-
EVERYBODY SING ALONG DEPARTMENT -
Melody Deciphered in
Rosslyn Chapel
ROSLIN, Scotland - Like a plot from “The Da Vinci Code,” a team of code
breakers claims to have found music hidden for 500 years in intricate
carvings at the church where author Dan Brown set the climax of the
best-selling book.
Father and son team Thomas and Stuart Mitchell say they deciphered a
musical code hewn into stone cubes on the ribs supporting the ceiling
of Rosslyn Chapel in the village of Roslin, near Edinburgh.
“Breaking the code was a true eureka moment. It’s like we have been
given a compact disc from the past,” said Stuart Mitchell, 41, a music
teacher from Edinburgh. “But unlike the fiction of ’The Da Vinci Code,’
this is a tangible link to the past.”
The music has been recorded, and will get its official premiere in the
chapel May 18.
Musical experts reserved judgment, but did not dismiss the Mitchells’
theory.
“We have 213 cubes (at Rosslyn), and the possibility that they have
something to say is by no means implausible,” said Warwick Edwards, an
expert on early Scottish music at Glasgow University. More research is
needed, he said.
Gordon Munro, an expert on Scottish church music from the 1500s, 1600s
and 1700s at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow,
said, “I have heard the music and it is not impossible, but it can only
be a reconstruction that is open to interpretation.”
“There is a series of shapes they are using, but I could not say if
they would read the notes on the chapel ceiling from left to right or
up and down,” Munro added.
The 15th-century chapel, 10 miles (16 kilometers) from Edinburgh, was
built by Sir Gilbert Haye and Sir William Sinclair and is steeped in
the traditions of the Knights Templar and Freemasonry.
The elaborate decoration and the mysterious symbolism have inspired
many legends, among them that the building is a replica of Solomon’s
Temple and that it is the resting place of the Holy Grail, the Ark of
the Covenant or even the mummified head of Jesus Christ.
Brown’s novel, based on the theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalene
and founded a dynastic line which survives today, climaxes at Rosslyn
Chapel. “Symbology heaven,” Brown called it.
The Mitchells’ research centered on the ribs of a ceiling in the Lady
Chapel. Rows of carved angels play instruments above the columns of
cubes.
The elder Mitchell, 75, who was a code breaker for the Royal Air Force
during the Korean War, said he spent 25 years working at the puzzle.
“Many of the angels had musical instruments and some were arranged as a
choir, but there was one angel we couldn’t work out,” he said. “Then we
realized she was carrying a musical stave, the lined blueprint for
musical composition, and therefore we were looking at a coded piece of
music.”
The five-line stave that Mitchell believes the angel is holding came
into general use in the 16th century in the West, music historians say.
If the Mitchells are right about the meaning of the shapes, the people
who built Rosslyn Chapel between 1446 and 1486 knew something about the
science of sound that wasn’t generally known in the West until the
1700s.
The Mitchells believe the patterns on the cubes are Chladni patterns —
created by vibrations of musical pitches.
The patterns are named for Ernest Chladni (1756-1827), a German
musician who is also remembered as the inventor of the glass harmonica.
Chladni spread fine sand on metal or glass plates, then used a violin
bow to make the plate vibrate. Sand gathered in parts of the plate
which were not vibrating, creating patterns unique to each pitch.
Although the patterns are associated with Chladni, the effect had been
noted a few decades earlier, by the English scientist Robert Hooke in
1665.
The Mitchells assert the effect was also known by Gilbert Haye, one of
the chapel’s builders, who died in 1513.
“The Cymatics/Chladni patterns were inspired and found in the art of
the ancient Chinese gong making which Sir Gilbert Haye would have
discovered during his time in the Far East,” said Stuart Mitchell.
Source: MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18417877/
-
MINDS THROUGH TIME AND SPACE DEPARTMENT -
The Pantograph Effect
Papers are soon to be released on the findings of Physicist Benson
Herbert's exhaustive studies into the paranormal, under the 40 year
rule and virtually forgotten today, because of his open mindedness to
study results.
For remember, most psychic researchers have reach the conclusions that
their financiers expect.
In 1966 Herbert was top dog, and he moved his laboratory called 'The
Paralab' to Wiltshire, in order to avoid London's traffic vibration,
electrical system and noise pollution. His delicate instrumentation
brought in similar results to those of Nicola Tesla.
The Soviets who during the Cold War greatly feared scientist Peter
Wright of 'Spycatcher' fame, have documentation taken from his friend
and spy Lord Rothschild. This claims that during radio eavesdropping
from Cyprus, the biggest listening post in the world, primitive
evidence of E.V.P or Electronic Voice Phenomena, or voices from the
dead. were obtained accidentally by Peter Wright.
Benson Herbert believed that all psychic phenomena was electrical in
origin and transmission and visited many haunted sites with his
equipment. He also captured strange, intriguing sounds from the past.
In 1970 Herbert was invited by Soviet scientists, as top British
representative, to the Prague Symposium on Psychotronics. This is the
technical term for military use of psychic ability, first pioneered by
Churchill in W.W.II. Although Herbert is not well known in the Britain
of today, his work is much valued and still studied in the Soviet bloc.
R.G. Medhurst, of the Society of Psychical Research, invited Herbert to
a series of séances and for anyone to attend these was anathema
to orthodoxy at the time. The fact that he investigated U.F.O sightings
and allowed himself to be regressed to previous lives upset many of his
colleagues, who felt there should be very clear lines of division
between scientist and psychic.
In 1972 Herbert, while in Leningrad, met Nina Kulagina, the Soviet PK
specialist who shocked him by moving a heavy chair toward him across
the room by pointing her finger at it. Later she held his arm and as
the heat burnt him and he collapsed in pain, he had the scar for over a
week.
He also investigated Suzanne Padfield, the psychic who held a
photograph of a murdered child in Moscow, and from 1700 miles away
identified the killer. She also deflected and bent beams of light in
his laboratory.
Experiments on blind people who could read through their fingertips
(derma-optics) bore amazing results.
Herbert, a top class intellectual and expert Paraphysicist had some of
his research taken by British authorities and stamped Top Secretand as
he saw himself as a man of the people, this did not sit well with him.
He claimed that H. G. Wells had stumbled onto something when he spoke
of extra-spatial dimensions. Herbert described this as 'The pantograph
effect'; that the drawing in one world of an event, would cause similar
phenomena in another. This in a synchronistic way was described by
Schopenhauer as: "Coincidence is the simultaneous occurrence of
causality, unconnected to events", of which Hippocrates said: "The
world was held together by hidden affinities or threads".
Similarly, Adolph Hitler viewed the shameful way Germany was treated
after W.W.I by the international community, made him believe in the
"world seriality theory", that all worlds exist linked in cyclic accord.
Carl Jung brought it all together as the Collective Unconscious.
Herbert's death in 1991 revealed that, like many other genuine
researchers, he believed in psychic abilities but said there were many
fakes. He had no time for publicity seeking quacks, such as we see with
James Randi types and make believe psychologists, but that much, much
more research was necessary.
In the workings of the great pantograph, over time the inner meanings
of the psychic worlds would be revealed.
Source: Farshores/Terry Stokes
http://www.farshores.org/p07ts1.htm
-
WHAT LIES BENEATH DEPARTMENT -
Text Reveals More Ancient Secrets
Experts are "lost for words" to have found that a medieval prayer book
has yielded yet another key ancient text buried within its parchment.
Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had
already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes
Palimpsest.
But now advanced imaging technology has revealed a third text - a
commentary on the philosopher Aristotle.
Project director William Noel called it a "sensational find".
The prayer book was written in the 13th Century by a scribe called John
Myronas. But instead of using fresh parchment for his work, he employed
pages from five existing books.
Dr Noel, curator of manuscripts at the US-based Walters Art Museum and
a co-author of a forthcoming book on the Archimedes Palimpsest, said:
"It's a rather brutal process, but it means you can reuse parchment if
you are short of it.
"You take books off shelves, you scrub off the text, you cut them up
and you make a new book."
In 1906 it came to light that one of the books recycled to form the
medieval manuscript contained a unique work by Archimedes.
And in 2002, modern imaging technology not only provided a clearer view
of this famous mathematician's words, but it also revealed another text
- the only known manuscript of Hyperides, an Athenian politician from
the 4th Century BC.
"At this point you start thinking striking one palimpsest is gold, and
striking two is utterly astonishing. But then something even more
extraordinary happened," Dr Noel told the BBC News website.
One of the recycled books was proving extremely difficult to read,
explained Roger Easton, a professor of imaging science at Rochester
Institute of Technology, US.
"We were using a technique called multispectral imaging," he said.
This digital imaging technique uses photographs taken at different
wavelengths to enhance particular characteristics of the imaged area.
Subtle adjustments of this method, explained Professor Easton, suddenly
enabled these hidden words to be revealed.
"Even though I couldn't read Ancient Greek, just the fact that I could
see the words gave me shivers," he said.
Foundations of logic
An international team of experts began to scrutinize the ancient words,
explained Reviel Netz, professor of ancient science at Stanford
University, US, and another co-author of the palimpsest book.
A series of clues, such as spotting a key name in the margin, led the
team to its conclusion.
"The philosophical passage in the Archimedes Palimpsest is now
definitely identified as a relatively early commentary to Aristotle's
Categories," said Professor Netz.
He said that Aristotle's Categories had served as the foundation for
the study of logic throughout western history.
Further study has revealed the most likely author of this unique
commentary is Alexander of Aphrodisias, Professor Robert Sharples from
University College London, UK, told BBC News.
If this is the case, he said, "it gives us part of a commentary
previously supposed lost by the most important of those ancient
commentators on Aristotle".
A provisional translation of the commentary is currently being
undertaken.
It reveals a debate on some aspects of Aristotle's theory of
classification, such as: if the term "footed" is used for animals, can
it be used to classify anything else, such as a bed?
The passage reads:
For as "foot" is ambiguous when applied to an animal and to a bed, so
are "with feet" and "without feet". So by "in species" here [Aristotle]
is saying "in formula".
For if it ever happens that the same name indicates the differentiae of
genera that are different and not subordinate one to the other, they
are at any rate not the same in formula.
Dr Noel said: "There is no more important philosopher in the world than
Aristotle. To have early views in the 2nd and 3rd Century AD of
Aristotle's Categories is just fantastic.
"We have one book that contains three texts from the ancient world that
are absolutely central to our understanding of mathematics, politics
and now philosophy," he said.
He added: "I am at a loss for words at what this book has turned out to
be. To make these discoveries in the 21st Century is frankly nutty - it
is just so exciting."
Source: BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6591221.stm
