The Mystery of the Octave – The Ultimate Secret of Lincoln Cathedral

by DAN GREEN

Connoisseurs and collectors alike of coincidences would note that on the final scheduled day of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ movie being filmed within Lincoln Cathedral in the summer of 2005, the Circular Chess Championship – with a board shaped like King Arthur’s Round table – was also being held in the Cathedral, the first time it had featured in such an environment. For me, this became a further clue to the Magdalene mysteries cloaked in and around this great Gothic church, and that stayed on hold until now.

Pic 1. The Great East Window – A Chess Board?

I had stated back then that I suspected that the Great East Window with its 64 roundels, was an covert chess board yet to be fathomed, and had already noted that the famous Rennes-le-Chateau Parchment Two was decoded by use of the Knights Tour, a mathematical problem involving a knight on a chessboard, dating back to the 9thC. What further agitated my interest is that the Knights Tour may avail itself to solution by way of the implementation of an artificial neural network composed of artificial neurons thus mimicking neural processing in the brain. Again, this appealed to me as I was looking for further evidence to reinforce the stance that Lincoln Cathedral is a deeply psychological battleground of Light and Dark, complementing that the squares of the chessboard are even called ‘light’ and ‘dark’.

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The hypothesis was beginning to take shape….the Great East Window as a board of chess, that tactical game of strategy and war in which the object is to take the opposing King, in a Cathedral whose hidden aspect is an actual battleground. My ‘Lincoln Cathedral Code’ research has shown me already that a great secret had been maintained here concerning a location a short distance across from the South East corner of the edifice, and had it been preserved in moves of strategy resembling a game of chess being played? For related to the Cathedral we have all six chess pieces – the King (Edward) and Queen (Eleanor) both stone statues at that very South East Corner, the Knight that is concealed as a carving hidden under the Sub-Dean’s seat in the Choir Stalls, – in 2005 the Dean of the Cathedral was even called Alec Knight! – the Bishop at the 12thc Bishops Palace adjacent the Cathedral, and the Castle of Lincoln Castle alongside the Cathedral, the piece now known as the rook, of which I will soon mention. Only the pawn remains unaccounted for, unless it is Dan Green, drawn into this game and used by the Collective Unconscious?

Pic 2. The chequered floor of the Rennes-le-Chateau church

The initial premise of a battle between Light and Dark suggested itself at the 19thC small church at Rennes-le-Chateau with its chequered floor of black and white squares, a sure sign of Freemasonry as the floor or groundwork of every Lodge denotes this dual nature, some say symbolising the Good and Evil principles of the Egyptian and Persian creed. Staring across at each other in this strange ornately decorated church are the figures of Jesus and the demon guardian Asmodeus. The dual Light and Dark aspect of the Rennes mystery is also clearly demonstrated in the name of one of its key players, who without doubt was privy to the mystery, Marie de Negre de Blanchefort, whose name means ‘Black Marie of the White Fort’.

Pic 3. The 64 Hexagrams of the I-Ching

Over the years it hadn’t missed my attention that there is a close relationship between chess and the classical Chinese text the I-Ching, possibly the oldest divinatory system known, often called the Book of Changes, with its 64 Hexagrams. The 64 squares of chess mirror the number of Hexagrams (64 also being the number of DND Codons), the 8 major trigrams replicate the 8 ranks, 8 files, six lines in a hexagram duplicate the 6 types of chess pieces and both have two opposing modes, the Ying-Yang and the two opposing black and white colours. Transformation in the I-Ching entails 8 major shifts paralleling the musical octave, something we will be returning to.

Pic 4. The Dog on the Platter, Great East Window

Harking back to the strange symbology that first attracted my attention at the Great East Window, a dog on Jesus’ plate at the Last Supper – which, using a standard number grid system we find at 5th roundel down and 4th across – I thought It would be interesting to introduce the 64 Hexagrams of I-Ching to the 64 roundels of the chess board doing so, intuitively, in twisting, serpentine fashion, starting with top left square as number one and continuing second square down top left as number 9 and so on, in order not to break sequential contact and also to symbolise the snake as guardian of temple treasure By doing so, where the dog on the platter sits as a roundel, it arrived me at the very apt Hexagram number 36 for Hexagram 36 is ‘Darkening of the Light’, loosely translating as ‘By concealing your light when danger is around is an effective way of avoiding detection’.

Pic 5. The Lincoln Cathedral Code Marker Tomb, concealing the ‘treasure’

Given that my ‘Lincoln Cathedral Code’ that initiated with the discovery of the dog on the platter leads to a location at a burial ground opposite the SE corner of the Cathedral – whereby a secretive ‘treasure’ guarded by the Knights Templar and relating to Mary Magdalene may await at a depth under an established tomb – this hexagram serves superbly in intimating the wisdom and necessity for concealment. Even when employing a basic 1-8 line from left to right, continuing line two 9-16 and so on, one still arrives at the dog on the platter roundel being hexagram 36!

It would have satisfactory to have left it at that but turning my attention to the ‘Cullinane sequence of the 64 Hexagrams’, an arrangement discovered in 1989 during an investigation of the six-dimensional affine space over the two element field, whereupon a geometry of the I-Ching is revealed, we then find the dog on the platter sittingly neatly on square 28…..a re-occuring key number associated with Lincoln Cathedral and also the catalogued number of the tomb under where the Templars Magdalene ‘treasure’ resides. This geometrical aspect is made all the more interesting when we learn that the Great East Window was reglazed in 1762, the design at that time chiefly, if not entirely, of geometrical forms rather than the current scenes from the Old Testament and life of Jesus.

So far, we have taken a deep psychological look at the alternative facets of the Great East Window and the unsuspected possibility that a deeply psychological game of chess is somehow being played out at Lincoln Cathedral. If an actual ‘Mind Game’ is being played here, could the opposing forces of light and dark be found in the two hemispheres of the brain? If it is a likelihood that ‘evil’ emanates from one side of the brain, and discussions of this kind first surfaced as far back as 1854 in a book by American physician Joseph Buchanan, ‘Outlines of lectures on the neurological system of anthropology’ in the chapter ‘Organology – Hemispheres of Good and Evil’, I wondered if an area of brain hemisphere could also be responsible for the unfortunate almost demon-like affliction suffered by 10% of those with the neurological affliction we know as Tourettes Syndrome, named after its founder Georges Gilles de la Tourette. It is sadly misunderstood that sufferers of this fascinating disorder, who cannot but help exclaiming obscene and derogatory remarks, are exerting their Tourettes, for this involuntary swearing is an independent neurological disorder called Coprolalia from the Greek ‘kopros’ meaning ‘feces’ and ‘lalien’, ‘to talk.’

Pic 6. The Demon Guardian Lincoln Imp, the Rook of the Chessboard

Using the phonetic aspect of the Mother Tongue, we will discover some interesting hidden connections.‘Tourettes’ is pronounced as ‘Turrets’, in architecture a small tower, from the Old French’ tourete’. Magdala, the home of Mary Magdalene, in Hebrew, means ‘Tower’. A turret is traditionally supported by a corbel, a piece of stone jutting out of a wall. ‘Corbel’, is from the Late Latin ‘corvellus’ diminutive of ‘corvus’, a raven. A raven is a species of crow, in turn a rook. The demonic Lincoln Imp guardian is seen on a spandrel squatting under the corbal high up between two arches on the North side of the Angel Choir within Lincoln Cathedral. Is he playing the part of the chess piece, the rook? The rook is most formidable towards the end of a game and a powerful piece to deliver checkmate.

There is a growing public suspicion about the grip of Freemasonry within the police force, that leads to fears of corruption. Both British and American police display the black and white chequers of the Masonic Lodge floor on their uniforms. The most prevalent of slang terms for a British policeman or woman is a ‘copper’. Amongst a few contending theories as to why, we are told that the term originates from the Latin ‘capere’ meaning ‘to seize, to take’. The other contender is that it comes from New York’s first official police force in the States who wore badges made from copper. However, ‘copper’ hides neatly in ‘copralalia’ – copr. Perhaps the unknown origin for another popular slang for police, ‘rozzers’, can also be claimed in ‘Kopros’, containing both ‘cop’ and ‘ros’.

We return for one final and potential covert explanation for the Great East Window. It is known that cathedrals, like old churches were built to serve as vibrationary chambers, holding undetected acoustic and sonic properties, and if one were to make the right sounds within them the effect can be Mind expanding. Aware of the octave connection and the window through the I-Ching, I was interested in taking a closer look at what is known as the ‘Liturgical Octaves’. In Christian liturgical useage, octave is the 8th day after a feast, sometimes called ‘Octave Day’ as well as the entire period of these days during observance of certain major feasts. In 2000, author of ‘Music and the Earth Spirit’, musician Bob Dickinson, conducted research on particular acoustic properties of Lincoln Cathedral which he focussed on some ‘ringing pillars,’ an octave and a fifth apart, which connected with certain intervallic relationships of the harmonic series. During the Easter Octave, for each of the days, there are specific chants. Could an analysis of these chant melodic/pitch patterns reveal certain intervallic relationships between notes that might connect with these ‘ringing pillars’?

Pic 7. The Devil’s Tuning ‘Pitch’ Fork

Scottish author Brian Allan is a firm believer that the musical notation given the title ‘The Devil’s Chord’ by the Catholic church in the 12thC, and banned throughout Christendom, this the musical interval of the augmented fourth, could be the frequency and harmonic chord that holds the key (pun intended) to the ultimate mystery of Rosslyn Chapel, perhaps precipitating the opening of a portal of consciousness. In a prior article on the world wide web ‘Lincoln Cathedral – Battleground of Light and Dark?’, I explained in length the numerous ‘Devil’ connections, and so it might not be unlikely to consider an involvement with the ‘Devil’s Chord’ here.

The classical image of the devil with his pitchfork might actually be a visual allegory of an acoustic resonating tuning fork which can be used to emit a pure musical tone, key or pitch. For use in the opening of a ‘Portal’?

Pic 8. ‘Between Two Worlds ’ scultpture by Michael Dan Archer

International stone sculptor Michael Dan Archer, who has used the tool of the Collective Unconscious for some of his work, in 2002 contributed numerous examples of his sculptures in and around Lincoln Cathedral, one he called ‘Portal 1’. Although this has since been removed, at the South East end of the Cathedral you can still see his Gateway entitled ‘Between two worlds’.

Not without its Alice in Wonderland absurdities and the inter-connectiveness of the Collective Unconscious when synchronicities collect up, let me share some starting with Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and what it has to say about the keystone. Architecturally, the final piece placed during construction to lock all the stones into position, Brown’s keystone in his novel was an encoded map revealing the hiding place of the Holy Grail. Given that we know that a key is the major or minor scale around which a piece of music revolves, and that ancient South Indian temples were once built by ancient kings who chose stone granite pillars which produced musical notes when struck with a stick, we have to concede to a whole new and musical meaning to ‘key’ stones. Returning to our investigation into police origins, ‘The Keystone Cops’ were incompetent fictional police that featured in early 20thC silent film comedies and in 2010 it was discovered a previously lost short was discovered featuring a previously unknown cameo appearance from the famous English comedy actor Charlie Chaplin. The connection here? Authoress of ‘City of secrets’ is Patrice Chaplin who claims that the Rennes mystery involves a portal upon a mountain in Spain – and she was married to Charlie Chaplin’s son!

Amidst my speculative attempts, perhaps the final and ultimate mystery of Lincoln Cathedral is that it conceals a consciousness portal of its own, fought over by unconscious brain lobes of light and dark in a constant game of chess (more correctly, ‘Chase’), one side keeping it closed the other seeking to open, the start of the game of chess actually called ‘The opening’, of which the key is a musical one. And for those of you who will ask where does the dog on the platter at the Great East Window fit into that particular scenario, I will point out that the other name for the Octave of Easter is known historically as Quasimodogeniti – find him hiding amongst the word.

Copyright Dan Green 2012