The Blueprint did indeed fit precisely over the chapel floor plan, aligning with the eastern wall of the sacristy. As if to confirm the correctness of this approach, the square then locked perfectly into a prominent notch in the north wall like a key. Studying the floor plan closely, I was struck by how well the chapel’s dimensions and features instantly aligned with the various intersections of the Blueprint fractal.
Crisscrossing the floor like an enormous tartan plaid, the Blueprint marked out each of the chapel’s key locations and dimensions, including wall positions, wall thicknesses, location of columns, outer and inner dimensions, and even the placement of the Shekinah at the heart of the star in the Lady Chapel. In fact, the double-square floor plan of the chapel appeared to be some kind of inner geometric property of the Blueprint egg itself, able to create special acoustical resonance effects.
This was a geometric blueprint not only for acoustical resonance and structural integrity, but also for a spiritual foundation upon which Rosslyn and perhaps other such temples might have been conceived. There in its very architecture, Rosslyn was telling the eternal story of conception, birth, life, death, and rebirth, all based on the principle of harmony, resonance, and rhythmic cycles, just as Venus does in her rose orbit and transit of the Sun.
As a fitting tribute to Venus, the chapel was designed as a giant resonating musical instrument, not unlike the resonator of the Hindustani Veena stringed instrument. Through the Blueprint design, Rosslyn was balancing resonance and damping while simultaneously symbolizing universal harmonic principles in its decorative carvings. Such harmony in geometric and acoustical design would have made this chapel a sacred space indeed for the Sinclair family and their closest friends.
Built by fifteenth-century Gnostics, Rosslyn has much to teach the world about harmony. It tells of an age when the cosmos and everything in it was seen as the frozen music of crystallized light. It describes a time when theism, philosophy, and natural science were united in the physics of music. It remembers a time when great temples of natural learning were built to celebrate nature’s perfect balance, celebrated in story and song. As perhaps the last temple built using the Venus Blueprint, Rosslyn chapel is anything but a simple Roman Catholic collegiate chapel.
The Saint Matthew Cover Story
As with many other stone temples and pyramids around the world, it seems likely that Rosslyn was created to record and preserve key elements of Vedic cosmology in its architecture. The designers did this not only to create sacred spaces for themselves but also to ensure the science behind the cosmological symbolisms would live on without corruption or misinterpretation. It is a true record in stone—empirical, measurable, and, in many ways, indisputable.
Scholars can always argue over where ancient people came from, what they believed, and how they lived, but the dimensions of Rosslyn and other such surviving structures hold the truth about what people once knew and what they thought was important. These temples stand as a testament to our ancestors’ highest science and noblest worldview.
Rosslyn is a compendium of everything Sinclair and Hay had to teach us. While it was ordained a collegiate chapel dedicated to St. Matthew, these people had much more to teach than just another Bible story. Their lesson was not from the Christian gospels and neither did it adhere to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, it was something much older and infinitely more authentic. It was the true unedited history of religion.
As Gnostic Ebionites, Sinclair and Hay were latter-day students of the reconstructed Hebrew Qabala. They saw Matthew as a teacher descended from Mosaism rather than a strict disciple of Jesus. In this way, they passed over the New Testament to a time predating the Christian Messianic era by at least a thousand years. This fact becomes apparent by understanding how Matthew was linked to the Vedic Upanishads and Buddhist Sutras through “didymus” Thomas, the supposed twin or double of Jesus who taught in India.
As the story goes, Matthew gave Thomas a copy of his writings, which he took back from Israel to southern India. From that moment on, Thomas taught his disciples using Matthew’s gospel, soon becoming the primary holy scripture of the Ishanni Christians. In fact, the only two Christian writings considered authoritative by the Ishannis for many centuries were the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Thomas. This was because the Essenes considered the Hebrew texts of the Old Testament corrupt and untrustworthy as guides in spiritual matters. The Ishannis also considered the remaining four gospels and the epistles of Paul of lesser authority, although they did adopt a few portions they felt were true. So in following the example of Thomas, they based their spiritual study on a combination of the Vedic Upanishads, Buddhist Sutras, and the two gospels of Matthew and Thomas.
It was this connection to the Vedas that must have caused the writings of Thomas to be excluded from the Christian Bible. Thomas, as the double of Jesus, was thus labeled a Gnostic heretic, and the writings of Matthew went on to be accepted into the Bible. So, under cover of Saint Matthew’s “gospel according to the Hebrews,” Rosslyn was publicly dedicated as a Catholic collegiate chapel, while the Sinclairs privately held a secret link to Thomas and the Vedas. Theirs was a temple founded on Vedic cosmology and the ancient science of harmony in nature—not Bible stories.
However outside of its odd carvings, the Rosslyn chapel we see today gives every indication of being a devout Catholic chapel. Its baptistry provides the “born again” cleansing ritual practiced by John the Baptist, and its stained-glass windows create a traditional Christian setting. Like every Catholic chapel and cathedral since the tenth century, stained glass was used to illuminate the Bible stories for the masses. At every turn there are illuminated stories of Jesus, the nativity scene, and the saints. A little quirky perhaps, what with its ornate carvings and strange symbolisms, but it still seems quite obvious and undeniable to most visitors that this must be a Catholic collegiate chapel.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The fourth Earl of Rosslyn added the baptistry and stained-glass windows in Rosslyn during the 1860s as part of a restoration project. According to old drawings, the original windows were clear (or perhaps open) and had no overarching Christian theme at all. Instead the stone latticework in and around the windows incorporated themes of sacred geometry. These included a square inscribed within a circle, arches designed using a Vesica Piscis, and a plethora of carved pentagonal rosettes decorating the stone window frames. In the ceiling of the choir we see stars, rosettes, and cymatic patterns arranged in sequence as if to offer clues for how to decipher the hidden meaning of the chapel.
The Lady Chapel can only have been designed to tell the true story of Christianity—what it means and where it came from. It was a tribute to all of the religions that led up to the Christian era, each of them a slightly different embodiment of the Rig-Veda. Here in this one stone temple is found the first history, science, and religion of the world, illuminating a path back to the musical-astronomical philosophy that once inspired the rise of human civilization.
The Qabala Connection
There is solid historical evidence to suggest Sinclair and Hay had access to ancient Hermetic knowledge, which they used to design their temple. This access came by way of a Frenchman named René d’Anjou, a man of great nobility who was simultaneously the Duke of Anjou, Count of Provence, King of Naples, titular King of Jerusalem, and King of Aragon. In fact, the Sinclair family shared the same Merovingian bloodline as the House of Anjou, descending through Charlemagne and then branching through Pepin II of Peronne and S. Quentin around 815–49 AD. It was probably through William Sinclair that Gilbert Hay came to know d’Anjou, becoming his chamberlain and trusted friend.
D’Anjou himself was related to the king of France by marriage and was a trusted ally during the war with England. On paper, he was one of the most powerful men in Europe. Through him, both Sinclair and Hay came to know Cosimo de Medici, of the powerful Medici family in Florence, who was the pope in Rome at the time.
At the
urging of d’Anjou, Cosimo de Medici established a nonchurch library in 1444 at San Marco where works of Plato and Pythagoras as well as books on Hermetic magic were translated and available to scholars. This library marked the end of the Dark Ages and beginning of the Greek Arcadia revival that sparked the European Renaissance. Hay was an important part of this effort, traveling to Cathay and across the Orient for many years to find and bring back ancient texts to this library. From these and similar texts came the esoteric compilation of ancient wisdom known as the medieval Qabala.
The Arcadian revival was so named from the Semitic legend of Akkadia originating in ancient Sumer or Sumeria (meaning “excellent Meru”). This legend describes a King Sargon of Akkad in ancient Mesopotamia who was raised by a gardener. He was a cupbearer in his youth and beloved by Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of Venus. As king he worshipped the fish-god Dagon and venerated the Taurus or Silver Mountains in southern Turkey, believed to be protected by the Akkadian god Amurru.
In this Akkadian legend we can clearly see the influence of Vedic cosmology. Dagon was the god of the sea associated with fertility and the garden, and Ishtar was the goddess of light, life, fertility, and love. Together these deities are a personification of Vena and Shukra representing the Birth of Venus fertility concept. Arising out of the sea was the god of Amurru, an Akkadian version of Lord Kubera of Meru.
The Sumerian legend of Akkadia is thus a retelling of the central stories of the Rig-Veda. At its heart, the Renaissance was a rediscovery of the Vedic roots behind all religions, not just the rediscovery of Greek writings as conventional history tells it. Rosslyn was contemporaneous with this revival and as such was an embodiment of Vedic cosmology.
It was through d’Anjou’s patronage of art, literature, and the advancement of knowledge that he became one of the most important figures in the early years of the Renaissance. It was also through his influence with Cosimo de Medici that literary agents such as Hay were sent out in search of ancient texts that might have survived the burning of the Library at Alexandria. He is arguably the single most influential person behind the revival of Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Qabalist philosophies that culminated in the Arcadian revival and Renaissance.
After collecting materials for d’Anjou in the Orient, Hay returned to Scotland to help build Rosslyn chapel. There is little doubt that much of what Sinclair and Hay knew about Meru temple design and other Arcadian philosophies they had learned through their association with d’Anjou and the Medici library. The Qabala they would have had access to includes many direct references to Meru and the Vedic teachings, as well as old-world philosophies and scriptures from all over Europe, Egypt, and the Orient.
This secret collection would have revealed the true history of religion and the original purpose of sacred spaces to Sinclair and Hay. The etching of Mount Meru with the Shekinah symbolism is testament to their awareness of, and interest in, the Qabala and ancient religion, especially as they had descended through Gnostic Ebionite traditions.
Pillars and Waves
As Ebionite followers of the Church of Jerusalem, Sinclair and Hay were very familiar with Hebrew temple ritual. Indeed, their blood ties with René d’Anjou, King of Jerusalem, would have made this a requirement. They would have known that the Hebrew Temple of Jerusalem was constructed on Mount Moriah (another Meru derivative) and that it housed the fabled Ark of the Covenant. They would have also known that this Ark is just another name for the Shekinah or feminine presence of God and that the Hebrews called her Asherah.
Sinclair and Hay would have been very familiar with the two golden cherubim at either side of the Ark as the dual feminine presence and that they were mirrored on either side of the temple entrance as twin masculine pillars made of bronze—one representing King Solomon and the other his father, King David. They would have known that the left-to-right order of these elements while looking eastward into the front opening of the temple was then the Hebrew trinity—father David, the mother-wife Asherah, and their son Solomon.
As this is found in Rosslyn chapel facing the same eastward direction, we have the same trinity—the Earl, the Shekinah, and the Prince—as symbols for the twin father-son pillars around the mother-wife Ark in the Temple of Jerusalem. And like the legendary Ark, Rosslyn’s Shekinah Pillar is adorned with the cherubim of Venus.
Such references to Solomon’s Temple are fairly obvious and have been pointed out many times before. But what has not been discussed as much is why this particular architectural design would have been considered so sacred and important to the temple in the first place.
Descending from the Akkadian Baal trinity which in turn descended from the Rig-Veda trinity, we find the Hebrew trinity to be none other than the Vedic trinity Indra (the Sun), Soma (the Moon), and Vena (Venus), the wife of Indra and mother of Soma. Soma, as the Moonchild deity, can then be either male or female depending on the context needed. Since the Sun and Moon are the largest bodies in the sky, appearing to be the same size, their importance in holding up the heavens was symbolized as twin pillars.
The twin father-son pillar symbolism has been repeated throughout history and across many cultures. Alexander the Great found and inspected many giant twin pillars in India made of gold and bearing strange scripts. Plato also wrote about them in his Critias, saying that the Atlantean kings inscribed their laws, edicts, and judicial decisions on such golden pillars. The most recent example of such pillars was the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, destroyed in a terrorist attack against not just America, but Western civilization in its entirety.
All of these legends come together in the famed Phoenician “Pillars of Hercules” located on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Greek mythology tells us the rock pillars at the strait—the Rock of Gibraltar on the north side and Monte Hacho on the south—were created when Heracles cleaved Atlas in half, opening up the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. These were believed to be the arms of Atlas upon which the cosmos sits.
The twin pillars of Solomon are thus a continuation of Vedic cosmology in which Venus is fertilized by the Sun to create the Moon. This pillar symbolism was so popular in the seventeenth century that it was even depicted on the silver coins minted by the Spanish conquistadors in Peru and Bolivia. After sailing through the Pillars of Hercules to reach the New World, twin pillars and waves were used as a fertility symbol for America.
In previous writings, I have made the case that the twin pillar legend may have originated from a single ancient source of wisdom concerning harmonics and vibration. My hypothesis is that some natural philosopher or priestly sect in prehistory engaged in a series of cymatic experiments to understand harmonics and the patterns they can produce. Intoning different intervals over a sand-covered drumhead, cymbal, or gong would have produced patterns that could have suggested the pillar symbolism.
By keeping a record of the cymatic resonance patterns produced by each musical interval in an octave, ancient temple priests could have linked numeric proportions with their corresponding geometrical patterns. In doing so, they would have discovered the two largest regions in an octave where patterns cannot form and are least harmonious. Located between the two “cracks between the keys” of the tritone and tonic major third in any major scale, both of these locations represent the twin golden sections of a musical octave.
Since the physical effect of any golden section is to damp or kill resonant vibration, musical intervals and chords near this proportion are anti-harmonic to the prime resonant frequency. Cymatic experiments on drums, cymbals, or gongs would have revealed this fact.
Within the harmonic series of a single tone, these golden sections also suppress and damp waves that are not whole-number multiples of the fundamental. It is through the physics of these two stabilizing vortices or “golden pillars” that standing waves are able to sustain and harmonics form. This applies to everything from atoms to solar systems and beyond. Everything material is a harmonic formation of light.
Having rudiment
ary knowledge of this physical process of harmonic formation, it is only natural for early priests to symbolize these constant damping locations as twin pillars of gold (the Sun and Moon) and resonance as the Harmonic Center or Ark (Venus). As a universal spiritual science taken from the sky, this trinity has had many names.
For Hebrew priests, the pillars would have been personified as David the Earl on one side and Solomon the Prince on the other. The Venusian “waters” of the Shekinah and Ark of Asherah would lie between them in the middle. The practice of baptizing was then a symbolic rebirth through the Shekinah or womb of Venus. Building the Holy Trinity into the temple itself provided a model of coherence for society. It told the story of a musical cosmos just as we find it in Rosslyn chapel.
From this harmonic theory came the Rig-Veda and “what is heard.” And from the Rig-Veda came the Sound Current, the Audible Life Stream, the Greek Logos, the Tao of Lao Zi, the Musica Universalis or Music of the Spheres of Pythagoras, the Sraosha of Zoroaster, the Kalma in the Quran, and the Word of the New Testament. Indeed, upon these musical pillars rests the great religions, governments, and cultural traditions of all mankind.
Son of the Sun
One thing I especially wanted to see during my visit to Rosslyn was the set of eight dragons carved around the base of the Prince’s Pillar. As the pillar representing Solomon, these serpent symbols identify him as the “Son of the Sun.” Indeed serpents are a very old symbol for the Sun and so personified Solomon as “the man of Sol.”
Angels are also part of the Solomon legend. There are stories throughout the Talmud and Midrashim about Solomon being aided in building his temple by angels, though not by choice. These angels were said to have magically lifted and placed the heavy stones needed to build the temple. Some people suggest they were moved into place by acoustic means—either by the chanted spells of magicians; by song; by striking with a magic wand; or some combination of trumpets, gongs, lyres, cymbals, or whistles. Given the importance of sound to early religion, we cannot help but wonder if sound might have been used in some way.
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