Happisburgh Chuch

 

Happisburgh church with the North Sea just visible top left

The Norfolk coastal village of Happisburgh was one of Arthur Conan Doyle's haunts. He used to stay at Happisburgh's Hill House Inn and I imagine him writing as he reflectively looked out to sea from the top floor. Whilst at the inn he was inspired to write the Sherlock Holmes story "The Dancing Men" (See here for more). In that story Doyle captures the atmosphere of the landscape of this part of Norfolk with the following passage:

...there was much around us to interest us, for we were passing through as singular a countryside as any in England, where a few scattered cottages represented the population of today, while on every hand enormous square towered churches bristled up from the flat green landscape and told of the glory and prosperity of old East Anglia. At last the violet rim of the German ocean [The North Sea] appeared over the green edge of the Norfolk coast and the driver pointed with his whip to two old brick and timber gables which projected  from a grove of trees. "That's Ridling Thorpe Manor" said he.

The view of Ridling Thorpe Manor may have been inspired by Happisburgh Manor which can be seen in this picture which I took telescopically from the top of Happisburgh lighthouse....

Happisburgh Manor

Those enormous square towered wool financed churches Doyle speaks of are typified by Happisburgh church which can be seen in the first picture above. One can also get a glimpse of The German Ocean (Nowadays called The North Sea) on the top left side of my picture. 

The interior of Happisburgh church is typical of a 15th century perpendicular church: A wide aisled building with slender pillars making it far more airy than the claustrophobic interior of those Norman Romanesque churches with their thick chunky pillars.....

Inside Happisburgh Church

The east end of the two aisles may have once been chantries reserved for the wool merchants who helped finance the church, but today at the end of the north aisle we find a colourful postwar stained glass window depicting a romantic and chivalrous looking medieval warrior with sword and bright armour. This window is a memorial to the brave men and heroes who fought in WWII and lost their lives fighting for freedom. Right next to this striking memorial, as my picture below shows, we can see that other archetypical hero who died that we may all have freedom; it is of course a crucifix of Jesus the Messiah

East end of the North aisle

Moving over to the end of the south aisle we find a niche with a statue of Mary the mother of Jesus. This is appropriate as the church is dedicated to St Mary. 

At east end of the South aisle

I was unexpectedly moved by the contrast between the dedications of these two sacred spaces. Unbidden, thoughts came into my mind that were a surprise to me. I've been brought up in a strongly reformed tradition, a culture which tends to look askance at the Catholic status of Mother Mary as if  that status might just be a little too close to idolatry for comfort. But as I sat in one of the pews and contrasted the very different celebrations at the ends of North and South aisles I had an inkling as to what was behind the age old Catholic veneration St Mary.  

The north aisle places before us a daunting ideal of heroism, an ideal which we may feel enjoined, pressured even, to emulate. It's the kind of heroism spoken of in Romans 5:6ff. That passage tells us about how challenging it is to die for the righteous let alone for those who make themselves enemies. Many of us doubt (and that includes me) we could ever emulate this ideal, an ideal often expected of men in war. So, if we feel unable to rise to a challenge that is a qualification for conditional love and acceptance we can leave behind the north aisle and move to the south aisle where we find the mercy and comfort of a mother's unconditional love in the form of St Mary with her welcoming open hands and look of love. This response is very understandable. But though the public rendition of Christianity communicated by some preachers is far too intimidating and presents a moral bar too high for the likes of us, that is not the message I read into Romans 5:5-11 and Romans 8:14ff. Given the (passive) aggression of some preachers it is no surprise that the aspect of love yearned for and symbolized by the very feminine figure of St Mary has somehow come adrift from the Godhead. 

Beeston Castle and Basing House. Part II

(See here for part I)

Reconstruction of the Great Gate House of the Old House at 

Basing: House: Siege of Basing House 1642 to 1645 during 

the English Civil War. See here Siege of Basing House

The ruins of Basing House are situated on a modest salient just outside the village of Basing (Near Basingstoke). Basing House, like Beeston Castle was initially conceived as a Norman motte and bailey fortification, but the environs of Basing House are no scenic match for the high rise epic landscape of Beeston Castle. Basing House, however, compensated for its relatively low relief landscape by reaching social heights that Beeston's functional garrison castle couldn't hope for. During the 16th century the courteous social climber and owner of Basing House, Sir William Paulet, spent a fortune rebuilding the Norman site and ended up with what was arguably the grandest mansion in all England, although it is now largely reduced to its foundations. The guide book tells us.....

 It is [now] hard to imagine that it was once "the greatest of any subjects house in England, yea larger than most of the King's palaces"

Paulet became Earl of Wiltshire and Lord Treasurer of England in 1550 and a year later the Marquess of Winchester. Such was his social climbing success that the guide book can quote Francis Alen the Earl of Shrewsbury who in 1560 said: 

"The Queen [Elizabeth] so liked the house of the Lord Treasurer at Basing and her entertainment there that she openly and meryly bemoaned him to be so olde, for else by my trouthe (sayeth she) if my Lord Treasurer were a young man I could fynde in my harte to have him to husbande, bifour any man in Englande".

Even the much younger Lord Leicester of the fashionable and elegant Kenilworth castle who openly tried to court Elisabeth failed to get a similar compliment. Born in the 1470s Paulet died in 1572 which means he must have been in his nineties, a remarkable age for that era. 

The original foot print of the castle wasn't big enough for the ambitious Paulet and he extended his property by building the New House which was appended to the the original Norman Motte and Baily site. The New House can be seen at the top of my photograph of this model of Basing House....

Model of Basing house depicting how
it looked before its destruction

After Paulet's death the site went into decline, but at the start of the civil war in 1642 it was refortified as a royalist garrison because of its strategic location on the main route to the west country. In 1643 it came under parliamentary siege. Although primarily a house and mansion rather than a castle it was a surprisingly difficult nut to crack and the parliamentarians made several attempts under different commanders to capture it. Finally under the command of Colonel John Dalbert and none other than Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell, the House fell with the New House proving to be its Achilles heel. See below for an artist's picture of the siege...

The siege of Basing House: The first mansion is on the
 left; its curtain wall follows the circular mound of
the Motte. The New House can be seen on the right. 

After the siege the house was offered as a quarry for the inhabitants of Basing to help rebuild their devasted town. It is no surprise then that little of the original house remains, although the large scale of the still intact Great Barn gives a feel for the red brick glory of the original mansion....

The Basing House Great Barn: I've never seen an old barn
this big: It almost felt aircraft hanger size.

All that is left of Basing's grand dinning hall is its wine cellar. The dinning hall was no doubt the scene of many an aristocratic banquet. Those banquets would be the setting for a mixture of social climbing, connection building, gossipy intrigue and discussions about the latest affairs of state. It was a place to keep your social masks on but those attending probably felt pleased knowing that their presence proved they were on the top rungs of society's status ladder. 

All that is left of the great banqueting hall;
the wine cellar underneath. 

In the nearby oven rooms & kitchens the hoi polloi worked very hard to keep their snobbish betters pleased by serving up lavish vittles. The oven room where they worked would have been a very hot and unpleasant environment; a nearby interpretation board tells us that a Spanish visitor in 1554 described Basing's kitchens as "...veritable Hells such is the stir and bustle in them".

What remains of Basing House's kitchen ovens

Reflection

As I stood on the edge of the open cellar which is now all that is left of the Great Hall and looked at the nearby ovens I became aware of the meaning and apt symbolism of this now ruin of devastation along with its departed culture. It harked back to a day when a privileged upper ruling class, the aristocrats, was taken for granted to be part of the natural order of things. Today, needless to say, high privilege is looked at askance as perhaps an unjust anomaly in what should be the moral natural order of things. How has that change come about? One man to ask is Oliver Cromwell....

 As a show piece of upper class excellence and aristocratic self-satisfaction Basing House had few rivals, although its halcyon days lasted not much over a 100 years. How fitting then that it was Oliver Cromwell, a man of the earth who styled himself as a humble agent of God's people should take part in bringing judgement to this extravagant seat of privilege. But Cromwell was a fundamentalist by mentality and was full of the certitudes of righteousness, a dangerous condition which so often afflicts religious zealots. Nevertheless, as I have remarked before, Cromwell had pioneering ideas about government by parliament but he failed to implement them. He failed to implement them because a man of such decided religious conviction was simply unable to accept that given our very human tendency toward self-interest and our epistemic limitations, government by argument (as opposed to government by ruling class diktat) and government by agreeing to disagree was the inevitable norm of a genuine parliament. So, in all his fundamentalist self-confidence Cromwell could not accept a quarrelling parliament of ordinary human beings and regarded them as too unrighteous to rule; that is, all except himself of course! So, although he rightly didn't have the gall to accept the crown he nevertheless became the "righteous" dictator who ruled with an arrogant certitude. 

Simon De Montfort, Earl of Leicester is also credited with conceiving the idea of a parliamentary democracy. His and Cromwell's ideas were moving in the direction of democratic accountability but ultimately they both muffed it. De Montfort was to the Jews of the country as Cromwell was to England's Catholic community; both leaders unleased terror upon their identified pet hate group, a group they regarded as a conspiratorial cartel of the wicked and who therefore became objects of blame and persecution. Cromwell's and De Montfort's jealously held certainties may account for them both failing to implement a true parliamentary "rule by argument and disagreement" government (but constrained by a constitution). It wasn't until the days of King William III that things started to move in the right direction.

Appendix

This photograph shows a breach in the curtain wall of the Old House allegedly made during the parliamentary siege..

Visit to York: The End of History Experience. Part I

I wish to God he was right but with Godfathers like Xi, Putin,
Kim Jong-un & Trump at large not to mention those religious  
hegemonists Francis has had to think again! 

Francis Fukuyama popularized the phrase "The End of History" with the publication of his book "The End of History and the last man" in 1992.  With the end of the cold war and Western democratic values in the ascendency and their capitalist economies generating technology & wealth undreamt of since the beginning of history it might have seemed that we were now all going to live happily ever after in the democratic lap of luxury. Moreover, many smaller countries still under authoritarian yokes wanted to join the rich democratic club, naturally enough. Well, we now know what happened:  Russia and China became powerful dictatorships, religious fundamentalists of differing brands sought the universal hegemony of their oppressive ideas and in the West a recrudescent far-right promoted lies and conspiracy theories in order to reinstate the demagoguery of Godfather style Government and the conceptual world-view of the unwoke. Does this mean we are on the way back to the Sauline worlds of monarchs (1 Samuel 8: 7-18) vying for as much power as possible and magnifying their personal glory via the violent extension of their empires of power? Such are the slaves & dupes of games theory as they make and break alliances in the monarchical ebb and flow of political influence. Traditional history with its unstable games theory feedback systems is very much back with us. 

And yet in a recent visit to the historic city of York (with the wife) the phrase "The End of History" kept coming back to me. I had had a sheltered and comfortable life untroubled by the privations of having to scratch an existence and free from the war & strife stirred up by Godfather rule. I had the education, health, time and comfort to take stock of the world around me. This privileged position allowed me to evaluate in a detached sort of way, the human condition and all that happens under-the-sun.  In a few more years, like my parents, I'm likely die in my bed. and history for me personally ends in a whimper. How anti-climatic!

***

On the way up to York we visited the Palladian Cusworth Hall which overlooks Doncaster from its far-seeing hillside (see picture above).  The remnant of its aristocratic owners sold the hall to Doncaster city council about 70 years ago. The estate is now run as museum by the council with free entry. (But we made a donation). The council keep the hall in good condition, and it has become a specimen in a protective "resin block" ready for curious "end of history" visitors like ourselves with the time on our hands to be thoroughly nosey about the affairs of those who came before us.  

With the wind whistling through the crevices of the house, few other visitors about and the architectural vestiges of a past glory still evident, the house had an abandoned feel about it. It was no surprise when a steward told us that the Hall was haunted and he himself had heard the stories. I've never seen or felt anything that remotely classifies as a haunting. In fact, the wife and I have visited places with the scariest of ghostly reputations and never experienced anything spooky (most notably Bodmin Jail). I was three years working at the haunted Blickling hall and saw and felt absolutely nothing. 

The above picture is of Cusworth Hall's grand staircase, just inside the entrance. After the long driveway with the Hall sitting conspicuously at its end the staircase is the next item on the chorography of status, a chorography designed to impress the visitor. In halls larger than Cusworth I've seen grander staircases but given a hall's size architects would endeavor to make the staircase a statement of the owner's wealth by making it as impressive as possible. Compare the above picture with the main staircase of No 1 the Crescent, Bath:

Being a terraced house, the staircase at No 1 is not as grand as Cusworth's, but nevertheless it does what it can to impress the visitor.  It's worth comparing these staircases with the entrance hall of our own late Victorian terrace house, constructed for the bottom of the end of an aspiring lower middle class where similar ideas about aggrandizing entrances were employed:

With its small footprint in a crowded city street the hallway of our house is inconveniently and painfully narrow, but the Victorian architects tried to mitigate this limitation by increasing the height of the house and its main rooms thus enhancing the illusion of space; it is affected grandeur on a small scale. But to those whose houses had no hall it sent out subliminal signals of being on the next rung of the status ladder and an illusion of keeping up with the De Montegues with their aristocratic Norman ancestry.  

Back at Cusworth Hall we found the main reception room to be decorated with some elegant Georgian plaster work. This would be the room where guests were entertained with music and formal dancing. 

In one of the wings, we found the chapel: In my opinion they should have decorated the chapel with similar elegant Georgian plaster work: Instead, we get a poor imitation of Italian mannerist/baroque art, in an attempt to echo Micheal Angelo's Sistine chapel. I'm no art critic but somehow the figures in this depiction looked as though they were made of dough rather than flesh. They should have stuck with stucco, but then the artist was probably good enough to convey, at first look, a sense of sophistication, & opulence and perhaps even help the owners affirm their faith in God.

To finish let's have look at Osterley House which we visited in 2010. It is much bigger and grander than Cusworth Hall. With its ogee turrets it is a peculiar blend of Elizabethan and later Georgian modernization. But somehow the pedimented Collonade goes well with the turrets although I doubt classicists would have thought so. And just look at that grand reception room below making Cusworth's reception look rather pokey. 

I include this house because of the part it played in Sir Keneth Clark's Civilization series at the beginning of the episode "The Fallacies of Hope".  See the end of this post where I wrote the following: 

 ***

At the start of the 12th episode of his Civilisation series we find Sir Kenneth Clark in the clean rational and regular neoclassical interior of Osterley House in England. As he looks upon this epitome of rational control he says:

A finite reasonable world, symmetrical, consistent and ….enclosed. Well, symmetry is a human concept because with all our oddities we are more or less symmetrical and the balance of a mantelpiece by Adam or a phrase by Mozart reflects our satisfaction with two eyes, two arms, two legs and so forth. And “consistency”… again and again in this series I’ve used that word as a term of praise. But “enclosed”, that’s the trouble. An enclosed world becomes a prison of the spirit, one longs to get out, one longs to move. One realises that symmetry and consistency, whatever their merits are the enemies of movement……and what is that I hear, that note of urgency, of indignation, of spiritual hunger, yes it’s Beethoven, it’s the sound of European man reaching for something beyond his grasp. We must leave this trim finite room and go to confront the infinite. We’ve a long rough voyage ahead of us and I can’t say how it will end because it isn’t over yet. We are still the off spring of the Romantic Movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope.

The romantics of the late 18^th and 19^th centuries rebelled against the deconsecration of the cosmos through the symmetries and regularities of enlightenment thinking and yearned for the infinite. They attempted to return to a much more intuitive apprehension of the natural world. As Clark says the journey isn’t over yet and even today our romantic intuitions and aspirations continue to do battle with our reason. I would suggest that two words are missing from Clark’s last sentence….victims of the fallacies of hope…in man!  !  ….. I want to look at the question of why science has left us high and dry…..

***

According to Clarke, then, we are still very much in the middle of history and Francis Fukuyama has had to go back to the drawing board! In the meantime, in Part II, I'll continue to play out this end of history fantasy as we move on to York and back to times a thousand years or more before the snobbish, self-satisfied and Whiggish post-Newtonian Georgian upper-class who to us feel very familiar and so close to our own times.

Status & Temptation in Christian Communities

Blickling Hall: A high status home and like all stately homes 

it was built to impress one's peer group and cement one's status.

 This was my view of it  as I walked up the drive for an interview 

there as a cleaner! (I got the job & was very proud of it!)

 

I have spent sometime pondering the role of status in human society and in fact I have made it one of the labels of this blog. Included under the "status" label is this very post which looks at a pertinent article appearing in the August Edition of Premier Christianity magazine. This article was titled "The Problem with Pedestals" and deals with the subject of  Christian celebrities and leaders who have been caught in wrong doing (i.e. sinned!) and fallen from their position of high regard among their respective Christian communities and following. 

The fact is human beings seek the approval, regard and care of their fellow human beings. For a gregarious animal which depends on a diverse range of support from their communities this is not only natural but in many ways an essential survival instinct; one can't easily live by being at odds with one's social surroundings. It's fairly obvious that at the very least human beings need the material support of their society but once this is satisfied the higher goal of human beings is to get emotional support as well and this takes the form of having a sense of role, purpose, acceptance, recognition, attention, regard, respect, approval, honour, pride, prestige, esteem and kudos etc from one's community; all these are extrinsic properties that can only be conferred by being in relationship with one's community and which I would like to subsume under the general heading of "status" or "community glory". Let me stick my neck out here and say that once one's basic survival needs are satisfied, status seeking is among the primary motives of just about all human beings and constitutes a drive so strong that it often trumps all other considerations. In fact for the really gregarious among us some measure of status is essential for mental health. Like food, sex and other appetites the instinct that seeks status is natural and is part of the repertoire of motives to be expected of healthy human beings needing material and emotional support.  

But like all appetites, especially if there is an ongoing desire for excessive satiation, status seeking can go badly wrong; we can become addicted to status, always demanding more of it. Since the tokens of status hood are a mix of attention and accolade from one's community along with the status symbols of material wealth, the implicit zero sum games which constrain status markers has the potential to lead us into a competitive world where people become rivals in a race for status tokens. Accompanying this competitiveness there are a cluster of negative emotions such as a sense of unfulfillment, envy and bitterness if we don't get our way. Once again, then, we face the age old conflict between service to others vs service to self. In the New Testament Philippians  2:1-11 directly addresses the conflicts of interest that status seeking implies: It is a passage which talks about the mind of Christ and implicitly tells us how status should be handled and why we need salvation. If the meaning of life, the universe and everything is actually found in the goals of successful community then Philippians 2:1-11 tells us why right meaning and right purpose have been lost and how Christ has saved the human community by doing the very thing we ourselves find very difficult -  namely, letting go of our hold on status because strong claims to status come at a cost to other members of the community.

The cut and thrust of human society revolves round the subject of status and so much of human behaviour is about maintaining the facades of status via image control. This was the subject of my series on my trip to the city of Bath. 

***

In the Christianity article I'm thinking of we read a very familiar story: Viz: Otherwise much admired Christian leaders, movers and shakers (now called "influencers"!) who have been exposed in some sin or other and subsequently fallen from grace. One of them is Steve Timmis who I blogged about here. Very common is sexual abuse, but I'm less interested in that than the case of Steve Timmis whose sin wasn't some hidden sexual vice but in fact an on going policy of power abuse at the heart of which was a harmful Restorationist ideology. However, I've always maintained that part of the problem is less to do with the "influencers" than it is the followers of "influencers" whose support has effectively made the celebrity and put them on a pedestal of power in the first place by giving them uncritical adulation, glory and honour they don't deserve. There is a free market of influencers out there and it is the demands of this market which gives these influencers their power.

But in spite of the danger of pratfalls, elevating certain people to a higher status is not only a very human trait found in society but may be entirely necessary; society needs clever leaders and innovators. Where the problem lies is less in status per se than in those celebrities and leaders who, all said and done are only human after all, are potentially corruptible through their power, influence and celebrity. Like life in general celebrity is beset by temptations. 

***

The story that did intrigue me in the Christianity article was about the one time head of Wycliffe Bible Translators, Eddie Arthur, who tells us of the effect on him of stepping down from this prestigious role: 

On his blog, [Arthur] describes the difficulty of leaving this role and his feelings about the subsequent loss of rank and invitations to speak. People who'd called him a "really good friend" have not contacted him since.  Though he was aware he "shouldn't" find it hard, in reality: "This loss of status was horrible.....Leadership is insidious and it is dangerous. I didn't realise how important my role, influence and title were to me until I stepped down....At this distance, I can see that it would have been all too easy to see myself as being more important than I am and to believe that normal rules didn't apply to me. I can understand why leaders fall and I can see why those responsible for monitoring them allow it to happen" 

A very sobering confession that brings one up with a start. The fact is many, if not most of us have (in vary degrees) an appetite for those status markers; attention, recognition, kudos, high position, accolades, praise, social glory, material status symbols and what have you. Nothing wrong there in and of itself but the status appetites, like most appetites, may present us with the temptation of glutting on those appetites in a way which brings ruin. Also at fault are those social scenes which are apt to lavish these things upon us; the tempter is as much a sinner as the tempted.

***

Another instructive article in the same edition of Christianity is by Christian band leader Chris Llewellyn who is a middle ranking Christian celebrity. In an article entitled Confessions of a Christian Celebrity Llewellyn expands further on the temptations of celebrity: He confesses that his minor celebrity makes him feel uncomfortable, especially as a worship leader is supposed to direct glory to Christ and not oneself.  Clearly Llewellyn understands the all too human tension between worshiping "the only one worth worshiping" and the pleasures of celebrity which in his case are bound up with him being a skilled musician and a (relatively) famous rock band member. He tells us of the good example of John Baptist who said "He [Jesus] must become greater; I must become less" (John 3:30). And then in a further confession Llewellyn says: "Honestly, I'm not even fully sure I want to become less for the Kingdom...I'm a minor Christian celebrity - get me out of here!". That's the central conflict of the human predicament in a nutshell; how do we cope with our pleasures in a society full of zero sum games? Well, guess what, Llewellyn ends by quoting Philippians 2:6-8.

There is tight rope to walk here. There's nothing wrong with talent in and of itself and neither I feel is there anything wrong in the wake of celebrity that talent leaves behind it; after all, worthy talent comes from God and deserves celebration. Moreover, there's nothing wrong with good leadership. In fact healthy society and community needs all these things; it needs leaders, movers, shakers, and talented showmen and innovators. But it's how our culture copes with these facts of life that is the crux of the matter. 

Fame, celebrity and concomitant status, are mathematically inevitable: They are extrinsic relationship properties not unlike web site connectivity. Hence, like website connectivity it is likely that celebrity has a power law distribution over the population.  Given, then, that we are likely to be dealing with a  mathematical fact of society then the temptations associated with celebrity and power will also be a fact. But it helps, as Llewellyn suggests, if Christians become more aware of the temptations they are heaping on celebrities and leaders via their accolades, regard and admiration. It may also help if the celebrities themselves become aware that our status appetites, though not wrong in & of themselves, all too easily lead into temptation and corruption.

Like other human appetites our status appetites are not going to go away; they are part and parcel of gregarious humanity; in fact a necessary part. So it is inevitable that these appetites are going to be abused at some point or other; it is a hazard of living, a hazard of community. But the first step is to recognise the inevitable, be braced for it when it comes and then above all recall Philippians 2:5ff:  In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.....

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.