The Temple Technology
The puzzling traditions summarized in the first part of this book have been explained in many ways. Nearly always, though, they have been approached in isolation from one another. That temples all over the Old World share a common set of structural elements unrelated to their obvious function as places of worship; that these same structural elements crop up in Christian churches in the Middle Ages; that Masonic traditions dating back to the Middle Ages retain enigmatic scraps of lore related to those structural elements; that these elements and the temples that embody them are so constantly associated with the renewal of agricultural and ecological fertility; that this same theme of fertility also plays a central role in that most mysterious of medieval legends, the narrative of the Holy Grail: these points have been addressed piecemeal, not together, and the connections linking them have been dismissed as mere coincidence when they’ve been noticed at all.
The hypothesis at the heart of this book is that the connections between the themes just listed aren’t coincidences—that they point to an extraordinary and largely unsuspected reality. I propose, in fact, that ancient temples and medieval churches did exactly what the legends claimed they were able to do: they caused a significant increase in local agricultural and ecological productivity when they were built and operated according to certain principles.
The effects thus produced, furthermore, have nothing to do with magic or miracle. They were physical phenomena generated by physical forces that are most likely well known to today’s science, but they were put to work in ways that happen to be unfamiliar to us today. The principles, design features, and practices that generated and made use of these effects can best be understood as the elements of a technology that used relatively simple but carefully chosen means to produce surprising results. These means, taken together, comprise what this book will call the temple technology.
I’m aware that these are sweeping claims, and some of my readers will doubtless reject them out of hand. On the one hand, even in an age that’s used to wireless Internet service, a surprising number of people still have a hard time remembering that physical effects can radiate outward from a central point to affect an area surrounding it. The temple technology, if the hypothesis at the core of this book is correct, involves exactly such a physical effect, which is generated and broadcasted by structures built and operated according to specific principles. As we’ll see shortly, there are at least two known physical phenomena that influence agricultural fertility and are known to function in this way, so the basic concept is by no means impossible.
On the other hand, it’s unfashionable these days to suggest that ancient cultures could have made what contemporary society considers advanced scientific and technological discoveries, even when all the evidence points to that conclusion. What tends to be forgotten, amid all the cheerleading for today’s technology, is that people in ancient times might have lacked our current theoretical understanding of nature, but they were perfectly capable of noticing what worked and what didn’t, drawing rational conclusions on the basis of experience, and trying out new techniques to expand their ability to work with natural phenomena—even when their theories about the nature of those phenomena strike us as primitive or absurd.
One crucial difference between modern science and the lore of ancient societies needs to be kept in mind as we proceed. Our science is analytical: it takes apart every phenomenon into the factors that account for it, and repeats the process on the factors, until analysis finally stops with a small number of simple processes as the foundation beneath it all. That’s an extraordinarily powerful approach, but it’s a very recent one in historical terms.
The sciences of older societies were synthetic rather than analytical. Instead of taking phenomena apart, synthetic sciences put them together, treating similar effects in very different spheres of nature as though they were manifestations of a common pattern. This can be seen clearly in surviving ancient sciences such as feng shui, the traditional Chinese science of landscape and architectural placement. Some rules of feng shui relate to physical phenomena—for example, the rule that houses in the northern temperate zone should be built on south-facing slopes, so they will get as much sunlight as possible in the winter months. Some rules relate to psychological phenomena—for example, the rule that fences and other psychological barriers can be used to screen out unwanted influences. Others relate to cultural phenomena—for example, the rule that nothing relating to the traditional Chinese symbolism of death should have any place in houses for the living—and many others fuse these categories in ways that very often seem to make little sense to the modern mind.
To the practitioners of the old synthetic sciences, the tradition at the heart of this book was and is no mystery. Back in the fourth century CE, Iamblichus of Chalcis discussed standing stones and similar monuments in his famous work On the Mysteries, noting that “the erection of the phalli is a certain sign of prolific power, which, through this, is called forth to the generative energy of the world.”99 In the same way in the twentieth century, the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner advised gardeners to plant vegetables in raised beds, because any piece of ground raised above the ordinary level of the soil attracted a subtle influence that resulted in increased vitality and growth of plants.100
Both of these pieces of advice are echoed in important expressions of the temple tradition. Still, the question that occurs first to the modern mind—what causes these reported effects?—is a question that the old synthetic sciences are poorly equipped to answer. Lacking the concept of an analytical science, it never occurred to people in ancient societies to try to pick apart the complex phenomena of nature to figure out exactly how they worked. What often gets forgotten, though, is that the lack of analytical science did not prevent them from getting remarkable results by careful observation and experiment.
There are plenty of examples. One that’s relevant to the present case is the process by which modern food crops were bred out of ancestral wild plants. The grains that provide most of humanity’s food today all descend from various species of wild grass, all of which provide fewer grains and far less food value than their cultivated descendants. Scientists exploring the way that wild grasses became domesticated grains have tracked the process by which ancient farmers brought about that transition, using selective breeding and hybridization to encourage traits they wanted in their crops and get rid of traits they didn’t want.
What makes this especially interesting is that the scientific basis behind their activities wasn’t figured out until the late nineteenth century, when Gregor Mendel carried out the epochal experiments with pea blossoms that founded the science of genetics. Thousands of years before, though, farmers and breeders had figured out through trial and error and careful observation how to make use of the unknown laws of genetics to reshape plants and animals to meet human needs.
In the same way, the founders of the temple technology, lacking scientific knowledge of the laws of nature that made the technology function, were still able to use the same skills of observation and experiment to get equally remarkable results. They had no idea what forces they were using, and since the very existence of the temple technology has remained unnoticed and unsuspected by contemporary scientists, the specific forces used by the temple technology can’t yet be identified with any kind of certainty. Some branches of recent scientific research, however, suggest two likely candidates: two forces well known to today’s physicists have known positive effects on agricultural fertility, and which can act over the modest distances that separated, say, an ancient Greek temple or a medieval church from the surrounding fields.
Terrestrial Electricity and Magnetism
One possible medium by which the temple technology could have worked is the beneficial effect of weak electrical charges on plant growth, which was extensively researched and documented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century before chemical fertilizers came into widespread use. Professor Selim Lemström of the University of Helsingfors in Sweden carried out extensive experimental research on this effect and found that a weak electrical current applied to the soil, or an electrostatic field in the air, increased plant growth by an average of 40 percent.101
Electroculture, as this effect came to be called, became widely known in the decades that followed—enough so that in the early twentieth century how-to manuals meant to teach farmers about electrical appliances routinely included a chapter about electroculture among discussions of electric irrigation pumps and automatic milking machines.102 Only with the arrival of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, marketed relentlessly by the chemical industry, did electroculture drop out of use, becoming one of many orphan technologies that never had the chance to fulfill their early promise.
More recently, John Burke and Kaj Halberg have spent many years documenting connections between ancient religious sites, terrestrial electricity, and food crops.103 Burke’s background as an inventor in the agricultural technology field brought him into contact with intriguing research into the effects of electric charges on seeds. When seeds are exposed to a strong electrical field before planting, the plants that grow from them are consistently more productive and more resistant to stress than seeds of the same kind that don’t get the same treatment. That was an interesting data point and nothing more until Burke realized that certain kinds of ancient monuments are well designed to produce exactly the sort of electrical field that will provide the electron-shower treatment.
At Tikal, one of the great ruined cities of the Maya, local farmers still take their seed corn and beans to the top of one of the surviving pyramids, leave them there for the duration of a ceremony, and then take them back down for planting.104 The custom was apparently common throughout the ancient Mayan world; the old Mayan name for their pyramids, in fact, translates literally into English as “corn mountain.”105 Similar customs are reported from all over the world and, in particular, wherever holy places take the shape of ziggurats or raised mounds. For reasons of simple physics, such structures attract electrical fields from the ground and sky that are strong enough to provide seeds with the necessary stimulus.
Some places, due to a galaxy of complex geological and physical reasons, are better suited to this effect than others. Burke and Halberg found that far more often than not, important sacred sites where some form of the electrical-charge treatment seems to have been used are located atop conductivity discontinuities in the Earth: places, that is, where the flow of natural electricity through the ground is disrupted. A mound, pyramid, or raised platform placed over such a discontinuity will generate a much stronger electrical field than the same structure located somewhere else.
How did ancient peoples, without the benefit of advanced technological equipment, locate these spots? This is, in some ways, the most fascinating dimension of Burke and Halberg’s research. A significant fraction of people, they have pointed out, are sensitive to electrical and magnetic fields and can perceive them directly. Research carried out over many decades by Canadian researcher Michael Persinger, in fact, has shown that many experimental subjects exposed to a pulsing magnetic field begin to hallucinate, and a much larger fraction experience less dramatic changes in consciousness.106 The fields Persinger used were considerably stronger than those that appear in most places on the Earth’s surface, but quite a range of factors can concentrate electric and magnetic fields in specific places, to the point that effects of the sort Persinger found become possible.
Terrestrial electricity thus apparently provides a straightforward explanation of the ziggurat tradition discussed in Chapter Three, as found in Mesopotamia, China, and the New World. Whether or not this is the only thing ziggurats and the rituals associated with them were meant to do is another matter. One of the consequences of the synthetic approach to knowledge pursued in ancient times is that many different factors can feed into any one practice or tradition, since the intellectual tools needed to tease out different causal mechanisms hadn’t been devised yet. Much more research needs to be done, and traditional customs surrounding the “corn mountains” of the Maya and Chinese earth altars carefully studied, before any but the most tentative conclusions can be drawn.
The temple tradition at the center of this book’s inquiry is less easy to link directly to the specific use of terrestrial electricity explored by Burke and Halberg. Electroculture, the use of electrostatic charges to enhance plant growth directly, is another matter. If ancient temples were located in places where terrestrial electricity builds up relatively strong charges, as their research suggests, the lore surrounding the Temple of Solomon takes on a new and remarkable meaning. The lore cited in Chapter Two, boiled down to its basics, claims that streams of water flowed out from a hidden spring underneath the Temple Mount to fertilize the countryside, and that the presence of the Temple caused changes in the weather near Jerusalem.
These claims make perfect sense if they’re understood as fragmentary memories of the lost temple technology. The Jews who passed on these stories knew no more about the physical forces behind the temple tradition than any other ancient people; they knew, at most, that something flowed out from beneath the temple and brought unexpected fertility to fields along the routes of flow. They had no way of knowing that the currents they could track though their effects on greenery were currents of terrestrial electricity, not of water. To dwellers in a dry land, the thought that there must somehow be underground streams associated with the burgeoning of the fields would have been an obvious guess.
In the same way, a strong electrostatic charge built up on high ground attracts corresponding electrostatic charges in the atmosphere, making lightning more likely. Top the high ground with a stone building with plenty of metal on it, and two huge brass pillars in front of it, and the effect will be considerably amplified. In arid countries, thunderstorms are welcomed for the rain they bring—it’s no accident that many of the thunder gods of cultures in the world’s arid belts are also gods of fertility—and Jewish scholars in the centuries immediately following the destruction of the Temple, when folk memories of the change in the weather were still keen, would have had reason to note down the change in the frequency of storms.
It’s entirely possible that some of the specific weather effects those scholars recorded, such as the torrential downpours in the time before the First Temple and the rains brought by the south wind during the era when the Temples stood, were the product of natural climate change rather than results of the temple technology. That’s one of the drawbacks of research into the old synthetic sciences: it’s often impossible to tell, without extensive research, when some detail included in the traditional lore is there for reasons of raw coincidence. In this case as in many others, and for reasons that will be explored later in this chapter, any attempt to carry out that research faces significant challenges.
Low-Frequency Infrared Radiation
More speculative but potentially just as relevant to the temple technology are the discoveries of entomologist Philip S. Callahan, whose pioneering studies of the effect of infrared radiation on insects and plants offer glimpses of an otherwise unexplored realm of ecological interactions. Callahan served as a radio technician during the Second World War before embarking on a scientific career studying insects, and his background in radio engineering enabled him to recognize something about night-flying moths that other researchers had missed: their antennae pick up radiation in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum where microwaves and infrared light overlap.107
To make sense of his discovery and its implications, it’s necessary to know at least a little about electromagnetic waves. The crucial point is that the only difference between radio waves, microwaves, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays, and gamma rays is their wavelengths—quite literally, the distance the waves cover between one peak and the next as they move past at the speed of light. Radio waves from an AM station can have wavelengths of half a mile; wavelengths from an FM station have a much shorter wavelength, around a yard; the waves a microwave oven uses to cook with have wavelengths around five inches, and so on up the scale to gamma rays, which have wavelengths less than a millionth of an inch. Wavelength has nothing to do with how far an electromagnetic wave can travel—a gamma ray with a wavelength of a half millionth of an inch can travel from one end of the galaxy to the other if it doesn’t run into anything en route—but waves of different wavelengths have different effects on matter, including the matter that makes up living things.
The retinas of your eyes, for example, contain cells full of compounds that are sensitive to a narrow band of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation—the wavelengths we call “light.” Other wavelengths a little shorter or longer than light don’t make the compounds in your retinas react, and so you can’t see them. What Callahan discovered is that the antennae of many insects can sense electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths around a thousandth of an inch long, on the border between microwave and infrared radiation. He showed that certain species of moths will come from miles around to an antenna radiating these wavelengths, and slight shifts in wavelengths change the way the moths behave—for example, when certain wavelengths are broadcast, male moths of a particular species frantically attempt to mate with the antenna.108
Further experiments showed that the interactions between insects and electromagnetic radiation in the microwave-infrared region of the spectrum are even more complex than Callahan originally guessed. Most insects, like most other living things, emit pheromones—chemical signals that can be smelled by other members of the same species and influence their behavior—and the pheromones of most species of moths, like those of many other insects, have a remarkable property: under certain conditions, they glow in very precise wavelengths in the microwave and infrared part of the spectrum.
A great many organic compounds will do the same thing at one wavelength or another. The laser in your computer’s DVD drive works that way: a trickle of electricity flowing through a laser diode makes an organic compound in the diode give off light at a single frequency. What Callahan found is that under natural conditions, moth pheromones do exactly the same thing, absorbing energy from the background radiation of the night sky and releasing it in the form of infrared beacons at specific wavelengths that other moths can pick up with their antennae.109
Moth antennae can sense infrared and microwaves because they have very fine spines called sensilla, too small to be seen without a microscope, which are covered with a layer of wax. Their shapes and the wax coating allows them to function very efficiently as what physicists call dielectric antennas.110 What Callahan noticed, as he pursued his research, is that insects are not the only living things that have wax-covered spines well suited to function as dielectric antennas. Nearly all plants have equivalent spines, called trichomes, and nearly all plants emit aromatic compounds that absorb energy from various sources and release it in specific wavelengths at various points on the electromagnetic spectrum.
All this offers a glimpse into a dimension of nature that human beings, with our narrow senses, can never experience firsthand. Imagine a meadow at night. In place of darkness, the air is filled with shimmering veils of color—not just the narrow range of colors our eyes can see, but a spectrum many times broader, as complex and nuanced as scent. Every insect flying through the night air and every plant in and around the meadow is attuned to the dance of colors through their sensilla or trichomes, and each of them contributes to the spectacle by emitting pheromones and aromatic compounds that glow when stimulated by movement, sound, or the background radiation from the night sky. Millions of years of evolution have tuned each species to perceive those wavelengths that matter most to them. Each type of moth, for example, catches the gleam that means a fertile mate of its own species is near, and each species of plant reacts to the presence of parasites by producing protective compounds—and the parasites, in turn, sense the protective compounds and zero in on those plants that produce them least effectively.
Now imagine a structure set up to influence this unseen realm using a technology evolved over thousands of years of trial and error methods. A building is set up in a carefully chosen location where a strong charge of terrestrial electricity builds up due to the shape of the terrain and the presence of conductivity discontinuities in the ground. Incense is burnt to fill the air inside the structure with a complex mix of volatile aromatic compounds that absorb certain infrared wavelengths and radiate others. Movement, sound, and background radiation—the same things that stimulate infrared emissions from insect pheromones and aromatic compounds from plants—produce similar effects inside and around the structure, saturating the local environment with a distinctive set of infrared wavelengths. What effect would this have on nearby plants, insects, and ecosystems? Nobody knows, because the research that would be needed to answer these questions has never been done.
That, ultimately, is the central challenge that will have to be faced to make sense of the temple tradition. The research that would be needed to track down the effect at the heart of the temple technology is well within the reach of today’s science. It would be a relatively straightforward research project, for example, to use currently available technology to check for unusual electrical charges and infrared radiation in and around surviving temples and temple ruins. The difficulty is that while this would be easy to do, it wouldn’t be cheap; the equipment that would be necessary is complex and expensive, and many hours of fieldwork would be needed to do even the most elementary research. Nor is this a branch of study that the scientific mainstream is by and large interested in exploring, or funding.
The Dragon Project
Some measure of the challenges involved in any such research project can be found by paying attention to the one really sustained attempt to carry out a similar investigation, Britain’s Dragon Project.111 Beginning in 1977 under this label, a network of volunteers invested their own time and money to carry out a program of scientific research at a number of stone circles and other megalithic sites in northwestern Europe. Their focus differed significantly from the more orthodox archeological research at the same places: they were attempting to follow up on reports of puzzling energy effects surrounding these ancient sacred spaces.
There was (and is) no shortage of such reports. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have experienced what felt like an electric shock when touching ancient standing stones. Strange magnetic phenomena, such as dramatic deflections of compasses, have been reported from these sites at least as often, and there were also scattered reports of unusual effects involving high-frequency sound waves and electromagnetic radiation around ancient sites. Anecdotal evidence of this kind proves nothing, at least in the eyes of contemporary science, but it very often points out subjects worth researching. That was exactly what happened in this case, with one difference: the institutions that have the funding, staff, and equipment to carry out the research weren’t interested, and so the volunteer staff of the Dragon Project were left to pursue their investigation with their own resources.
The Project’s findings were fascinating but ultimately inconclusive. Strange ultrasound phenomena, sharp swings in the terrestrial magnetic field, and unexplained interference with radio signals were all detected around the Rollright Stones, the site most closely studied by Dragon Project investigators.112 Other sites, though they received much less attention due to lack of funding, also showed remarkably odd phenomena: there are several standing stones in Britain, for example, that reliably cause compass needles to swing round at sharp angles to their normal alignment.113 Due to a lack of funds and staff, though, it was never possible to maintain a constant record of ultrasonic, magnetic, and electromagnetic effects—or even any one of these—at any one site for an extended period. Such research as the Project was able to carry out was constantly hampered by difficulties with equipment that a very modest research grant would have prevented.
Research grants, however, aren’t generally available for investigations of the kind the Dragon Project was trying to carry out. Nor are they likely to be available for research into the temple technology this book attempts to sketch out. I’ve already mentioned the common modern prejudice against any suggestion that ancient peoples might have known anything that we don’t. For a variety of complex historical reasons, the scientific community these days is even more deeply committed to that prejudice than public opinion in general. While that prejudice endures, a great many interesting and potentially useful legacies from the old synthetic sciences will go unnoticed or remain in the hands of the few people willing to ignore today’s dogmas and explore the old sciences on their own terms.
There is at least one other major difficulty that any such exploration will have to overcome, though. For all of its ancient and medieval history, the temple technology explored in this book has been closely associated with religion. One of the chief reasons why the scientific community these days is hostile to investigations like those carried out by the Dragon Project, not to mention those that would be necessary to confirm or challenge the hypothesis at the center of this book, is the widespread scientific antipathy to religion. Nor can religious institutions be expected to welcome such investigations with open arms, for reasons that unfold from the same unfortunate and unproductive rift between the sciences and the world’s religious traditions.
Religion and the Temple Technology
One of the least useful consequences of the secularizing fever of modern times is the habit of trying to redefine religion as something other than what it is: the body of traditional teachings and practices through which human beings relate to those transcendent powers that we may as well call “divine.” It’s unfashionable these days to notice that a great many human beings have had, and continue to have, experiences that they describe as interactions with such powers by way of the teachings and practices just mentioned, and so scholars in a baker’s dozen of disciplines and more have busied themselves coming up with other things that religion must “really” be about. Suggest that some dimension of religious practice has practical results in some other aspect of human life and it’s tolerably common for people to take the practical results as the real point, purpose, and meaning of religion.
Thus it’s probably necessary to say in so many words that the temple technology is not the real point, purpose, and meaning of religion. It’s one set of design elements and practices, particularly beneficial to agricultural societies, that were adopted into the toolkit of certain religions and embodied in some religious buildings. The members of many other religions, and in some cases other branches of the same religions, have carried on equally devout religious lives without reference to the temple tradition.
Perhaps the best way to think of the temple technology in its religious context is to compare it to religious music or some similar art or craft. Many religions accompany their ceremonies with music of some sort, and in some, musical accompaniment is an essential part of worship. It’s quite common for religious buildings to be adapted in various ways for the sake of music, whether this involves finding a place for an electric organ or a choir or the use of far-reaching design features that shape the acoustic properties of the entire building. At the same time, the fact that hymns are sung and organs played in many churches does not prove that churches exist to provide venues for musical performances.
In exactly the same sense, the traditions explored by this book have historically been put into practice in a religious context by priests, monks, and other religious professionals and incorporated into certain aspects of religious life. Nonetheless they remain, like religious music, one part of the much broader phenomenon that is religion as a whole. Just as certain aspects of religious music can be found across a remarkably broad range of faiths, in turn, the traditions studied in this book can be traced in a great many religious traditions of past and present, leaping straight across even the most profound differences in theology and practice; just as all religious music has to conform to the laws of acoustics, equally, the temple technology may be understood in various ways in different religious traditions but must ultimately conform to the laws of physics, biology, and ecology.
It’s probably also necessary to discuss here the relationship between the temple technology and recent disputes in the field of religious architecture. Many of the ideas that have been fashionable among church architects over the last century or so have come in for heavy criticism of late, and it’s fair to say that much of that criticism is well justified. During the course of the twentieth century, modernist and postmodernist architects threw out traditional principles of religious architecture as often as they could get away with it, and the resulting buildings were hailed as innovative, daring, exciting, and so on through the avant-garde’s litany of praise.
Now, with the benefit of a few decades of hindsight and experience, other terms generally come to mind: dated, dismal, dysfunctional, and just plain ugly. Architectural critics such as Michael S. Rose have anatomized the failures and the implicit agendas that left so many congregations in America and Europe burdened with aesthetically bleak and spiritually barren structures that look more like high school gymnasiums or third-rate shopping malls than holy places.114 In response, revivals of older and arguably more fitting traditions of religious building are under way in many faith communities.
All this is relevant to the state of religious architecture and of religion, more generally, in today’s world. Once again, though, the temple tradition and the technology at its heart is something distinct from the issues these arguments have addressed. Many churches built after the temple technology dropped out of use are still beautiful and fitting places of worship. In the same way, a vast number of religious structures built for the use of faith communities that never encountered the temple tradition are still appropriate and beautiful sacred spaces.
The design features necessary to the functioning of the temple technology, in other words, are distinct from esthetic or religious fitness, though they’re not contradictory to either of these things. The temple technology itself is something distinct from, though not opposed to, religion: a way of directing physical forces to improve crop yields that was once wielded by the clergy of many faiths but has been forgotten in modern times. While that technology seems to have been originally developed by priesthoods in ancient times and put to work in the context of religious buildings all through its heyday, it is an open question whether a revival of the temple tradition will take place under religious auspices or not—and that question will be decided, as it should be, by the clergy and congregations of each faith community.
99 Iamblichus 1984, 53.
100 Steiner 1974, 68.
101 Lemström 1904, 10; see the detailed results in the pages following.
102 See, for example, Allen 1922.
103 Burke and Halberg 2005 is a good summary of their work for general audiences.
104 Burke and Halberg 2005, 39–45.
105 Ibid., 43–44.
106 Persinger and Lafreniere 1977; see also Burke and Halberg 2005, 25–28.
107 Callahan’s research on insect communication and the infrared spectrum has been published in more than two dozen papers in peer-reviewed journals; see Callahan 1975, 229–234 for a list of papers. I have cited his book for the general public here, as it is considerably more accessible to those readers who don’t have access to a well-stocked research library.
108 Callahan 1975, 69–90.
109 Ibid., 163–178.
110 Ibid., 96–100.
111 Devereux 1990 is an accessible survey of the Dragon Project’s results.
112 Devereux 1990, 69–94.
113 See, for example, Devereux 1990, 96–99.
114 Rose 2001 is a good example of this literature.