High Edifice

Great drinking games to play when reading papers about comparative religion. I'm not sure how Mormons could play drinking games, but it sure would be useful sometimes to have something at least superficially similar. Take a drink (or whatever) every time the word "attestation" appears. Take a drink (or whatever) every time something "indexes" something else. You start thinking in these big long technical sentences after a while; it's pretty useful for writing long papers at least. In some ways. In others... I find myself writing deeper before writing longer; my prose gets denser the longer I work on it, instead of trying to fill out a wordcount. I don't think that really has anything to do with the subject or the reading material though; it could just be me.

I am out like a lump of coal right now. I've got material from a couple of my papers here, though, paragraphs interlaced in a way that hopefully makes sense...

The topic is the temple, the focus, what that means. Simply put, a temple is a building of worship, the place where other objects of religious reference are found, an especially sacred place for being the dwelling place of a god or gods. Beyond that, the word is fluid, and is used in different contexts when referring to different cultures: each culture has its own ideas of what constitutes religion, far less its highest edifice, so naming any given building as a temple or not is tricky going in blind. That is not to say that temples don’t generally follow basic patterns—in terms of layout, a few features are near-universal, which, while their presence doesn’t automatically make a building a temple neither their absence a building not, are all at least helpful to understand the concept of a temple and understand its place within religion and within society.

The temple is thus [in preceding paragraphs not here] symbolized of both labyrinth and axis mundi- which is possible, specifically, with the separation of sacred spaces from spaces even more sacred. As the inner sanctum is beyond the outer sanctum, the axis mundi is at the center of the labyrinth, something to be attained only after meeting the challenges. It is only after learning of the mysteries and navigating the challenges, such as presenting the ritual symbols and tokens and passing the tests of morality and worthiness, that the initiate may ascend into a higher plain of consciousness both literally as an initiate and symbolically, with the temple ritual being preparatory for death and resurrection. The navel, then, would be cut off to all but those initiates into the mysteries, and the labyrinth, with its complex pathways spiraling inward one way and outward the other, is a reminder of this.

The importance of the axis mundi to labyrinth symbolism is demonstrated in the Buddhist Mandala, which is a well-attested labyrinth symbol. Mandalas are in a sense mini-temples, being encapsulations of the whole universe or axis mundi unto themselves, the square (symbolic, with its four faces, of the four cardinal directions and thus the earth) containing the circle (the sky, or heavens.) Specifically beyond the dimensions of being cosmic representations to themselves, and specifically illustrating the axis mundi as being central to or of the labyrinth, mandalas have at their centers representations of Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain. Mount Meru was the primordial hillock in Buddhist belief, and represents the axis mundi in nearly all ways possible: it occupies the center place, being underneath the polestar, and having the four continents and seven seas spring from it; it is connected to the four cardinal directions: flanked by four mountains, each of its sides (varnas) a different color, and the point where Ganges touches the earth dividing into four rivers that flow each a different direction.

Sacred place, then, is designed to set apart sacred time. In temple drama, the history of the world is presented: the creation of the earth is collapsed into the present, and to its destruction; death and birth are collapsed into one, signifying the resurrection of the believers as an aspect of the temple drama itself and indexing the initiate’s own place within the cosmic order. The initiatory aspects of temple worship mark another commonality between patterns of temple worship: liminality. Temple worship usually takes place within the context of marriages, coronations, or funerary rites: transitions from one state to another. These transitory times and places affirm themselves much in temple symbolism- cherubim, the famed threshold guardians of Hebrew belief, are themselves liminal creatures, usually depicted symbolically with mixed animal attributes.