Temple

The summer of my sophomore year in college, I took an immersive ten week course in Latin in midtown Manhattan. The days were long--at least sixteen hours, often more--and the building had few windows. It is perhaps because of the close, fluorescent-lit environment that I remember the etymology of temple so vividly. 

Temple comes from the Latin templum, meaning “piece of ground consecrated for the taking of auspices, building for worship of a god.” It’s root likely goes to the PIE *tem- (to cut), or possibly to *temp- (to stretch). I don’t know if the story I heard--which links the root of temple to the practice of augury--is factually verified, but it’s a beautiful story to ponder regardless. 

As I heard it, Roman Augures (people who based prophecies on bird watching) would go out on a hill and draw (in their mind’s eye), a square in the sky. They would watch that square all day for birds, and make interpretations based upon the behavior of the birds. This act of delineating a patch of the sky, of cutting out a special piece of space, flowed into the concept of temple. 

What I love about this story is that it illuminates so clearly how strange and wondrous our act of making sacred is. It’s odd enough to try to wrap our heads around a physical area being consecrated (why build a temple in one place versus another?), but to imagine that act happening in the sky is magical on an entirely different level. We associate the sky with the ephemeral, with what is (literally) beyond us. It’s a convenient and logical place for gods to live, or for after-life realms to be housed. I think the reason it’s by nature such a spiritual space is because of how Other it is to our earthly experience. Whereas we live out a material and finite existence, closely tied to and dependent upon what we can touch, consume, and find shelter beneath, the sky is the realm of the ‘non’ material, where clouds gather and dissipate, light magically appears, and infinity lurks. 

I believe that we invest the sky with the spiritual--we are only able to invest the sky with the spiritual--because while we are primarily ensconced in a finite existence, we do experience at least a taste of the infinite. When we think about our self, our soul--whatever you want to call it--we intuitively sense that we aren’t fully limited to the bodily, that there is something more to us. That is what makes us look to the sky, or to the spiritual space more generally. If we were entirely finite, it wouldn’t occur to us to look to the realm of the infinite. If we were entirely infinite, we wouldn’t need to look to it. It is because of our middle position, our being caught between heaven and earth, that we are moved to usher the sacred into our lives. 

Back to bird watching. How does one keep their eyes fixed on a square in the sky all day? Given the changing nature of the sky, it seems to me that looking away even for a moment--even just blinking--would make a return to that exact patch almost impossible.

But perhaps that’s not the point. Perhaps Augures were more than aware that the exact location of the square would inevitably shift throughout the day, and that the act of making sacred through ‘cutting’ would always exist in a tenuous balance between what is inside and outside.

Perhaps they understood that the need to make sacred is a strange and beautiful characteristic of the way humans are constructed, and that at the end of the day it’s less important what or where something is created, but the act of giving attention to it in the first place.