DAVID’S FOUNDATION STONE AND OTHER BAETYLS
There is a Jewish tradition that during work on the foundations of the First Temple, King David discovered a special stone, on which was found a simulacrum of the four Hebrew consonants forming the Tetragrammaton, the written form of ‘God’s Ineffable Name’. This acheropita (Greek: “made without human hand”) became known as the ‘Foundation Stone’ of the new Temple, although it was never used as part of the building itself.
Mysterious stones – many of meteoric origin (brought “by angels”?) and often called baetyl stones – were worshipped throughout the ancient Middle East and dedicated to various gods (see David Hambling, “Baetylmania”, FT292:4650). Some, like the Temple Foundation Stone, bore ‘holy simulacra’; others, like the Omphalos at Delphi, were believed to be animated, delivering prophecies. George Moore distinguishes true baetyl stones from more common ‘holy’ stones by their triangular appearance, and that they were widely believed to be “inhabited by a numen… and endowed with the power of self-motion”. Using such a stone as a pillow caused Jacob to dream of the ‘ladder to Heaven’, which Moore argues was in itself a visionary visit to “the abode of divine beings”.
Given the sacred nature of the Foundation Stone and the supernatural power of the Tetragrammaton, it was physically concealed and magically protected. Should its secret be stolen or defiled “there was danger of the whole nation, or even world, being perverted”. The stone was kept in the adytum (Latin, from Greek adytos, ‘not to be entered’), the innermost shrine of a temple, also called the ‘Holy of Holies’ or sanctum
sanctorum.
A feature of many temples of ancient nations, an adytum usually contained a sarcophagus and an image of the god to whom the temple was dedicated. Crookes referred to adyta as “symbolic wombs”. As sacred architecture they represented, in national worship, resurrection and initiation. “The
Jews, when they became exclusive and wholly exoteric in their religious beliefs and practices, made the adytum the symbol of their national monotheism, exoterically; and esoterically a symbol of generation rather than regeneration.”3
This inference, argued Edward Rice, can be read in the story of David dancing before the Ark as it was brought down from Mount Moriah (2 Samuel 6:14). He wrote that “the dance was essentially a Bacchic rite, whose meaning was unfolded
only in the Mysteries: the ark being the symbolic vehicle in which are preserved the germs of all living things destined to re-people the earth in a new cycle.”4
The pre-Islamic version of the Kaaba in Mecca – with its famous meteoric Black Stone embedded in its eastern corner – qualified as an adytum (see Richard Stanley, “The Mythos Meme, FT390:2835). According to Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History , it may have once contained as many as 360 idols, and was circumambulated once a year by tribes of different religions.5 This form of veneration – which at one time could have been undertaken in near nakedness – was an ancient fertility rite, argues Edward Rice, of which David’s dance may be a relic.6
Details of David’s Foundation Stone are scarce, but there is a Mishna passage
which refers to the stone as “the centre of the world” – an omphalos. Not only does it say that the stone was there “from the days of the earlier prophets” but that it levitated “three fingers above the ground”. The Talmud scholar Paul Isaac Hershon interprets this to mean that the stone was floating, quite literally “not touching the ground”.7 This magical floating stone gains additional significance from its proximity to the location of Jesus’s own paranatural transportation.
NOTES
1 George Moore, ‘Baetylia’, in American Journal of Archaeology, 1908.
2 Sir William Crookes, “Human Levitation, Illustrating Certain Historical Miracles” in Quarterly Journal of Science (Jan 1875).
3 Ibid.
4 Rice, Eastern Definitions, 1978, p433.
5 Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, 2002, p11.
6 Rice, 1978, p433.
7 Hershon, Treasures of the Talmud, 1882, p34-35.