Printed in the Fall 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 112:4, pg 2
This issue is dedicated to Freemasonry. Since there are many articles and many points of view here, and since I am not a Mason myself, I will turn my attention to a major theme in Masonic myth: the Temple in Jerusalem. The Masons trace their legendary history to Hiram Abiff, by their account the builder of Solomon’s Temple. (The Bible says the builder was one Huram or Hiram.)
The construction of the actual Temple, under the biblical King Solomon, took place around the middle of the tenth century BC (the chronology for this period is shaky). It continued in use until it was sacked during the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC.
After the Babylonian empire fell in turn to the Medes and the Persians, the Persian king Cyrus the Great authorized the reconstruction of the Temple, beginning in 539 BC. This time it continued in use for almost 600 years. In 23 BC, Herod the Great, king of Judea and a vassal of the Roman state, authorized a major expansion of the Temple, which took decades to finish. Its completion in AD 64—long after Herod’s death—created mass unemployment (the workmen had nothing more to work on) and social unrest, leading to a revolt against Roman rule and culminating in the Temple’s destruction in AD 70. (There must be a lesson in here somewhere.)
Herod built an enormous embankment for his Temple, supported by four massive retaining walls. The only significant remnant of this complex to survive is the western retaining wall, better known as the Wailing Wall, a focus of Jewish devotion to this day.
To the best anyone can determine, the site of the original Temple is now occupied by a Muslim shrine known as the Dome of the Rock. Hence any archaeological excavation of the site would achieve the nearly impossible feat of making tensions in that region even worse than they are.
In any case, it is not clear what an excavation would reveal. The account of the building of the first Temple under Solomon in 1 Kings 6 says that it was made of cedar and cypress covered with gold. If we assume that the Babylonians stripped off the gold and burned the wooden part afterward, there would be few remains to be seen, except perhaps for the foundations.
There might be more remains of the Second Temple, but for the same reason, these too are inaccessible. For a picture of what it was like, we have to rely on firsthand literary sources such as the Letter of Aristeas, usually dated to the second century BC. The text reveals some surprising facts: the author was particularly impressed by the elaborate plumbing system, installed “so that the blood of the sacrifices which is collected in great quantity is washed away in the twinkling of an eye.”
In his book The Temple of Jerusalem, scholar Simon Goldhill writes, “It is extremely difficult for a modern visitor to recapture . . . the overpowering smell of the ancient Temple. It would have been a heady mixture of incense (which was burnt on a small altar), together with the distinctive odours of fresh blood, slaughtered carcasses, animal dung, roasting meat, and, no doubt, the smell of the crowd, all exacerbated by the heat of the sun in the open-air courts.” The Talmud cites as a miracle of the Temple that “no woman miscarried because of the aroma of the sacrificial meat.”
These details give a more rounded picture of a building that was, according to another source, “covered on all sides with massive plates of gold. When the sun came up, the people had to avert their eyes as if they were looking directly at the sun.”
H.P. Blavatsky gives quite a different account of the building of this Temple: “that the detailed description thereof in I Kings is purely allegorical, no serious scholar . . . can doubt. The building of the Temple of Solomon is the symbolical representation of the gradual acquirement of the secret wisdom, or magic; the erection and development of the spiritual from the earthly; the manifestation of the power and splendor of the spirit in the physical world, through the wisdom and genius of the builder.” Citing 1 Kings 6:7, she goes on: “This is the ‘Temple’ which can be reared without the sound of the hammer, or any tool of iron being heard in the house while it is ‘in building’” (Isis Unveiled 2:391, emphasis HPB’s).
These reflections lead me to some speculations of my own. Even if there was a physical counterpart, what if the real Temple was not a material building, but an enormous thought-form in the astral realm, constructed and painstakingly elaborated—possibly over centuries—by the meditations and visualizations of sages? (The same may be true of the legendary realm of Shambhala.)
If so, this Temple must be invulnerable to the blows of time and sledgehammers. But where in the invisible realms it is to be found, who can find it, and what they would find there—even if we grant my supposition, these would remain great mysteries.
Richard Smoley