... so far ...
THE world's oldest temple, Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, may have been built to worship the dog star, Sirius.
The 11,000-year-old site consists of a
series of at least 20 circular enclosures, although only a few have been
uncovered since excavations began in the mid-1990s. Each one is
surrounded by a ring of huge, T-shaped stone pillars, some of which are
decorated with carvings of fierce animals. Two more megaliths stand
parallel to each other at the centre of each ring (see illustration).
As
Chesterton noted:
The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is
an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in
its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to view
of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in
the most rational of these civilizations. It is only as an afterthought,
when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few
Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalize them,
and even then only by trying to allegorize them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion.
The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing
that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before
been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.
Mythology, then, sought god through the imagination; or sought truth by
means of beauty, in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most
grotesque ugliness.
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