In fact, as I stepped into this underground room, I was surprised to find it was just an empty, rectangular stone vault totally bare of any carvings or other decoration. The only feature of note was a stained-glass window at the far eastern end that let sunshine in from aboveground.
According to Sir Walter Scott, the barons of Rosslyn had originally been buried in chambers right off this room through the north wall. They were laid out on tables without coffins and were clad in full body armor topped off with red velvet caps. As I stood there imagining such a scene, I got the distinct feeling that even with its stark simplicity the sacristy must still play an important role in the chapel’s overall symbolism and function.
Stuart clapped his hands to test the room’s acoustics, snapping me back into the moment. Listening to the wet reverb of his handclap in the chamber, we both commented on how odd it was this underground chamber would be so reflective compared to the aboveground chapel. I wondered aloud if its “liveness” could have been intended as an acoustical symbol for everlasting life.
Smiling like an imp, Stuart agreed and motioned for me to take a closer look at the north wall. It was only then that I noticed faint diagrams and illustrations on the smooth stone surface.
Etched into the wall were large circles and pentagrams that seemed to be some kind of stylized star chart. Then lower, I was startled to find an ancient Egyptian geometric figure of seven overlapping circles known as the Seed of Life. Realizing it would take some work to understand the meaning behind all of the circles and stars, I had the distinct impression it was a symbolic map of the planets with Earth as the seed.
Moving next to the opposing south wall, we could make out two main figures etched into its surface. The first figure looked like a partial sketch of one of the gothic arches used to design the aboveground chapel. It was drawn using the standard method of two intersecting circles aligned at their mutual centers known as a Vesica Piscis, the basic component for the Seed of Life. Although it was a nice drawing and emphasized the use of harmonic principles in the chapel’s construction, it was hardly surprising. What was surprising was the figure next to it.
This etching looked something like an oil derrick or electrical tower—a figure completely out of place in a fifteenth-century building. Designed symmetrically with a wide base tapering off to a flat top, it included diagonal lines zigzagging on each side like an electrical tower with diagonal cross struts. But the strangest feature of all was at the top.
There a half-circle opened out of the top like a funnel. In addition, I noticed a small pentagram star etched onto the left side that overlapped the left side of the semicircle. Through the middle of the entire figure, a line bisected the tower with two wavy lines wrapping around its tip like the two serpents in a medical caduceus. Standing back, none of us had any idea what this etching might mean and knew of no theory that had yet explained it. It was a complete mystery.
One thing did occur to me though as I studied the figure closely. The semicircle at the top reminded me of a cup or, better yet, something I had seen on our Mediterranean trip—the crescent and star symbol.
Crescent and the Star
While visiting Tivoli gardens outside of Rome, my family and I took a tour of the nunnery known as Villa D’Este. We were quite taken with the beautiful Renaissance frescos and paintings throughout the building. However, a few things did seem a bit out of place for a nunnery.
First there was a portrait of Pythagoras. What was this prophet of the pagans doing here? Then there was a painting of a goddess with a crescent Moon hovering just above her head. I smiled, wondering what a pre-Christian goddess was doing in a Catholic nunnery.
Commenting on the goddess, I suggested to our guide that the crescent might be a reference to bullhorns and the Greek stauros (meaning “stake” or “cross”) related to Taurus. I remarked that some historians think that death by crucifixion actually originated as a sacrificial offering to Marduk, the Sacred Bull of Taurus, and that this painting may symbolize this anthropomorphic concept. But our guide was having none of it and disagreed emphatically.
She said this was a picture of Diana, the huntress and Roman goddess of the Moon, and that she was always depicted with a crescent Moon above her head, just as Venus is often depicted with a star next to her. This sounded plausible enough, and I conceded to her expertise. But I made a mental note to look into the matter later.
As it turned out, we were both right. Back home I found a reference explaining that in ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh referred to the crescent Moon as the Bull of Heaven. In this painting, the Roman Moon-goddess Diana was given horns to connect her to both Taurus of the zodiac and the crescent Moon worship of the Sumerians.
It was while following this thread of research that something else caught my attention. I came across a very revealing harmonic relationship between Venus and the Moon.
Since the lunar cycle is twenty-eight days, as a median between the 29.5-day synodic cycle and 27.3-day sidereal month, the Moon orbits Earth thirteen times a year. At the same time, Venus orbits the Sun thirteen times for every eight Earth years. In this way, the Moon and Venus are harmonically related through the Earth’s orbital frequency as a proportion of thirteen, expressed as the ratios 13:1 and 13:8 respectively.
Furthermore, since there are 8 x 12 = 96 months in the Venus cycle, dividing 96 by the 29.53-day synodic lunar month yields 3.25 or about double the Venus-Earth orbital cycle of 13/8 (=1.625). What this means is the orbital resonance of Venus to Earth can be calculated directly from the Moon’s cycle. From a harmonic perspective, Venus and the Moon are really two sides of the same resonant coin.
During our trip that summer, I found this astronomical equivalence between the Moon and Venus repeated many times. Not in some museum or ancient ruins, but on the modern-day flags of Turkey and Tunisia. These and many other Islamic flags bear the crescent Moon and Venus Star, indicating their ancient theological connection to these heavenly bodies. It was during this trip that I began to realize just how interconnected the two really were in ancient times and how they were personified as a divine feminine duality.
As I came to learn, it originated in the Morning and Evening Stars as two separate goddesses. But when it was discovered that both were in fact the same planet Venus, the Evening Star goddess became the Sumerian Moon-goddess Inanna or Diana.
Nineteenth-century artist William Adolph Bourguereau is famous for representing this duality in his paintings of Venus and Diana by using similar poses for the two goddesses. Their pose was even based on Botticelli’s famous painting the Birth of Venus, which itself had been modeled on ancient Greek sculptures and mosaics.
Applying this symbolism now to the tower etching in Rosslyn, I couldn’t help but think about Tivoli and that painting of Diana with her little stauros horns. I wondered if the etching might be symbolic of a tower holding up the Moon or the bullhorns of the stauros itself. After all, what else could have motivated Rosslyn’s designers to etch this symbol on the sacristy wall? Surely, I thought, Sinclair and Hay would not have worked so hard on the architectural masterpiece of the chapel above only to scratch some meaningless graffiti on the wall directly across from where the Sinclair family was to be buried.
Tower of Gold
In the weeks that followed my visit to Rosslyn, I simply could not get that strange tower out of my mind. I immediately began to correspond with Stuart and Tommy about it, letting them know that I thought it might relate to Venus and the Moon. This prompted Stuart to send me a picture of the wall with the etching outlined in black. Studying the image, I noticed that it incorporated specific angles in the cross struts and so began to look for a larger common geometry that it might be based on.
Due to the fertility symbolism in the chapel, my first thought was to compare it to the golden egg related to the Egyptian triangle. Overlaying the egg onto the chapel floor plan, I was pleased to find that the circular Moon proportion of the egg fit perfectly within the cresce
nt of the tower etching when sized to fit. Although the tower appeared to be holding up the Moon as I had imagined, there was little else to suggest the egg was the purpose behind the etching. Putting the golden egg aside, I decided to continue down a different path of investigation.
I recalled reading a scholarly paper a few years back linking the famous numerical sequence known as the Fibonacci series with the Hindu legend of a sacred mountain named Meru. I decided to reread this paper because both seemed related to Venus through the golden mean. And since the Shekinah Pillar in Rosslyn was at a golden mean in the overall geometry, I thought it might provide some clues. I began my research by learning more about Hinduism and the Vedas.
The Vedas are a large body of texts written in Sanskrit originating for the most part in ancient India. Comprising the oldest layer of Hindu scripture, they are the oldest-known religious texts. Unlike most other holy books, the Vedas are written in hymn form and intended to be sung.
Vedic scripture is composed of four canonical texts, including the oldest, Rig-Veda, followed by the Yajur-Veda, Sama-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda. According to Hindu tradition, the Vedas are “not of human agency” and were divinely revealed from sruti or “what is heard.”
In the most ancient text of the Rig-Veda, I found a story about the sacred-world mountain of Meru. It tells of a huge transcendental mountain extending from the deepest depths of the Earth’s oceans to the farthest reaches of the sky. Around the mountain are seven seas in concentric circles separated by mountain ranges.
At the summit of Mount Meru lives Lord Kubera, the god of wealth and riches, who above all else loves gold. Known as “Kubera’s treasure” or “Kubera’s honey,” he hides his gold inside a cave.11 Wise men say that Kubera’s gold “gives to mortals immortality; it makes the blind see; it restores youth to the aged.”12
The mountain summit itself is described as a playground named Lanka (from Sanskrit “land”) populated by many other supreme deities. In Lanka, the spirits of the waters are said to sing and dance in the “lake of lotuses of gold.” Accordingly, the top of the sacred mountain is always associated with water, rainbows, and beautiful music.13
As the story goes, the regular attendants of Kubera are the Nagas or mahorayas, which means serpent kings. Traditionally associated with king cobras, these serpent kings are famous in the Vedas for stealing and hiding jewels, thus helping Lord Kubera hide his gold deep inside their serpent holes or caves. To find the golden treasure in the mountain, one must engage the help of the Serpent of the Depth, Ahir Budhnya (also Budha or Buddha), with the combined aid of Agni and Kubera. It is said, “Brilliant is the golden stone guarded by serpents.”
While this sounds like a harmless little fable, I found several layers of meaning behind it that I thought might cast a light on Rosslyn’s design. Of special significance was the fact Mount Meru had been described as a Fibonacci spiral by the Vedic grammarian Pingala in his Art of Prosody (the Chhandah-shastra, 400–200 BC). Pingala claimed that Maatraameru actually represents a sacred mathematical cadence that converges toward the golden mean—the same constant found in the intersections of the Star of Venus.
Mountain of Cadence
In Pingala’s account, Mount Meru was a pyramid of stacked numbers from which diagonals could be added to produce the numerical series {1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …} (Fig. 8). Known today as Pascal’s triangle, the sequence of numbers within this pyramid is the Fibonacci series generated by the equation f(n) = f(n-1) + f(n-2). Long recognized as an organizing property in nature, Fibonacci proportions are found in the distribution of limbs on a tree, spiral geometries in sea creatures, and branching proportions of the human body, to name just a few.
As Pingala explained it, this series creates a “mountain of cadence” in how the diagonals of the pyramid ascend to Unity or one at the top of the pyramid, while also spiraling downward as adjacent arithmetic proportions that converge toward the golden mean of about 1.618033.14
FIGURE 8. Mount Meru as a Fibonacci cadence
The description of Mount Meru in the Rig-Veda is thus an allegorical reference to this numerical pyramid and the Fibonacci series. Kubera, along with his golden city and treasure, was a metaphor for the golden mean hidden at the infinite center of the Fibonacci pyramid. The Naga serpents then represented the diagonal Fibonacci lines that spiral or coil around a three-dimensional version of the pyramid.
While the pyramid and golden mean seemed relevant to Rosslyn, it was something else that really caught my attention about this story. Venus is the goddess of the sacred mountain.
The Vedic goddess of Venus, named Shukra, is described as hovering over the summit of Meru to protect it. She is considered the Lord of the Nagas (the Fibonacci series) who hide Kubera’s gold. In this way, Shukra (Venus) is personified as the creator of the golden mean and Meru itself, presumably because every intersection of her pentacle orbit very nearly creates a golden mean. Since both Venus and the Moon are linked through the Fibonacci proportion 13:8, the Moon-god Soma can also be considered part of the Mount Meru legend (more on this later).
Now, since we can take the center of the Meru pyramid as both Unity and the golden mean, this would explain why the summit came to represent the heavenly realm. The numerical cadence of the mountain acts as a kind of serpentine staircase, bridge, or tower to heaven, with Venus, the Sun, and Moon hovering overhead. In fact, this is exactly what we find in so many ancient stories about sacred mountains and gods associated with the visible planets (Fig. 9).
FIGURE 9. Sacred mountain symbols and planet personification
This is why Moses ascended Mount Sinai to meet God and why Zeus and other Greek gods lived on Mount Olympus. It explains why Mount Etna was the home of Jupiter, why Solomon’s Temple was built on Mount Sion, and the reason Nepalese Machapuchare and Zoroastrian Hara Berezalti were sacred mountains. Even the biblical heaven paved with gold has its origin in Lanka atop the golden pyramid of Mount Meru.
As I began to understand Meru’s mathematical symbolism and impact on ancient religion, it seemed likely the designers of Rosslyn chapel had used it in their design. If Venus symbols and golden proportions could be found in the chapel, I reasoned, maybe the tower etching itself is the geometry of Meru. Pursuing this idea further, I came across a Jainist illustration in a sixteenth-century manuscript known as the Samghayanarayana.
The Venus Blueprint
In the Samghayanarayana, Mount Meru is depicted as a tower pictogram with five levels and five corresponding deities. The thing that struck me about it was how similar its angles, flat top, and tier spacing were to the Rosslyn tower etching. Comparing the two side by side in an illustration program would confirm this.
Scaling them so that their bottom and top tiers were horizontally aligned, the other tiers snapped into place. There was a trinity of “houses” at the top of the Jainist Meru similar to the Baal trinity that also seemed to correspond to the two crescent “horns” and caduceus at the top of the Rosslyn tower. I figured they symbolized Venus, the Sun, and Moon as the pentagram star, solar serpent, and crescent in the etching. It seemed more than a little likely to me that the Rosslyn tower was indeed Mount Meru.
The one thing I still could not understand was why the Rosslyn tower had diagonal cross struts. What could these have to do with Mount Meru? Then it hit me. They were probably the angles in a stack of pentagrams.
With this as my hypothesis, I quickly overlaid the eight-year orbital rose pattern of Venus onto a stack of pentagrams in which each star was scaled at a golden mean to the previous. This arrangement created a geometric figure known as a fractal—a pentagonal fractal, in fact.
Scaling and comparing this fractal to the orbital geometry of Venus, I was happy to find the Venus orbital rose and pentagonal fractal were indeed a perfect vertical match. Duplicating and rotating the pentagonal fractal in five equal directions then made a composite figure congruent with the Venus orbital rose (Fig. 10).
FIGURE 10. Venus orbit compared with
pentagram fractal and egg geometry
However, this composite figure still did not explain the crescent found in the Rosslyn etching. For this, I retrieved the earlier golden egg geometry and overlaid it onto the fractal. Taking a deep breath, I pushed back from the computer to survey the result.
To say the least, I was stunned by how well everything fit together. The fractal star aligned not only around the golden egg but also around the Earth-Moon circles, which were tangent at the top tier of the tower. This was because the golden egg and the pentagonal fractal were related through the golden mean. Naming the composite figure the Venus Blueprint, I then compared it to the Rosslyn tower geometry to see if it matched (Fig. 11).
FIGURE 11. The Venus Blueprint symbol behind Mount Meru
Almost immediately, I recognized that the angles of the Rosslyn tower cross struts matched the pentagram angles in the Venus Blueprint. At the same time, the other lines of the tower aligned with various intersection points of the Blueprint fractal as if it had been traced over them. With this, I knew I was definitely onto something.
As a symbol, the crescent and star at the top of the tower etching represented the Rig-Veda description of the planet-gods hovering above Mount Meru. Based on both geometric and symbolic correlations, I was beginning to think the pentagonal orbital geometry of Venus either separately or as a composite symbol, had been used as a template to create both the Rosslyn tower and the Jainist illustration.
Reading further on the history and meaning of the World Egg, I became increasingly convinced that the combined star and egg symbolism was correct. I learned that the egg was, in fact, an ancient fertility symbol commonly associated with Venus and that the tradition of coloring and hiding Easter eggs actually originated in the fertility rites associated with many Venusian goddesses.
The Venus Blueprint Page 6