The Temple Tradition
It has been an item of faith in Judaism since ancient times that the Jewish religion and its God are uniquely true, and whatever pertains to them is equally distinct from the religions of the world’s other peoples. Whether or not this is correct in a theological sense is an issue I don’t propose to explore here. For the purposes of this book, the relevant point is that in any historical or architectural sense, it’s hard to find anything about the Temple of Solomon, or its successive structures in the days of Zerubbabel and Herod, that was unique in any way. Quite the contrary, the Temple of Solomon was for all practical purposes just another temple of the national deity of another Levantine kingdom, and the structures that followed it were no more distinctive in their own times. The one thing that sets them apart is the traditional exclusion of all other deities from the Jewish Temple, and even that has counterparts elsewhere.
One of the many things that the Temple of Jerusalem has in common with other temples, though, is its legendary power to increase the fertility of crops and livestock. Far from being unique to Solomon’s structure, this claim appears wherever you find temples like the one in Jerusalem. Scholarship on temples repeats this point again and again. In his study of the Jerusalem Temple, to cite only one example, John M. Lundquist notes, “This [association of temples with agricultural fertility] is a universal idea among temple-building peoples, and relates to my observation that ‘The temple is associated with abundance and prosperity, indeed is perceived as the giver of these.’”34
It’s important to understand what’s being said here. Scholars of comparative religion not that many decades ago used to lump all faiths other than Christianity, Judaism, and Islam into the arbitrary category of “fertility religions,” and some traces of that attitude still linger in the holes and corners of the modern imagination. It’s true that many ancient religions placed a high value on the fertility of their fields and crops, but the same is true of modern Christianity—go to any church service next Sunday in any part of rural America that’s being hit by drought, for example, and you’re very likely indeed to hear the preacher and congregation alike praying to God with all their might for rain and a bountiful harvest.
What’s more, different religious traditions use different methods to ask the beings they worship for help with fertility. The “increase ceremonies” performed by Australian aborigines don’t have much in common with the prayers for rain in a Baptist church in Kansas, say, or with young couples making love in the fields to bring good crops—this used to be common practice in much of rural Europe—or, for that matter, with the sacrifices and prayers that were standard practice at the Temple of Solomon. Rather than some vague association between religion and fertility in general, in other words, what’s being discussed here is something much more concrete: a specific set of architectural design elements and ritual practices that consistently has a traditional reputation for improved harvests in nearby agricultural areas.
Nor do these parallels show up randomly at various places and times around the planet. The design elements and ritual practices under discussion can be traced from country to country and age to age, following the same channels of cultural transmission that brought many better documented
legacies from one age and people to another. Variations in design and practice appeared as the basic concepts moved from culture to culture, and some of these were then taken up elsewhere and modified in their turn. All in all, the spread of the patterns discussed here resembles nothing so much as the way that technical innovations such as the arch, steelmaking, or the printing press migrated around the world.
Thus we can speak of a temple tradition: a particular body of knowledge and practice that appears to relate to temples and their traditional effects on fertility. This tradition seems to have originated in prehistoric times and spread over much of the Old World, only to be abandoned in Europe and the Middle East for religious reasons, and then largely obscured throughout the world during the centuries of Europe’s political and cultural dominance over the rest of the planet. A thorough survey of the temple tradition would fill many volumes the size of this one. In this and the following chapter, I will be providing a very brief overview, focusing on those cultures and temple designs that are particularly well-documented and have had a significant impact on the tradition as a whole.
The survey that follows falls naturally into two parts. In this chapter, we’ll consider temples in what might best be called traditional religions—those faiths that had no one historical founder, but descend from the distant past. In the next, we’ll consider the transformations of the temple tradition in what can be called prophetic religions—those faiths that were founded by historical individuals. The Pagan faiths of ancient Egypt and classical Greece, as well as such surviving religions as Hinduism and Shinto, belong to the first category, while religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam belong to the second.
While the temple tradition, as a later chapter will show, seems to have its roots in prehistoric times, the oldest known civilization to practice it is that of ancient Egypt. Our survey, therefore, will begin on the banks of the Nile.
Egypt
When they encountered Egyptian culture in its twilight years, Greek and Roman writers remarked admiringly on the vast number of temples that stood on the banks of the Nile and the centrality of religion to Egyptian life. According to contemporary archeologists, they were not exaggerating. No other culture, ancient or modern, produced temples in such numbers, and the vast sacred precinct at Karnak, near Thebes in Upper Egypt, is still the single largest temple complex on the face of the planet.35
Traditionally, modern archeologists divide Egyptian temples into two classes—divine temples, dedicated to deities, and mortuary temples, dedicated to the honored dead. The relevance of the distinction has been challenged by some recent scholars, who note that the ancient Egyptians themselves drew no such distinction.36 Even granting the division, though, there is enormous diversity among Egyptian temples. During the more than three thousand years that ancient Egyptian civilization flourished, many different designs came and went. Only in the Middle Kingdom did something like standard patterns begin to emerge, and even those saw spectacular variations now and then as Egyptian history continued; see illustration on page 40.
In the later centuries of Egyptian history, however, it becomes possible to talk about a standard design for an Egyptian temple, especially when talking about the smaller sanctuaries of provincial towns and the shrines of the non-royal dead. These were rectangular stone structures, usually oriented so that their entrances faced the eastern horizon, with a series of courts and halls of increasing sanctity leading up to an innermost sacred space that functioned much like the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon.
The best way to envision an ancient Egyptian temple is to imagine following a festival procession from the world outside to the innermost sanctuary. As you approached the main entrance of the temple, the first thing you would encounter is the massive pylon gate, a soaring structure with four or more flagpoles rising against its face, bearing the fluttering banners that since earliest times were the ancient Egyptian emblem of divinity. Beyond the pylon gate you would enter an open courtyard called the peristyle court, surrounded by a pillared portico. This was open to ordinary worshippers during the many festivals of the Egyptian calendar, and many temples have hieroglyphic signs on pillars to mark the places where the rekhyet, the common people of Egypt, were supposed to stand.37
Further in, beyond the peristyle court, lay one or more hypostyle halls, broad roofed rooms with massive stone pillars supporting the roof, where the lesser priests and priestesses carried out their part in the temple rituals. Beyond that lay the innermost part of the temple, where only the senior priests and priestesses went: the sanctuary of the god or goddess, containing a consecrated image that filled roughly the same role in Egyptian religion that the Ark of the Covenant did among the Jews. This was very often surrounded by a series of side chapels dedicated to other deities, each with its own sacred image.
Animal sacrifice along the lines practiced at the Temple of Solomon had no part in traditional Egyptian religion. Instead, banquets were prepared in a kitchen outside the temple itself—bread, beef, poultry, onions, fruit, milk, beer, and wine, all the things that pharaohs and rekhyet alike loved to eat—and served to the deity as part of the regular temple service. Over the course of the day for that service, priests and priestesses treated the statue of the deity as servants treated a pharaoh: waking it in the morning, bathing it, dressing it, serving its meals, entertaining it with music and dancing, and managing the affairs of its household.
On occasion, especially during festivals, the image of the deity would be taken out of the sanctuary and placed in a traveling shrine to visit other deities or attend important ceremonies outside the temple complex. As boat travel on the Nile was the most common mode of transport in ancient Egypt, the traveling shrine usually looked like a model boat covered with gold and precious stones, with poles along the sides so it could be carried on the shoulders of priests. In these vehicles, the images of the gods would visit one another—the sacred image of the goddess Hathor at Dendera, for example, would travel every year to the temple of her husband, the god Horus, at Edfu, so that their lovemaking would bring fertility to the fields.38
These ritualized activities had little in common with the sacrifices and prayers offered to the God of Israel at the temple in Jerusalem. Nor, for that matter, did the exuberant diversity of the Egyptian pantheon or the elaborate Egyptian theory of personal immortality through mummification share much common ground with the very different religious traditions of the Jews. Thus it’s all the more intriguing that Egyptian temples shared so many design features in common with the Temple of Solomon and its successors—and, as already noted, the traditional conviction that the temple and the worship performed there would improve agricultural fertility.
There was one major exception to the pattern of Egyptian temple religion sketched out here, and that was the short-lived solar monotheism of Akhenaten, Egypt’s famous heretic pharaoh. As part of his attempted religious revolution, Akhenaten ordered the temples of all the traditional gods and goddesses of Egypt closed, desecrated, and in many cases demolished, and he replaced them with temples of a very different design—temples devoted to his sole god, the Aten or sun-disk. The temples of the Aten were basically large halls in which people gathered to pray to the Aten, without any of the ceremonies, offerings, or other activities that were part of the rich texture of traditional Egyptian faith. Later in this book, the same pattern—the transformation of religious architecture from a specially designed sacred space for making offerings to a hall used solely for communal prayer and readings from scriptures—will appear more than once. For the time being, it may be worth mentioning that one of the troubles that afflicted Egypt during the last years of Akhenaten’s reign, and helped bring his religious revolution to a sudden stop after his death, was widespread agricultural failure.
Mesopotamia
The broad valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in present-day Syria and Iraq, was called Mesopotamia—“the land between the rivers”—by the ancient Greeks, and it boasted civilizations as old as Egypt’s. Cities, writing, and the other foundations of civilized life emerged there about the same time they appeared on the banks of the Nile. The temple tradition discussed in this book, though, did not appear in Mesopotamia until it was brought there by the armies of Alexander the Great. The Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other peoples of the Tigris-Euphrates valley built lavish structures for their gods and goddesses, to be sure, but the core elements of the temple tradition shared by Egypt and ancient Israel did not appear there.
Mesopotamian temples were as diverse as religious structures in other cultures, but broadly speaking, there were two basic types.39 The most common type derived from palace architecture and, in fact, differed from the palaces of local kings only in minor details. There was no Holy of Holies in such a temple—in fact, it was a common practice for worshippers to be brought into the presence of the divine statue in the innermost chamber of the temple by priests or priestesses in exactly the same way that a king’s servant might bring a petitioner into the presence of the king.40
Less common than these palace-temples, but considerably more spectacular, were ziggurats, artificial mountains of mud brick with small temples on top. Most Mesopotamian cities had a single ziggurat, which was the residence of the city’s deity, for each city in the Land Between the Rivers had its own divine patron: Marduk, for example, was the patron god of Babylon, and the moon god Nanna was the patron of Ur.
The ziggurat and the temple atop it might face any direction. The vast ziggurat of Babylon faced south-southeast, for example, while that of Ur faced northeast.41 The temple itself was usually a single large room with an image of the god or goddess inside it. The linear structure of Jewish and Egyptian temples, moving inward along an east-west line from an outer door flanked with pillars or pylons to a Holy of Holies inside, does not appear in Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamian religion did have a strong focus on agricultural fertility, and the ziggurats played an important role in ceremonies relating to that purpose. As we’ll see, the ziggurat was at the center of a different tradition—more precisely, a different technology—which pursued the same goal as the temple tradition but used alternative methods to achieve it. This tradition seems to be older than the one at the heart of this book’s project, and as we’ll see, traces of it can be found in certain cultures over a remarkable fraction of the world.
Greece
Ancient Greece, by contrast, was in the mainstream of the temple tradition, which reached the Greek peninsula from Egypt in the seventh century BCE. Egypt was at that time experiencing the last flowering of its ancient culture. The pharaohs of the twenty-sixth dynasty, whose capital was at Sais in the Nile delta, presided over the systematic revival of old religious practices and temple cults, and sacred texts, such as the Book of the Dead, which had once been reserved for the political and religious elite, became accessible to any literate Egyptian. At the same time, Egypt needed trading partners and military allies against the rising powers of the Tigris-Euphrates basin farther east, and the Greek city-states were full of ambitious merchants and some of the toughest soldiers in the eastern Mediterranean. As trade increased and Greek mercenaries found steady work and good pay under the pharaohs, cultural exchanges blossomed, and the temple tradition was among the many things that crossed the sea to the isles and rocky peninsulas of Greece.
Before the arrival of the temple tradition, Greeks went to outdoor sanctuaries—the Greek word for such an outdoor place of worship was temenos—to sacrifice to their gods or simply made offerings at their homes or in other public places. Another set of religious customs, dating from very ancient times, focused on cairns—that is, heaps of loose stones marking pathways and boundaries, to which every passerby added another stone. Hermes, the god of travelers, merchants, and thieves, was originally the guardian spirit of the cairn.42 These cairns were later replaced by pillars of stone carved to resemble erect penises or schematic statues with the god’s head on top and an erect penis farther down.
By the eighth century BCE, as trade with the eastern Mediterranean coast brought new ideas and inspirations to the nascent city-states of the Greek peninsula, some Greek communities built simple temple structures made of wood and sun-dried brick, with thatched roofs, in established temenoi. As late as 600 BCE, the main temple at the important pilgrimage center of Olympia was built of these same humble materials. By that time, though, Egyptian architectural knowledge was becoming widespread, and the first stone temples were already rising elsewhere in Greece, as part of a general cultural flourishing that also kickstarted the rise of Greek philosophy and science.43
The temples that came out of this transformation took several forms, but the one relevant to our purposes is the naos, the classic Greek colonnaded temple. The naos was reserved for a handful of divinities; of the 142 Greek naoi whose presiding god or goddess is known, 90 belonged to just 5 deities—Apollo, Athena, Zeus, Artemis, and Hera—with Apollo accounting for no fewer than 29.44 Sparta, the most conservative of the Greek city-states, never built a naos at all, and even in Athens, where naoi were common, one of the city’s holiest shrines—the Erechtheum—was built to a completely different design.
There seems to have been a specific logic behind the religious attributions of naoi, which is anything but irrelevant to the theme of this book. Four of the five deities just listed have significant connections to the religious dimension of Greek agriculture: Athena was the goddess of the olive groves, Zeus ruled the sky and thus the rains that made the grain flourish, Artemis governed the fertility of animals, and Hera governed human fertility among other things. The reason that Apollo was patron of so many naoi is less clear, but his role as god of reason and the sun suggests that he may have been seen as the patron of the temple tradition itself.
The diversity of temple types in ancient Greece was in large part a consequence of the disunity and diversity of classical Greek culture. The unification of the Greek peninsula and the expansion of Greek culture across the eastern Mediterranean world in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great changed that dramatically, leading to a standardization in favor of the naos design. When Greek ideas were spread across the Mediterranean world and western Europe under the aegis of the Roman Empire, the naos became the standard form of temple over a vast geographical region. At the peak of the naos’ popularity, around the beginning of the Common Era, temples built to this pattern could be found across the ancient world from Britain to southern Egypt and from Morocco to Afghanistan, the widest geographical expansion of any single outgrowth of the temple tradition.
Whether or not it was a naos, each Greek temple—and each temple built in the Greek style, whether it stood in Roman Britain or in the Greek-
influenced kingdoms of the Silk Road far to the east—stood within a temenos, surrounded by a wall, and the entrances were flanked by vessels of water for purification. Very often—especially in rural temples, or in the shrines of deities associated with the natural world—the precinct was full of trees and other vegetation that was sacrilege to cut down. Toward the center was the naos itself, usually but not always oriented with its main door facing some point on the eastern horizon; see illustration on page 48.
Every naos differed from every other, but the diagram shows the most common general layout. The columns around the exterior support the roof, which extends well out from the inner building. The front porch gave access to the inner building; the back porch was a place where people assembled to listen to poetry, music, and the like—Herodotus is supposed to have read his Histories aloud to an audience for the first time from the back porch of the temple of Zeus at Olympia.45 Inside the inner building was the main statue of the deity facing the door, anything up to several dozen incense burners, and a table on which barley cakes and other bloodless offerings were placed—animal sacrifices, which were as central to ancient Greek religion as they were to the worship at the Temple of Solomon, always took place outside the temple at an altar under the open sky, just as they did in Jerusalem. Inside there might also be statues of other deities, votive gifts, and works of art lining the walls, but these were of less importance to the temple and its cult than the main statue.
Some Greek temples included spaces set apart where ordinary worshippers did not go—close equivalents, in other words, to the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon. The Greek term for such a space was adyton, literally “not to be entered.” In some cases the adyton of a temple can be identified in the ruins—it was fairly common to have an inner room behind the main statue of the deity, for example, while other temples had underground crypts reached by stairways.
One thing the Greeks didn’t borrow from Egypt was the linear structuring of space by which processions toward the inmost part of the temple moved through progressively more sacred zones—an arrangement the Egyptian temples shared, as we’ve seen, with the Temple in Jerusalem. The more egalitarian ethos of Greek culture required a less structured approach to sacred space. As already noted, every temple was surrounded by a temenos, a sacred enclosure of the kind that had been used before the first temples were built. Worshippers ritually purified themselves with clean water before entering the temenos.
Individuals who were considered impure for one reason or another were not allowed to enter. Most of these impurities had nothing to do with moral issues; women who had just given birth, for example, were not supposed to enter a temple precinct until some days had passed and a ceremonial cleansing had been performed. Once inside the temenos, though, the entire temple and its surroundings were open to the public, except for an adyton if there was one.
The relationship between the temple and agricultural fertility in ancient Greek religion was nuanced, but very important. As already noted, many of the principal Greek gods related directly to some part of the agricultural economy—thus Zeus ruled the life-giving rain, Demeter the soil, Athena the olive groves, Bacchus the vineyards, Artemis the forests, and Pan the uplands where sheep and goats grazed. Many of the religious festivals in the ancient Greek year celebrated events in the agricultural cycle.46 Then there were the Mysteries, which deserve special attention in terms of this book’s investigation.
The ancient Greek Mysteries were secret initiatory ceremonies in honor of deities closely linked to the soil and the agricultural cycle. The most famous were celebrated every autumn in Eleusis, a small town close to Athens, but there were many others. Some were celebrated all over the ancient Greek world, others were local rites unknown outside of a single town or rural district.47 It has been noted by many writers down through the years that the Mysteries filled roughly the same role in Greek society that Freemasonry fills in the modern Western world, though there was one consistent difference: unlike Freemasonry, initiation into the Greek Mysteries was open to women as well as men.
Exactly what was taught and enacted in the Greek Mysteries remains almost completely unknown. One Gnostic writer states that the central act of the Eleusinian Mysteries was the reaping of a single stalk of grain in perfect silence. Of the Mysteries of the Great Mother we know a little more, thanks to a description in On the Gods and the World by Sallust, a Pagan writer of the fourth century CE.48 In these Mysteries, which were celebrated at the time of the spring equinox, initiates fasted and dressed in mourning garments to commemorate the death of the god Attis, then made incisions of some kind in a tree, then drank milk, and finally donned festive garments and crowns to celebrate Attis’s resurrection. Sallust explains these events in terms of his own austere Neoplatonist philosophy; what might have been taught to the initiates in the ritual itself remains, in every sense of the word, a mystery.
The Greek Mysteries were not associated with naoi. Some were celebrated in private homes, others had their own ceremonial buildings. At Eleusis, the Telesterion (hall of initiation) was a vast structure that could hold several thousand people at a time. In the center was a stone building, the Anaktoron, resting on an outcropping of unworked rock. It was quite literally the Holy of Holies of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and into it only the Hierophant, the high priest of those Mysteries, was allowed to go. The Telesterion itself faces southeast, toward the midwinter sunrise, though the Mysteries themselves were celebrated near the autumn equinox, and none of the surviving records explain the divergence.
During the nocturnal ceremony that completed the process of initiation at Eleusis, the Telesterion blazed with light so brilliant that the illumination from its clerestory windows could be seen from many miles away.49 Most modern scholars assume without evidence that the “great light” that appeared at the climax of the Mysteries must have been merely torches or a bonfire, but it’s at least remarkable that there should be so close a parallel with the light or fire that blazed mysteriously in the Temple of Solomon on certain occasions.
India
The temple tradition found its way to India somewhat after it reached Greece; estimates vary, but a date around 500 CE for the first classic Hindu temples would fit the evidence well. The Vedas, immense collections of ancient hymns and ritual texts, are the oldest strata of Hindu religious teaching, dating from sometime before 1000 BCE, and according to their testimony, the gods were worshipped at that time on a fire altar in a sacred open-air enclosure not unlike a Greek temenos. Though the Vedas are still honored wherever the gods and goddesses of the Hindu faith are worshipped, the old open-air enclosure has long since been replaced in most uses by the mandira, the classic Hindu temple (see illustration on page 52), which combines the exuberant richness of India’s architectural and artistic heritage with a set of elements that will be familiar already to readers of this book.50
As with temples and other religious buildings everywhere, mandira vary significantly from place to place in India and throughout the Hindu diaspora. There are important regional differences, and the creativity of individual architects and builders also plays a part. In general, though, a mandira is surrounded by a low wall, with an open space between wall and temple all the way around to allow the practice of the Hindu rite of circumambulation—that is, walking clockwise around a holy place as a sign of reverence. The main entrance through the wall is often marked by an arch supported on pillars, and richly carved; outside it will be a pool where worshippers can cleanse their hands and feet in fresh water.
Inside there will usually be one or more courtyards, each entered by its own ornate arch. Farther in, beyond a veranda, is at least one mandapa (pillared hall) where worshippers gather and sacred dances and hymns are performed. Beyond the innermost mandapa is the garbhagrha, the innermost shrine or Holy of Holies, where the deity of the temple is believed to be present. Around the garbhagrha is a passage allowing devotees to circumambulate in the immediate presence of the god or goddess, but the garbhagrha itself is entered only by a single opening, and only the presiding priest is permitted to go there. Above the garbhagrha, finally, stands the most visible dimension of the mandira—the shikhara, a stone tower or symbolic mountain covered in ornate carvings.
While scholars trying to figure out how Egyptian and Greek temples were designed and laid out have to rely on guesswork, fragmentary records, and the ambivalent results of archeology, the mandira is quite another matter. Hinduism is very much a living tradition, with countless temples in use today. What’s more, detailed writings, the Shilpa Shastras, cover every detail of the process of setting out and building a temple, from the selection of the site to the final consecration of the sacred images.51 According to these documents, once the site is selected, the ground is cleared, seeds are planted on it and allowed to grow through an annual cycle to determine if the soil is of sufficient quality, because a temple can only be built on fertile ground—a more direct indication of the link between temples and agricultural fertility is hard to imagine.
Then the ground is smoothed, a pole set up in the center, and its shadow is used to determine the cardinal directions. From this center, using ropes and stakes, a complex geometrical pattern is laid out by the master builder, and the mandira rises on the foundations defined by the plan. Most mandira are aligned with all the gates and arches on a straight line from the door of the garbhagrha—the same arrangement we have already seen in Jerusalem and Egypt and will see again in other expressions of the temple tradition.52
Animal sacrifice was once an important element of Hindu worship but has been set aside by nearly all of the many traditions of the faith. Instead, as in ancient Egyptian temples, food is prepared and placed before the deity of the temple as a banquet, then taken away and consumed by priests and worshippers as an act of communion with the deity. Requirements of personal purity that are more or less parallel with those that surrounded Greek temples, or for that matter the Temple of Solomon, can also be found in Hindu practice—as, of course, can the traditional link between temple worship and agricultural fertility.
China
With China, as with Mesopotamia, we come to a radically different style of temple with its own distinctive traditions of orientation and design. Since very ancient times, Chinese temples have been built according to the pattern of the traditional Chinese house, a walled compound with the door facing south and the most important rooms on the north side.53 For well over two thousand years, this indigenous pattern has remained dominant across the entire lively spectrum of Chinese religion to such an extent that Buddhist temples in China have the same form as the temples of clan ancestors or traditional Chinese gods.
A Chinese temple is a facility for offering prayers and incense to one or more holy beings, a broad category that can include deities, Buddhist saints, clan ancestors, and revered figures of the past, such as Confucius. Any religious group too poor to afford a temple simply has a large incense burner that is kept in the house of one of the members and brought out for ceremonies, which can be held in any convenient space. There is no Holy of Holies in a Chinese temple—in fact, it is not uncommon for less prominent temples, which are only used for occasional festivals, to have a very poor family living there for want of better shelter, so the deity’s altar and incense burner share the space with household goods and the family chickens.54
The Chinese temple was just as central to the traditional Chinese community as its equivalents were to the communities of other cultures, but these social and religious functions were not combined, as elsewhere, with the agricultural dimension explored in this book. Worshippers at Chinese temples prayed for good harvests, to be sure, as religious people do in every agricultural society, but the concept of the temple as a generator and amplifier of the productivity of farms and fields does not seem to be found there. The logical conclusion is that the temple tradition central to this book’s inquiry was not present in the formative periods of Chinese religion, and it seems to have left few traces on Chinese soil.
What does appear in traditional Chinese religion is another kind of sacred space that serves a function closely related to the temple tradition. Before the Communist takeover in 1949, every community in China had—apart from temples for locally revered deities, temples for clan ancestors, Buddhist temples, and the officially mandated civil temple for Confucius and the leading figures in Confucian philosophy—an outdoor altar for the gods of land and grain. This was in a courtyard of its own and consisted of a square, raised area of pounded earth, reached by a flight of three or more steps. At the center of the altar a stone pillar was buried in the packed earth so that its rounded upper end protruded from the ground. Worshippers approached this altar from the east and faced west while performing the rites that guaranteed agricultural fertility.55
The altar for the gods of land and grain resembles nothing so much as a miniature version of the Mesopotamian ziggurat, with a standing stone at the center. As we’ll see later on, there are good reasons to think that the altar and the ziggurat are independent developments out of the same prehistoric tradition, shaped by the very different religious and cultural patterns of China and Mesopotamia respectively. The Chinese version also incorporates a standing stone, which has been used in other parts of the world as a focus for fertility ceremonies. The reasons for this focus will become clear when we turn to the technology behind the tradition.
Southeast Asia
East of India and south of China, the diverse nations of Southeast Asia have enriched their indigenous traditions with influences borrowed from one or both of their mighty neighbors. Where Chinese influence predominated, as in Vietnam, the temple tradition discussed in this book left few if any traces. Where India’s cultural heritage has been a major influence, on the other hand, temples built in some variant of the Hindu form are common, and some of these are among the most spectacular buildings ever to embody the temple tradition.
The temples of the ancient Khmer capital of Angkor, in what is now Cambodia, are a case in point. Angkor Wat, the largest of the temples of old Angkor, was built in the early twelfth century CE when the Khmer state religion was a blend of Hinduism and traditional Khmer beliefs. It is among the largest and most elaborate expressions of the Hindu version of the temple tradition ever attempted. Like temples all over India, it was carefully oriented to the compass points, with the route from the innermost sanctuary to the outermost gate running, as usual, straight along the main axis from east to west, and lavishly ornamented stone galleries around the sanctuary to allow for the ritual of circumambulation. Above the innermost garbhagrha rises a soaring stone shikhara, visible for miles around. The geometries and proportions of the great structure are so precise that a recent study of Angkor Wat has been able to decode the symbolism of the entire temple complex on purely mathematical grounds.56
The other temples of old Angkor are laid out to a similar plan, if not on so lavish a scale. The reflections of Hindu temple architecture are precise enough that it’s clear that at least one of the Shilpa Shastras came east across the Bay of Bengal along with other aspects of Hindu tradition. In the century following the building of Angkor Wat, however, the Khmer people converted to Buddhism, and the temple tradition lapsed not long after, only to be replaced by the very different religious architecture of the Buddhist tradition.
Some sense of the change can be seen today in the innermost sanctuary of Angkor Wat, which was walled off on three sides once the local religion changed from Hinduism to Buddhism. A tall stone statue of the Buddha stands before each of the sealed doorways. On the fourth, while the doorway remains open, another statue stands in the way, blocking whatever fertilizing influences might once have flowed from the Holy of Holies down the axis of the temple.57
Korea
Located just east of China and well within the Chinese sphere of cultural and political influence, Korea absorbed Buddhist and Confucian traditions from its huge neighbor but has also retained a rich indigenous tradition of village rites and folk shamanism.58 Korean Buddhist and Confucian temples thus resemble their equivalents in China, and like them, lack any of the distinctive signs of the temple tradition. It’s in the village rites and sacred spaces that traces of an archaic fertility magic appear, and as in China, these derive from the older tradition found also in Mesopotamia—but with elements we’ve already seen in a surprising place.
Traditionally, each Korean village has a s˘onang, or guardian deity, who dwells in a shrine at the entrance to the village or on a hillside nearby. The s˘onangdang or s˘onang shrine is either a cairn of stones, a tree with a rope tied loosely around it, or a combination of the two. Villagers offer food and wine to the s˘onang at specific dates in the Korean lunar calendar. A more routine form of veneration is practiced whenever a villager passes the s˘onangdang: adding a stone to the cairn—the same rite as in ancient Greece—or tying a bit of cord around the tree.
The ancient Greek parallels aren’t limited to s˘onangdangs. Stone phalluses rise from the ground all over rural Korea; some have faces carved on them and look for all the world like ancient Greek herms. Their positions are chosen by traditional geomancers in order to influence the subtle currents of energy that, according to Korean geomantic lore, flow through the soil and can bring fertility to the fields if managed correctly.59
Japan
Like Korea, Japan lies within China’s sphere of influence and combines traditions imported from the Asian mainland with its own unique cultural forms. Surprisingly, though, Japan received the temple tradition in something close to its standard form. In the religious structures of the indigenous Japanese religion of Shinto, so much of the temple tradition remains intact that it comprises one of the most extensive surviving bodies of information relevant to the subject of this book.
The explanation for this curious fact is simple if surprising. Until the ninth century CE, Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion, had few sacred buildings, and those served mostly as storehouses for sacred properties. Worship normally took place either in ordinary homes and public places or outdoor enclosures in places of traditional sanctity—identical, for all practical purposes, to the temenoi of early Greece or the sacred enclosures of Vedic India. These holy places were set apart from the profane world by rice-straw ropes hung with strips of cloth or shide—strips of rice paper folded in a zigzag pattern that look, to Western eyes, remarkably like stylized lightning bolts.
The straw ropes and zigzag shide can still be seen at every Shinto holy place in Japan, and so can many of the practices once performed within the sacred precincts that were marked out in that way. Starting in the sixth century CE, though, Shinto came to share space in the Japanese religious consciousness with Buddhism, which was imported from Korea at that time. After a brief period of religious conflict, partisans of the two religions worked out a compromise that allowed room for both.
The ninth century CE saw a new influence arrive: esoteric Buddhism, enriched with a lavish heritage of ritualistic, meditative, and magical practices from Buddhist schools in India and China. Two major schools, the Shingon and Tendai sects, were responsible for introducing esoteric Buddhism to Japan. Both were founded by Japanese monks who traveled to China and, as noted in the next chapter, both these monks had access to the temple tradition by way of a remarkable chain of connections. An important difference distinguished the esoteric schools from earlier forms of Japanese Buddhism: where the earlier schools by and large held Shinto at arm’s length, the esoteric schools actively pursued alliances with the traditional faith and brought Shinto deities and practices into their own traditions.
This habit of creative borrowing had been a core element of esoteric Buddhism from its earliest days. Historians of religion have traced certain Japanese esoteric Buddhist practices back through this route to surprising sources: for example, the goma fire-offering ritual practiced by Shingon and Tendai priests was originally practiced by the Zoroastrians of Persia, borrowed from them by early esoteric Buddhists and passed from there all the way to Japan.
The temple tradition seems to have made much the same journey. As we have seen, it was received and elaborated in India early on and thus would have been available to esoteric Buddhist scholars and mystics from the beginning. For reasons to be explored in the next chapter, Buddhist practice had few points of contact with the temple tradition and the important philosophical and spiritual differences with the religions that preserved it, and so the tradition found only a few tentative expressions in Japanese Buddhist architecture. Shinto was another matter. Over the course of the ninth century, many art forms borrowed from esoteric Buddhist sources found a home in Shinto, and at the same time structures clearly modeled on the traditions explored in this book began to appear at Shinto holy sites.60 Ironically, the Japanese word for these sacred structures—jinja—is normally translated “shrine” in English, while the word “temple” is reserved for Buddhist structures that have little in common with the temple tradition this book discusses.
Shinto architecture is extremely diverse, drawing on local architectural forms and fitting closely to the local landscape, so it’s difficult to define any single pattern or geometry. A remarkable custom has kept that diversity fixed in place: until recently, most important Shinto shrines were rebuilt every few decades, but the new shrine building was a precise copy of the old one, raised next to it—the few shrines that are still regularly rebuilt have two sets of foundations set side by side, and the location of the actual shrine alternates from one to the other with each rebuilding. That said, the floorplan shown on page 60 is a more or less approximate fit to the layout of many Shinto shrines. As so often in the temple tradition, the usual design elements remain standard, but the details of their relationship go through an assortment of changes.
one common style of torii,
the ceremonial gateway to a shinto shrine
Approaching a Shinto shrine, the first thing the visitor encounters is one or more torii—two pillars joined at the top by an elaborate superstructure, forming a gateway.61 In most cases, the outermost torii marks the formal entrance to the shrine grounds, which are normally full of greenery—in urban or suburban shrines, this typically takes the form of a formal garden, while rural shrines are generally surrounded by native forest. The route that worshippers follow from the outermost torii to the shrine doors sometimes runs straight along the axis of the shrine, but in a great many cases it deliberately avoids doing so because the line that extends from the heart of the shrine straight out to the outermost torii is sacred; its Japanese name is seichu, and worshippers are permitted to cross it but should never walk along it or stand upon it. For this reason, many of the more important shrines have two routes extending from the main doors—a wandering route taken by human beings, and another route that runs dead straight along the seichu until it ends at a river or the sea.
At the main doors of the shrine, worshippers ceremonially cleanse their hands and mouths in clean water before entering or addressing the kami, the gods and goddesses of Shinto. Under ordinary circumstances, worshippers at a Shinto shrine simply pray at the outer door, make an offering of money in the offertory box, and go on their way. During regular services and festivals at a shrine of any size, however, as many worshippers as will fit inside proceed to the outermost room of the shrine, the haiden (hall of worship). This is where the public ceremonies of the shrine take place.
Further in, usually separated from the haiden by a passage that may involve a flight of stairs, is the heiden (hall of offerings), where offerings are placed before the kami of the shrine. An ancient Egyptian who was suddenly transported to modern Japan would find this part of the worship completely familiar, as the offerings in most shrines consist of food and drink, which is placed before the kami and then taken away to be served to the priests and priestesses of the shrine, as well as respected members of the lay community.
Behind the heiden, finally, is the honden (inner sanctuary), which is forbidden to all but the most senior priests, and it serves the same function as the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon or its equivalent in other forms of the tradition. It contains one or more objects called goshintai, which are held to contain the tama (soul) of the kami who inhabit the shrine.62 Most of the time, the doors to the honden remain tightly shut; on special occasions, the doors may be opened or the goshintai may be taken out by the priests and placed in a traveling shrine to go out among the people—another detail of Shinto practice that an ancient Egyptian would have understood at once.
Not all Shinto shrines are large enough to have a full-time priest. There are many small neighborhood shrines that are open once a year on the date of a festival, though worshippers may pray privately there at any time. Smaller still are stones all but identical to ancient Greek herms, complete with phallic shape, which can be found in rural Japan by the thousands marking the route of old roads; farmers make offerings there to the local agricultural kami, who is usually but not always some form of the rice kami Inari.
As this may suggest, fertility plays a large role in Shinto thought and practice. Like the believers of every faith, worshippers at Shinto shrines have the normal human diversity of needs to bring into the presence of the divine, but agricultural fertility is a central theme in a vast number of Shinto rituals—more important in the overall scheme of the faith, perhaps, than any other factor beside the core Shinto concept of purification. Shrines dedicated to the rice kami Inari or to a galaxy of other agricultural kami are found in profusion all over Japan, and ceremonies meant to help bring bountiful harvests play a significant role at most Shinto shrines. The traditional Jewish belief that the Temple in Jerusalem made the fields bear abundant crops would cause no surprise at all among believers in Shinto; according to their tradition, that’s one of the most important things that shrines and shrine ceremonies are meant to do.
Africa
Africa, it bears remembering, is a continent, not a country, and traditional African religions are as richly complex and diverse as those of any of the world’s other continents. The sacred spaces that play a role in the religious lives of African peoples are just as diverse. Some traditional African religions make use of temples and other sacred buildings; others worship in sacred groves or at open-air altars; others worship primarily in the home.
One common thread to be found all throughout traditional African religions, though, is that these faiths experience the presence of the divine everywhere, not merely in sacred spaces. In his widely acclaimed book African Religion and Philosophy, John S. Mbiti notes:
Again we see that to African peoples, this is a deeply religious universe whether it is viewed in terms of time or space, and human life is a religious experience of that universe. So, African peoples find or attribute religious meaning to the whole of existence.63
This focus on the omnipresence of the divine means that spaces set apart for sacred use are relatively less important in traditional African religions than in many other faiths. To the African religious imagination, the divine is everywhere and can be worshipped in any setting.
Thus it may not be accidental that the temple tradition explored in this book seems to have left few lasting traces in traditional African religion. During the heyday of ancient Egypt, temples in the Egyptian style spread south along the Nile into the kingdom of Nubia, and the Ethiopian Christian church appears to have its own variant of the modified temple tradition that was adopted by other branches of Christianity. Other African cultures, as China did, maintained their own traditions of religious architecture and sacred space and made no use of the temple technology.
Native America
In the New World, finally, rich and complex temples with elaborate ceremonial uses emerged in the belt of urban civilizations that extended from the Mississippi Valley through Mexico and Central America to the Andes. Those traditions, though, have very little in common with the temple tradition central to this book. Surprisingly, they share a great deal of common ground with another tradition discussed briefly in an earlier section of this chapter: the older tradition found in Mesopotamia, which centered on the ziggurat.
The great religious structures of Native America, though they’re normally called pyramids by modern people, are actually ziggurats of the classic Mesopotamian type. Like the great ziggurat of Babylon and its many equivalents, they rise from the ground in a series of great steps, and a stairway allows ascent to the summit, where a temple is perched high above the ground. None of these features are found in the great Egyptian monuments from which pyramids take their name.
The “pyramids” of the Aztecs, Mayans, and other Mesoamerican people, the great earthen mounds of the so-called Mound Builder peoples of the Mississippi basin, and equivalent structures elsewhere in pre-Columbian North and South America all follow the Mesopotamian pattern, not the Egyptian one. It’s interesting to speculate whether the ziggurat tradition, as we may as well call it, got to the Americas somehow from the Old World, or whether it appeared as a result of independent invention by the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The first traces of it known so far are in the ruined settlements of the Olmecs, the New World’s first known urban civilization, dating from before 1000 BCE; this is well after the ziggurat tradition reached its full flowering in Mesopotamia, but well before the kind of maritime technology needed to cross the Atlantic seems to have been available.
What makes the traditions of the New World of central importance to the theme of this book is that a few of the old Mesoamerican ziggurats are still being used today by native peoples as places for activities meant to improve the fertility of their fields and crops. These traditions—along with experimental evidence collected by researchers into their practices—offer crucial insights into the nature of the ziggurat tradition, as well as the temple tradition central to this book. We’ll discuss that evidence in a later chapter.
34 Lundquist 2008, 76.
35 Wilkinson 2000, 154.
36 Haeny 1997, 86–90.
37 Bell 1997, 164–67.
38 Wilkinson 2000, 96.
39 Curatola 2006 provides a good overview.
40 King 1976, 210–16.
41 Curatola 2006, 212 and 266.
42 Burkert 1985, 156.
43 Spawforth 2006, 20–25. See Hahn 2001 for an overview of the cultural flowering that created the classical Greek naos.
44 Ibid., 98.
45 Spawforth 2006, 94.
46 Parke 1977 is a good introduction to the Greek ritual calendar.
47 Burkert 1985, 278–81.
48 Sallust 1976, 21–22.
49 See Plutarch 1937, 18–19.
50 Wangu 2009, 96–97.
51 Wangu 2009, 94–96.
52 Huyler 1999, 131.
53 Thompson 1975, 62–66.
54 DeGlopper 1974, 54.
55 Thompson 1975, 80–81.
56 Mannikka 1996.
57 Ibid., 14–17.
58 See Kim 1996 for a good overview.
59 Kim 1996, 168 and 184–85.
60 Kageyama 1973, 15–18.
61 The following description is based in part on Tsubaki America Shrine, Granite Falls, WA, where I attended ceremonies from 2002 to 2004. I am grateful to Rev. Koichi Barrish, chief priest of the shrine, for the opportunity to experience a surviving form of the temple tradition in its natural habitat.
62 Nelson 1996, 30.
63 Mbiti 1990, 73.