Nicholas Hawksmoor: Dark Geomancer?

Nicholas Hawksmoor was a pupil and protégé of Sir Christopher Wren and has also been known by the rakish appellation the devil’s architect.  Both Wren and Hawksmoor are reputed to have been Freemasons, although this is difficult to prove for obvious reasons.

Christ Church, Spitalfields.  A Ripper murder took place opposite - was this the altar?
by stevecadman on Flickr

Whilst it is true that there are portraits of Sir Christopher Wren in full Masonic regalia, some people have suggested that the Brotherhood was not averse to ‘adopting’ eminent men without their knowledge.  The Craft, with its emphasis on the Temple of Solomon and putative connections with many things ancient Egyptian, would have added fuel to Hawksmoor’s fire as it was known that he held a fascination with the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World that informed and shaped his output especially the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.  Although he was indeed an apprentice to the acclaimed architect Sir Christopher Wren, his designs were no mere aping of his master, concerned as they were with forms of antiquity that sometimes went back further than the Greeks and Romans and a bold, confident use of shapes that were mainly unfamiliar in English architecture at the time and less easy to pigeonhole.  After the Great Fire of London in 1666, there was a determination to rebuild.  A result of this was originally a plan to build fifty new churches.  However, a mere twelve were built before the project ran out of steam.  Hawksmoor himself only finished six, although he added to two more.  Despite the seemingly modest number of churches completed, they were to stay in Hawksmoor’s life until a few years before he passed away at the age of 65.  It is these churches and additions that concern us here.

Iain Sinclair, the poet and psychogeographer, has an abiding fascination with London, but most especially the East End, which has both troubled and inspired him to rich and strange musings.  Some of these musings were written into the prose poem Lud Heat (A Book of Dead Hamlets), which he published it in 1975 using his own imprint - Albion Village Press.  In itself it is a remarkable and haunting work that took the shabby and rundown and transformed it into the sinister and liminal.  To sum up the parts of the poem that are relevant here; Hawksmoor built the churches and additions in such a way as to create malignant lines of force across London.  They combined with what some folk know as ley lines.  The result may be interpreted as a vast Eye of Horus across the City.  It may also be possible to interpret the Jack the Ripper murders as ritual sacrifices either deliberately planned utilising the evil force of the churches' disposition or, in an even more disquieting fashion, as a direct result of the forces channelled by these alleged temples of the damned.  Another powerful writer, Peter Ackroyd, took this concept, embellished and adapted it in his excellent yet disturbing novel Hawksmoor.  The essence was the same, however.  The architect, this time named Nicholas Dyer, was an acolyte of a man calling himself Mirabilis who teaches that Jesus was the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the Devil should be worshipped in His stead.  They also sacrificed virgin boys, to safeguard against pestilence and war, in order to secure the greater good.  Dyer killed and buried the boys in the foundations of his churches, thereby mirroring the real-life practise of burying or immuring a domestic animal in new buildings in order to guard against the influence of evil spirits.  Cats seem to have been preferred for this sacrificial ritual, but by no means exclusively.  In a personal aside, it was a synchronistic shock to pick up the novel and find that Nicholas Dyer’s assistant is a Walter Pyne.  My surname is Pyne and, whilst not completely rare, it is an unusual surname.  This gave a sense of there being a mystery that, quite literally, called to me by name.

Interestingly, Sinclair has his Hawksmoor laying his churches out across the East End to create an Egyptian hieroglyph, whilst Ackroyd’s Dyer plots his after the positions of the main stars in the constellation of the Pleiades.  The possibility of at least one star map being created and imposed upon London starts to move into the disputed territory of supposed star alignments in building complexes such as the pyramids on the Giza plateau, where some researchers think that the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Pyramid of Khafre and the Pyramid of Menkaure may be laid out to reflect the three main stars of Orion’s Belt along with the Thornborough Henges near the village of Thornborough in North Yorkshire.  The positioning of the celestial upon the terrestrial may be seen as a very bold act of magick indeed.

A short while ago I plotted the positions of the churches on a map.  The Church of England denies that Hawksmoor was using his creations in any way other than orthodoxy dictated.  This may well be the truth of the matter.  However, plans were already put forward to create street plans after the Cabbalistic Tree of Life by those who saw London as nothing less than the New Jerusalem.  Also, the relationship in terms of distance and orientation to points of the compass was echoed by Sir Christopher Wren himself when he rebuilt St Paul’s and reproduced the spatial association between the Dome of the Rock (St Paul’s) and the Holy Sepulchre (Temple Church).  Some of this crosses over into my other post, The London Mysteries.  None of this is definitive proof, but it is certainly my opinion that the relationships between buildings and their surroundings are not always left to chance and, certainly in the case of London, will repay further scrutiny.