Library of the Grand Lodge of Canada
in the Province of Ontario

Located on the second floor of the
Grand Lodge Memorial Building
363 King Street West
Hamilton, Ontario

The Library is open September through May,
Daily, 10 AM - Noon
Monday evenings, 7 PM - 10 PM
Wednesday afternoons, 1 PM - 4 PM
except for statutory holidays.
all attempts will be made to accommodate out of town visitors
at other times, through pre-arranged appointments.

Book Reviews

ROSSLYN

GUARDIAN OF THE HOLY GRAIL
By R.W. Bro. Brian King

“I felt the usual tingling in the fingers. Standing in the aisle I felt a powerful force that made me sway. I was aware of shadowy figure – possibly Druids. I became aware my hands were no longer mine. They felt like they were growing till they were as big as footballs. It was sometime after I left that they began to feel normal.”

The speaker is not talking about Rosslyn Chapel but the Toulouse Cathedral, one of the other six sites the author claims make up the path to the Holy Grail. Six cathedral and Rosslyn the seven chakras – seven stops on the path. All built under the direction of the Knights Templar, and all built on top of previous Druid sites. Lessons of wisdom and spiritualism learnt at each one until the traveler reaches the ultimate and seventh chakar, Rosslyn, crown of the chakras where pure enlightenment, the Holy Grail is finally acquired.

            No one questions what the Holy Grail is. Tim Wallace and his co-author the Hopkins however fall far short of convincing me that they have done anything but twist history to support their claim to have found the true path to the Holy Grail.

            First the author praises the Druids (read Celtic peoples) as having the true spiritualism. They claim that they operate sixty universities in Britain alone and taught this knowledge to the Greeks – Aristotle and Socrates. This knowledge was suppressed by Holy Mother Church and thereby lost for a thousand years until the Middle Ages. The Knight Templar rediscovered the true secrets of the Universe when they were digging in Jerusalem in the 14^th century and hid them in Rosslyn Chapel. Making Rosslyn the rightful centre of true godliness in the world and not Basilica in Rome.

            The title of the book is misleading. It is not `about’ Rosslyn, except to the extent that the author wants to promote it as the seventh and crown chakra.  The book is not Masonic, except that the author speaks of the children of Solomon as the builders of the cathedrals and one of the groups that kept faith as true Gnostics. (Agnostics being non-believers, and Gnostics being true spiritualists always seeking enlightenment. The soul is on earth to improve itself and continues the cycle of rebirth until it joins the state of perfection.

The author sees two streams of spiritualism since Jesus. The true one that extends back in time even before Jesus, on the one hand, and the Holy Mother Church that they attack for false dogma, persecution and suppression of knowledge, on the other hand. The first steam flows from Babylon or India to Egypt then the Druids; to the Celtic peoples; to the Greeks; to the Templars; to the St. Clairs and Rosslyn. He makes the statement that the Knights Templar in common with other Gnostic groups derived their spiritual roots from the esoteric traditions of Egypt and Biblical Israel. The other stream is the Holy Mother Church, which was only given respectability by Emperor Constantine. The Church used the concept of heresy, (everyone who claims freedom of thought on religious matters) to maintain its authority. “The birthpangs of the repressive church, founded in the name of Jesus, were announced to the world by the screams of its victims.” The inquisition perpetrated this divine love and burning continued into the 17^th century. Gnostic enlightenment went underground for centuries. The author spends almost half the book attacking the Church and its dogma, pointing out fallacies of belief and even descending to an attack on the concept of the virginity of the Virgin Mary.

            The attacks are mindless and show the extent the authors are prepared to go in attempting to prove how forward looking and enlightened the Knights Templar were and how they spawned the organisations which became the stream of gnosticism “secretly irrigating the deserts of the times”. Finally they claim that Rosslyn should take its place at the head of the true spiritual church of Jesus in place of the Basilica because Rosslyn is the Omphalos or spiritual umbilicus of the world

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