THE MACHINERY OF THE TEMPLES.
A. Rich, in his “Dictionary of Roman and Grecian Antiquities,” relates, under the word adytum, that many ancient temples possessed chambers that were known only to the priests, and that served for the production of their mysteries. He was enabled to visit a perfectly preserved one of these at Alba, on Lake Fucino, in the ruins of a temple in which it had been formed under the apsis, that is to say, under the large semicircular niche which usually held the image of the god at the extreme end of the edifice. “One part of this chamber,” says he, “is sunk beneath the pavement of the principal part of the temple (cella), and the other rises above it. The latter, then, must have appeared to the worshippers assembled in the temple merely like a base that occupied the lower portion of the apsis, and that was designed to hold in an elevated position the statue of the divinity whose name was borne by the edifice. This sanctuary, moreover, had no door or visible communication that opened into the body of the temple. Entrance therein was effected through a hidden door in an inclosure of walls at the rear end of the building. It was through this that the priests introduced themselves and their machines without being seen or recognized. But there is one remarkable fact, and one which proves without question the purpose of the adytum, and that is, that we find therein a number of tubes or hollow conduits which form a communication between this compartment and the interior of the temple, which end at the different parts of the walls of the cella, and which thus allowed a voice to make itself heard at any place in the temple, while the person and the place whence the sound emanated remained hidden.”
APPARATUS FOR SOUNDING A TRUMPET WHEN THE DOOR OF A TEMPLE
WAS OPENED.
Sometimes the adytum was simply a chamber situated behind the apsis, as in a small edifice which was still in existence at Rome in the sixteenth century, and a description of which has been left to us by Labbacco, an architect of that epoch.
Colonel Fain tells us that he himself has visited an ancient temple in Syria, in the interior of all the walls of which there had been formed narrow passages through which a man could make a tour of the building without being seen.
In the temple of Ceres, at Eleusis, the pavement of the cella is rough and much lower than the level of the adjacent portico; and, moreover, the side walls exhibit apertures and vertical and horizontal grooves whose purpose it is difficult to divine, but which served, perhaps, for the establishing of a movable flooring like that spoken of by Philostratus in the “Life of Apollonius” (lib. iii., ch. v.). “The sages of India,” says he, “led Apollonius toward the temple of their god, singing hymns on the way, and forming a sacred procession. The earth, which they strike in cadence with their staves, moves like an agitated sea, and raises them to a height of nearly two paces, and then settles again and assumes its former level.”
The statues of the gods, when they were of large dimensions, possessed cavities which the priests entered through hidden passages, in order to deliver oracles (Theodoret, Hist. Eccl., vol. xxii.).