Feeling Grateful that I Have Visited Rosslyn Chapel and Found True (A)Symmetry

I had a dream last night about Rosslyn Chapel. Like a lot of my dreams, it was simple and lovely and, well, ...dreamlike. I was just sitting there in the chapel, relaxing with the spirits of people I would have loved in life, the creators and builders of Rosslyn.

While my daughter was in college for four years at St. Andrews in Scotland, I went to Rosslyn twice. The Chapel, built in the 1400's, is just five miles south of Edinburgh. I had wanted to go there since a long-ago teacher enthusiastically showed our class her photographs of this deeply mysterious place.

But by the time I got there, it had become very famous, thanks to The DaVinci Code. I was almost embarrassed to visit, joining with the throngs of curious folk who had seen the movie and were probably hoping for a glimpse of Tom Hanks or Dan Brown. Ridiculously, I imagined myself to be just a cut above the tourists who would be thronged there for all the wrong reasons. After all, I was looking for clues to the deepest mysteries of mankind. But we all are, in one way or another. And Rosslyn's builders really did something about it. Rosslyn's a great pilgrimage, if you like puzzles and mysteries with a spiritual context.

My daughter and I first approached Rosslyn by a two-mile walk along a deserted road, having taken the wrong bus out of Edinburgh. There were apparently no busses directly to Rosslyn that day, and no cars passed us by during the approach to the village. We walked through the village and out the other side without seeing any major signs. The entrance to the hillside chapel was utter simplicity, very few markings. Yes, there was a small parking lot with a few cars, and a gift shop with a few idlers, and the chapel itself, not in the least crowded. Thanks to a preservation project underway to protect the roof in particular, there is scaffolding around the upper outside of the chapel, with a walkway along the upper scaffolding open to the public for up-close examination of the incredible carvings in every nook and cranny.

There's no way to describe it. There's no way to explain what a wonder this place is. There is a fabulous story of a carved pillar that I will let you learn on your own. But suffice it to say, the pillar was carved in the fifteenth century, and resembles a strand of DNA. There are carvings of corn, or maize, grown then only in North America, and supposedly unknown in fifteenth century Europe, before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Throughout the chapel are carvings of the Green Man, who appears around the world in oddly similar carved incarnations. There are carved cubes that seem to spell out a musical code, and one man has recently made a recording of what he believes that code is, after many years' work. There's a fanciful feeling throughout, (cartoon stars in the vaulted ceiling), but serious too, reminding me of the way Antoni Gaudi's architecture is fanciful and serious all at once, oddly out of place and time. But at Rosslyn, there is a sense that every millimeter of carving is heartfelt, thought through by an enlightened mind, never self-indulgent, and always serves a higher purpose, of worship.

But the biggest clue for me that I was walking through the handiwork of loved ones, the thing about it that calls me home, and makes me dream, and holds my heart still and very still, is what I love more than any other communication from the past: an apparent symmetry that is not symmetry at all, or symmetry only in the very largest sense, a sense that easily includes past present and future even now. If you look at the photographs of Rosslyn to the right of this column or if you stare at closeups of the entrances for awhile, you may understand what it is that I love. There's a sense of symmetry at first, but you will find if you start counting things, that, as in life, there's most often an aberration, an asymmetry that relaxes the overall effect. Six rosettes on one side, seven on the other. Four of these, three of those. One this size over here, one that size over there. I've gone out on a limb here, and into cliche, to try to explain the unexplainable. I can't explain it, but it's what I love.

I'm so grateful to have seen it. And I hope to go again and to sit in the comfort of that handiwork. In real time, or in a dream.
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And if you're interested, here's a little video (maybe stretching it a bit but who knows?) about just one mystery in the Chapel-that musical cypher and the carving of the stave angel:



Thanks to Stuart7M (Stuart Mitchell, who has done years of research and published the CD last year.)