Original headline: Why is Rosslyn such a magnet?'
THE TILLS ARE ringing at Rosslyn Chapel, probably the most extravagantly carved church in Scotland - and certainly the most fantastically endowed with myths, pseudo-history and controversy. A place of pilgrimage for freemasons, latter-day Templars, UFO spotters, ley-liners and crypto-historians seeking everything from scrolls containing the lost teachings of Christ to the Holy Grail, the chapel, nestling in the Midlothian village of Roslin, has become a destination for aficionados of The Da Vinci Code, the mystical thriller by Dan Brown which has sold more than eight million copies worldwide and which climaxes at Rosslyn.
Outraged historians may tear their hair out, but the Collegiate Chapel of St Mathew, to give it its proper Episcopal title, has never been so busy. The trust currently restoring the 15th-century church in conjunction with Historic Scotland is benefiting from soaring visitor figures - while refusing to countenance any investigation of its fabled vaults - and is now inspiring leading Scottish artists such as painter Steven Campbell and Turner-prize-winner Douglas Gordon. It even has its own Fringe sho
While the chapel’s visitor centre goes like a fair, its shelves display copies of The Da Vinci Code alongside more predictable volumes on local history, freemasonry, the Templars and Celtic mysticism. Stuart Beattie, project manager for the Rosslyn Trust, speaks to The Scotsman straight after a telephone call from the New York Times. He has a Radio 5 interview scheduled for later. The fuss is all down to Brown’s ubiquitous page-turner, a movie of which is now on the cards, with George Clooney, Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks and Hugh Jackman currently contenders for the lead.
"The biggest impact has been on my time," says Beattie, somewhat wearily, of the Da Vinci effect. "We always enjoy the visitors who come to Rosslyn - without necessarily agreeing with them," he says, tactfully. "But the Trust is here to conserve the chapel and the visitors are an enabling factor in that."
Ten years ago, when the Rosslyn Trust was formed to do something about the historic building’s deterioration and damp, the little chapel attracted some 9,500 visitors a year . "Last year," reports Beattie, "we had 40,000 and this year we’re almost certainly going to be in the low 50,000s. That’s a significant blip, due to the book and, indeed, to the various other ‘Cracking the Da Vinci Code’ books that have appeared."
Brown’s novel, which has engrossed millions and outraged some Catholics, is a fast-moving tissue of renaissance art, cryptology and conspiracy theories involving a bloodline of descent from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. It kicks off with the grotesque murder of a curator in the Louvre, his naked body spreadeagled like Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man sketch, and ends with a denouement at Rosslyn.
But books featuring the chapel, established in 1450 by William Sinclair, Third Earl of Orkney, were proliferating long before The Da Vinci Code, espousing various theories, largely involving the Knights Templar popularly associated with the chapel, the Holy Grail, or lost biblical texts in which are enshrined the origins of Freemasonry (freemasons have long regarded some of the chapel’s carvings as significant). Perhaps the weirdest was anthropologist Keith Laidler’s The Head of God, which suggested that the chapel conceals the embalmed head of Christ, while UFO buffs from the famed "Bonnybridge Triangle" in West Lothian have claimed the building is nothing less than an "astral portal".
BEAMING BACK DOWN to solid ground, however, no-one who enters the place - currently capped by a protective canopy while restoration work continues - can fail to be affected by its breathtaking interior, almost feverish in its swarming, sculpted imagery. There is the famous "Prentice Pillar", regarded so fondly by Grail theorists, its elaborate traceries supposedly carved by an apprentice whose master was so consumed with jealously at his protegé’s skill that he killed him (their carved faces glare at each other under the vaulted stone ceiling). Elsewhere the frenzied chisels have picked out dances of death, crucifixions and celestial orchestras (including an angelic piper), not to mention details supposed to represent aloe cactus and maize, in reference to an alleged pre-Columbian voyage to America by William Sinclair’s grandfather, Henry, first Earl of Orkney.
Writhing his way through it all is the ancient pagan fertility symbol of the Green Man, tendrils curling from his grin, who now inhabits the vivid painted "fictions" of renowned artist Steven Campbell, in a newly opened exhibition in Glasgow Print Studio, largely inspired by Rosslyn. "I love the great romance of the Prentice Pillar," says Campbell, who expresses surprise that the chapel doesn’t attract more attention from the art world. "I think the painter is always the apprentice, so you tend to side with the boy. It’s a life and death sort of thing, all about creativity. A metaphysician would have a field day. The almost over-elaborate detail is curious for a start. It’s as if someone’s just run amok."
From across the Atlantic, Douglas Gordon, the Scots video artist and Turner Prize-winner, is turning his attention to a much older and more enigmatic artwork and plans a video based on Rosslyn, in conjunction with Edinburgh College of Art. Currently researching in Chicago, Gordon says: "As someone who has always been interested in the aesthetics of freemasonry and its roots in Templar culture, I suppose a book like The Da Vinci Code was inevitable. Hopefully, the current wave of interest will smother itself in its own mystery and go away."
So far as the video project is concerned, perhaps as befits its subject, it remains shrouded in mystery. At least, he says, it’s too early to talk about it.
However, many historians doubt any direct link between Rosslyn, its builders and the Templars, not to mention the more outlandish claims for the place. Stressing that the Grail legend is largely a literary creation, Dr Gary Dickson, honorary fellow of the school of history and classics at Edinburgh University, warns what happens when myths use whatever historical basis there may be as a springboard: "Disparate myths can take on a life of their own, converging and interacting to become a kind of ‘supermyth’. I think Rosslyn has become a connecting point for separate myths, like the Holy Grail and the Templars. Myths grow in the telling; they get richer and more elaborate. When they fall out of the sky and land in a particular spot like Rosslyn ... well, they call it home."
Meanwhile Andrew Sinclair, Grail theorist, fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge and author of books such as The Secret Scroll and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, recently wrote to The Scotsman, deploring much of what he calls "the monstrous Da Vinci Code" but claiming that the chapel’s complex carved symbolism refers to "many unfolding secrets of existence", including the double helix of DNA, and pointing to the biotechnology pioneers and cloners of Dolly the Sheep at the nearby Roslin Institute.
Sinclair, who two years ago unearthed a painted scroll in a masonic lodge in Orkney which he described as the "missing link" between freemasons and the Knights Templar, and is currently preparing a documentary on Rosslyn, was involved in an inconclusive attempted excavation of the chapel’s vaults, which enthusiasts endow with everything from sacred scrolls to buried Templar knights in full armour.
COMING FROM YET another direction, John Ritchie, Grand Herald and spokesman for the modern organisation which calls itself the Scottish Knights Templar or Militi Templi Scotia, agrees physical excavation is not desirable, but says that he and his colleagues are carrying out non-invasive surveys of the area between the chapel and Rosslyn Castle, using sophisticated radar scanning equipment. "We’ve established a grid system, but all we’ve seen so far are structures such as walls," he says. "We’ve not seen any detail. That will come later."
Not that Ritchie expects to find anything particularly mystical, although he does think investigation could reveal the Anjou documents brought to Scotland by Sir Gilbert Hay, the influential teacher of Sir William Sinclair. Ritchie, who grew up in Roslin, regards the chapel as "a lexicon in stone. Authors come here and they can pull stuff off the walls to back any theory they like."
Sir Walter Scott celebrated Rosslyn as "the place, that chapel proud/Where Roslin’s chiefs uncoffined lie", and Ritchie believes that not Templar knights but the Sinclairs themselves are buried there, with Sir William Sinclair, killed at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, the last to be interred there in full armour. There are, he agrees, some wild fantasies invested in the place: "I reckon one of these days I’ll walk into the chapel and find it staffed by the crew of the Marie Celeste."
Whatever your beliefs or cynicisms, Rosslyn remains a bewitching place - as Fringe audiences experienced the other night, filing out from Nonsense Room Productions’ play, The Apprentice, based on the pillar legend, to find Roslin Glen a sea of infiltrating haar.
Some may argue that, like the Loch Ness Monster, Rosslyn’s mysteries are too profitable for anyone to wish them resolved. But if an investigation of what lies beneath the chapel ever comes to pass, will it unearth knowledge, relics beyond price, mouldy old bones, or just acres of flannel?
