There is a persistent assumption in the modern world that ancient cultures were simply less sophisticated versions of ourselves – that they looked at the same reality we inhabit and drew primitive conclusions from it. That their gods, rituals, and sacred symbols were the best explanations of the world available to minds not yet equipped with the tools of reason and science.
This assumption is worth examining carefully. Because the evidence does not support it.
The culture of civilisations that built the Parthenon, the temples of India, the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe, and the sacred mounds of the ancient world was not an earlier, incomplete version of where we have ended up. They were operating from an entirely different worldview – one with its own internal coherence, its own philosophical depth, and its own understanding of what it means to be human.
Our inability to truly appreciate cultures of ancient world is rooted in deep misunderstandings that we hold in our contemporary world. I discern two main reasons beneath this miscomprehension.
Primarly, the modern cultural world view has serious blind spots regarding the metaphysical structures of possible ontologies. Whitehead had a precise regard of this mindset, where unexamined presumptions create this certain arrogant certainty:
Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.
From this condescending standpoint our contemporary culture judges every other ontology only as silly superstition of simple minded people or just as wishful thinking.
Consequently of this naiveté our modern cultural world view is incapable of understanding how interrelated our own mind is the deeper layer of reality. This interrelatedness of our being with the whole reality is what in premodern philosophy is called participation and it was the most important aspect of practice of philosophy.
I. A Different Starting Point
The most fundamental difference between the pre-modern and the modern worldview is not a difference in knowledge – not in the accumulation of facts, the sophistication of technology, or the reach of science. It is a difference in the understanding of the nature of reality itself.
The modern worldview begins with matter. Physical substance is the ground floor of existence. Everything else – life, mind, meaning, experience – is a product of material processes. Consciousness is something that emerges from what the brain does. The cosmos is a mechanism. The universe does not, in any meaningful sense, care.
The pre-modern worldview begins from the opposite direction. Across the Vedic tradition of India, the Platonic tradition of Greece, the mystical currents of the Abrahamic faiths, and the indigenous wisdom traditions of every inhabited continent, the foundational premise is the same: existence is not fundamentally material. It is fundamentally experiential. Fundamentally alive. Fundamentally one.
In the language of modern philosophy, this position is called monistic idealism – the view that reality is, at its base, a single unified field of consciousness or mind-like being, from which all apparent multiplicity arises. The pre-modern traditions simply started with this as their starting position for their world view, the same way as we begin with elemental particles and atoms.
The cosmos, in this view, is not a collection of objects in motion. It is a self-regulating process – an unfolding of one underlying reality into the vast multiplicity of forms we perceive. Everything that exists is an expression of a single source. And the dynamics of that unfolding have a structure. A coherent order. A pattern that can be known.
II. The Order Beneath Everything
In the oldest philosophical corpus of the Indian tradition, the Rig Veda, this underlying order is called rta. The scholar Barbara Holdrege defines Ṛta as the principle of cosmic order that ensures the integrated functioning of all levels of existence. It is not a law imposed from outside – it is the intrinsic harmony of reality itself.
Dharma – the term most people encounter first – is the relationship of all beings to rta. Dharma is that when a thing acts in alignment with its own deepest nature, and thereby with the order of the whole. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions defines it as action that is in accordance with rta – with the order and tradition that makes life and the universe possible.
The Greek tradition names the same principle differently. The word Dike – often translated as law or justice – carries the meaning of right order, of things being as they should be. The Greeks understood the human relationship to this order primarily through the virtues – aretē, often translated as virtue or excellence. Aristotle's definition of aretē is precise: a thing fully realising its intrinsic nature.
The classical tradition identified four of these virtues: temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice. The last of these, dikaiosynē, was not simply one virtue among others. It was the condition in which the soul aligned with the order of the whole. This is what the Indian tradition would call dharma.
Etymologically, aretē traces back to the same root as ṛta – the connection is not only conceptual but linguistic. Even the Latin word ritus – from which we get ritual – shares this root. A rite is, in its original sense, an action that binds the one who performs it to the fundamental order of existence.
These are not coincidences of etymology. They are traces of a shared recognition – that existence has an intrinsic order, that human life participates in that order, and that this participation can be cultivated or neglected.
III. The Problem of Transmission
A worldview of this kind is difficult to transmit. It is not primarily a set of propositions that can be listed and memorised. It is a way of inhabiting reality – an orientation, a felt sense of one’s place in the whole. And that kind of knowledge does not transfer through argument.
You cannot reason someone into a lived sense of meaning. You cannot lecture a person into a different relationship with existence. The information can be communicated at the surface level of the mind, and stay precisely there – understood intellectually, changing nothing.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers a useful image for this problem. He describes the human mind as a rider on an elephant. The rider is the conscious, rational mind – analytical, deliberate, capable of constructing arguments. The elephant is the vast unconscious substrate of the mind – instinctive, emotional, pattern-driven, the layer where identity and orientation actually live.
The rider can steer the elephant, but only when the elephant is willing. Intellectual argument reaches the rider. But it never reaches the elephant. And it is the elephant that determines how a person actually inhabits the world – what feels natural, what feels threatening, what feels meaningful, what feels sacred.
Pre-modern cultures understood this with a clarity that modern culture has largely lost. They understood that if you want to transmit a worldview – not just as an idea but as a way of being – you have to speak to the elephant directly. And the elephant does not understand propositional arguments. It understands symbols.
IV. Symbolic Language as a Technology
This is the context in which symbolic language must be understood. Not as decoration. Not as primitive explanation. Not as the confused proto-science of minds not yet capable of better. But as a precision technology for transmitting a worldview into the deeper layers of the mind.
Symbolic language works through images, narratives, and structures that carry meaning at multiple levels simultaneously. A symbol is not a sign with a fixed referent. It is a compressed form that opens outward – legible at the level of surface narrative, and at the level of deep metaphysical statement, and at every level between.
The most universal symbols are the ones closest to universal human experience. Heaven and earth, for instance, appear in the sacred vocabularies of virtually every culture that has ever existed – because for all of human history, they have been the two constants of daily perception.
The heaven – the sky opens above us as limitless, beyond any boundary, containing everything. This became the universal symbol for infinity, for the absolute, for the source from which all manifestation proceeds. The earth – solid, varied, the ground of all physical multiplicity – became the symbol for manifestation itself.
Light, which naturally comes from the sky, became the symbol for understanding, for goodness, for proximity to the source. Darkness from the shadows – the negation of light – became the symbol for ignorance, for distance from the source, for the state of being oriented away from the order of things.
The bird, which alone among common animals moves freely through the sky, became a universal symbol for the soul. It represents the essence of a person which is united with the infinite and which belongs to the order of the sky more than the order of the earth.
The serpent has no limbs and cannot lift itself from the earth. It is, by nature, inseparable from the ground it moves on. Yet it flows with a liquid movement that brings to mind the flow of energy, and can become suddenly, completely still like solid matter. It moves equally naturally on land and in water. This double nature runs through everything the serpent is – fast and motionless, earthbound yet fluid, and in its venom, at once poison and medicine. It became a symbol for the energy underlying all manifestation: the same force, now moving freely, now frozen into matter.
None of this is arbitrary. The symbolic associations are grounded in direct perceptual experience. Their power is not in their cleverness but in their depth – in the way they connect abstract metaphysical realities to the immediate texture of lived life. This symbolic language was shared across pre-modern cultures. It had its own dialects, but the core vocabulary was consistent enough that someone who understands one tradition can navigate others.
V. Mythology, Ritual, and Sacred Space
These symbols do not operate in isolation. They are woven into three primary vehicles through which pre-modern cultures transmitted their worldview: mythology, ritual, and sacred architecture and art.
Mythology is not primitive explanations of natural events. It is the primary vehicle of symbolic language – narrative that operates at multiple registers simultaneously. When the same story is heard from childhood, told and retold across generations, it does not merely inform. It gradually shapes the pattern of orientation in the deeper mind. It programs the elephant.
The mythological symbols that survive across generations are the ones that carry something real – something that resonates at the level of deep structure. Temporary distortions fall away as generations pass. What remains is what is genuinely meaningful.
Ritual is mythology made bodily. Where myth creates a map – a symbolic account of the structure of reality and the human place within it – ritual provides the compass and the way. It orients the practitioner not intellectually but through repeated action, through embodyment. The incense, the gesture, the threshold crossed, the words spoken at specific moments – these are not arbitrary customs. They are a grammar through which something is learned that cannot simply be understood at the surface.
Sacred architecture – the temple – is the crystallisation of both. The temple is the whole cosmos made visible and concrete. Its proportions, its orientation, its thresholds – the progression from outer court to inner sanctuary: all of this enacts in stone and space the same structure that mythology describes in narrative. The Church Fathers of the early Christian tradition saw in the structure of Eden – cosmic mountain; outer garden, inner sanctuary, the presence of God at the summit – the blueprint for every temple built afterward. Eden as the original temple, every other temple as its echo.
Together, mythology, ritual, and sacred space constitute a comprehensive technology for transmitting a worldview into the layers of the mind where worldview actually lives.
VI. What Was Lost
The modern world did not simply stop using this technology. It largely forgot that it existed.
The Enlightenment – which brought genuine and important advances in empirical understanding – also carried a particular blind spot. It identified reason as the sole legitimate vehicle of truth, and categorised everything else as superstition, primitive religion, or irrational sentiment. Mythology became fairy tale. Ritual became empty formalism. Sacred symbols became decoration or idolatry.
This was not malicious. It came from a genuine misunderstanding – from judging the products of one way of knowing by the standards of another. From assuming that because symbolic language does not work as propositional argument, it does not work at all.
But the elephant did not disappear. The deeper layers of the mind – the layers where identity is formed, where meaning is felt rather than reasoned, where orientation toward the world is established – these did not go away simply because the culture stopped deliberately engaging with them. They continued operating, as they always had. But now without a sophisticated technology for their cultivation.
This is, at least in part, what lies behind the particular form of modern disorientation. The worldview is fractured, the symbols are secularised or commercialised, the rituals are vestigial or absent. The rider has a great deal of information. The elephant is largely unaddressed.
VII. The Work of Temple Artisan
Temple Artisan begins from the conviction that this tradition of symbolic transmission is not merely historical. The knowledge encoded in pre-modern symbolic languages – about the nature of existence, about the structure of the mind, about the relationship between a human life and the order of the whole – is still available. It can be understood on its own terms, and brought into contact with the present.
The work is not recreation or nostalgia. It is not the claim that the pre-modern world got everything right. But it does begin from a simple assumption: that previous generations were no less intelligent than we are. Their understanding of the world was every bit as sophisticated and coherent as anything we have today – in some respects more so. They simply started from entirely different first principles, and their ways of transmitting knowledge were entirely different as well.
They were not doing a cruder version of what we do. They were doing something else entirely. Where we build explanations on top of empirical evidence, they mapped the self-regulating order of existence through mythology, encoded ways of aligning with that order through ritual, and built environments that kept that deeper reality in daily view through architecture and art.
Where we speak to the rider – through argument, evidence, explanation – they spoke directly to the elephant. But the language of the elephant is so different from anything we are used to that we no longer recognise it for what it is. We see mythology and call it fairy tale. We see ritual and call it empty custom. We see sacred symbols and call it just an ornament. What we are actually looking at is a sophisticated technology for a part of the mind we have largely stopped tending to.
These cultures developed, over long periods of time, a real understanding of how the deeper mind receives meaning. And that understanding produced tools – symbolic forms, ritual structures, sacred objects – that can still do what they were made to do.
A sacred object is not ornamental. It is a concentrated form of symbolic language, made to speak to the part of the mind that argument cannot reach. When made with care – with attention to what the symbols carry, where they come from, and the quality of material and craft that makes them worthy of contemplation – it works as a point of orientation. An anchor for the deeper mind in the order of things. The symbols we place in our environment are not decoration. They are foundation stones for the deeper layers of the mind – the ground upon which a coherent life and culture can be built.
1. Whitehead, Alfred North. The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science. Edited by Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.