structure, believers took their place in an increasingly hierar-
chically demarcated church building: the bishop’s throne,
the apse for the clergy, the communion railing separating lay
from religious. Jesus became a lordly king; Mary, his mother,
became a grand queen of both worlds. The upper stories of
the towering churches carried worshipers in spirit to this
higher realm. At the same time these “towers” marked the
earthly splendor of the dwelling place of the divine presence
and the place where God was most fittingly worshiped.
The churches acquired a host of other meanings. Not
only did they house divinity, they were images of divinity as
the body of Christ crucified. Many, such as Westminster
Abbey in London, served funerary purposes as crypts for the
royalty, nobility, and high clergy, whose funds had built,
supported, and maintained the churches. They were the sites
of colorful pageantry and elaborate ritual, where the secular
and sacred often mixed indistinguishably. They housed the
relics of the saints; hermits attached themselves to certain
churches like barnacles to anchors; and pilgrims flocked to
them seeking miracles, sometimes creating new meanings
and discomfiting ecclesiastical authorities. These churches
also became symbols of civic pride, with cities vying with
other cities to have the largest, highest, or most costly cathe-
dral. All of these factors, together with many others, must
be considered if one wishes to interpret the meaning of
Christian churches.
MINAR. In Islam the minar towers over the landscape as a
reminder of the obligation of Muslims to pray five times a
day in conformity with the second pillar (prayer) of the reli-
gion. Traditionally the muezzin or prayer caller would climb
the minar at the prescribed times, projecting his voice over
village or city to remind Muslims of their duty to pray. Mi-
nars also mark off a significant ritual space for worshipers,
as minars are most often positioned at the four corners of the
mosque where Muslims come to pray, at least once a week
on Fridays, and where they may gather periodically for other
important social occasions.
Minars normally stand as slender towers (thus the
French minarette) rising above the domed mosques, though
in parts of Asia the minars took on enormous proportions,
as, for example, at the Emin mosque in Turpan in China,
where the tower, like a huge inverted ice cream cone, dwarfs
its companion mosque. At least once in Islamic history the
minar symbolism was changed into a blatant expression of
political and military power. QDtub-ud-din, the twelfth-
century central Asiatic conqueror of India, built the original
QDtub minar some 238 feet high as a symbol of his victory
over North India. It remains the tallest minar in the Islamic
world.
MESOAMERICAN STRUCTURES. Though tall, narrow struc-
tures are rare in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (the multisto-
ried palace at Palenque is the outstanding exception), the
abundant pyramidal temples of that region are suitably con-
strued as towers. Often inaccurately contrasted with the
Egyptian pyramids as architecture for the living instead of
for the dead, the comparison is not exact, for many of the
Mesoamerican structures, such as the Temple of Inscriptions
at Palenque, had burial chambers within them. Imitating
mountains and generally conforming to the Eliadean para-
digm of the axis mundi, they were considered to mark the
center of the earth, the site of creation, and could be de-
scribed as places where the three worlds were connected. The
pyramids were often linked with nearby cenotes (sacred
wells), their contrasting meanings of upper- and underworld
mutually reinforcing one another.The Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacán was considered
a mountain where celestial gods, terrestrial deities of fertility
and plenty, and underworld beings met. The temple, and the
entire city around it, was oriented to the place where the set-
ting sun on the summer solstice touched the horizon. The
great pyramid of Cholula was built over a spring (under-
world), and its iconography, including the feathered serpent
motif, indicate that it was a place of communication between
the lower and upper worlds, the worlds of humans and the
gods. The Castillo pyramid at Chichén Itzá, with its famous
descending serpent, is the best-known expression of this
motif and a veritable compendium of cosmic, astral, and ca-
lendrical correlations; at the same site the Caracol, a circular
pillbox rather than pyramidal configuration, provides a simi-
larly prominent variation on the tower theme. Tenochtitlán
of the Aztecs had its Templo Major, the twin pyramid sites
for worship of the god of war, Huitzilopochtli, and the god
of rain, Tlaloc, referring to mountains in the mythic history
of the Aztecs. The pyramids of Mayan Tikal in the Peten area
are the most vertical in feeling, with sharply inclined steps
leading to a temple platform. The temple in turn was sur-
mounted by a cresteria (comb) rising high above the back
wall of the temple, adding to the impression of height. The
priests would have performed rites of worship with the peo-
ple watching from far below.
The Mesoamerican pyramids show cosmic orientation
and astronomical and calendrical correlations and are gener-
ally built in layered levels, manifesting a stratification expres-
sive of the hierarchical societies that produced them. Besides
being sites to worship the gods, the pyramids offered a ritual
stage to carry out rites of warfare and human sacrifice and
to dramatize the coronations that established sovereignty and
claimed divine authority and purified and renewed the com-
munity. As with church architecture, their forms are quite
similar from place to place, while their meaning has changed
from one historical period and culture (e.g., Toltec, Maya,
Aztec) to another.
MODERN TOWERS. The U.S. Capitol and the Washington
Monument obelisk in Washington, D.C., stand as symbols
of American civic religion. The Capitol was planned as the
center of the city, and it manifests the same spatial metaphors
as the Byzantine church, with its dome showing the first
president in the heavenly realms and a crypt below the rotun-
da floor originally intended for his burial. The Washington
Monument’s towering height, together with its mysterious9266 TOWERS