11
THE HOUSE OF GOD
King Gudea of Lagash, founder of the temple at Girsu (in modern Iraq), worshipping the god Ningirsu, c.2130 BCE
The site of Göbekli Tepe is little known outside archaeological circles: yet it holds a central, perhaps the prime, place in the history of religious building. The name means Potbelly Hill, and it is in south-eastern Turkey, near the border with Syria. It is not much of a hill – only about fifteen metres high. The land around it is now barren scrub; but excavations begun in 1996 indicate that here, between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago, a society of hunter-gatherers came together to build an enormous stone monument. It contains at least 200 megalithic pillars, some nearly six metres tall, and most are arranged within circular enclosures. Some are decorated with relief sculptures of animals – generally not of the deer on which the local population fed, but of dangerous beasts such as lions, snakes and vultures. What was it for?
Most of the site remains to be excavated, but the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who led the digs in the late 1990s, contended that this huge, mysterious construction was not a settlement, but a sanctuary – a place of periodic gatherings, probably dedicated to cults focused on the dead. He found animal bones which suggested large occasional feasts held over several centuries, but not continuous habitation. Schmidt concluded that Göbekli Tepe, erected a full 6,000 years before Stonehenge, is the oldest large-scale religious construction anywhere in the world.
Excavations at Göbekli Tepe in south-east Turkey, believed to be the oldest religious site in the world
If he is correct, this site represents that pivotal moment in history when human beings for the first time created a colossal structure to accommodate rituals of faith. Like Newgrange, it was evidently a place built at great cost by a large community with a shared set of beliefs. In that sense it was a development, on a massive scale, of what we think we can discern at the mouth of the Lion Man cave in Chapter 1, a place where people from a wide area gathered for ritual celebrations.
Schmidt suggested that Göbekli Tepe might be even more significant: that a shared belief system not only drew scattered people to assemble here, but enabled its makers to collaborate on a greater scale than ever before. He argued that it was because hunter-gatherers first learnt how to co-operate in making a site like this for religious ceremonies that they were later able to live and work together in cities. Planning and building a great sacred space was the necessary trial run for urban civilization – or, as he strikingly put it, reversing the traditional sequence, ‘First came the temple, then came the city.’ In other words, we lived with the gods before we lived at close quarters with each other.
In the last two chapters we looked at how people try to engage with the divine, how strategies have been devised – contem-plation, prayer and singing – to help us move away from everyday concerns, and focus instead on a world beyond immediate cares. But just as important as how we encounter the divine has always been where. In most cities and civilizations, the sacred structures are the grandest, the costliest and the most enduring, often the culmination of communal as well as spiritual life. This is true of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Chapter 16), of the great stupa at Sarnath (Chapter 14) or of the cathedral at Cologne (Chapter 14). But how do you design such buildings – places where gods may come to their people, and the people to their gods?
We can only speculate what ideas or politics lay behind the complex shapes and sculptures of Göbekli Tepe, though we may learn more as the excavations proceed. The oldest sacred spaces about which written texts survive – where we can be fairly confident that we know what people were thinking, and how the building process was directed – are just a few hundred miles south of Göbekli Tepe, in Mesopotamia. They were built about eight millennia later, shortly before 2000 BCE. The British Museum holds both texts and objects from one of these sacred sites, a temple in a city just north of where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. It was then called Girsu, and is now Telloh in Iraq.
Girsu was the religious centre of Lagash, a small state of about 600 square miles, containing several important and, by the standards of the time, large cities. Lagash had grown rich on agriculture and trade, importing gold from Sinai, copper from Arabia, and cedar wood from Lebanon; and it had successfully fought off its neighbours under the protection of its principal god, Ningirsu, who governed rain and thunder, agriculture and war. His main temple, in Girsu, was the most important religious building in Lagash.
Stone tablet recording King Gudea’s renovation of the temple at Girsu: ‘Gudea, ruler of Lagash, made things function as they should’
The first step in the creation of this sacred space, according to a poem preserved in a cuneiform text in the Louvre, was a visit by a god to Gudea, king of Lagash, in his dreams. The god instructed him to turn a piece of ordinary ground into the site for a temple to Ningirsu. Gudea was of course obedient, and had wealth at his command, but was uncertain how to proceed: ‘Ningirsu, I am to build your house, but I don’t know how! Warrior, you have called for the “proper thing”, but lord Ningirsu, son of Enlil, the heart of the matter I cannot know.’ He clearly soon found somebody who did know, because in the British Museum is the evidence of what happened next: four copper alloy figurines of bearded men about fifteen or twenty centimetres high, each down on one knee, holding in his hand a copper nail more than half the size of his body. As Sébastien Rey, the curator at the British Museum who is currently excavating the site, explains, they are not your average Bronze Age construction workers:
These people are gods: they are wearing tiaras with four horns, the symbol of divinity. They are carrying foundation pegs. Their role is to consecrate the ground, and they were buried to mark the boundary of the sacred space of the temple. Tablets placed in the foundations told the gods – and so ultimately us – that this temple was called Eninnu, which means ‘House-fifty’. It seems a strange name, but fifty was the secret number of Enlil, the supreme god of the Lagash pantheon and the father of Ningirsu. Inside the sacred space of the temple were lots of different artefacts – statues, plaques and inscribed vessels – all dedicated to the god.
Four copper gods plant foundation pegs for the temple at Girsu
There would certainly have been statues of Ningirsu himself in his human form, but not one of these remains: they were made from composites of wood and precious metals – silver and gold, which were probably later melted down. But the British Museum also contains a copper alloy relief from a neighbouring temple, where we can see Ningirsu in his non-human form – as the flashing tempest bird, a lion-headed eagle. He is the master of the wilderness, sinking his talons into a pair of aggressively antlered stags. He is so powerful that his head bursts out of the top of the frame into the space of the spectator. When he flaps his wings, he creates storms. He holds the forces of the natural world within bounds. He is the defender of Lagash.
Master of the wilderness: the god Ningirsu as a tempest bird, made around 2500 BCE
The statues of Ningirsu in his human form would have been at the very centre of the temple, in an enclosed space, beside statues of King Gudea: god and builder side by side. We know what Gudea looked like, because he was a particularly enthusiastic temple-builder and many statues of him have survived. One of these statues is now in the British Museum (this page). Standing face to face with him is a disconcerting experience. The statue is virtually life-size, carved in dolerite, a hard green-black stone, so the features are boldly schematized. His head is completely shaved, his eyebrows are one great dipping bow over his eyes. He is wearing a robe that leaves one shoulder bare and his folded hands visible. This is a representation of a powerful man unconcerned about who might be looking at him, focused entirely on prayer. Sébastien Rey explains:
Gudea’s statue was placed within the holy of holies, the most sacred place in the temple, so that he could gaze upon the god Ningirsu and worship him for eternity, even after his own death. His eyes are big, because he sees Ningirsu; he has large ears, because he can hear the voice and the message of Ningirsu. And as the ruler worships the god, the spectators worship both the god and the ruler.
Not all worshippers had access to all parts of the temple. There were gradations of sacred space within it: thresholds, marked by colossal stone door sockets and large corridors, through and across which only some were permitted to pass. Status would determine who could use which entrance, and how far towards the inner sanctum – how close to Ningirsu himself – they could go. The temple was, for the inhabitants of Lagash, the god’s palace, and just as in a royal palace, most of the population would be kept outside, in the forecourt. Our word ‘basilica’, which derives from the Greek for a royal court of justice, shows how deeply this equation of the divine with the kingly has shaped later, Christian religious building. But in Girsu the temple was in a literal sense the god’s home, with private spaces crafted to meet his every need, including kitchens and dining rooms, family rooms and spaces for guests. Here and in temples like it, the gods had their own beds, and there is evidence dating back to the first millennium BC of complex priestly rituals by which meals and clothes, vessels and other objects, were laid before them. Sébastien Rey continues:
A newly fashioned statue of a god was turned into something animated – a living entity – by means of a ritual to wash its mouth. After that, these cult statues received the attention of priests as though they were human beings. They were awakened in the morning, they were clothed, and they received two meals a day. At the end of the day, they were put to bed in their own chambers within the temple.
On the lap of a statue of King Gudea in the Louvre is a groundplan of the shrine of the god Ningirsu. It clearly shows the enclosure of sacred space where Ningirsu dwells and is worshipped, separated from the city by thick buttressed walls and gates flanked by towers.
So it was not simply a case of human beings aspiring to live with the gods, but of the gods coming to live with us. And they were not confined to their temples. They owned the land of Lagash, so several times a year the statues would be taken out of the temples and carried around in chariots, or boats, touring the fields, leading grand processions. The statue of a god like Ningirsu would also set out to visit other divinities, especially his relatives, whose temple-homes were in other cities of Lagash: his sister, Nanshe, in Nigen (present-day Zurghul), his wife, Bau, close at hand in the same complex at Girsu, and so on. These processions of gods and people played an important part in what we would now describe as state-building. They reminded the inhabitants of Lagash that, although they lived in different cities, they were part of one state, subjects of the same ruler and united in their worship of the same gods.
The temple of Ningirsu was built, furnished and inhabited over 4,000 years ago. Yet the patterns and the ideas that shaped the sacred space in ancient Lagash are surprisingly familiar today across the whole of Eurasia. The doors of St Paul’s Cathedral in London carry an inscription to remind the visitor that ‘This is none other than the House of God’, suggesting, at least metaphorically, that it too is a residence as much as a sanctuary. Inside are monuments erected in gratitude to God for battles won and a state preserved: the link between secular and divine power could hardly be clearer. In Hindu temples all round the world, the gods rest, and are wakened and tended at the appropriate hours of the day. A Roman Catholic church will usually have an image of the saint to whom it is dedicated, as images of Ningirsu presided in his temple – and in Southern Europe and Latin America statues of those saints sometimes visit other saints in churches throughout the city, as Ningirsu visited his family millennia ago.
The hierarchy of access which is already clear in the Mesopotamian temples at such an early stage is later replicated across the rest of Eurasia too. In Girsu most were excluded from the inner sanctum, where the god was housed, and remained in the forecourt. At the Temple in Jerusalem, over 1,000 years later, there was a comparable system of strict gradation, for gentiles, women, men and priests. In Zoroastrian temples only priests may approach and tend the sacred fire (Chapter 2). For much of Christian history altars have been similarly screened off and the space around them reserved for clergy. Even today, during the liturgy in Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, the laity cannot enter or see inside the holy of holies, to which priests alone have access. Across the millennia, statues of builders and benefactors have been set nearest to the sanctuary in Christian churches and cathedrals, where, as in Girsu, they are shown praying not just in perpetuity but in privileged proximity to the god they worship. The Mesopotamian tablets and sculptures in the British Museum show the beginnings of patterns of astonishing longevity, patterns where power secures access – and access further reinforces power.
Architect’s maquette for the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Kericho, Kenya
At the opposite end of the documented time scale to King Gudea’s dream, and gods carrying foundation pegs, are the designs and models prepared by the British architects John McAslan + Partners in 2012 for a new cathedral in Kericho in Kenya, about 125 miles north-west of Nairobi. Here every assumption about space seems to be different. The hierarchy of access, the fencing-off of particular areas, the rigid division between inner and outer space have all disappeared. Where Ningirsu’s temple replicates many features of Royal palace architecture, the design here speaks of a desire for transparency and democratic openness. This society meets its god on a quite different footing.
The cathedral at Kericho stands high on a hill, with broad views over extensive tea plantations, on the edge of the Rift Valley. Its red-tiled roof can be seen from miles around. Consecrated in May 2015, it is a landmark for its region. It illustrates some of the issues architects today must confront as they take on the millennia-old challenge of building sacred spaces for large communities, in this case a diocese of around 250,000 people. The simple lines of the architect’s model show how inside there are no internal thresholds, no reserved spaces: the interior steadily expands, getting wider and higher as visitors move from the west door to the altar at the east end. It is entirely shaped and contained by ten exposed concrete ribs, in the shape of inverted Vs, lined with slats of wood, which filter the strong African light. Funding was provided by a foreign benefactor. But where the great temple builders of antiquity – Gudea in Lagash or Solomon in Jerusalem – brought exotic woods and metals from afar, the architects here were clear that this should be an African, in fact a Kenyan, building. Aidan Potter, one of the architects, explains their thinking:
We didn’t want to import any materials. It’s a grand building in its scale and size, but we didn’t want it to feel as if it was imposing a European or American act of generosity, helicoptered onto this site. The floors are of Kenyan granite and bluestone, and the sculptures of local soapstone. The timber slats, the doors and furniture are of Kericho-grown cypress. And the red-pantile roof is a local material. Although it was funded by an act of generous philanthropy, we did want to make sure that the building had a certain frugal quality.
An expanding cathedral: Kericho Cathedral reaches its greatest extent at the altar
Once the materials had been chosen, the design was discussed with the Bishop of Kericho, Emmanuel Okombo, and the decision taken to dissolve the divisions of space often found in traditional churches:
The bishop was very keen to promote a greater engagement of the congregation in the celebration of the Mass. So the cathedral departs from the classic Latin cross configuration. The space and the volume get bigger the nearer you get to the altar: the idea of that was to make sure that there was the largest possible number of people around a very wide altar – to maximize the visual and social engagement of the entire community in the focus on the Mass.
Remarkably, Aidan Potter found that one of the most important considerations in designing the new building was exactly the one that had preoccupied the builders of Newgrange 5,000 years ago (Chapter 4): how the light gets in.
How do you make a sacred space? A lot of it is to do with the careful admission of light. The great mysterious spaces always pay very careful attention to light. In our cathedral, we used a roof light to cast a line of light down the central aisle of the church, coming to a focus on the altar. We wanted the perimeter of the building to be slightly gloomy, slightly darker, to enhance the dramatic effect of the light. The result was a gentle, serene space with a wonderful glow given off by local timber. It helps create an interesting dynamic of sacred space: it can comfortably accommodate two people, or fifteen hundred people – and no one is short-changed, experientially, anywhere in between.
As well as the architects and the bishop, the congregation played a major part in the planning process. The choice of local materials reflected the tastes of the community, just as the design reflected the way they come to church. Although it is contained by solid walls, which carry sculptures showing the Stations of the Cross, the perimeter of this sacred space is extravagantly porous. Aidan Potter explains:
The bishop had a beautiful idea, which was that down either side of the cathedral we would have multiple doors and at the end of the service all of them would be flung open. The idea was that, after Mass, everybody would go forth, as though sent, like the apostles, by Christ himself into the world outside. The numbers wanting to use the cathedral are so great in Kericho that the next congregation is always stacking up outside the cathedral, waiting to get into the next service. When they open all the doors and the first congregation leaves, there’s a mêlée of people from the service meeting friends outside, and it’s a marvellous moment – a very African phenomenon, which the building enables and encourages. It lets the building breathe socially and environmentally. At the same time, it creates an extra-communal community and a lot of social and sacred activities actually happen outside. It’s a lesson that we can learn from Africa: that faith can be practised and celebrated outside the conventional enclosures that we design.
The cathedral at Kericho could hardly be further removed in conception as well as in time from the temple at Girsu, and it exemplifies a radical shift in Christian architecture world-wide in recent decades. This cathedral is still conceived as a house of God, but it is very much a house of God where all people are equal. There are no internal divisions of space to assert hierarchy or to separate the different parts of the community. It is a space from which the sacred can spill out into the landscape around it. Like the temple at Girsu, like all religious buildings, the cathedral at Kericho, in its plan and in its materials, reflects aspirations and ideals that are as much political as religious.
The way in which sacred spaces operate may be changing, but much of the experience within them remains as it always has been. These spaces are hallowed by the presence and prayers of previous generations, sometimes stretching over centuries – an atmosphere of holiness, impossible to define, but not difficult to sense, which allows believers to feel closer to the divine. This may explain the striking increase in recent years in attendance at English cathedral services – even those whose beliefs may be uncertain are drawn by the music, the beauty of building and the sense of an enduring pattern and community in which they have a place.
This is one reason why abandoning sacred spaces is often so problematic. Although many countries in the West are increasingly secular, there are frequently mixed feelings, publicly voiced, about using deconsecrated churches for housing and simple commercial purposes. Many of them have become community centres, art galleries or concert halls, so remaining places of refuge from the worries of the outside world, where people come together to encounter something beyond themselves – a kind of secular sacred space.
This enduring respect for sacred spaces is clearest when a place of worship – mosque, temple, synagogue or church – is desecrated. Even if nobody is hurt, it is universally read as an attack not just on a building, but on a community. From the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE (Chapter 27), to the demolition of the Huguenot church in Charenton in 1685 (Chapter 28), the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 (Chapter 28) and the Orthodox churches and mosques in the Balkans in the same decade, such attacks shock and threaten as few assaults on property can: people, beliefs and buildings are instinctively understood to be one.