Rosslyn’s Pillars & Cubes Examining the evidence concerning Rosslyn Chapel’s famous pillars and its controversial “musical cubes” (An earlier version of this article ran in the April 2010 edition of Girnigoe: Scotland’s Clan Sinclair Magazine)
By Jeff Nisbet
Rosslyn Chapel, 1828, by David Roberts
D
uring the last ten years or so, but especially since the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, some of the more esoteric theories surrounding certain elements of the architectural enigma we know as Rosslyn Chapel have taken a bit of stick, and I have been responsible for some of it. Let’s take a look at two of them -- first the chapel’s famous pillars, and then its so-called “musical cubes.” The text for John Slezer’s 1693 collection of copper engravings “of all the King’s Castles, Pallaces, towns, and other notable places in the kingdom belonging to private subjects,” the T h e a t rum Scotiae, was written by Robert Sibbald, Geographer Royal for Scotland. In part, here is what Sibbald had to say about Rosslyn Chapel (emphasis mine): “This Chapel lies in Mid-Lothian, Four Miles from Edinburgh, and is one of the most curious Pieces of Workman-ship in Europe. The Foundation of this rare Building was laid Anno 1440 by William St Clair, Prince of Orkney, Duke of Holdenburgh, &c. A Man as considerable for the publick Works which he erected, as for the Lands which he pos-
sess’d, and the Honours which were conferred upon him by several of the greatest Princes of Europe. It is remarkable that in all this Work there are not two Cuts of one sort. The most curious Part of the Building is the Vault of the Quire, and that which is called the Prince’s Pillar so much talk’d of.” What are we to make of the fact that the pillar we now refer to as the Apprentice or Prentice Pillar was, in the late 1600s, known as the Prince’s Pillar, and had indeed been known as such long enough to be “much talk’d” about? Eight decades later, in his 1774 An Account of the Chapel of Roslin, the Bishop of Caithness, Robert Forbes, supposes that the Prince’s Pillar was so named because of the chapel’s “princely founder,” and then goes on to relate, for the first time anywhere, the by-then-well-known legend of the slain apprentice, killed in a jealous rage by Rosslyn’s master mason for carving the pillar during the master’s absence -- a tale only marginally reminiscent of the murder of Hiram Abiff, grand architect of the Temple of Solomon, an act that is central to freemasonic ritual. The legend, Forbes claims, is
Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com
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Left: Detail from Samuel Dukinfield Swarbreck’s 1837 East Aisle or Lady Chapel, Rosslyn Chapel. Right: Photo by Thomas Vernon Begbie, circa 1880.
“a tradition that has prevailed in the family of Roslin, from father to son.” The legend has since enjoyed a long and robust life, but its dodgy provenance has recently given rise to a number of books that insist the chapel’s symbolism is strictly Christian, and cannot be considered in any way freemasonic. While I am of the studied opinion that Rosslyn was built to preserve and pass forward certain occult knowledge, as those of you who have read my work will know, there’s no doubt that the architectural fabric of the chapel has been tampered with over the last two centuries in an over-zealous attempt to further a Masonic agenda. As just one example, let’s consider the pillar now known as the Master’s Pillar. First, let’s compare the detail from Samuel Dukinfield Swarbreck’s 1837 lithograph of Rosslyn’s Lady Chapel, shown above-left. Then compare the pillar in the foreground of that detail with the same pillar in Thomas Vernon Begbie’s circa 1880 photograph next to it, taken after architect and freemason David Bryce’s 1860’s restoration of the chapel interior. To all appearances it seems that Bryce’s work went
far beyond the remit of simple restoration. And yet, an entry in the Scottish Records Office seems to indicate that Bryce actually discovered an ornate inner pillar that at some point in time had already been partially restored and concealed beneath a false exterior. That entry, dated 1861 and referenced as GD 164/Box12/21, reads as follows: “David Bryce describes the pillar on the opposite side and corresponding with the Apprentice Pillar: ‘It has at one time been ornamented not in a spiral form but with upright ornament which has been partly cut out and new stone introduced, and other stones where entire being plastered over. The introduced plain stone is white, the original is red.’” Whether or not you are predisposed to believe that Bryce was lying in order to establish that two ornate pillars had existed in Rosslyn from the time of the chapel’s original construction, thereby lending credence to the idea that the Masonic pillars of Boaz and Jachin had been intended by the builder, the evidence of your eyes should indicate that the drab and unrestored pillar shown in Swarbreck’s 1837 lithograph is of an obviously angular construction, unlike all other chapel pillars.
Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com
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Left: Samuel Dukinfield Swarbreck’s 1837 The Interior of Rosslyn Chapel. Above: Screenshot from Tommy and Stuart Mitchells’ YouTube presentation, The RosslynStave Angel --Music Cipher.
Solomon’s directions.” So, Sibbald’s naming of the Prince’s Pillar may have had nothing to do with the founder’s “princely origins.” The pillar we now know of as the Prentice Pillar may, in fact, have originally been the Master’s Pillar. And now, on to Rosslyn’s “Musical Cubes.” Many of you will know that today’s varied patterns on the 213 cubes that hang down from the ceiling ribs of Rosslyn’s Lady Chapel have been long thought to hold a musical code, and that the father-and-son team of Tommy and Stuart Mitchell, a few years ago, came up with a solution to that code that resulted in a commercially successful book and a musical composition titled The Rosslyn Motet. Many of you will also know that I subsequently wrote an article on the Mitchells’ solution, now archived on my website at mythomorph.com, taking issue with its veracity, and used as evidence the 1837 Swarbreck, showing the sorry state of the cubes before their restoration in the 1860s by architect David Bryce. In that article, the Mitchells’ “Stave Angel” is described as “holding a stave of music, and is pointing to notes on the stave that exactly correspond with the Chladni patterns shown on the first three cubes above the angel’s head and, astonishingly, that these three notes account for 70 percent of the entire cube sequence.” Chladni patterns are caused when a “sustained note is used to vibrate a sheet of metal covered in powder, producing marks.” The marks produced by different notes can “include flowers, diamonds and hexagons -shapes all present on the Rosslyn cubes.” My article did not convince the True Believers that the Mitchells’ claims were suspect, perhaps because the Swarbreck drawing I used as evidence was not of a sufficiently high resolution. I have since acquired a large-format and high-quality reproduction of his original drawing, and have included a section of it on the following page for your inspection.
One other theory about the naming of the Prentice Pillar, albeit a rather mundane one, bears mention. Contemporaneous to the building of the chapel there was, in the East Midlands town of Chellaston, England, a renowned alabaster quarry and workshop of the firm Prentys and Sutton. Perhaps master carver Thomas Prentys carved the Prentys Pillar. While there may be no legitimate tie to freemasonry afforded by the legend of the slain apprentice -- a legend that is not unique to Rosslyn Chapel -- my recent research has shown that there may indeed by a symbolic tie, however tenuous, between the building of the chapel and the building of Solomon’s Temple. In James Anderson’s 1723 Constitutions, which utilizes some of freemasonry’s oldest manuscripts, is the following description of the building of Solomon’s Temple (emphasis mine). “Dagon’s Temple, and the finest structures of Tyre and Sidon, could not be compared with the Eternal God’s Temple at Jerusalem. There were employed about it no less than 3,699 Princes or Master-Masons, to conduct the work according to
Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com
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High-resolution detail from Samuel Dukinfield Swarbreck’s 1837 The Interior of Rosslyn Chapel. Note that the cubes above the Mitchells’ “Stave Angel” are missing, and that the balance of that particular arch is also missing. Note, too, that all of the surviving cubes in that year were of the same design (shown inset).
As you study it, note that the three all-important cubes above the angel were actually missing in 1837. Note, too, that there are many other cubes missing in the area of the drawing shown and, finally, note something that I did not mention in my original article as published -- that the cubes shown to exist in 1837 are all of the same design (shown inset, above). My conclusion: There was no message encoded in the patternns of Rosslyn’s cubes, musical or otherwise, by the builder of the chapel But, as I’ve said, the mystery of the cubes was not new. Three years before the Mitchells’ revelation, in response to a 2002 news report that certain parties in Scotland were attempting to decipher a coded message in the cubes, Tim WallaceMurphy, co-author (with Marilyn Hopkins) of Rosslyn: Guardian of the Secrets of the Holy Grail, claimed there was indeed a message hidden in their arrangement. The relevant part of his claim reads as follows: “When Marilyn and I went to Rosslyn in June of 1997 or 1998 to take photographs for ‘Rosslyn Guardian of the Secrets of the Holy Grail,’ Marilyn was at a loose end as I pointed my box-brownie at the various carvings we needed as illustrations. Her knowledge of medieval symbolism is almost as good as my own, but she has an added talent -- superb spiritual insight. Within a short space of time she had discovered the key to the order in which the cubes are to be read. “When the designs on the cubes are plotted in the revealed
order, repeating patterns emerge in the symbols which may well, to any good cryptographer or cryptographic computer programme, reveal the hidden message within the carvings. “We are prepared to share our insights with any interested party of repute subject only to a binding and enforceable contract containing two main conditions i.e. that any knowledge so revealed shall be placed in the public domain where it rightly belongs and that Marilyn and I be given the right to publish the findings first.” A few months later, when I had the temerity to suggest that some changes had been made to the original architectural fabric of the chapel -- a suggestion that should now seem farless preposterous to some of you than it did then -- Tim had this to say: “Having examined the carvings in Rosslyn in detail by means of scaffolding and an air hoist may I make the following observations: 1) The present carving of the Madonna in the main body of the chapel is new. 2) The Head of the so-called ‘Murdered Apprentice’ once had a beard that has been chiselled off. 3) The monk carrying the chalice in the SW window has been subjected to some degree of violence. 4) Apart from natural degeneration, which sadly in some cases is considerable, there is, other than those mentioned above, as far as I am aware, no new carvings or significantly altered carvings within the main body of the original chapel since the barrel vaulted roof was installed. However I could be wrong, after all I have only spent about twelve years examining this fascinating place and there is
Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com
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Mark Your Calendars: The new and improved Rosslyn Motet website (left) as it looked 105 days before the 19 March 2011 Rosslyn Motet 2011 Concert and Science Tour [postponed from 8 December 2010]. Right: The Rosslyn Motet CD on sale at Rosslyn Chapel’s online store.
still much to learn.” I will not argue with Tim’s first three observations, but proper research in no way supports his fourth. As for his final sentence, I leave it to you to decide his reason for writing it. Truth, given the benefit of hindsight and sufficient humility, may still conquer all -- eventually -- or so I thought when I first published this paper in the April 2010 edition of Girnigoe: Scotland’s Clan Sinclair Magazine.. I have since learned that on 19 March 2011 (postponed from 18 December 2010) The Rosslyn Motet will, once again, be played within the walls of the chapel. “The Rosslyn Motet Concert and Science Tour” will, it is announced, give attendees “the opportunity to hear a full (new score) version of the Rosslyn Motet as yet unheard in its complete form,.” at just £35 for the tour and concert, and just £22.50 for the concert only. The musical/science tour, we are told, would be “hosted by Stuart Mitchell who will explain and demonstrate the incredible decoding process that eventually arrived at the piece of music that was so carefully embedded into the architecture of Rosslyn Chapel.” But that’s not all. We are also told what lies ahead for the Mitchells. “Since the realisation of the music in 2005, Stuart and Tommy Mitchell have discovered some incredible new information which will be published later this year in our new book ‘The Rosslyn Key’ and focuses upon the Chapel’s relationship with the planet Venus and the mythical mountain ‘Mount Meru.’ This new research is in collaboration with musicologist Richard Merrick (USA) and will also be discussed during the tour to further enhance the natural architectural beauty that is Rosslyn Chapel and the place it holds in our hearts.” Hmm ... Back in 2003, with the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and in 2005, with the world-wide release to the non-reading public of Ron “Opie” Howard’s movie of the same name, it became apparent that there were, in fact, two
huge audiences with pockets to pick -- those who were eager to believe in the “heresies” promoted therein, and those who were not. Each side in the controversy showed a willingness to buy, with good folding money, evermore literary and cinematic ammunition to lob at the other, and more is what they got -- in spades. Almost as quickly as the presses could roll, the Da Vinci Code also-rans appeared on the book shelves. Liberally festooned with market-researched and browser-friendly buzzwords, there suddenly appeared books that “decoded” Brown’s work, those that promised the “real history” behind it, “Dummies” editions and “Rough Guide” travel tomes that would take you to all the “secret” places where, for centuries, the timid had not dared to ask the really hard questions: Did Jesus Christ die on the cross, or did he survive, marry Mary Magdalene and have children? One of those secret places was Rosslyn Chapel, and one of those books was Mark Oxbrow and Ian Robertson’s Rosslyn and the Grail. Arguably the most successful debunking book to come down the pike in quite some time, second only to Robert Cooper’s The Rosslyn Hoax, Oxbrow and Robertson’s Rosslyn and the Grail has, paradoxically, been advertised on Stuart and Tommy Mitchell’s Rosslyn Motet site for at least three years, perhaps because the four all appeared in Dan Burstein’s critically acclaimed 2006 documentary, Secrets of the Code, narrated by Susan Sarandon and spawning a best-selling series of similarly controversial and eminently bankable products. Rosslyn and the Grail co-author Ian Robertson will be sharing the bill with the Mitchells on their big day, and will be delivering a “History of Rosslyn Chapel.” I ended my 2007 paper on The Rosslyn Motet by paraphrasing a quote by Mark Twain: “A lie can be half way around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” I will end this paper with another Twain classic: “The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sewn thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal.” END
Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com
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