Classical tuning was typically based on a reference pitch around A-422, becoming the European standard in 1711 when John Shore invented the first tuning fork pitched at A-423.5. After this, composers and organ builders in different countries began using variations of this tuning.3
Once again my mind was spinning with questions. Could it be that Classical tuning was calculated from the speed of sound, perhaps based on a prime resonant frequency of twenty-seven hertz in a seventy-two-foot room? There are, after all, other examples of seventy-two-foot-long chapels in England, such as the famous Durham Cathedral based on the same double-square design as Rosslyn. Fact is, many cathedrals are built in multiples of 72 feet, especially 216 and 432 feet. Why would medieval masons do this if not for its acoustical qualities?
This said, Classical tuning is not the only tuning that will work well in Rosslyn. At other temperatures, sound will travel at different speeds and produce different resonant frequencies. One especially interesting tuning is known as Verdi or Universal tuning based on A-432.
Advocates of Universal tuning argue that the wavelengths of certain pitches are inextricably bound to the harmonies of the universe and that all life therefore has a mathematical relationship to A-432. Recent experiments by reputable acoustics laboratories and calculations by aesthetics experts seem to support this claim, concluding that music tuned to this frequency is nicer to listen to and affects our health and well-being in a different and more positive way than the modern tuning of A-440 or any other tuning.
Given the even divisibility of 72 feet into 432, I naturally began to wonder what temperature would be required for Universal tuning to fit into Rosslyn. Running through a few calculations, I found the air temperature would need to be a steamy 33.72°C (92.7°F) in order to produce the same wavelength of two and two-thirds feet.
Of course, heating the chapel like an oven for the sake of acoustic perfection seemed a little extreme to me. It would be quite uncomfortable to sit in such heat while trying to enjoy music, much less while contemplating spiritual matters. Why would anyone do such a thing?
What if comfort was of secondary concern for some reason? What if a heated chapel and resonance to A-432 were required to reproduce some ancient funerary ritual or secret rite? What if the symbolism of music tuned to A-432 performed inside the superheated resonance chamber of the chapel’s choir helped to induce a special sense of spirituality or condition believed to aid in the ascension of a dead baron’s spirit? And what if the experience of listening to music tuned to certain frequencies had a special psychological or even physiological effect on the congregation?4
Taking this as a hypothesis, the question becomes where would Rosslyn’s designers have learned to do something like this in the first place? What physical effect or spiritual symbolism could be so important that they would suffer for it inside a sweltering chapel? And if they really did intend this with their design, how could they have heated the chapel enough to achieve the required temperature, especially considering the fact that the average summer temperature in Edinburgh is a very mild room temperature of 20°C?
Chapel Womb
In 1804 Sir Walter Scott wrote “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” a poem that recounts a very old and mysterious story about Rosslyn chapel. According to legend, when a baron of Rosslyn died, a ceremony would be held in the chapel and the deceased buried in the underground crypt. As the poem tells it, when the last baron was buried, the chapel was reportedly engulfed in flames as witnessed by surrounding villagers:
O’er Roslin all that dreary night,
A wondrous blaze was seen to gleam;
Twas broader than the watch-fire’s light,
And redder than the bright moon-beam.
Reading closer, we find more detail about the fire:
Seem’d all on fire within, around,
Deep sacristy and altar’s pale;
Shone every pillar foliage-bound,
And glimmer’d all the dead men’s mail.
A little further on, a description is provided from inside the chapel as recounted by those in attendance:
Then sudden, through the darken’d air
A flash of lightning came;
So broad, so bright, so red the glare,
The castle seem’d on flame.
…
And fill’d the hall with smouldering smoke.
As with many old legends, there is often a seed of truth. If this poem is an account of something that actually happened, then we might conclude the chapel was heated from outside as part of the funeral ceremony. It is not out of the question to presume the Sinclairs had a secret burial rite designed to help family members ascend into the afterlife and aid in their reincarnation. There is a long history of fire festivals in Scotland, possibly connected in some way to the five-tiered Hindu funeral pyres in India.
There is also a large stone fireplace in the underground sacristy to consider. Measuring five-by-five feet with a chimney out the roof, it could have been used to heat the chapel. It would have been capable of raising the ambient temperature inside the chapel, perhaps burning for days in order to purify it for the funeral. Fires could have then been set around the perimeter of the stone chapel to bring it up to temperature like a giant stone oven.
This would explain how the chapel could be heated up to 33.72°C, but it still does not tell us why. To find a motive, we might again turn to the symbolisms inside the chapel. We know the chapel is designed according to harmonic principles and that it resonates at specific frequencies compatible with its inner dimensions. We also know it is adorned with musical cubes, pentacles, musical cherubs, and beehives in the roof—all ancient fertility symbols for Venus. Given this, there could be secret funeral rites associated with Venus that require the chapel to be purified by heat in order to contain the purest music possible—the music carved into the cubes in the arches.
These additional excerpts from Sir Walter Scott’s poem seem to confirm this connection to Venus and her mythical birth from the sea:
There are twenty of Roslin’s barons bold
Lie buried within that proud Chapelle;
Each one the holy vault doth hold—
But the sea holds lovely Rosabelle!
And each St. Clair was buried there,
With candle, with book and knell
But the sea-caves rung and the wild wings sung,
The dirge of lovely Rosabelle.
The name Rosabelle means “beautiful rose” and probably refers to the pentacle rose orbit pattern of Venus. Playing a purified dirge to Rosabelle, or Venus, could then have been a way to request assistance from the goddess to help the deceased baron into the afterlife. For the funeral dirge to work as an incantation or offering to the goddess, the chapel would naturally need to be tuned to Venus. This is where B and the bees come into the picture.
First, it is important to know that honeybees are cold-blooded creatures and, as such, lack any kind of auto control over their body temperature. Because of this, the worker bees must contract flight muscles without moving their wings in order to keep the hive at a constant temperature. As it turns out, the temperature required to gestate the hive is about 33.888888°C or 93°F—the exact temperature needed to tune A-432 to the dimensions of the chapel. Honeybees are naturally resonant with A-432.
So as a supreme offering to Venus, the chapel may well have been designed as a superheated, resonant honeycomb chamber tuned to A-432, thus providing a kind of spiritual launch pad for the Sinclair barons or, as Scott refers to them, “minstrels.” In particular, the dimensions could have been intended to amplify the sacred music of Venus’s children, the angelic honeybees, to invoke her assistance in reincarnating. Once heated, the chapel would become one with the hives on the roof, vibrating synchronously with the speed of sound inside the chapel. And in the process, the entire chapel would become an acoustical womb or gestation chamber believed to transmit the baron’s inner spirit into the outer cosmos of the gods.
If this i
nterpretation is correct, the experience inside the chapel must have been truly fearsome. It would have been stifling and filled with smoke, just as the poem describes. And if bonfires were set around the chapel, the inside would surely be filled with colors of red, yellow, and orange as described in the poem, illuminating the chapel’s strange carvings and creating a swirling convection of smoke in the choir loft. And as the dirge of Rosabelle played (the Rosslyn Motet), it would resonate beautifully inside the stone chapel, creating an otherworldly experience for the congregation bordering on the occult.
We can only wonder what happened in the final moment of this Scottish rite as the music reached its crescendo and final cadence. Did something else magical happen as the legend suggests? Did a blinding spark and crackle of electrostatic charge suddenly arc through the hot, dry air, closing the gap between microphones and Shekinah and spiriting the dead baron away on the back of a lightning bolt from Zeus?
Chapel Octave
Returning now to the question of the three frequencies for the stave angel and microphones, we can begin to understand the musical symbolism of the chapel by viewing it as a resonant octave chamber tuned to A-432. Starting an octave lower at the eastern wall, multiples of the Rosslyn Magic Ratio mark twelve steps down the length of the chapel to the entrance. From this scale, the first three steps A-216, B-240, and C-256 would then correspond to the frequencies pointed to by the stave angel (Fig. 4).
Figure 4. Resonant proportions in Rosslyn chapel
As a musical octave of twelve six-foot steps along the seventy-two-foot interior length, the chapel now resembles a giant musical keyboard. We can walk down its length like a chromatic scale on a piano to read the chapel’s harmonic symbolisms and religious meaning as its designers might have intended.
Starting at A-216 under the three microphones, we take two six-foot steps across the Holy of Holies. At twelve feet from the A-216 tonic, we reach the Shekinah Pillar marking the dwelling of the Venusian goddess. As this location represents one-sixth of the chapel length, it is equated with the supertonic B-240 (the ninth or Harmonic Center). Directly above this point, on either side of the roof are the two beehives, together symbolizing celestial fertility and everlasting life as the children of Venus.
Six feet beyond the Shekinah at scale step C-256, we arrive inside a rectangular arrangement of six pillars. As an acoustical and geometric symbol, this space could represent the point of conception in the chapel. It may, in fact, mirror the stave angel as the place where A and B conceive a new life at C.5
The remainder of the chapel to the entrance then represents nine-twelfths of the total octave length. This happens to be the same proportion as the nine-month human gestation period in a twelve-month year. We can view it as the beginning of a process of descent into the womb of the choir.
Just one step beyond the conception point we arrive at C#, the most resonant proportion in the chapel. This begins the choir or what we might call the womb and pregnant belly of the Lady Chapel where gestation occurs. During a service, it would literally resonate the congregation for the proper length of time before delivering them through the front door like a newborn baby. In this way, the chapel appears to be telling the story of the fertilization and Birth of Venus through a metaphor of resonance and music. Yet the story does not stop there.
We can apply the same logic inversely to describe the afterlife and cycle of reincarnation. From the top of the stairs to the eastern underground wall of the sacristy there is in fact an entire seventy-two-foot musical octave stretching below ground. Starting from the conception point C and walking backward, the sacristy seems to be symbolizing the afterlife (or before life) in which souls wait to be reincarnated, resurrected, and resonated back into the Earth. Reincarnating through the union of male and female at the Shekinah, the soul reenters the resonant womb of the choir to be born once again.
In this way, Rosslyn chapel reads like a storybook of harmonic symbols. It tells the musical story of birth, death, and rebirth through the physics of resonance in an octave.
Pollinating the Yellow Bell
Fantastic as it may be, Rosslyn chapel appears to have been designed as a kind of musical instrument synchronized with the speed of sound and gestation temperature of bees. Even more fantastic, it seems to have been based on an ancient harmonic symbolism and fertility cosmology involving Venus.
But how could Rosslyn’s designers have known the speed of sound at different temperatures? And if they did learn this from some much older source, how would those ancient people have calculated the speed of sound to design such a resonant space? The only reasonable answer, of course, is they did not know the speed of sound yet still managed to get it right. How then did they do it?
There is an ancient Chinese tuning method known as Ling Lun that begins by dividing an octave into eighty-one steps. According to Chinese legend, this method was discovered by a scholar named Ling Lun in 2697 BC under orders of Emperor Huangdi to journey into the mountains and cut a set of special bamboo pipes or lü. He was told these pipes should recreate the sounds made by the birds, especially the legendary Fenghuang or Chinese phoenix. Reaching a special place in the mountains, Ling Lun cut the first pipe to the auspicious length of 8.1 Chinese inches, known as the Huang-chung or “Yellow Bell.” He then proceeded to cut this into eighty-one parts from which he selected twelve to make a panpipe.6
Here we find a possible origin for 81-AET temperament and the corresponding keyboard architecture of Rosslyn chapel. It suggests the chapel may have been a recreation of this ancient Chinese myth and its corresponding Ling Lun tuning. After all, Sir Gilbert Hay spent some fourteen years in the Far East before returning to Scotland to build Rosslyn. Maybe he learned of it during his studies there.
If this is what happened, the question becomes how exactly did Ling Lun determine the Huang-chung frequency for the first pipe? How did he know what size bamboo to use such that it, and Rosslyn with it, would be tuned to the speed of sound? The answer once again may lie in what hovers above both the Yellow Bell flower and the chapel, namely the bees.
According to five different references, honeybees flap their wings in the range of 190 to 250 times a second—a range that would include A-216 and B-240. In order to supercharge the lift power of their wings, it seems that bees resonate at or near a factor of the speed of sound, adjusting the frequency of their wings to match the ambient air temperature in much the same way they use their wing muscles to heat up the hive.
If this hypothesis is correct, then the Huang-chung reed could have been cut to match the buzzing frequency of a bee as it was pollinating a five-petaled Chinese Yellow Bell flower on a beautiful spring day. With this as a starting point, the speed of sound could have been discovered without Ling Lun even realizing it, just by listening and reproducing the wing frequency of a bee. It could be through the bee and its symbiotic pentagonal flower that music and fertility became associated with Venus. This would also explain why beehives were built into Rosslyn’s roof.
Whether we choose to accept this explanation or not, the chapel remains a highly resonant chamber similar to a beehive. When tuned to A-432 Universal tuning and heated to a hive temperature of 33.72°C, it will synchronize with a bee’s wing frequency of 216 hertz. No matter how you get there, Rosslyn is in tune with the bees and, through them, all of nature.
With this harmonic interpretation, the three microphones, three pillars, and three fingers of the stave angel all begin to make sense. Represented as the frequencies A-216, B-240, and C-256, this musical Holy Trinity centers on the Shekinah or Queen “Bee-240” in the chapel. When resonated properly, the Lady Chapel is a fertile chamber for birth, rebirth, and enlightenment. Perhaps this is what it means to activate the chapel.
The Reshel Lines
In early April 2010, Tommy sent me a rather lengthy email explaining that he had finally decided to go ahead and share his theory about Rosslyn with me. He told me the chapel had been built in a special location over something called
a Reshel Ley Line. Doing a little research on this, I learned that retired U.S. Naval Commander William Buehler had found evidence of an ancient system of naturally geosynchronous locations in the Earth’s crust that form a harmonic grid around the Earth.
Buehler claims that ancient peoples once used these harmonic lines and nodes to locate and take advantage of special sites. He says these lines are “self generating energy templates that allow for a multitude of frequencial portals.” As it concerns Rosslyn, Buehler says that it too contains a potent Reshel grid beneath its structure. Other researchers, many living in Edinburgh, have expanded on the concept, providing evidence this grid could affect the human heart and mind—even changing DNA through subtle resonant interactions.
Another researcher named James Tyberonn says this about Rosslyn’s special location:
Rosslyn is a very special place, indeed, and its energies are an especially potent blend of geomantic and cosmic energies that converge precisely at this point. Here is a rare concentric apex. Because of this, within its structure lies a very ancient energy device that utilizes and refines the energy. It is not a relic from the Christian crusades.
The component is in the sealed vault, placed there by the founding St Clair. It is a circular vessel, both metallic and crystalline in composition containing twelve half spheres around the rim of its circumference. It is very ancient, and was in the care of the Secret Order based in Orkney. It is from before the Atlantean’s era. Its source and construction and technology are of extra terrestrial origin. Its base is of a unique metallic alloy, having properties similar to gold and platinum, but with a much stronger magnetic field. The spheres are crystalline, each attuned to a dimensional field and projecting a strong electrical field. The structure facilitates dimensional travel, to those adepts capable of achieving sufficiently high vibrational rates.
The Venus Blueprint Page 4