Temples and Trouble…!?!

I want to thank several gods, syncretized to Antinous and also to Silvanus, for prompting me to write this particular post today. One could say “This post has been brought to you by ___,” just like it was the Antinoan version of Sesame Street, I suppose, but I’ll shy just short of doing that. Now I see why I was prompted to do this.

Today, on The Wild Hunt blog, there was a post about various pagan community matters, and a link to the Pagan Newswire Collective’s Minnesota Bureau’s report on a new Celtic Temple that just opened. I wish them all the best with that.

If I am not mistaken, in my post a few days ago, as well as on my Patheos.com “Niche Religions” post, I mentioned that a lot of modern pagan organizations (in the U.S. and elsewhere) look at “success” as “building a temple,” and having the organization and the personnel and the money to be able to do something like that. Too many groups, I think, have this materialist approach to these matters, that their work or their devotion or their organization doesn’t really “mean” something unless it has “real estate” (and just look at that term, as if “owning land” is what constitutes the “real”). There is nothing wrong with materialism–modern and ancient forms of paganism are, if nothing else, quite materialistic (and not in a negative sense), in terms of filling themselves with sensual and sense-oriented experiences of and worship for the gods–and, there’s also nothing wrong with wanting things like this in general. However, the idea of “temples” itself is a little problematic in terms of how people seem to understand them now and how they were understood in the past.

Most people think of temples as spaces in which they can do their rituals. It is nicer to be able to have such a space that is guaranteed, rain or shine, any day of the year, and for which one does not have to pay money for space rental, or risk not being able to secure the space for an important event. That is wonderful, where and when it can happen, and would make things infinitely more convenient. So yes, of course, they are that; but they’re a great deal besides. The “big” rituals of many pagans don’t happen more than once a month in many cases…so, in a secular calendar year, that means that a dedicated ritual space might be without any activity on 353 days of the year…!?! While setting aside a space specifically for a particular deity or deities generally might seem like a good sacrifice (in terms of “to make holy,” which is the original meaning of the term; as well as in terms of “giving something up” in the more common understanding, mostly derived from Christianity), I think that is missing the point a great deal. Setting aside such spaces was not so that no one ever went in them, it was so that they could be used, and used constantly; and even if they weren’t used constantly, there was care going on in relation to them. Having a temple or a shrine–even a small one in a corner of your home, or a whole room (for those who have the available space)–means that a god is enshrined there, and therefore has a space and a dwelling space there. Ignoring them for most of the year is like ignoring a guest in your home, and if nothing else, hospitality is considered not only a virtue but a sacred duty in several of the cultural traditions from which I draw inspiration. If nothing else, maintaining the shrine regularly by keeping it free of dust and clutter, doing regular offerings, and if possible daily contact with the gods there through prayer or ritual or whatever one’s practice happens to be, should be the expected norm. Yes, we sometimes fall short on this–and I certainly do!–but if something is that important to set aside a whole section of one’s house, or a whole room, then it must be that important. If the case plays out that one is able to build a full-on dedicated temple, that must be the expectation all the more.

If given a huge budget (many millions of dollars), I know exactly what I’d like to build for a temple complex. But let’s be serious for a moment: short of Bill Gates divorcing his wife, becoming gay, and deciding he’d like me to be his lover, and then leaving me everything when he dies (should I be so lucky to outlive him), where in the world would that kind of money come from? Saving a little bit here and there, and doing capital campaigns, is really not an option–the former because I barely can make my bills on a monthly basis at present without regular employment, and the latter because a lot of people in the Ekklesía Antínoou are in a financial situation which doesn’t allow for a lot of disposable income. Plus, in order to make that work, banks and investment accounts would be necessary, and I do not trust these institutions at all, and their fingers are in so many unjust practices and causes that the less I have to do with them, the better. I am also very opposed to the idea of doing something like Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral–sure, it’s an interesting building from an architectural standpoint, but could all of that money have been spent on something more worthwhile, more helpful, more useful to humanity-at-large? So, that sort of grand temple is probably not going to be possible.

Smaller temples, on the other hand, would not be out of the realm of possibility. And, in this sense, we have some good indications of precedent within the ancient Antinoan cultus. Not many temples are known to have existed (about ten or twelve cities had them to Antinous that we’re aware of at present), but two have recently come to light. The Antinoeion at Hadrian’s Villa, which has two traditional cella-style buildings, as well as additional structures, which were technically not that big. Another is a temple at Carnuntum (modern Pfaffenberg), which was founded by Aelius Caesar in honor of Antinous.

The temple inscription here reads “Imperator Lucius Aelius Caesar, son of Trajan Hadrian Augustus, of tribunician power, consul, twice proconsul, quindecemvir, made this temple sacred to Antinous.” This titulature would date the temple’s foundation date securely to sometime in 137 CE. The temple itself is not gigantic; though, building it in fine stone would still cost a fair amount of money; lesser stone (e.g. cinder-blocks!) with a nice plaster siding would be cheaper, but perhaps not to everyone’s taste. The height of it would still be noticeable.

Something that seems to me more probable, once I’m able to be in one location for my job, and happen to have some space in my back yard, would be something like this temple, from Roman Britain. There were many temples of this size on the island, and elsewhere in the empire.

There are traces in the ruin (which I have visited in July of 2003) that the original door was on the back of the building, opposite the apse, and I think that set-up would be preferable. This temple is about the size of a small room in a house. It could be built with cinderblocks and then sided with nicer stone or tile, easily insulated and wired for light and plumbing (as a drain in the floor and probably a sink of some sort for obtaining water, and perhaps having a fountain or internal water feature) would be desirable. The roof could be done in interesting mission-style tiles, but a more basic roof structure would certainly be fine as well, as I would hope to have solar panels on the roof taking up almost the entirety of it. I would hope to have small fluorescent spotlights bathing the image of the deity in light constantly, and this would be a fairly environmentally-sound way to do it, meanwhile perhaps being able to power some of the house and attached electrically powered accoutrements as well. (Offering a deity light by having candles or lamps burning before it is something that goes way back in many western spiritual practices, and continues today in various forms of Christianity, and has never ceased. Burning that many hydrocarbons, while probably representing a much lesser environmental impact than one car on the road every day, is something that I think would need to be taken seriously as a concern to modern regular pagan practices involving such things. Conspicuous consumption cannot be the norm of religious activity any longer, and therefore advocating constant light burning in the form of candles or oil lamps, I think, is not the best option when there are others; though a thorough and dedicated analysis of these impacts would still be desirable to obtain at some point. Natural light apertures would also be utilized, of course.) Ideally, I’d hope to eventually have a side-building containing a pool for purification.

Daily temple rituals would be necessary: “waking” the god in the morning, making offerings and prayers, and then doing the reverse every evening would be a necessity. Just maintaining the space, keeping it clean, and so forth would be at least a weekly activity. Larger and more involved rituals on all of the holy-days in one’s religious calendar would also no longer be a luxury, but a necessity. If one is not in the position to be able to clean one’s kitchens and bathrooms on a weekly basis, or sometimes doesn’t do a particular ritual to the fullest extent possible (and both of these are true of me, I’ll say just right off the bat!), then one isn’t in a position to be the caretaker of a deity’s image in a dedicated temple space. “If you build it, he will come” does not really apply in such cases–having a temple won’t make one’s priorities re-organize themselves to fit the temple; the practice has to be in place before the location is dedicated for it to take place more effectively.

A small temple of this size would not be able to accommodate many people–this is true. However, at anything but the largest rituals we’ve held in the Ekklesía Antínoou (at PantheaCon), no more than twelve people or so would be involved most of the time anyway. If for some reason larger numbers of people would be involved, there are ways to handle it that don’t involve building a larger structure. The highest individual expense for something like this would be the image of the deity itself, which I think is probably as true now as it was in the past, and there are bronze life-size reproductions of Antinous statues like the Farnese Antinous in Naples that are available for around eight-thousand Euro at present. So, having the rest of the temple would not even be desirable until the means were available for purchasing and looking after the main eidolon/agalma.

Thinking about temples as more than just “dedicated ritual-spaces” is really essential, I think, in assessing whether they are feasible in not just material and financial terms, but in terms of human effort and devotional capacity. But this could lead to all sorts of other things as well–if a working person couldn’t do all of the daily rituals at a temple due to work constraints, then perhaps a retired person who was still fairly mobile and healthy could do it, and this could be an excellent incentive for taking a more active role in caring for the elderly in the pagan community by, say, allowing such a person to inhabit one’s guest-room in the house in return for doing this regular shrine and temple care duty. It’s a thought, in any case…