(Originally published in Atlantis Rising #65 -- September/October, 2007 -- under the title “The Rosslyn Motet: What the Mainstream Media Didn’t Tell You about the Chapel’s Musical Cubes,” and republished in translation in the December 2007 edition of Italy's Hera magazine.)

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On April 30, 2007, Scotland’s newspaper of record, The Scotsman, published a short article headlined “Musical Secret Uncovered in Chapel Carvings,” about a father-and-son team of Edinburgh musicians, Tommy and Stuart Mitchell, who claimed to have “found a secret piece of music hidden in carvings at Rosslyn Chapel.” It was, Stuart said, like finding a “compact disc from the 15th century.”

Despite the fact that when the final notes of the Motet had been played the chapel had resisted, contrary to the expectations of many, giving up even one of its long-speculated secrets, the commercial success of the composition had been assured, and the product made available to shoppers around the world. Three more performances of the piece were quickly scheduled at Rosslyn and, by month’s end, a Google search of “Rosslyn Motet” netted an astounding 17,300 hits.

But the story about the discovery, already dubbed “The Holy Grail of Music” by the Mitchells, themselves, was not a new one, and was far from complete.

I first read about Stuart Mitchell 18 months earlier in an Oct. 1, 2005, Scotsman article titled “Composer Cracks Rosslyn’s Musical Code.” The article reported that Stuart took “20 years to crack a complex series of codes which have mystified historians for generations,” and that “his feat was hailed by experts as a stroke of genius.”

“The codes were hidden,” the article continued, “in 213 cubes in the ceiling of the chapel, where parts of the film of Dan Brown’s best-seller The Da Vinci Code were shot this week.”

I immediately posted a lengthy list of cautions about the claims put forth in the article to the Sinclair Discussion Group, a worldwide network connected, by blood or by interest, to the chapel’s founder, William St. Clair. One of those cautions was simply that the hailing “experts” touted in the article were represented by just one—James Cunningham, author of “The Medieval Diatonic Scale,” who said that it was a “stroke of genius to have discovered the cadences which inspired the music.” I told the group that a Google search for Cunningham and his tome would garner zero results—and except for results now connected to me, it still does.

Over the next 18 months, including the article that set the alternate history world on fire, the Scotsman published three more articles about Stuart Mitchell.

In the first of these articles, the April 27, 2006 “Tune in to the Da Vinci Coda,” Stuart’s father Tommy is introduced to us as the man who “spent 20 years cracking this code in the ceiling.” Stuart is now described as “orchestrating” his father’s finding for “The Rosslyn Motet.”

It is in this article that we get the first quasi-comprehensible description of the chapel’s hidden code, and how it was unraveled. I will try to make it better than it was.

At one end of Rosslyn Chapel is an area known as the “Lady Chapel,” the ceiling of which is supported by arched ribs reaching out and under it from the three pillars to its immediate west and the wall to the east.

From these ribs hang what have become known as the “Rosslyn Cubes,” and among the 213 existing cubes (two are missing) can be found 13 uniquely different carved patterns. Tommy’s breakthrough, the article says, came when he “discovered that the markings carved on the face of the cubes seem to match a phenomenon called Cymatics or Chladni patterns,” caused when a “sustained note is used to vibrate a sheet of metal covered in powder, producing marks.” The marks produced by different notes can “include flowers, diamonds and hexagons—shapes all present on the Rosslyn cubes.”

Believing that the similarity of the Chladni patterns with the carvings on the Rosslyn cubes was “beyond coincidence,” Stuart assigned a note to each of the 13 carved variations and, according to the article, is now “orchestrating the findings for a new recording called The Rosslyn Motet.”

It is the Mitchells’ hope that the music, as the article says, “when played on medieval instruments in situ, will resonate throughout the chapel unlocking a secret in the stone.”

As we now know, that did not happen. But with the well-timed assistance of the global media, combined with a public interest in all things Da Vinci and Rosslyn, it hardly mattered. The commercial success of the Motet was orchestrated to be a fait accompli, and it was.

Readers of the four Scotsman articles about the Motet, still available in the newspaper’s online archive, might find it curious that in none of them is Tommy Mitchell specifically credited as the “composer” of the piece, which we now know him to be. This is perhaps because by the time the third article had been written the newspaper had already produced, and would soon offer to its readers on May 15, 2006, the first podcast in a five-part Rosslyn Chapel series, meant to raise the paper’s profile in international cyberspace. Each of these five podcasts uses the Motet as its soundtrack, and lists Stuart as the composer in its end titles. It is inconceivable to me that after three articles and five podcasts the Mitchells would not have pointed out the paper’s error, and yet it seems they didn’t. The short Scotsman article that went round the world on April 30, 2007, still did not substantively contradict any part of its previous reports, but it is very interesting to those of us who notice such things that the newspaper has not touched the story since—not even to review the May 18 concert held just a few miles south of the paper’s Edinburgh headquarters.

But the story of the Rosslyn Cubes did not begin with the Mitchells.

As early as June 2002 the Scotsman had already published an article about the mystery of the cubes, and mentioned within it a name that might ring some bells with alternate history enthusiasts—Stephen Prior. A co-writer and researcher with the well-known writing team of Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett, this former head of the parapsychology division of the British Secret Service was, at the time, running the day-to-day operations of a hotel in Gullane, Scotland, named The Templar Lodge. Under Prior’s stewardship the hotel hosted, until his untimely death from a particularly aggressive form of cancer, several successful confabs of such “fringe” historical research groups as the Sauniere Society.

As far as the Rosslyn Cubes were concerned, it seems that Prior sincerely believed that the cubes could, as he says in the article, “hold the key to a health-giving chant from the Middle Ages,” and had already set in motion certain initiatives to finding that key, including commissioning a photographer to record every different variation in the carvings. He was also supplying a CD of those photographs to anyone who would like to look for that key. To sweeten the pot, Prior was offering a hefty monetary prize to the lucky code-breaker, a prize set up in the name of Clementina Bentine, widow of the UK’s famous “Goon Show” alumnus, comedian and author Michael Bentine who, shortly before his death, was made an honorary member of the modern order of the Scottish Knights Templar.

Three years later, in the Scotsman article that gives Stuart Mitchell sole credit for cracking Rosslyn’s musical code, Stuart claims that he “took photographs of the cubes and broke them down into sections.” Actually the photographs the Mitchells use in their YouTube Chladni pattern demonstrations are the same photographs commissioned by Stephen Prior, and the person who performed the Herculean task of mapping the layout of the cubes is a talented musician by the name of Mark Naples, a friend and associate of Prior at the time. Naples, incidentally, sings the vocal tracks on the only album of music actually recorded beneath the cubes of the chapel, “The Roseline Connection,” the title of which relates to the Scottish leyline subsequently made much of in Dan Brown’s blockbuster.

And then there is Brian Allan, author of the book Rosslyn: Between Two Worlds, who has also investigated the cubes/music connection. In a Feb. 8, 2006 article on the SacredFems blog, attributed to an earlier article in the London Sunday Herald, Allan says, “I think the true secret is not the musical score. I think what the cubes represent is something called the Devil’s chord, which is in fact an augmented fourth.” A low frequency sound in the range of 80 to 110 hertz, the Devil’s chord was outlawed by the Catholic church in the middle ages under the belief that those exposed to the chord would begin to enter altered states of consciousness. Allan believes that Rosslyn’s architect, William St. Clair, might have “felt an antipathy to the church which he couldn’t express openly—hence he might have done this in a manner that wouldn’t have been detected.”

In a subsequent Scotsman article, “Tune Into the Da Vinci Coda,” a careful reading makes it obvious that Stuart Mitchell was presented with Allan’s theory, although Allan is not mentioned within the body of the article, giving the article a bit of a disconnect that most readers would not notice, but offering Mitchell the opportunity to say that “In the ceiling is this jump of an augmented fourth, in fact [the music] opens up with an augmented fourth.”

The Mitchells’ first Eureka moment on their path of discovery came when Tommy recognized that the patterns on the cubes were strikingly similar to patterns discovered by German physicist Ernst Chladni in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Mitchells then hypothesize that Chladni’s patterns must have already been known by the fifteenth century and, on the basis of the layout of the 13 distinctly different patterns on 213 cubes, with only two cubes missing, are able to reconstruct the melody that has been hidden there for over 500 years.

In the spring of 2002 I attended an exhibit at Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland titled “Rosslyn: Country of Painter and Poet,” and purchased the exhibit’s handsomely printed program. On page 51 are two remarkable lithographs by Samuel Dukinfield Swarbreck which show that in 1837 there were many more than just two cubes missing, throwing into doubt the 15th-century origin of the Mitchells’ composition if it was based on the layout we now see at Rosslyn. [These lithographs can be seen at the beginning of this article, and can be enlarged for closer viewing].

More intriguingly the Mitchells’ second Eureka moment came when they discovered what they have dubbed the “Stave Angel.” Mark Naples, in the description of his 2001 layout, cautiously suggests that this particular angel may be holding a “zimbala or portable organ.”

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The Mitchells are not so cautious. This angel, they say, is 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.”

A close inspection of one of the Swarbreck lithographs shows that in 1837 the cubes above that angel were already missing and, indeed, the balance of the arched rib was also missing. Additionally, the shadow next to the angel’s right hand indicates that the hands Swarbreck depicted were not holding a musical stave but were, in fact, raised above an instrument being played on the angel’s lap.

The restoration of the interior of Rosslyn Chapel finally got under way in 1861, a quarter-century later, under the direction of architect David Bryce.

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Are we now to believe that Bryce had a reproducible example of every cube that had been broken off in the four centuries since the chapel had been built, including the three that account “for 70 percent of the entire cube sequence,” as well as a schematic that enabled him to recreate the original layout planned in 1446, so that the Mitchells could announce the cracking of the hidden code in 2005?

There are those who will certainly bring that argument to the table, and point to the fact that Bryce was a Freemason to whom such knowledge could certainly have been imparted by his St. Clair employer. There are also those who will argue that Bryce, because he was a Freemason, might have played a little fast and loose in his restoration, making changes to the architectural fabric of the chapel that would eventually connect its iconography to occult knowledge, and tie the relatively modern Freemasons to the medieval Knights Templar in ways that the chapel’s founder had never intended.

I am happy to let both sides duke that debate out, and am satisfied to say just this:

Rosslyn Chapel, in my studied opinion, continues to be a place of great mystery that has yet to give up its secrets in any way that transcends speculation—including my own. There is a preponderance of oddities about the place that make it one of the most mysterious places on Earth, not the least of which is the importance of the chapel’s geographical location, elegantly described in Scott Creighton’s recent book, The Giza Oracle, and in my previous articles about the chapel.

The above would imply to many observers, that—contrary to what he says in the Oct. 1, 2005, Scotsman article—Stuart Mitchell may not have photographed the Rosslyn Cubes himself. Moreover, one may be forgiven for suspecting, that, in fact, those photos were actually downloaded from Mark Naples’ website for use in Mitchell’s YouTube video, “The Stave Angel,” which shows images of only 11 of the 13 patterns. It is important to note that on Naples’ website only 11 patterns are shown.

The evidence also suggests that Mitchell may very well have utilized Naples’ 2001 layout of the cubes. As the accompanying screenshots show, it appears that Naples’ simple freehand drawing has merely been dressed up for website presentation, albeit without giving credit to the source. Although it appears that, in the probable rush to publish, several mistakes were made, possibly the most suspicious could be this: Naples’ misspelling of the word “Altar,” is also included.

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Finally, on Stephen Prior’s now defunct website there was an article titled “The Rosslyn Chapel Cubes Quest” which presented, at some considerable length, the possible connection between the cubes and the Chladni phenomenon. That article has also been archived on Naples’ website since Prior’s death in 2003.

There’s an old saw that says “a lie can be half way around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” Of the only words carved within the chapel, taken from the Old Testament Book of Ezra, the last three might rather mitigate the idea that any falsehood about the chapel can long survive: “Truth Conquers All.”

(Originally published in Atlantis Rising #63 – May/June, 2007. Rosslyn Chapel ceiling photos are by Antonia Reeve for the Rosslyn Chapel Trust)

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In "Return to Rosslyn Chapel," published in Atlantis Rising #48, I revealed my discovery of a Lorraine Cross encoded in Rosslyn's five-course vaulted ceiling. Wayne Herschel, author of 2003's "The Hidden Records," has now added another layer to the mystery by claiming that a Vitruvian Man, a symbol made much of in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," is also encoded there. His claim has led me to Rosslyn’s darkest secret.

Pushing the crowding elements out to the left and right of the ceiling, until all of the elements were harmoniously spaced, revealed the two-barred Cross of Lorraine.

While it is not within the scope of this article to repeat my theories about why a Lorraine Cross would be encoded there, it will be useful to keep in mind the following:

• It is upside down. The shorter bar, symbolizing the INRI sign put above the head of the crucified Christ, should be above the longer.
• Today’s Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (SMOTJ) uses the same reverse-barred configuration in its official insignia, but does not say why.
• An equal-barred Cross of Lorraine was the first insignia granted to the Knights Templar. In Dagobert’s Revenge, Boyd Rice says that the equal-barred cross represents “the union of opposites, the intersection of creative force and destructive force, or the union of male and female principles;” that the bar “above” mirrors the bar “below” and, as such, is symbolic of the Hermetic maxim, “as above, so below.”

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A few months ago a friend sent me a link to a page on Wayne Herschel's website which showed how Herschel had combined a modified version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic Vitruvian Man with my graphic of Rosslyn's Lorraine Cross. While the arms of Leonardo’s man are shown at both the 3- and 9-o’clock positions and the 2- and 10-o’clock positions, allowing him to graphically describe the proportional relationships of the human body to a circle and a square, Herschel had eliminated the 2- and 10-o’clock positions and added a 12-o’clock position, allowing him to show how human proportions relate to a pentagram. Herschel’s modification was based on a treatise that Leonardo was himself inspired by—a description of human proportions by ancient Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio.

While I have not the space to relate where Herschel’s path of inquiry takes him, the pentagram he described struck a resonant note along my own—and it was chilling.

When I had counted the relative numbers of architectural elements in each course of the ceiling and had revealed the upside-down Lorraine Cross, there were five elements left over which I took to symbolize a five-pointed star—which can of course be drawn within the five points of Herschel’s pentagram. And if the configuration of the cross is upside-down, then by turning it rightside-up the five-pointed star and the star course turn with it.

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In Manly P. Hall’s 1928 book, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Hall claims “when the upright star turns and the upper point falls to the bottom, it signifies the fall of the Morning Star.”

The disturbing significance of this will soon become clear.

I had also noticed a curious mistake in the order of the stars in Rosslyn’s star course. Instead of forming a perfect checkerboard, the sixth and seventh rows faced each other, thereby reversing that order. I then suggested that this reversal was meant to symbolize a day that many far-flung world mythologies say “the sky fell,” a day of cataclysm that Christians are taught to believe was the biblical flood, unleashed upon the peoples of Earth, by God Almighty, as punishment for their wickedness.

Could it be that the upside-down Lorraine Cross, Herschel’s Vitruvian Man in the pentagram, and the mistake in the order of the stars in Rosslyn’s ceiling were meant to act in concert to symbolize, for those with eyes to see, the darkest secret in the world—that we live on a flawed planet?

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In Plato’s The Statesman, the philosopher has this to say about the various cataclysmic tales:

"All these stories and others still more extraordinary have their source in one and the same event. At certain periods the universe has it's present circular motion, and after long intervals, this motion shifts such that during other periods it revolves in a contrary direction and inevitably at the time this reversal takes place, there is a great destruction of animals in general and only a small part of the human race survives."

In his Timaeus, Plato continues that “there have been many and diverse destructions of mankind. We know this because we possess the records of those who witnessed the events and survived. Now the stories as they are told have the fashion of a legend, but the truth of them lies in the shifting of the bodies in the heavens that recurs at long intervals."

In other words, Plato was implying that these “many and diverse destructions of mankind” were cataclysms of a cyclical nature. His “shifting of the bodies in the heavens” may have been witnessed, as he says, but it would have been the Earth the witnesses stood on that was moving, not the heavens. His scenario also brings into philosophical doubt the existence of either a perfect creator or a merciful god.

I have recently been in touch with Gary Osborn, whose forthcoming book, The Axis of God, will talk in fascinating detail about a recurring symbol he has discovered in an astonishing number of famous artworks, including those of Nicolas Poussin of “Et in Arcadia Ego” fame—the angle of 23.5 degrees. This angle, he reminds us, is the angle that the Earth is presently tipped at—a phenomenon that gives our planet its four seasons, and enables us to judge the passage of time, short or long, by the observably changing positions of the heavenly bodies throughout the year and, indeed, over the millennia.

Why would these artists encode the angle of the Earth’s tilt into their works? Was it simply to prove that they had greater knowledge than history has given them credit for, or was it for another reason? Could they have been warning us that the Earth’s tilt was not natural—that it had changed more than once before, and would change more than once again? Could they have been saying, in their quietly cryptic way, that cyclical cataclysms had not only happened, but also were predictable?

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Taking a cue from Osborn’s astounding observation and my theory that the symbology of the Rosslyn Chapel ceiling was put in place to draw attention to a “day the sky fell,” I decided to look for the 23.5-degree angle in Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Remarkably, it was there. The angles between the man’s two left arms and two right arms, when connected to the prominent dots that Leonardo had so very obligingly drawn at the lower corners of the square delineating the proportions of his man’s head, measured exactly 23.5 degrees!

Wayne Herschel, while showing how the proportions of a body can delineate a pentagram, had eliminated the angle that Da Vinci had encoded. While I cautiously suggest that Herschel’s thesis will eventually maintain that human life on Earth came from elsewhere in the universe (a theory I and others subscribe to), my focus in this article is not to show where humankind came from so much as where it might be headed.

While Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man does not show the arms extended overhead, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio has this to say in his De Architectura, the only major book on architecture that survives from classical antiquity:

"The navel is naturally placed in the centre of the human body, and, if in a man lying with his face upward, and his hands and feet extended, from his navel as the centre, a circle be described, it will touch his fingers and toes."

Let's now reconsider Herschel's crucifixion of his Vitruvian Man on the upside-down Cross of Lorraine, noting that the location of the man's navel, as shown in Herschel’s graphic, lies between the second and third courses of the ceiling.

Freemasons Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight, in their 1996 book The Hiram Key, focus their attentions elsewhere. After speculating that the ground plan of Rosslyn Chapel mirrors that of Herod's Temple, they calculate that an invisible Seal of Solomon, more commonly known as the Star of David, can be drawn above the floor within the chapel’s exacting architectural measurements, and draw the reader’s attention to a carved pendulum known as the Sinclair Engrailed Boss which hangs directly overhead:

"At the very centre of this invisible Seal of Solomon,” they say, “in the arched roof there is a large suspended boss in the form of a decorated arrowhead that points straight down to a keystone in the floor below.  It is, we believe, this stone that must be raised to enter the reconstructed vaults of Herod's Temple and recover the Nasorean Scrolls."

Lomas and Knight base their theory on the words of the first Templars as given in their fraternity’s Royal Arch Degree," which read as follows:

"We determined to examine it [the vaults of Herod's Temple], for which purpose we removed two of the stones, when we discovered a vault of considerable magnitude, and immediately cast lots who should descend. The lot fell on me; when, lest any noxious vapours or other causes should render my situation unsafe, my companions fastened this cord or life line round my body, and I was duly lowered into the vault. On arriving at the bottom, I gave a preconcerted signal, and my companions gave me more line, which enabled me to traverse the vault; I then discovered something in the form of a pedestal and felt certain marks or characters thereon, but from the want of light I was unable to ascertain what they were. I also found this scroll, but from the same cause I was unable to read its contents. I therefore gave another preconcerted signal, and was drawn out of the vault, bringing the scroll with me. We then discovered from the first sentence that it contained the records of the Most Holy Law, which had been promulgated by our God at the foot of Mount Sinai."

Well, who knows?  Most books have a climax, and that was theirs.

No book, however, has brought more attention to Rosslyn Chapel than Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." Because of that book's enormous readership, guides at Rosslyn must now explain why there is no Star of David carved into the chapel's floor, even though Brown clearly based his suggestion on Lomas and Knight's speculations. There can be no doubt that what the questing public wants to get into are Rosslyn’s sealed vaults. Perhaps, when the current ticket sales start to decline, those seals will open—but that might take some time.

If there is indeed an invisible Vitruvian Man, however, crucified on the upside-down Lorraine Cross encoded in Rosslyn Chapel’s ceiling, then we must again consider the importance Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and Leonardo Da Vinci placed on the navel as the center of the circle.

If the navel of the Vitruvian Man is the center of the circle, then the positioning of Herschel’s Vitruvian Man presents us with a bit of a conundrum. While Lomas and Knight position the Sinclair Engrailed Boss above the center of their invisible Seal of Solomon, the Sinclair Engrailed Boss can be seen to be located in an empty and relatively insignificant space between the Vitruvian Man's legs, between the third and fourth courses.

Could it be that the Vitruvian Man’s navel, between the second and third courses of the ceiling, hangs directly above another significant spot in the floor below? Perhaps beneath that spot is ancient documentation of humankind’s true past, as well as its destiny. Again, we shall have to wait until the vaults are opened.

In the meantime, no matter what might lie below, there’s plenty more to see above.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio decreed, in the 1st century BC, that great buildings should be built with the proportions of nature in mind. It is therefore not surprising that the ideal proportions of a human body would be incorporated into Rosslyn’s ceiling. What is surprising, however, is that the flaw in the order of the star course in Rosslyn’s ceiling would hint that civilization, as stated by Plato, is periodically destroyed by a cyclical cataclysm, and that the 23.5-degree angle found between the arms of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man would hint at the very same thing.

In his recently published “The Giza Oracle,” Glasgow-based writer Scott Creighton tips his hat to Gary Osborn’s 23.5-degree thesis and, although he reaches his conclusions from a different direction, concurs that the ancients took great pains to make sure that the truth about Earth’s cataclysmic history was encoded in the careful relative positioning of some of the world’s most awe-inspiring structures. Creighton places Rosslyn Chapel high on his list of those structures, and I must agree.

On the south side of the star course of Rosslyn’s ceiling are four architectural elements worthy of note—a sun, a dove, a moon, and a bearded head with a hand raised alongside. While two of those elements have been somewhat modified since as recently as 1892, as I talk at greater length about in my AR #38 “Secrets of Rosslyn Chapel,” the relative positions of those elements, one to the other, have not—and it is in those positions that further proof of Rosslyn’s darkest secret lies.

A line drawn between the moon and the sun creates an angle of exactly 23.5 degrees—a clear, indeed blatant reference to the positions of the heavenly bodies relative to Earth’s axial tilt that has been hidden in plain sight for centuries.

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Whether or not our Earth once spun without a tilt, enjoying a “Golden Time” of endless Atlantean summer, and was knocked off kilter at the hand of a less-than-merciful god, a comet, an asteroid, a magnetic pole shift, the return of Zecharia Sitchin’s 12th Planet, or whatever planetary upheaval any combination of the above might visit upon us, it is not likely that so much effort would be put into telling us that our home had suffered a one-in-a-million-chance cataclysm. Since you can’t change chance, why bother?

It is far more likely they were warning us that the cataclysm documented in our “myths” had happened before, and would certainly happen again. In doing so they were showing that they cared more about us, then, than we seem to care about each other, now.

Perhaps they knew that all of us, no matter where we live or what god we have been taught to pray to, were adrift on the same rocky boat.

Shouldn’t we have learned, by now, how to row together?

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POSTCRIPT

While I did not know it at the time the article went to press, I was soon informed that the 23.5-degree angle, and it's 47-degree double, are two of Freemasonry's "Cosmic Angles," according to Frank C. Higgins in his 1919 book, Ancient Freemasonry: An Introduction to Masonic Archaeology. Higgins goes on to say that these angles are also encoded on coins showing pre-Christian Phoenician temples of Cypress, ancient Greek paintings of Hermes and Ceres, as well as in the Masonic Keystone and Compass of the present day. This was, of course, in Higgins’ “present day.” Today’s Masonic compasses are opened to 60 degrees.

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It is interesting, however, that the 23.5-degree angle has become a part of modern-day Masonic ritual. In a 1998 Masonic Manual and Monitorial Instructions booklet I have consulted is a section titled “Manual of the Rod,” abridged as follows:

“The rods are carried by the Deacons and Stewards as emblems of Office. They are carried in the performance of official duties, either directed or implied, from the sound of the gavel which congregates the Lodge to the sound of the gavel which closes the Lodge … While they are marching, they carry the rod between the upper arm and the body, inclining it forward at an angle of 23 and one-half degrees …”

The Masonic Manual, though highly interesting in its entirety, does not elaborate on the significance of that angle, but I have been told that many Masons do in fact know that this is the angle of the tilt of the Earth.

I have been unable to discover whether those same Masons know why such an angle is considered important enough to be a part of their ritual, or whether they are simply satisfied that it is.

I suspect that the knowledge is very carefully parceled out, by degrees.

(Originally published in Atlantis Rising #57 – May/June, 2006)

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But first let's look at the painting.

Now known to have been commissioned in 1602 by Ciriaco Mattei, one of Caravaggio's wealthy Roman patrons, "The Taking" depicts the moment Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss, revealing Christ's identity to the soldiers sent to arrest him.

That Caravaggio had painted such a work was known to scholars through a 1672 description by Giovan Bellori, an art critic who had seen it hanging in Rome.

"Judas lays his hand on the shoulder of the Lord after the kiss," Bellori wrote, "and a soldier in full armor extends his arm and his ironclad hand to the chest of the Lord who stands patiently and humbly with his arms crossed before him."

Although it is discussed nowhere in Harr's book, readers of this article will notice a major discrepancy in Bellori's description--Christ's arms are not "crossed before him." In fact, Caravaggio's rather bored-looking Christ, one eyebrow raised, appears to be doing little more than cracking his knuckles. To the far-right Caravaggio, in one of several self-portraits, holds up a lantern in true Luciferian fashion as though suggesting that this pivotal Biblical event may have been meticulously planned by the main participant--an idea that has found wider acceptance in the last 40 years than it had back in Caravaggio's day.

But I get ahead of myself.

In Harr's book two art researchers, Francesca Cappelletti and Laura Testa, gain rare access to the privately held Mattei archives in order to authenticate the provenance of a painting of St. John the Baptist. While there, they discover a mention of "The Taking," and follow the painting's paper trail across two centuries, from the time of its commission until the time it was sold to Nisbet. Along the way they discover a highly flawed inventory of 1793 that switches the painting's attribution to Gerard van Honthorst, a known Caravaggio imitator.

Laura then discovers Nisbet's export license in Rome's Archivio di Stato, which puts the declared value for a six-painting purchase at 525 scudi, the Roman currency of the day.

Later in the book, Francesca makes her way to the U.K., where she finds a 1972 history of the National Gallery of Scotland's collection, written by then assistant keeper of the gallery, Hugh Brigstocke, which listed a painting named "Tribute Money," by another Caravaggio imitator named Serodine, as having been "bought as by Rubens from the Palazzo Mattei by William Hamilton Nisbet in 1802." The Serodine, Brigstocke wrote, was part of a 1921 "bequest of 28 paintings" from Mary Georgina Constance Nisbet Hamilton Ogilvy, the last of William's direct heirs.

If "The Taking" was part of that bequest, the Scottish National Gallery had let what would become, Harr writes, "the single most valuable painting of the group slip through its hands." It is not made clear, however, whether the bequest actually included the misattributed Caravaggio. Most likely it did not.

While there are indeed at least two paintings of the original six Matteis currently in the National Gallery's collection, I have a bit of a problem with Brigstocke's description of the provenance of Serodine's "Tribute Money," specifically his claim that Nisbet had bought the painting "as by Rubens."

In Nisbet of That Ilk, a genealogical tome written in 1941, I discovered a list of the bequeathed paintings transcribed from the gallery's 1929 catalog that attributes "Tribute Money" to Jusepe de Ribera, yet another Caravaggio imitator. While I can appreciate that a painting's misattribution might be discovered and rectified after its acquisition, it makes little sense that Brigstocke's 1972 history of the National Gallery's collection says that the Serodine painting was bought as a Rubens while the gallery's own 1929 catalog indicates it was bought as a Ribera. It is also highly interesting that the research project that initially drew Francesca and Laura to the Mattei archives touched upon a dispute between two respected Caravaggio scholars over the attribution of a pair of almost identical paintings of John the Baptist. One of the paintings, long thought to be by Caravaggio, is later found to have been by Ribera. Jusepe de Ribera, it would seem, was the most accomplished Caravaggio imitator of them all.

I also have a problem with the number of paintings in the bequest. Harr writes that Brigestocke put the number at 28, while the 1929 catalog put the number at 29. There are clearly issues here that should be investigated: the number of paintings bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1921, and the attribution of "Tribute Money" at the time it was bought by Nisbet.

If and when these issues are resolved another "lost" masterpiece is found, I am ready to accept my fair share of the finder's fee, thank you.

But back to the chase.

Three of the book's investigators independently find it likely that Nisbet's Caravaggio was later sold at auction, but none find a record of the buyer. One of the investigators, however, finds an intriguing document in Edinburgh's Scottish Records Office--a receipt for the six paintings, signed by Duke Giuseppe Mattei in 1802, for 2,300 scudi, more than four times the price declared on Nisbet's Italian export license. While the vast discrepancy in valuation would have saved Nisbet a tidy sum in customs duties, the misattributions, I feel, would have enabled him to take at least one national treasure out of Italy into the bargain.
Although Nisbet remains a man of mystery throughout Harr's book, I will now put some meat on his bones.

William Hamilton Nisbet was the eldest son of William Nisbet of Dirleton, and Mary, heiress of the wealthy Hamilton family. He incorporated the name Hamilton upon the death of his mother, whose properties he inherited.

William's only child, another Mary, married Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, in 1799, three years before William purchased the Caravaggio. And while William was striking his bargain with Giuseppe in Rome, Thomas, as British ambassador to Constantinople, was arranging the removal of what have become infamously known as the "Elgin Marbles" from the Athens Parthenon, underwritten in large part by the Nisbet family fortune and fueling a bitter debate between Greece and Britain which has raged ever since. Indeed, the term "Elginism" has become synonymous with the systematic and opportunistic plunder of the antiquities of less-powerful nations by more-powerful nations.

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Moreover, while Elgin and his father-in-law were conducting business in Greece and Italy, Elgin's secretary, William Richard Hamilton, seized custody of the Rosetta Stone from the French following that country's 1801 defeat at the Battle of the Nile. Key to the deciphering of hieroglyphics, that great prize, along with the Elgin Marbles, is among the British Museum's greatest tourist attractions, and is still as much a bone of contention with Egypt as the Marbles are with Greece.

Quite the family business.

While British Admiral Horatio Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile greased the way for Elgin and his secretary to get the political leverage necessary to dismantle the Marbles from the Parthenon and relieve the French and the Egyptians of the Rosetta Stone, Napoleon's 1798 occupation of Italy, on the other hand, had put the economic squeeze on many of that country's wealthier families, forcing them to pay for the upkeep of the occupying army. It is at this point that the material wealth of the Mattei family begins to diminish, and just three years later William Hamilton Nisbet shows up with his moneybags and strikes a bargain for "The Taking of Christ" and five other paintings.

Could it be possible that the aforementioned highly flawed inventory of 1793, which misattributed so much of the Mattei collection, had been compiled in anticipation of Napoleon's occupation and ultimate defeat, with the knowledge that molti scudi would soon be forthcoming from Britain?

It follows that there is another interesting bond between Elgin and his father-in-law that begs our attention and, given an admittedly speculative clandestine connection between all adversaries during the Napoleonic Wars, it should not be taken lightly.

William Hamilton Nisbet's father was the 11th Grand Master of Scottish Freemasonry in 1746, and Lord Elgin's grandfather Charles was the 23rd GM during 1761-63, the first GM to serve what became the customary three-year term. The significance of this relationship should become more apparent as we focus our attention on the Italian contingent of the Caravaggio saga.

I have little to say about Giuseppe Mattei, the man William bought six paintings from in 1802, except that he wrote two receipts--one for William to take home to Scotland, and one for the customs man--and furnished some form of documentation that considerably downplayed the true value of the paintings.

As the man who originally commissioned "The Taking," however, Giuseppe's ancestor Ciriaco deserves a closer look. Like the Freemasons, Ciriaco Mattei seems to have held a considerably more than pedestrian interest in Egyptian symbology. Indeed, his garden was graced by the only privately owned Egyptian obelisk in Rome, first raised by Rameses II in Heliopolis and brought to Italy during the Roman occupation of Egypt to be erected at a temple to Isis, the Egyptian goddess who weaves her way in and out of freemasonic lore. It is for Ciriaco that Caravaggio paints one of several depictions of John the Baptist, patron saint of both the freemasons and the Knights Templar, arguably the progenitors of the Freemasonic brotherhood. Interestingly, his "Beheading of John the Baptist" was commissioned by the Knights of Malta, a Catholic chivalric order similar to the Templars that Caravaggio was initiated into just two years before his death, and is the only painting Caravaggio is known to have signed, intriguingly placing his signature in the Baptist's pool of blood.

Ciriaco was the brother of Cardinal Girolamo Mattei, one of several cardinals to also commission works by Caravaggio. Considering the rather revisionist Christian imagery to be found in "The Taking" and other works, it is surprising that Caravaggio's talents would be much in demand by such princes of the church--and yet they were.

Let's take just one other Caravaggio, "The Penitent Magdalene," as an example.
The repentant Mary Magdalene was a popular subject of the day, but Caravaggio's version should have been recognized as heretical, especially by the man who commissioned it--a Catholic Monsignor named Petrignani.

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The painting shows a young girl seated on a low stool, one tear running down her cheek, with her hands in her lap. Once again, as in "The Taking," it is the hands that give the telltale clue something is amiss here.

Unlike most of his contemporaries who drew their compositions from their own imaginations, Caravaggio used live models while working, He therefore became a master at depicting naturalistic poses, and so it is surprising that in this painting Mary Magdalene's hands do not seem to be naturally placed in her lap, unless Caravaggio had instructed his model to pretend she is cradling a baby. Mary has also set aside the jewelry a baby might grab, and even has on her lap a baby's support cushion.

Who would be the likely father of this invisible baby? Well, if we are to believe assertions put forth in such blockbusters as Holy Blood, Holy Grailand Dan Brown's more recent Da Vinci Code, the most likely candidate would be Jesus, himself--a theory that contradicts two-millennia of Catholic dogma, but which continues to gain ever more purchase in the popular imagination. If true, could it be that Caravaggio's painting was meant to show a 16th-century Mary Magdalene mourning a child who had been written out of history for the previous 1600 years?

Whether such a composition was Caravaggio's vision or the vision of Monsignor Petrignani is a question well worth asking, and there are certainly "alternate" paths of historical inquiry that will suggest that at the upper levels of the Vatican a suppressed history of Jesus and Mary Magdalene had always been known, but had not been considered a good fit with the church's scrupulously-considered and ongoing business plan.

You might well wonder how evidence of such a huge secret, if true, could possibly be kept hidden by so many for so long. The answer to that question may be that it has not been kept hidden; at least from "those with eyes to see," because it's known that the vast majority with eyes that cannot or will not see has always ignored the same evidence.

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Caravaggio was neither the first nor last painter to pictorially suggest that Mary Magdalene and Jesus may have had children. Just one example can be found in the right-hand panel of the "Portinari Triptych," painted by Hugo van der Goes over a century earlier. Mary is the woman in white holding the jar. Saint Margaret of Antioch, patron saint of pregnant women, tellingly stands by her side. On display at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, countless visitors continue to view the painting annually without giving Mary's spectacularly distended abdomen a second of serious thought.

As previously mentioned, Bellori's description of "The Taking of Christ" is woefully deficient when it says that the arms of Jesus are "crossed before him." A 1999 article in the Catholic Herald describes Christ's hands as being "folded in a gesture of submission" and, although a tad closer to the mark than Bellori's description is still a far cry from the interpretation that Caravaggio's composition begs upon viewing, no?

On February 17, 1600, Caravaggio's Vatican patrons watched a Dominican monk named Giordano Bruno burn to death in Rome's Campo dei Fiori. Giordano, an exiled Dominican monk, had the temerity to agree with the Copernican view that asserted the earth rotated on its axis once daily and traveled around the sun once yearly--an argument that subverted, too soon, a timeline of discovery perhaps already long set by the cognoscenti.

It is only nowadays that Bruno's true danger to the "spin" of his day can be recognized for what it was, and what it continues to be--the danger that the unwashed masses might occasionally become inclined to think for themselves.

"Who so itcheth to Philosophy," Bruno said, "must set to work by putting all things to the doubt."

Amen!