness served as jet fuel for the tale, providing energy for its take-off.
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