Rosslyn Chapel Mystery

From November 6 through 21, 2002, I kept a “Road Diary” of our participation in The Healing Arts Festival in London, England, followed by 10 days in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Click HERE to read the entire diary:)

The following excerpt is from the Saturday, Nov. 16th entry -- the day we visited Rosslyn Chapel a few miles out of Edinburgh.

We arrive at the medieval structure three-and-a-half hours after beginning our journey. The sky is slate gray and it’s raining and cold. My first impression is a dark foreboding, as if the stone-carved, gargoyle-like figures serving as rain spouts might swoop off the roof to warn us away. Tara, on the other hand, feels an immediate affinity. I know little about Rosslyn upon my arrival, except that it was built in 1446 upon a sacred Druid site. I don’t yet realize this chapel will open some challenging new doors to be researched.

In the book, “The Temple and the Lodge”(Arrow Books) 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.’”

“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.

“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, Cheyenne and I are in awe. In all our travels, we’ve never seen anything to compare with this 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, 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.

Rossyln Chapel is a mystery I need to better understand. I’ll begin with a couple books and see where they lead.

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