Rosslyn and the Grail Myths

The glorious, superabundant symbolism of the carvings of Rosslyn Chapel is just such a mystery. Yet, the attempt to reduce this mystery to a key, code or formula that can be solved or unlocked is a fallacy. From a historian’s point of view, the real problem is to explain why Rosslyn Chapel has become the site and source of so much speculation and mythology. There are a number of different elements to this, which we have attempted to explore in our short course, In Search of the Grail, at nearby Newbattle Abbey College.

Firstly, there is the idea that Rosslyn possesses a ‘great secret’, a vague but compelling idea possibly rooted in the traditionally sacred nature of the ground it inhabits, and fed over the centuries by folklore and literature (such as Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel).

Secondly, there is the supposed association of the chapel with the Knights Templars, a religious-military order suppressed by the Catholic Church in the early fourteenth-century. The Templars are the conduit through which all kinds of contradictory ideas flow, most notably one of the richest streams in western thought, the Grail tradition.

Briefly, the idea is that the Templars possessed some mystical wisdom, perhaps derived from the pre-Christian Gnostics, and initially located within the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. After the suppression of the Templar order in 1314, this treasure was conveyed in some form to Scotland, where it found its home in Rosslyn.

The precise nature of this secret, whether it is the literal grail (a cup or chalice), the head of Baphomet supposedly worshipped by the Templars, the scroll of the Temple of Solomon, or something much less tangible, is unclear. Dozens of different theories and speculations have been advanced, and the architecture and topography of Rosslyn relentlessly studied and misrepresented in search of this unknowable secret.

Rosslyn has become the site of many of these theories for various reasons. There is much speculation on the founder of Rosslyn Chapel, William St Clair, Prince of Orkney, and his possible motives. Attempts have been made to link him both with the suppressed Templar order and with the early development of Scottish freemasonry. There has also been speculation on his interest in esoteric knowledge, with one writer suggesting that St Clair was the mysterious, legendary Christian Rosenkreutz, the supposed ‘founder’ of the Rosicrucian order.

There is no doubt that the images in Rosslyn have a compelling power and beauty, from the profusion of ‘green man’ images to the representation of the Nordic tree of life in the Apprentice Pillar. Yet however they are interpreted, no single undisputed meaning can be placed on them. There are many images whose precise significance we cannot fully explain, since the world in which they were made has disappeared. Yet too many people try to read just such a definitive text into this ‘Book in Stone’.

As for the connections with the Templars, these also seem to suffer from a lack of evidence. Rosslyn Chapel was built over a century and a half after the end of the Templar order. Some ex-Templars may have come to Scotland, but there is no proof that they carried anything secret with them, nor that they would still have considered themselves as Templars and attempted to carry on an underground Templar tradition. Nor was St Clair either a Templar or what would later be called a ‘Freemason’ (freemasonry simply did not exist in the fourteenth-century). The only tangible link is that the headquarters of the Templar order in Scotland had been at the nearby village of Ballantradoch (known as Temple Village). Yet the Templars were everywhere in Europe, and so this proves nothing.

It is moreover, from everything we know about the Templars, extremely unlikely that they would have been the repository of a mystical underground tradition. As the historian Malcolm Barber has argued, there is no evidence of any tradition of learning or theological speculation amongst the Templars: they were primarily soldiers.

The way in which these myths and theories have coincided and woven together disparate themes is in itself a fascinating story. The early traditions of freemasonry claimed a link with the military orders, and adopted some of their themes and symbolism (the Scottish exile Chevalier Andrew Ramsay was the first to do so). Then, through the demonisation of the freemasons after the French Revolution, this was worked into a full-blown conspiracy theory by Catholic writers such as Augustin Barruel, who traced a great pagan anti-Christian conspiracy against the Catholic Church. This was further developed by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who believed that the Templars had been dangerous heretics, and continued to be a threat to Catholic Europe. Purgstall used the supposed finding of Temple artefacts in Jerusalem to identify the idol supposedly worshipped by the Templars – Baphomet. The Grail was the symbol of anti-Christian Gnostic knowledge, represented by Baphomet.

In the twentieth-century this unsympathetic portrayal of the Masons, Rosicrucians and Templars was turned on its head and celebrated as the underground, suppressed ‘truth’ of the Christian faith by books such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the forerunner of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. This and other books focused on Rosslyn, picking up on an older folklore tradition linking it with the Grail. Although many of the claims made in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail have either no basis in fact, or are distorted and simplified, such ideas have become phenomenally popular.

Overall, the danger is of over-interpretation. Fragments of genuine evidence are used to try to claim far too much. Links are made between widely separated subjects – the Templars and the Cathars, or the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons – on the basis of superficial or misunderstood ‘similarities’. Symbols that are claimed to be unique to Rosslyn – the depiction of foliage resembling American plants – turn about to be common motifs in medieval art. The gaps in our knowledge, the unknowable – all of which is the nature of history – are exploited by those who seek to find the hidden message that links all the mysteries, a procedure reminiscent of Mr Casaubon’s hare-brained ‘Key to All Mythologies’ in Middlemarch.

My interest is in how and why people seek meaning in the kind of legends recounted in The Da Vinci Code. Too many academic historians turn away from these stories, seeing them as self-evidently absurd. Yet any attempt to understand the meaning of the sacred in the modern world needs to come to terms with the power of these associations, as well as the reality that underpins them.

Scotland is a land of contradictions – Enlightenment and Romanticism, scepticism and faith, bigotry and tolerance. The Rosslyn myths display many of these contrary characteristics: the yearning for a suppressed truth, the romantic images of buried chivalry, the radical edge of underground movements and the Gothic appeal of secret conspiracies, the sceptical rejection of authority and the credulous faith in all manner of oddball fantasies. It is no accident that the Grail legends – born in France and fostered in Germany – have found their most lasting home in the peaceful hills of Lothian.

Dr Neil Hargraves is Lecturer in History at Newbattle Abbey College, Midlothian, and a contributor to the workshop ‘In search of the Grail’. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh and has published several articles on aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment in publications such as Journal of the History of Ideas, Eighteenth-Century Life, History of European Ideas, The Adam Smith Review and Anthropology of the Enlightenment (forthcoming). He is working on a book on the social thought of the Scottish Enlightenment, and is also researching the history of Newbattle Abbey. He will be giving a public lecture on Rosslyn, the Templars and the Grail Mythology at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, on Tuesday 26th September.