Groonk[dot]Net ಠ_ಠ

ROSSLYN Chapel holds many secrets. For hundreds of years experts and visitors alike have puzzled over the carvings in the chapel. Whilst some debate whether they point to hidden treasure, Edinburgh composer Stuart Mitchell thinks he has cracked one part of the enigma.
He believes that the ornate ceiling of carved arches, featuring 213 decorated cubes holds a code for medieval music. His father Thomas Mitchell spent 20 years cracking this code in the ceiling and now Stuart is orchestrating the findings for a new recording called The Rosslyn Motet.

[you can hear this on the main news site]

They hope that the music, when played on medieval instruments in situ, will resonate throughout the chapel unlocking a secret in the stone.

The breakthrough to interpreting the notation came when Mitchell’s father discovered that the markings carved on the face of the cubes seem to match a phenomenon called Cymatics or Chladni patterns. Chladni patterns form when a sustained note is used to vibrate a sheet of metal covered in powder producing marks. The frequency used dictates the shape of the pattern, for example; the musical note A below middle C vibrates at 440 KHz and produces a shape that looks like a rhombus. Different notes can produce various shapes including flowers, diamonds and hexagons – shapes all present on the Rosslyn cubes. Stuart Mitchell believes this is “beyond coincidence” and has assigned a note to each cube.

Ernst Chladni first documented the phenomenon in the late 18th century – yet it appears to be present in a 15th century building. Which begs the question: “Was Sir William St Clair (the man who built Rosslyn Chapel) familiar with sciences far in advance of his time?”.

Stuart Mitchell believes a link between the Knights Templar – who may have gleaned advanced Eastern scientific knowledge during their stay in Jerusalem during the Crusades – and Rosslyn could explain the encoded musical notes.

“The symbolism in Rosslyn is reaching back to times of a civilisation that is lost to us now that had sciences that are the roots of all the mechanics of the universe,” says Mitchell.

If this science was used in the carvings at Rosslyn, then there needs to be an explanation of how this information came to be lost for centuries. According to Mitchell, the Church suppressed the knowledge as a means of controlling the public. “What it points towards is the church system denying people certain knowledge because knowledge is awareness. People who knew too much were burnt as witches.”