The Recovery of the Grail
If the hypothesis at the core of this book is correct, something like seven thousand years ago, people in several parts of the world began to notice that certain kinds of structures they built had beneficial effects on the crops that sustained their lives. As the generations passed, and people in different regions interacted and shared knowledge, a body of traditional lore slowly evolved, guiding the priests and priestesses of ancient tribes in activities that made use of those effects for the good of their communities. The result of this long, uncertain, and haphazard process of evolution was the emergence of what I’ve called the temple tradition, a set of architectural design features and apparently ceremonial practices that harness certain natural forces to improve harvests in the surrounding region.
The Temple of Solomon was only one of many ancient structures that drew on the temple tradition to benefit the people who worshipped there. Once Christianity became the established religion of post-Roman Europe, though, Solomon’s building became the one ancient temple that could be linked symbolically to Christian churches without risking accusations of heresy, and so for many centuries, it served as the archetype of the temple in the imagination of the western world. This may have been one reason why the order that apparently spearheaded the recovery of the temple tradition in western Europe during the Middle Ages, the Knights Templar, placed the Temple of Solomon at the center of its collective identity. It may also have inspired the last custodians of the temple tradition in Europe, the Freemasons, to see themselves as the heirs of Solomon and the rebuilders of the Temple—and to retain that sense of identity even after the secrets they once preserved were lost.
Outside the western world, of course, different influences prevailed and different factors shaped the rise and fall of the temple tradition. It’s entirely possible that even today, despite all the convulsions of recent centuries and the wholesale destruction and abandonment of ancient traditions, there are Hindu temples in India or Shinto shrines in Japan that preserve documents or oral teachings relevant to the temple technology. It’s even possible that similar knowledge lingers in some corner of Europe, perhaps preserved in neglected documents in one of the European languages that few scholars can read.
Some chance discovery someday might provide the missing pieces of the temple technology and make it possible to go beyond the limited evidence and the speculative hypotheses I’ve been able to gather in this book. Until and unless that happens, though, all that remains of a forgotten technology millennia old—a secret that many people once considered sacred enough to justify risking their lives—is an assortment of enigmatic traditions and fragmentary lore, some of it preserved by rote within Masonic lodges, much more scattered far and wide in the history of architecture, the folklore of many lands, and the obscure and poorly researched areas of science where physics influences biology and ecology.
If the story of the temple tradition ended there, it would be a melancholy tale indeed. In today’s troubled, overpopulated, environmentally unstable world, a set of principles and practices that could increase vegetative growth using simple, natural, readily available means would be an extraordinary asset. Improved harvests would be only one of the many possible benefits. The effects of the temple technology on the natural environment might be even more important, especially at a time when so many ecosystems are under strain from climate change. The old custom of surrounding a temple or a church with a grove of trees or other natural vegetation takes on a new importance when it’s remembered just how much carbon dioxide healthy, thriving trees can take out of the atmosphere and bind in their tissues. Even so, if the story ends at the point to which I’ve traced it, if the temple tradition and the secret technology at its heart have passed beyond any hope of recovery, all those possibilities went whistling down the wind forever when the last heir of the Knights Templar who knew the secret took it with him to his grave.
But the story of the temple tradition need not end there. Though the thread of the tradition in the western world snapped more than three centuries ago and the knowledge that once made it work apparently survives only in hints and fragments, it may still be possible to reconstruct enough of the temple technology to revive it.
Seeking the Holy Grail
At first glance, any such project poses immense challenges. If the hypothesis at the heart of this book is correct, after all, the temple technology most likely produced a complex cascade of effects that influenced crop fertility in ways that contemporary science has yet to duplicate. While there’s no reason to assume that the forces behind those effects are unknown to today’s physicists, research into the ways that electric and magnetic fields and low-frequency infrared radiation affect living systems hasn’t been a priority for scientific research. A great deal of original research would have to be done and some very large blank spaces would have to be filled in to make sense of the temple technology if, in fact, these are the forces that mediate it—and because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence, it’s only a guess that these were the specific energies involved.
Given a great deal of grant money and the support of capable research teams, this could still probably be done. To begin with, the sort of research carried out on a shoestring by the Dragon Project researchers described in Chapter Six would have to be applied on a much larger and more comprehensive scale to surviving temples that are likely to retain important elements of the old tradition—structures in India and Japan sacred to agricultural deities, for example. If unexpected energy effects were detected, controlled trials could be used to see whether and how those energies influenced crop growth, while further research in and around temples might sort out some of the variables involved, place the temple tradition on a sound theoretical basis, and enable further work to proceed from there.
Possibility is one thing, of course, and probability is something else again. I would be astonished, to use no stronger word, if any research program of the sort just outlined got serious consideration, much less the funding and personnel that would be needed to do the thing properly. A galaxy of prejudices stand in the way of any such attempt. The modern conviction that people in ancient times couldn’t possibly have known anything we don’t know today remains strong. So does the distaste, very common among scientists, for religion and everything that might possibly be connected to it. In the historically Christian countries of Europe, the Americas, and Australasia, for that matter, most scientists who don’t share that distaste for religion belong to mainstream faiths and have their own reasons for discomfort with a tradition historically connected to Pagan faiths and heretical religious ideas.
I would be delighted, in other words, if a major research laboratory were to set out to try to put the hypothesis at the center of this book to experimental test. For that matter, it would be cause for celebration if something as simple and relatively inexpensive as modern ground-penetrating radar were to be used on the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey and Rosslyn Chapel to find out once and for all if there’s anything to the traditional claims of buried vaults in the vicinity. I don’t expect either of those things to happen, not until and unless there’s a profound shift in attitudes toward the past and a new openness to the possibility that ancient peoples might just possibly have stumbled across a discovery or two that we haven’t made yet. Fortunately, the sort of research project just outlined isn’t the only possibility that exists.
The thing that brings a revival of the temple technology within reach is precisely the same thing that made its rediscovery so difficult: it doesn’t look anything like the kind of technology we use today. Its tools were those of ancient architecture and religion, not those of modern physics and biology, or for that matter modern agriculture. A technology that was based on the movement of natural energies through the landscape, amplified by structures of stone and wood laid out according to precise geometries and carefully positioned relative to the Earth’s magnetic field, and stirred into activity by some combination of sound waves and volatile organic compounds in an enclosed airspace is so alien to modern expectations that it has been far too easy for people not to notice that it was a technology at all.
That disadvantage, though, is balanced by an even more important advantage. The old temple technology required no expensive laboratory equipment, no highly refined materials, and no energy supply beyond the one the Earth naturally receives every day from the sun. The people who discovered it in ancient times did so using their five unaided senses and simple methods of recordkeeping to track changes in the world around them. Those who reassembled it from scattered fragments in medieval Europe had no better tools to work with. In both cases, the tools they had were adequate to the task, and it’s worth suggesting that the same tools could do the job once again, even in the difficult conditions of the present.
Asking the Right Questions
There are at least two directions a search for the lost technology of the temple tradition might take, and they’re both equally valid—and equally necessary. The first is documentary research. This book has attempted to carry out a first reconnaissance of a forgotten landscape of ideas, drawing on the limited scholarly resources available to me in the handful of languages I can read. Meanwhile, all through those countries where the temple tradition once flourished, ancient religious texts, myths and legends, collections of folklore, and scholarly works of various kinds sit in libraries I have not had the opportunity to visit, and some of them could well contain pieces of information that could be of crucial importance in reconstructing the temple technology.
Like the quest for the Holy Grail, the search for scraps of lore concerning the temple tradition is very largely a matter of knowing enough to ask the right questions in the right places and times. When modern readers encounter passages in old texts talking about how this building or that ritual made the crops flourish, the normal reaction is to treat such statements as superstitious nonsense or, at best, a storyteller’s whimsy. This is the way that the temple tradition as a whole has been approached for centuries now, and just as in the Grail legends, those who forgot to ask questions about what they encountered wound up right back in the Waste Land where they started.
The alternative is to take seriously the possibility that any given item of folklore or mythological reference dealing with agricultural fertility might have some basis in physics, botany, ecology, or the interactions among them. In some cases the basis is obvious. An old tradition among my wife’s Welsh ancestors, for example, had it that a little bowl of milk should always be left outside the back door at night for the Tylwyth Teg, the faeries of traditional Welsh folklore, who would then bless the house and the fields around it with good luck. Factor in the earthy realities of rural Welsh life in which rats and mice were major agricultural pests and cats were among their main predators, and the benefits of a habit that would encourage cats to frequent one’s property after dark are not exactly hard to work out.
The same logic applies on a much larger scale. In Shinto, for example, a great many items of lore make practical sense when the ecological context of traditional Japanese agriculture is kept in mind. The taboos that placed sacred groves and entire mountains off limits to logging and farming, for example, were not randomly applied; studies have shown that many of these sacred spaces were precisely located to control erosion and aid in the absorption of rainfall into groundwater.206 Similar logic seems to have guided the location of sacred groves in many other societies, ancient Greece among them.207
The same logic applied to a different set of effects can govern inquiries into folklore, mythology, and religious teachings relevant to the temple tradition. All through the lands the temple tradition reached, customs, beliefs, practices, and stories can be found that relate temples and temple worship to agricultural fertility. The survey of the temple technology in the second part of this book gives a very rough, tentative, and preliminary sketch of what might be accomplished by work of this kind. More extensive explorations of the same general type could quite conceivably turn up a body of data substantial enough that the temple technology could be reconstructed—and there remains the tantalizing possibility that somewhere there might still survive a written account of the technology complete and detailed enough to allow a working temple to be built and tested on that basis alone.
Even without some such document, it may be possible to follow the example of the unknown discoverers of the temple technology and work out the requirements of the temple effect by sheer trial and error. Enough is known about some of the better documented structures that used the temple technology—Shinto shrines, Hindu temples, western European churches between the Crusades and the Reformation, and so on—that it’s entirely possible today to locate, orient, design, and construct a building to the traditional design, perform appropriate services inside, and keep track of any noticeable effects on plant growth around it. Alternatively, where temples built according to traditional rules still exist and function in something like their original manner, detailed study of gardens and fields nearby in comparison with others not so sited could provide crucial data.
For obvious reasons, either of these latter projects would need either the acquiescence or, better still, the active participation of clergy and congregations in one or more of the temple- or church-building faiths. Whether that would be forthcoming is a question that can’t be answered in advance, and will depend among many other things on how the theory proposed in this book is received by the various religious traditions in question.
Finding the Lost Word
One other institution, of course, is deeply concerned with the matters discussed in this book, and that is Freemasonry. If the hypothesis I’ve proposed is correct, the Lost Word—the original secret of the Craft, for which the current Master’s Word and the secrets of the Master Mason’s degree conferred today are substitutes—was a symbolic key that explained the secret technology at the heart of the temple tradition. Knowing the Lost Word, the master builders of the Middle Ages were able to site, orient, design, and build churches that made effective use of that technology for the benefit of their communities.
Exactly what form the Word might have taken in medieval operative lodges is anyone’s guess today. It’s possible that once the details of the medieval European form of the temple technology are better understood, some puzzling word or neglected symbol in medieval documents will suddenly make unexpected sense, and the Lost Word will be restored to the Craft. It’s just as possible that whatever symbolic key the operative masons of the past used to communicate their secret will remain lost forever, even after the secret itself has been revealed.
What does all this imply for the present and future of Freemasonry? Certainly it takes away nothing from the reputation of the Craft if the secret that it once guarded was an ancient technology of immense benefit to all, which was woven into the structure of some of the greatest architectural creations of our species. Though the secret was lost, generations of Masons have devoted their best efforts to its recovery. While their quests for the Lost Word often went tolerably veering off in strange directions, a great deal of good has come out of their labors: from Masonic hospitals and benevolent institutions, through quieter and more personal acts of charity, to the simple efforts of millions of men who have been inspired by the moral teachings of Masonry to lead better lives. None of that is erased or rendered irrelevant if the original secret of the operative Craft was something that was beneficial to human life in a very different way.
Even if future discoveries prove beyond a doubt that the temple tradition as I’ve outlined it was the secret communicated by the old operative lodges, modern Freemasonry is not the operative Craft, and its commitments remain what they have been for the last three hundred years. To the Grand Lodges that govern contemporary Freemasonry, whose central task is the preservation of the currently accepted landmarks of the Craft, this book and any future discoveries it may inspire can be at most a matter of historical interest. Most Masons will very likely treat it the same way, and it’s entirely appropriate that they should do so. All things considered, the ancient temple technology is no more necessarily relevant to modern Masons than the right way to build an arch or a pillar out of freestone.
That said, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hope that some Freemasons who share an interest in the relics and traditions of the operative Craft will be inspired to join in the search for the Lost Word that once made the fields flourish. In the same spirit, I hope that at least a few believers and clergy in those religions that once made use of the temple tradition, and perhaps still preserve remnants of the old lore, will be inspired to search the scriptures, teachings, and practices of their faiths for traditions that might bear on the temple technology, and that at least a few people with the scientific background needed to make sense of the data—whether or not they share either the Masonic or the religious commitments just mentioned—will contribute their talents to the search.
According to Sir Thomas Malory’s version of the story, when the quest for the Holy Grail began, “every knight took the way that liked him best.”208 It remains good advice for seekers after the Grail that has partly been unveiled in this book, not least because no one knows which of the available routes is most likely to lead to the discoveries that could heal the Waste Lands of the modern industrial world. I can only hope that the fragmentary evidence I have been able to gather in this book will be helpful in that quest.