THE HERMETIC CODE-CHAPTER 3

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/11/2006 (6898 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A close encounter four years ago with a sphinx atop Manitoba’s legislature has taken Winnipeg scholar Frank Albo down an increasingly curious rabbit hole.

His journey has uncovered one of the province’s greatest secrets.

The facts and people in this made-in-Manitoba mystery are real; the events have been brought to life by writers Carolin Vesely and Buzz Currie.

In this, the third chapter of a special two-week series, Frank reveals a world of pagan temples and ancient sacrifices.

---

Chapter 3

I pointed up at the woman’s head hanging over the south entrance to the legislature lobby.

“Hey, Frank,” I called out. “Is she just having a bad hair day or is that Medusa?” He walked over to where I was standing. “That’s her,” he said. “She’s one of the apotropaic icons. In fact, Medusa is considered the embodiment of apotropaic power.”

“C’mon, Frank,” I said, “speak English.”

“Apotropaic, it’s the scholarly word for ‘warding off evil,’ ” he said, grinning.

I studied the bronze bison flanking the Grand Staircase. Large, horned beasts they were, no doubt about it. Call me a skeptical reporter, but I was having trouble swallowing Frank’s line about how they were there to guard the entrance to a temple.

“So, seeing the bison told you the legislature was built as a pagan temple?” I asked.

“Well, not exactly,” he said. “It clued me in to the possibility that the architect was familiar with temple vocabulary. The bison function as protective guardians and are situated precisely where you’d expect to find protection — the entrance. It’s like they tell the visitor, ‘You’re about to tread on sacred ground.’

“But they aren’t the only apotropaic icons. This room is full of them. Check it out.”

As I pondered what it was I needed protection from, Frank walked over to the north entrance and pointed up at a face in the keystone above the arch.

“That’s Athena, Greek goddess of war,” he proclaimed, “embodiment of democracy and also the protector of cities.”

He pointed across the foyer to the southern arch. “And your friend Medusa. She has the power to send evil packing.”

It was getting close to 10 a.m., and around us the building was coming to life. Even though the legislature was not in session, streams of people were beginning to flood through the doors to work.

There were secretaries in pantsuits, electricians in coveralls and assistant deputy ministers in business suits. Here and there, I saw a familiar face. Hugh McFadyen, the Opposition leader, a briefcase in his left hand and gesturing with his right to a young man I took to be his executive assistant. Two northern MLAs, Steve Ashton and Oscar Lathlin, walked in together.

For a moment, I amused myself by picturing how they’d react if they realized they were under the protection of Medusa. I even mentally crafted a front-page headline: World’s ugliest woman delivers Manitoba MLAs from evil, and turned to share the joke with Frank, but his attention was elsewhere.

“Look over here, at the lion heads,” he said, pointing along the perimeter of the room. “There are 14 of them, and probably, like the sphinxes, they’re connected with sun-god worship. But the lion is also a symbolic guardian. You’ll find them outside palaces, as well as temples and tombs.

“And at the gateway to the Underworld.”

Frank pointed up to the arched ceiling. “See those cattle skulls around the top?” he asked. There were eight of them.

“In the old temples, they were carvings of ox skulls called bukrania, and they were also meant to deflect evil. Think of fighting fire with fire. That’s what gargoyles do: They’re supposed to scare the pants off you and ward off evil spirits.”

I tried again. “So, all these carvings told you this building was a temple?”

“Not quite,” said Frank. “They told me the entrance was a room of protection, which is part of a temple, but only a part.”

“Wait a second, Frank,” I said. “It seems to me cattle skulls would be a fitting bit of decor for a building on the prairies.”

He nodded. “I thought the same thing,” he said, “but the legislature’s chief architect, an Englishman named Frank Lewis Worthington Simon, answered that one for us.

“Look at this.”

He handed me a photocopy of a 1937 article from Canadian Thinker magazine, by provincial librarian W.J. Healey. When Simon heard the cattle skulls were being called memorials to Manitoba’s bison, Healey wrote, he frowned in annoyance and said:

“The skulls are, of course, copied from the ancient temples in the classical Mediterranean lands where they were survivals from the earliest times of the offering of animal sacrifices, when it was the custom of the sacrificing priest to fasten a skull of the sacrificed animal high on the trunk of the tree beneath which the sacrificial ceremony was performed — the groves were God’s first temples.”

I handed back the article, eyebrows raised.

“See?” he said. “We’re not talking about an ode to the Wild West, here.

“Let’s go upstairs.”

The Grand Staircase is a thing of beauty — three flights of 13 steps of brown-veined Italian Cararra marble. It’s enclosed by four walls and, though Frank called it the Grand Staircase Hall, it isn’t long and narrow like a hallway.

“It’s a perfect square,” Frank said. “And it’s 66.6 feet on each side — that number jumped out at me when I studied the blueprints.”

It jumped out at me, too — 666. Isn’t that the number of the beast? Cue Satanic soundtrack.

“Forget that stuff in the Bible about the anti-Christ,” Frank said, as if he’d read my mind. “This 666 has everything to do with the occult world and its bible — De Occulta Philosophia, written in 1509 by the arch-magus Cornelius Agrippa. In Egyptian astronomy, the number 666 was assigned to the sun, which ruled over all the gods of Heaven and Earth.”

We were halfway up the third flight of marble stairs when we were greeted by a handsome, tanned face with a wide, toothy smile and a flop of sandy, brown hair.

It was Premier Gary Doer.

Consummate politician that he is, he stopped and gave us both a hearty handshake.

You don’t get a 79 per cent approval rate by hiding in your office, I thought, as I watched the popular 58-year-old tease Frank.

“Pretty soon we’re going to have to find you a room in here with a cot,” he said.

Grinning, he turned to me.

“Watch out for this guy,” Doer nodded at Frank. “He’s digging up stuff about this place that’ll make your head spin.”

“Tell me about it,” I winced, and watched the premier bound down the stairs and out.

I turned back to Frank with some trepidation.

“So where was I?” Frank said, looking around. “Oh yeah! I was walking up these stairs and thinking, ‘OK, I’ve got a sphinx and a bison, but I don’t have a temple until I find the…” — he paused and pointed in to the rotunda — “that thing. The altar.”

There is a limestone balustrade in the centre of the rotunda, right under the Golden Boy. “See?” Frank said. “It’s the hub, and the whole rotunda floor is a geometric wheel.”

Indeed it was, inlaid with small, black squares and circled by an ornamental border.

“That’s called a tessellated border,” Frank said, seeing me studying the perimeter of the rotunda. “It’s traditionally called the Greek Key, and signifies the eternal quest for knowledge.

“Let’s look over the edge of the altar.”

One floor down, perfectly centred under the circle described by the balustrade — and perfectly centred under the dome and the Golden Boy, too — was an eight-pointed star, picked out in black and white marble.

“The Black Star,” said Frank. “It symbolizes the Pole Star, just like the altar in an ancient temple. It’s the stage on which the movements of the cosmos play out.

“Most altars are square. But there’s a tradition of round altars in some ancient temples, too. They’re in temples dedicated to deities of the Underworld.”

Temples, altars, deities. My head felt like it was ready to explode.

“Hey, Frank,” I said, shoving my notebook into my backpack and slinging it over my shoulder. “This is information overload. How about we take a break?”

He chuckled. “Sure, but can I show you something first? You’ll love this.”

I let out a sigh and leaned against the… legislative altar.

Frank pulled a well-thumbed old booklet out of his bookbag. It was the first guidebook to the building, written in 1925 by a guy named Thomas Leslie.

“The first time I gave my unofficial Legislature tour,” Frank said, “one of the guides pulled me aside and said they’d been told not to mention this to visitors because it might spook them.

He read:

There should be an Altar here, and a Priest, and the image of a god, and a victim, and a curved knife, and a circle of white-robed worshippers around the outer edge of the Pool, and the victim should be on the altar and the curved knife should flash; the floor is stained; dull red stains are trickling through the black veins of the marble.

“Omigod!” I cried out, suddenly losing the need for caffeine. “That’s wild.”

I turned around and looked over the balustrade with new eyes, trying to absorb what Frank had just read from the guidebook.

As I gazed through the circular opening down into the Pool of the Black Star, my shadow seemed to flow thickly over the marble below.

It was a summer day, warm even in the shaded marble halls.

But I shivered.

NEXT CHAPTER