Location and Orientation
A mystery thus stands at the heart of the ancient temple technology. Exactly what set of physical effects causes the enhanced agricultural fertility that temple-building cultures expected from their temples remains unknown for the time being. It might have been something related to terrestrial electricity, or to the complex realm of ecological interactions between plants, insects, volatile organic compounds, and low-frequency infrared radiation. It might also have been something else entirely, and until a great deal of research is done, the question remains open.
There is at least one other way of exploring the subject, though. The builders of ancient temples and medieval churches didn’t have access to electrostatic voltmeters, infrared-sensitive CCD cameras, and the like. They got the effects they did with hand tools and natural materials. Whether or not the cause of the temple effect can be identified, at least some of the methods that were used to generate the effect can be learned from the remains of the temple tradition itself. The next four chapters will sum up some of what can be learned from that source.
One of the basic rules of the old temple tradition is that not every place was suited for a temple. Legends in every culture that participated in the tradition tell of holy places whose sites were revealed directly by God or the gods through all the usual means of religious folklore: here a god or an angel is said to have pointed out the proper location to an awed worshipper; there the oxen pulling a cart full of sacred relics suddenly set out across country for three days and nights without stopping until they reached the proper place, from which they could not be budged once they arrived, and so on. Read any collection of local folklore in a place where the temple tradition flourished and you’re likely to find plenty of stories of the same kind.
The historical accuracy of these tales is beside the point. What they communicate in the usual symbolic language of myth and folktale is that the locations proper for important temples or churches are chosen by something other than mere human preference or convenience. The exact details of the ancient art of siting temples for maximum effect are mostly lost at this point, but it may be possible to recover some of them by a careful study of surviving sacred places, as discussed below.
Once the temple site is determined, its groundplan needs to be laid out in the right orientation. This is one of the few places where surviving documents, existing sacred places, and the fragmentary legacies embodied in Freemasonry all point toward the same body of knowledge with enough exactness that the principles can be worked out in detail. This, too, will be discussed below.
Finally, temples and churches built to make use of the effect at the heart of the temple tradition tend to have a distinctive set of surroundings, which can be found in one form or another across the entire geographical reach of the tradition. Here, too, it’s possible to put together enough knowledge from the temples that survive in different regions that a fairly complete idea of the principles can be obtained, and the last two sections of this chapter will explore what can be known or guessed about this aspect of the temple technology.
One crucial point to keep in mind as we proceed is that not every temple or church—not even among those built in times and places where the temple tradition was in full flower—made use of the full toolkit of the secret technology. The buildings that embodied the tradition were all primarily places of worship, and in places where people wanted and expected to worship but the necessary location, orientation, and surroundings weren’t available, a temple or a church went in anyway and served the needs of local worshippers without having any of the functions explored in the previous chapter.
This was especially true of temples and churches constructed in cities, where whatever rules of urban planning and land ownership might be in force took precedence over the secret knowledge of initiates and master builders. On the other hand, in rural areas where land was readily available, and especially at traditional holy places, as well as monasteries and other establishments that could be located wherever conditions were right, the full panoply of the temple tradition could be, and was, employed to good effect.
Location
One thing that makes it hard to work out the principles behind temple siting is that ideas concerning the proper location for temples vary significantly from one branch of the tradition to another. In Egypt, where the tradition seems to have begun, the standard practice was to build temples on low ground, close to the water table—the standard ritual for founding a temple included digging a trench in the ground until water began to seep into it. Many Egyptian temples are thus close to the Nile, with the red cliffs of the desert looming above them in the distance.
Hindu temples also tend to be on low ground near rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. As noted in an earlier chapter, the traditional rules for siting and laying out a Hindu temple have been carefully preserved and are still used today. Much of what is in these documents, known collectively as Shilpa Shastras, belongs to later chapters of this book, but each set of rules includes precise instructions for locating an appropriate site, including a simple but effective form of soil testing: seeds of various plants are sown on a proposed temple site and their growth observed through the following season.
The Temple of Jerusalem, as we have seen, was built according to a completely different principle: located on high ground, so far above the water table that complex underground structures had to be built to get water to the temple for ritual and practical needs. Temples in ancient Greece, similarly, were placed on high ground far more often than not. Ancient writings on the subject suggest that the reason was to make the temple visible from the countryside around it, partly as an encouragement to piety, partly for the sake of the sheer visual spectacle—even today the ruins of a colonnaded Greek temple against the Mediterranean sky are a stunning sight, and when the temples were in their prime and the white marble had not yet darkened with age,115 it must have been even more so. Still, there are good reasons to think that the choice may have been motivated by reasons unrelated to aesthetics.
The later forms of the tradition tended to combine these two approaches to location in various ways. Japan and Northern Europe, both of which inherited the temple tradition not much more than a millennium ago, are cases in point. It’s common in Shinto temples and medieval Christian churches alike to find both high ground and low ground used in a single religious complex. At the Fushimi Inari shrine on the southern outskirts of Kyoto, for example, the main shrine complex is at the foot of a sacred mountain, while the peak of the mountain—a thirty-minute hike along a path marked by hundreds of torii gates—is equally sacred and marked by a cairn of stones.116 Similarly, on the other side of Eurasia, the old pilgrimage center at Glastonbury in England features the ruins of the great abbey church on low ground not far from the foot of Glastonbury Tor, the highest hill for many miles around, while the peak of the Tor is occupied by the ruins of a chapel of St. Michael.
In the light of the hypothesis proposed in the previous chapter, all these variations make perfect sense. Ancient and medieval peoples, trying to make use of the effect at the heart of the temple tradition, had to contend with a galaxy of variables they had no way to measure. The electrical conductivity of the soil and stone underlying any given temple site was among these, and such variables as chemical composition and water content of the different layers beneath the surface play a role in determining this. Depending on local conditions and the fine details of temple design and practice, heights, low-lying places, or a mix of the two might get better results in any given region.
There may also be an unexpected meaning to the claim mentioned above that many especially sacred sites were revealed by deities or the like. Michael Persinger’s research, as noted in chapter 6, shows that magnetic fields can put some people into states of unordinary consciousness, with visionary experiences a common result. A place that had an unusually strong geomagnetic field would tend to produce similar effects in people who were sensitive to it, and the results filtered through the religious traditions and folk beliefs of the time would readily take the form of miracle stories. The role of such miracle stories in the traditional location of many temples and churches suggests that geomagnetism may well be one of the forces involved in the temple technology.
Orientation
One of the most consistent elements of the temple tradition is the orientation of the structure toward a specific direction, most commonly a point on the eastern skyline where the sun rises at least once over the course of the year. The word “orientation,” in fact, is a relic of this custom, as it literally means facing eastward: orient-ation. It can be traced all the way back to the fifth millennium BCE when the first long barrows of megalithic Britain were built; most of these have their entrances facing the rising sun.117
The same principle governs the majority of temples in the tradition, but not all. Most ancient Greek temples, for example, were oriented with their doors toward the sunrise, and the exact date of the sunrise in question was of as much importance as it would be in the later Christian tradition. Even within a single temple complex, different temples might be oriented toward the sunrise corresponding to a variety of festival dates. The temples and other structures atop the Acropolis in Athens, for example, have different orientations; the Erechtheum faces due east, but the Parthenon faces around ten degrees north of east, so that the sunrise shone through the Parthenon doors on the image of Athena at the time of the Panathenaic festival, which was around the middle of August in our calendar.118 Greek temples that faced some direction other than east generally had some way to let the light of the rising sun into the sanctuary. The temple of Apollo at Bassai, for example, has its door facing north, but an opening in the eastern wall allows sunlight to enter the temple’s innermost chamber at dawn.119
A similar blend of common themes with individual variations can be found in India and wherever else Hindu temples have been built. Most Hindu mandira are aligned on an east-west axis with the main entrance facing due east, just like the Temple of Solomon, so that the light of the rising sun at or near the equinoxes can shine through the entrance arches and doorways toward the garbhagrha, the innermost shrine of the deity.120 Most of the Shilpa Shastras, the documents which give rules for the construction of Hindu temples, include methods to determine the cardinal directions using the moving shadow of a vertical pole over the course of a day; from the intersection of the north-south and east-west axes, and using cords and stakes to trace lines on the ground, the rest of the temple design unfolds with mathematical exactness.
There are several exceptions to this habit of sunrise orientation. The temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, as already noted, followed the Hindu version of the temple tradition closely, but its main entrance faces west, not east. The underground temples of Mithras, the god of one of the mystery cults celebrated in Roman times, also had their altars in the east and their doors in the west. The most important exception, though, is found in Christianity.
Christian churches from earliest times were oriented with the doors to the west and the altar in the east. One of the earliest Christian churches to be discovered, for example, is a house in the city of Dura Europos in Syria, which was refitted in 232 CE for use as a church. The centerline of the room for worship, which is a long and relatively narrow space much like later churches, is canted about 10 degrees north of due east, and the altar is on a dais in the eastern end of the room.121 The variation away from due east, as we’ll see, corresponds to a significant tradition that the early Christian church appears to have borrowed from their Pagan neighbors.
Once Christian congregations were able to build churches on a less hole-and-corner scale than the Dura Europos house-church, the same rule nearly always applied: the worship space was considerably longer than it was wide, the sanctuary with the altar was in the east, and the main doors were in the west. The one important variation from this before modern times took place in the immediate aftermath of the Edict of Milan, which legalized the practice of Christianity in the Roman Empire. A handful of important churches built under the Emperor Constantine’s personal patronage in Rome between 313 and 327 CE—in particular, the church of St. John Lateran and the original church of St. Peter in what is now the Vatican—were built with their doors facing east and the altar in the west, like Pagan temples.122 When St. John Lateran and St. Peter’s were rebuilt in the Renaissance, the old orientation was kept. No one seems to know why.
Some other fourth-century churches in Italy and North Africa did the same thing, following the standard Pagan temple alignment in place of what was elsewhere becoming the standard Christian orientation. So did a church in Silchester, in the far-off province of Britannia, which was built around the same time.123 The reasons for this variation are unknown. Whatever the purpose might have been, it did not catch on, and churches built after Constantine’s time were consistently built with altars in the east and doors in the west. That habit remained standard all across the Christian world until after the Reformation.
As with Greek temples, though, Christian churches might or might not be aligned due east to due west. In western Europe in the Middle Ages, certainly, it was customary to set out the centerline of the church by marking the point of sunrise on the feast day of the saint to which the church was to be dedicated. The master builder hired to build a church dedicated to St. Michael would thus start laying out the structure on Michaelmas, September 29; if it was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the laying out might begin on the Annunciation, March 25, or one of the many other days assigned to the Virgin in the Christian calendar, and so on.
The method that was used to trace out the centerline of the new church was simple and effective and has left traces in today’s Freemasonry. Before sunrise on the chosen day, the master builder and two assistants—deacons, in modern Masonic practice—went to the building site, which had previously been cleared of vegetation and rubbish down to bare soil. Both deacons carried tall straight staffs. One deacon would go to the eastern edge of the site and stand where the sanctuary of the church would be located, holding the staff upright and well away from his body. The other would go some distance to the west and wait with his staff held in the same way while the master builder went farther to the west and waited.
When the sun rose, the master builder would direct the deacon standing in the west to move one way or the other until the two staffs were lined up on the sunrise like the two ends of a gunsight; both staffs were then pushed into the soil to mark the spots; stakes were driven into the spots marked by the staffs, a cord was stretched between them to mark the centerline, and the rest of the laying-out process followed, using stakes and cords on the bare soil. To this day, the two deacons in a Masonic lodge carry tall staffs as they go about their ritual duties. The senior deacon, whose seat is in the east, has a staff tipped with the image of the sun. The junior deacon, who sits in the west, has a staff tipped with the image of the crescent moon—a classic bit of medieval symbolism, since the crescent moon follows the sun across the sky, matching its movements to the movement of the sun the way the junior deacon on a medieval building site moved his staff to follow the location of the sunrise.
The traditional Masonic diagram of a point in a circle, flanked by two parallel lines, is another reflection of this custom. As noted back in chapter 1, the two parallel lines are held to represent St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist; there’s been an immense amount of speculation about why these two saints were chosen, but the reason is instantly clear once it’s remembered that the feast day of St. John the Baptist is June 24 and the feast day of St. John the Evangelist is December 27, and these are therefore stand-ins for the two solstices. At the Northern Hemisphere’s summer solstice, the sun rises and sets farther north on the horizon than any other day; at the Northern Hemisphere’s winter solstice, it rises and sets farthest south; in between these days, it cycles back and forth from one extreme to the other.
A medieval master builder who wanted to instruct apprentices and fellow crafts in the movements of the sun could do far worse than to sit them down in front of the diagram of the point in the circle and use it as a teaching aid. That’s very likely why, as Masonic tradition has it, that diagram may be found in every regular and well-governed lodge: it was essential for the proper training of apprentices in the days of the operative Craft.
Surroundings
The surroundings of the temple were also part of the old technology. Whenever possible, a temple was surrounded by an open space marked off by a wall or some other simple barrier. The size of the open space varied dramatically depending on local custom and land use. In some countries, a temple in a crowded urban setting might have only a narrow walkway around it, while in others, room was found somehow for a larger space. In all cases, access to the sacred precinct was restricted, and certain people, objects, and activities were forbidden within the barrier that surrounded the temple.
The habit of setting apart an open area for religious purposes, as already mentioned, dates back from long before the emergence of the temple tradition itself. Temple builders adopted the same custom to their uses, but there seems to be more going on here than the simple persistence of a habit. The area around most traditional temples is not simply empty space; far more often than not it has a specific relationship to the natural ecosystem of the region.
The standard practice, in fact, was to fill the space around a temple with greenery of one kind or another. In desert areas, this obviously had to be a planted and irrigated garden; the great temple complexes of Egypt, for example, were commonly surrounded with orchards of fruit trees.124 Elsewhere, the greenery surrounding temples might be cultivated or wild. Temples of Athena in rural Greece were commonly surrounded by olive orchards, since the olive was sacred to that goddess, and temples of Zeus often had oak groves around them because the oak was Zeus’s sacred tree, but many other Greek temples stood within groves of whatever trees happened to grow there. The laws of most Greek city-states protected such groves, whether cultivated or wild, by making harvesting wood from them an act of sacrilege, and ordaining that any animal who was allowed to graze in the temple’s temenos became the property of the deity and was delivered promptly to its new owner by way of sacrifice.
The same variation between cultivated and wild vegetation is found in Shinto practice today. Urban shrines are very often surrounded by elaborate gardens in which trees play a major role. Out in the countryside, though, it’s more common to see largely untouched woodland around a shrine, and the areas are larger. The sacred precincts of some very old and famous rural shrines include entire mountains which have been set aside for the kami and can be put to no secular use, while even the smallest neighborhood shrines, the sort that have no resident priest and are opened for ceremonial use once a year for a local festival, generally have a tiny greenbelt around them.
The transformation of the temple tradition by Christianity adopted the same principle but, in keeping with the logic of the great religious revolution, put it to a use that the Pagans must have found deeply disturbing. Old churches, like temples, routinely have a wall setting them apart from the surrounding area, and a sacred space—the churchyard—given over to greenery and sacred activities. The Christian churchyard, though, is primarily a place for the dead. As we’ve already seen, in most of the old temple traditions, bringing a corpse into a temple precinct was considered an act of profound impiety in the older religions; in Christianity, it became standard practice.
Nonetheless, the same broad principles still applied. The churchyards of medieval churches across western Europe routinely have trees planted in them, like the trees that surrounded Greek temples and still frame Shinto shrines. Yew was the standard tree in old English churchyards, for example, while other countries had their own preferences. Like the sacred precincts of temples, churchyards were off limits for certain persons, objects, and activities—in the Middle Ages, grazing animals on a churchyard was as unthinkable as doing the same thing in the temenos of a Greek temple a thousand years earlier, though the convenient habit of sacrificing animals that were allowed to stray there was misplaced during the religious revolution that replaced Apollo and Athena with Christ.
Linear Paths
The most controversial dimension of temple surroundings is also, curiously enough, one of the best documented. In most areas reached by the temple tradition, it was common practice to set out a series of ceremonial paths extending out from the temple in various directions. The most important of these paths usually extended from the main entrance of the temple for some distance—very often to a river, a seashore, or some other geographical boundary.
Most of these paths ran dead straight, though there were variations here as elsewhere between different cultures, and the way they were marked was equally varied. In ancient Greece, for example, the paths were originally marked by cairns—that is, heaps of stones to which each passerby added an additional rock for good fortune—and later by herms, stone pillars shaped like erect penises or the bearded face of the god Hermes and an erect penis carved on them.125 In medieval Europe, the network of paths that extended out from churches were known as church roads, corpse roads, or death roads—the latter two named because the bodies of the dead were traditionally carried along them to the churchyard—and were marked by stone crosses at intervals.126
In Japan, as discussed earlier, the seichu or straight line leading away from the front entrance of a Shinto shrine is a sacred space marked at intervals by torii, open wooden gateways of traditional design, and may extend for some miles to the nearest river or the seashore. In prehistoric Europe, finally, paths of the same type seem to have been marked out by standing stones and other megalithic remains—and in that last detail lies the reason why this subject has been mired in controversy for most of a century.
In 1922 a Herefordshire businessman and amateur antiquarian named Alfred Watkins proposed a theory to account for the distribution of ancient trackways, standing stones, and earthworks across much of England.127 He had noticed and documented at great length that many ancient sites lie on straight lines extending across country, connected in some cases by footpaths or roads of great antiquity on the same alignments. His thesis was that these were the remains of a network of trackways—leys, he called them, having encountered that name-element over and over again in place names along the old straight tracks—that had been laid out in Britain long before the arrival of the Romans, and that travelers on these trackways had used the standing stones and earthworks as landmarks to find their way through what was then densely forested country.
It was a reasonable suggestion. Tribal peoples around the world find their way across the countryside by similar means. The Australian aborigines, to cite only one example, guide their journeys through the forbidding landscape of the Outback using traditional chants orienting them to visual landmarks that stand out against the horizon.128 For that matter, the same approach to land navigation sees plenty of use today—“See that steeple?” says the country dweller; “just you keep on going toward it ’til you come to the bridge, and there you are.” Despite the plausibility of the theory and the extensive body of data Watkins and, later, his friends and supporters amassed, though, British archeologists rejected the idea out of hand, and they still do, generally without taking the time to learn the first thing about what it is they’re denouncing.
To understand this reaction, it’s necessary to know a little about the intellectual climate of the time when Watkins’s theory first appeared. During the years between the two World Wars, scientific archeology in Britain was still clawing its way to respectability. The idea of archeology as an academic discipline was new; universities had only just begun to set up programs in the subject, and professors of long-established disciplines such as history and philology were fond of looking down their noses at archeologists who spent their time grubbing in the mud. The resulting pressure toward respectability led archeologists to distance themselves as far as possible from the amateur antiquarianism from which their discipline had emerged not so long before. A theory about the past from a bona fide amateur antiquarian of the old school was thus guaranteed a hostile reception from archeologists, especially if it challenged the then-fashionable insistence that the people of pre-Roman Britain must have been howling, skin-clad savages barely out of the caves.
Once Watkins’s theory had been angrily dismissed as nonsense by leading archeologists at the time, in turn, a phenomenon well known to sociologists guaranteed that it would receive no second hearing. Communities define themselves by what they reject, and once something has been assigned that outcast role, a tremendous weight of collective inertia has to be overcome to get the community to reassess it. Scholarly disciplines function as communities, with all the usual community dynamics. This is why, for example, once a theory is embraced by a scientific discipline, no matter how much evidence piles up against it, it rarely gets discarded completely until all its original supporters are dead.129 Rejection of Watkins’s theory thus became something close to a badge of membership among the fraternity of British archeologists. While they didn’t actually place their hands on a copy of the latest issue of Archaeology and swear never to admit a believer in leys to their sacred lodge, they might as well have done so.
To be fair to the archeologists, Watkins’s theory attracted more than its share of strange ideas and wild speculations over the years, and from the 1960s to the present, it’s been as much these latter as the original theory that has drawn their ire. It’s only been in recent decades that enough research has been done to sort through the confusion and figure out what exactly stands behind the controversy and the florid mythmaking.130
Two points stand out from the confusion. The first is that there is unquestionably a system of old straight tracks oriented toward sacred places across much of Britain, and it dates from the Middle Ages. The church roads, corpse roads, or death roads already mentioned were found in most rural English parishes; precise equivalents also existed in the Netherlands, where they were called doodwegen (death roads), and in large parts of Germany, where kirchwegen (church roads) is the usual term.131 The network survives only in fragments, but enough of it and of records concerning it have survived to make it clear that these straight tracks once crisscrossed much of northwestern Europe, and some of the alignments Watkins and his followers found likely came from this source.
The second point is that there are just enough traces of a similar arrangement dating from much earlier times to make Watkins’s theory worth a second look. It was standard practice in many parts of Europe for Christian churches to be built on the sites of old Pagan sanctuaries, and so it’s entirely plausible that some straight tracks may have passed in the same way from the old religion straight to the new. In areas where this didn’t happen, though, the alignments of old tracks, standing stones, and earthworks Watkins discovered very often center on sites of prehistoric sanctity—Stonehenge, for example, is a point on which several well-documented leys converge.
All this is relevant to the thesis of this book because some lines of evidence suggest that the straight tracks and alignments extending out from temples and churches may have had some function distinct from their role as ways for people, or corpses, to move to and from the sacred center. A remarkable body of traditional folklore clusters around the church roads and their equivalents. In Ireland, nearly identical folk traditions focus on the paths of the sidhe—the ancient inhabitants of the island, now associated with burial mounds and other prehistoric sites; the stone crosses, stone cairns, and standing stones that trace out such routes in different parts of the world are, as we’ve seen, associated in tradition with fertility and good fortune. It’s possible that straight routes extending outward from a temple using the secret temple technology serve some role in communicating the fertilizing effect to the surrounding fields. A great deal of further research, though, will be needed to find out if there’s anything to this suggestion.
115 Spawforth 2006, 48–49.
116 Nelson 1996, 25–27.
117 North 1996, 23 and 28–29.
118 Connelly 2014, 231.
119 Spawforth 2006, 51–52.
120 Huyler 1999, 131.
121 Jones et al. 1992, 531.
122 McClendon 2005, 5–7.
123 Scullard 1979, 167–69.
124 Hamblin and Seely 2007, 12.
125 Burkert 1985, 156.
126 Devereux 2003, 25–36.
127 Watkins 1925 is a more complete statement of the theory.
128 Devereux 2003, 21–24.
129 Kuhn 1970, 151.
130 See Devereux 1993 and Pennick and Devereux 1989 for good surveys of this research.
131 Devereux 2003 is the standard book on these.