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SATURDAY, NOV. 16:
ROSSLYN CHAPEL I’m really over the bother of long hair -- at least for awhile. Tara agrees to play beautician and it ends up SHORT. This morning we’re going to Rosslyn Chapel, a site the woman in the Wicca store told Tara about. It’s about seven miles south of Edinburgh. Our big mistake today is not hiring a cab to take us directly there. But since we know the bus system and it’s so easy, we decide to board a bus. The bus we’re told to take doesn’t exist. The bus lady says go here. We do. They don’t have a bus. We walk to main bus station. It no longer exists. Tara becomes fiercely determined and that’s an understatement. We finally board a bus that takes us to Penicuik, a town close to the village of Roslin, where Rosslyn Chapel is located. This is also the town where the first sheep were cloned. Later, upon looking at a map, I realize we’re as far from Roslin, in the other direction, as we were in Edinburgh There are no visible cabs in Penicuik, but there is a cab stand. But without a cab company name we can’t call, there are no yellow pages and information doesn’t work. Tara asks the Universe to send her some angels. A teenager appears and dials a company by name. A cab will try to come within 45 minutes. So we sit in a tea shop and wait. Instead of our cab arriving, a man parks his car in the cab zone and comes into the shop to obtain change. I talk to him. His name is Willie, his car is a cab, although not the one we called. He will take us to Rosslyn, come back and get us when it closes and then drive us back to Edinburgh. Willie is our angel. |
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In the book, “The Temple and the Lodge” by Baigent and Leigh, the authors describe their first visit to Rosslyn: “Perched on the very edge of the gorge is an eerily strange edifice, Rosslyn Chapel. One’s first impression is that it appears to be a cathedral in miniature. Not that it is particularly small. But it so overloaded, so dripping with Gothic carvings and floridly intricate embellishments, that it seems somehow to be a truncated part of something greater -- like a fragment of Chartres, transplanted to the top of a Scottish hill. “The interior of the chapel is a fevered hallucination in stone, a riotous explosion of carved images and geometrical configurations piled on top of one another, flowing into one another, overlapping one another. One finds one-self in what appears to be a petrified compendium of ‘esoterica.’” |
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“Scotland The Best” (Harper Collins) travel guide by Peter Irvine calls the chapel, “Freemason central and New Age fuel station: stories abound of the Holy Grail hidden in the walls ...” “Time Out Guide Edinburgh” (Penguin Books) says, “... the chapel is a fantastic blend of pagan, Celtic, Christian and Masonic symbolism. It has more ‘green men’ than any other building in Britain -- over 100 have been counted. There is a bizarre twisted pillar for which the maker is said to have been killed, representations of the seven sins and virtues, whole orchestras of carved musicians and what may be the death mask of Robert the Bruce. |
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A Pagan “Green Man” -- one of 100 in the chapel. |
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“Questions abound. Why are there carvings of new world plants, such as Indian corn, carved over 100 years before Columbus ‘discovered’ America? Was the chapel built as a copy of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and thus have little to do with the New Testament? What lies beneath the floors -- the Scrolls of the original Temple, the Ark of the Covenant, the true Stone of Destiny, 20 barons or Knights Templar or even the head of John the Baptist? And where is the secret entrance to the crypt?” The chapel doors are wide open, so it’s as cold within as without. After the first few minutes of exploring the interior, Tara and I are in awe. In all our travels, we’ve never seen anything to compare with the weird mix of occult and Christian symbolism. Obviously, the builder included the Pagan symbols to entice local Pagans to embrace a new religion. But there is so much more that doesn’t seem to make sense. The Knights Templar were forcibly dissolved in 1312, but they’re represented here in combination with what appear to be Freemasonry symbols. The Masons, however, supposedly didn’t come into being until the sixteenth century. Today the chapel is officially an Episcopalian church. While I review Rosslyn books, the girls remain in the chapel to do a meditation. Tara leads and is soon speaking as if she were channeling. This evidently lasts 15 minutes. They bless the chapel, Scotland, the US, their own lives and they pray for peace in the world. During a sourcing segment, they ask for experiences they need to grow, and for health, happiness, abundance, creativity and harmony with others. I’m sure there was more, but that’s the recap as told to me. |
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Rossyln Chapel is a mystery I need to better understand. I’ll begin with a couple books and see where they lead. Click HERE for the continuation
of Dick’s London/Edinburgh
2002 Road Diary |
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