OK, BPers - here's some blood & guts for you... from an Australian yet. Ian?
Any response?

-- Mary Krugman
____________________________

Subj:    RE: Timber framing tradition
Date:   9/21/1999 11:16:34 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:   [log in to unmask]

Below is the second [response] just in case you didn't
get it.  The architect was Wren or Hawksmoor
or Inigo Jones or someone about that time
(18th century?).

Julian

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I don't have a lot to add.
There are stories of buildings having
living creatures sacrificed and incorporated
into them, which I suppose were also cases
of a kind of sympathetic magic.  A famous architect
of the seventeenth or eighteenth century in
England was alleged to have sacrificed human beings during
the construction of some of his buildings.
At times, it has been an animal.  The concept
seems to be that the building needs to be
given life.

There are also stories of people being killed
at the time of the commissioning of Viking
longboats.  And a concept that bad luck
has to be focussed on a sort of scapegoat,
to avoid bad luck for the masons, during building
in mediaeval times, is covered in passing in
William Golding's novel, The Spire. I'm not sure
how accurate this is.

If you want to know more, you will have
to talk to, or read, some folklorists.

Julian O'Dea
Canberra, Australia