Architecture, Theurgy, and Human Sacrifice

Alexander J. Ford

Summer, 2024

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Architecture and Murder

 

Not far from Edinburgh along the river North Esk stands the famous chapel Rosslyn, and inside the chapel there is an uncommonly ornate pillar of stone. Since the 17th century, give or take, that pillar has been typically referred to as the Apprentice Pillar on account of a popular folk tale, which details its grim origins. The story goes that the chapel’s architect—a master mason—desired that one of the three columns standing behind the choir would be his masterpiece; more delicately adorned with splendid imagery than any other in the world. This was his dream. He set to work, and as he did, the master came to realize with sadness that his hands were not commensurate with that vision. Resolved still to perfect the pillar, he halted work and embarked on a trip to Rome in order to study the works of the great masters, so that he could return reinvigorated and capable of completing the pillar. During the intervening years, however, his young apprentice was blessed with a holy vision while the work sat incomplete. So divinely inspired, he succeeded with his own hands where the absent old mason had not. The apprentice carved the pillar to completion instead. It’s his work that stands in the chapel today, so-called the Apprentice Pillar.

 

When the master mason returned from Rome, prepared again to attempt the completion of his opus, he was astonished to find not only that the pillar already stood there, finished, but to learn that it was his lowly apprentice who had accomplished it. To add insult to injury the mason realized, looking on his student’s work, that such a thing as this would be beyond his own skill, even now. In a fit of envy, he took up his mallet and clubbed his apprentice to death.

 

The master was tried for the murder of his student, and although he was condemned to death and hanged, the stonemasons guild believed even-still that it was not punishment enough. So, they carved his likeness in a small relief and placed it in the chapel across the choir where it faces the Apprentice Pillar. In this way, they cursed him to look upon his student’s work, and on his greatest failure, until the end of time.

 

In the medieval memory there are an enormous number of examples of apprentice masons killed by their masters—and prodigal masons killed by jealous competitors. We will examine a few in short order. Nearly identical to the story from Rosslyn, the reader will perhaps recall, is a similarly famous drama—the murder of the architect of King Solomon’s temple, Hiram Abiff of Tyre. It’s often said that Hiram was beaten to death by three jealous initiates, who demanded that he reveal to them the secrets of the trade. They buried his body in a shallow grave beneath a sprig of acacia.

 

Unfortunately the tale of Hiram has, of course, been subject to much repetition and popular-occult attention in relatively recent years. The form in which it’s typically known today likely emerged, stylized, from modern freemasonic doctrine. It’s only on account of its popularity that mention of the story of Hiram is made now, as some readers may furrow their brow should a treatment on the present subject appear to overlook such a well-known story. However we will take care to caution the reader that freemasonry, in general, is, at best, an early-modern lens (and often a politicized, and surely a Christianized one) through which some of the materials of history have been viewed and interpreted. Modern freemasonic doctrine ought not to be confused for an authentic glimpse of the ancient mind.

 

Toward this point we’ll note that sources from earlier than the 18th century on the character Hiram Abiff omit his murder entirely. We are told by the Roman chronicler Josephus only that an architect, or artificer, from Tyre called Hiram was tasked with the building of the temple by King Solomon. It was Hiram, according to Josephus, who was responsible for the temple’s wondrous stature and as well for the twin pillars Boaz and Joachim. There is, again however, no word in Josephus’s writings concerning the death of that architect whatsoever. Similarly, an Aramaic commentary on the Biblical book of Esther credits Hiram for the building of a throne for King Solomon; though once again, sparing no words on his supposed murder. The bulk of the freemasonic fancy which surrounds the tale of Hiram’s death, only begins to appear with any commonality in sources so late as the 19th century. Recent scholarship has suggested, quite conclusively, that the freemasonic story of Hiram’s murder can have its origins no earlier than the mid-18th century.

 

With all that said, we can sidestep Hiram and the modern freemasons, and train our attention more neatly on deciphering the many ancient traditions on which modern tales—like that of Hiram—were modeled. The specific source from which 19th century dramatists drew the story of Hiram’s death was proposed by the historian Paul Naudon: A medieval epic titled Les Quatre Fils Aymon, the oldest iteration of which dates to the 12th century. This particular cycle involves the death of a knight; one Renaud de Montauban. Following his return from the Crusades, Renaud travels to Cologne and enters the monastery of St. Pantaleon, where he apprentices himself to the masons who are constructing a cathedral dedicated to St. Peter. In one account he is killed by his fellow masons because of his strenuous diligence, which shames them. In another, he is killed out of jealousy—on account of his work is superior to theirs. In both, Renaud is possessed of some secret knowledge or divine capacity and is beaten to death by envious stonemasons, armed with their hammers. His body is cast into the river and thus concealed.

 

Even still Renaud’s murder is easily identified with the killing of an earlier, 10th century Benedictine monk—St. Reinold (or Reinhold von Koln)—who as well, angered master masons by often surpassing their work. He was eventually beaten to death by such a group of rival architects, and his body was cast into the Rhine. So it is that Reinold remains the patron saint of Stonemasons. In his death we can sense, too, some poetic similarity with the martyrdom of St. Boniface.

 

 

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The Builders' Rites

 

Investigating the great tangle of symbolism that links death to architectural consecration, one will begin to recognize that these much younger medieval tales—of an architect’s death or murder—are all apparently recollections of a much older practice, in which, a human sacrifice was believed to serve some architectural function. Whatever that function was, it was not isolated to the foundations of a temple or church, but occurred at one time or another with most major architectural undertakings. Foundation rituals, or as they've been called in some places, the builders' rites, have been performed at the construction of family homes, as well as beneath the city gates, at bridges, or below the city walls.

 

It has been suggested in the past even that the founding of Rome; the story of conflict between Romulus and Remus, can be correctly understood as a version of just such a foundation sacrifice. The memory of the death of Remus at the construction site of the city wall is, for example, qualitatively similar to the story of the reconstruction of Jericho, by Ahab. When the voice of the god of the Hebrews pulled down the walls of Jericho, Joshua issued a curse on whoever would seek to rebuild the city in the future, requiring that they would have to sacrifice their eldest and youngest sons to keep the walls from falling over. So Ahab, who rebuilt Jericho, is said to have sacrificed his eldest, Abiram, beneath the walls and his youngest, Segub, beneath the gates. There is a germ here linking the lack of sacrifice to instability, which is by no means original to, nor isolated to the Hebraic canon.

 

One story persists from the 6th century in which St. Columba entombed a young man named Odran in the cathedral at Iona, in order to stop it from falling apart during construction. Another story of late-medieval Romanian provenance concerns the architect Manole, who also faced the periodical collapse of work at the Curtea de Arges monastery in Wallachia. Both for Manole and St. Columba, whatever progress was made during the day on the church collapsed at night. The structure only stood firm after he resolved to immure his own wife in the foundations—as the literary episode recounts—according to the directions of God in a dream. Both stories are strikingly similar to that of Vortigern and Merlin in the Historia Brittonum. Both are connected by numerous scholars to dozens of other tales—the Hungarian tragedy of Kelemen the Stonemason, the Magyar song of Clement the Mason, there is even a Greek incarnation attributed to the building of the Bridge at Arta. A Bulgarian version retains the same name for the titular architect, Manol. Often glossed in sparse works that endeavor only to catalog the many related myths of this sort, is the Georgian story of a boy called Zurab who was sacrificed to ensure the stability of the fortress at Surami. Even today there remains a strange, perpetually dampened area along the bottom of the battlements, on account of some unidentified internal water source in the rock. According to local tradition Zurab’s mother wept there at the spot where he was immured and her tears never dried, and so on, and so on.

 

The idea that a human sacrifice serves some architectural function during the construction process is not peculiar to European and Near Eastern cultures, either. In Japan there persisted up to modern times an identical tradition, called Hitobashira (人柱), literally meaning the ‘human pillar.’ It’s a practice that has analogues in China, Burma, and Indonesia, and involved the ritual killing and burial of a person beneath, or near to important architectural structures. This was done, according to tradition, in order to secure their stability. Da Sheng Zhuang, as the old practice was called in China, is said to have been first proposed by a master architect of the Zhou Dynasty, called Lu Ban. Although later deified, Lu Ban’s birth is recorded at the end of the 6th century B.C., in the year 507. There is a perhaps a clue in the fact that the Chinese attribute the invention of the practice of architectural sacrifice to Lu Ban—to whom they also attribute the invention of the architect’s square, the saw, the drill, the planar, the shovel, and many other fundamental tools of the trade. We can glimpse the degree to which the foundation sacrifice was, as well, considered among the absolutely elementary tools of the architect by the Chinese. Many bridges, dams, palaces, and city walls across the East are remembered in the local legends as having been constructed atop sacrificial victims; men, women, and even children, just the same as in Europe.

 

Rather than continue to survey the literature item-by-item (after all, we mean to understand the ritual—not to catalog instances of its performance), we’ll instead content ourselves only to note here that the commonality and persistence of this folk system suggests that we are dealing with an idea so elemental in the mind of man, that cultures isolated from one another in time and space arrived, in their own manner of course, nevertheless at similar conclusions. While there is an Indo-European branch on this tree, it cannot be denied that the roots of that tree reach down into the most general, far-ancient, and humane soil. Gould writes of the same mind, in his own survey of the lore, that “one swallow does not make a summer, it is true, but a straw will tell the direction of the wind.”

 

Before we attempt to lay hold of the rationale underlying the architectural sacrifice, it will be worthwhile first to spare some words on the procession of many later traditions—which we will argue are only deteriorations of that elder rationale—in order to separate those things from the core of the issue.

 

Speth explains rather optimistically that “every race in turn, in its progress towards a higher and purer culture, at some period or other, rejects human sacrifice, and replaces it with animal sacrifice in the first instance, then with vegetable, and finally with a more symbolical sacrifice.” Naturally, the idea that this procession from ritual to imitation represents a maturation, or indeed a “purification” of the culture is no-doubt a sign of the times in which Speth advanced his survey of the rites. Even still, the simple observation that the sacrifice was substituted for other things over time is accurate, no matter the editorial opinion with respect to whether or not such a procession represents a heightening, or indeed, a muddling of the tradition.

 

So we see in pouring over the histories that a human victim may at times be exchanged for an animal, an animal may be exchanged even for a meal prepared from its slaughter, or even in some Hindu traditions, a sacrificial cow substituted merely for an offering of butter. A sprinkling of blood on a foundation stone (as in the Pictish tales), whether from a live human victim—who may only provide the blood, not necessarily the life itself—or from an animal; both occasion to suffice. In other places, paper effigies of sacrificial victims are merely burnt in offering. Votive figures are often deposited beneath the foundation stone, or in the foundation trenches, or beneath critical structural members. In some cases wine is offered in exchange for blood. It’s been noted by popular consensus that the tradition of breaking a bottle of wine to christen a ship is, in fact, done in place of the neck of a victim—and is an echo of the foundation sacrifice; for as Speth, Eliade, and many others have noted in their own way: While the rationale for a custom is inevitably forgotten, the custom itself tends to persist, and be justified according to different fashions.

 

One additional curiosity in the realm of sacrificial substitution, or sacrificial simulation—perhaps being a better term—is the tradition of capturing a living shadow within the construction, rather than victim himself. Frazer treats the subject quite thoroughly, so we’ll refrain from justifying the connection between soul and shadow, according to the ancients. The idea of capturing a man’s shadow is deeply connected to the esoteric importance of measurement, about which I have written extensively elsewhere. Speth notes of this curious practice, in-passing, that “not long ago in England there were still shadow-traders whose business [was] to provide the architects with the necessary measure of shadows.” The capture of the shadow often took the form of measuring it in one way or another, and that article of measurement is what was offered as representative of the shadow, which was itself representative of the human victim. In many cases it was thought that the individual whose shadow was captured (that is, whose soul was separated) would die in short order.

 

We recall, in considering the connection of a lost shadow to human sacrifice, the various Greek analogues that survive in the mythical record at Mt. Lykaion, for example, in the central Peloponnesus. Pausanias tells us that the sacred precinct at the summit of Lykaion, just beneath the Ash Altar to Zeus, was a place no person was permitted to enter. Trespassing in the temenos would result in death. Pausanias also tells us that huntsmen whose game crossed the boundary of the temenos saw that animals lost their shadows while within. As for the particular rites and rituals conducted at that site, in his time, Pausanias says only that he was hesitant to inquire after the specifics on account of their sheer antiquity. Human sacrifice is attested in the literary record by numerous authors at Lykaion, and elsewhere in the Greek textual record as well. Along the same train of thought, we might observe that the legacy of anthropomorphic architectural ornamentation—so common in the Hellenic tradition, although by no means contained to it—that is, of shaping pillars after male or female figures (Telamons, Caryatids) was perhaps meant to recall in some way the foundation sacrifice. It is not difficult at all to imagine such ornamentation even as votives, after a fashion: The forlorn figure of a man or woman quite literally supporting the temple’s edifice; bearing its weight. Alas in the field of Greek archaeology human sacrifice is an idea which, even still today, remains of the utmost academic contention—but nevermind.

 

In his consuming studies of the folk traditions, Grimm wrote of foundation sacrifices, that “…it was often thought necessary to immure live animals and even men in the foundation on which the structure was to be raised, as if they were a sacrifice offered to the earth, who had to bear the load upon her: By this inhuman rite they hoped to secure immovable stability or other advantages.” Apocryphal or not, what we find in these stories of murder associated with a sacred precinct is a common theme in many cultures—even though at times dissolute and nearly unrecognizable; it is an echo of a chorus most ancient, and most familiar to man. It assures us of a complex and fundamental relationship between death and the setting-out of a sacred structure.

 

There are two lines of thinking which are typically presented by those who have wondered after the origins of the foundation sacrifice. And although both typically earn a nod of the head at first glance, upon more thorough consideration, neither argument seems to actually constitute a substantial answer. The first is one that we have not yet brushed up against in the present discussion, and that is the idea that the structure needed to be supplied with a soul, in the form of a human sacrifice, in order to fill some apotropaic or protective function. The second is the idea that a human sacrifice was required, according to some logic, in order to ensure the stability of the construction.

 

Considering first; the theory of ensoulment and apotropaic magic, it seems to follow, then, that the character of the person who is to be sacrificed would matter. That is, the person whose soul would be charged with, or transformed by a duty so noble as the protection of the temple from ruin, or the gates from invaders, would surely be limited to those of, at the very least, virtuous character or noteworthy stature—that they be well suited to such a duty. And yet, what we see by scrutinizing both the textual and the archaeological record is that often times those offered in sacrifice were criminals, slaves, or even infant children. Why would one sacrifice a thief, and forever charge his soul with the safekeeping of a sacred precinct? Was the wife of Manole, weeping and begging him to stop while he and his laborers somberly laid up the wall around her, truly a desirable candidate to hold the stones of the great cathedral firm? The spirit of this explanation appears clearly at odds with the spirit of the myths, and the material record. Often times victims who were not sacrificed to the builder's rites for punitive reasons, instead had to be trapped, tricked, or otherwise ensorcelled into the position and remained unwilling participants once they realized their fate.

 

The cadence of the myths seems more to suggest not that a specific person was required to inhabit the structure, or that a person was required to furnish their soul according to the performance of some noble task—but rather, such a wide variety of sacrifices suggests only that any person at all would do for whatever purpose the ritual was thought to fulfill. What was critical was the death itself, according to some rationale, and the poetic tragedy of who it was that fate consigned to the stones then, perhaps, might come to serve a literary purpose thereafter. So we gather that the operative component of the ritual plainly concerned the death, and not so much the person being put to death. Much more likely it seems, that stories of apotropaic ensoulment are comparatively remote from the true purpose of the practice. As men forgot the specific reason for why it was necessary to make the sacrifice, they recalled only that sacrifices were made; only that in these old places bloody rituals were once performed. It’s not so far a leap at all to make, the thought that the discontented spirits of those who were offered for some mysterious purpose by master artisans of lost ages, still wander those structures, safekeeping them from intruders—or, as the case may be, haunting their long and time-eaten corridors. One finds it easy to imagine that men of later times would come to believe that this was, in fact, the function of the sacrifice.

 

With respect to the second theory—that a human sacrifice won stability on the part of the edifice, the general idea appears to be that because some disturbance was made on the earth in order to construct the wall, or the house, or the temple, that this in-turn required a placation of the earth, or, of some earth spirit or analogue. It’s this idea that Grimm recounts and offers as explanatory. This as well, however, begs a rather puzzling question. What is it about the sacrifice of a living human that would work to placate such a spirit? Often, as time advances and the memory fades, the idea of a specific deity being placated isn’t even mentioned. Many writers are content to simply repeat the idea for fact that a sacrifice must be made in order to ensure the stability of the edifice. But the same question appears. One still wonders why a human sacrifice was taken to confer stability to a structure at all—what is it that links the one to the other? Our object here is to clarify (at last) the nature of that relationship.

 

Again and again the earnest student of ancient teachings is faced with very much in the way of lists and tables of data, and very little in the way of a holistic understanding for why that data was produced. The modern mind is so often alienated from man of antiquity. The easier path is to presume his superstitious ignorance wherever we ourselves fail to grasp the finer points of his qualitative train of thought. Of all the celebrated authors who are guilty of this prejudice, none are more guilty than Frazer—but that is beside the point. As it stands, the very fact that these two explanatory lines have been supplied so often, and for so long, suggests that we ought not to dispense with them as crucial pieces of the puzzle. However, we cannot mistake these pieces for the full picture either, as even taking one or both on board as accurate still fails to supply us with a clear answer as to the question of why.

 

In order to get to the root of the issue, we will first have to spare some words on the subject of the role of death or killing in cosmogonic myths. Equipped in that way, we can then venture to alloy the question of why with a brief foray into the subject of theurgical magic—and therein lies the satisfactory picture. It can hardly be denied that the architectural task in antiquity was intimately connected to cosmological theory by magical ritual. As we will come to understand, the linkage between sacrifice and stability emerges quite naturally from a theurgical manner of thinking about architecture and cosmogony.

 

 

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Cosmogonic Killing

 

In a great many traditions the cosmogonic act—that is, the genesis of the cosmos—is instigated by the death, the sacrifice, or the killing of a primordial being. The reader will hopefully oblige treatment of a representative portion of those traditions, in order to produce some clarity on the subject, now. Among the Chinese the ancient belief was that in Illo tempore, to borrow the term from Eliade, the giant Pangu emerged from a cosmic egg—a common cosmogonic symbol that, while most commonly associated with Orphism, is by no means exclusive to the Greek anima. With his axe Pangu split the yin from the yang, and held them apart. When Pangu died, the various parts of his body became the various parts of the world. In the Chaldean religion, the great cosmic monster Tiamat was fought and defeated by Marduk, who dismembers her and sets out the elements and the architecture of the cosmos from her body. The Vedic character Purusa—which became a more complex concept over the long march of time, was in its earliest form a primordial being whose body in death enabled the creation of the cosmos just the same.

 

The story of the dismemberment and resurrection of Osiris among the Egyptians is an obvious analogue. Among the Greeks the mysterious and controversial figure of Zagreus is of interest. The etymology of the name is a subject of some dispute, It has been suggested as relating in different ways by different scholars to ideas like youth, life or life-giving, or to identify Zagreus as a skilled hunter. Whatever the case may be, Zagreus was a chthonic deity. In the Alcmeonis, and as well for Aeschylus, Zagreus was a chief god of the underworld. Numerous sources, Euripides foremost among them, relay that Zagreus enjoyed ritual significance in particular among the Cretans, for whom he was a counterpart to Dionysos; a patron of strange and ancient nocturnal rites that involved the consumption of raw flesh. In the Orphic tradition, the story of Zagreus is revealed in a form that would persist into the era of the Neoplatonists, and even enjoy some degree of Christian inculturation. The Orphic myths establish Zagreus not just as a counterpart to Dionysos, but as his prior form.

 

According to the Orphic sources, Zagreus was the offspring of Zeus and Persephone. As an infant Zagreus was watched over by the Kouretes, Curetes, or, those same Idaean Dakytloi who watched over the infant Zeus. Nevertheless Zagreus was attacked and captured by the Titans, who dismembered him in an episode known as the Sparagmos, boiled him in a cauldron, and consumed his body. Enraged on account of their transgression, Zeus struck the titans down with his lightning bolt and it was from their ashes that mankind was created. In the versions of this story which were assembled by Euphorion and by Callimachus, Rhea (much like Isis in the Osirian myth) collected the pieces of Zagreus and reassembled him, resulting in his resurrection and rebirth in the form of Dionysos. This Orphic account of the creation of man, or the Anthropogony as it’s been termed, has enjoyed multiple treatments across the centuries. In any case, echoes of the distant idea—that creation is brought about by the body part of the divine—survive as fragments in later canona. Take for example that of the goddess Aphrodite being born of the castration of Uranus. For the Persians in their turn, the body of Kuni becomes the world, his bones the mountains, his hair the plants and growing things, his flesh the earth, etc. In the Rig Veda the primeval figure Purushta is dismembered and reconfigured into the world. The list of cosmogonic sacrifices is long. The following two verses serve well to generalize these ideas. First, an Oracle delivered to the King of Cyprus, and second, from Basavanna (820):

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A god I am such as I show to thee

The Starry Heavens are my head, my trunk the sea,

Earth forms my feet, mine ears the air supplies

The Sun’s far-darting, brilliant rays, mine eyes

 

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The rich

Will make temples for Shiva,

What shall I,

A poor man do?

My legs are pillars,

The body the shrine,

The head a cupola of gold.

Listen, O Lord of the meeting rivers,

Things standing shall fall,

But the moving ever shall stay.

 

We find a similar figure in the Eddas among the Germanics: the giant Ymir. Created of the elements within the primordial, grassless plain called Ginnungagap, Ymir suckled from the celestial cow and was killed by the grandsons of Buri—Odin, Vili, and Ve. From his blood they fashioned the rivers and the oceans, from his flesh the earth, from the dome of his skull the dome of the sky, and so on. It’s well known that Ymir is identified with an earlier deity who appears in the writing of Tacitus on the Germanic tribes of his era: Tuisto. Even the name Tuisto has been connected specifically to Ymir by philological effort. Tacitus writes, “In their ancient songs, their only way of remembering or recording the past, they celebrate an earth-born god, Tuisto, and his son Mannus, as the origin of their race, as their founders.”

 

Curiously, the conjunction of the giant and the cow establish Ymir’s legend as part of an even older and deeper Proto-Indo-European mytheme. In the Old Irish tales, for example, the pieces of the body of Finnbhenach the bull are dropped around Ireland, becoming features of the land and inspiring place names. Adams and Mallory have conducted an in-depth survey of cosmogonic themes among the Indo-European peoples, and reconstructed their essential Proto-Indo-European elements. To quote them, for it hardly serves to try and form the thought more neatly than they have themselves: “The [Proto-Indo-European] cosmogonic myth is centered on the dismemberment of a divine being—either anthropomorphic, or bovine—and the creation of the universe out of its various elements.” Of the most pure notion of sacrifice as the Indo-European mind seems to have carried it forward, out of the far-reaching mists of the early histories, Adams and Mallory write that

 

“the relationship between sacrifice and cosmogony was not solely that of a primordial event, but the entire act of sacrifice among the Indo-Europeans might be seen as a re-creation of the universe where elements were being continuously recycled. Sacrifice thus represents a creative reenactment of the initial cosmic dismemberment, and it helps return the material stuff to the world.”

 

Here we may have the truth of the matter. Dismemberment coincides with consumption, which, engenders sustenance. It can hardly have escaped man even in the earliest days that death and dismemberment was required by, and preceded the allaying of the forces of voracity which withered him, and that in taking into himself some sacrificial material—as the Titans sacrificed, dismembered, and consumed Zagreus; as the sons of Buri dismembered Ymir—his own constitution was protracted. It follows on that the cycle of sacrifice is connected to man’s persistence in time, and follows on as well in sympathetic terms that sacrifice in some divine manner is connected to the persistence of time itself. So Kronos consumed his children.

 

 

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Architectural Theurgy

 

The world, perpetual though changing, originated in many traditions, as we've seen, with a death. There is of course a certain sympathy at play in that idea—identified with the old and common notion that mortal life in this plane begins with the fall or death of the immortal soul, and its subsequent mundane incarnation. Identifying the temple, the city, the home (or any structure which was considered symbolic of the cosmological center; of the king, of the people, of the family) with both the cosmos and with himself, man across time ordained according to sympathetic rationale that such structures must be founded on a death as well. That is why sacrifice is the oldest operating principle of the builders’ rites; later only, blood, later only an animal, later only a votive. The moment of death occurring within the precinct, or otherwise figuring into the literal foundations of the temple is critical in the ritual's purest form.

 

Eliade describes, in his treatise on the legend of Master Manole (which has regrettably never appeared in an English translation), that in many traditions of magical construction the ground, the earth, or the site was first consecrated. The meaning of this consecration is the ritualistic transformation of the site into the center of the world. That is, the transformation of the mundane land into the mythical land upon which the cosmic creation occurred. Next, the sacrifice would be carried out according to what can best be described as theurgical intentions.

 

Theurgy, for the purposes of the discussion at hand, provides the most fertile analogical framework for explaining the construction ritual because, as a form of magical practice, it is entirely unalloyed with other disciplines—as, for example, palmistry requires the companion study of the symbolism in the hand, geomancy of the symbolism in precious stones, astrology of the symbolism contained in the figures and lore of the stars. Theurgy, even in its more decadent, Byzantine forms, only employed curios of the other magical disciplines as inert qualitative linkages to set the stage, as it were, for the ritual. What is theurgy?

 

As ever we begin by scrutinizing the name, as the name of a thing is inseparable from its spirit. While the first half of the word is self explanatory, the second descends from a Proto-Indo-European root that translates most nearly to the act of making. In this sense, Theurgy is a deeply ancient notion that springs from the Pontic-Caspian recesses of the Indo-European mind. It is the act of ‘making god,’ or more specifically, of engendering possession; of a ritualist by the deity evoked in the ritual, of an idol by the deity with which it’s associated, and so on. Plotinus explains,

 

"I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it, and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it."

 

In the simplest way theurgy is the process of identifying a mundane thing with a divine thing, and in-so doing, the one becomes the other. Inviting possession by a divine being is a younger idea developed from this elder sensibility. Eliade correctly noted theurgical identification in discussing the Sabazia, writing

 

“The ceremonies took place at night, in the mountains, by torchlight; a wild music (the sounds of bronze cauldrons, cymbals, and flutes) inspired believers to joyous outcries and to dances in furious circles. [quoting Euripides] ‘It was especially women who indulged in these disorderly and exhausting dances; their costume was strange; they wore bessares, long, floating garments made, it seems, from foxskins; above those, deerskins, and probably horns on their heads.’ In their hands they held snakes consecrated to Sabazius, daggers, or thyrsi. Attaining paroxysm, ‘sacred madness,’ they siezed animals chosen to be sacrificed and tore them to pieces, eating the raw flesh. This ritual omophagy produced identification with the god; the participants now called themselves Sabos or Sabazius. … Ecstatic experiences strengthened the conviction that the soul is not only autonomous but that it is capable of an unio mystica with the divinity.”

 

Identification is the magical modus operandi par excellance. Understanding this, the purpose of the foundation sacrifice is revealed to be the magical identification of the mundane site into the sacred, mythical ground of the original creation; transforming the one into the other. In conducting that transformation, the temple is to be imbued with, and ensured of the same stability and enduring permanence that suffuses the cosmos.

 

Wielding the death as a kind-of building material in this way, if you will, is likely the reason too for why many victims, in countless traditions, were interred alive. Again, the death itself is important. The idea that the structure needed to be ensouled, and that the soul acted to protect, keep, or safeguard the architecture is an outgrowth of a much more central rationale: The temple falls apart as the body falls apart, as all things do. It is the soul which enables the bodily clay to, for a time, resist the decaying forces which typify the material world. At the precise moment of death, that is, with the passing on of whatever-it-is that animates the inanimate body, that endows it with humanity and with personage, in a word, the soul, the body quickly withers away into the earth. And so it follows that—as the cosmos, body, and temple are models of one another, and as the cosmos originated in the sacrifice of a mythical or godly stature, the architectural object would suffer the some sort of analogous obliteration without the offering of a soul to contravene that tendency. The cosmogonic killing, or sacrifice at the moment of all creation, is in-turn what supplied the world with its own contravening principle.

 

As a final thought offered in addendum to the foregoing observations, we might observe at the close that there is, as well, a much more material frame of mind, which stands harmoniously with these magical deliberations. Consider that when the temple collapses during construction or soon thereafter, as very often it did in antiquity, it would have been a matter of no complicated conjecture that some improper preparation at the level of the foundations was commonly the culprit. For architects of any age, creating a level and stable interface between the structure and the site is of critical importance. Even in the architecture schools today it’s often said that to raise a building, first you dig a hole. Euthentyria was the name given by the Greeks to the leveling course, beneath the stereobates, which was set out first upon the prepared ground. Ergo, the symptom of collapse was easily identified with the apparent stability of the soil. It's not that human sacrifice directly provided stability, but rather, that without the human sacrifice the structure was doomed—and only that the way in which it was doomed tended to be metered out from the earth beneath. In this way the literal manner of failure enjoyed a symbolic confluence with the theurgic idea of the temple: Without providing a body, as a body was provided in the cosmogony, the earth itself—the bodily clay—would fail to support the temple. There could be no creation without destruction. Elsewhere, I have termed the artisanal instantiation of the doctrine of costs as the creative antagonism, and likened it to the canonical deformities that tend to be exhibited by the artisanal gods. It’s worth mentioning again. Thus, much scholarship on the question that ventures to repeat this common line mistakes a symptom for a cause.

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end.