The Ancient Secret
The first ten chapters of this book have summarized the evidence that certain traditions of religious architecture in the ancient and medieval world embodied a technology that used simple but subtle means to yield significant benefits to local agricultural fertility—a technology that has not yet been recovered by modern science, though there’s no reason to assume that the forces that it used are unknown to today’s physicists. That hypothesis raises many questions, of course, and a great deal of further investigation will be needed to provide answers to most of those. Two of the most important, though, can be answered readily enough from the information already surveyed. The first of them is how the temple tradition came into existence in the first place. The other is how it came to be lost.
The first is not hard to understand once it’s remembered that people who lived before the scientific revolution, while they had different ways of understanding the world than their descendants do today, were just as capable as we are of noticing changes in their environments and drawing conclusions from their experiences. Anthropologists noticed a long time ago that tribal peoples who explain the natural world in terms of elaborate mythologies about the doings of gods and spirits are perfectly capable of using that knowledge base to anticipate the movements of game animals, treat diseases effectively with the local medicinal herbs, and find their way safely across trackless deserts or long stretches of open sea. The same process of learning through experience, extended over millennia, was doubtless the source of the temple tradition as well.
It’s easy to imagine how such a thing might have happened. All it would have taken was one temple that happened to be built of the right materials in the right place and therefore got some trace of the effect at the center of the technology. Local farmers, noticing that fields close to the new temple were suddenly producing better yields than fields a few miles farther up or down the river valley, would have brought this to the attention of the temple priests or priestesses, if only by the enthusiasm with which they offered prayers of thanksgiving. The priests or priestesses of other temples that didn’t have the same effect would have had a potent incentive to figure out what accounted for the difference, and though most of their guesses were doubtless very wide of the mark, all it would have taken was one successful replication of the effect to kickstart the process that brought the temple tradition into being.
As mentioned back in Chapter Nine, the ways in which cultural forms develop over time have certain similarities to the evolutionary process by which living things develop over much vaster periods of time. One of those similarities is that in both cases diversity is crucial. Just as the genetic diversity of a population of living things provides the variation among individuals that natural selection works with, the cultural and religious diversity of the ancient world gave the emerging temple tradition an ample supply of variations, and those that turned out to be more successful than others became the basis on which the future built. All the variables discussed in the last four chapters—location, orientation, geometry, structure, substance, and the details of ritual—were sorted out over thousands of years of trial and error by people who had no idea of the forces at work but were perfectly capable of noticing when a new temple in this place yielded sudden improvements in crop yields, while a change in the rituals performed in that shrine caused the effect to diminish in the fields nearby.
There’s no reason to think that the resulting lore was ever codified into anything like a coherent theory. It may have never even been written down. One common feature of ancient religious traditions is that they rarely wrote much about sacred things. Even in highly literate societies such as Egypt and Babylonia, religious writings tended to consist of myths about the gods and goddesses, hymns, prayers, and not much more. The sort of detailed accounts of theology and practice that fill the shelves of religious bookstores these days were for all practical purposes absent in ancient religions. If you wanted to learn such things, you normally did that by becoming a priest or priestess or by participating in special, secret religious activities such as the ancient Greek Mysteries.
These Mysteries in particular may have had a very close connection to the temple tradition. One of the curious things about the Greek Mysteries, in fact, is that so many of them centered on agriculture. The most famous of them all, the Eleusinian Mysteries, were sacred to Demeter, the grain goddess. One of the few ancient testimonies about the ceremonies of initiation at Eleusis claims that at the high point of the ceremony, a ripe ear of grain was reaped in silence and shown to the new initiates.165 A tradition with that theme would be a logical place to look for elements of an archaic technology focusing on agricultural fertility. Whether or not those elements were actually part of the Mysteries of Eleusis will never be known, though, since the lore of those Mysteries was lost forever more than fifteen centuries ago—but a body of initiates whose teachings focused on agriculture would be a logical place to find the inheritors of the process outlined above.
In the heyday of the ancient world, if the thesis at the core of this book is correct, a band of urban societies extending across Eurasia from Britain to northern Pakistan had learned how to build temples that had a beneficial effect on crop yields. In all probability, this effect was understood in purely religious terms: if the temple is built in this way and this sort of ceremonies are performed in it, the logic ran, the gods and goddesses will be well pleased, and their blessings will make the grain flourish. If the philosophers who were beginning to explore the possibility of a science of nature in those same centuries ever noticed that something not quite so theological was involved, their writings have not come down to us.
In order to understand what happened thereafter, it’s crucial to keep in mind that the temple tradition was part of the fabric of ordinary life in ancient societies. If you had lived in those days, it would never have occurred to you that anything strange was involved. To the Jews who flocked to the Temple in Jerusalem to offer prayers and sacrifices to the God of Israel, for example, the fact that some influence from the temple made the countryside around it more fertile was simply the sort of thing you can expect when you please the Lord. Eight hundred miles or so northwest of Jerusalem, the Greeks of the same era would have said exactly the same thing about what happens when you make the proper offerings to Demeter, and any other religious center in the ancient world that made use of the temple tradition, no matter what god or goddess was worshipped there, would have had something similar to say.
Ancient religions, as noted in chapter 4, had a very different relation to the facts of life than the prophetic religions that mostly replaced them. The deities of the old Pagan faiths were expected to do things in this world for their worshippers, and their worship was entirely integrated with the fabric of everyday life. The temple tradition shared this same immersion in the ordinary—and this turned out to be the most important factor in the tradition’s eventual disappearance. When the fabric of everyday life was shredded by traumatic change, many of the threads that had been woven into it vanished forever.
Two Shapes of Time
It’s very difficult for most people today to understand the crisis of confidence that swept the ancient world beginning in the second century BCE and the long trajectory of decline and fall that followed it. Our industrial civilization has an incurably optimistic attitude toward history, and most people in the modern world tend to think that history always moves in the direction of progress. It’s almost unthinkable that a society could reach a relatively high level of civilization, stall out, and then gradually revert to barbarism—even though this has happened over and over again in the course of human history.
People in the ancient world didn’t share the modern faith in perpetual progress. There were two common ideas about the shape of history in ancient civilizations, one of which has a certain similarity to modern ideas about progress, while the other flatly contradicts it. The first of these ideas held that the universe began in chaos, but was gradually reduced to order by the mighty deeds of the gods and would stay that way forever. According to this view, in other words, something like progress had happened in the past, but once the proper order was established, that process came to an end. The future would be like the present, changing only in detail, and human affairs could be counted on to prosper so long as individuals and societies obeyed the laws handed down by the gods.
The other idea offered a bleak counterpoint to this confident vision. The Greek poet Hesiod, who lived toward the end of the eighth century BCE, was far from the only exponent of this view, but he was the most famous in the western half of Eurasia, and his account has now been in circulation in the western world for some twenty-seven centuries.166 In Hesiod’s harrowing vision, history began with a golden age in the distant past. In point of fact, the widespread fame of his great poem Works and Days, where his account appears, is the reason why people nowadays use the phrase “golden age” in the first place.
Each age that followed the golden age—the silver age, the bronze age, the age of heroes, and the iron age in which we live today—was worse than the age before it. Nor can things be expected to improve in the future. In due time, Hesiod warns, infants will be born with their hair already white from old age, the last traces of virtue and happiness will trickle away from humanity; shortly thereafter the human race will die out, and that will be the end of the story. Where the modern belief in progress imagines history as a road leading ever upward from the caves to the stars, and the vision of time mentioned earlier imagines it as a road leading out of chaos into a permanent steady state of stability and peace, Hesiod’s—and the visions of his equivalents elsewhere in the ancient world—imagined it as a road leading down from golden heights into darkness and silence forever.
One way to talk about what happened in the last centuries of the ancient world is that Hesiod’s view of history, which had been the opinion of a minority before that time, gradually became the view of the majority. There were valid reasons for the shift. For many centuries beforehand, in large parts of the ancient world, economic expansion had been the rule rather than the exception, and while civil rights and political liberty were still restricted to a minority, that minority became much larger than it had once been. More influential still in shaping the earlier optimism of the ancient world was the birth of philosophy. It’s a remarkable detail of history that China, India, and Greece all invented philosophy about the same time in the sixth century BCE. The extraordinary adventure of ancient philosophy led the intellectuals of that age to imagine a utopian future in which human affairs might be guided by reason and justice—and in which, of course, intellectuals would have a far more privileged position than they were used to.
Unfortunately for them, the philosophers of the ancient world, like so many intellectuals before and after them, proceeded to find out that it’s one thing to tell people how to manage their affairs in accordance with reason and quite another to get them to do it. Plato, the most famous of the Greek philosophers, was among those who learned that lesson the hard way. When he tried to encourage the dictator of the city-state of Syracuse to reform his government, he ended up being sold into slavery for his pains and had to be rescued by an admirer. Meanwhile the ancient world’s long age of economic growth came to an end as further expansion ran headlong into environmental limits, and increasingly bitter and destructive wars followed. When relative peace finally came, just before the beginning of the Common Era, it arrived at the point of a sword as the armies of three great empires—in the west, the Roman Empire; in India, the Maurya Empire; in China, the kingdom of Ch’in—swallowed one exhausted and bankrupt kingdom after another.
The ideologies of these empires drew heavily on the first of the two visions of history sketched out earlier. According to Rome’s propaganda, for example, just as Jupiter, the king of the gods, had beaten the unruly Titans into submission and established peace and good order in the universe, so Rome had done the same thing to the equally unruly peoples of the ancient world. In both cases, at least according to the propaganda, the resulting peace and good order would last forever.
That way of thinking about history was doubtless as comforting as it was convenient for the wealthy elites that prospered from the rule of the new empires. It was considerably less satisfactory for the rest of the population and especially for those toward the bottom of the social hierarchy who received few of the benefits of the imperial system and had to pay most of the costs. As each of these three great empires began the long slide downhill toward the dark age that followed, and the lot of the common people became increasingly unbearable, religious ideologies that rejected the imperial systems and everything they stood for began to spread through the crawlspaces of the ancient world.
The Revolt Against the Gods
It was at this point that the religious shift discussed in Chapter Four—the change from worshipping the old gods of nature to revering dead human beings—became a massive political fact. The way that this played out, though, took one path in the Roman west and the Chinese east and a very different path in India. In the Roman and Chinese worlds, the state religion was based on the worship of the old gods of nature, and the religions that became the focus of popular dissent—Christianity in the west and religious Taoism in the east—rejected the old gods. In India, by contrast, one of the new religions, Buddhism, had become the official faith of the Maurya empire, and so the popular revolt took the form of a return to the worship of the old Hindu gods and goddesses.
In all three cases, the resulting revolution had immense political as well as religious implications. The religious side of it was profound enough, to be sure. In China, the replacement of the old religion was so complete that archeologists studying the physical remains of the old faith—for example, painted silk banners from Han dynasty tombs, covered with the images of unknown gods and spirits—have been reduced to guesswork in an attempt to figure out what these relics might once have meant. In India, Buddhism was all but eliminated, and only the fact that missionaries had already established secure bases in countries outside India preserved Buddhist teachings and scriptures for the future.
The Roman west took a different path. There the imperial government began early on to try to co-opt the religious revolution by offering the disaffected an assortment of human beings to worship. The Roman emperors themselves were among the first beneficiaries of this strategy, and temples dedicated to various emperors duly sprang up across the Roman world. As the revolt against the gods gathered strength, though, the temple tradition in the classical world retained its old loyalties. Historians have noted that when the worship of Roman emperors as gods spread to Greece and the Greek-speaking nations of the eastern Mediterranean, temples built on the traditional colonnaded naos plan were used for emperor worship only when the emperor was paired with one of the Olympian gods, usually Zeus. When the emperor was worshipped by himself, or paired with Roma (the deified city of Rome) or some other human or abstract focus of worship, the temple was built to a different, nontraditional plan that lacks the core elements of the temple technology.167
Then, over the course of the fourth century CE, a series of Roman emperors desperate to shore up their power in the face of spiralling collapse first came to terms with Christianity, the strongest of the rising religions of the dispossessed, then made it the state religion of the empire, and finally outlawed all other religions. That political maneuver had an immense impact on the new faith, as a great deal of material from the older worship of the gods of nature found its way into Christian thought and practice. The intellectual borrowings mentioned in chapter 4, and in particular, the wholesale adoption of Neoplatonism as the philosophical basis for Christianity, were one result of this era of adoption, but there were also more pragmatic borrowings as well.
Many Christian churches built in the last century or so of the failing Empire, for example, made lavish use of spolia—literally “spoils” or “booty” stripped from demolished Pagan temples. Columns and the ornate capitals that topped them were especially common pieces of spolia.168 The enthusiastic use of architectural plunder may have played at least as important a role as the philosophical borrowings in getting some elements of the old temple tradition across the divide between Pagan and Christian faiths.
Incense was a more significant borrowing, not least since it seems to play an important role in the secret technology at the heart of the temple tradition. In the first three centuries of the Christian church, as already mentioned, incense was not used in Christian practice because of its powerful contemporary associations with the Jewish temple ritual, Pagan temple practices, and Roman emperor-worship.169 Once the new faith was legalized and brought under imperial protection, that changed rapidly. The writings of the Christian Neoplatonist author Dionysius the Areopagite, which date from around 500 CE, assume as a matter of course that churches were filled with incense smoke before the ceremony of the Eucharist.
While these transformations were taking place, the collapse of the Roman world shifted into overdrive. By the time Dionysius wrote his treatises, the empire had been divided into western and eastern halves, the western half had been overwhelmed by barbarian invaders, and the eastern half was scrambling for survival. Christianity in the eastern Empire had been wholly incorporated into the imperial system and was accordingly rejected by a growing fraction of the poor and dispossessed, who went looking for other religious options. A galaxy of alternative versions of Christianity, including the Nestorian church that transmitted the temple technology to Japan, were among the popular options, but the option that finally came out on top was Islam, which came surging out of the Arabian peninsula in the middle of the seventh century CE and conquered most of the eastern Empire in little more than fifty years.
Islam was far more uncompromising in its attitude toward the legacies of Paganism than the state Christianity of Constantine’s heirs had been. Across the Dar al-Islam—the portion of the world in which Islam became the dominant faith—Christianity and Judaism were permitted to survive, but the bulk of the population promptly converted to Islam, and mosques took the place of churches and temples in the religious life of communities. A mosque, as any devout Muslim can tell you, is not a temple. It’s a place where the Muslim community assembles to hear the Quran and pray to Allah, and the practices and design elements of the old temple tradition are not welcome there. Wherever Islam became established, accordingly, the ancient secret of the temple tradition seems to have died out completely.
It is a curious coincidence, if that’s all it is, that every part of the ancient world where Islam established itself became a desert over the centuries that followed. Many people today think of North Africa and the Middle East as deserts by definition, but as recently as Roman times, this wasn’t the case. The North African provinces that are now the nations of Libya and Tunisia, for example, were the most important grain growing areas in the Roman world and shipped millions of tons of wheat annually to other parts of the empire. In the same way, the great river valleys of Mesopotamia, in the modern nations of Syria and Iraq, were green and fertile not that many centuries ago.
Scholars of ecological history have tried to explain that transformation in many ways. The fourteenth-century Muslim scholar ibn Khaldun was one of the first to discuss the matter, pointing to the destruction of canal systems by nomadic tribes as the cause.170 Later theorists have talked about the impact of goat herding on fragile arid soils, soil salinization caused by irrigation practices, deforestation of highland areas, and many other factors. These things doubtless played a part, but all of them also took place along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe, and yet the same results did not happen there. It’s at least possible that the abandonment of the temple tradition and the secret technology at its core turned out to be one blow too many to an already fragile and damaged agricultural ecosystem, while the preservation of the same technology outside the Dar al-Islam allowed local agriculture to maintain itself despite other ecological problems.
The Celtic Connection
The western half of the Roman Empire, meanwhile, went its own way once the empire shattered and the barbarians swept in. To the conquerors of the west, Christianity wasn’t the official faith of a hated and despised ruling elite; it was part of the booty they had won at sword’s point, and literate Christian clergy proved to be useful to the warlords of the invading tribes once they settled down to rule the domains they had seized. The Christian church, for its part, was ready to meet the new rulers of the western world more than halfway, and the marriage of convenience between the church and barbarian kings generally ripened into close alliance once the kings and their families converted to the new religion.
Over the centuries that followed, Christianity in what had been the western half of the Roman Empire gradually drifted away from the version practiced in Byzantium and in those formerly Roman lands that had fallen under Muslim rule. The Catholic Church—as the western branch of the faith came to be called—was in its early days much more diverse and decentralized than the Orthodox Church of the east. So long as local congregations and their clergy kept within very broad doctrinal boundaries and acknowledged the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, they could get away with quite a bit of innovation. Among the transformations that slipped into the church as a result of this openness to innovation were the changes that brought the temple tradition into medieval churches across Europe.
The Celtic lands of far northwestern Europe were among the least regulated and most innovative areas of the Christian west, and Ireland was unruly and innovative even by the standards of the other Celtic nations. This is not surprising, since Ireland was also one of the very few corners of the post-
Roman world that received Christianity and classical culture without getting overrun by barbarians shortly thereafter. Protected by their isolation, Irish monasteries thrived straight through the fall of Rome and the years of chaos that followed, and when the era of barbarian invasions drew to a close, it was Irish monks who spread Latin culture through most of western Europe.171
They may have spread a heritage considerably older as well. As discussed in chapter 9, the builders of the mounds and standing stones of the megalithic era in northwestern Europe appear to have had some knowledge of the way that terrestrial electricity and magnetism can be used to improve agricultural yields. As one of the few parts of northwestern Europe that was never conquered by Rome and subjected to Roman culture, Ireland is known to have retained religious customs dating back to the Stone Age. The conversion of Ireland to Christianity, while it involved a certain amount of turmoil and violence, was considerably less traumatic than the equivalent transitions from Pagan to Christian religion elsewhere in the Roman world, and it has been suggested by reputable scholars that significant amounts of the Pagan priestly traditions of the Irish Druids found their way into the hands of Irish monks in the century or so after the conversion took place.
Celtic traditions in Ireland and elsewhere included something else that has already appeared in a different context in this book: the idea that something of great importance might be buried in an underground vault, awaiting the right moment for its recovery. Irish legends to this day portray some of the most famous mountains and hills in Ireland as “hollow hills,” inside which magical treasures are hidden away, and dozens of locations in Britain are pointed out as the place where King Arthur sleeps an enchanted sleep, waiting for the hour of his return.
Even more relevant is an extraordinary and little-noticed passage from The History of the Kings of Britain by the medieval Welsh author Geoffrey of Monmouth, written sometime before 1150.172 Geoffrey’s legendary history drew heavily on ancient Welsh lore about Arthur, Merlin, and a great many other figures of Celtic antiquity, and so it is more than a little startling to find what looks very much like a Masonic legend tucked away in his chronicle. According to Geoffrey, when King Lear of Shakespearean fame died, his daughter Cordelia buried him in an underground vault beneath the river Soar, a few miles downstream from the town of Leicester—and in that vault, the craftsmen of the town performed ritual activities once a year thereafter. The echo of Masonic legends about hidden vaults and secret ceremonies is fascinating, and it suggests that Masonic tradition may include scraps of lore from very old Celtic traditions.
In any case, the Irish church—and especially Irish monasteries—seem to have taken the lead in adapting the temple tradition to Christian use. Early churches in Ireland were basically large huts made of wood, wattle and daub (mud plaster over woven twigs), or stacked sod. By the seventh century, though, more impressive structures were being built. The Hisperica Famina, an Irish text of that period, describes a wooden church supported by heavy timbers with a central altar, a porch on the western side, and no fewer than four steeples.173 Stone churches followed soon thereafter, along with high stone crosses, the Christian equivalent of the standing stones of the megalithic era. By the tenth century, these were joined by the most distinctive and enigmatic of medieval Irish structures, the famous round towers.
There are sixty-eight of these remaining, some complete or nearly so, some reduced to stumps; there were probably many more in the past. Those that are intact stand between 70 and 100 feet tall, tapering gently as they rise, and most are topped by a conical roof. All but one has a door 10 feet or so above ground level. The interiors were made of wood, supported on stone offsets or corbels, and a stair zigzagged up the inside to the very top, where four windows looked out over the surrounding landscape.
The received wisdom about the round towers is that they were built as refuges against the Vikings. The problem with this often-repeated claim is that the round towers were useless as defensive structures: a few fire arrows in the wooden door, or shot through one of the windows into the wooden floors within, and the whole thing would go up like a rocket—as did in fact happen from time to time, according to Irish chronicles.174 They were not fortifications, then, and they weren’t bell towers, either—the technology of bell casting didn’t reach Ireland until long after most of the round towers were built. What was their purpose?
The answer has already been discussed in chapter 9: they served as a medium for the phenomenon at the heart of the temple tradition. The experiment with paramagnetism presented in that chapter actually came from investigations into agricultural effects observed around some of the surviving round towers, which shows what a hollow paramagnetic cylinder will do for plant growth. A standing stone generates the same effect, and it’s tempting to speculate that the first of the towers might have risen because some abbot in a corner of Ireland devoid of large stones, and familiar with fragments of Druid tradition, decided to use mortared stone to build an artificial standing stone on the grand scale.
Whatever the process that brought them into being, the round towers can best be seen as prototypes, the first very rough draft of what later became the lance carried before the Holy Grail, the soaring spires of the Gothic churches and cathedrals. Little enough remains of Irish monastic churches from the Dark Ages that it’s difficult to tell what other experiments may have been made in the monasteries of the Emerald Isle during those same years. As Irish scholarship, and a great many Irish monks as well, spread out over western Europe, those experiments that proved to be successful will have found their way to many other lands.
These discoveries, enriched by whatever lore might have survived in Ireland from Druid times and combined with scraps of the tradition recovered from Roman Pagan temples, played at least some role in bringing the ancient temple technology into use in medieval Christianity. What came from Ireland through monastic channels, though, appears to have been fragmentary, and another source of information was needed to complete the transfer of the ancient secret to the Christian west. The circumstances of its arrival include some of the most dramatic events in the history of the temple tradition.