CiTemple.htm
What would you
say if you were told that the Western (or Wailing) Wall is not a remnant of the
Jewish Temple, but of a temple built by the emperor Hadrian for Jupiter, the
sun god, and in fact that the whole Old City is a kind of great Temple, One ot
its main focuses apparently at the site of the existing Holy Sepulcher – the
burial site of Jesus? Recent research outlines new and exciting possibilities
for contemplating Jerusalem and its role as a City of Peace.
* this article was originally written by Dr. Yitzhak Hayut-Ma’n as “The Real Revelation of the Temple in our Times” then re-written in the current version by Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi and published in the July 99 issue of Hayim Aherim (Living Alternatives) – the leading Israeli magazine of Natural Health, Mysticism and Alternative Thinking. This Internet version of it does not (yet) contain the copious illustrations that came with it in the magazine.
The
end of the Millennium is approaching, and with it is amplified the hopes and
fears of all humankind. Fears and hopes that existed all along and that underly
our daily routine are waiting for the opportune time to burst into
consciousness, if not even into actual reality. One of the loci around which is
gathered many fears, precisely because it is also the focus of many hopes, is
the subject of Jerusalem in general and particularly the Temple within it. Many
apocalyptic visions are connected to the hope for the restoration of the
Temple, some of them frightful enough to cause the larger public to seek refuge
and remove the subject of the Temple from the public agenda. But to my point of
view, it is precisely these things that demand of us a creative effort in order
to focus alternative thinking upon this loaded issue that is lurking all the
time around the corner for the State of Israel and threatens to blow up like a
gunpowder keg, if not much worse.
A
creative effort relating to the Temple is required from whoever is sensitive to
the question of the concept of the Temple and to the answer hidden within: how
can humankind connect with the divine dimensions that seem beyond understanding
and nevertheless be renewed through them. Can we find ways that fulfill the prophecy
of Isaiah “For My House shall be called a House of Prayer for All the Nations”?
To a large extent, this depends on us, on those who desire a vision in which
the redemption of Israel is not connected with the oppression of other people.
If we leave the focus of the problem in the hands of the seekers of the
apocalyptic end, lovers of bloody visions, then we shall not be able to come
and say on a day of reckoning “our hands did not shed this blood and our eyes
have not seen”.
The Secrets of
Ancient Architecture
For
years I have been dedicating concentrated effort to researching the futuristic
aspects of Jerusalem as a temple for all the nations. As part of this
preparation I have invited the veteran English researcher, John Michell, to
visit Jerusalem and research its secrets as a member of the research entity
I’ve established – “The Academy of Jerusalem”.
John
Michell is famous since the 60’s as a prestigious researcher. He wrote many
books, some of them became best-sellers, in which he studied the secrets
embedded in the archeological remnants of ancient temples all around the world.
In his researches, John discovered a basic system of measuring units, which
unifies human thinking about the Holy in different cultures. These sacred units
are related to natural measures, based on cosmological dimensions and on the
human body. The English foot is the last remnant of this ancient mode of
thinking that is still current in the Western World. The outcome of this is
that the majority of researchers, who are habituated to a metric system that
has no relation to natural measures, cannot uncover the important holistic
relations among the dimensions that fashion the spaces of ancient temples. When
we expose the ancient sacred measures with which these temples were built –
from Stonehenge in Britain to the Great Pyramid in Africa – fascinating secrets
are revealed. Such research exposes the story that lies beneath the
archeological remnants. Until the invention of print, architecture served as a
real language by which the priests, rulers and city planners expressed the
messages they wanted to convey to the public, and at times even an orientation
towards more esoteric phenomena. As part of his work in these areas, John
Michell has raised world consciousness regarding the ancient methods for space
design, such as Feng Shui, which was quite unknown till then. John claimed that
in order to understand the mysteries of these unknown sites, we must follow the
ways of thought of the ancients. The relations among the objects that produce
the architectural space – walls, stairways, streets and gates – encode in them
secret insights that are rooted deep in the human psyche.
Another
discovery reported and elaborated upon by John Michell (precisely because he
has not limited himself to a narrow speciality and has wandered upon continents
to study well the shrines around the world) is that there exist certain axes,
straight lines, along which the founders of ancient temples chose to place
them. Many sacred sites in England, he discovered, are located along a single
straight line (the “Saint Michael Ley Line” that goes across the widest stretch
of England and is oriented towards the sunrise of the summer solstice). Other
axes draw interesting straight lines that connect ancient sites across various
continents.
What lies beneath
the Heavenly Jerusalem
Jerusalem
comprises a great mystery. Many cultures have ruled over it, and each one
regarded it as a very sacred site, built monuments and changed its appearance.
The current political and religious situation prohibits archeological digs in
many places so that many questions remain without an unequivocal answer. One of
these is the question of the location of the Hebrew Temple. Ostensibly, this is
a question that would interest only archeologists and members of the Chief
Rabbinate, but, as I hope to show in the following, herein is hidden the key
for the development of an alternative approach to the whole issue of the
Temple, the key, in fact, to the whole great subject of the coveted peace among
the major religions of the modern world.
It
is quite the convention to think that the Holy of Holies, the most sacred place
of the Temple, stood where the Islamic Dome of the Rock stands today. But this
is not the only view. There are those today who are pursuing different lines of
research. In his second visit I introduced John to Professor Asher Kaufman, who
claims that the Holy of Holies was situated at a place called “The Dome of the
Spirits”, about a hundred yards North-Northwest of the Dome of the Rock, and
John has made several discoveries based on this assumption. On his third visit
I introduced him to another one of them – architect Tuviah Sagiv – whom I first
met when he was my student at the Israel Institute of Technology, and was
already then distinguished as an original thinker. Tuviah, who has invested
many years in research of the sacred sites, has reached some most interesting
conclusions. Even though he is an observant Jew and dresses like one, Tuviah
claims, on the basis of finds he obtained from painstaking examinations of the
Temple Mount including use of infra-red aerial photography and radar surveys,
that the Western Wall is not a remnant of the Jewish Temple but a remnant of
the Temple built by the Roman emperor Hadrian for the Sun God Jupiter in order to obliterate the memory of
the Jewish Jerusalem.
Sagiv
demonstrates that the Solomonic Temple was built at a place between the current
Dome of the Rock and the El-Aksa Mosque. The place is currently bereft of a
Moslem building (it has a washing fountain, called El-Cas). It is interesting
that the greatest of the Kabbalah masters of the 16th century –
Rabbi Hayim Vital, the student and scribe of the Holy ARI of Safed –
wrote in his diary that the place of the Jewish Temple remained unoccupied, and
the gentile nations have not built an edifice upon it. Also the Lubawitcher
Rabbi has supported this notion about the location of the Temple.
Sagiv
has also discovered that the Dome of the Rock is not just a Moslem edifice. The
Moslems found an ancient structure, erected and covered it with gold and
fantastic mosaic arabesques. But its base was a Roman structure, part of a
pattern of shrines that the Roman emperor Hadrian built for the Sun god
Jupiter. Yet the Romans did not invent the location of this shrine, and they
too have followed the remnants of what was there before. Sagiv discovered that
the rock upon which the Dome of the Rock is located is a giant rock with only
its tip above ground. The survey of the whole area by novel electronic means
reveals that it is chiseled in a very interesting form that is characteristic
of ancient temples built for the Phoenician goddess Ashtoret!
The
Bible actually relates that King Solomon built in Jerusalem not only a temple
for the God of Israel, but also followed the council of his foreighn wives and
built an altar for Ashtoret (who was later identified with Venus or Aphrodite)
as well as altars for two Middle Eastern idols. Could it be that the rock upon
which Hadrian built the Temple of Jupiter and his wife Hera, and the Moslem
structure built upon that to mark the place of the heavenly ascention of the
prophet Mohamad, are actually remnants of a temple for the goddess Ashtoret,
which was built by our wise King Solomon alongside the Jewish Temple?
The
meetings between John Michell and Asher Kaufman and later with Tuvia Sagiv led
John to examine the street map of the Roman Jerusalem and to examine the axes
that connect the sites in the Old City that are sacred to Christianity, Islam
and Judaism. To our surprise John discovered that the summary of these axes,
North-South and East-West, gives a new picture, which resembles a sixfold
increase of the form of the Temple! Take the form of the Temple (e.g. from
Kaufman’s rendering of Tractate Midot in the Talmud), multiply it by six, lay it over the whole Old City, and
you get a map of a giant temple, hidden in the secret ley lines of the ancient
city. It seems that the old streets of Jerusalem (in which we still roam)
reproduce the connecting axes of the sacred sites, and in actuality the whole
Old City is a kind of a giant Temple, with alternate foci at the Dome of the
Spirits and at the Rock of Golgotha within the present Church of the Holy
Sepulcher – the burial place of Jesus. The other sites sacred to the various
religions, including the ancient pagan religions, occupy key points in this
amazing plan. Jerusalem comes revealed as the extended Temple of Solomon (Shlomoh).
The Temple of Interfaith Reconciliation (Hashlamah) is manifest; we walk
inside it and do not know that we are walking within it.
It
should be noted that already in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel (ch. 40-45)
the future Temple is described as a giant Temple, about the size discussed
here. Also the descriptions of the future Temple in the Dead Sea Scrolls and
the description of “The New Jerusalem” in the Revelation of John in the New
Testament describes an entire city as the Temple of God, which is destined to
be revealed at the End of Days – a giant cosmopolitan Temple designed to serve
all humankind.
The
more the mysterious possibilities unfolded, the caprices of history started
falling into place: what happened here? It turned out that the plan built by
the Romans in order to obliterate the memory of the Jewish Temple actually
forms a hidden harmony with it. The mother of Constantine, the Roman emperor
who converted to Christianity, chose the Rock of Golgotha as the site to
worship Jesus, a site formerly dedicated to another ancient pagan worship. The
Moslems who built the shrines of the Mosque of El-Aksa and (rebuilt) the Dome
of the Rock opposite the shrine of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher did so
within the ancient outlines of the Temple of Jupiter in Elia Capitolina.
Four
inimical cultures competed on the site of the Temple of Jerusalem, and each one
has built upon it and added an aspect to it. The Jewish Temple was orientated
Eastwards, The Roman Temple turned 90 degrees to the axis of the Polar Star.
The Christians conquered Rome from within, and turned the axis by another 90 degrees
westwards, towards their main shrine in Rome. Along the continuation of the
Temple axis they built their shrine at Golgotha over the ruins of another
ancient pagan shrine. John Michell shows the placement on this axis by a
distance of 864 Temple cubits (12x12x12/2, a number associated systematically
with the Temple) extending from
Kaufman’s original foci at the Dome of the Spirit. Then, when the hand
of Ishmael prevailed, the structures over the Temple Mount were rebuilt and the
orientation was turned by another 90 degrees, southwards, towards the schematic
direction of their temple at Mecca. “How the Wheel keeps turning”!
Now
we are here in the new State of Israel and we draw the pattern of the Temple
upon the East-West Axis. Surprisingly enough, the continuation of this axis
goes right to the Knesset (Israel’s
parliament), and it seems that its designers had no conscious conception that
they were adding another feature within the whole pattern of the Temple.
Moved
to the depth of his soul, John wrote in his summary that he sees no explanation
for this amazing turn of events but in the realm of the miraculous: “that the
wonderful pattern over the Holy City was a product of divine providence,
working through each generation of various different peoples to create an
active symbol of the Holy Spirit that is ever the same for everyone,
everywhere. The revelation of that pattern was to come about when it was
needed, in response to a generations’s desire for the ‘healing of nations’, and
in God’s good time. It seems likely that the time has come”.
What
is written here is supported by many drawings along with historical,
archeological, mathematical and theological discoveries. Additional details can
be found at the Internet site of the Academy of Jerusalem at www.thehope.org, where the full text
of John Michell’s monograph can be found at .
What
should be done about it?
This
is the big question. As long as we thought that the question of the Temple is a
national-Jewish question, and that its erection necessarily entails some World
War, we had a good excuse to postpone it for another time. But if there is any
truth in what is being discovered through the esoteric research of Jerusalem,
then the focus of human consecration is not limited to the few square yards on
which the Jewish-Arab conflict is centered. The Future Temple is not intended
to become another place for the slaughter of sacrifices, but a place of the
formation of a great Peace upon Earth – as described by the prophets – a place
where all humankind will meet to sacrifice what divides us and find what draws
us near. What are the forms of worship appropriate for such a Temple of
Reconciliation? Here it is facing us. The whole Old City with its catacombs and
alleys is the place where the Temple is hidden and waiting for all those who
are willing to uncover it.
Is
it possible to create, in the streets of Jerusalem and its labyrinth of rooms,
new kinds of religious ritual? (The chambers of the Academy of Jerusalem that
overlooks the Dome of the Rock can be the first place to be dedicated to this
purpose). Will the New Millenium bring together peace seekers to sanctify,
through song and prayer and spiritual exercise, the interfaith Temple that is
already virtually here?
In
order to promote this, the associates of the Academy of Jerusalem are seeking
to create a virtual model of the Temple of Reconciliation, which could be
extended as a Tabernacle of Peace “built” from laser Light Beams over the Old
City. Likewise there are attempts to design exemplary rituals, psychological
and esoteric, in which groups of people may gather together to seek ways to get
closer, to sacrifice their animal and divisive nature for the sake of what is
divine and complementary. Each such group would add a Leaf of Light in the
Light Vine Tabernacle that will extend in delicate lines over the city.
When
many groups are engaged in these practices, the common weave of the leaves of
the Light Vine will form fascinating patterns of reconciliation via which all
the tribes of humankind will unify through the ever renewing Temple, as we
reach novel insights about our own identity and discover new ways to contribute
to the sanctification of the whole world. (See also my article on “The Poor
Knights of the Temple of Solomon”).
The Academy of Jerusalem invites whoever feels that “God has touched in
his heart” to suggest ideas and to share in the work of the Temple that is
being revealed at present in Jerusalem – the City of God.