Of Stones, Stars, Circles, Status, Secrets, Sacredness, Mystique and Masons. Part 3

Centre ground: Reconstruction of the temple of Sulis Minerva in Roman Bath

Parts 1 and 2 of this series can be found here and here respectively. 

Bath is a city of facades, a city where at its height in Georgian England image, style and above all displays of status reigned supreme. The ill-tempered queen Anne came to Bath in the early 1700s when it still looked rather medieval. She came to take the warm mineral rich waters bubbling up from the mysterious depths of the Earth in the hope that it might alleviate her ailments. It was her visits which were to the trigger the fashionable culture of Bath, setting the city on a road through heady Georgian elegance to its eventual award as a world heritage site today.

The creative masonic society men whose development businesses thrived in eighteenth century Bath believed their traditions to have descended from both the builders of the stone circles and the architects of Solomon's temple. But I wonder if in all their pretense at being the possessors of  esoteric secrets inherited from ancient craftsmen they were aware of an apparent cultural disconnect between the relatively well documented Solomonic temple and those mysterious stone circles about whose purpose there is very little data indeed.

My meeting with Sulis Minerva

Solomon's temple followed the linear plan that is still very much in the consciousness of modern man: A clear entrance at one end of a brick proportioned building and at the other end facing the entrance was a space dedicated to an effigy of a deity: This layout was the likely pattern of the Roman Temple of the syncretist god Sulis Minerva (See pictures), the deity who was worshipped at Bath's hot springs. This pagan temple configuration was also the pattern for Solomon's temple, but there was one important concession to the living God who suffers no potentially blasphemous depictions to be dedicated to him: In Jerusalem's temple the space normally occupied by a classical god was empty of all but His mysterious presence. The empty space behind the temple curtain was eloquent statement of a God who wanted to speak for himself. However, in many ways the Judaistic model still feels pagan in essence: How can an immanent cosmic God who has created everything be confined to a small space in a small building? This could only be symbolic of God's rightful centrality to the lives of those he has created.

When we turn to the henge circles of northern Europe it appears that they too had a holy of holies at their centres, but these sacred spaces weren't occupied by effigies of gods; as far as I am aware no traces of idols have been found in henges. Apart from an altar they were as absent of idols as the temple at Jerusalem. Moreover, as I have already remarked in part 1 their structures, via divers alignments, connect them with their cosmic surroundings. Unlike classical temples which tended to exclusively look in, the henges also looked out. They were, may be, like huge lenses focusing the power of a cosmic deity (or deities) into the centre of their circles. In this sense they feel less pagan than the classical world of temples and are more akin to our modern vision of an all pervasive, all powerful God. This is not to say, as is typical of human kind, their concept of God was uncorrupted; there is evidence of human sacrifice in at least one henge.

But why this change from an all pervasive God to the localised anthropomorphic God of the classical temples? Was this a knock-on-effect of the information revolution of writing which help facilitate the bureaucracy needed for large cities and a civil service which distributed the power of an absolute  monarch? Did such monarchs become the model for anthropomorphic deities celebrating the glory of  personality? Well, maybe; this is my current working theory!

The glorification and celebration of personality is what Bath, in Georgian days, was all about. Like the henge priesthoods the free-masons of Bath could rightly claim to know a thing or two about the world in which they worked. But to this they added the gloss of a contrived mystique and affectation: They pretended (perhaps even to themselves) that they were the possessors of secrets and this was expressed by the arcane symbols adorning their buildings. But keeping up appearances was useful in a social context: It help maintain the facades of mystery and status.

As I proposed in my first post in this series, the physical form of the henges may echo the fact that for the ancient cultures who built them life was full of circles & cyclic motions both on Earth and in the heavens and these circles and cycles governed those all important agricultural rhythms. So, as the wife and I left the sumptuous surroundings of No 1 The Royal Crescent, where the celebration of personality and status loomed large, it was appropriate that we then went on to the house of William Herschel, the eighteenth century astronomer whose life's work was taken up with a scientific study of the of movements in the heavens. It was Herschel who (re)discovered the dim object that was Uranus and eventually identified as a planet. He no doubt knew that those planetary motions weren't exactly perfect circles. He also knew about those erratically placed smudged patches they called nebulae and those truly wandering stars called comets, many of which were discovered by his sister Caroline. The Herschels therefore were very aware that the heavens did not fit into precisely tidy circular patterns and were full of anomalies.

While the Herschel's worked on discovering more about the pattern, or lack of pattern in the heavens, the celebration of personality and status continued in Bath unabated, oblivious to where the kind of thing the Herschel's were doing was taking us as a race. The Cosmos was looking increasingly less like a celebration of personality; at least certainly not human personality and by the eighteenth century it was well-known not to be the perfectly concentric henge-like temple of the Ptolemaic universe, a temple with man at the centre. The world was changing and the Almighty had some difficult lessons in store for humankind;....as if Philippians 2:1-11 which tells us what we should really be doing with personality, wasn't challenge enough. 

Of Stones, Stars, Circles, Status, Secrets, Sacredness, Mystique and Masons. Part 2

View across Bath from the Landsdowne Grove Hotel. 

See here for Part 1

During a year at Bath University I took the train journey from London to Bath on several occasions. Just before arriving at Bath the train from London passes through Brunel's  two mile long Box tunnel. Shortly after the tunnel breaks out into the open the city of Bath fills the vista, its magnificent magnolia limestone buildings climbing the steep sides of the Avon valley.

For me there was always something a little unreal about the city of Bath: The precipitous setting, the hot springs from deep under the Earth attracting sacred devotion and the relatively systematic architecture give a rather un-English feel to the city. In going through Brunel's tunnel and finding this City at the end of it, it is almost as if one has passed through some kind of wormhole into a parallel universe where the tendency of English towns to host a motley and unplanned collection of often nondescript and ugly buildings has taken an entirely different course:  I can never dispel the feeling that the city of Bath is a little otherworldly. Norwich, where I live, has a well deserved reputation as a picturesque and ancient English city with an eclectic and quaint mix of buildings from across the ages, but in comparison with Bath, it is an architectural mess!

When you've been in Bath for a while, however, you realise that it's no dream or sacred city although it might have had aspirations to be that. It is, in fact, a city based on the very worldly commercial interests of architects, developers and speculators, all of whom were very concerned about their pockets and their careers; status seeking once again is found to be an important driving force of human endeavour. Behind those impressive and elegant facades architectural compromises were made in order to service the constraints of economic exigencies and practicalities. Bath's selling point was its facades, much to the chagrin of Victorian Gothic revivalist Pugin who had no time for Georgian architecture. In his view those facades were for pseuds. For unlike Gothic architecture, we find in Georgian architecture no clear link between form and function: Those elegant pilasters and architraves, in spite of appearances, served little or no structural purpose. To Pugin they were architectural lies which prioritised style over content.

Nevertheless, I don't think many people would venture to gainsay the elegance and beauty of the Palladian style; for some reason it just seems to touch an aesthetic sweet spot in our visual cortex. I see no reason to write it off as architectural deceit: Those facades are simply two-dimensional canvasses in stone where the mason, like the painter, is free to express the artistic impulse. However,  I'm not so sure that Georgian architecture ages with grace, especially when it's made of Bath limestone, a stone which does not weather well and blackens with time. When I was in Bath in the seventies I often felt that Norwich's mishmash of unplanned building looked neater and often less run down than Bath's crumbly stained buildings. But during our recent visit to Bath we happened to stumble across the new development in the south central city, a development that captures the original impact of the Georgian style. This newly built area conveys the real breathtaking effect of freshly minted Bath-stone and the crisp unfussy lines of palladian architecture in its hey-day. From this we can see that palladianism was an expression of bright, optimistic and confident modernism, two hundred years ahead of its time. Modern architecture is meant to have straight edges, unspoiled by the distorting effects of time; it is meant to be eternally new.

Stunning new build in the city centre recreates the fine straight lines of Georgian Bath....

....the eighteenth century equivalent. 

The chief architects of Bath were John Wood and his son John Wood junior. They had such a free hand with the city that for a short while some "central planning" actually erupted in an English city. In fact rumour has it that the Woods succeeded in laying out a street plan that traces out that symbol of Masonic secrecy; namely the key. This "key" is formed from the Circus, Gay street and Queen's square; inspection of a map of Bath will show it. The guide book to the The Building of Bath museum says that one contemporary described the Circus as "the Colosseum turned inside out".  The guide goes on to say of John Wood senior:

An obsessive archaeological, he believed that long before the Romans ever came to Britain, Prince Bladud  had built for his Druid priests a circular temple similar to Stonehenge near the site of the circus. Indeed the Circus shares the same diameter as Stonehenge - according to Wood's rather distorted measurements - and the stone acorns  running round  its parapet  were a reminder of the legend  of how Prince Bladud discovered the hot springs.

The Staircase at the
Royal Crescent. 

These enlightenment men were, to their credit, curious, very curious about their world. This curiosity drove the enlightenment and was also apparent in our visit to No 1 The Royal Crescent which is open to visitors; Henry Sanford, who owned the house from 1777, was an avid collector of curiosities; that's something  I can empathise with.  They were not, however, very critical in their reading of history which they tended to take at face value: It is now believed that the druids had little to do with the construction of henges. However, Wood probably got one thing right; as we have seen: Henges look inward as does the Circus and like the Colosseum they may have hosted some kind of spectacle.

The Royal Crescent

The Royal Crescent may be based on the Masonic Moon symbol and this symbol can be used to allude to the way a subordinate reflects the solar glory of his master. That master may be some respected Masonic patriarch or may even be God himself: The Masons saw their creative efforts as that of following in the footsteps of the Divine architect, their ultimate master.

The Building of Bath guide book says of the Royal Crescent:

It was the first Crescent in Britain - what inspired its unique shape? It is possible that Wood the Younger inherited his father's theory that a crescent shaped Druid "Temple of the Moon"  once stood  near to Stonehenge, or alternatively he may have intended the shape to reflect the curving contours of the landscape. 

I think it is well-known that the Masonic movement gets a lot of mileage out of its esoteric symbolism (and probably more mileage than it deserves); a quick dip into their websites confirms this. It is certainly true that this symbolism gives to the movement the touch and feel of arcane wisdom and mystique; or at least it once did: In today's cynical and nihilistic times people may be less impressed. Nevertheless some still fear the Masonic movement because of it and believe the movement has more malign intelligence than can actually be credited to it and this has fed some fanciful conspiracy theories. I see nothing to fear in the Masonic movement myself, but I do see some very human foibles at work: The tendency to form elite secretive clubs which feed a human weakness for special status and social acceptance is a well established instinct. Secrecy and codes can also be seductive and draw people in, intrigued by the thought of discovering profound truths. The irony is that the conspiracy theorists who target the Masonic movement, have themselves become enthralled with secrecy and intrigue.

But to me the notion that the Masons are a group who remain tuned into to some kind of ancient wisdom known only to an elite, but going as far back as the henge builders and Solomon's temple, is fanciful;  let me express the opinion that just like the stone facades of Bath much of it is bluff and charade.  To me it all looks awfully like the games that boys like to play of initiating one another into secret clubs! They are, in fact, dabblers and dilettantes in fancied secrets. Some Christians are hostile to the Masons. But not me. Like John Wood & son many of them are no doubt hard-working professional people with much expertise that they contribute to society; its just that I can't take the gloss of their symbolism and their cloak of secrecy seriously. Like the henge builders they know their stuff, but the notion that they are custodians of something more esoteric and more intriguing is a myth. The best complexion I can place on the Masonic predilection for theatre and symbolism is that this symbolism is a hook to express our awe in the face of the unknowns of creation. As the saying goes: A word is a raft when the mind is at sea.

In the eighteenth century Bath was at times the grotesque epitome of style over content as Jane Austin knew and regarded with contempt. The following information board at No 1 the Royal Crescent expresses it well:

Click to enlarge. 

Quoting from this board:

Using images to control people's perceptions about your life is not new it has be done for hundreds of years; the only thing that has changed is the medium. Today we use photographs and social media, but over 250 years ago the Georgians used oil paintings, prints and busts to share their status.

Yet again we see how so much about human life revolves round social position and where apparent status is mediated via the control of appearances and the promotion of mystique. Image is as important today as it was in the Bath of the 18th century, a city of facades, a city of image. And going further back I very much suspect that Avebury henge (as we saw in Part 1) also had much to do with image, theatre and the embroidering and inflating one's profile, knowledge and power in order to impress. But let's face it: Even the human weakness for play acting has generated much beauty, art and wealth, such is the paradox of human nature and the human predicament.

...to be continued. 

Of Stones, Stars, Circles, Status, Secrets, Sacredness, Mystique and Masons. Part I

Ancient Neolithic stones march off into the distance 

against the medieval backdrop of Avebury. 

The wife and I recently had a few days holiday in the City of Bath. On the way to Bath we decided to do a short sight seeing tour through Wiltshire. Among England's counties Wiltshire has an unrivaled mystique generated by its reputation for a fascinating mix of UFO sightings and corn circles. On top of this there are the numerous enigmatic ancient monuments, including legendary world heritage sites like Stonehenge and Avebury; in the minds of many these monuments are somehow bound up with those UFOs and corn circles. In previous years we have stopped at West Kennet long barrow, Avebury and even flown a kite with our off-spring on the summit of Silbury hill in the days when you could still climb it. But during those visits we never saw or felt anything of a strange nature,  unless it be the hippy who was soaking up the vibes as he sat in a rather modest looking  corn circle!

This time we decided to stop again at Avebury, a monument which is well worth several visits.  We arrived around 3 pm on a bright but overcast day, weather ideal for this kind of tourist stop.

Avebury: A chocolate box village scene vies with rough hewn stones for camera pixels

Avebury village goes back to medieval times but in comparison with the largely unknown culture which constructed the henge and stone circle during a period of some 500 years well over 4000 years ago, medieval Avebury feels very much like the familiar home culture one has been brought up with and thinks one understands. In any case the strange gnarled old stones of the circle look very anomalous set against the soft grass covered slopes and the chocolate box village. These stones look like alien monoliths dropped from the skies and don't blend in at all, anymore than, say, an electricity pylon or a wind turbine blends in with its idyllic backdrop.

In their day, however, the stones wouldn't have looked at all anomalous given the very different atmosphere and mood conveyed by the magnificent neolithic spectacle that was Avebury. Archaeology has revealed that the original earthworks would have provided a breath taking back drop of brilliant white chalk dazzling the eyes in the sun. Hints of this can be seen in the white tracks on the outer bank worn away by the feet of the many visitors who circumnavigate the site.  In their time the banks and the ditch would have been higher, deeper, steeper and all in gleaming white, bearing no comparison with the smooth green slopes of today.

It is well known that (by definition) henges have an inverted fortification structure. That is, the usual defensive bank and ditch, rather than pointing outwards, point inwards. This immediately suggests that the henge bank was a place of viewing for the rank and file who looked in on the activities inside the circle. In fact this video conjectures that Stanton Drew henge may have been a kind of theatre for blood sports. This is not a theory I have heard before but it is plausible and would explain the inward looking fortification effect; nothing could get out without a struggle; it would in effect be the ultimate ha-ha. However, it is difficult to imagine blood sports taking place in the smaller henge monuments, or at a very large henge enclosure like Avebury as much of the action would be too far away to see. But the general idea of a henge enclosing some kind of spectacle with an audience standing on the perimeter well separated from whatever went on within the circle could well have been the role of all henges.

The ritualistic and religious particulars of henges have, of course, been lost in the mists of time. (Unless some middle eastern traveller has left us a text somewhere). But there are some general conjectures about henges which seem at least plausible if not probable. These monuments must encapsulate the thinking and world view of the neolithic people who built them, a world view that today would probably strike us as otherworldly and supernatural. The environs of Avebury, with its avenues linking it to other monuments and the vicinity of West Kennet long barrow and Silbury hill, has prompted archaeologists to refer to the whole complex as a "Ritual landscape".  I imagine that the farming families on pilgrimage to this complex from their small thatched huts and farms would have been gob smacked by the huge artificial landscape, all garbed in brilliant white, that confronted them. Above all this landscape would have conferred a sense of power, status and mystique upon the aristocracy and/or priesthood which managed it. That power was real at least in the sense that they had enough control of the agrarian labour surplus in order to organise the building and maintenance of this ritual complex. Their power was also real in that their knowledge was genuine: It is clear from the connection that henges and stone circles have with their environment, especially the astronomical environment, that the builders did know something about how the world worked. Moreover, in an agrarian society where everyone's life was so obviously modulated by the beat of the seasons, seasons apparently driven by the configurations in the heavenly vault, this was significant knowledge. In as much as henges and their stones circles encapsulate information about the neolithic perspective on the world they not only look inwards but also outwards towards the cosmic context.

To the plebeians coming to this monument for the first time it must have seemed that its priesthood was surely in touch with the divine. The power of the site resided in the sense of spectacle, mystery and the sheer theatre of it all. A near equivalent in our own culture are the cathedrals of the middle ages which would have taken the breath away of the peasantry and be clear evidence of the aristocracy's and priest's right to rule. Also, I'm reminded of the Victorian Gothic revival and Pugin's attempt to revive the mystique of Catholic power through the sheer intimidating mystery of catholic rituals carried out in the context of lavishly reinterpreted pseudo Gothic churches.

But perhaps an even better modern analogy to the pilgrim's wonder at Avebury may be seen in the visitor to the huge circle of the Large Hadron Collider where we have engineering on an unprecedented scale. Like the circle at Avebury the LHC impresses by its sheer size lending gravitas and status to the techno-scientific elite who have built it, run it and understand it*. As with the neolithic circles the LHC looks both inward and outward by demonstrating that the builders certainly do know a lot about the workings of the cosmos at large. And like the fortified walls of Avebury the LHC has even had its rumour of being a container for potentially dangerous arcane power; there have been conjectures that it might have had the potential to generate a black hole or two, little gateways to unknown dimensions! All this only adds to the wow! effect and glory of its scientific priesthood as they wrestle with dark forces..... well, it would do if it were not for the fact that in these days of reactionary popularism and benighted fundamentalism the ivory tower establishment is less likely to get a blank cheque of kudos! They need to take note of this!

It might be old but engineering on a huge scale will always impress!

 For the priesthood of Avebury spectacle was the name of the game: The monumental level of construction, the dazzlingly white surfaces and the hint of them being responsible for the control of dangerous forces served to inflate the status of the priesthood in the minds of the plebeians. That priesthood need have done little but keep flashing their wares and imagination would have done the rest to keep up the mystique of power and fear of the unknown. Like a huge peacock's tail it doesn't necessarily have to serve any real purpose other than to say "We know this display impresses you!". In fact sometimes human beings can be caught in the act of outright deception in order to keep the mythology and mystique about themselves going. See for example the bazaar case of Bob Lazar where obfuscation, magic and mystery are an end in themselves.

***

In part II we go to the city of Bath where we will find another world of Stone's, stars, circles, status secrecy,  sacredness, mystique and masons. Another world of facades made to impress!

But there remains to tell of a curious ending to our visit at Avebury. We had just finished doing our tour of the circle and had entered the space in front of the National Trust museum when a low flying black helicopter passed over head! Knowing all those legendary associations of black helicopters with UFOs and corn circles I was absolutely gob-smacked! Moreover, even though I had been taking lots of pictures of Avebury I didn't quite have my camera at ready at that moment, just when I wanted it! Some people would say that's down to the camera imp who turns up and does his stuff whenever the strange makes a showing! I don't, of course, believe in black helicopter conspiracies but, I thought, what a fitting piece of symbolic synchronicity to end a day at Avebury! I was left chuckling over it for some time!

Footnote:

* As we know the construction of the LHC required a large number of specialists each very skilled in their particular specialism. It is an interesting question, then, as to the specialism break down at Avebury. The construction and running of the henge at Avebury would require manual skills, engineering skills, knowledge of the heavens and presumably priestly skills. Perhaps even ancillary tasks like catering and miscellaneous services were needed once the crowds converged on the site! An interesting exercise is to look for parallels between the specialisms needed at Avebury and the specialisms needed at the LHC!

NOTE: Link on New Grange: Quotes from the article:

One of the most tantalizing aspects of Newgrange is that it appears to be astronomically oriented: every year, on the morning of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, sunlight penetrates the passage and illuminates the floor of the chamber. As the sun rises higher, the beam widens within the chamber so that the whole room becomes dramatically illuminated. This event lasts for 17 minutes, beginning around 9 am.

“To the Neolithic culture of the Boyne Valley, the winter solstice marked the start of the New Year– a sign of nature’s rebirth and promising renewed life to crops, animals and humans. It may also have served as a powerful symbol of the inevitable victory of life over death, perhaps promising new life to the spirits of the dead,” said World Heritage Ireland.

The Cosmic Perspective

I have a reproduction of this painting pinned up in my room. It shows a peaceful English country scene at night. The glowing candlelit windows of a church and a distant house betray the presence of human life. Above the idyll the star-lit sky is illuminated by the brilliant streak of the Great Meteor of October 1868, a meteor as bright as the moon and, it is said, with a trail which hung around for several minutes. If you have ever seen a bright meteor you may at first be a little taken aback by the noiselessness of this celestial firework. Intrinsically, of course, meteor strikes are very violent affairs as are most events in the heavens. But for the distant and detached ground observer they are as ethereal and silent as a passing wraith.

The painting of the Great Meteor of 1868 will always remind me of Jonathan's Benison's learned commentary in my copy of H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" where Benison writes:

"Wells' time traveler .... has to learn to accept his limitations as a human being and to become perceptive to the cosmic perspective, the view of human reality that an impartial external judge might have" 

Benison is commenting on the fact that in spite of the dire straights in which the Time Traveller found himself 800,000 years into the future he is not so distracted that he is unable wonder at the procession of the equinoxes and the changed star configurations of the constellations. The Traveller also notices a fossil megatharium he finds falling into decay in an abandoned museum. Both the stars and the fossil speak of the vastness of space and depths of time far greater than even the 800,000 years through which the Time Machine has taken the Traveller. It is reflections like this which Benison refers to as being perceptive to the the cosmic perspective.

The painting, which is by an unknown artist, juxtaposes the glow-worm like evidence of human life with the spectacular display of the 1868 meteor. In those Victorian days (The same days in which Wells was writing) people had started to understand the very physical nature of heavens; it no longer seemed to (wo)men to be a sacred stage specially prepared for the centrality of the Earth. As the Victorian Wells wrote:

"Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that this light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still."



Of course as a Christian that is not how I read science. Something of my reaction is recorded here and here, although I endeavour to understand the atheist's position: The incongruity of a tranquil and introverted English village scene set against a cosmic event with its potential for catastrophe may have appealed to the artist: I'm sure it would have appealed to Wells.

The primeval object shown entering the Earth's atmosphere was likely ending its long journey in space, a journey far longer in duration than the time traversed by HG Wells' Traveller. Here was an object which, after travelling for perhaps billions of Earth years and many light years, had just noiselessly dissolved into an ephemeral streak of light. Did the people behind those apparently safe cosily glowing windows care or even know?