One of Kircher's closest friends was the great baroque architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who Christopher Wren met in France in 1665 at the court of Louis XIV.
Bernini, Like Kircher, was (or seemed to be) an ardent Jesuit, and all his life would attend Mass every morning at the small church of Il Gesù in Rome, where the founder of the Jesuit order, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, was buried. Kircher's vast knowledge of perspective and of the symbolic use of architecture gave him much in common with Bernini, and they collaborated on several architectural projects for the pope in Rome. Notable amongst these was an ancient Egyptian obelisk (not to be confused with the Vatican obelisk described in Chapter Thirteen) that they erected in the Piazza della Minerva where once had stood a Temple of Isis. It was in 1652, thus 13 years before Bernini met Christopher Wren in Paris, that Kircher published his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, a book that was a bestseller in its days and widely read throughout Europe.
Kircher's depiction of the Sepirothic Tree is identical to the portrayals in the Hebrew Cabala with ten emanations interlinked by 22 pathways. But unlike others, Kircher saw the original source of the Cabalistic knowledge enshrined therein as being ‘Egyptian’. Could Kircher's ‘Egyptianised’ Hermetic-Cabalistic ideas of sacred and symbolic architecture and perspectives somehow have reached Christopher Wren and John Evelyn in England?
John Greaves, the Pyramids and Gresham College
In considering this question we note that there is another possible ‘Egyptian’ connection – again peculiarly involving Kircher – in Christopher Wren's background.
The reader will recall that Wren was appointed Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford in 1661, right after the Restoration of Charles II.83 Prior to Wren's appointment, the post had been occupied by Seth Ward, who held the position from 1649 to 1660. Before Ward the professor had been another eminent figure – John Greaves.
Like Wren, Greaves had formerly taught mathematics at Gresham College in London. His stint there was from 1630 to 1637, after which he took a sabbatical in order to make a rather unusual journey to Egypt, the main objective of which was to investigate the Pyramids of Giza. He hoped to find a ‘universal unit’ of measurement encoded into these great structures. To this end he teamed up with an Italian scientist, Tito Livio Burattini whose sponsor was none other than Athanasius Kircher.84
Burattini, although Italian by birth, was domiciled in Poland. He was a keen mathematician, astronomer and cartographer, but his real passion, like Kircher's, was ancient Egypt. Burattini was finally to travel there in 1637 with support from Kircher, a short while before Greaves himself arrived in Egypt. In his book Pyramidograhia, published in 1646, Greaves refers to Burattini as ‘an ingenious young man from Venice’ and makes use of some of Burattini's drawings of the pyramids.85
It was when Greaves returned to England in 1639 that he was rewarded for his Egyptian endeavours with the post of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford – the same post that Christopher Wren would eventually occupy in 1661.
David Stevenson, professor of Scottish history at the University of St. Andrews, has discovered that Sir Robert Moray, the principal founder of the Royal Society and the first man to be initiated into Freemasonry on English soil, also had a connection with the ubiquitous Athanasius Kircher: In 1643 he [Robert Moray] was knighted by the king [Charles I] … Later in that same year he was captured by imperial forces while fighting for the French, and was imprisoned in Bavaria. By 1645 he had been ransomed, having made use of his captivity to develop his scientific interests through conversations and correspondence with Jesuit scholars, including the remarkable Hermetic polymath Athanasius Kircher who was a leading authority on the mysteries of ancient Egypt.86
There is, too, another common denominator to consider: Gresham College itself. Many of the protagonists associated with the Invisible College, the Royal Society and the early London Masonic lodges were directly or indirectly involved with Gresham College. These included Robert Moray, John Wilkins, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. The origins of this college go back to Sir Thomas Gresham, the famous founder of the London Royal Exchange. In 1575 he bequeathed his home in Bishopsgate to serve as headquarters for the college and left provision in his will for it to be funded in the future through revenues accrued by the Royal Exchange. The idea of such a college seems to be somewhat ‘Masonic’, in the sense that Thomas Gresham decreed that seven ‘readers’ or scholars would be appointed to lecture on each of the seven liberal arts.87 Indeed, according to Robert Lomas, Gresham College was ‘the main centre for Freemasonry in Restoration London … which Sir Thomas Gresham had set up to support his Masonic ideals of study.’88
Could all these circumstances, as well as the encounter with Bernini in Paris, have brought Christopher Wren into contact with Kircher's Hermetic-Cabalistic ideas and their application to geometrical design and structures such as the Sephirothic Tree of Life? And if they had, might they have influenced Wren's plan for the rebirth of London after the Great Fire? We can only surmise that the opportunity was there for this to happen.
Oddly enough, the same can also be said of John Evelyn, who presented his plan for a ‘new’ London just a couple of days after Wren. Evelyn, as we shall recall, had travelled to Europe between 1643 and 1652. He spent time in Rome during this period where he is known to have developed a keen interest in Bernini and his works.89 It is by no means impossible that he might have seen or learnt something there, in the city where Giordano Bruno had been burnt at the stake less than half a century before, that sparked off Hermetic-Cabalistic ideas in his mind.
Many different streams converging
‘After the disappearance of Catharism and the Temple at the beginning of the 14th century,’ Arthur Guirdham asks: … what outlet was there for those of a dualist tendency? One thing we can say with certainty. By this time the dualists of Europe had learnt that the open profession of their opinions was so hazardous as to be impracticable.90
In other words if religious teachings as contrary to Church dogma as those of the Cathars were in any way to survive the mindset of the Middle Ages they would have to go underground, and to follow whatever further course of natural evolution and development they could while remaining out of sight. We are convinced that this happened and that dualist beliefs were sheltered and nourished beyond the view of the Inquisition and historians long after ‘Catharism and the Temple’ had been officially destroyed. It seems to us that this process was dramatically catalysed and briefly brought out into the open again by the recovery of the Hermetic Texts in 1460 and that afterwards another period of incredible openness, progress and revolutionary thinking followed. But Hermetists like Bruno, who pushed the revolution too quickly, died for their beliefs while other less hot-headed thinkers waited patiently for a better time.
In the long years of waiting many different ideas, like many different streams converging, all become available to ‘those of a dualist tendency’. Included in the mix were remnants of Cathar Gnosticism; Jewish mysticism and the Cabala; the recovered Hermetic revelations; Templar and Masonic notions about rebuilding Solomon's Temple; the Rosicrucian and ‘New Atlantean’ programme for an ideal utopian city designed to bring harmony between heaven and earth; and last but not least Tommaso Campanella's Civitas Solis, the Adocentyn of the Picatrix, to be made ‘in such a wonderful way that only by looking at it all the sciences may be learned.’91
All these elements and influences, we suggest, were at work in the mysteriously similar city plans that Christopher Wren and John Evelyn prepared after the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Wren's plan to rebuild the Temple
The Great Fire swept over the city of London like a giant blowtorch, clearing an area one and a half miles long and half a mile wide. It destroyed almost everything from Tower Hill in the east to Temple in the west, where it finally burnt itself out in front of Temple Church, a distinctive round structure built of stone in the Gothic style.
The district where the Fire stopped – still know
n as ‘Temple’ and today inhabited mainly by lawyers – is so named because of its historical association with the Knights Templar. It lies roughly between St. Paul's in the east and Covent Garden in the west, and is bracketed by Fleet Street in the north and the Victoria Embankment in the south. The Templars built their great preceptory (headquarters) of the New Temple here in 1161, providing themselves in the process with a pier on the River Thames and inland access for their ships all the way to Newgate via the nearby River Fleet.92
Construction of Temple Church began in 1180. Like many other Templar places of worship, its core structure was a circular building with a domed roof, reminiscent of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the supposed tomb of Jesus) in Jerusalem. Let us note in passing that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre lies west of the site of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, an alignment, as we shall see later, that did not go unnoticed by the Templars in London. Dedicated to the Virgin, Temple Church was consecrated on 10 February 1185 by Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, who was brought to London for the purpose. This was just two years before the dramatic fall of Jerusalem to the ‘heathen’ forces of the Arabs under Saladin in 1187.
The district of Temple and Temple Church remained under the order's control until its suppression in 1307. In 1312 all Templar properties in London, including the round church, were handed over to the rival military Order of the Knights Hospitallers. When the Hospitallers were in turn suppressed during the Reformation, the church and its surrounding buildings passed to the crown. The buildings were tenanted by lawyers – the benchers of the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple – who secured the freehold by royal charter from James I in 1608. These two ‘Inns of Court’ have remained the owners of Temple Church ever since and are under an obligation by terms of their royal charter to maintain it and its services forever.93
In the plans that Wren and Evelyn drew up for London's architectural rebirth after the Great Fire, both men paid inordinate attention the area around Temple Church.
Christopher Wren was first to get the king's attention. On 11 September 1666, with a blueprint tucked under his arm, he rushed to see Charles II at Whitehall. The blueprint was an amazingly detailed and professionally executed map for a new London, the sort of town-planning design project that should take weeks, if not months, to conceive and draft in final form. Yet barely a week had passed since the Fire and there were still dozens of smoke plumes hanging over the skyline of the charred city.
Wren's ideas combine a magnificent vision for a new capital city with an appreciation of sophisticated concepts in urban planning. His blueprint, which has survived, looks like the polished product of a highly-skilled team. Yet the evidence suggests that Wren did not consult his colleagues at the Royal Society and worked alone on the plan.94 Was he trying to protect his ideas so that no one else could take the credit? Or was he just in a tremendous hurry – out of a natural desire to be ‘first’?
He could have had many motives for secrecy and speed, but what interests us more are his motives and hopes for the new London.
Freshly back from his eight months in Paris where he had studied neo-classical architecture as well as new and daring city plans, Wren's dream was to replace the winding streets and courtyards of the old medieval city with new monumental avenues such as those he had seen in France. His plan is dominated by a main central avenue that runs virtually straight from one end of the city (Aldgate) to the other (the Strand), passing through a series of huge star-shaped plazas distributed along the way. From these plazas numerous straight roads emanate in all directions, linking up to smaller piazzas or circuses on either side of the main axis to form a closed network. Wren's plan also features a second monumental avenue running from the Tower of London, along Cannon Street and up to St. Paul's.95 This second avenue merges with the main axis coming from Aldgate, and the whole is then prolonged to Ludgate to become Fleet Street.
It is at this point, just past Ludgate – and not far from Temple Church – that a major feature of Wren's plan stands out: a large open plaza in the form of an octagon with all eight sides of equal length. Wren's established Masonic connections make it more than likely that he would have known the significance of the octagon as the Templars’ own symbol for the Temple of Solomon. He should also have known that the location he proposed for this distinctive octagonal plaza encroached physically on the site of the Templars’ former London headquarters. But if there is any doubt over his deliberation in these matters it is settled for us by a final telling detail. Half a mile to the east Wren deliberately altered the east-west axis of the ‘new’ St. Paul's Cathedral by a few degrees to the south so that it would now align with Temple Church.96
We've noted that Temple Church was conceived of initially as a scale model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and that the latter stood west of the original site of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. In Wren's London Temple Church stands west of St. Paul's in the same way. Could it be, therefore, that what the architect had in mind with all this was a scheme for building a ‘hidden Jerusalem’ in the heart of London?
The ghost in the plan
It is reported by Christopher Wren's own son (also called Christopher) that during his inaugural speech as professor of astronomy at Gresham College, Wren Senior described London as: … a city particularly favoured by the celestial influences, a Pandora, on which each planet has contributed something …97
This, it must be remembered, was a time when astrology and scientific astronomy overlapped seamlessly, and when many still believed in the influence of the stars and planets. But it is unlikely that Wren had in mind horoscopic astrology when referring to London. What is more likely is that he was thinking of influences of a more spiritual and mystical nature, such as the talismanic influences found in Hermetic magic and in Renaissance Christian-Cabala. Steve Padget, a professor of architecture at the University of Kansas, explains: Following the break with Papal authority, the ‘cosmos’ for the English no longer centred around Rome and St. Peter's, but London and the old Gothic St. Paul's. Its centre spire acted the role of axis mundi for this world, symbolising the centre of London, England and the universe … When the spire was broken (felled in the Great Fire of 1666), it denoted a catastrophe of cosmic proportion. The symbolic connection between heaven/earth/underworld had been severed …98
Charles II and the Anglican clergy were eager to dispel the rumour started by Catholics that the Great Fire had been the act of a wrathful God to admonish the English people for having broken away from the Church of Rome and the authority of the pope. The trick that the king and his advisers pulled off was to transform the Fire into a symbol of purification and regeneration for London and the realm, intended to bring to fruition a ‘perfect Christian society’. And once that had been achieved, comments Professor Paget, ‘the implication was that fulfilment of the New Jerusalem was possible.’99 The king himself wrote a sermon in which, according to historian Vaughan Hart, … the Bishop of London proclaimed St. Paul's at the centre of a royalist New Jerusalem for ‘here hath the lord ordained … the throne of David for judgement; and the charge of Moyses for instruction,’ adding that ‘this Church is your Son indeed, others are but synagogues, this is your Jerusalem, the mother to them all.’
Following the Cabalistic theme within this sermon, the influence of Christian Cabala … could be expected in … subsequent work of the restoration of the seat of David and Moses … The Christian Cabalist hoped that through such divinely inspired intellectual magic, pre-Christian or otherwise, the conditions on earth for nothing less than the Second Coming would be created, a necessary prelude to the Apocalypse and final establishment of the Heavenly Jerusalem.100
We shall return to Wren's design of the new St. Paul's and its full implications in due course. Meanwhile the longer we looked at his plan for London, the more we sensed something else was embedded in it, something ‘ghosted’, as it were, beneath the layout of the avenues and plazas. Standing back and viewing the design as a whole we realised that
what the overarching vision reminded us of – albeit a little hazily – was the Sephirothic Tree of Life!101
Naturally our first thought was that our eyes were just being tricked by a common optical illusion. And, indeed, a common optical illusion it might well have been were it not for the fact that two days after Wren had presented his plan to Charles II, yet another ‘sephirothic’ scheme for the redesign of London was proposed to the king by John Evelyn.
Evelyn's plan
On 13 September 1666, Evelyn secured his own audience with Charles II in – of all places – the queen's bedchamber in Whitehall.102
What immediately strikes the eye in Evelyn's plan, and must surely have struck the king's eye as well, is how strangely similar it is to Wren's. Yet on the face of things Wren seems to have done everything he could to keep his work secret.103 We know, for example, that he did not take the advice of his colleagues at the Royal Society – much to the chagrin of Secretary Henry Oldenburg.104 When the latter complained about the lapse Wren curtly replied that he had wanted to submit his design first, before anyone else had the chance to distract the king's attention and thus ‘could not possibly consult the Society about it.’105