Rosslyn Chapel

Having returned recently from my summer holiday in Scotland I thought I would blog about some of the more ‘unusual’ things we did whilst there.

On the way to Edinburgh we paid a visit (£7.50 for adults!) to Rosslyn chapel. I had first come across Rosslyn at a lecture given by Gorden Rutter and Scott Russell at a Fortean Unconvention and then later through Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci code. I had expected a few carvings but was blown away by the place. The building itself is redolent with history; even the name Rosslyn is perhaps significant. According to research conducted by Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight for The Hiram Key (1997), the word can be broken into its two syllables, 'Ros' and 'Lyn' which have their roots in the Gaelic 'Ros', meaning ancient knowledge and 'Lyn', meaning down the ages. It can therefore be argued that even the name of the place is telling us what it is: a library carved in stone ciphers; an attempt to impart arcane knowledge in something more durable than paper – knowledge available only to those with the intellect to decode it. . Rather, the building was designed and left for posterity as a learning tool, a coded book constructed in the most durable medium available – stone.

Rosslyn Chapel is still a working church (the Collegiate Church of St Matthew) but it is also something much more than that, to me it seemed to be a pantheistic temple which was later called a church in order to secure it’s survival, I have never seen a Christian church so covered with pagan symbols, images of Lucifer, dragons, plants, fields of flowers, sins and death. The carvings cover every inch of the small chapel and trains of intricate patterns and a large number of splayed crosses mark this place as an important meeting place of the Knights Templar. The splayed cross is also part of the Sinclair family’s insignia.

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