THE ‘BLEEDING ANGEL’

IN THE CRYPT OF ROSSLYN CHAPEL

Ward L. Ginn, Jr.

I owe this story in no small measure to the Sauniere Society because it would not have happened had I not responded last January to the Templar Lodge Hotel’s web site’s promotion of the Society’s February 1999 Symposium in Gullane near Edinburgh. So I flew the 4,000 plus miles from Washington D.C. to Edinburgh to attend the Symposium. The story relates to a discovery I made in my first visit to Rosslyn Chapel on the Friday before the Symposium with several Society members and friends, including John, Joy and Richard Millar, Penny White, Henry and Jay Lincoln, Tom Graham and our guide for the affair, Mr. Struart Beattie.

Friday, February 26 was a sunny, relatively balmy day when you consider the time of the year and the latitude. The high level walkways connected to the protective canopy over the Chapel’s roof allowed us to view at close hand details of the exterior of the Chapel that we would otherwise not have the opportunity to see. It was the inside of the Chapel, however, that proved to be a feast for the eyes, fulfilling all of my expectations, and then some. Intrigued as I was with the chapel’s many carvings and vast cornucopia of plant life from which over one hundred Green Men peered down, it was the lower crypt which held a strange fascination for me. Therefore, I broke off from the others and headed for the well-worn stone stairway to the crypt. On descending the steps, I could picture in my mind the pilgrims from earlier times who had passed this way seeking spiritual enlightenment. Compared to the busier, more illuminated Chapel above, the crypt was another world. Here everything was dank and dark. I felt as if I was an intruder, that eyes were watching me. A stone slab against the wall was menacing, because carved upon its surface was a skeleton brandishing a scythe with the inscription

" King of Terrors." Whereas, in the Chapel proper there had been a proliferation of carvings, the crypt held only a meager few and those were sited at the ends of the decorative arches that spanned the vaulted ceiling of the crypt.

One of the carvings was an old man (supposedly St. Peter) holding a single key (rather than the usual bunch of keys to open the heavenly gates), but odd although the single key may be, it is St Peter’s penetrating stare that draws one’s attention. He is looking at the opposite wall in the vicinity of two angel carvings, one holding a shield on which the engrailed cross of the Sinclair family is prominently displayed. Unlike the carvings in the Chapel proper, the carvings in the crypt are curiously painted in brilliant colors.

As a first time visitor to the Chapel, I felt uneasy taking photographs, thinking that I was disturbing a state of spiritual peace that seemed to pervade every nook and cranny of this miracle in stone. With a feeling approaching guilt, I photographed "St Peter" and the angel and left the crypt to join my companions in the Chapel proper. Other than the uniqueness of these painted carvings, I noticed nothing strikingly unusual about them in the near darkness that surrounded me.

Several months later, I had the photograph of the angel enlarged with the intention of having it framed as an appropriate gift for a friend who admires Rosslyn Chapel (see "February Photo"). Much to my amazement, I noticed in the enlarged photograph what are presumably water stains of a rust color that resemble a bleeding wound on the right side of the forehead of the angel at the hairline. From the wound, "blood" appears to flow down the right side of the face and then divides into two streams. One stream, the shortest, flows under the jaw and down the neck where it stops at the angel’s bodice. The other longer stream flows from the hair onto the shoulder where it separates and flows downward in two streams disappearing beneath the Sinclair shield the angel is holding. A photograph of the angel taken during a subsequent visit in October provides a better perspective of the blood-like stains (see "October Photo").

While appearing to be blood, it is doubtful that these stains are indeed blood. What are they then? In the absence of spectral or other forms of scientific analysis, I would surmise that the stains are caused by water leaking into the crypt. Indeed, Phase 2 of the Chapel Conservation Programme calls for a new roof for the crypt. The planned roof replacement, therefore, suggests that the current roof is leaking and thus possibly caused the blood-like stains. The source of the water, if that is what it is, is a mystery, however. There are no visible signs of water leakage on the surface of the curved stonework above the angel carving. The raised surfaces of the corbel above the carving show a drop line of similar rust colored stain which would indicate that the source of the stains would be the juncture of the top surface of the corbel with the crypt wall. As the blood-like stains on the angel appear to be a continuum of the similarly colored stain line on the unpainted corbel, it is doubtful that these stains are part of the painting scheme of the angel.

Surprisingly, the blood-like stains on this angel carving had gone undetected until July of this year when I brought the discovery to the attention of the inner circle of people most knowledgeable of the Chapel’s history and preservation efforts. The previous curator of the Chapel, Judy Fisken, had never noticed the stains during her several years as the chapel’s chief caretaker. The stains were also unnoticed by Jim Munro, an expert in Masonic history who had conducted a multitude of tours of the Chapel in recent years. A possible explanation as to why the stains went unnoticed by those closest to the chapel is that up until recently, the crypt was not well lit, and it would appear, therefore, that the stains went undetected because of the poor lighting conditions.
A strange coincidence is that the wound on the angel’s forehead is in the same position as the alleged wound on the temple of a carved head in the upper chapel reputed to be the murdered apprentice who legend claims carved the architectural centerpiece of Rosslyn Chapel, the Apprentice Pillar. The carving of the "apprentice" at the west end of the chapel is flanked by carvings also reputed to be the heads of his grieving mother and the master mason who tradition claims murdered the apprentice in a fit of jealous rage because of the latter’s superior skills as a mason. Also seemingly a coincidence is that Hiram Abif, architect of King Solomon’s Temple and centerpiece of Masonic Third Degree ritual, was wounded on his right temple by one of his murderers. In a similar fashion, St. Magnus in Orkney was killed by a blow to his right forehead. However, there are practitioners of speculative Masonry who might argue that these "parallels" are not "strange coincidences."

There are nine other carvings in the crypt and virtually dozens more in the chapel proper. Unlike the stained angel carving, most all of the multitude of carvings in the Chapel have no stains that detract from their intended appearance. Where carvings are water stained, the stains appear to be random and leave nothing for inference or for the imagination. The bleeding angel is thus curiously unique when you consider the similarity of its "bleeding wound" with those of Masonic martyrs in a place that traditionally has been connected with the Knights Templar and Freemasons. It would be interesting to subject this phenomenon to statistical analysis to determine the probability of the stains occurring by chance alone.

Being that we are close to a new millennium, there are those who believe that the "sudden" appearance of the blood-like stains on the angel is some kind of revelation. To some, it is a "Millennium Message" of some sort. To others, there is a spiritual explanation. While I have stuck to the facts at hand in this article, an evaluation of the stained angel has been made by Reverend Willaim Stuart Buehler using spiritual dynamics. His analysis can be found on the Clan Sinclair web site at www.mids.sinclair/cryptangel/html/#SUMMARY.

Setting aside all theories on the stained angel, the truth of the matter is that the stains do, in fact, exist, and the mystery closest at hand is how the stains went this long without being noticed. The crypt at Rosslyn Chapel is an interesting place, and mystery abounds. The crypt’s stained angel is but another of its many mysteries and secrets.