A wind mandala of cosmic clouds supports the circular earth and oceans base of the universe. The cylindrical pyramid face of Mt. Meru is depicted as a tapering rock stack. The moon and sun are placed to the left and right of Meru’s summit.
In the east is the half-circle of the wind element, in the south the triangle of the fire element, in the north the circular full-moon orb of the water element, and in the west the golden square of the earth element.
The four lower tiers are drawn with the rainbow enhaloed palaces of the demi-gods on each of their levels … above Mt Meru’s summit, Indra’s palace and sacred groves are enclosed by a rainbow; from its upper arc ascend radiating rainbows which indicate the realm of the gods.
Here again we find the Sun and Moon at the peak of the mountain with four terrace levels below. The geometries of a triangle, circle, and square form a symbolic harmony around Meru, and the eastern wind is represented by a half-circle. The arch of a rainbow radiates up over the summit, enclosing it. As a metaphorical description, this could just as well be the geometric floor plan of Rosslyn or sacristy tower etching surrounded by an egg.
Just like the Blueprint symbol, the circular Earth forms a resonating foundation and yolk for the pyramid, which extends upward to the Sun and Moon. Here at the top we find the father-son duality of a solar eclipse with the Moon filling a semicircle cup like that of the Rosslyn tower etching. The summit and four lower tiers then comprise a five-level geometry consistent with the pentacle orbit of Venus. The rainbow arch encloses all of these symbols into one beautifully unified Cosmic Egg, encompassing both the Sri Yantra and orbital star pattern of Venus.
The Egyptian triangle or pyramid geometry is located inside this harmonic structure as the proportional relationship between the Earth and Moon. As the simplest component in the Blueprint symbolism, it embodies the divine proportion central to Vedic cosmology and is the prime symbol for Mount Meru in the Rig-Veda. This is confirmed in the various names for Egypt and the pyramids.
The ancient name for Egypt was To-Mera, and the written name for the Great Pyramid was M’R, the root for Meru, Myrrh, Mihr, and Mithra. In this way, the Meru archetype was the mountain symbol behind Egyptian cosmology as well as the rock of Persian Mithraism. Just as it glues the Sri Yantra and Cosmic Egg into a single structure, so too did the Meru pyramid once unify civilizations through a common ideology of harmony.
As mentioned before, the region east of Egypt from Byblos to Ugarit (Lebanon to Syria) was called Amurru after the Sumerian/Akkadian god who was the son of the sky-god Anu. Like Kubera, he was the lord of the mountain and dwelled in the pure or shining mountain. Again we find an etymological connection between Amurru and Meru.
Amurru was also associated with lightning and considered the source for the legendary thunderbolts of Zeus. There is evidence Amurru was also the real god of Abraham, perhaps replaced along the way by the rival Jewish god YHWH, who descended into Christianity and Islam. In any case, the god of Meru was a central figure in the religious beliefs of Egypt and ancient Sumer, as it was in India.
In 1933 a set of Sumerian tablets was discovered during the excavation of a city named Mari located on the eastern flank of Syria. Dated to around 2500 BC, one of the tablets describes the sun-god Shamash and another one describes Dagon (or Dagan), the Semitic fertility god that later became the Greek Draco or dragon. Dagon’s wife was Belatu (meaning “Lady”) equated with Ashara, Ishtar, Astarte, and later Hebrew Asherah. In this way, Dagon and Belatu correspond to Shukra and Vena as the male-female deities for Venus in the Rig-Veda. Indeed Dagon and Belatu were worshipped together in the Dagon temple complex named E-Mul, meaning “House of the Star.”
The star is of course the orbital rose pattern of Venus. Like the Rig-Veda, this star hovers over the sacred mountain, which for the Sumerians was named Mashu as a variation of Meru. Shamash, the all-knowing, all-seeing Sumerian sun god, was portrayed in many seals standing between two large doors. According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, he was located between Mount Mashu and the eastern doors to heaven. Mashu, meaning “twin,” was thus an early form of the masculine twin pillar symbolism found in later Hebrew temples and a possible reference to the double golden sections in a musical octave described earlier.
Thus, like the Greek Ladon, Dagon was the dragon-serpent and son of the sun-god Shamash. Personified as the god of rain, sea, and agriculture, he was a fertility Moonchild corresponding to the Morning Star goddess Ishtar. Sitting between the Earth and the eastern entrance to heaven, Dagon was the son of Shamash and Belatu/Ishtar, just as the Soma Moon god was the child of Indra and Vena in the Rig-Veda.
As this Sumerian trinity formed the foundation for Semitic beliefs that led to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there are several important parallels between the Dagon sea dragon and the Christian narrative. Dagon is often depicted as half-man, half-fish—a merman god like Vishnu, Enki, and Triton—who was an early archetype for all interdimensional deities. Jesus the fisherman is one such interdimensional deity some believe was modeled after the Dagon archetype.26 This is confirmed by the Aramaic name Mari for Jesus and its association with the feminine duality in his life—Mary, the mother of Jesus, and wife, Mary Magdalene.
Indeed the Christ symbol appears deeply rooted in the Dagon sea-fertility mythos as the “fallen one,” born the Son of the Sun from the virgin star rising out of the eastern ocean. The story of Jesus the fisherman is just one in a long line of personifications of this sea-dragon mythology. When the Christian narrative is compared with that of the Rig-Veda, the Christian messianic birth appears to anthropomorphize the cosmological Birth of Venus corresponding to the astronomical Transit of Venus. As a personified solar serpent, the Christian messiah was born through the sea as the Moonchild from the celestial congress of Venus and the Sun.
The Christian Holy Trinity thus descended from the Babylonian trinity, which in turn descended from the Vedic sky deities of Sumer, Egypt, and India. It is only natural that the Roman Church would be built in an ancient Vedic garden for entheogenic plants and that its central theme would be the timeless story of solar fertility and birth.
We should not be confused by the presence of an astrological Egyptian obelisk in St. Peter’s Square or the Church’s astronomical observatory outside of Rome. Neither should we be shocked to learn that Christianity’s central deity is none other than a serpent king, a fisherman, and son of a sun god—born a Moonchild from the star in the east. All of these stories are but the harmonic gods of Vedic cosmology, adapted over time into different cultures to fit different tastes.
Slaying the Dragon
Given the Vedic roots of the Vatican, what does this tell us about the meaning of Rosslyn? Can it further explain the motivation behind its musical symbolisms and resonant architecture?
Well for one it confirms that the entire menagerie of symbols in Rosslyn—angels, stars, bees, geometries, pillars, etchings, and floor plan—are all Vedic fertility symbols and that the Lady Chapel was a House of the Star secretly dedicated to Venus and the sacred Mount Meru. It tells us the acoustical effects and musical symbolisms are designed to embody the Vedic principle of “what is heard” as it once existed in the harmonic science of numbers, vibration, and geometric patterning. It is the pyramid laid flat, bowing to the dawn.
Designed according to Qabalist tradition and disguised as a Roman Catholic collegiate chapel to St. Matthew, the celestial harmonies of the planets are at the center of Rosslyn’s teachings. This is the message of the Lady Chapel—hidden in plain sight, yet invisible without an understanding of harmonic science. Through its construction, William Sinclair and Sir Gilbert Hay sought to preserve the Vedic worldview and spiritual wisdom so that the world might one day remember Christianity as the study of astronomy, geometry, and music rather than only Church doctrine and Bible verses.
Of course building a chapel in the Middle Ages to preserve this secret was no easy task. The Church wanted to hide its pagan past, and anyone who might attempt to reveal this
was in mortal danger. The best Sinclair and Hay could do was to disguise their story in obscure symbolisms and hope that someday people would be free enough, both mentally and politically, to handle the truth.
While revealing the Hebrew goddess was essential to Sinclair and Hay, the more important and difficult part of the story to reveal—the part the Church wanted to keep hidden most of all—was the solar serpent at the center of Christianity. How could they possibly reveal that Jesus was really a dragon god without being discovered? How could they explain he was a Vedic harmonic symbol for celestial fertility or that he was symbolically born from a planet? How could they ever tell the painful truth about what it really means to be a messiah?
Church Fathers would certainly have known that their messiah story has its roots in the Hindu and Buddhist mythology of the divine serpent or Naga. In ancient Egypt this was the well-known god Sebek, the musuh or crocodile messiah. In fact, this was the messiah of the Naga worshippers who built the Giza pyramids.
From Egypt, the serpent-messiah concept spread across Mesopotamia, becoming the Sumerian serpent god Ningizzida (the original medical caduceus) and Chaldean dragon Mušhuššu (associated with Marduk, the god of water and vegetation). In India the serpent messiah became Krishna and his serpent Kaliya, while in China the legend morphed into the “Lung” or water dragons. In South America we find the Mayan serpent kings of Caramaya, Naga Maya (later as Kukulcan and Quetzalcoatal), as well as the Amarus and Con Ticci Viracocha of Peru.
Greek philosopher Pythagoras learned much of what he knew from serpent worshippers such as the Egyptian Nagas, Chaldean Magi, and Hindu Brahmins. Even the name “Pythagoras” has its origin in the Greek words “Python” and “agoras,” together translating into the phrase “serpent meeting.” It was the cult of Pythagoras that unified the ancient Naga mystery schools into the study of resonance and harmonic waves.
While most shiver at the thought of serpents these days, the dragon-serpent archetype was once revered as the very essence of God manifest in nature as the Fibonacci series. Solar serpents flew as waves of heat above the desert floor, emanating down from the life-giving Sun. As plants consumed the sunlight, it was in turn consumed by biological life. In this way, solar serpents would enter the body through the sacred plants.
In both Hindu and Egyptian beliefs, the kundalini or uraeus serpent of the Sun was believed to spiral around the spine, traveling up and out through the third eye at the center of the brain. Deduced from the study of spirals and waves everywhere in the natural world, the notion of serpents as the primordial essence of God flourished.
Prior to the Christian age, the spiraling or coiling action of a serpent, a snail, or a seashell was seen as the pathway to God. The serpent was synonymous with spirituality and divine intelligence in all things, both macro and micro. It was God at the infinite golden center of the World Mountain, wrapped around the Cosmic Egg. It was the yellow brick road that spiraled home—a path by which everyone might reach the Source and become enlightened some day.
Slaying the dragon meant conquering death, elevating consciousness, and reconnecting with our inner solar serpent—the Christos, Krishna, or King within. This was a very happy thing indeed, celebrated around the world in both fertility and funerary rites.
In spite of all this—the beauty of Vedic cosmology and belief that all things were alive and one in the Sun’s light—the dragon-serpent fell out of favor with the rise of the Roman Church. In fact it became downright despicable and mightily feared. How could the serpent symbol have been transformed from something so good to something so bad?
The truth is the Church worked very hard to twist the meaning of the original harmonic symbolism of the solar serpent in an effort to erase Christianity’s roots in solar-serpent worship. Indeed, the Church Fathers recast the serpent as a symbol of deceit and banishment from the Garden from the very first page of Genesis.
To promulgate the evil serpent symbolism into the public consciousness, the Church then launched the Holy Crusades and Inquisition tribunals, complete with heretic torture and witch burnings, all to hide the fact that their Holy Trinity was once associated with planets and their messiah was actually a solar serpent. The power of sunlight to transform itself into plants and living creatures was replaced with the theory that God was entirely separate from Nature and located in a place called Heaven, a reinterpretation of the Meru legend.
As it happened, the rise of the Holy Roman Empire quickly stripped the dragon-serpent of its harmonic identity. Slaying the dragon became a battle against the idea of God in Nature. A dying Jesus on the cross became the stand-in symbol for the solar serpent that had once brought light and enlightenment. Instead of reminding people of their intrinsic divinity and goodness, the crucifix became a way to remind them of their intrinsic evil and the Church’s power to absolve them of their sins.
Beginning with the Cathar Heresy in southern Europe and gradually reaching all the way to Jerusalem, the Church struggled to destroy the ancient serpent religions and their harmonic science. They expunged harmonic balance from music in 1234 AD through canon law, then used this law as philosophical justification to prosecute pagan impurities elsewhere. The libraries of Alexandria were burned, and pagan temples were sacked with religious artwork destroyed or disfigured. Back home the Inquisition crushed the Gnostic cults and esoteric societies that sought to preserve the Vedic wisdom. Anyone seeking salvation through the study of natural harmony and entheogenic enlightenment was put to death.
This project of purification by the Catholic Church is perhaps best described in the so-called Golden Legend of Saint George and the Dragon. In this thirteenth-century story, Saint George is a Roman soldier stationed in Silene, Libya, in North Africa. Riding through the countryside of this very exotic land, he encounters a beautiful princess about to be eaten by a dragon rising out of a lake. To save her George fortifies himself with the sign of the cross and charges the dragon on horseback, giving it a grievous wound with his lance. Retrieving a girdle from the princess, he uses it to collar the dragon and force it to follow the girl around like a meek beast on a leash.
Adored by virtually every Christian soldier in the Holy Crusades, this story embodies the anti-pagan doctrine of the Roman Church. The dragon is used to represent the pre-Christian sun gods just as its location in North Africa links it with Egypt and the Middle East. The mythical location of Silene suggests an association with Silene Capensis, also known as African Dream Root, which is in fact a sacred plant entheogen. Gallant Saint George, as the Roman Church, slays the serpent messiah and, with it, the sacred vatica once used to commune with the sky gods.
In place of the dragon now sits a dead solar serpent, the revered icon of asymmetry and imbalance. Where once stood a vision of harmony lifting up great civilizations is now an anti-harmonic doctrine of cathartic purity.27 From this came the philosophy of the West—a philosophy to forever slay the Hebrew Serpents of Wisdom from which Christian civilization had descended. Today, the dragon is deader than a doornail, slain by Saint George a million times over.
Yet some believe the solar serpent will return. Not as the dead symbol of the water dragon, but as a new feminine messiah—the fiery she-purple Phoenix of Venus. Hatched from the Cosmic Egg of Eastre, they hope the mythical firebird might someday rise from its own burning pyre amid the embers to save the world. Upon this flying serpent rides the Budha, wise Messenger of the Sun, bearing the lost key to unlock the transcendental mountain within. Perhaps this was the hope of the Lady Chapel.
Mother of the Mountain
Leaving Vatican City, I strolled with my family across the avenue into one of two corner gift shops. Resplendent with Catholic icons, gold and bejeweled crucifixes, religious murals, and idolatrous plastic saints, they offered one gift I could never have expected.
There, mixed among the statues of saints and martyrs, were statues of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. At first taken aback, a smile grew across my face as I realized what this must mean.
CHAPTER 6
Key to the Musical Mountain
Studying the geometry of the Vatican complex, one immediately wonders why the layout of the Basilica and its astrological square is in the shape of a giant key. With the oval sundial in front of the Basilica as the key handle and the Basilica itself forming the shank of the key, what could have been the motivation behind choosing this shape?
During my visit there, I found this design repeated throughout the Vatican in the Papal Seal, embedded in everything from marble floors to massive wooden doors. As the holy symbol for the Pope’s power, it comprises two crossed skeleton keys and a crown. Given the earlier discussion about Solomon’s keys and resonant patterning, it is only natural to wonder if this symbolism might have something to do with the Venus Blueprint.
In my first book Interference, I described how the interference pattern between locations of maximum resonance and damping in an octave can be symbolized by a skeleton key. The resonant end of the pattern resembles a hexagonal key “bow” pattern while, at the other end, the deadening golden ratio resembles an unlocking “bit.” Based on its resemblance to Masonic key jewelry, I named it the Solomon Key Model as a fun way to explain harmonic physics and how this might have been represented in the past.
When I later applied the Solomon Key Model to the symbols and acoustical properties of Rosslyn, I came to believe certain theosophical ideas might also have arisen from this harmonic interference pattern. I hypothesized that the resonance pattern over an octave might be the missing key alluded to by Masonic researchers and might even be a secret Templar symbol pertaining to Vedic cosmology and temple design.
The Venus Blueprint Page 11