My instincts were deeply ambivalent when I embarked upon writing this book. Now I am not at all sure why. Let me explain.
Over the past forty years I have attended three weddings, three christenings and a funeral in the small, candle-lit Collegiate Church of St Matthew, otherwise known as Rosslyn Chapel. On such occasions I was aware of the beauty of my surroundings. I was moved by the chapel’s intimacy. Prior to the funeral service, I was given the task of lighting the candles, so many of them, in fact, that it took me a full twenty minutes to do so. As the soft light glowed and flickered over the intricate traceries on wall and ceiling, it was hard to believe that this was widely considered to be the epicentre of some great, unearthly conundrum.
Yet, 600 years after its creation Rosslyn remains an enigma, a centuries-old puzzle buried under a bandwagon-load of inventive nonsense. So multifaceted, and brilliantly conceived, is this nonsense, that the more the strands are analysed, the more difficult it becomes to discredit them. Such is the human need for mystery, that the documentation relating to Rosslyn, and its brethren holy sites in France and the Holy Land, has, in recent years, swollen to gargantuan proportions. The result is a breathtaking web of intrigue that spans three millennia to embroil the Catholic Church, Crusader knights, Freemasonry, painters, poets and musicians, politicians and kings. It even dares to question the veracity of the Holy Bible as we know it.
Increasingly under scrutiny is the wealthy Catholic interest group Opus Dei. Lurking in the wings are the sinister Prieuré de Sion and an arcane Merovingian Royal dynasty, both of doubtful provenance but given fictional credibility in Dan Brown’s best-selling book The Da Vinci Code and the Hollywood film of the same name starring the American actor Tom Hanks and the French actress Audrey Tautou.
The invention that has taken place to support this ultimate of New Age conspiracy theories, which strikes at the very roots of Christianity, has spawned a veritable skein of wild geese to chase. Riddled with inconsistencies and articulating several manically unfounded allegations, The Da Vinci Code, inspired from an earlier, non-fiction source, The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, has fired the imagination of millions.
And Rosslyn Chapel itself is not least among the beneficiaries, or victims, depending upon your viewpoint. Over 2005 it attracted in the region of 120,000 visitors, a figure which is expected to rise even higher in the years to come. Already there are 32,000 associated websites, and the chapel’s official website (www.rosslynchapel.org.uk) currently gets an average of 30,000 hits per week.
Under such circumstances, I do not think it unreasonable to question how and why such a diminutive place of worship, so obscurely situated in the north of the British Isles, should have come to occupy such a pivotal role in a Europe-wide web of intrigue. In the following chapters, I shall attempt to make sense of it all, to burrow through the mounds of unfounded speculation and self-indulgent fantasy. The facts, as I have discovered, speak for themselves, and they are no less amazing or compelling than the fiction.
Roddy Martine, Edinburgh, May 2006