This book has been many years in the making and had no single starting point. Over the course of decades of omnivorous reading about the folklore, mythology, and religious customs of many lands, I happened to notice unexpected similarities between traditions, far removed in space and time, that related to religious architecture on the one hand and agricultural fertility on the other. A long time passed, and much more research had to take place, before I began to suspect that those similarities fit into a single pattern, and even more time and study was required before I guessed what that pattern might once have been.
There have been plenty of attempts over the years to fit all the world’s mythologies and folk traditions into some single theory. From solar mythology through the archetypes of the collective unconscious to ancient astronauts, there’s no shortage of Procrustean beds into which, with enough stretching and lopping, any myth, legend, or tradition can be force-fitted. Thus it’s probably necessary to point out that this book doesn’t attempt any similar surgery. If anything has been learned from the last century and a half of comparative mythology, it’s that myths, legends, and folk customs talk about many different things in many different ways, and no one scheme of interpretation makes sense of them all.
People tell stories and establish customs, in other words, for many different reasons. The hypothesis at the heart of this book is that certain people in a number of Old World societies told stories and established customs that, among other things, had to do with an archaic technology, centered on temples of certain specific kinds and kept secret by its possessors, that had beneficial effects on agriculture in the areas immediately around those temples. To judge by the traces of this technology in myth and folklore, it evolved very gradually in prehistoric times, flourished in many of the literate urban societies of the ancient world, and went out of use for a variety of complex historical reasons in the late Middle Ages or not long thereafter. While the actual mechanism behind the lost technology can’t yet be determined with any certainty from the surviving traces and traditions, there’s no reason to assume that the forces that underlie it are unknown to today’s scientists, and nothing in those traces and traditions suggests that anything involved in that technology violates the laws of nature as presently known.
It’s only fair to caution my readers that the investigation chronicled in this book is frankly speculative in places. That is unavoidable. Few tasks in any branch of scholarship are as difficult as trying to tease out, from fragmentary records, a secret that people in ancient times did their level best to conceal. I have followed a slender thread through the labyrinth that leads to the lost technology chronicled here, and that thread can be snapped readily enough by those who aren’t interested in finding out where it leads. I can only hope that enough of my readers will find the quest as intriguing as I have, and so will follow it to its end.
For reasons that will become clear in the pages that follow, much of the research that led to this book was made possible by my membership in Freemasonry. I would therefore like to thank the officers and brethren of Doric Lodge #92, F&AM, Seattle, WA, where I was made a Mason in 2001; the officers and brethren of Queen City Lodge #131, AF&AM, Cumberland, MD, where I’m currently a member; and the officers and brethren of all the other grand lodges, lodges, and appendant and concordant bodies in the family of Freemasonry who have welcomed me as a member or visiting brother and very often given me clues and insights of critical importance to the adventure chronicled in these pages. My gratitude remains with all.