Rosslyn Treasury

by P. L. Snow

  Hosarsiph fled Egypt, making for the land of Midian. He took refuge with a wise old African priest, by the name of Jethro. In the threefold account that he made of his sojourn with Jethro the Ishmaelite, he tells how, while resting by a well, the seven daughters of this priest came to draw water to fill the troughs for their father’s sheep, but shepherds came to chase them from the well. Hosarsiph took the girls’ side, and drew water for the sheep himself. Thus, their father asked them to invite him to eat with them.

  During his time with Jethro, Hosarsiph knew that he had to do penance for the Egyptian overseer whom he had slain. Jethro took him to a cave where Hosarsiph was to fall into a deep sleep in which he left his body to seek the souls of those who had died, but were still tied to the earthly realm. There he had to seek out the soul of the slain overseer, ask his forgiveness, and show him the way out of the bonds of the earthly sphere, and direct him towards the light of the higher spiritual worlds.

  As highly initiated as he was, this was still no easy task for Hosarsiph, but after some time, it was done, and he emerged from the cave quite changed. To mark this change in himself, he now called himself ‘Moses’, the rescued one.

  Moses married Zipporah, one of Jethro’s daughters, and had a son by her called Gershom. Meanwhile, he worked as a shepherd for his father-in-law. One day, he saw a bush, all in flames, but the fire did not consume the bush. He went closer, but was stopped by a voice that told him to approach no nearer, and to take off his sandals, for he was in a holy place. This angelic voice identified itself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Filled with fear, Moses knelt, covering his face. The angel instructed Moses to return to Egypt to lead the children of Israel, the Habiru, out of bondage.

  ‘Who am I, that I should go to Pharoah and lead the Israelites out of captivity?’ asked Moses. The angel replied: ‘I am with you. Bring the children of Israel to this place, to worship God on this mountain.’

  ‘But if I go to the Habiru and say that the God of their forefathers has sent me to lead them, and they ask me His name, what shall I reply?’

  ‘I am that I am,’ the angel answered: ‘Tell them that I AM has sent you to them, and His name is Jahweh. Jahweh is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and say also that the God of their fathers has seen their suffering and heard their lamentation, and shall lead them out of Egypt into a land of milk and honey.’

  Moses recognized this God, the I AM. Osiris was, for the Egyptians, the countenance of this God, and Moses knew the Egyptian mysteries well. This God was coming closer to the world and to human beings, though the journey would be long.

  The return to Egypt

  It is said that Moses was forty years with Jethro. Now he left to fulfil the task laid upon him by the God who spoke to him from the burning bush, even though he had no faith in the power of his words to move Pharaoh. Sure enough, at first Pharaoh made the tasks of the children of Israel yet heavier than they had been before, but now Moses had the help of a brother initiate from the ranks of the Habiru, Aaron.

  He also had with him a staff given to him by Jethro, to help him accomplish his mighty tasks (see Chapter 2). This staff, it was said, had belonged to Seth, the son of Adam. Seth passed it on to Enoch, who gave it to Noah, who gave it to his son Shem, and his descendants, until it came into the hands of Abraham. From Abraham it went to Isaac, who passed it on to his son Jacob, who valued it above all other objects. When Jacob journeyed to Egypt to visit his son Joseph, he gave Joseph the staff as something of greater value than anything that he had given Joseph’s brothers. On Joseph’s death, the staff was passed on to the priests of Midian. Jethro was the greatest of these. When he received the staff, we are told that he planted it in his garden.

  In the threefold language in which he later recorded the story of the exodus from Egypt, Moses described how he and Aaron tried to persuade Pharaoh to let the children of Israel leave their life of slavery. First came a fierce debate with the priests of Egypt, which is given in the picture of the priests each throwing down his staff, which then turned into a serpent. Moses met this by throwing down his own staff, which, also became a serpent, and devoured the other serpents. However, this did not persuade Pharaoh.

  There then follows the tale of the Ten Plagues. In the face of Pharaoh’s obduracy, Moses turned the waters of the Nile and the drinking water into blood. Still Pharaoh refused to let the Habiru go. There followed a plague of frogs, then of maggots, of flies, a pestilence that attacked and killed livestock, a thick layer of dust, outbreaks of fierce boils on the Egyptians’ skin, hailstorms that destroyed growing crops, and an east wind bringing a cloud of locusts that devoured those crops not affected by the hail. None of these pestilences affected the children of Israel in the Valley of Goshen.

  Still Pharaoh refused to allow the children of Israel to leave. Moses then gave clear instructions to the Habiru to take a sacrificial lamb and smear its blood on the doorposts and lintels, to roast and eat the lamb, burning any remains, and leave nothing of it behind. The lamb was to be eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs; all this in preparation for a terrible scourge that would affect the first-born of the Egyptians.

  That night, the Angel of Death moved through Egypt, passing by the households where the doorposts and lintels were marked with the blood of the sacrificial lamb, but striking the first-born of Egypt.

  The exodus from Egypt

  At last Pharaoh’s obstinacy gave way. His army at the time was fighting away to the west of Egypt, and he did not have the resources to stop the great caravan of people and livestock that started eastwards, towards the land of the promise. Moses, Aaron and Miriam led the great procession towards the land that they hoped to make their home.

  They continued eastwards until they arrived at a finger of the Red Sea, known as the Sea of Reeds, somewhat to the west of the Gulf of Aqaba. Here they made camp, but became aware that they were being pursued by Pharaoh’s army, now returned from battle, and sent after them as Pharaoh’s need for vengeance for loss of face grew savage within him.

  Moses saw that, with the movements of the tides and the way the east wind was blowing, an opportunity had arisen for them to pass through the Sea of Reeds safely. At first the people were afraid to take the risk, but one young man among them waded out, and the others gradually followed his example, and the children of Israel crossed the Sea of Reeds without mishap.

  By the time Pharaoh’s army arrived at the shore, the wind had dropped and the tide was on the turn. So, when they attempted the same route through the waters, they perished.

  The people that Moses, Aaron and Miriam led did not yet know what to make of their leader, and whether to trust him. Thus the way was beset with quarrels and arguments, but always Moses managed to show strong leadership, and brought them to Sinai, where Jethro, Zipporah and the two sons of Moses, Gershom and Eliezer, met them. Moses greeted his father-in-law with extreme respect and reverence, and showed in his record of those times how it was the advice of Jethro that made him a more efficient and effective leader by teaching him how to delegate and mandate tasks among those able to take on such work

  The great caravan of the Habiru people had been joined by others on the way that had not undergone the slavery in Egypt, or the hazards of the journey. These had a powerful influence on the children of Israel, and while Moses was on the mountain in solemn communion with his God, Aaron found himself at a loss to know how to direct the yearning of the people for a god that they could understand, and bowed to pressure to make something that the people could at least see. After they had crossed the Sea of Reeds, they had been led by a pillar of cloud by day and a column of fire by night, but the notion of a god for whom there are no pictures or effigies possible was too abstract for them to grasp. So Aaron gathered gold and jewellery from the people and caused to be made a calf of gold, which the people then worshipped, led by the example of Moabite women who had joined them, and were known for their sinuous beauty and their ability to dance in a way that fired the ad
miration and appetites of the men.

  The golden calf and the Ark of the Covenant

  When Moses came down from the mountain, he was horrified and outraged at what he saw, and acted quickly to destroy the golden calf and to rout, with a sternness that could appear cruel, those who had instigated this turning away from the God who had led them from captivity towards the task that was to take them many generations to fulfil. During his sojourn on the mountain, Moses had received the inspirations that made clear what the law should be, and what were the tenets and instructions by which the society, whose leader he was, should conduct their lives. Chief among these was the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments at the basis of the Law. Moses had carved these on two tablets of stone, which, when he saw the dancing in worship of the golden calf, he dashed to pieces on the rocks.

  Once the unruly elements had been purged from the great camp, Moses again went up the mountain, and remained there for forty days and nights, fasting as he communed with his God. When he returned, bearing the newly made tablets of the law, he appeared to his people as though illuminated from within.

  While in communion with God on Mount Sinai, Moses received strict and detailed instructions for the construction of an ark, made of acacia wood, and plated with gold, decorated with precious stones, and covered with fine cloth. It was to be further embellished with two gold cherubim at each end of the ark, with wings outspread and pointing upwards. Their wings would act as a screen over the cover. The Lord commanded Moses: ‘Put the cover above the Ark, and put into the Ark the tokens that I shall give you. It is there that I shall meet you, and from above the cover, between the two cherubim over the Ark of the Tokens, I shall deliver to you all my commandments for the Israelites.’

  This mysterious structure, designed to be carried by four men as the Israelites journeyed through the wilderness, was to be the outward sign of the promise God made to the Children of Israel, and came to be known as the Ark of the Covenant. It was to accompany them wherever they went. There were ceremonies to be observed whenever the Ark was approached, and these were to be rigidly followed, otherwise, the consequences were drastic. The Ark of the Covenant became the central focus for the Israelites through all their wandering, and remained so when their great pilgrimage came to an end in the Land of Canaan. Through it, God spoke to them.

  Moses never saw his people arrive in the Land of the Promise. He died after forty years wandering in the desert. Moses was forty years in Egypt, forty years with Jethro and the priests of Midian, and forty years in the desert. No doubt the fires of life energy burned in him with a bright Zarathustra-like flame, but perhaps this time of forty years denotes something beyond simply the passage of a given time.

  The death of Moses

  When the Children of Israel finally became settled in the Promised Land, King David wished to build a temple to house the Ark of the Covenant, but this he was never to achieve. It was Solomon who was to carry this out, and then only with the help of a neighbouring king. The next chapter tells that story. The Temple of Solomon took forty years to build, and was representative of the transformation in the souls of those who strove to build it. Perhaps behind these stages of forty years is concealed the time in which an important inner transformation is accomplished? No doubt the children of Israel went through an important change during the time of their wandering, as they grew from an enslaved people to the bearers of a vital new impulse and possibility in the world; the development of abstract thought.

  What became of the Ark after the second destruction of the Temple in Roman times? No-one can say for sure, but a strange rumour describes how it was discovered, and taken, with an escort of Templar Knights, deep into the mountains of Ethiopia, where, according to some explorers, it remains to this day, still a potent and mysterious thing.

  7. The Temple of Solomon

  Rosslyn is built on the site of an old Temple of Mithras, a remnant of the Roman occupation (see also Chapter 8). Mithras worship began in Persia, and was a rigorously demanding process of initiation that bound Roman soldiers together in a military brotherhood in something of the same way that soldiers in Victorian times had Masonic Lodges specifically for military men, regardless of rank. Temples of Mithras were generally subterranean constructions, and thus it is that Rosslyn goes down into the ground as high as it rises above it. The existence of vaulted passages under the chapel is well known; the Sinclairs were laid there in their armour from its beginning until the year 1650.

  The Zerubabel architrave.

  There are, as we have noticed elsewhere in this work, all the signs of Templar influence in the building of the chapel, and the existence of the underground spaces that once were dedicated to Mithras took on a different identity when they became the vaults of Rosslyn. Those Templars who excavated beneath the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem took away with them certain things that they found there — no-one really knows what — and there is a tradition that these things were hidden in the vaults of Rosslyn: further, that this was the chief function and purpose of the chapel, to be a worthy place of concealment for those finds. No searches beneath the chapel so far have been able to discover any such treasure, but such investigations as have been conducted certainly show the presence of something below the floor.

  Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas argue in several of their published works that Rosslyn is intended to be homage, conscious and deliberate, to the Temple of Solomon, as it was found by the Templars in 1118, and that the west wall of Rosslyn is a sort of Gothic version of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Rosslyn is by no means a copy of the original Temple; rather it is an imaginative reconstruction, using techniques and forms available to the builders in the fifteenth century.

  Certainly, the builders, the craftsmen and masons who raised the chapel had a mythology at the centre of the mystery of their craft, and this was based on the awareness of a long connection with the building of the first Temple of Solomon. The Master Craftsmen all knew the story of the building of the Temple, and it was passed on to the journeymen and apprentices when they were deemed worthy to receive it. It was at the heart of their work, all through the forty years that the chapel was in construction. This is the story that they knew.

  Fourteen generations after Abraham came King David. David’s wish at the end of his days was to build a temple to hold the Ark of the Covenant, but he was unable to encompass this in his lifetime. The legends suggest that David wished to make his peace with his God through the building of a place of worship. But he was unable to build the temple as his attention was forcibly diverted by various wars and strife. The building of the temple was a task taken up by Solomon, the son of David and Bath-Sheba. In order to do this, he was forced to call upon the skills and experience of a man from a neighbouring country, Hiram Abiff.

  But the story of the building of the Temple of Solomon starts with the very beginnings of the world, as told in the legends of the Freemasons.

  The building of the Temple of Solomon

  In the early days of the world, the Angelic beings of the order known as the Elohim created Eve, and they fathered Cain on her. Adonai-Jahweh created Adam. Adam and Eve became man and wife, and Eve gave birth to their son Abel.

  Cain worked the land, while Abel was a shepherd. Cain transformed what he found, while Abel took the world as he found it. Cain’s sacrifice was rejected by Adonai-Jahweh, though Abel’s was accepted. In jealous rage, Cain slew Abel, and thus Mother Earth lost her innocence as the first drops of blood shed in anger fell on to her soil. After this, Adam and Eve had another son, Seth.

  After many great ages had passed, Solomon the son of David became the King of the Children of Israel. He wished to complete the work that his father David wished to see accomplished: the building of the Temple of the Lord. But Solomon, of the bloodline of Seth, brother of Abel, had no-one in his kingdom with the wisdom or knowledge necessary for such a task. He sent to the King of Tyre, Hiram, for help. Hiram of Tyre sent one of his subjects to undertake the work for Solomon.
This man was Hiram Abiff, of the race of Cain, and the son of a widow. And so the work began.

  Now, Balchis, the Queen of the South, from the land of Sheba, came to Solomon. She was led into his presence, and beheld him seated on his throne, where she took him for a wonderful statue of gold and ivory. Solomon’s glory impressed her deeply, and soon, they exchanged rings as a token of promise to each other.

  Balchis wished to see the temple that was being constructed, and Solomon led her there. She expressed the desire to see all the men employed in building the temple. Solomon said that this was not possible, but Hiram Abiff climbed on to a small promontory and made the sign of the Tau. The workers, seeing this sign, stopped their labours and gathered round him.

  If Balchis had been impressed by Solomon, it was a different feeling that awoke in her on seeing Hiram. Her heart kindled towards him, and Solomon noticed this, and jealousy began to poison his heart.

  The three journeymen

  The work on the Temple progressed, including the two pillars Jachin and Boaz, to the left and right of the entrance to the Temple. But there were fifteen workers, journeymen who wished to be given the Master Word, and thus promoted to the full mystery of their crafts. These fifteen came to Hiram, who begged them to be patient; that they would, in course, be promoted in their just degree. Twelve of the journeymen were satisfied with this, but three were angry and whispered together against Hiram, vowing revenge.