History
Houses of the Gods
It’s funny/strange in a way, I have written quite a bit about our current cultural obsession with home ownership and how that has become almost religious in its intensity. The communities wholesale love of real estate and how it seems to fulfil the lives of so many individuals at this point in time. When researching this book I discovered some insights into the journey of early humankind and their relationship to their houses, their buildings and their gods; and in particular the archaeological idea that early man did indeed bring his gods down from the sky and into the buildings he constructed. I suppose it is obvious when you think about it, with Cathedrals and Temples becoming places of worship and therefore inhabited by gods. The Ziggurats, which were multi-layered structures constructed over time, (built of temple becoming burial tomb and then another temple built on top of that and so forth in repetition), were the first buildings to house these gods.
“At Eynan, still dating about 9 000BC, the king’s tomb – the first such ever found (so far) – is a quite remarkable affair. The tomb itself, like all the houses, was circular, about 16 feet in diameter. Inside, two complete skeletons lay in the centre extended on their backs, with legs detached after death and bent out of position. One wore a headdress of dentalia shells and was presumed to have been the king’s wife. The other, an adult male, presumably the king, was partly covered with stones and partly propped up on stones, his upright head cradled in more stones, facing the snowy peaks of Mount Hermon, thirty miles away.
At some later time , soon after or years later, we do not know, the entire tomb was surrounded by a red- ochred wall or parapet. Then, without disturbing its two motionless inhabitants, large flat stones were paved over the top, roofing them in. Then, on the roof a hearth was built. Another low circular wall of stones was built still later around the roof-hearth, with more paving stones on top of that, and three large stones surrounded by smaller ones set in the centre.”(3)
These kings were considered to be gods and continued to influence those within their village or town, even beyond death, and their houses became temples of worship and tombs. The king’s tomb is the house of god, within the Mesolithic world of Eynan. So the origins of our houses are imbued with a sacredness, and this reverence for what may appear, externally, to be buildings of just bricks and mortar, is deeply embedded in our human DNA. There are theories put forward, that at this time, millennia’s ago, we actually heard the voices of our gods inside our head, literally, like the voices a schizophrenic hears, commanding attention. The voice of god would have been heard at its loudest inside these buildings, inside these houses of the gods. So the tradition of houses being places for communication with ethereal presences, has a lengthy history in humanity.
For many millennia the largest building in just about every village, town or community, was a building to house the dead; and thus the gods. We do not think anything of this today, as we have all grown up with the existence of churches and temples, and think them ordinary. But if you stand back from the known reality and ask yourself is it natural to create palaces for dead kings and ethereal presences, whilst at the same time having the majority of the population, pretty much, living in hovels; or structures of a very sparse and basic nature anyway? It is rather, uniquely human, I would posit, and not something occurring in the animal world, or should I say the other animal worlds.
“The Egyptian temple was more than a physical structure for pious devotion; it was an image of the universe that acted as an instrument to enable the world to order its parts in harmony and recreate its elements by the mystery of resurrection. Through it people could reframe their views on the world. Its grand and imposing presence, even when only viewed from the exterior, expanded the consciousness of one’s own life, petty and inconsequential, beyond the personal into the cosmic scheme.” (4)
Today we are building houses, the equivalent of the palaces of yesteryear, and it is worth considering the possibility that today we have become the gods living inside our own temples. We would definitely appear so to those who lived a few millennia ago, with all our wealth and with such technological wonders at our finger tips. If god does not live up there in the sky anymore, and with many of us no longer worshipping him or her in churches and temples around town, perhaps we now commune with the gods in our own homes? Why else have we erected these, in many cases, enormous, temple like houses? We must be the kings and queens, high priests and priestesses, whom inhabit these houses of god; and maybe it is time to recognise that.
3 – Jaynes Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. First Mariner Books 2000, pp 141-142.
4 – Grey Tony, Seven Gateways, Halstead Press, 2008, pp 49.
©Sudha Hamilton – excerpt from his book House Therapy: Discovering who you really are at home.
