October 24, 2009
On this day, I took the bus to the village of Roslin and combed Rosslyn Chapel inside and out, seeking the “sacred in the material” that would connect this magnificent creation of William St. Clair to H.P.’s Knights Templar legacy.
On the exterior wall is a carving of an initiation, linking the Masonic builders of the chapel builder (foreground) with the Knights Templar (in characteristic attire with the cross on the front).
Through my research into HP’s geneology, I already discovered the connection between the two families. The first William St. Clair (Sinclair) was a friend of Hughes de Payans, who not only accompanied him on a Crusade but married his daughter!
H.P.’s earlier ancestor was a priest in the Temple of Solomon. This explains the impetus for Hughes de Payans to found the Knights Templar and launch the Crusades to retrieve the Holy Lands. Moreover, the order was unique in that members were both warriors (body) and monks (spirit), and therefore were living icons of the Sacred Marriage of Heaven and Earth at a time that the official Church hierarchy denied sacred in matter, along with the divine feminine.
The ancient rites of the Sacred Marriage were embedded into the Holy of the Holies of Solomon’s Temple, where the Templars resided during the Crusades. In their book The Second Messiah (Barnes and Noble Books 2000) Christopher Knight and Richard Lomas theorize that the Rosslyn Chapel was never meant to be the apse of a cathedral but actually a replica of Solomon’s Temple, complete with the still standing but crumbing front exterior wall.
The chapel’s tormented history includes: Cromwell using the chapel as a stable for his horses (!); destruction of original statues by English invaders; and misguided attempt at preservation by painting concrete over the original sandstone interior. Despite these assaults on its beauty, I still managed to locate key symbols within the architecture which were resurrected for the historic Black Madonna exhibition at HP Garcia gallery in New York City.
Primarily, there is the prominent X, which I wrote about in the catalog essay (https://blackmadonna2009.wordpress.com/black-madonna-the-great-work/) as the early Christian symbol of the Sacred Marriage, the unity of Chalice/feminine (downward pointing triangle) and blade (upward pointing triangle):
Mark Wiener and I had no knowledge of this symbol when we created the signature image Still Life in Red for the exhibition.
Then, there was the Templar Cross, which was already established in the design of HP Garcia Gallery.
But what was unexpected was the appearance of the Yod embedded within the sacred geometry of the original structure. The Yod, which is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, is known as the Finger of God, which bestows bounty from heaven to those who are able to complete the alchemical transfusion of spirit into matter!!
The Yod represents the divine hand of destiny, marking a convergence in which all possibilities can be realized as a multidimensional unfolding of spirit into matter.
I have been working consciously with the astrological Yod for the dozen years of my avant-garde experiment of applying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to the matter of an emerging 21st century archetype. This was the topic of the paper I delivered for the 2009 AICA International Congress (the paper will be posted at http://www.aica.ie/?
This holistic integration of Sacred and Matter (X) and Manifestation Process (Yod) is contained in the chapel’s Keystone (below).
An interesting bit of contemporary lore I picked up during the tour: the makers of The Da Vinci Code film were so intent on having the Seal of Solomon symbol of the Sacred Marriage in their film that they stuck one on the wall above the entrance to the crypt where they filmed the final scene of the movie. It left a mark!
In their quest to uncover this symbolic link between Rosslyn Chapel and the past, Knight and Lomas claim that the Seal of Solomon is embedded in the construction by way of the column placement, but that leaves position for the downward pointing triangle in the center of the floor. I asked the guides if there could be something on the floor marking the spot and they told me that the rugs were just picked up: no mark of any kind was found. Debunkers of this theory point out that a hexagon could be marked within any square space!
Having a Seal of Solomon inside the Chapel would have been far too obvious of a signal to its true orientation and would have been long ago destroyed by invaders. The makers were far too brilliant for that. Instead, they combined the X and the Y (Yod) to create a more esoteric symbol of the Sacred Marriage, readily available for a pioneering art critic to discover. Within the proper timing, clearly!
And my personal Yods which drove my process of discovery was triggered in two places by transits of the Sun, Mercury and Saturn on the day of my visit.