The Octagon
Forthview
Shipmate
A few months ago I heard a priest talk about the octagon or eight sided shape in Christian iconography. The day after the seventh day (Sabbath) is the commemoration of the Resurrection of Christ and the first day of the new covenant. Baptism is the first sacrament of the New Covenant and baptismal fonts in churches recall this in having either eight sides or being built upon eight columns. Over the last few weeks I have looked at baptismal fonts in six RC churches in my locality and found this to be the case. It is something which I have never thought about before.
What is the baptismal font in your church like ?
What is the baptismal font in your church like ?
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Augustine's_Church,_Brookland
There’s a real Romney Marsh?? 😮
There certainly is. It even has its own breed of sheep - the lush pastures made good grazing and the salt blowing off the sea helps prevent the bacterial infections that cause foot rot on wet pastures, so prime sheep country.
It's a splendidly weird place, bookmarked at one end by a vast expanse of shingle peppered with wartime relics, a narrow-gauge railway, a lighthouse, and nuclear power stations.
It also has the isolated Fairfield church, though I can't see a pic of its font anywhere.
St Bats in the Belfry has a stone late Saxon/early Norman font shaped very mich like a flowerpot - round with tapering sides. It's in the tower, right between the ropes for bells 2 & 3, but presumably was once against a wall as one of the carved sets of decoration only goes two thirds of the way round, and gets simpler towards the end as if the mason was struggling to reach.
I wonder if the octagon was adopted later, maybe for example because it was a handy shape for showing the seven sacraments? Or just a theory to try to explain a preponderance of 8-sided fonts?
https://artandchristianity.org/ecclesiart-listings/velarde-tyson-smith-english-martyrs
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-interior-of-st-thomas-a-becket-church-on-romney-marsh-at-fairfield-112635430.html
The present Chapel was built in 1817 but I'm not sure how old the font is, it could be older.
(I feel similarly about the water added to wine for the Eucharist. The standard custom of mixing wine with water in the ancient Mediterranean world then had a devotional gloss put on it - either read as symbolising uniting humanity and divinity or reflecting the water and blood flowing from Jesus’ side at the crucifixion.)
Romney Marsh? Have you read Russell Thorndike's Dr Syn books? If not, there's a pleasure in store for you.
I’ve not read the books, but I have seen some of the TV series, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. I did not know it was a real place.
There is also a major road junction in Budapest with the name (slightly different spelling): https://pestbuda.hu/gallery/2020 marc/oktogon.jpg
A circular font would be even easier to make (and you could equally attach some kind of devotional theology to it) and is easier to move into place.
Octagonal fonts start to appear sometime in the middle ages afaicr.
A neighbouring church has a circular wooden font. It was gifted to the church in 1930 in memory of their mother by the twelve of her children who survived to adulthood. A particularly apposite gift!
(Both Presbyterian churches.)
Wesley apparently thought it was the ideal shape.
I don't know whether I'm imagining this but I've heard there are octagonal church buildings in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The building is rectangular. The lantern in the roof is octagonal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley's_New_Room#/media/File:New_Room.jpg
(Octagonal, with an entrance porch added on one of the eight sides.)
I was thinking of this one.
https://heptonstall.org/heptonstall-methodist-chapel/
I've been in both.
As far as I am aware the Heptonstall chapel was the first to be built with Methodist worship in mind. I might be wrong but I think the New Room had a previous life.
We went there for their Christmas Eve service this past December. Nice building, good priest. My husband had met him during his organ researches.
The CofS in Kelso is also octagonal, and larger than St. Margaret’s.
St Margaret's in Huntly is built in a somewhat Spanish style as it was donated by the family of Gordon's gin. Again I have never looked or thought about this before but I imagine that there are quite a few octagonal churches in Spain.
New Room originally built by John Wesley in 1739 and rebuilt to be twice the size in 1748. It had a later (rather than previous) life as a Welsh Calvinist Methodist Chapel (1808 - 1929).
I do not know what shape the original 1739 building had.
Lion Walk URC in Colchester - a modern building - is also octagonal, reflecting an earlier wooden one (but not a non-octagonal building which existed in between!).
Also, if I remember rightly from a visit on an Open Doors Day more than 2 decades ago, the former Kail Kirk in Edinburgh’s New Town.
It back on to the Edinburgh bus station.
Very often he hides in the pulpit.
I think the symbolism mentioned upthread might have something to do with the choice of eight sides, but again I might be wrong, but I get the idea that Wesley believed it was a practical arrangement as he believed it gave everyone a good view.
I remember seeing an abbey chapter house which had a devil carved above the door which was opposite the abbots seat. Im damned if I can remember where (or even which country.)
I worked for many years in a private school with a Presbyterian heritage.
Above the door to the chapel were written the words 'Gloria in excelsis Deo'. Perhaps nothing too surprising, but these words were flanked by two plaques,one with the letters IHS and the other with a letter M with a crown above it. Although IHS is a sort of transcription into the Latin alphabet of Greek letters starting the name Jesus they are often understood as Jesus Hominum Salvator and a monogramm closely associated with the Jesuits. M with a crown above it would normally indicate Mary ,Queen of Heaven.
The chapel of the school was refurbished in the mid 1800s. Either it was someone playing a joke or the refurbishers had simply looked up a book with religious imagery and chosen these two because they were letters and not pictures.
I suspect that merits an exclamation mark of surprise.
Not from me - I heard that explanation given by the Lay Reader in charge of the C of E Tin Tabernacle Of My Yoof. He was of a fairly High-Church disposition, so he took the trouble to explain that IHS could also be based on Latin, as @Forthview says.
'I have suffered' was what I was told as a child that it means.
Another meaning in Christian iconography is 'In Hoc Signo (vinces'
In this case there is often a cross above the H.
The Welsh tern for church is 'eglwys' from the Greek via Latin 'ecclesia', but in Welsh place-names 'Llan' generally denotes the presence of a church and refers to the enclosure in which the church was set.
A lot of woo-woo is talked about so-called 'Celtic Christianity' but there were localised customs, although their liturgies appear to have been in Latin and probably weren't that different from those used in Gaul.
They also tended to be overseen by abbots rather than bishops although some believe that metropolitan bishops continued in Viriconium (Wroxeter) long after the end of Roman rule.
In Wales and Ireland and other 'Brythonic' and Gaelic speaking parts of these islands monasteries and churches tended to be set within circular or oval enclosures.
This may have been to mark them out as sacred spaces or to keep animals out or both.
There are some interesting oval-shaped church yards in that part of Yorkshire that used to be the 'British' kingdom of Elmet.
It was a Celtic enclave well into the Anglo-Saxon period.
The number of places in Wales and Cornwall called after local saints to this day, and the stories told about them might even be circumstantial evidence that Christianity had been little more than a flickering flame when the Romans went and that either most of western Britain had only been properly evangelised in the intervening 175+ years or that sometime during that period there had been a revival against which 1904-5 would be a mere shadow.