In the summer of 2005, I had the opportunity to visit Rosslyn Chapel, an extraordinary site just seven miles from Edinburgh. The final scenes in the best-selling novel The DaVinci Code take place there; it's said to be the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant and the Grail, among other things. It also has Masonic and Knight Templar connections. My tour guide that day was a fellow Mason, who was very knowledgeable about the place – both the traditional lore and the somewhat more esoteric stories. While I was standing with him in the northeast corner of the chapel – highly significant, that, as my fellow Masons will attest – he and I had a conversation similar to the one below.
“Look up there,” he said, pointing to the ceilings. I could see the pendant bosses hanging down from the place where four arched supports met; each arch was decorated with hundreds of boxlike projections and an assortment of carvings and decorations – animal and human figures, angels and devils, nature emblems and Green men.
“Extraordinary,” I managed.
“Unlike anything else,” he said. “There are countless numbers of places of worship, holy places, all across Europe and the world. But this is different, Ian. This is not merely a work of art: it’s a text written in stone. More than that – it’s a song.”
“I don’t quite get your meaning. A song?”
“Take a look around the arches. There are seven slightly different shapes for those boxes. There are seven notes in the scale. In fact, if you’ve a good ear, you could strike each of them and hear a slightly different sound.
“Now imagine if all of them – there are more than fourteen hundred – were arranged as music . . . It’s the healing music of Rosslyn,” Madson said softly, looking away from me as if he were trying to remember something.
“I don’t think that was in my briefing.”
“No, it wouldn’t be,” he said. “But if it could be found . . .” “What happens then?”
“It heals the world.”. . . And, as sometimes happens in my line of work, I had a moment of inspiration. A song, I thought. A whole plot dropped into my head; what if that song was truly the key to healing the world – what if it unlocked something of great importance? People have been trying to unlock the music for centuries; someone claims he's actually done it, though my guide suggests that this falls short of the true "healing music". But if the music was more complex, there might be an even more complex reason for it to have been encoded in the stones of the Chapel. From such small things are great things born. By the time I headed for home a week and a half later, I'd sketched out a plot for a new novel; by Labor Day there were five chapters. Within a year, there was an entire book. It was the first book I've written that isn't part of the Dark Wing universe. The quoted portion above is from that book.
About Rosslyn
"Prince William, his age creeping on him, came to consider how he had spent his times past, and how he was to spend his remaining days. Therefore, to the end, that he might not seem altogether unthankful to God for the benefices he received from Him, it came into his mind to build a house for God's service, of most curious work, the which that it might be done with greater glory and splendour he caused artificers to be brought from other regions and foreign kingdoms and caused daily to be abundance of all kinds of workmen present as masons, carpenters, smiths, barrowmen and quarriers ... " – from Father Hay's account of the founding of the chapel.
The chapel at Rosslyn is wrapped in mystery, from its founding to its present day appearance in novels. Sir William St Clair, third and last St Clair Earl of Orkney, began the construction of a collegiate chapel that remained unfinished at his death in 1484. If, as the account says, Sir William's intent was simply to glorify God – why did he build this extraordinary structure and fill it with carvings of all kinds? And why did he build it here? Ask Rob Madson in A Song In Stone:
“I understand that this building was intended to be only a part of a larger one and it was never completed. But . . . why build it here? It’s a good ways from the castle, not terribly convenient for a collegiate chapel at all.”
“William St. Clair chose this spot for a reason,” he said. “Like so many holy places, Rosslyn Chapel is built upon another, earlier place. If the Templars did come here, they chose this place for a reason as well.”
“There was a pagan temple here?”
“Almost certainly. And in the Celtic tradition, even more so than in the Roman one, there’s a remarkable amount of syncretism. You see it all over the Isles. My native Tiree has all sorts of sanctified places that were holy long before Columba reached Iona.”
He placed his hand on the Master’s Pillar, touching it almost reverently. “You see, Ian, the new religion doesn’t replace the old - it molds it to a new shape. As you walk around this place look at the walls, the pillars, the ceilings. Green men, nature symbolism, pagan emblems. Even the dimensions of the place have meaning.”Even the dimensions have meaning. As I began to plan out the plot of A Song In Stone, I became more and more aware of the strange field of sacred geometry – the way in which medieval builders created remarkable structures without resorting to advanced mathematics, computer-aided design, or any other modern convenience. There is a great confluence between the Gothic architectural style and the mathematics of music. It shows at Rosslyn, at the great cathedrals such as Chartres (explored later in the book, and to be described in a later post) . . . and at Rosslyn as well. Rosslyn is rightly called a "mystery chapel" – and it deserves better than to be an anticlimactic footnote. From the Lady Chapel to the decorated ceiling, from the pillars to the sacristy, Rosslyn is full of little mysteries waiting to be discovered. For example, during his tour of the Chapel, my principal character, Ian Graham, notices two carved figures at either end of a plinth.
. . . a stone plinth with an upright stone, like a grave-stone, set into it. At either end was a carved statue of a man; one had his index- and ring-fingers pointing to his mouth, and the other stood with his hands pressed palms-inward to his chest, one above the other.
These, and other images, appear elsewhere in Ian's travels, and elsewhere in the story. Rosslyn is a numinous place, a sacred site - it impressed me from the moment I stepped inside. Since visiting there in 2005, I've concluded that The DaVinci Code brought a lot of tourist traffic to Rosslyn, but the book didn't do the place justice. I hope that A Song In Stone is worthy of it.
