CHAPTER 8
Climbing the Invisible Tower
The afternoon talks in the ballroom of the Original Rosslyn Hotel went quite well. After a short introduction by Stuart, acoustic engineer and good friend John Reid gave a beautiful cymatic demonstration. Using only a square brass plate, sprinkled sand, and a violin bow drawn across its edge, John produced a wide array of stunning resonance patterns to the audience’s delight. Some of the patterns even looked like the musical cubes in the chapel.
After a short afternoon break for tea, it was my turn to present. I began by describing the long line of Venusian goddesses in ancient cultures and their connection to the Rig-Veda. This was then linked to the design of ancient pyramids and temples through the orbital pattern of Venus, which I introduced using the Blueprint symbol.
“Based on this geometry,” I said, “Rosslyn’s floor plan can be ‘unlocked’ using the Venus Blueprint by following a simple sequence of slide and rotate steps.” With that I gave a step-by-step explanation for how the chapel could have been designed using the Blueprint as a template.
As smiles of understanding began to light up the faces of my audience, I ended with a conceptual illustration of how Sinclair and Hay might have imagined their chapel. “This is Mary of Meru,” I said with a smile, “the virgin goddess awaiting the birth of God’s Sun (Fig. 29).
FIGURE 29. Rosslyn as the fiery womb of Venus
Needless to say this idea was bit of a jolt for many in the audience. A few were clearly upset with my inference that the virgin birth of Jesus might be just an astrological metaphor rather than a literal account. Combined with my suggestion that Rosslyn chapel was actually a pagan temple to Venus, I am quite sure some viewed me as a heretic, if not a crazy “mad rocket,” as they say.
But overall my talk was positively received. Several people approached me afterward to say they liked the idea that Rosslyn was a temple to Venus. They agreed that it probably was built as a launch pad into the afterlife for the Sinclair barons and thanked me for sharing my research.
Gathering up our equipment, everyone began to make his or her way out of the hotel and down the road toward the chapel. It was getting dark and nearing time for the concert. As I exited through the hotel’s pub, Tommy had just arrived and was getting out of the car. Shaking hands, we decided to walk instead of ride so we could enjoy the cool air and magnificent scenery of Roslin glen at dusk.
As we approached the chapel, I was very happy to find that most of the scaffolding had been removed since my last visit. I was anxious to get a clear view of the interior after the roof had been so completely obstructed the year before. Taking in the scenery, it was easy to see that Rosslyn had been built on a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside, just like many other Meru temples. It was also easy to see how people from miles around could have seen Rosslyn engulfed in flames just as Sir Walter Scott described.
Entering the chapel, I saw that a good crowd had gathered and was quickly filling the bench seating in the choir area. The ceiling was spectacular. Lit with a blue light that highlighted groups of carved symbols progressing from pentagonal stars to five-petaled roses to a region of what appeared to be a checkerboard of cymatic patterns, the choir ceiling looked like a Rosetta stone for resonant symbolism. I simply could not wait to hear what the music would sound like inside this chamber.
It was quite cold in the chapel that evening, near freezing in fact, with only a few space heaters near the musicians at the front of the choir. Having met many in the audience during my talk, I knew most of the people were Scottish and had driven in from Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside. Dressed warmly in woolen sweaters, coats, and tightly wound scarves, everyone sat in quiet anticipation of the concert, totally entranced by the sight of a medieval stone chapel lit by more than a hundred candles.
Stuart kicked it off by welcoming everyone. He then invited each of the presenters from that afternoon to say a few words before the concert. When it was at last my turn, I began by describing how we were all sitting inside an acoustical chamber built according to ancient harmonic principles. I explained how sound resonated inside the choir loft and spread through the rest of the chapel while simultaneously suppressing echoes.
I pointed out how the chapel sat within a set of perfectly balanced circles, squares, and triangles—all centered on the Shekinah Pillar—and that it was this sacred geometry that made it such an ideal acoustical space. Then sweeping my arms around the room, I concluded by saying the chapel was a finely tuned musical instrument and should be considered part of the night’s performance. Glancing over at the musicians, I could see they were quite pleased by this thought.
With that Stuart took the stage to direct the chamber ensemble and small choir in a performance of the Rosslyn Motet. Making my way to the back of the chapel, I stood directly in front of the entrance facing eastward down the aisle toward the musicians at the other end of the choir. Since the main entrance is usually the “wow location” in most buildings, I figured it might also be the case for Rosslyn.
Then as the music began, I was struck by something I could not have expected from all the calculations in the world. The music sounded as if it was coming, not from the musicians and singers directly in front of me, but instead from the ceiling as if being performed in the sky! It made absolutely no difference how I moved my head; the music was reaching my ears from someplace above. The disembodied voices of the singers sounded like angels, and the antique musical instruments sounded as if they were suspended in the air above me. I simply could not believe my ears and began to wonder what on Earth might be causing this incredible effect. Then it hit me.
The heavenly music illusion was a result of the sound waves in the choir loft above resonating more inside the tighter space than the sound waves at ground level. In this way the sound above me was more contained and amplified than the sound in the open space below. I figured that Rosslyn’s designers must have intended this as an auditory illusion of music spinning down from the heavenly summit of Meru. Standing there in a state of supreme musical reverie, I was finally beginning to understand what it meant to create a sacred space.
The World of Illusion
Outside of death itself, the term “ascension” once referred to the consumption of entheogenic wine to reach the realm of the gods. Represented as a sacred mountain, a tree, tower, axis, or serpent, the purpose of ingesting psychotropic plants was to transcend the illusion of Maya to see the spiritual world behind the physical.
If proto-Phoenician sailors did indeed colonize America in ancient times, as I believe they did, the religion of the American Maya would have originated in the Amurru region east of Egypt, where the Amorite people worshipped the sea-god Dagon. The early Maya and other Native Americans would have been taught to see the material world and themselves as Maya illusion, projected from a divine Source deep inside the archetypal realm of the sacred mountain.
One of the best examples of the Maya concept in America is the so-called legend of Amaru Meru. The story goes that an Incan priest of the Temple of the Seven Rays named Amaru Meru (a.k.a., Tupac Amaru) fled from his temple as the Spanish conquistadors arrived, taking with him a sacred golden disk known as the key of the gods of the seven rays.41
During his escape into the countryside, Amaru came upon a doorway that had been carved into the side of a mountain. Opening this doorway with his golden disk, he is said to have found a tunnel filled with blue light. Seeing this he quickly entered and disappeared into the mountain never to be seen again.
While it may sound like so many other mythical tales, this one is a little different. There is in fact a real doorway named the Gate to Heaven carved into a rock outcropping in the Hayu Marca mountains of Peru, located some thirty-five kilometers from Puno near Lake Titicaca. The doorway has no opening and is only a rectangular impression in the rock face.
However embedded into the rock next to the door is a small hand-sized circular depression large enough to fit a small bowl
or disc. Nowhere is there any mechanism or separation that would indicate a working physical door or tunnel inside the rock. With the surrounding area carved smooth or even vitrified with extreme heat, visitors say it appears more like molded butter than chiseled stone. Many have wondered why anyone would create something like this out of such hard rock in such a desolate location.42
The only reasonable answer seems to be that the so-called Gate to Heaven was never intended as a real door, but instead to symbolize a Maya doorway into the sacred mountain. It may have even been used in entheogenic ceremonies as a symbolic entrance to the archetypal dream realm of Meru. Opening the doorway would be a symbolic opening of the mind to the gods, and the golden disc could have been a sacred cup or dish filled with a psychedelic brew.
Like the Soma drink described in the Vedas, the Mayan and Incan cultures do, in fact, use a psychoactive brew called Ayahuasca, meaning “vine of the dead.” Made with plants containing the psychoactive “spirit molecule” DMT (dimethyltryptamine), the legend of Amaru Meru suggests this is what really enabled him to escape the Spanish. The Incan king made good his escape only by breaking through the Maya illusion of reality.43
Indigenously Indigo
There is a very curious connection between India, Egypt, and the Americas that has to do with the sacred color indigo. This dark-blue color was originally the Greek word for India because it was used to depict only the most important Vedic deities, such as Krishna, Siva, and Vishnu. Common to the Indus Valley region, the dye was extracted from the indigo plant indigofera tinctoria and used in painting.
The original name for indigo in various Mediterranean languages was actually annil or anil. This became the word nila or nilah, which is the etymological origin for the word “nile” and Nile river. As it happens, the waters of the Nile river originate on the plateau of Ethiopia and split into two tributaries called the White Nile and Blue Nile.
Since the Vedic Aryans colonized both India and Ethiopia, they are the ones who probably introduced indigo as a sacred color into both regions. The same thing may have happened in America.
The Mayan and Aztec civilizations used a similar blue pigment extracted from the leaves of a related species of indigo plant named indigofera suffruticosa in their pre-Columbian artwork, sculptures, murals, textiles, and writings. At Chichen Itza “Maya Blue” was even used to paint human sacrifices as a symbol of purity. Here again it was the Vedic Phoenicians and their Danite friends who likely introduced this sacred color to the indigenous peoples of America.
The obvious question this raises is why was the color indigo so important to the Vedic people? Why did it represent purity and divinity? Did it symbolize the sky or water, say before dawn and at dusk, or was it something more? The answer may be it was part of an ancient knowledge of harmony, not only as it occurs in sound but also as it occurs in color (Fig. 30).
FIGURE 30. Indigo as Harmonic Center
The Harmonic Center was introduced earlier as a physical point of symmetry in the harmonic series as well as the ninth scale step in a diatonic major scale. When the same idea is applied to the color spectrum so that the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors are perfectly balanced, the Harmonic Center automatically aligns with indigo.
While there are many possible color-to-tone mappings, this is arguably the most organic. This is because both red and green are the colors furthest from dark-blue indigo, which together correspond to the three types of cones in the human retina. In this way, the three colors of red, green, and indigo blue are balanced symmetrically in RGB color space corresponding to the evolution of sight in humans. But this is not the only proof this mapping is the most organic.
There is a natural progression of plant chemistry during the autumn from green-reflecting chlorophyll to red-reflecting anthrocyanin—all underneath a cyan or, in the evening, indigo sky. From this simple observation of nature, all of the color frequencies in the visible light spectrum align in a spectral octave centered on the indigo Harmonic Center. The big question is how would ancient peoples have understood this and then related it to sound?
The likely answer is they organized the color spectrum around the indigo color of the sky at dusk just after the Sun “died” and before it was “reborn” from the indigo dawn. As a masculine symbol of Vedic cosmology, indigo could have represented the “resurrection” of the Sun by the Morning Star of Venus.
From this first color, the sky turns from indigo to blue and finally cyan in anticipation of the sunrise in the east. When the Sun finally does peek over the horizon, the foliage becomes green while the Sun’s yellow and orange streaks blaze in the morning sky. At sunset the color progression continues with golds, reds, and magentas appearing in the west, gradually dimming to the cool violet and indigo color of dusk as the Sun dies.
Through this natural cycle of colors in the sky, ancient priests could have recognized indigo as the Harmonic Center and masculine axis of the world around which all the other colors of the sky revolve. Without any knowledge whatsoever of standing waves and harmonic formation, they would have taken the color wheel directly from the sky, aligning it symmetrically to their musical scales.
From this the colors of the rainbow would have naturally mapped onto the seven-step diatonic scale, leading to a rudimentary but essentially correct understanding of harmonic theory as it pertains to human perception. From this simple understanding of natural harmony, Tibetan monks would have known to make their robes the color yellow-orange, opposite indigo on the color wheel, to symbolize their place counterbalancing the sky gods on Earth. A basic harmonic science of color-tone harmony is thus the most likely explanation for the use of indigo as the color of divinity.
Yet there is more to Vedic color symbolism than just indigo. Another color was also considered to be sacred, perhaps even more sacred than indigo. As discussed earlier, purple was a very sacred color to the Phoenicians, which they associated with the land of Canaan or Amurru. This was the color of the Shekinah, the she-purple pillar of the Hebrews and the sacred Phoenix. It was the color embraced by the Danites and the color used in the royal robes of the Merovingian kings. Like the masculine color of indigo, the feminine symbolism of purple also has its roots in an ancient harmonic science.
The Purple Ratio
The Phoenicians who lived in Canaan were the exclusive traders of purple dye throughout the Mediterranean. Having learned how to extract it from the Murex snail (another possible Meru reference), it was named Tyrian Purple after the Phoenician city of Tyre where it was produced. Because of its unique ability to resist fading, it was highly prized as a dye and so very expensive.
Since only the Phoenicians traded this purple dye, they and the entire region of Canaan were closely associated with this color. In fact the name Phoenicia actually means purple, as does Canaan. Purple was considered a very sacred color in those days and used only for royalty and nobility. Many have wondered why this color would be so important to kings and be considered so sacred by priests. For the answer we might look to the purple Phoenix.
The Phoenix is considered equivalent to the mythical Egyptian sunbird known as the Benu Bird. Based on the long-necked pink flamingo, the Benu or “purple heron” was closely associated with the Egyptian Temple of the Sun. Greek historian Herodotus explains:
I have not seen a phoenix myself, except in paintings, for it is very rare and visits the country (so at least they say in Heliopolis) only at intervals of 500 years, on the occasion of the death of the parent bird. To judge by the paintings, its plumage is partly golden, partly red, and in shape and size it is exactly like an eagle. There is a story about the phoenix: it brings its parent in a lump of myrrh all the way from Arabia and buries the body in the Temple of the Sun. To perform the feat, the bird first shapes some myrrh into a sort of egg as big as it finds, by testing, that it can carry; then it hollows the lump out, puts its father inside and smears more myrrh over the opening. The egg-shaped lump is then just the same weight as it was originally. Finally, it is
carried by the bird to the Temple of the Sun in Egypt.
From this description, we can begin to piece together the meaning of the Phoenix and its purple symbolism. The mound of the Sun from which the Phoenix rose was named M’R or Mihr (the name of the Great Pyramid of Meru and the Egyptian embalming perfume myrrh). This mound was believed to be a burning five-tier funeral pyre from which the serpent spirit arose during cremation. As a symbol of resurrection after death, the purple Phoenix was said to hold the feminine power of fertility and bestow the “Principle of Ascension” upon the Pharaohs.
In this way the Phoenix can be considered another symbol for Venus fertility and resurrection through Meru. Because of its long neck, it would have been considered the serpent who hid the lord’s gold in the mountain. And because of its purple color, it would have also been associated with the divine proportion at the center of the Fibonacci spiral of Meru. This is found in the long spiraling shell of the Murex snail. The snail and its purple color are found at the very tip of the shell’s spiral.
Using the color wheel of the sky centered on the indigo Harmonic Center, we might now see that purple is located at a golden section in the Vedic harmonic model (Fig. 31).
FIGURE 31. Harmonic equivalence of purple to the golden mean
When measured as a proportion from the tonic, the inverse golden ratio 1/Ф literally falls on the color yellow-orange corresponding to gold, and the divine proportion Ф falls on the color purple—right where the visible spectrum loops around and connects to form a wheel. In this way, we find both an explanation for the historical importance of the name “golden ratio” and the reason purple was considered divine. Indigo was the masculine Harmonic Center of Meru, and feminine purple was the Fibonacci spiral to the infinite divine realm. The two colors together would have symbolized the union of masculine and feminine to the Vedics, therein fertilizing the heavenly mountaintop or Eye of the Pyramid.
The Venus Blueprint Page 16