Rosslyn : Between Two Worlds

Excerpt:

There have been several books written about Rosslyn Chapel, the most recent seem determined to undermine any possibility that this very special building is anything more than a stone church, albeit highly detailed and elaborate, and nothing more. This work confronts this rationalist stance head on and presents startling new evidence suggesting just the opposite. From the outset it should be clear that two quite distinct histories are applied to Rosslyn Chapel. One is the official version insisting that the Chapel is nothing more than a place of simple piety and worship, while the other is a much more esoteric shadow interpretation with immense implications, the histories are not interchangeable and there are very few points of convergence.

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If ever there was an example of Sir Winston Churchill's famous quotation referring to Russian foreign policy as, 'a puzzle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma' applied to a building, then surely this building must be Rosslyn Chapel. Over the years, fevered speculation over this medieval structure has fuelled a series of quests to uncover what if any mystical and arcane secrets and codes may be encoded within its design.

These quests have involved everything from the straightforward and robust, i.e. drilling directly into the vaults through the flagstoned floor of the chapel, and in one notorious instance an entirely unauthorised attempt to bore into the vaults from a field outside the building, to learned historical and archaeological research and debates about the images and patterns carved into the stonework. It is notable that the more intrusive archaeological endeavours have all been rebuffed, although several ultrasound ground scans have been carried out with considerable success. There have also been attempts to employ very different and subtle types of questing techniques using the talents of psychics and mediums and, as we shall see, these methods appear to have had more success than the more conventional and traditional and it is to these alternative methods that we apply ourselves.

While it can be argued that all places of worship are, by nature, in a sense supernatural or otherworldly, as we shall see, in the case of Rosslyn Chapel this assertion just might be literally true. The theories expounded and words written about this small Midlothian chapel are legion, but until fairly recently the interest in the building and its legends was confined to a relatively small band of people.

They tended to be academics, historians and members of various quasi-religious and mystical groups, e.g. the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians and the Militi Templi Scotia (MTS), who are a relatively modern, (18th century) Scottish variant on the legendary and near mythical order of warrior monks, the Knights Templar. Ownership of the Templar inheritance has been claimed by a variety of groups and organisations and there are a series of Masonic degrees, beginning with the Royal Arch and continuing through The Preceptory and Cryptic Council, all rituals invoking Templar imagery and traditions. In addition there have been other less worthy groups who claimed to invoke the Templar name and its code of honour, among them the OTO, or 'Ordo Templi Orientis', and the more recent but much more venal and avaricious, 'Order of the Solar Temple'.

Both of these groups were more concerned with enacting rituals and quasi-magical ceremonies than promoting chivalric values, particularly the OTO, which included the notorious, late 19th, early 20th century occultist, Aleister Crowley, among its members. In the case of the Solar Temple, which in fact was organised and operated more like a cult, the lives of several of its adherents ended in mass suicide at the whim of it founder rather than initiation into anything genuinely worthwhile.