THE SEVEN JERUSALEM TEMPLES
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We are used to think that there were just two Temples on the Temple Mount. But there were in fact, many more, and the last two are still there and likely to remain. Any future treatment of the Temple Mount will have to treat all seven in a new synthesis.
The Seven Earthly Jerusalem Temples*
1 – Ancient Pagan (Pan-Gaian):
The earliest historical-archeological records we have about the city of Shalem are Egyptian. This was before the conquering of The Land of Canaan by the children of Israel, much before King David’s time, when the country was subjugated to Egypt, and the king of a city called Shalem was called “Abdi-Hapu” or “Avd-Haba”, which means “the slave of Love”. That means that the city was the ritual place of the God, or likely Goddess, of Love.
From studies made by architect Tuviah Sagiv, using infra-red aerial photography, it appears that there is a giant rock under the Dome of the Rock, which crops up under the Dome, but extends much underground towards the East. The overall form is of a large square that has its Eastern corner chiseled to make an (unequal) pentagonal shape. So this figure is pointing west, and the point is now under the Dome of the Rock. This very same form of rock has been found in the ancient Acropolis in Amman, and identified with a Temple of the Goddess, with the idea of penetration of the Male God into the Female one. The same pentagonal form appears in later times in Caesarea and in Jerusalem in towers called “Stratton Towers” – a name that has to do with Ashtoret – the local Goddess of Love. Thus apparently this place was originally the place of a cult for a goddess of love and fertility.
About the same time we learn from the bible of Melchizedek King of Shalem, a priest of the high El, which is a God, not a Goddess, who greets the patriarch Abraham - A God? A Goddess? Both a God and a Goddess?
Realizing that "Shalem" means "Whole", we shall show how the essential inner pattern of prehistoric temples worldwide point to Jerusalem as the center location for the Whole Earth Temple and is in fact "The New Jerusalem Diagram".
2 - Israelite:
Later on, two nations invaded that land. One came from the West, and had superior technology based on iron. These Western colonizers were called Plishtim – the Philistines – that means in Hebrew “the Invaders”. Other tribes invaded and penetrated this land from the East, from the desert. They were called Habiru – meaning “the bands”, which became “Hebrews”, and eventually became to be known as Yisra'el – the Israelites.
These two fierce peoples managed eventually to destroy or dispossess the local native population. They fought each other for several centuries, until eventually David became the King of Israel and the conqueror of Jerusalem. His son, King Solomon (Shelomoh), went to build a temple that will bolster his kingdom.
The Bible extols the glory of the Temple of Solomon, and later generations built much upon its legends. Even no lesser persons than Isaac Newton was convinced that the measures and the proportions of that fabled temple disclose the greatest secrets of the universe and its laws. We shall later see how the legacy of the Temple of Solomon fed several revivals and significantly affected human history.
But if one looks at the Bible carefully , one finds that King Solomon built not one Temple in Jerusalem, but four of them. He built one temple for the God of Israel that we talked about. But he built also a shrine for the Ashtoret of the Phoenicians, and for the gods of two subjected nations that Solomon sought to integrate with his kingdom: the nations of Ammon and Mo'av from across the Jordan, called Kemosh and Milkom. Building these shrines in Jerusalem must have been calculated to make Jerusalem the place to which they would orient their prayers and allegiance.
In the Temple that Solomon built was a rather strange contraption. Two giant sculptures of angels, Cherubs, stood in the Holy of Holies of the Temple. The legends of the later sages (which went into the Talmud) say that these were male and female, and that they could turn around. When Israel and her God were in good connections – these two sculptures would turn towards each other and copulate. And when the relationship was in a bad way, they would turn their backs to each other. On the holiest day of the year, the legends tell, the high priest would open the cover of the Holy of Holies and the people could see explicitly how much their God loved them.
Before the temple was destroyed, when it became clear that the enemy was getting ever closer, there came a time to hide the most significant implements of the Temple. These were the Ark of the Covenant, in which were located the Tablets in the handwriting of God and of Moses, and the Urim veTumim – some divinatory tools for the work (shamanic, one may say,) of the priest. Supposedly these implements were never seen again, but at least some clairvoyants in Israel are sure they are hidden underneath the Temple Mount.
The Babylonians destroyed this Temple, and thus Babylon became the antithesis of Jerusalem. But within 70 years, the new emperor – Cyrus the Persian (who is explicitly called in the Bible a Messiah), issued an edict that “whoever of YHWH’s people who had the Lord in him, should arise to build the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem which is in Judea.”
3 - Jewish:
This new temple had a very stormy existence. It went through wars and invasions. It started under the edict of Cyrus, was challenged by the Samaritans, profaned by the Hellenists, conquered by the Hashmonites, and in its very last days was completely rebuilt and enlarged by a non-Davidic king of Judea, who had been installed by Rome – Herod the Edomite. Herod was an extremely shrewd man, who realized that just as his parents could convert to Judaism, so could others, and if so, they would pay each year a large amount – half a Shekel each – to the Temple of Jerusalem. And he could see that there might be a way to convert the whole Roman Empire to the God of Israel. Herod had large imperial plans, and he built that giant Temple, where hundreds of thousands could assemble.
Judea and Rome were by now on a collision course – who will be the winner? There was a Jewish uprising in the year 70 C.E., the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, and this terrible blow caused the Jewish people and religion to lose its center.
4 - High-Pagan:
The most interesting, and perhaps most enlightened Roman emperor, Hadrian, first turned to the Jews and was ready to have the Temple rebuilt, and even collected their money for it. He built the Pantheon in Rome (where twelve gods were facing each other in the same edifice) and other temples in other part of his empire. But Hadrian had his own agenda, though he did not mean any harm. He did not allow the Jews to circumcise their newborns, and the temple he planned was Hellenistic-Roman one. The city was not called Jerusalem any more, but “Aelia Capitolina”, after the emperor’s own name – Aelius (and "Judea" was renamed "Palestine"). As Tuviah Sagiv suggests, even the whole system of walls around the Temple Mount, including the Western Wall, may not be Herodian but Hadrianic construction, intended to make the place bigger and higher so to completely cover up any remnant of the Jewish Temple. Hadrian has apparently erected his statue riding his horse right over the place of the Jewish Temple, and built there several shrines for the Roman Gods. The remnants of those shrines likely provided later the foundations to what is standing now on the Temple Mount – the El-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, to which we shall return. The street pattern of Aelia Capitolina (with its Byzantine extensions) established the current form of the Old City, embedding in it some sacred geometry masterpieces.
5 - Oriental Christian:
But history proved to be craftier than the emperor Hadrian. Rome eventually became Christian, and the Christian Church identified itself as “The New Israel”. The Christianization of the Roman Empire occurred in parallel with the building of a new capital city called Constantinople, or Byzantium. Here again, our New Jerusalem Diagram comes in handy.
If we consider the direction from the Great Pyramid to Jerusalem, and at Jerusalem we make a right angle (90 degrees) turn to the Left or to the Right, we shall find two cities on this alignment – Constantinople, the original Christian Capital, to the Left and Mecca (to which we’ll turn next) to the Right. Byzantium made its sacred pilgrimage orientation towards Jerusalem.
An interesting question arises about the Byzantine Jerusalem – whether the site of the Dome of the Rock was the place of a Byzantine Christian chapel. There are claims that this site was formerly the Antonia Garrison, where Jesus was tried, and that Hadrian’s extension of the Temple Mount platform included this site as a shrine to a goddess, which was turned in Byzantine times into a chapel for the Holy Wisdom – Santa Sophia – a feminine entity. There was a belief that the mark on the rock (which the Moslems now identify as the place of Mohammad’s Ascent) was where Jesus stood at his trial before Pilate. Shortly before the Moslem conquest of Jerusalem, there was a Persian invasion that destroyed that chapel, along with most of the churches of Jerusalem.
6 – Moslem:
Now we come to the Moslem conquest and the fights over leadership in the generations after Mohammad. The first Moslem ruling dynasty was the Umayyad dynasty that ruled from Damascus, and most of its Caliph-rulers were instituted (coroneted) in Jerusalem. They built a new city in Jerusalem, including the Dome of the Rock, the El-Aqsa Mosque and the Umayyad Palace. It seems that the original intention of this dynasty was to turn Jerusalem into the Moslem Empire’s center. Scholars of Moslem history show that during the period that the Dome of the Rock has been built and in its first decades, this edifice was not regarded as a monument for Mohammad and his Ascent to heaven (as is nowadays taken for granted by Moslems), but was considered the rebuilt Temple of Solomon.
And since there were yet no skilled Moslem artisans who could build an edifice to surpass the Christian edifices in Jerusalem, craftsmen were called from the whole new empire, which extended from Morocco and Spain in the West to India in the East. Jewish, Christian and Moslem artisans worked together on the Dome of the Rock.
The Umayyads were soon overrun by the next dynasty, the Abbasids, who chose to build Baghdad – by the ruins of the ancient Babylon, Jerusalem’s old rival – as the new Moslem capital, and Mecca was retained as the place for Moslem pilgrimage. During most of the subsequent 1,300 years, the Dome of the Rock was left as an empty shell, and the local prayer was done towards Mecca, with the worshipers in the El Aqsa mosque turning their backs towards the Dome of the Rock.
7 – Occidental Christian and Esoteric:
For a short time the Dome of the Rock came again into religious prominence, during the time of the Crusades. The greatest military force in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was the religious order of knight-monks, who called themselves “The Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon”, known in short as the Knight Templar. They had possession of the Temple Mount and their main cult center was the Dome of the Rock, which they called “Templo Domini”.
When the Knights Templar came back from Jerusalem and the Holy Land, they started the Gothic cathedrals, dedicated to The Lady, the Mother of God. The Dome of the Rock was likely the womb from which the Gothic style was born. There were several ways that this renewed encounter with “the Temple of Solomon” had influenced the world culture.
The Templar Legacy has apparently led to the establishment of Freemasonry. The Freemasons see themselves as “The Builders of Solomon’s Temple”. Freemasonry has had a great historic influence (especially in the foundation of the USA). Though it may have by now become an empty shell, it still gives a contemporary relevance to “adherents of Solomon’s Temple” in an appropriate multi-faith organization.
* This article is a part of a lecture delivered at the Visionary Conference at the Tamera Community, Portugal, on 25.9.04. The conference was organized by the Lassale Institute of Switzerland,