Temple of Diana

  • TQ321811
  • Disputed
Nearest town:
City Of London (2km W)
OS reference:
TQ321811
OS sheet:
176
Latitude:
51° 30' 46.18 N
Longitude:
0° 5' 45.94 W
Added to TMA by

Images

Image of Temple of Diana by RiotGibbon

I got a little over-excited when I saw this view. This is standing at the Temple of Mithras, looking up Watling Street (the old Roman road from Kent), straight up to St Pauls. My mind was working overtime with ideas of alignments, generations of evolving sacred complexes and who knows what else.

Then I discovered that the Temple of Mithras had been moved from around the corner, but I still like this picture --- it was a moment when I stopped to look at the ancient arrangement of the City, something subterranian, primitive and ancient, still holding up despite thousands of years of re-arrangement and “development”.

It’s all there if you look ...

R
RiotGibbon Oct 18, 2001

Articles

Folklore

Temple of Diana
UncleRob
UncleRob May 26, 2009

This Brutus chap who turns up in London folklore is not the one from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but a supposed survivor from the sacked city of Troy. Have a look at “Brutus of Troy” on good old wikipedia for an excellent summary. The notion that a handful of Trojans would leg it all the way across Europe to settle down anew in misbegotten and backward Britain is probably a little far-fetched. There probably was a Troy (there is a corresponding archaeological site at Hisarlik in Turkey) and it may well have been sacked by a load of dudes from Mycenae about 1200BC, but there is no Brutus or similar name in the Iliad, which was written down from oral history about 800BC. So all in all a load of old cobblers? Not entirely as there have been waves of invasions from the continent, notably the Roman colonisers, and one feature of colonised literature is that old native stories are given a flavour of the occupying culture as a way of making them seem more respectable, a little like building a church in the middle of Knowlton Rings. Old stories about legendary king Bran/Bendigeidfran sounded much better in the early middle ages once they had been given that Latinate gloss. I find it easy to believe there was a native hunting ritual that took place here, which was assimilated and survived in some form until the 1500s, given a respectable “Diana” label. Corresponding Christian saints would be Hubert or Eustace (both symbolised by a stag’s head with a cross between the antlers, which will sound familiar to those of you who have read Riddley Walker), but I’m not aware of any old City churches dedicated to them geezers. Anyone up for a re-enactment?

Folklore

Temple of Diana
Rhiannon
Rhiannon Apr 8, 2005

Further to RiotGibbon’s post, I found this in Peter Ackroyd’s “London the Biography”:

In the records of St Paul’s Cathedral the adjacent buildings are known as ‘Camera Dianae’. A 15th century chronicler recalled a time when ‘London worships Diana’. She was the goddess of the hunt, so perhaps linking with the ceremony “that took place at St Paul’s as late as the 16th century: a stag’s head was impaled on a spear and carried about the church; it was then received upon the steps of the church by priests wearing garlands of flowers upon their heads.”

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