Stuart, who was sitting closest to my wife and daughter at one end of the table, began to talk about the upcoming Venus transit in 2012, explaining it as the rebirth of the sacred feminine. Although I was aware that Venus moves or transits across the Sun every 105 to 121 years, Stuart suggested there was a link between Rosslyn chapel and the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. This was an idea I had not heard before.
The significance of Venus in ancient cultures had been well established. In fact, I had written extensively about it in my previous books and articles. What was not yet clear to me was how Rosslyn chapel could be connected in any way to Venus. I wondered how the Mayan sacred Tzolk’in calendar based on the 260-day Venus cycle could have anything to do with the construction of Rosslyn and why the Venus transit, in particular, would be so important to the builders of Rosslyn.
Yet Stuart was so sure of this connection that he was planning to write a piece of music about it and perform it in the chapel during the next transit. It was because of his insistence on a connection between the 2012 Venus transit and Rosslyn that I made a mental note to look into it when I returned home. I thought it might have been overlooked by the general public as the media had become obsessed with the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012.
A Musical Sign
One of the last things discussed at the dinner was Stuart’s plan for an Egyptian concert in 2012 near the Giza pyramids. It seems a French acquaintance and investor in Cannes named Philippe Bruneau was helping sponsor a concert of Stuart’s Seven Wonders Suite to be performed by the Cairo Symphony Orchestra and Alexandria Choir in an outdoor arena near the Giza pyramids on December 21, 2012. The plan also called for a performance of Stuart’s Transit of Venus fanfare in June 2012 at Rosslyn chapel to mark the end of the Mayan Tzolk’in calendar and beginning of the celebration period that would culminate with the Giza concert.
Other events were planned, including a daylong lecture series about how geometry, resonance, and music were central to the design of medieval cathedrals and ancient temples. To make this point during the concert, a laser light show would project geometrical patterns onto the Great Pyramid—then, at just the right moment—a gong would be sounded in the King’s Chamber of Khufu and piped into the performance to demonstrate the pyramid’s resonant design. It would be a stupendous celebration marking the end of the 25,625-year World Cycle.
Then, just as Stuart had finished describing all of this, one of the movements of his own Seven Wonders Suite began to play over the Old Rectory’s speakers. It was entitled “The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus,” named after the legendary Greek tomb where Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army had once defeated the Persians. Reproduced in Washington, DC at the House of the Temple of the Masonic Scottish Rite, this pyramidal tomb is arguably the most famous historic link between Scotland and America.
Of course, everyone laughed at the irony of such a well-timed coincidence and took it as a fitting conclusion to a very enchanting evening. As we stood to leave, Stuart said he would stop by our hotel in the morning to pick us up. We were going to the Scottish countryside to visit what the Scots like to call the “Lady Chapel.”
The Lady Chapel
It was another clear and sunny morning as our motorcade arrived in Roslin glen. Exiting from our car, I caught a glimpse of Tommy Mitchell stepping out of the other car wearing a sport coat and sunglasses. At last I would get to meet him.
We shook hands. Looking distraught, he said that he would unfortunately not be able to join us today and must return home. It seemed the medicine he was taking for his heart condition was having some adverse affect, making him disoriented and unstable. He suggested that we meet at his house before we left Edinburgh, perhaps over tea and biscuits. Disappointed and concerned at the same time, I bid him farewell, saying I certainly understood his plight and looked forward to our discussions.
Catching up with the others, my excitement was growing as we walked up a small path to the chapel. I was a little surprised to see that a ticket entrance and gift shop had been built in front of the chapel. Tourist traffic in the wake of The Da Vinci Code had required crowd-control measures while creating a new source of income from branded merchandise sold in a gift shop.
Emerging from the other side of the shop, I discovered that the entire stone chapel had been encased in scaffolding and tarps, making it impossible to tell what was underneath. As we entered the chapel, I found that the carved ceiling I was expecting to see was also completely obscured. It seems a botched repair job in the 1950s had caused the roof to begin crumbling. The chapel’s caretakers had little choice but to use tourist dollars to help pay for it.
In spite of the scaffolding, many carvings on the walls and pillars were just as I had seen them in pictures during my early research. The features of greatest interest to me were visible and as mysterious as ever. Walking slowly through the chapel, we all marveled at the number and intricacy of the carvings.
The most prominent carving was the so-called Green Man associated with the Greek god Dionysus and Roman Bacchus. Known as the liberator and god of intoxication who brings ecstasy and epiphany to the mind, I wondered why he was represented so frequently throughout the chapel. How could these pagan gods have anything to do with Christianity or for that matter the planet Venus?
The resonant cubes the Mitchells had decoded into a melody were projecting downward from the arches like arms reaching out from the stone. There were carved figurines and strange symbols everywhere. Even with much of the chapel obscured behind scaffolding and huge sheets of plastic, its intricate beauty was breathtaking.
The Shekinah Pillar
At the east end of the chapel, directly in front of the so-called Holy of Holies area, were the three famous pillars—the Master Pillar, Journeyman Pillar, and Apprentice Pillar. As I had learned during my research, these are their Masonic names from the late Georgian period and not their original names. They were originally named the Earl’s Pillar, Shekinah Pillar, and Prince’s Pillar.
The old names are a clue to the true meaning of the symbols. Starting with the pillar in the center, “Shekinah” is a Hebrew word used to denote the dwelling or settling presence of the feminine aspect of God in the Temple of Jerusalem. Its etymology stems from the conjunction of “she” and “kinah,” the latter of which refers to the color purple.
As “kinah” was used in naming the Holy Land of Canaan, the color purple was considered a very holy color. This is perhaps due to the fact that it is the only color not actually present in a rainbow (purple is neither violet nor magenta). Instead purple is a perceived blend of both the red and blue ends of the spectrum, creating the illusion of a closed, periodic color wheel where in fact there is an open spectrum of light frequencies beyond human perception. In this way, the Shekinah or “she-purple” could have represented transcendence into the divine realm and used to symbolize the invisible feminine presence of God in Canaanite religions.
There are several references to the Shekinah in the New Testament as well as in the Islamic Quran and Gnostic writings of the Manichaeans and Mandaeans. In the Gnostic writings, Shekinahs are described as hidden aspects of God, later becoming the Holy Ghost in the Christian trinity.
This goddess symbolism in Rosslyn is thus very significant as it explains the thirteen small angels with musical instruments carved into the top of the three pillars. Admiring the detail and craftsmanship, I thought that these were surely a reference to the cherubic children of Greek gods Zeus and Aphrodite, or their Roman equivalents Jupiter and Venus. If so, I mused, then one of the cherubs must be Eros or Cupid, the leader of the cherubim. Could their presence be a sign that the Lady Chapel really was dedicated to Venus as Stuart had insisted the night before?
The Star of Venus
The Venus connection was starting to seem more likely. Not only because the musical angels were symbolic of the children of Venus, but also because of what they were sitting on. Underneath each angel on the Shekinah Pillar were five-poin
ted stars or pentagrams that were apparently intended as celestial chairs. Stars like these were once associated with Venus, both the goddess and planet.
From my earlier research on the subject, I had learned that the five-pointed star geometry of Venus was actually discovered thousands of years ago by ancient astronomers as they tracked the path of Venus in the night sky. With no light pollution and nothing to distract them at night, they had discovered Venus traces a rose-like pentacle pattern in the sky over an eight-year period. Taken as proof of a divine intelligence and harmony in the cosmos, the Venus pentacle had become a very sacred symbol to many philosophers, such as Pythagoras (Fig. 1).
FIGURE 1. The orbital star pattern of Venus as viewed from Earth
As more people learned of this Venus star pattern in different regions and cultures, pentagonal patterns found elsewhere in nature were used as substitute symbols. This included the five-petaled rose, the pentagonal seed pattern in an apple, and of course the five-appendage groupings common to humans and other mammals. It was because of this that the number five was considered a very sacred number.
Much more than mere speculation, the number five really is the source behind the most enigmatic constant in nature—the so-called golden ratio equal to about 1.618033. Symbolized by the Greek letter F, which can be pronounced either “fee” or “fie,” this proportion originates from the square root of five and is thus found in every cross section in a pentagram star.
As a constant of physics, the golden ratio has been found in recent scientific studies to act as a stabilizing constant in everything from atomic coherence and planetary orbits to the branching patterns of life. Because of its omnipresence in nature, it was long ago nicknamed the divine proportion and associated with the planet Venus and all its symbols.
In those ancient days, Venus was called “the light bringer” (in Latin, “Lucifer”), primarily because it rises before the Sun in the morning (as the morning star) and follows it in the evening (as the evening star). In early religious texts Venus was referred to as the Babylonian Ishtar (later as Eastre, meaning eastern star), while some scholars believe it to be the biblical Star of Bethlehem. Thus the star symbolism refers simultaneously to the planet Venus, its pentagonal geometry, and its corresponding spirit or deity—all as one in the night sky.
To understand how and why the star symbolism was used in Rosslyn, one must consider the role of astronomy in early religion. Early astronomers found that Venus orbits the Sun thirteen times for every eight orbits of the Earth, creating an almost perfect 13:8 orbital ratio between the two planets. Amazingly this ratio is equal to 1.625—very close to the golden ratio or divine proportion of 1.618033. So as Venus rotates in the opposite direction of Earth, it retrogrades or reverses direction in relation to the Earth while aligning five times over an eight-year period to face or “kiss” the Earth. When these five facing (or synodic) alignments are connected, they create what we might call the Venus Star in the night sky.1
It is in this orbital star pattern that we find the deepest meaning behind many of the symbols in the chapel. There are thirteen angels carved into the top of the three pillars, while there are exactly eight dragons carved into the base of the Prince’s Pillar. Since the proportion 13:8 is identical to the orbital ratio of Venus to Earth, the angels and dragons are references to these two planets respectively. They also connect Venus and the divine proportion with Rosslyn and, in particular, its feminine Shekinah Pillar.
While most people who visit Rosslyn are told it was built as a fifteenth-century collegiate chapel to St. Matthew, these symbols seemed to be telling a different story. They suggest the chapel had instead been intended as a fertility temple to Venus. Pondering this as I strolled amongst the pillars, I wondered if there might be any other evidence to support this interpretation and, in particular, if the chapel could be directly tied to the Venus transit as Stuart believed.
Deciphering the Cubes
It was in October 2005 when a Reuters press release hit the wires announcing Tommy and Stuart Mitchell had decoded the frozen music carved into the arches of Rosslyn chapel. Reading the announcement that same day, I was amazed to learn that a total of 215 “musical cubes” carved into the pillars and arches of Rosslyn chapel had been matched to thirteen unique geometrical resonance patterns known as Chladni figures or “cymatics” (from Greek kyma, meaning wave).
Sprinkling salt or powder on a vibrated metal plate can easily recreate resonance patterns like this. First documented by Ernst Chladni in 1787, the patterns range from simple triangles, pentagons, and hexagons to beautiful Hindu-looking mandala patterns, depending on which frequencies are used to vibrate the plate. Chladni was known to use a violin bow to vibrate the plate while lightly damping the edge to control the patterns.
The Mitchell release said they had found that each of the cube patterns in Rosslyn matched a specific musical tone, which were organized into vertical groups around the chapel’s pillars. To help them decode the cubes, they identified a special “stave angel” figure on the Shekinah Pillar who was holding what appeared to be a five-line musical staff.
Assuming the staff to be a modern treble clef, the figure points to B with his right hand and to A and C with his left. This was taken by the Mitchells to indicate the music was in the key of C major (or A relative minor) with the so-called leading tone B balanced symmetrically in the center. From this, they had matched each cube pattern against a particular frequency using a square Chladni plate tuned to C. The resulting pitches were then ordered from bottom to top, left to right around the columns to produce a melody.
Using this melody, the men composed a piece of “thawed music,” which they named the Rosslyn Motet. The announcement said it was to be performed inside the chapel in an upcoming concert.
As it happened, this news came just as I had made a breakthrough in my own theory of music perception. I had discovered how humans perceive music through a similar process of matching resonant patterns on the eardrums. Since this was so similar to the musical cubes, I immediately began to look for more information about Rosslyn chapel and its designers.
What might those people have known about resonance or music perception back in the fifteenth century? Why would someone encode music as cymatic resonance patterns in a Scottish chapel in the first place? And what could be so important or dangerous that they would need to hide it like this?
A Gnostic Temple
Founded in 1446 by William Sinclair, first Earl of Caithness of the St. Clair (or Sinclair) family, Rosslyn chapel was officially designated a Roman Catholic collegiate chapel. The chapel’s puzzling architecture was designed by Sir Gilbert Hay, one of the most learned and intellectual minds of the fifteenth century, under the direction of Sinclair. Although they presented themselves publicly as devout Catholics, scholars suggest they were actually followers (or at least sympathizers) of a Gnostic Jewish-Christian sect known as the Ebionites.
The term Ebionite is often used to refer to all early Jewish-Christians, including the Nazarenes, but they are uniquely different. Unlike the Nazarenes, the Ebionites denied the deification of Jesus and his virgin birth while rejecting Paul of Tarsus and his epistles. As the Hebrew word ebion meant “poor,” they also placed a special value on voluntary poverty, which was not necessarily a Nazarene value. Yet like the Nazarenes, they did revere James the Just, the presumed brother of Jesus Christ and head of the Jerusalem Church.
So, while neither Sinclair nor Hay was poor, the Hebrew Shekinah Pillar suggests they did embrace Jewish-Christian Gnosticism and adhered to the Council of Jerusalem and Knights Templar practices. Many sources connect the Sinclair family to the Knights Templar, citing William as the so-called hereditary grandmaster and genetic link between the Templar bloodline and modern Freemasonry.
Even though there is still much debate over the details of these connections, there is plenty of evidence confirming the Sinclair family was part of the ancient Hebrew Council and Jerusalem Church that had descended through the
Essene Mystery School and Ebionite tradition. Given this, Rosslyn chapel would have been designed specifically to preserve and protect the Essene wisdom by recreating the Church of Jerusalem and, in some sense, replicating the Temple of Solomon.
Others dispute this connection. They point out that Rosslyn was never a safe haven for the Templars and that William even testified against the Ballontrodoch Templar knights. The Catholic Church claims that the Sinclairs were pious Catholics and were not associated with either the Templars or the Ebionites. They also defend Rosslyn as a Catholic chapel, claiming it has nothing to do with cymatic music or pagan temple practices.
This argument is supported by the fact that old drawings of the chapel show cubes missing from the arches, perhaps broken off by an angry mob centuries ago. Historians point out the cubes could have been repaired incorrectly and might as well be interpreted as leaves or floral designs instead of cymatic patterns or music. Musicologists claim that the five-line staff held by the stave angel may not even be a treble clef, as this notation was not used until the fifteenth century. When it comes to Rosslyn, almost everything is disputed and emotions are certain to run high on both sides of any controversy.
With all of this duly noted, I decided early on to view Rosslyn in a different light than most scholars and study it without epistemological bias or preconceptions. I came to view the chapel’s architecture and symbolism as a source of inspiration and information—no matter who did it, when they did it, or why they did it. I accepted the reality that some elements of the chapel had been updated since the fifteenth century and that the Rosslyn Motet might not be entirely literal to the original design, assuming the cubes were intended as musical cymatic patterns in the first place (which I think they were). Instead, I decided to just let this old medieval collegiate chapel teach me its lessons. And teach me it did.
The Venus Blueprint Page 2