TWENTY
Apocryphal or apocalyptic?
During the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe a group of players under the guise of Nonsense Room Productions annually enact the tale of The Apprentice written by Simon Beattie, a former tour guide at Rosslyn Chapel, and the son of Stuart Beattie, the chapel’s custodian. The setting within the chapel is enchanting. The details are apocryphal; the moral, nevertheless, enduring. It comes as no surprise to find that the seats are sold out.
The plot to the story is thus: Rosslyn’s master mason, having received instructions from his patron as to the design of an exquisite pillar, was hesitant to carry out the work until he had been to Rome for inspiration. While he was away, an apprentice, having seen the finished pillar in a dream, set about the work. When the master mason returned he was so jealous of his apprentice’s achievement that he murdered the young man in a fit of rage.
For aficionados of the initiation rituals of Freemasonry, it probably sounds familiar. Hiram Abiff was the principal architect of the Temple of Solomon. There were large numbers of master masons employed in the building of the temple, but only King Solomon, the King of Tyre, and Hiram Abiff, the son of ‘a widow of the tribe of Naphtali’, shared the secrets of the High and Sublime Degree. As a result, when certain craftsmen sought to further their knowledge, they approached Hiram and, when he refused to help them, murdered him in the manner described in Masonic ritual.
Thus, with the relentless passage of time, do legends become intermingled, adapted and elaborated upon. Furthermore, in 1893, the Revd Thompson tells us that similar legends existed at Melrose Abbey, and the cathedrals of Lincoln and Rouen, implying that these masons must have been a fiercely competitive bunch, especially when it came to storytelling.1
Not only is the tale of the Rosslyn apprentice not unique to Rosslyn, it is further undermined by the column in question having previously been referred to as the Prince’s Pillar. Those who are determined to perpetuate the legend point to the image known as the ‘Apprentice Carving’ situated about halfway up the west wall of the choir, on the south side. This shows a face with a deep scar on the right temple. Leering on the opposite corner is the head of his murderer, the master. These carvings, it is claimed, were designed to commemorate the incident, but again this is pure conjecture. Moreover, Father Hay makes no mention of it.
Notwithstanding all this, the Apprentice or Prince’s Pillar, on the south-east of the choir, in close proximity to the steps leading to the crypt, remains one of the most aesthetically crafted architectural features of all time, surpassing all of the others within the chapel. In his booklet The Templar Legacy and The Masonic Inheritance Within Rosslyn Chapel, Tim Wallace-Murphy observes that it represents ‘the Yggdrasil tree of Norse mythology, the World Ash which binds together Heaven, Earth and Hell. The crown of the “tree” comprises the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. The spiralling branches symbolise plants and the roots of the trunk dig deeply into the elements of the Earth. At the bottom of the pillar the dragons of Neilfelheim can be seen gnawing at the roots of the tree to rob it of its fruitfulness.’
Certainly, the carvings appear to depict only leaves, pointing to it being symbolic of the Tree of Life, which is probably exactly what was intended, given that much of the inspiration for the carvings throughout originates from the Old or New Testaments, in this case either the Book of Genesis or the Book of Revelation. Of course, it cannot be ignored that the Tree of Life also features in several pagan religions and in Kabbalah, the tradition of Jewish mysticism, but there are limits to the fifteenth-century knowledge of even Prince William St Clair and his stone carvers. Notwithstanding, a more recent and even more esoteric claim is that the coiled spirals that encircle the pillar are an early representation of the double helix of DNA. No doubt we will hear considerably more on this thesis in years to come.
Behind the altar, in front of the Lady Chapel, and to the left of the Apprentice Pillar, are two other remarkable load-bearing columns. The first, under the east window, is known as the Mason’s Pillar; the one in the centre, the Journeyman’s Pillar. Although the former is a work of intricate tracery, the second is a testament to simplicity and equally pleasing to the eye. But there is an anomaly here. In none of the surviving pictorial representations of the Mason’s Pillar painted prior to David Bryce’s restoration work of the early 1860s (for examples see The Apprentice Pillar, Rosslyn Chapel by George Shepherd after Joseph Gandy, 1809, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, or Samuel Dickinfield Swarbreck’s Lady Chapel, Rosslyn Chapel, 1837) does the heavily tooled decoration on its central panels appear. The conclusion is that it is, in all likelihood, a Victorian embellishment, and no doubt a serious contributor to the controversy that surrounded the repair work (see Chapter 17). Certainly the tracery was in place when the chapel was photographed by George Washington Wilson in 1880.2
Questions of restoration aside, what elevates these pillars and enhances their beauty still further – and indeed that of all of the columns encapsulating the choir – are the carvings on the ceiling above them. The sheer quantity of illustration is blinding, the beauty of the whole distracting from the biblical storylines within the detail: the Fall of Man and Expulsion from Eden, the Dance of Death, the Birth of Christ, the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Victory of Truth, the Contrast between Virtue and Vice, the Annunciation, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Jesus the Carpenter, the Prodigal feeding the Swine, the Crucifixion and Descent from the Cross, the Resurrection and Rolling Away of the Stone from the Holy Sepulchre, the Conquest over Death, and Our Lord Seated in Glory. But this is no preachy, intolerant place. Interspersed throughout is the humour. Wit and wisdom go hand in hand.
What strikes me as the most fascinating aspect of all is the sheer dazzling intensity of visible spiritual and academic thought that has gone into it. Bear in mind that these images were created more or less around the same time as William Caxton first introduced the printed word into England. Up until then, only handwritten manuscripts had existed in the West. Many were beautifully ‘illuminated’ with gilt and coloured embellishment, but few manuscripts of any description were in wide circulation. The Holy Roman Church was considered, and considered itself, to be the font of all knowledge, but the paradox of Rosslyn Chapel, erected to glorify the teachings of that very Church, is that almost every spiritual influence which existed in the centuries before it was conceived are illustrated on its walls and ceilings: Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew and pagan Norse.
And remember that all of this was created in mediaeval Scotland. Although St Andrews University had been in existence for over thirty years when the chapel was built, the universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen were only in the early stages of being set up. The Renaissance thinking of mainland Europe had only just begun to infiltrate the British Isles, a cultural backwater compared to Italy, where, in Milan, a young painter called Leonardo da Vinci was about to embark upon The Last Supper. His future rival, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, was an adolescent living in Caprese in Tuscany, where his father was mayor. Within this context, the stone decoration of Rosslyn Chapel can be seen as a breathtaking tribute to the scholarly genius of Prince William St Clair and the team of carvers whom he employed. Taken in its entirety, it ranks among the most outstanding and miraculous achievements of the second millennium.