The Rosslyn Code

Slate ^ | May 17 2011 | Chris Wilson

[Palter]

The real mystery lurking in the chapel where Dan Brown set The Da Vinci Code.

From the outside, the Rosslyn Chapel does not look like a suitable place to hide Jesus' head. It's not much bigger than a country church, standing inconspicuously on a small hill in the miniature Scottish town of Roslin, a few miles south of Edinburgh. Its Gothic pinnacles, flying buttresses, and pointed arches have been battered by 500 years of capricious weather, and for years it has been encased in an exoskeleton of scaffolding as restoration efforts plod along. Until recently, it was covered by a giant black canopy.

But inside the chapel, beneath the carvings that blanket the walls and ceiling, is a spartan stone crypt that figures into one of history's most famous mythologies. According to legend, the treasure of the fabled Knights Templar is stowed in a still-deeper vault whose entrance is sealed off by a stone wall. Depending on whom you ask, that treasure is the Holy Grail, sacred scrolls from the time of Christ, a fragment of the cross on which he died, or even his embalmed head, secreted out of the Holy Land as the Templars fled prosecution 700 years ago.

If any of this sounds familiar, it's because Dan Brown borrowed this legend for The Da Vinci Code. In the book's climactic scene, the heroes race from London to Roslin, tailed by a hodgepodge group of French police and Catholic thugs. (At this point, they're on the brink of exposing a 2,000-year conspiracy to erase evidence that Christ had children.) They discover that the Holy Grail itself did once reside at Rosslyn, left there by the Templars so many centuries back, but has since vanished again.

[Palter]

PART II:
THE STONE ANGELS

• 

  PART III:
  A HIDDEN MELODY
• 

  PART IV:
  THE SCOTTISH DA VINCI

• 

  PART V:
  IS IT REAL OR FAKE?

[Palter]

Rosslyn etc.

[ZULU]

Balderdash

[PalmettoMason]

Bfl

[SpringtoLiberty]

Give it up Slate.

Jesus of Nazareth died on a cross then rose form the dead three days later. This is the most researched and verified occurence in history.

If you deny the fact that he rose from the dead you have no regard whatsoever for the veracity of eyewitness testimony.

[Rockingham]

For me, the most interesting aspect of Rosslyn Chapel is the stone carvings of ears of corn — dated before Columbus made it to America.

[Palter]

Maize
Surrounding a window are carvings of maize or Indian Corn

The presence of this plant carving in the Chapel raises many questions: not only is it an exotic plant but it originates from North America, a country traditionally thought to have been discovered by Columbus in 1492, almost 50 years after Rosslyn Chapel was built. Lucifer

[SunkenCiv]

· GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach · · join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic · subscribe ·
	Antiquity Journal  & archive  Archaeologica  Archaeology  Archaeology Channel  BAR  Bronze Age Forum  Discover  Dogpile  Eurekalert  Google  LiveScience  Mirabilis.ca  Nat Geographic  PhysOrg  Science Daily  Science News  Texas AM  Yahoo  Excerpt, or Link only?	Thanks Palter. There's a book out there which claims that the Templars also stashed that huge imaginary treasure in a pit on Oak Island, I think it was supposedly some decades before Columbus. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
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[SatinDoll]

The Knights Templar probably made it to North America and back during the 1300s.

The History Channel had a very interesting show concerning their journey.

[worst-case scenario]

P T Barnum was right.

[worst-case scenario]

Ummm .. those are ears of barley. All it shows is that the sculptors loved their John Barleycorn. It probably brought them closer to God.

[Rockingham]

That seems likely, with the discovery of North America kept secret as a potential place of refuge for Templars and a source of wealth in the form of furs and Newfoundland’s rich cod fishery.