Temple Builder of the Mind


Old fashioned dedication and sacrifice

I have pictures in my head. Houses, buildings, and temples. Places I want to be, places I want to build, places I want to experience. I'm not much of an artist or draftsman, but I do sketch. Lately I have been working with SketchUp to try to get some details down.

My favorites are probably the temples, although the houses come a close second.

These temples change a lot depending on how I am feeling. One of the simplest isn't much more than a paved circle with an altar. Sometimes there are standing stones in around the circle, looking vaguely like Stonehenge. Sometimes they are obelisks. Sometimes they are more abstract. Sometimes it is roofed over (looking a lot like this). And sometimes it is just trees with interlacing branches up above.

My most elaborate one, it took years to come up with the details. It could never be built, not legally anyway. I meant it to replicate some of the feeling of the old Mystery Cults. Much of it is an underground and unlit labyrinth leading to a central chamber which I call the Well of Souls. In the chamber, there would be a pool. At the center of the pool, there is a round tower rising and piercing the ceiling. To get into the tower, you would have to swim through the pool to a underground tunnel and into the lower level. Then you would go up the stairway along the outer wall to the ritual space on the top of the tower set beneath the night sky.

Just try getting something like that through your local building code.

Obviously those are beyond my means. I still get satisfaction from putting them together in my head. It's one of my favorite meditations.

I never have understood this whole idea that a outdoor Pagan ritual space has to be "natural." Yes you want to work with the flows and the land shape around you, but we can make things more suited for rituals. I'm sure the gods will understand. I believe that sometimes it should be elaborate, the best we can provide. It is an offering of a sort after all. Stonehenge, just to use one example, was built and rebuilt over centuries. The Parthenon took decades, even if it was never used as a temple.

Maybe for some modern Neopagans, the need for a "natural" ritual space reflects their desire to be connected to Nature with a capital N. Maybe for others it reflects their dedication to their faith, fleeting and changing moment by moment. And maybe it is just the fad of the week.

I come from a long line of farmers. I feel a connection to the land every moment of every day and long before I had a name or a phrase for it. For me, the outdoor ritual space had to be something that the gods and I built together. Mine is pretty simple, just a patch of raised ground edged by a small retaining wall of concrete, poured and shaped by me. Not much more than a step up, but it is Holy Ground to me. I tend it like it is.

But when I am away from that space, I build the temples in my mind and find sanctuary for my spirit there.

Posted: Sat - December 2, 2006 at 02:18 PM
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