Rosslyn Chapel, the enigmatic Scottish church, built at the behest of Sir William St Clair in the late 15^th Century, has recently gained notoriety from its inclusion in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

Many have commented on the possible symbolism inherent in the carvings and geometry of the building, with some firmly of the belief that it was deliberately designed as an encoded lesson for mankind. Yet others, most notably Knight and Lomas, in their book "The Hiram Key", argue that it is nothing less than an accurate reconstruction of part of King Herod's temple.

Here is something new for the debate, which you will not have seen before.

On this page you will find the scale groundplan of Rosslyn Chapel, with some simple construction grids that will demonstrate that the entire floor plan was designed to a simple geometric idea.

In the next diagram you will see that if  you take the mid-point of the chapel walls as a datum, then the main section of the Chapel is a simple 2 by 1 rectangle.

From here however the construction plan becomes more esoteric.

At this point if you are unfamiliar with the construction method of Phi, please take a moment to refresh your memory by clicking HERE.

If you take the mid-point of the second square as the datum and construct a Phi rectangle using this point as origin, you obtain the following geometry.

You will easily see that the length of the Chapel ( A C) is proportional to the Chapel width in the following ratio

1 + Phi + (Phi - 1)

Or

1 + 1.618033989 + 0.618033989

Which equals

In the above diagram you can easily see how the entire groundplan forms a cohesive and geometrically structured plan by reference to the small Chapel adjunct whose length is denoted by ( B C)

(B C) is another square of the same size as the two squares which form the plan for the main section of the Chapel. You can see that the elaborate extension to the main Chapel is designed to bridge the gap between the 2 by 1 rectangle of the main Chapel and the final square of the smaller Chapel.

It is of course clear that the mathematics of the 15th Century had advanced sufficiently to allow such geometric expression. Indeed the concept of Phi was well known by this time, and yet the question of whether this design was original lies at the heart of the controversy over the origin of the Chapel's design.

If, as many suppose, this Chapel was a faithful copy of King Herod's temple, then it seems clear that the architect of Herod's temple had to have designed it utilising root five and Phi. This will prove a bitter pill for established archaeology to digest, and yet you have the evidence of the plans above to make up your own mind.

What I will say, is that in my second book "The Geometry of the Earth Goddess" I compare the groundplans of middle Egyptian temples, and the width to length ratios of most of them conform to square root three, or square root five geometry.

The groundplan of Rosslyn Chapel therefore owes its birthright to the middle east, and it certainly seems possible that King Herod could have modelled his temple on Egyptian examples that his architects would have been familiar with.

Are Knight and Lomas therefore correct in their assertion that Rosslyn Chapel is a reconstruction of King Herod's temple?