Chapter Nine

Structure and Substance

The temple tradition was never a static thing. The architectural forms and material substances that gave the tradition its embodiments, in particular, changed over time. This was partly due to shifts in ideology and cultural fashions, but it also depended in part on the varying results of differences in design. During the centuries when temples were expected to have an effect on the harvest, when a newly built or renovated temple helped bring about more than the usual increase in agricultural fertility, its distinctive features were more likely to be copied. Where innovations failed to bring the usual results, on the other hand, they were unlikely to be repeated.

Evolutionary biologists have a concept called “convergent evolution.” This is the process by which creatures from very different ancestral lineages end up looking and acting similar to one another because pressures from their environment favor development along similar lines. Porpoises are a good example. The ancestors of porpoises fifty or sixty million years ago were furry, hooved mammals related to pigs and deer. Once their descendants took to the water, though, the requirements for survival and success favored each mutation that made them a little more like fish. Generation by generation, those with slightly smoother skin and slightly flatter paws tended to do better than their shaggier and blunter-pawed rivals, until after millions of years the descendants of this process resemble fish so closely that many people have trouble telling the difference.

Cultures don’t evolve in exactly the same way that species do, but a form of convergent evolution shows up in the history of cultures as well. Medieval Europe and medieval Japan, for example, had no contact with one another, but the two societies developed feudal systems that were remarkably similar to one another. European nobles and Japanese daimyo, European knights and Japanese samurai, the European code of chivalry and the Japanese code of bushido: these had functions that parallel each other the way the flippers of porpoises parallel the fins of fish. Behind these remarkable similarities stood profound parallels in the technological and historical background. Just as living in the ocean makes fins and flippers more useful than legs, living in the wake of political and economic collapse in a society with the metalworking capacity to produce effective armor makes feudalism more useful than other options.

In exactly the same way, variants of the temple tradition in distant societies followed remarkably similar trajectories of development. India and Europe, for example, received the secret technology at nearly the same time; the first stone temples in India were built in the fifth century CE,140 only a short time after Christian missionaries began establishing churches across western Europe. Early Indian temples and early Christian churches also followed similar plans derived from the Greek version of the temple tradition: a rectangular hall for worship, with the focus of ritual and ceremony at one end.

From that starting point, in turn, both traditions evolved in remarkably parallel ways. Both moved the core ritual activities into a secluded space—in a Hindu temple, the garbhagrha; in a medieval Christian church, the sanctuary—while the worshippers remained in an equivalent of the original rectangular hall—the mandapa in India, the nave in Europe. Both established secondary worship spaces around the outside of the central holy space. Most striking of all, both traditions transformed the shape of their sacred places by raising a massive vertical structure with a sharp point at its zenith. The shikhara in India and the steeple in Europe have no obvious relevance to the religious dimension of temple or church; they play only the most minor roles in ritual and belief; considered from the ordinary perspective of the theologian or the architectural historian, the parallel evolution of structures so similar in such radically different religious traditions can only be a puzzle.

Bring the temple tradition into the equation, by contrast, and the puzzle is easily solved. The steeple and shikhara can be seen, in fact, as late equivalents of that very ancient element of the tradition, the standing stone. The influence that concentrates in a single tall mass of the right kind of stone seems to concentrate just as effectively in a more artificial construction of the same general shape and orientation, built of the proper materials. Just as fins and flippers make sense in the context of ocean life, tall stone masses make sense in the context of trying to exploit the effect at the heart of the temple technology, and different cultures using the technology were likely to discover this independently if they had the means to do so.

It’s clear, to continue the example already mentioned, that steeples and shikharas had completely different origins. In India, the shikhara seems to have emerged as a straightforward elaboration of the temple roof. In Christian Europe, by contrast, bell towers in the Mediterranean region and the mysterious round towers that flanked monastic churches in early medieval Ireland, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Eleven, seem to have been the original form of what later became the steeple. It was only after the original rectangular floor plan of churches gave way to the classic medieval cross-shaped design did it occur to anyone to put a steeple over the church itself, and even then the process didn’t happen overnight; instead, master builders experimented with a raised roof over the crossing, then with a low tower, then with a taller one, until finally the familiar steeple took its standard place over the crossing.

By the time the Middle Ages reached their zenith, tall steeples rising to dramatic points were a common feature of church design: “the spear borne before the chalice” of the Grail romances. Since the relation of the design to the mysteries of the temple tradition was a trade secret of masons’ guilds and, as we’ll see in a later chapter, also seems to have had certain connections with heretical religious ideas, the steeple passed for an ordinary design feature—and it survived as an ordinary design feature, relocated more or less randomly in the church building, long after the hidden technology underlying the temple tradition was lost.

The Evolution of Temple Design

As shown in previous chapters, temples working with the temple tradition have taken a galaxy of different forms. The core architectural requirements of the temple technology seem to be relatively simple; any enclosed space of certain proportions that is made of the right materials will apparently have some effect if located in an appropriate place and aligned more or less to the compass directions. All the changes rung on the temple form through the millennia are essentially refinements on that basic recipe.

Certain refinements, though, tend to appear repeatedly in different branches of the temple tradition, in ways that converge on one another. The European steeple and Hindu shikhara are examples of this process, but they’re by no means the only ones. Another even more striking example is the emergence of a square or rectangular inner sanctuary at one end of the main structure of the building in most of the cultural forms taken by the temple tradition. Egyptian temples of the New Kingdom and later periods nearly all had this feature; so, of course, did the Temple of Solomon and its successors; so did Christian churches in medieval Europe; so do Hindu temples; and so do Shinto shrines.

What makes this convergence especially fascinating is that only one of these traditions started out with any kind of inner sanctuary. The Jews are the exception. The oldest form of worship space recorded in their tradition, the Tabernacle of the nomadic Israelite tribes, had a sanctuary in the same position of the Holy of Holies of the later temple. According to their own traditions, though, the Israelites lived for many generations in Egypt, and as shown in an earlier chapter, the basic design of the Tabernacle and Temple of Solomon alike was very close to the standard Egyptian temple design during the New Kingdom, the period during which the Exodus traditionally took place.

By contrast, Egyptian temples, Christian churches, Hindu temples, and Shinto shrines didn’t start out with a sanctuary. Instead, each form of temple gradually evolved one over a period of centuries. The history of the sanctuary in Christian churches is particularly instructive, since churches started out in Roman times as very simple rectangular buildings with the altar for the celebration of the Mass on the eastern end. From there, as the temple tradition worked its way into church architecture, the interior of the church was gradually divided more and more strictly into spaces for clergy and laity.

In the Catholic West, the main body of medieval churches was divided into three parts—the nave, where the congregation sat; the choir, where the clergy sat; and the sanctuary, where the high altar was located and the actual ceremony of the Mass took place. Over time, the division between the nave and the choir became more and more marked. By the twelfth century, as already noted, a barrier called the rood screen made it impossible for the congregation to see any part of the ritual at the high altar. Many cathedrals of the Gothic era have the choir and sanctuary walled off on all four sides, an enclosed church within a church. Historians of liturgy like to suggest that this was driven by an exaggerated sense of the terrifying nature of the sacrifice of the Mass,141 but as noted in Chapter Four, no such terror seemed to interfere with the regular performance of the Mass in full view of the congregation in the many chapels found in every medieval church of any size.

In the Orthodox East, a process of convergent evolution reached the same endpoint, though it took longer to get there. By the early medieval period, the sanctuaries of Orthodox churches were separated from the rest of the church by a low screen, but it was not until the sixteenth century that an equivalent of the rood screen, the iconostasis, came into use in Orthodox churches. Like the rood screen, the iconostasis makes it impossible for the congregation to see the ritual of the Mass. Despite the obvious inconveniences of this practice, it remains in place in most Orthodox churches to this day.

The rood screen did not have a similar longevity. As we’ll see in a subsequent chapter, the temple tradition seems to have been thrown out of Christian churches in the Western world at the time of the Reformation. In Protestant and Catholic countries alike, rood screens were torn down, sanctuaries were opened to the sight of the congregation, and rituals were drastically revised and standardized. Protestant churches either cut back the ritual dimension of worship or got rid of it altogether, refocusing church services on preaching, scripture readings, and the singing of hymns.

In many denominations, the entire legacy of Christian church architecture was thrown out wholesale by the reformers, resulting in church interiors that were reduced to rows of seats facing a pulpit and exteriors that were plain peak-roofed boxes with a steeple tacked on somewhere for show. The changes were accelerated by the transformation of architecture from a craft practiced by master builders following traditional patterns to a fine art practiced by architects who were celebrated for their originality rather than their understanding of the lore handed down from the past.

Catholic church architecture also changed dramatically, though not so completely as in the Protestant denominations. Catholic churches built after the Reformation era did away with the rood screen and the enclosure around the choir and sanctuary, moved the pulpit into a much more central position, and reshaped church interiors as well as the rituals performed there to make preaching more central than it had been. Here again, as professional architects replaced master builders, what had once been the components of an ancient technology got redefined as design elements and rearranged to suit the whims of architects and patrons. That process reached its logical conclusion in the twentieth century with the creation of churches that resemble high school gymnasiums, shopping malls, opera houses, and the like, rather than sacred spaces of any description.142

Paramagnetism and Diamagnetism

The lore of the old master builders was not limited to issues of design, however, and among the things that got misplaced with the coming of professional architects was a knowledge of building materials that went beyond the purely practical. The old builders’ guilds, it bears remembering, took care of everything that happened on or around a building site. The master builder in charge of a medieval building project, like his equivalent in many other temple-building societies, started out his career hauling stones and mortar, sharpening tools, and doing other menial labor of the kind assigned to apprentices; as his knowledge and technical skill developed, he was assigned increasingly complex tasks, and so every detail of the building process was known to him from personal experience.

The proper selection of materials was among the things master builders learned on their way up the ranks. A competent mason, in particular, had to know the difference between freestone—the kind of fine-grained stone that can be used for carvings—and the various other types of stone that might be used in a building project, from the rubble in foundations to the slate that went on the roof. The term “Freemason” itself is a contraction of the phrase “freestone mason,” a stonemason sufficiently skilled to be trusted to work in freestone, while “cowan”—an old term used by Freemasons for those who are not members of the Craft—originally meant the sort of untrained day laborer who could only handle less demanding kinds of stonework.

All this is relevant to the temple tradition because structures built to make use of the old temple technology are made, almost without exception, from materials that have a little-known physical property in common: the property of paramagnetism. While a great deal of research needs to be done here, as elsewhere, it’s possible that paramagnetism represents one of the keys to the entire temple tradition.

Most people these days, if they remember anything at all from the science classes they took in school, know that some materials are attracted to magnets and others aren’t. Iron is the most famous magnetic material—if you take a magnet of any strength and hold it over a small iron object, the iron will defy gravity and leap upward to attach itself to the magnet. Try the same thing with a nonmagnetic material such as lead, and nothing happens.

Most science classes never get around to mentioning paramagnetism and its opposite, diamagnetism, which is unfortunate. A paramagnetic material is slightly attracted to a magnet—not enough to leap into the air but enough to register on sensitive measuring equipment and concentrate magnetic lines of force in itself. A diamagnetic material, on the other hand, is repelled by a magnet—again, not enough to jump away from a magnet but enough to register on measuring equipment and bend lines of magnetic force away from itself.

Most solid materials are paramagnetic, at least to some degree, unless they contain plenty of water. Water is strongly diamagnetic, and anything that has a lot of water in it shares in that property. Your body, for example, is diamagnetic, because it’s 70 percent water. A living tree is diamagnetic, and so is a tree trunk that’s just been cut down. When it’s been stripped of its bark, sawed into lumber, and dried, on the other hand, its wood is paramagnetic.

The materials used in temples and churches tend to be very strongly paramagnetic. The same thing is true, curiously enough, of the old standing stones of Britain and northwestern Europe—for example, the stones of Stonehenge—and of stones at a great many other ancient sacred sites. Investigators for the Dragon Project discussed in chapter 6 noticed that many standing stones in Britain will reliably deflect compass needles.143 While the investigators apparently had not encountered the concept of paramagnetism, and so did not reference it in their reports, this is exactly what would be expected from strongly paramagnetic stone.

What makes this intriguing from the standpoint of this book’s inquiry is that the presence of paramagnetic materials has a remarkable effect on plant growth. Those effects have been replicated repeatedly by investigators of this phenomenon, but as with the Dragon Project discussed in Chapter Six—or, for that matter, the network of leys mentioned in Chapter Seven—these findings have been roundly ignored by scientists, even in those fields that might be expected to have an interest in them. Research into the biological effects of paramagnetism has thus been published almost entirely in periodicals and books in the alternative science field, where they routinely rub elbows with strange speculations of various kinds.144

Readers who wish to test the effects of paramagnetism themselves are encouraged to perform the simple experiment described on the sidebar on page 161.145 Remarkably, seeds grown on the north side of something that’s strongly paramagnetic—for example, a cylinder like the one in the experiment—tend to grow more rapidly and vigorously than those on the south side. Why? Nobody knows; as with so many other factors related to the temple tradition, the experiments that would be necessary to figure out the cause haven’t been done.

Whatever the precise mechanism, strongly paramagnetic substances seem to have an important role in the temple technology, as well as some of the more ancient methods of increasing fertility that appear to have fed into the temple tradition. The powerful paramagnetism of ancient standing stones has already been mentioned, but an even older form of construction combined paramagnetic and diamagnetic materials in a specific, carefully arranged way.

A Megalithic Technology?

The structures in question are the long barrows of Neolithic northwestern Europe, the oldest surviving monumental structures in the world. The oldest known long barrows were built around 4300 BCE, and they continued to be built until 3000 BCE or so—around the time that the first ditches and earthen banks were excavated at Stonehenge.146 While archeologists today identify them as burial sites, the number of human bones found in long barrows is tiny compared to the total number of people who died in the vicinity during their active lifespans, and it’s at least possible that the role of the skeletal remains in long barrows had more in common with the relics of the saints treasured in medieval churches than with the churchyards outside.

In constructing a barrow, diamagnetic and paramagnetic substances were arranged in one or more layers. In the simplest barrows, a central chamber was made either of large stones or of massive wooden posts, and this was surrounded by heaped flints, blocks of chalk, or other strongly paramagnetic materials. Atop this went a thick layer of turf, which absorbs and holds water in damp climates and is thus strongly diamagnetic.147

In more elaborate barrows, several layers of stone and turf were stacked atop one another. The famous mound at Newgrange in Ireland is a classic example. It was made out of neatly stacked layers of stone, turf, and soil, some 300 feet in diameter and 36 feet high. The presence of water in the turf and soil is clearly shown by the design of the inner chamber; the stones forming the corbel vault of the chamber all tilt slightly outward, so that water drains off sideways rather than dripping into the central chamber.148 The exact reasons for the layering await rediscovery by careful experimentation, but similar patterns can be found in many other earth mounds of the megalithic era, including the famous Silbury Hill in England, near the great Avebury stone circle.

Silbury Hill, the largest ancient artificial mound in Europe, is worth careful attention in its own right. As far as anyone knows, it was never used for burials or associated with the cult of the dead, but it remains a huge testimony to the importance that it must have had to the people of its time. It stands 130 feet above the surrounding landscape, and contains an impressive 12.5 million cubic feet of chalk, clay, soil, and gravel. When it was complete, an artificial lake was constructed around its base by damming a local stream. It must have been a stunning site when it was new. The white chalk sides would have been blindingly bright against the green Wessex countryside and reflected in the still water of the surrounding lake.

For all its impressive scale, Silbury Hill is by no means unique in design. A similar flat-topped mound without a burial rises thirty-six feet above the hill of Knocknarea in Sligo,149 and mounds of the same basic form with no burials inside them are scattered over much of northwestern Europe. Their purpose likely involved the effects of terrestrial electricity described in Chapter Six. In their research into those effects, John Burke and Kaj Halberg carried out experiments at Silbury Hill and found strong electric charges there of a kind well suited to the electron seed treatment method they explored.150 Similar experiments carried out atop other mounds in Britain got even more dramatic bursts of electricity—in one case sufficient to fry the internal circuitry of an electrostatic voltmeter.151

These traces of a megalithic technology are relevant to the temple tradition in more than one sense. On the one hand, they demonstrate that ancient peoples working with the synthetic sciences of their own culture seem to have been able to harness an assortment of natural energies to enhance the fertility of their fields—the same thesis that lies at the heart of the argument of this book. The electrical and paramagnetic technologies of the megalithic age have a more direct relationship to the temple tradition, though. The areas of northwestern Europe in which megaliths and barrows are found also played a crucial role in the rediscovery of the temple technology in early medieval Europe—and an equally important role in transmitting the last fragments of the ancient knowledge to the guilds that became modern Freemasonry. These points will be explored in a later chapter.

An Experiment with Paramagnetism

Materials needed:

Start by bending the index card into a cylinder and taping the ends together. Prepare the limestone, flowerpot clay, or potting soil—it should be as fine a powder as you can get—then coat the cylinder with the spray adhesive and roll it in the paramagnetic powder. It may take up to three coats of spray adhesive to get all of the cylinder coated with powder. Let each layer of powder dry before spraying on more adhesive, and when the cylinder is entirely coated, let the whole assembly dry for at least twenty-four hours.

25528.jpg

paramagnetism experiment setup

While it dries, take the flowerpot full of potting soil, moisten the soil well, and plant a ring of seeds close to the outside of the pot. Once the cylinder is dry, put it upright in the center of the flowerpot, as shown in the diagram. Push it down a short distance into the soil so that it stays in place.

Once this is done, wait for the seeds to sprout, watering the soil in the pot whenever it begins to dry out. Don’t splash water on the cylinder, as potting soil only has a strong paramagnetic effect when it’s dry! Once the first seedling has appeared, place the flowerpot directly under the grow-lamp, and leave the lamp on for twelve hours each day—this is to make sure that all the seedlings get the same amount of light. Note the compass directions, and see if the seedlings on one side of the paramagnetic cylinder grow more vigorously than those on the other.

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140 Wangu 2009, 96.

141 See, for example, Jones et al. 1992, 64.

142 Rose 2001 is a useful discussion.

143 Devereux 1990, 96–99.

144 See, for example, Callahan 2001 and Davis and Rawls 1980.

145 This experiment is adapted from Callahan 2001, 26–37.

146 Souden 1997, 18–19.

147 North 1996, 18.

148 O’Brien and Harbison 1996, 15–16.

149 O’Brien and Harbison 1996, 12–13.

150 Burke and Halberg 2005, 123–127.

151 Ibid., 122.