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.