Of all the nations of antiquity the Persians were the most simple and
direct in the worship of the Creator. They were the puritans of the
heathen world, and not only rejected all images of God and his agents,
but also temples and altars, according to Herodotus, whose authority we
prefer to any other, because he had an opportunity of conversing with
them before they had adopted any foreign superstitions. As they
worshipped the ethereal fire without any medium of personification or
allegory, they thought it unworthy of the dignity of the god to be
represented by any definite form, or circumscribed to any particular
place. The universe was his temple, and the all-pervading element of
fire his only symbol. The Greeks appear originally to have held similar
opinions, for they were long without statues and Pausanias speaks of a
temple at Siciyon, built by Adrastus—who lived in an age before the
Trojan war—which consisted of columns only, without wall or roof, like
the Celtic temples of our northern ancestors, or the Phyrœtheia of the
Persians, which were circles of stones in the centre of which was
kindled the sacred fire, the symbol of the god. Homer frequently speaks
of places of worship consisting of an area and altar only, which were
probably enclosures like those of the Persians, with an altar in the
centre. The temples dedicated to the creator Bacchus, which the Greek
architects called _hypœthral_, seem to have been anciently of this kind,
whence probably came the title (“surround with columns”) attributed to
that god in the Orphic litanies. The remains of one of these are still
extant at Puzznoli, near Naples, which the inhabitants call the temple
of Serapis; but the ornaments of grapes, vases, etc., found among the
ruins, prove it to have been of Bacchus. Serapis was indeed the same
deity worshipped under another form, being usually a personification of
the sun. The architecture is of the Roman times; but the ground plan is
probably that of a very ancient one, which this was made to replace—for
it exactly resembles that of a Celtic temple in Zeeland, published in
Stukeley’s _Itinerary_. The ranges of square buildings which enclose it
are not properly parts of the temple, but apartments of the priests,
places for victims and sacred utensils, and chapels dedicated to the
subordinate deities, introduced by a more complicated and corrupt
worship and probably unknown to the founder of the original edifice. The
portico, which runs parallel with these buildings, encloses the
_temenos_, or area of sacred ground, which in the _pyrœtheia_ of the
Persians was circular, but is here quadrangular, as in the Celtic temple
in Zeeland, and the Indian pagoda before described. In the centre was
the holy of holies, the seat of the god, consisting of a circle of
columns raised upon a basement, without roof or walls, in the middle of
which was probably the sacred fire or some other symbol of the deity.
The square area in which it stood was sunk below the natural level of
the ground, and, like that of the Indian pagoda, appears to have been
occasionally floated with water; the drains and conduits being still to
be seen, as also several fragments of sculpture representing waves,
serpents, and various aquatic animals, which once adorned the basement.
The Bacchus here worshipped, was, as we learn from the Orphic hymn above
cited, the sun in his character of extinguisher of the fires which once
pervaded the earth. He is supposed to have done this by exhaling the
waters of the ocean and scattering them over the land, which was thus
supposed to have acquired its proper temperature and fertility. For this
reason the sacred fire, the essential image of the god, was surrounded
by the element which was principally employed in giving effect to the
beneficial exertions of the great attribute.
From a passage of Hecatæus, preserved by Deodorus Siculus, it seems
evident that Stonehenge and all the monuments of the same kind found in
the north, belong to the same religion which appears at some remote
period to have prevailed over the whole northern hemisphere. According
to that ancient historian, _the Hyperboreans inhabited an island beyond
Gaul, as large as Sicily, in which Apollo was worshipped in a circular
temple considerable for its size and riches_. Apollo, we know, in the
language of the Greeks of that age, can mean no other than the sun,
which according to Cæsar was worshipped by the Germans, when they knew
of no other deities except fire and the moon. The island can evidently
be no other than Britain, which at that time was only known to the
Greeks by the vague reports of the Phœnician mariners; and so uncertain
and obscure that Herodotus, the most inquisitive and credulous of
historians, doubts of its existence. The circular temple of the sun
being noticed in such slight and imperfect accounts, proves that it must
have been something singular and important; for if it had been an
inconsiderable structure, it would not have been mentioned at all; and
if there had been many such in the country, the historian would not have
employed the singular number.
Stonehenge has certainly been a circular temple, nearly the same as that
already described of the Bacchus at Puzznoli, except that in the latter
the nice execution and beautiful symmetry of the parts are in every
respect the reverse of the rude but majestic simplicity of the former.
In the original design they differ but in the form of the area. It may
therefore be reasonably supposed that we have still the ruins of the
identical temple described by Hecatæus, who, being an Asiatic Greek,
might have received his information from Phœnician merchants, who had
visited the interior parts of Britain when trading there for tin.
Anacrobius mentions a temple of the same kind and form, upon Mount
Zilmissus, in Thrace, dedicated to the sun under the title of Bacchus
Sebrazius. The large obelisks of stone found in many parts of the north,
such as those at Rudstone, and near Boroughbridge, in Yorkshire, belong
to the same religion; obelisks being, as Pliny observes, sacred to the
sun, whose rays they represented both by their form and name.—_Payne
Knight’s Worship of Priapus._