From the outside, Rosslyn Chapel is not seen as a suitable place to hide the head of Jesus. It is no bigger than a church in the countryside, it is located on a small hill in the Scottish town of Roslin, a few miles south of Edinburgh.
Its gothic pinions, buttresses and semicircular arches, have been mistreated for more than 500 years of capricious weather, and have long been locked in an exoskeleton of scaffolding in effort to a restoration progressing laboriously . Until recently, it was covered by a giant black canopy.
But inside the chapel, below the carvings that cover the walls and ceiling, there is a Spartan stone crypt that has one of the most famous mythologies in history . According to legend, the treasure of the legendary Order of the Temple is kept in an even deeper vault whose entrance is closed by a stone wall. Depending on who you ask, that treasure is the Holy Grail, sacred scrolls from the time of Christ, a fragment of the cross on which he died, or even the embalmed head.
The movie The Da Vinci Code brought the Rosslyn Chapel the world's attention
If any of this sounds familiar, it is because Dan Brown presented this legend of The Da Vinci Code, where they were close to exposing a 2, 000-year-old conspiracy to erase evidence that Christ had children.
The Da Vinci Code brought the Rosslyn Chapel to the attention of the world. Although he had been popular with the Grail nerds and imaginative scholars for decades, Dan showed the legend of the Templars, even though the chapel was relatively unknown even in Scotland before the first novel of 2003.
After the movie, visits to the chapel increased by more than 50 percent, increasing the revenue needed for the Rosslyn restoration project . The chapel remains in the hands of the descendants of its founder, Sir William St. Clair, but guided by a trust that oversees the site.
The view when entering the Rosslyn Chapel, is much smaller than it seems from the outside. Just spend a few minutes at the church to understand how Dan Brown was inspired. The Rosslyn Chapel is a theoretical game room of the conspiracy, where mysterious stone carvings are found. In the film version of The Da Vinci Code, professor of symbology, Tom Hanks looks respectfully at the walls full of reflections "Christians, Jews, Egyptians, Masonic, " which marks the influence of the place.
This is not far from reality, except for the Masonic part . The chapel was completed more than a century before the foundation of Freemasonry . The place is really messy, like a person who is completely full of incongruous tattoos. Eight Nordic dragons form a ring around the base of an ornate pillar, as do the pagan jungle deities seen as dozens of green men peeking through the stone foliage.
An arch represents the Dance of Death, represented by skeletal figures. A two hump camel shows a curious appearance, even though such an animal was rare in Scotland at the time. The stories, both New and Old Testament appear again and again.
Little information can be found that could explain what the founders of the chapel wanted when placing all these sizes. Several fires in the nearby Roslin Castle consumed much of the archives of the St. Clair family . This lack of contradictory evidence is very convenient for the people who care for the church and its history. Rosslyn Chapel is a treasure of pieces of a puzzle that do not match.
The Order of the Temple was a royal band of well-armored bankers, founded around 1120. Its function of the knights was to protect the pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, but after the Egyptian Sultan Saladin took Jerusalem later that century, there was not much need for their services. No less than six crusades in the next 200 years would not be able to establish a lasting Christian lease in the sacred territories.
Without a great army to defend their great wealth, the knights became an easy target. In 1307, the French King Philip IV initiated a relentless campaign to stop them, culminating seven years later, when the last great master of the order was burned at the stake . Most of the accounts end here, 150 years before the first stone was laid in the Rosslyn Chapel.
However, a handful of knights escaped persecution and fled to Scotland with the Templar treasure, and survived long enough to keep the secret of the sacred treasure of the Rosslyn Chapel, which was completed around 1480 .
Although this was almost false for a variety of reasons, it was almost impossible, for example, to navigate from the northwest of France to Scotland in the month of October, which was when the persecution began . However, the association between Rosslyn and the Grail remains immovable, causing the idea of conspiracy to be accepted by tourists, making the purchase of T-shirts and cups customary, run a Rosslyn gift shop where they sell copies of The Da Vinci Code and a variety of other copies.
Like the chapel crypt, Rosslyn's stone carvings are embedded with doubtful stories . One holds that resembles a corn plant carved over an arch near the crypt, is proof that a Scotsman discovered the New World before Columbus and returned with this crop exclusively American However, any type of ambiguity is the fuel for conspiracy theorists. Even the most insane story will persist as long as it meets two conditions : The theory has a fiery spokesman, and it is impossible to definitely refute .
This is precisely why Tommy Mitchell is so easy to point out as false. His theory that there is a secret code hidden in the stone carvings of Rosslyn is far fetched, fantastic and infalsifiable. But after spending a few days in Scotland scrutinizing his hypothesis, it has been found that it is increasingly difficult to be a skeptic.
The east end of the Rosslyn Chapel sits under 13 intersecting arches that run along the room from north to south . While a lot of Gothic cathedrals feature a similar architectural gold clasp, Rosslyn arches have a distinctive feature: small stone cubes that protrude at regular intervals, such as teeth.
There are 213 cubes in total, 17 or 18 per arch. Each has a geometric pattern, a diamond, a rosette and an inverted circle. In total, 12 patterns are repeated in irregular sequences, some appear frequently, others only once or twice. At the base of each arch, with the exception of the first and last, there is an exquisitely carved stone angel either playing an instrument or singing a hymnal.
Mitchell, a former Royal Air Force cryptographer, ran into the chapel almost 40 years ago, when it was largely unknown and in disrepair. However he would return to Rosslyn in recent years, always attracted by the cubes and their mysterious symbols. While there was no obvious order for the sequence of the cubes, Mitchell realized that, as in a DNA chain, there were small patterns that would be repeated.
The same sequence of three symbols appears at the base of two of the arcs, for example, an arc contains long sections in which only one symbol is repeated.
Mitchell, he thinks this is no accident . The symbols, according to him, form a 500-year-old code, legacy of the founders of the chapel, and the angels are the key to deciphering it.
AUTHOR: JoT333, editor of the great family of hermandadblanca.org
