Rosslyn Treasury Page 2

  ‘There ye see it, gentlemen, with the lace bands winding sae beautifully roond aboot it. The maister had gane awa to Rome to get a plan for it, and while he was awa his ‘prentice made a plan himself and finished it. And when the maister cam back and fand the pillar finished, he was sae enraged that he took a hammer and killed the ‘prentice. There you see the ‘prentice’s face — up there in ae corner, wi’ a red gash in the brow, and his mother greeting for him in the corner opposite. And there in another corner, is the maister, as he lookit just before he was hanged; it’s him wi’ a kind o’ ruff roond his face.’

  An aspect of the story that she did not relate was that similar legends are told of Huish Episcopi in Somerset, of windows in Melrose Abbey, and of Lincoln and Rouen Cathedrals, which perhaps indicates that the truth is here disguised in a legend understood by those concerned in the building of Christian churches.

  The chapel restored

  Queen Victoria, visiting in 1842, also indicated her concern for the fabric of the building, and hoped that ‘so unique a gem should be preserved to the country,’ but it was in 1861, that Lady Helen Wedderburn of Rosebank, and the Rev R. Cole, the Military Chaplain of Greenlaw, had the inspiration, quite independently of each other, that the chapel should once again become a place of worship. The Third Earl of Rosslyn was so enthusiastic about this idea, that he put the matter into the hands of the prominent architect Sir David Bryce. Bryce gladly took up the work, and there was generous support from several interested parties. The work was thorough, and the chapel was rededicated in 1862.

  Bryce, himself a Freemason, saw so much symbolism familiar to Freemasons in the chapel that he incorporated new carvings showing quasi-angelic beings in Masonic gestures along the east wall in the Lady Chapel. The great inspiration for both the Templars and the Freemasons is the Temple of Solomon. Certainly Solomon’s Temple was an inspiration for the first builders of Rosslyn, and this is reflected in some of the chapel’s original carvings.

  Further work was undertaken by the Fourth Earl of Roslin, who added the baptistery with an organ loft above it in the years 1880–81. Rosslyn Chapel was now a fully functioning Episcopalian church. It was the Collegiate Church of Saint Matthew, once again, after a gap of two and a half centuries.

  Rosslyn becomes famous

  A century after its rededication, Trevor Ravenscroft, author of The Spear of Destiny and The Cup of Destiny became convinced that the chapel holds one of the great mysteries of medieval Christianity: the Holy Grail. The cup used by Christ at the Last Supper was, according to Ravenscroft, to be found within the Apprentice Pillar, encased in lead. Whatever was the process by which he arrived at this conclusion, he was certainly convinced of its truth, and campaigned to have the Pillar opened. This the chapel authorities, understandably, did not allow.

  Other books were published that included the chapel in their preoccupations, among which was Holy Blood and Holy Grail, published in 1989. This work connected the Sinclair or Saint Clair family with the Priory of Sion, a shadowy institution whose task was or is, allegedly, to protect the secret of the bloodline of the Merovingian kings of France, who were displaced in the eighth century by the Carolingian kings. The ‘secret’ is that the Merovingians were descended from Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene, Jesus having escaped from Jerusalem before the Crucifixion, lived happily ever after in the South of France. The supposed connection of the Sinclair family with the Priory of Sion naturally involved Rosslyn Chapel, built by the Sinclairs. If this scenario seems familiar, it was used by Dan Brown in his Da Vinci Code. This was the book which, more than any, sparked an interest in Rosslyn Chapel unprecedented in its history. An enormous amount of tourists have come to measure their own responses against the imaginations of the place put forward in so many popular books, newspaper articles, TV documentaries and so on. Never before had Rosslyn evoked so much interest on so global a scale.

  Two more discoveries have been made in the recent past. Stuart Mitchell, an Edinburgh composer, found that patterns on the cubic projections in the Lady Chapel have a close resemblance with Chladni patterns. These are patterns formed by powder or fine sand on a metal plate when a violin bow is drawn along its edge. Different plates may be tuned to certain musical tones, and these form distinct patterns. Mitchell took down these patterns from the carvings, worked out what tones they represent, and wrote a motet based on the tones, which he has scored for the instruments to be seen carved on to the capitals of the pillars in the chapel. The work, called The Rosslyn Motet, is available now on CD, and is a simple but strangely haunting piece of work. Interestingly, it contains the so-called ‘Devil’s chord’, the augmented fourth, banned by the Catholic Church in religious music, as it sounded too disturbing. This chord opens the piece and appears again towards the middle.

  The second recent discovery is of a small window, pentagonal in shape, and of red glass, that predates the rose window of 1844, and sits just above it. On Saint Matthew’s Day, September 21, and on March 21, the sun’s rays shine directly through the window, bringing a bright red light into the chapel. This window was rediscovered by Alan Butler and John Ritchie. They point out in their book Rosslyn Revealed that medieval churches were built to face the rising sun on the saint’s day connected with the church. Saint Matthew’s day is September 21, the autumn equinox. Rosslyn Chapel, being named for Saint Matthew, faces exactly due east, and hence receives the light of both the spring and autumn equinoxes. The small red window allows light to shine in to the chapel, as the equinoctial sun’s rays fall parallel with it, forming a bright aura round the face of Christ in the window in the west wall opposite, though, when the chapel was first built, there was no window; just a blank wall, the better to reflect the light of the equinoctial sunrise. It seems that the complexity of the chapel’s construction is still slowly being revealed and appreciated.

  As I write, Rosslyn Chapel sits under a canopy, a construction like a Dutch barn, to shield it from the worst attacks of the weather, and to allow the structure to dry out enough so that the carvings can be preserved more effectively than previously possible. Although this free-standing structure is not particularly attractive, it allows visitors to climb up on to a catwalk from which the roof and outer structure of the chapel can be more closely seen, and you can admire the surrounding countryside, especially the beautiful Roslin Glen. Important restoration work is projected for the near future. This is made possible by the revenue generated by the many thousands of visitors to Rosslyn every year, for after nearly six hundred years, it still is a place of pilgrimage.

  * The spelling ‘Roslin’ refers to the town, and sometimes the castle; ‘Rosslyn’ to the chapel. There are other variants, for instance, Rosling, Roscelyn; but we adhere to the most common versions.

  1. The Expulsion from Eden

  On the back of the pillar immediately behind the High Altar, and facing east, is a carving, much damaged, of the expulsion from Paradise. The ancient legends, many of which were collected by Micha Joseph bin Gorion under the title Mimekor Yisrael, tell us that there were worlds created by the gods before our world was created. ‘Enoch,’ says the old Hebrew story, ‘had been exalted beyond others of his kind in the very first world that preceded the world of Adam.’ In another of the old tales we are told that ‘a thousand worlds the Lord had created at the beginning. Then He created still more worlds, and He continued to create and destroy worlds, until He created our world.’

  The Creation

  The Bible tells us that Adam was made on the sixth ‘day’ of Creation. The first of these ‘days’ saw the forming of heaven and earth, but all in a chaos, ‘without form and void’. The Elohim, or gods then said ‘Let there be light,’ and light and darkness became separated. The second day, or period of creation, saw the separation of the waters; those below and those above. On the third day, dry land appeared and the gathering of the waters below into the oceans of the world. The potential for plant life was given by the Elohim in this day. Sun, moon and stars appear
ed on the fourth day, and on the fifth, the creatures of the seas were brought into being. On the sixth day, the land animals were made, and mankind was created, bearing the imprint of the gods as the one made with an element of the divine, creative imagination.

  Next we learn an important thing: the human being was not yet of the earth, but a purely spiritual being, living in the imagination of the gods. He existed, but not yet as a physical being. The Bible tells us: ‘Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Thus the man became a living creature.’ This only happened after the Six Days of Creation that we read about in The Book of Genesis: ‘Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden away to the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.’

  In this island of peace, this garden in the east, Adam, the human being formed of the substance of the earth, lived. The Archangel Michael came to him with the Book of Wisdom, which contained all the wisdom of creation, but this was a wisdom that did not touch Adam’s innocence. This book he read until it became part of his nature, and he held it to his breast.

  But now the time came that what was masculine in Adam should be separated from what was feminine. Adam was made to fall into a sleep. The angels who had worked on the form of Adam’s body were then asked how they had done their work, and those who had made the ribs of Adam said: ‘We have made bones that reach out and clasp in an embrace to protect and support the heart and the breath, for the breath and the blood are the source of life.’

  Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of Eden

  Then said the Elohim: ‘Then you shall make woman to be the protector and preserver of life.’ Thus it was, and Eve was made by those angels who made the ribs, and upon the ribs of Eve they placed the organs of nutrition for the newborn, so that any child born to a woman would be held close to the heart, and hear its beating, and close to the breath, and feel its warmth, as they fed at the breast. To Eve was given the womb, and to Adam the seed.

  Then Adam awoke, and beheld his wife, and the light of the gods veiled them in glory, though they could still behold each other.

  Now the Devil, who had been a bright archangel in Heaven, had been angry at the creation of Adam, for it was said among the gods that this was one who would take his place with the highest gods at the end of time. He pondered how he could bring Adam and his wife Eve to their destruction. In the garden where the gods had placed them there grew two trees, the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Lord God had forbidden Adam to eat of the fruit of these trees, though of all the rest of the trees he freely could eat the fruit. So the Devil entered into the body of a serpent, and tempted Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit, but Adam, remembering what he had been told by the gods, and what he had learned in the Book of Wisdom, refused to eat.

  But Eve had not been made when the commandment was given. Now, some say that when the Devil came to her, she acted in ignorance of the commandment concerning the fruit of the forbidden trees, and that she sinned through the subtlety of the Devil’s wiles and cunning. Others say that she indeed knew the commandments, but saw the strength and power of the Devil, and knew that he was mighty. Therefore, she decided that she would make a sacrifice that would prevent worse evil coming into the world, for if the Devil did indeed finally tempt Adam to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life, then all would perish from the earth. But if they ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, their life would become arduous, but life would not perish from the face of the earth. She also knew that if Adam ate of the fruit of this latter tree first, his thinking would be hard and cold, but if she ate of it first, this would happen only after long passages of time and only after many generations had come and gone in the world.

  These are the stories of Eve’s temptation. Whoever has the right of it; Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and persuaded Adam to do the same. At once, the glory of holy light that veiled them faded away, and they appeared to each other as if naked. They found this nakedness shaming, and used leaves to cover themselves, and when they became aware of the presence in the garden of the gods, they strove to hide from them. The Lord God, seeing them in their nakedness, sent a high god, one of the Cherubim, to guard the gates of Paradise against them.

  In the days of their innocence, Adam and Eve were given everything that they needed. Now, they had to provide for themselves through their labour. Children would be born to them, but not in innocence, and their birth would be travail. They also knew that in their bodies of flesh and blood they were not immortal, but that these bodies would die, and their substance return to the earth from which they were made. Adam took with him from Paradise the Book of Wisdom, and this was handed down from generation to generation.

  Thus Adam and Eve were created in Paradise, and through the cunning of the Serpent they had to leave their paradisal beginnings. They began the work of the world, and their sons continued it.

  It is said by some that before Adam awoke, the gods looked upon Eve and saw that she was beautiful, and some tell that they fathered upon her the first-born of the world, whose name was Cain. She herself said: ‘I have gained a husband in the Lord’ or, the Lord is now my husband. The worst effects of the expulsion from Paradise were not yet felt in the birth of Cain. We are told further, in the old legends that he was born without pain after a pregnancy without suffering, but this is not told in all the tales. We learn that Cain was the first child, and after him came Abel. Abel was a shepherd, and a warden of the creatures of creation, whereas Cain took what the world gave him, but changed it. He made tools to drive into the earth to plant vegetables. His name means ‘Man of ability’. The gods were divided in their love for the sons of Adam, and some refused the offerings that Cain brought to the altar, and accepted the sacrifice of the lamb that Abel brought. Tension arose between the brothers, and Cain slew Abel because his offering was refused in favour of Abel’s.

  Thus, through Cain, the earth that had been virgin soil now lost that virginity, while the first spilling of blood upon the land was another loss of the earth’s innocence. Cain had to bear the responsibility for this through cycles of time.

  2. The Golden Legend

  In Rosslyn Chapel stands the Apprentice Pillar, and all the vegetation carved within the chapel seems to grow like the branches and foliage of a tree, from this pillar. It stands in the south-east of the chapel, and is wound round with garlands. At its roots are dragons that constantly gnaw away at them, to show that all life is in balance. This pillar represents the Tree of Life when it had intertwined itself with the Tree of Knowledge, and it stands like an archetypal plant, the source of all plant growth, inside the chapel, where only the undersides of the leaves are shown, and outside it, where the carved leaves show their upper sides.

  The Golden Legend

  Adam, with the Garden of Eden now closed to him, came at last to the end of his days. As he lay dying, he sent his son Seth to the Gates of Eden to bring back some drops of the Oil of Mercy to anoint him for his passing.

  Seth made his way through the hard and rocky terrain of the Land of Nod, and after a long and weary journey, he came in sight of the Gates of the Garden.

  ‘What do you wish for, Son of Adam?’ said a voice like a rushing wind.

  ‘I seek the Oil of Mercy for my father who is sick unto death,’ Seth replied, ‘and so I come here to beg for it.’

  ‘You know why your father may not approach these gates?’ the voice asked.

  ‘He ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,’ Seth answered, readily enough.

  ‘Just so,’ the angelic being replied, ‘and know, Son of Adam, that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has grown so close to the Tree of Life that they wind round each other, and are as a single tree. Now, turn your back, for the Gates will be opened, and you may not see within the Garden.’

  Seth turned his back, and after some little time had passed, he was bidden to turn round.
At his feet lay a small cruse of the Oil of Mercy, and three seeds.

  ‘My thanks for the oil,’ said Seth, ‘but what are these seeds?’

  ‘These are three seeds from the Trees that now grow as one. You should place them beneath the tongue of your father Adam before you lay him in the earth on top of the hill that shall be shown to you.’

  Seth returned and did as he was instructed, placing the seeds beneath Adam’s tongue at his death, before he was lain in the ground at the top of the hill.

  In time, the three seeds grew and wound round each other, making a single mighty tree.

  Enoch, the son of Seth, took a branch from the tree and planted it, and the branch grew into another great tree. From this tree he cut a staff which in time passed to Noah, and it was in his hand as he supervised the construction of the great Ark that was to survive the Flood.

  Once the flood waters had receded, and Noah was old and stricken in years, the staff was handed on to his son Shem. From Shem it passed to Abraham and it was inherited by Jacob.

  When Jacob went to visit Joseph when he grew to power in Egypt, he took the staff with him, and presented it to him as a gift. Joseph kept it and honoured it until his death, but when he died, it was looted from his house.

  After many generations had passed, it came into the hands of Jethro the Midianite. This was his priestly staff of office. Moses came to serve Jethro after his flight from Egypt, and after forty years had gone by, and Moses had served Jethro faithfully, Jethro gave the staff to Moses as symbol of his destiny when he should return to Egypt to bring the Children of Israel out of the Land of Goshen and the slavery that bound them.