Rosslyn’s Pillars & Cubes

Examining the evidence concerning Rosslyn Chapel’s famous pillars

and its controversial “musical cubes”
(An earlier version of this article ran in the April 2010 edition of Girnigoe: Scotland’s Clan Sinclair Magazine)

By Jeff Nisbet

Rosslyn Chapel, 1828, by David Roberts

D
uring the last ten years or so, but especially since the
publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, some
of the more esoteric theories surrounding certain ele-
ments of the architectural enigma we know as Rosslyn Chapel
have taken a bit of stick, and I have been responsible for some
of it. Let’s take a look at two of them -- first the chapel’s
famous pillars, and then its so-called “musical cubes.”
The text for John Slezer’s 1693 collection of copper
engravings “of all the King’s Castles, Pallaces, towns, and
other notable places in the kingdom belonging to private sub-
jects,” the T h e a t rum Scotiae, was written by Robert Sibbald,
Geographer Royal for Scotland.
In part, here is what Sibbald had to say about Rosslyn Chapel
(emphasis mine): “This Chapel lies in Mid-Lothian, Four Miles
from Edinburgh, and is one of the most curious Pieces of
Workman-ship in Europe. The Foundation of this rare Building
was laid Anno 1440 by William St Clair, Prince of Orkney,
Duke of Holdenburgh, &c. A Man as considerable for the pub-
lick Works which he erected, as for the Lands which he pos-
sess’d, and the Honours which were conferred upon him by
several of the greatest Princes of Europe. It is remarkable that
in all this Work there are not two Cuts of one sort. The most
curious Part of the Building is the Vault of the Quire, and that
which is called the Prince’s Pillar so much talk’d of.”
What are we to make of the fact that the pillar we now
refer to as the Apprentice or Prentice Pillar was, in the late
1600s, known as the Prince’s Pillar, and had indeed been
known as such long enough to be “much talk’d” about?
Eight decades later, in his 1774 An Account of the Chapel
of Roslin, the Bishop of Caithness, Robert Forbes, supposes
that the Prince’s Pillar was so named because of the chapel’s
“princely founder,” and then goes on to relate, for the first
time anywhere, the by-then-well-known legend of the slain
apprentice, killed in a jealous rage by Rosslyn’s master
mason for carving the pillar during the master’s absence -- a
tale only marginally reminiscent of the murder of Hiram
Abiff, grand architect of the Temple of Solomon, an act that
is central to freemasonic ritual. The legend, Forbes claims, is

Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com

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 Left: Detail from Samuel Dukinfield Swarbreck’s 1837 East Aisle or Lady Chapel, Rosslyn Chapel. Right: Photo by Thomas Vernon Begbie, circa 1880.
“a tradition that has prevailed in the family of Roslin, from
father to son.”
The legend has since enjoyed a long and robust life, but its
dodgy provenance has recently given rise to a number of
books that insist the chapel’s symbolism is strictly Christian,
and cannot be considered in any way freemasonic. While I
am of the studied opinion that Rosslyn was built to preserve
and pass forward certain occult knowledge, as those of you
who have read my work will know, there’s no doubt that the
architectural fabric of the chapel has been tampered with
over the last two centuries in an over-zealous attempt to fur-
ther a Masonic agenda. As just one example, let’s consider
the pillar now known as the Master’s Pillar.
First, let’s compare the detail from Samuel Dukinfield
Swarbreck’s 1837 lithograph of Rosslyn’s Lady Chapel,
shown above-left. Then compare the pillar in the foreground
of that detail with the same pillar in Thomas Vernon Begbie’s
circa 1880 photograph next to it, taken after architect and
freemason David Bryce’s 1860’s restoration of the chapel
interior. To all appearances it seems that Bryce’s work went
Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com
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far beyond the remit of simple restoration.
And yet, an entry in the Scottish Records Office seems to
indicate that Bryce actually discovered an ornate inner pillar
that at some point in time had already been partially restored
and concealed beneath a false exterior. That entry, dated 1861
and referenced as GD 164/Box12/21, reads as follows:
“David Bryce describes the pillar on the opposite side and
corresponding with the Apprentice Pillar: ‘It has at one time
been ornamented not in a spiral form but with upright orna-
ment which has been partly cut out and new stone introduced,
and other stones where entire being plastered over. The intro-
duced plain stone is white, the original is red.’” Whether or
not you are predisposed to believe that Bryce was lying in
order to establish that two ornate pillars had existed in
Rosslyn from the time of the chapel’s original construction,
thereby lending credence to the idea that the Masonic pillars
of Boaz and Jachin had been intended by the builder, the evi-
dence of your eyes should indicate that the drab and unre-
stored pillar shown in Swarbreck’s 1837 lithograph is of an
obviously angular construction, unlike all other chapel pillars.

One other theory about the naming of the Prentice Pillar,
albeit a rather mundane one, bears mention. Contemporaneous
to the building of the chapel there was, in the East Midlands
town of Chellaston, England, a renowned alabaster quarry and
workshop of the firm Prentys and Sutton. Perhaps master carv-
er Thomas Prentys carved the Prentys Pillar.
While there may be no legitimate tie to freemasonry
afforded by the legend of the slain apprentice -- a legend that
is not unique to Rosslyn Chapel -- my recent research has
shown that there may indeed by a symbolic tie, however ten-
uous, between the building of the chapel and the building of
Solomon’s Temple.
In James Anderson’s 1723 Constitutions, which utilizes
some of freemasonry’s oldest manuscripts, is the following
description of the building of Solomon’s Temple (emphasis
mine).
“Dagon’s Temple, and the finest structures of Tyre and
Sidon, could not be compared with the Eternal God’s Temple
at Jerusalem. There were employed about it no less than 3,699
Princes or Master-Masons, to conduct the work according to
Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com
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Left: Samuel Dukinfield Swarbreck’s 1837 The Interior of Rosslyn Chapel.
Above: Screenshot from Tommy and Stuart Mitchells’ YouTube presentation,
The RosslynStave Angel --Music Cipher.
Solomon’s directions.”
So, Sibbald’s naming of the Prince’s Pillar may have had
nothing to do with the founder’s “princely origins.” The pil-
lar we now know of as the Prentice Pillar may, in fact, have
originally been the Master’s Pillar.
And now, on to Rosslyn’s “Musical Cubes.”
Many of you will know that today’s varied patterns on the
213 cubes that hang down from the ceiling ribs of Rosslyn’s
Lady Chapel have been long thought to hold a musical code,
and that the father-and-son team of Tommy and Stuart
Mitchell, a few years ago, came up with a solution to that
code that resulted in a commercially successful book and a
musical composition titled The Rosslyn Motet.
Many of you will also know that I subsequently wrote an
article on the Mitchells’ solution, now archived on my web-
site at mythomorph.com, taking issue with its veracity, and
used as evidence the 1837 Swarbreck, showing the sorry state
of the cubes before their restoration in the 1860s by architect
David Bryce.
In that article, the Mitchells’ “Stave Angel” is described as
“holding a stave of music, and is pointing to notes on the
stave that exactly correspond with the Chladni patterns
shown on the first three cubes above the angel’s head and,
astonishingly, that these three notes account for 70 percent of
the entire cube sequence.” Chladni patterns are caused when
a “sustained note is used to vibrate a sheet of metal covered
in powder, producing marks.” The marks produced by differ-
ent notes can “include flowers, diamonds and hexagons --
shapes all present on the Rosslyn cubes.”
My article did not convince the True Believers that the
Mitchells’ claims were suspect, perhaps because the
Swarbreck drawing I used as evidence was not of a suffi-
ciently high resolution. I have since acquired a large-format
and high-quality reproduction of his original drawing, and
have included a section of it on the following page for your
inspection.

As you study it, note that the three all-important cubes
above the angel were actually missing in 1837. Note, too,
that there are many other cubes missing in the area of the
drawing shown and, finally, note something that I did not
mention in my original article as published -- that the cubes
shown to exist in 1837 are all of the same design (shown
inset, above).
My conclusion: There was no message encoded in the pat-
ternns of Rosslyn’s cubes, musical or otherwise, by the builder
of the chapel
But, as I’ve said, the mystery of the cubes was not new.
Three years before the Mitchells’ revelation, in response to a
2002 news report that certain parties in Scotland were attempt-
ing to decipher a coded message in the cubes, Tim Wallace-
Murphy, co-author (with Marilyn Hopkins) of Rosslyn:
Guardian of the Secrets of the Holy Grail, claimed there was
indeed a message hidden in their arrangement. The relevant
part of his claim reads as follows:
“When Marilyn and I went to Rosslyn in June of 1997 or
1998 to take photographs for ‘Rosslyn Guardian of the
Secrets of the Holy Grail,’ Marilyn was at a loose end as I
pointed my box-brownie at the various carvings we needed as
illustrations. Her knowledge of medieval symbolism is almost
as good as my own, but she has an added talent -- superb spir-
itual insight. Within a short space of time she had discovered
the key to the order in which the cubes are to be read.
“When the designs on the cubes are plotted in the revealed
Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com
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High-resolution detail from Samuel Dukinfield
Swarbreck’s 1837 The Interior of Rosslyn Chapel.
Note that the cubes above the Mitchells’ “Stave
Angel” are missing, and that the balance of that
particular arch is also missing. Note, too, that all
of the surviving cubes in that year were of the
same design (shown inset).
order, repeating patterns emerge in the symbols which may
well, to any good cryptographer or cryptographic computer
programme, reveal the hidden message within the carvings.
“We are prepared to share our insights with any interest-
ed party of repute subject only to a binding and enforceable
contract containing two main conditions i.e. that any knowl-
edge so revealed shall be placed in the public domain where
it rightly belongs and that Marilyn and I be given the right to
publish the findings first.”
A few months later, when I had the temerity to suggest that
some changes had been made to the original architectural
fabric of the chapel -- a suggestion that should now seem far-
less preposterous to some of you than it did then -- Tim had
this to say: “Having examined the carvings in Rosslyn in
detail by means of scaffolding and an air hoist may I make
the following observations: 1) The present carving of the
Madonna in the main body of the chapel is new. 2) The Head
of the so-called ‘Murdered Apprentice’ once had a beard that
has been chiselled off. 3) The monk carrying the chalice in
the SW window has been subjected to some degree of vio-
lence. 4) Apart from natural degeneration, which sadly in
some cases is considerable, there is, other than those men-
tioned above, as far as I am aware, no new carvings or sig-
nificantly altered carvings within the main body of the orig-
inal chapel since the barrel vaulted roof was installed.
However I could be wrong, after all I have only spent about
twelve years examining this fascinating place and there is
 Mark Your Calendars: The new and improved Rosslyn Motet website (left) as it looked 105 days before the 19 March 2011 Rosslyn Motet 2011 Concert
and Science Tour [postponed from 8 December 2010]. Right: The Rosslyn Motet CD on sale at Rosslyn Chapel’s online store.
still much to learn.”
I will not argue with Tim’s first three observations, but
proper research in no way supports his fourth. As for his final
sentence, I leave it to you to decide his reason for writing it.
Truth, given the benefit of hindsight and sufficient humil-
ity, may still conquer all -- eventually -- or so I thought when
I first published this paper in the April 2010 edition of
Girnigoe: Scotland’s Clan Sinclair Magazine..
I have since learned that on 19 March 2011 (postponed from
18 December 2010) The Rosslyn Motet will, once again, be
played within the walls of the chapel. “The Rosslyn Motet
Concert and Science Tour” will, it is announced, give attendees
“the opportunity to hear a full (new score) version of the
Rosslyn Motet as yet unheard in its complete form,.” at just £35
for the tour and concert, and just £22.50 for the concert only.
The musical/science tour, we are told, would be “hosted
by Stuart Mitchell who will explain and demonstrate the
incredible decoding process that eventually arrived at the
piece of music that was so carefully embedded into the archi-
tecture of Rosslyn Chapel.”
But that’s not all. We are also told what lies ahead for the
Mitchells.
“Since the realisation of the music in 2005, Stuart and
Tommy Mitchell have discovered some incredible new infor-
mation which will be published later this year in our new
book ‘The Rosslyn Key’ and focuses upon the Chapel’s rela-
tionship with the planet Venus and the mythical mountain
‘Mount Meru.’ This new research is in collaboration with
musicologist Richard Merrick (USA) and will also be dis-
cussed during the tour to further enhance the natural architec-
tural beauty that is Rosslyn Chapel and the place it holds in
our hearts.”
Hmm ...
Back in 2003, with the publication of Dan Brown’s The
Da Vinci Code, and in 2005, with the world-wide release to
the non-reading public of Ron “Opie” Howard’s movie of the
same name, it became apparent that there were, in fact, two
Copyright April/December 2010 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com
5
huge audiences with pockets to pick -- those who were eager
to believe in the “heresies” promoted therein, and those who
were not. Each side in the controversy showed a willingness
to buy, with good folding money, evermore literary and cin-
ematic ammunition to lob at the other, and more is what they
got -- in spades.
Almost as quickly as the presses could roll, the Da Vinci
Code also-rans appeared on the book shelves. Liberally fes-
tooned with market-researched and browser-friendly buzz-
words, there suddenly appeared books that “decoded”
Brown’s work, those that promised the “real history” behind it,
“Dummies” editions and “Rough Guide” travel tomes that
would take you to all the “secret” places where, for centuries,
the timid had not dared to ask the really hard questions: Did
Jesus Christ die on the cross, or did he survive, marry Mary
Magdalene and have children? One of those secret places was
Rosslyn Chapel, and one of those books was Mark Oxbrow
and Ian Robertson’s Rosslyn and the Grail.
Arguably the most successful debunking book to come
down the pike in quite some time, second only to Robert
Cooper’s The Rosslyn Hoax, Oxbrow and Robertson’s Rosslyn
and the Grail has, paradoxically, been advertised on Stuart and
Tommy Mitchell’s Rosslyn Motet site for at least three years,
perhaps because the four all appeared in Dan Burstein’s criti-
cally acclaimed 2006 documentary, Secrets of the Code, nar-
rated by Susan Sarandon and spawning a best-selling series of
similarly controversial and eminently bankable products.
Rosslyn and the Grail co-author Ian Robertson will be
sharing the bill with the Mitchells on their big day, and will
be delivering a “History of Rosslyn Chapel.”
I ended my 2007 paper on The Rosslyn Motet by para-
phrasing a quote by Mark Twain: “A lie can be half way
around the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
I will end this paper with another Twain classic: “The his-
tory of our race, and each individual's experience, are sewn
thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a
lie well told is immortal.” END