In bull sacrifice and the subsequent currency of the bucranium motif, there is the suggestion that the sacrifice of surplus males somehow provides for the continued well-being of the home, a feminine domain. Competition between males is a factor in genetics and visible in all sexual reproductive behaviour. In humans, there are reverberations down through the ages, not least the world wars of the C20. Animal sacrifice to female deities in India is a living tradition that expresses the principle. Revulsion at the gore of animal sacrifice for deliverance or continued prosperity, not to mention the enormous cost, gave rise to alternative doctrines in the post-Vedic/post-Christian era, though such sacrifice endures in parts of the world to this day. The early Christian doctrine, for example, had it that the sacrifice of Jesus would be enough to put matters right with the main deity – this was expanded in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer of 1549, where it says that Jesus ‘…made there (by his one oblacion once offered) a full, sufficient and perfect sacrifice, oblacion and satisfaccyon for the sinnes of the whole worlde…’ Even the nature of Jesus was thought to be dualistic – divine and human, in an as yet indeterminate composition. The exact recipe was disputed for many years, even after a majority of attendants set it down at the first council of Nycaea in 325, that Jesus was divine and equal with other aspects of God, father and spirit. This dualism concerned the following pairing: subjection to mortality v. authority over mortality. But not just that – the doctrine held, for reasons that are unclear, that by confirming Jesus had authority over mortality for himself, this would be extended to his having similar authority over the entire human race and every element of the universe. The Great Duality. But perhaps this has led us to our unwitting goal: to find the great duality as the instigator of architectural form – death-life, mors-vita in Latin, mritijivita in Sanskrit, mate-ora in M􀃞ori, thanatou-zoe in Greek. But more specifically life and death in the context of belief in resurrection: mainly this means living and the arrival of death, but it can mean living and the arrival of a new life by birth. The twin horns of the auroch recall the waning moon, its horns the inspiration of much poetry: ‘O Lady Moon, your horns point towards the west: Wane, be at rest.’ These lines by Christina Rosetti, 1872, are an example that captures the idea of death associated with the waning moon. This phase is preceded and followed by the new moon that suggests birth and rebirth. From Giotto onwards, depictions of the crucifixion draw from the imagery of the auroch – the arms and body recall the horns and skull. The Greek underworld, also called Hades in common with the god who ruled that region, is separated from the earth, the land of the living. The separation, according to different ancient writers, is by rivers – Oceanus is suggested by Homer (there is no other proper way to connect the prime forms). Oceanus is the father of everything that bounds the underworld; the Acheron, the river of sorrows, is also mentioned by Homer as the river of Hades, and by Virgil as the river of Tartarus, the deep abyss of the underworld from which the Styx and the Cocytus flow. The river Styx, most commonly thought of as the river that separates the two regions, Earth and Underworld, is crossed at death in a ferry for which a coin, an obol, was placed on the deceased’s tongue to pay the passage by the ferryman Charon. The Cocytus, the river of lamentation is a tributary of the Acheron. The Phlegethon which, according to Plato, coils around the earth, is a river of fire that descends to Tartarus. The Lethe, the river of unmindfulness, oblivion, flowed from the cave of Hypnos (sleep) and on around the underworld. Together, these rivers encapsulate the multiple jeopardy of grief and the change of state at death. In Hindu temples, the transition from the sacred space of the temple, the garbhagriha, where the image of godhead is mounted, is separated from the tribute space of the mandapa by images of sacred rivers in the form of the river goddesses. (This is noted under the section Water). The trench, or river of boiling water, that separated Vaitani, the palace of Yama, the god of death from the land of the living in Indian mythology is an axis of separation in Hindu belief. The symbolism of the river was not lost on the designers of Hindu temples. The coupling life/death is what has overarchingly obsessed human beings from the beginning, rivalled only by an almost equal obsession with mating – the challenge that exists in the human mind between living and dying and killing in order to live. There is a progression – to kill in order to eat; to kill sacrificial animals, birds and sometimes other humans as a means of prolonging terrestrial life; to kill as a sacrifice to live beyond death or to provide for those who are now dead in their new life after death; to die believing that death is a gateway to eternal life, or in Eastern thought, as a step towards extinguishment or combination with the universal soul. In Persian Sufism, death is a step to reunification with the creator. Whilst the idea of bloodletting as an important aspect of sacrifice is not given much credence today, in relation to medicine, health was thought to be restored by leeching and bloodletting as late as C19. The use of leeches to keep wounds clean still has support in some medical circles. The practice of bleeding patients existed for over 2,000 years, the humours, or bodily liquids, being thought in illness to have become imbalanced. An interesting example is that of King Louis XIV, the Bourbon king of France who outlived his son, the grand dauphin who died of smallpox and bloodletting, his grandson, the petit dauphin who died of measles and bloodletting, and his eldest great grandson who was also bled to death during his treatment for measles. The younger great grandson, King Louis XV, survived because his governess locked herself and the ill child away from the doctors to prevent them from bleeding him to death also. Such was the intensity of faith in and the entrenchment of the science of bloodletting as a means of preserving life. * To the ancient Egyptian, death was an interface between two states of living – for the pharaoh, to reside after death at the pole star as a god; for the nobility and courtiers, to reside in palaces and homes constructed for the purpose during their lives, the mastaba tombs and cliff tombs. The superstructure of the mastaba tomb of the vizier Mereruka, c. 2330 BCE, consisted of 32 decorated rooms, 21 for himself, 6 for his wife and 5 for his son. The actual burial chambers were underground, a disconnected basement. One of the telling moments in the development of the form that defines this belief is when two cuboidal sculptures of Hetep were created, one limestone, one granite, at Saqqara, Middle Kingdom, Twelfth Dynasty, c. 1975 BCE. The head emerges from the cube as do the arms resting on top and the lower legs at the front. These represent the moment of emergence from the compact prime form before time and record. By the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt, the architecture of the great duality had become clearly enunciated. The temple entrance pylon signified blood sacrifice, but in the contextof resurrection. Partly, this is a reflection of the actual religious practice – within the pylon, the first space is the forecourt, weba, where there was a sacrificial altar used for presenting the sacrifice to the deity, whether deceased monarch or godhead. This sacrifice could be bird, different species of which were bred for the purpose, alternatively bread or wine, later the elements of the Eucharist; flowers were also used, still the most common form of remembrance on graves. At Karnak, Thebes, (Waset in ancient Egyptian – Thebes is the Greek), modern-day Luxor, Egypt, Seti I is depicted presenting a bouquet of flowers on the north section of the Hypostyle Hall, c. 1280 BCE. Also at Karnak, the awe-inspiring depiction of Thutmose III on the seventh pylon, c. 1450 BCE captures his great conquests and killing sprees through state warfare. The Hypostyle Hall, wadjit, between the second and third pylons, was the complex space where the deity lived to whom the sacrifices were made. His Jubilee Hall (also called the Festival Hall) in the same complex is possibly the first ever basilica-form building. The walls that surrounded the hall contained a ‘Botanical Garden’ with depictions of plants collected during his campaigns, an early instance of a garden of flowers being associated with mortuary and cult temples. Pylons were sequential – there are six on the main axis at Karnak, square to the river Nile and a further four parallel with the Nile marking the arrival point of the ritual passageway from the Luxor temple, some 1.7 miles (2,780 m) to the south. The deity, Amun-Re, each decade during the Opet Festival, was processed from Karnak to Luxor temple through these pylons and from there across the Nile to Medinet Habu, the Mortuary Temple of Rameses III, on the west bank. The purpose of this ritual was ostensibly to ensure the continuance of creation. Could this have been the need to unify the communities of the two banks – the west side with the temples to deceased kings and their burial grounds, at that time separated from the mortuary temples, and the east side with the cult temples? This was an elaborate but quite efficient way of stitching one of the pair of geographical dualities of the new kingdom together. The Nile was the axis that separated east from west bank, whilst connecting Upper Egypt (towards the south) and Lower (towards the north).