The Economics Of Apocalypse

How’re you feeling about 2012? Admit it, you’re just a little bit nervous. Don’t be ashamed, the end of the world can do that to people. Well, if you want to survive that Mayan prophecy, I know where you should go. Bugarach is a small village of 200 souls located in Southern France. You wouldn’t be alone: 10,000 people are set to seek refuge in the town at the end of next year. Why? Because according to a bizarre blend of myths and coincidences, the peak of Bugarach is said to be the only place that’ll be spared after a huge and devastating flash of lightning crashes down on Earth on December 21st, 2012.

As if to prove that this planet is ripe for Armageddon, if you climb that mountain now, you’ll find a lot of people happily making money from the string of suckers desperate to save themselves from cosmic obliteration. I’m a borderline sucker, so I went to join them. After riding two trains and renting a car, we reached Bugarach, stopping at a bed and breakfast called La Maison de la Nature – 'the House of Nature'. Coincidentally, our sanctuary was being shared by an unprepossessing shaman called Jean-Gilles, and his eight-strong enlightenment team. He refused to speak to me, holing up in his teepee, masticating, no-doubt, on the secrets of the cosmos. Men like him aren’t rare round here. Annually, theology consultants, practitioners of the invisible world and other luminaries invested with a spiritual mission show up, offering mystical survival techniques to divine morons. According to a town official, these guys charge between 500 and 2,000 euros a week. $aving $ouls is hard work, after all.

This is a place buried in myth: the hidden grave of Mary Magdalene, treasure buried beneath churches, secret energy reserves, a time-warp gate, the corpse of Hitler and thousands of UFO sightings. Each myth adds just enough credibility to the next to give a surprising amount of people belief in the belief industry.

Within the “magical triangle” (formed by the three villages of Bugarach, Rennes-les-Bains, and Rennes-le-Château), are shops, agencies, camps and hotels, all of which provided spiritual assistance to those with the readies. We found two bookstores specialising in cults, a hotel hosting a conference on “psychic and occult pollution in the 21st Century”, a production house making moralising docufictions, and a shop selling a brand of hydrating cream made from Mary Magdalene’s DNA. They sold it for €150 but the clerk gave it to us for free. It had passed its use-by-date.

Every week Jean-Gilles takes his customers up the mountain. We followed them one day, watching them morris dance and embrace in their Gore-Tex jackets. Later, near the peak, Jean-Gilles announced they were going to “spend the night all the way on the top, sleeping in tents. It's a good way to recharge one’s batteries, here in the fresh air. From Russia with love!” Most of his followers were about 65, sweating dangerously and wearing purple silk headbands. I felt like reminding them of Aleister Crowley’s stupid expedition up Kangchenjunga.

Around Rennes-le-Château, I met Uranie, an old hippie who's lived around here since the 70s. Initially, he was part of a community of slightly louche guys who, it turns out, were big-shot drug traffickers in the South of France at the time. He took a lot of LSD, got sent to a mental institution for a spell, and now lives in a decrepit house decorated with mystical images and pictures of naked girls. Because of the wave of spiritual tourism, the town has been attempting to expropriate him for 15 years. “I was threatened by the mayor. They wanted to steal my land and demolish my house. They wanted to build an apartment complex for rich Scandinavians and Americans. They filed a suit against me, but they haven't called me in a while.” Armageddon theories have attracted an ever-growing mass of rich foreign mystics. In five years, the price of living has tripled. Restaurants are now more expensive than in Paris, and there are clusters of organic co-ops selling lavender-flavoured biscuits for €4 a box. Everyone hates a hippy. But when the hippies are pricing you out of the town you were born in with lavender-flavoured biscuits, you’re gonna hate twice as hard.

“They’re a bunch of cunts,” said a local kid about the hippies. His mates nodded. “We see them going up to the lake, moving a sign above their heads before bathing in the mud. Sometimes we see a van with crazy guys inside it. On the side of the vehicle, they wrote ‘COLLECTIVE SUICIDE’, but the police forbid them to drive in the village with a slogan like that. So they changed it to ‘SUI-CI-DE CO-LLEC-TIF’.” At Rennes-les-Bains, I asked a hotel owner about his new guests while he was eating a slice of pizza at the bar of his own restaurant. “I see them everyday. I know them well; I even hang out with them. They’re not bad people, they come here to bathe in the spa and do stuff with rocks. At the restaurant, they choose their meals by putting a pendulum above the menu.” In truth, these people are sustaining his business, but still, he couldn’t help but piss himself when he talked about them.

Just before we left this ridiculous place, we went for a stroll in a magic forest located between Bugarach and Rennes-le-Château. A shaman brotherhood (that’s how they describe themselves) composed of Germans, Swiss and Austrians, had erected their tent and parked their Volkswagen there. They told me they came here to hide away and to benefit from the iron present in the nearby mountains. They come here twice a year. I asked one of them how much this biannual retreat cost. “Not that much, to be honest,” he said. “Hardly €10,000.” Buying a stairway to heaven, I guess.

WORDS BY JULIEN MOREL
PHOTOS BY MACIEK POZOGA