The Rosslyn Code: Real or fake? (Part 5)

[mgc1961]

The Rosslyn Motet emanates from the crypt as you walk into the chapel. It's playing from a modest little boom box, but the acoustics of the underground chambers are so magnificent that you can hear it clearly from anywhere inside. The already solemn tones sound especially ghostly when the chapel is deserted and you can see your breath, even under the heat lamps.

In the five years since the Mitchells announced to the world that they had solved the Rosslyn code, they've received modest recognition in the media and respectable sales of a professional recording of the work. They shrewdly timed their announcement of the solution to the release of the movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, giving reporters and producers a ready-made news peg. Over time, however, their story has faded to a curiosity. Interest in whether it is real has waned.

Stuart and Tommy Mitchell say they don't much care if people believe them. On my last day in Roslin, I met Stuart and his friend Ian Robertson at the chapel. Robertson and his co-author Mark Oxbrow wrote by far the best modern book on Rosslyn Chapel, Rosslyn and the Grail. Mostly, Robertson and Oxbrow debunk the various rumors and legends that have attached themselves to the chapel, including the crazy ones about the Holy Grail and Jesus' head. But when it comes to the Rosslyn Motet, they're more circumspect. "One 'code' that may actually exist within Rosslyn," Robertson and Oxbrow write, "is the mysterious carved cubes that ornament some of the arches in the chapel."

http://www.slate.com/id/2294492/pagenum/all/#p2

[mgc1961]

1. Another curiosity.

Though built in the 13th century and lacking the apparent musical thread found in the Rosslyn chapel, the Castel del Monte is a uniquely geometric castle near the southeast coast of Italy that also continues to inspire scholarly inquiry.

http://uh.edu/engines/epi1348.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castel_del_Monte,_Apulia

Dr. Heinz Gotze's Castel del Monte: Geometric Marvel of the Middle Ages is an outstanding in-depth reference thusly completed:

The last ten years of the emperor's life, during which the building was constructed, were burdened with political setbacks and human disappointments, and the subsequent end of his dynasty put a sudden stop to the imperial ideas and plans. We are left with an architectural masterpiece of unusual ingenuity with regard to its combination of intellectual concepts of varying provenance, put into effect with geometric strictness and artistic inventiveness. With Castel del Monte, Hohenstaufen architecture was carried to a glorious zenith after an astonishingly short period of development. It had grown out of the traditions of Magna Graecia and the Roman Empire, the Greek Hellenistic heritage of the Islamic sciences, the spirit of Norman-Arab Sicily, and central European Gothic - a truly universal conception. pgs. 208-209

[dipsydoodle]

2. To help put this context

this all started with a series of documentaries on BBC2 here in the UK across the seventies the main subject of which was Rennes-le-Château in France. Some details here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lincoln Those BBC2 Chronicle programs were subsequently followed by the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. And so the myths and legends grew. :)