I mentioned before that the mythology behind our practices is reiterated elsewhere because of the nature of myth, just as the nature of a god is reiterated -- or extends -- throughout the sphere of that god's power.
This reiteration is active also in our anthropology: our understanding of Man is bound up with our image of the cosmos and of God. Michael Allen Gillespie has persuasively argued elsewhere that one central element of Modernity is the fissures between theology, anthropology, and cosmology, so that the broken understanding of reality we have inherited has left us each and all emphasizing one of these three to the detriment of the other, subsuming two of these three under one of them, and that cosmology (or naturalism) has emerged the cultural victor, but at a schizophrenic price.
Buildings have always been critical points of expressing myth. We should learn to read them better, but, generally speaking, we haven't, and we don't. In every Ancient Near Eastern theogony, mythology and cosmogony (as well as in the Edda), we find that, after beating back chaos and establishing order, this order climaxes in the building of a house or a temple for the gods. In these houses/temples (the temples are called "houses"), the relationship between God/the gods, Man, and the world are put in right order, and set forth clearly.
We must pay more attention to our buildings.
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