[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent February 2003]
Bradley and I went on a daytrip to Roslin on Sunday. Roslin is a village a few miles south of Edinburgh, out in the countryside, and is undoubtedly most famous for being the home of Dolly the sheep (RIP). I went, however, to wander in the valley that Brad had spoken of with such affection, and to see Rosslyn Chapel.
The valley was worth the trip by itself. It’s more of a gully than a valley, I guess, being a river-hewn trench
amongst relatively flat terrain (and for what it’s worth, I don’t think the maps call it either a valley or a gully). Anyway, you can stand on one side of it and see across to the other, and the whole interior is filled with trees.
One of the books I had consulted about the Rosslyn Chapel talked about the valley in terms of its haunted nature – apparently there is, somewhere along its length, a window in a cliff-face from a warren of hidden and inaccessible tunnels that were once the hiding place of Robert the Bruce. We didn’t find the window, but we did conclude the writer was imposing a mood rather than responding to one; as the sun spent progressively more time behind the clouds, the place did not become gloomy or eerie, simply cooler in its beauty. Trees, mostly bare, stood waiting. Ice stretched in fingers from overhanging rockfaces, and rimed the lee side of river-rocks like milk on an upper lip. A ferret lay peacefully dead at the streamside. Bradley spoke as we wandered, describing what it had been like when he had last been there in the height of summer, and I felt the power of the seasons as I only occasionally have while travelling – kicking through great drifts of autumn leaves in Montpellier, being under a snowfall early in January – winter is a time of dormancy here, a strange thing to me as in New Zealand nature pays little heed to the season.
There is a castle in the valley. It’s long ruined, but the ruins have been carefully preserved and strengthened, and the upper levels of the main structure have been refurbished into a holiday home. It towers up on a trunk of stone, concealing itself among the trees with surprising facility.
A path leads from the castle back to the entrance to the valley, where the Rosslyn Chapel stands. This was where we began, and where Bradley left me to continue alone.
Rosslyn Chapel is fascinating. It is also a famous keystone in the webs of innumerable conspiracy theorists and secret historians. The reason for its status is simple – it is a point, perhaps the point, where the worlds of the Knights Templar and the Freemasons collide. The Freemasons were heavily involved in the building of the chapel and the St Clair family (later Sinclair) whose territory it was were intimately connected with the early Scottish Freemasonry. Furthermore, the Knights Templar have a Sinclair connection as well, and the gravestone of one William St Clair, Knight Templar, is found in the chapel itself.
And even without this combination of links the place would be interesting. It was cold inside, much colder than outside, and fairly small, but so rich with sculptural ornamentation that I felt disoriented. Every surface was laid with a huge variety of carven images or decorations, often representations of Christian subjects and scenes, such as the seven virtues and vices, and other times more obscure subject matter – angels in odd poses reputed to be linked to masonic ritual (and if that is not the case, supremely odd poses indeed – why should an angel grip it’s ankle with one hand and touch its breast with the other?); a huge number of Green Man images sprouting foliage over mantel and sill; the eerily lifelike face of a man emerging from one wall like from quicksand, supposed to be the deathmask of Robert the Bruce; crowns of plantlife atop each window, including what is supposed to be maize, one of the chapel’s other mysteries since it was indisputably carved before Columbus sailed to America; and at the front the centrepieces – the Masons Pillar and the Apprentice Pillar.
These last are actually the most striking things about the chapel, certainly the most famous. All of the other dozen or so pillars in the chapel are built to the same elegant scheme, but the final row, dividing the main body of the church from the Lady Chapel, are different. The middle of these three is the same as all the others, but the right and left pillars both differ markedly. The Apprentice Pillar is the most striking, appearing to be wreathed in spirals of stone like strands of DNA. The story goes that the master mason travelled to Rome to work out how to carve this pillar, but on his return found his apprentice had solved the problem and completed the work; in jealous rage, the master struck down the apprentice with one blow to the forehead. At the opposite end of the chapel, high on the wall, are two faces, one marked on the brow – the apprentice and the master. It’s a good story, and it has been told for centuries.
Of course, some writers allege the apprentice was sacrificed deliberately; others have concluded that the Holy Grail itself lies somewhere in the chapel; many other elaborate stories of doubtful authenticity have grown from the chapel’s many mysteries. Fascination is the right word. It’s certainly the only church bookshop I’ve been in that sold hand-printed tracts on governmental cover-ups of alien abductions.
The chapel was intended to be one wing of a much larger structure. At the far end from the Lady Chapel and the strange pillars, a baptismal room and choir loft were constructed in a later style; on the outside, reaching from either side are blocks of stone awaiting their integration into a large wall. This building plan was never completed – the money ran out. For anyone who maintains the Freemasons or the Knights Templar are the secret all-powerful force behind the world’s affairs, this may be the most problematic mystery of all.
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The other day, with ten minutes to kill before toddling off to work, I ducked into HMV to browse. I admit that it was my ulterior motive to tempt myself with the single of TATU’s ‘All the things you said’, number one for several weeks here and to my mind one of those brilliant offerings that shows pop-by-committee can get it right now and then. I have been haunted by the ur-lyrics, so general that anyone anywhere can find personal weight in them: ‘all the things you said, running through my head’ repeated obsessively with ‘this is not enough’ howled desperately into the sky over the top of a sinister, breathcatching beat. It’s good stuff. Of course, I was initially most impressed by the video, which I saw in Europe in November
– or was it earlier? – and which features the two teenage girl singers, in school uniforms with unfeasibly short skirts, kissing each other in the rain as a silent crowd watches in silent disapproval from behind a fence. Impressed in the sense of, these people know how to sell. It’s been the canniest music video since Britney’s similar turn with a school skirt got her to the top of the charts about a hundred years ago, and since it hit the UK it’s been inescapable. Naturally, the discussion here immediately turned into a paedophile panic, but this is no surprise from a country where parents were forbidden to video their children’s christmas pageant for fear of paedophile incursion. And where before every movie at the big Odeon chain there is a big-budget ‘watch out for paedophiles on the internet’ ad that fills me with dumbfounded fury each time I see it. But wiser minds than me have torn apart this uniquely British obsession elsewhere.
So I’m in HMV, and my eye is caught by a book in the music section. Interesting. It has a photo of a burning church on the cover. More interesting. I flip it over and read the back. I’m stunned to find it’s a
journalistic (but sensational) expose of the Satanic followers of Black Metal (which is, for those too old to know, a kind of vicious heavy rock music tied in with lots of death imagery and built around a destructive
philosophy), who have apparently been behind a number of murders, suicides and about 200 church-burnings throughout Scandinavia. I flipped through; this kind of thing is very interesting to me, from my academic background in psychology and anthropology in general, and my interest in how people can
organise their lives around extreme philosophies in particular. Plus, it had shocking true crimes in it, and I was curious. I put it down a minute later, bored by the obvious lack of analysis and the focus on photos of
musicians in scary makeup, although an extensive section on Anton LaVey including numerous quotes suggested it wasn’t entirely without merit. Anyway. Not something I’d ever want to pick up again. I was curious how the musical scene could sustain itself, though, if all its practitioners were offing themselves or their bandmates with the regularity depicted in the book.
As I put the book down I noticed what was underneath it. It was a double-CD compilation of the music of the bands in the above book. It was the tie-in CD.
I despair.
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Latest drunk on the bus story: a young lad of 22 who’d just been dumped by his girlfriend of three years so she could ‘be with a junkie’. ‘He’ll just turn her into a junkie as well!’ The guy was miserable, and I was happy to talk with him about how messed up the human race is (I have to admit we spent a fair bit of time on the particular ways in which the female of the species is often messed up), but his sad story did depress me a bit. I was cheered, however, when he announced his plan for the evening: go home, hang
out with his mum and his little sister, and chill out. I couldn’t have written a better recipe myself. Sometimes us humans do get it right, after all.
The drug scene in Edinburgh is worth a mention. The problems are huge – hard drugs, particularly heroin, seem to be plentiful. I have had no first-hand encounters with it, but a huge number of people have been touched through their friends or their relations or their neighbours. It keeps bubbling up from below. It’s kind of disturbing, because to me it means there are a lot of troubled people in this town.
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News snippet of note: Saddam Hussein, interviewed by Dan Rather, offers to take on Bush in televised debate on Iraq issue. Ari Fleischer and the White House dismiss the offer as not serious.
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Love to all.
morgue
(currently reading the Illuminatus trilogy – and it’s better than I
expected, and I was expected it to be great.)