Re-imagining the Temple
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

image: Maxfield Parrish Land of Make-believe
Thus far in The Fallen Temple we have spoken of the temple of Sappho as if it was a marble pillared hall like the Parthenon; as if there were a single archaeological site that we could visit today. While we could visit sites on Crete or on the Nile, and find some aspects of the goddess-culture we are seeking, we would not find all of our expectations met in one site. The two reasons for this are that we are trying to re-imagine a generic goddess-temple, a temple in the mind which explains what was shared by goddess-believers as distant from each other as Ireland is from Java, and secondly, because the early temples of the nature-goddess were natural formations, not man-made. Various clues indicate that later goddess temples were not roofed structures. They were open to the sky in order that the moon, her chief symbol, could be viewed. Some were in the form of an open area within a sacred grove, as in Britain at the time of the Roman invasion, and others were circles of standing stones.  Some, like that at Nemi in Tuscany, were park-like walks by a sacred lake on which the moon could be seen mirrored during night ceremonies. There are examples of caves; grottoes and wells sacred to the goddess, but the general rule seems to have been that the temple should be open to the heavens and that if built of rock, that rock should be unhewn. It has been suggested that the leather aegis (Athena's shield) referred to in Greek myth was  the temple of the goddess in the form of a temporary encampment, a kind of leather tent, pitched outside the gates of the city. 
In later times, hewn  marble temples were built. The temple of Aphrodite at Knidos preserved some of the earlier traditions: it was open to the sky; it was circular, with pillars replacing the trees of the sacred grove. Within the circle was a statue of the goddess with cherubim, crouching as if peering into a pool.