Dan Cruickshank’s Bridges: Heroic Designs that Changed the World. Dan Cruickshank
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reads the same from different directions or possesses different meanings or pronunciations when read from different direction. For example, ‘a man, a plan, a canal, Panama’ has the same letters from either direction but is not pronounced the same from either direction – to grasp the point try saying ‘amanap lanac a nalp a nam a’.
Medieval Prague was indeed a meeting place of east and west, a melting pot of different cultures and religions. It had a large Jewish community from as early as the tenth century but this suffered waves of persecution culminating in the late twelfth century with an obligation imposed on all Jews to settle in an enclave on the east bank of the Moldau, near the main city square – and thus was created the first Jewish Ghetto. In the mid fourteenth century Charles IV relinquished some of the state power of the Jewish community, and perhaps even consulted rabbis about the construction of the bridge. These men would undoubtedly have enshrined the ancient esoteric wisdom of the Kabbalah, the branch of mystic Judaism devoted to the quest for the origin of life, of creation, and of the nature of the relation between God and man.
A key part of this quest – the code that could explain all – was language itself, in particular the twenty-two ‘foundation letters’ of the Hebrew alphabet which Kabbalists believed was the creation and direct gift of God and pregnant with many layers of meaning. One of the most important Kabbalistic texts – the 2,000 year old Sepher Yetzirah or Book of Creation – states most directly that God ‘ordained’ the letters of the alphabet: ‘He hewed them, He combined them, He weighed them, He interchanged them. And He created with them the whole creation and everything to be created in the future’. So if Kabbalistic rabbis were involved with the ritual of the foundation of the bridge, then the ceremony was evidently of a deeply mysterious nature, akin to casting a spell. This was the age of alchemy and of miraculous transformation, of the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, the ‘elixir of life’ and of attempts to transmute base matter into fine, the material into the spiritual. The construction site of the bridge could have been seen as a vast alchemical laboratory, for bridges are, in their way, a form of alchemy – they transform, they bring life. As Philip Larkin wrote in 1981: ‘All will be ‘resurrected in the single span’.9
A significant clue to the meaning of the foundation ceremony, and to the power of the Kabbalah in fourteenth-century Prague, lies in the story of one of the most remarkable alleged inhabitants of the medieval city – the golem. This is a creature of Jewish legend that – like Adam – is made of mud, but animated by man not God. In consequence the golem was a parody of divine creation, a mere perverse shadow of humanity, lacking a soul but desiring one and given to hubristic displays leading to chaos and, eventually, self destruction. The golem is mentioned in the Talmud and implied in several Old Testament texts, notably Psalm 139:14-16. Here, in most mystic fashion, a being seemingly full of pride addresses God and says: ‘I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned’. An ‘unperfect’ or unshaped substance in Yiddish is ‘goylem’.
The Charles Bridge in Prague was started in 1357 and its fine array of Baroque religious statues was added from the 1680s, turning a stroll across the bridge into a virtual Roman Catholic pilgrimage.
The means of animation was by tradition a deep and closely guarded secret but involved the Kabbalah and the use of certain letters from the Hebrew alphabet and magic words from, no doubt, the ‘book’ in which all about the golem was ‘written’. To deactivate his creation the magician, for such he was, had to remove letters from words to transform their meaning. For example, one legend says, that to bring the golem to life the word ‘truth’ has to be written in Hebrew on its forehead, and to kill it a letter has to be removed from that word that changes its meaning from ‘truth’ to ‘death’. Or to kill the golem the magician had to pronounce the animating word – the magic palindrome – backwards.
For reasons now lost in myth, the golem became closely associated with Prague and, in legend, was created and animated by rabbis as a means of protecting the inhabitants of the ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks. In the early nineteenth century the writer Berthold Auerbach went so far as to identify the learned late-sixteenth-century Prague rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel as the creator of a golem. Interesting, at this very time, the emperor Rudolf II gave active encouragement to alchemists at his court in Prague as they pursued their various vital and curious quests.
Given all this, and assuming some mystic intent, it must be assumed that the palindromic foundation time and date was intended to give the bridge some special quality – to protect it presumably, but perhaps even animate it in some way. And there is another peculiarity about the bridge. Legend says eggs were mixed into the mortar used to bind the stone and recent analysis suggests the old mortar does indeed contain some unusual organic matter.
Why eggs? Well, it is possible that their addition hardened or improved the mortar in some practical manner. But also, of course, eggs are pretty universally regarded as emblems of life, virility, of creation – especially, as it happens, in Islam where mosques often contain an ostrich egg. I remember seeing – to my surprise – a couple perched on the roof of the massive mud-built mosque in Djenne, Mali. The 79th sura, or chapter, of the Koran explains all. This sura – entitled rather intriguingly ‘The Soul Snatchers’ – starts by warning that the hearts of all humanity – including ‘those who snatch away men’s souls’ – will ‘on the day the Trumpet sounds its first and second blast…be filled with terror’. The sura then goes on to discuss creation and states that God ‘spread the earth, and, drawing water from its depth, brought forth its pastures’. This is one English translation of the seventh century Arabic of the original text.10 Other English translations use slightly different words, but in the original Arabic text is the word ‘daha’, which can be taken to mean an elliptical, geoid or, indeed, an ostrich-egg shape. Did the Arabs of the seventh century really know, as suggested through the revelation of the Koran, that the world was of spherical form? This would be an extraordinary insight for the time and is one that current Islamic scholars use to support their argument that the Koran is truly the word of God, for in the seventh century only He knew the shape of the world.
‘Assuming some mystic intent...the palindromic foundation time and date was intended to give the bridge some special quality – to protect it presumably, but perhaps even animate it in some way.’
So eggs had huge and ancient symbolic meaning in the fourteenth century, particularly in those countries of central Europe relatively close to the borders with Islam and familiar with its religious beliefs and customs. Were they added to the material body of the Charles Bridge – originally called simply the Stone Bridge – as part of some magic or religious ritual to quicken it? This is perhaps not as odd as it sounds. Stone has been venerated by different peoples and religions throughout time. The Ka’ba in Mecca – the holiest place in Islam – enshrines a stone, now called ‘the Black Stone’, that is perhaps a meteorite. In Islamic belief the stone fell from heaven – a gift of God – for Adam and Eve to use as an altar and was later used by Abraham. Whatever the truth, this stone was an ancient sacred object well before the rise of Islam. The Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem covers a pinnacle of stone held sacred by both Muslims and Jews because they believe it to be both the rock on which Abraham proposed to sacrifice Isaac, and the veritable Foundation Stone of God’s creation mentioned in the Book of Isaiah where God says: ‘…Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone…a precious corner stone, a sure foundation’. (Isaiah 28:16).
When Jews pray towards the west or ‘Wailing’ wall of the Temple they are in fact facing the buried body of the stone that peeps above the surface within the Dome of the Rock. They are praying towards what many believe to be Mount Moriah, now embraced by the Temple Mount and which, as the place where all things started, bears, as it were, the direct traces of God’s presence. And for Christians, rocks are an ever-present imagery (