Hesiod, Ovid, Timarchus and four ages in the light of Campbell’s Focal Tiered Town.
The vision of Timarchus related by Plutarch references a generative division of all things. As I drift about this wicked notion I notice architecture manipulation in real time, the death by square rental structures included. As I trained through small towns and cities viewing sky lines, tiny, modest and great, I recalled Joseph Campbell’s interview with Bill Moyers, in which the old sage noted that the collective soul of a town or city was focused via architecture by the height of its most prominent building.
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Hall
The hall of Heroat, where Beowulf quested, to the home of Odysseus where he afflicted the besieging suitors, represents pre-civilized barbarian architecture. The focus is practical, a building large enough to house the local warriors at one meeting. The building is not of a kind different, with no two stories, no balcony or tower for the lord to rule down from. It is taller because it is bigger and must be heated by fire without suffocating the chief and his men. This building probably evolved from a tent in many locations. Powhaton judged John Smith in such a building as illustrated in the 1609 chronicle.
This hall is preceded by a tent or hut. It is succeeded by the house, including the private house/manor of the oligarch descended from the chief, the public house for the council descended from the warriors, and eventually serves to limit the martial and moral vision of the once wise men as that house expands and shuts out the world from the realm of decision.
The hall as the prime building of a community, represents a voluntary social structure vested in the dispersal of power in the hands of able men.
The hall is not mentioned in Campbell’s thesis, as his was a religious study and the hall predates such social scale.
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Church
World Mountain [Step Pyramid] or Cathedral
Towering above the house of Gilgamesh was the step pyramid. Priests and elders both had to grant him, the king, permission to act. The walls of his great city were dwarfed by the temple mountain at its center. Note the temple at Ellis, housing an image of Zeus, [1] loomed above the secular buildings of that town.
The ancient grain slave states raised soaring monuments to bondage sanctioned by Heaven. These collection points replaced the mountain of the prophet as they weighed terminally upon the souls collected to raise and maintain it and its attendants.
The most successful world religions, Christianity and Islam, spread by the swords of the lords, were content, for the most part, with a church or mosque that was of similar dimensions to the castles of the great lords in a city, or to the hall of the village chief, or manor of the town’s overlord. The building was symbolically raised higher with a steeple or spire, an indication that the priesthood and the lords were working in concord with divine sanction from above. The obelisk is such a device of illustrated heavenly sanction detached from society. [2]
In Europe, during the warm period between 1000 and 1270s, cathedrals did serve as an unbalancing obsession by the clergy and the rising merchant class, with the money men taking the social lead from the lords and their king. The warrior class countered by raising higher castles, building towers which merely isolated their social position.
Campbell noted that a look at a place like Salt Lake City tells the tale of cultural reduction, as does any American town. In the early 1800s, in the agrarian America, the tallest building was the church, when faith was paramount.
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Palace, Castle, Courthouse Government Building
The Akropolis of Athens, of the “high city” raised on a hill in the midst of the community, served as a refuge, a holy symbol, a treasury, a place of artistic expression. Such a place required the consent of the community. The councils of free men and/or men of political status, either oligarchic, republican or democratic, would not originally meet and haggle before their God or Goddess, whose house was on high, but haggle in a political building down below. The decision would then be taken up and ratified in the temple, before Heaven.
As power increasingly devolved to the produce of argument and disputation, the size of the political building would increase. These were often the fronts of merchant, imperial or ideological interests of international scope, playing the politicians like puppets.
As Campbell, notes, after the American Civil War, American city skylines were no longer dominated by churches or cathedrals, but by government buildings. The height was no greater in proportion to the church, than the church was in relation to the hall, a church really was a hall with a steeple atop. But, the brutal, squat, oppressive nature of the late 1800s government buildings in American cities imposed a negative social gravity as the individual shrank. These buildings rose in mass at the same time that freemen were no longer permitted to go about armed. This occurred in ancient Rome as well.
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Financial House, Sky Scraper [3]
Baal of the Chaldeans, the god whose priesthood ran the world financial institution of Antiquity, was housed in a building distinguished by its great height. The networks that raised and felled emperors, used kings as pawns, played politicians as senators, bought off generals and armies, formed and liquidated companies, managed ideologies from their secure vaults, possessed an ego that must express itself in architecture.
The highest building in every city is a business building, a high rise. Even if a hotel or posh apartment building, it is foremost a business and secondly a barracks for financial actors, living above the sheep they sheer and the lambs they butcher. The skyscraper is reared in a society that is not just home to disarmed men, but to men who no longer fight, who not only abhor the duel as a horror, but the ritual of fists as well.
Campbell has a hard time suppressing a grin when he uses his finger to indicate a tower of such impractical ostentation supposedly raised by sober, soulless capitalists.
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Mortal Hubris [2]
Obelisks, Towers [Eiffel, Space Needle, Saint Louis Arch], Satellites
As a civilizations kills a multitude of host cultures upon its ages long, cancerous quest to grow; as growth becomes a shadow god flitting through a mirror of distortion, some disfigured souls seek godhead for themselves. From the Tower of Babel, to the ego-scientific obelisks of the late modern period [the 911 monument], buildings become pure artistic oppression. To include, hanging fixtures in the vault of heaven as God did in Genesis, the thirst to drink the hopes and toils of millions, even of billions, must be slacked in such ways. For we are ruled and feasted upon by a beast, and a beast, even of brilliant mind, must drink, must abide by the ritual of the kill.
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Returning to Timarchus and his four stages of things: Life, Motion, Generation, Corruption, perhaps, we see in the stages symbolized by the Hall, Church, Government House [4] and Skyscraper, a cycle of material rise and concordant moral decline implicit in our worldly condition?
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Notes
1.) The very non-Semitic image of Jesus, currently displayed in most houses I stay, was based on the likeness of Zeus at Ellis.
2.) Discussed in line of ascension two paragraphs above.
3.) Depression pulp author, Robert E. Howard, typically had for villains sorcerers [manipulators] in towers. I suggest here, that this convention, used also by J.R.R. Tolkien, is a symbolic narrative device pointing towards the corporate tower of power as evil. See also Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower, and Poe’s verse upon the same.
4.) I suggest that the public house, or pup, the tavern, is one half of the hall, in a society broken apart, the other half being the manor house. The first stage of social distortion is the separation of the chief from the warriors, in the form of lords over men, and officers over soldiers. This stage is not yet complete at the composing of The Song of Roland, Beowulf, the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is complete in Gilgamesh, depicting a Stage 2 theocracy.
