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This chapter is devoted to how the brain/mind responds to human views of the sacred, including a discussion of the architecture of sacred places and religious buildings. It describes memorials in Washington and the public response to them, with a special emphasis on the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The chapter concludes with proposed hypotheses related to sacred spaces.

Mythology is naturally permeated by sacred objects and places. Symbols provide the language through which a human being may transcend the individual and participate in the universal. This chapter discusses various sacred places and objects associated with Germanic and Celtic mythology. It examines the Norse and Germanic conception of the world tree, the practice of venerating sacred groves and mighty trees, and the popularity of the Cult of the Cross. This chapter also describes sanctuaries and numinous places such as Colonus, Mount Sinai, Delphi, Jerusalem, and Mecca, and sacred places in Britain that are associated with the Arthurian legend.

This chapter studies the role places of worship play in American spirituality. It considers the extent to which U.S. culture associates spirituality with the idea of inhabiting a space that has been sacralized. It then studies the Americans' attachment to sacred places and describes spiritual dwellings during the 1950s. It notes the way religious leaders made spirituality virtually equivalent to participating in the local congregation. This chapter also discusses the influence of social conditions on the Americans' desire to dwell with God, the limitations of spiritual homes, and the search for a sacred place.

This chapter examines the failure in the courts of Native appeals to religious freedom protections for sacred lands, and it extends the previous chapter's analysis of the reception of Native claims to religion as religion. Where a religious claim conforms to the subjective, interior spirituality that has become naturalized in the United States, it has worked reasonably well in the courts. This is emphatically not the case where claims involve religious relationships with, uses of, and obligations to, land. The chapter explains how courts reason their way out of taking steps to protect Native American religious freedom when sacred places are threatened, a puzzling matter in that courts consistently acknowledge the sincerity of the religious beliefs and practices associated with those sacred places. Along the way the chapter develops a fuller sense of the workings of the discourse of Native American spirituality as it comes to control judicial comprehension of Native religious freedom claims.

This chapter compares how Huashan, one of the five sacred peaks of classical China, is a source of enchanting experiences for both the Dream Trippers and the resident Daoist monks. The chapter traces the construction of Huashan’s sacrality in Chinese cosmology and history, its representation in Western travel accounts, and its role in both Western and Chinese tourism narratives, using theories of tourism, pilgrimage, the sacred. While many Dream Trippers perceive their enchanting experiences within a framework of ontological individualism, others use qigong practice to connect and attune to the energies of the mountain within the framework of a Daoist cosmology that is disembedded from Chinese history and culture. For the Chinese monks, however, an important dimension of cosmological attunement occurs through connections with the Immortals of Daoist history and lineage.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the Roman conquest of Britain and discusses the impact of Roman culture and various aspects of Roman rule. It the also examines some of the problems involved in determining the nature and extent of Roman impact on Britain's religious beliefs and practices. One aspect of Romano-British religion is that many of the native deities of the British were honoured. Sacred places or temples for Roman-British worship have been identified and despite their more recent date and sophisticated construction, the temples are more badly damaged than many of Britain's prehistoric sites.

One existential paradox implicit in the power-driving revelation and the spirit worlds of Chapter 8 lies in the curious fact that humans not only settle geographical domains but create imaginary worlds and then select certain places as portals from the one to the other. This chapter takes this double action as the basis for defining ‘sacred places’ and for analysing the worship occurring in them, as sound and silence interplay in nurturing religious identity by fostering hope and contextualizing a sense of otherness. This is not to deny that sacred places may be created within individual lives, but it emphasizes the social nature of foundational religious behaviour.

Materials and objects representing female saints and images are scattered all around the shrines the author visited. This chapter concentrates on these sacred objects and analyzes the structure and architecture of sacred places. What do these objects symbolize or represent? Why are they placed in specific places? And how do they produce particular effects or permit certain behaviors, cultural practices, and religious rituals? The author follows recent studies that center upon various items and their properties and materials, and that look at how these material facets give rise to human sensations, a consideration that is central to an understanding of culture and social relations in sacred places. In this view, sacred tombs and shrines pose an opportunity to explore the intertwined and dialectical relationships between people and things, pilgrimages, and sacred objects as they are arranged and experienced in the place of devotion.

In this chapter, the author adds a theory of place to the analysis of female ritualistic experience and materiality of sacredness. Place is basic in the ritual, as the experience is always shaped and designed within a particular scheme and its architecture. Jonathan Smith stressed the importance of place for ritualistic performance, especially of constructed ritual environments, to a proper understanding of the ways “empty” actions become rituals. Rituals, poetry, aesthetics, embodiment, identity, and class formation are all expressed in a certain architecture, which is why the forms and meanings of rituals can be both expected and unexpected. Rituals can create shared experience in one physical context and impose exclusion and separation in another. In the various female shrines discussed here, the ritual is both created by and affected by the politics of the place. In the context of Israel/Palestine, this is mostly the politics of struggle, conflict, and hostility between different ethnic groups. In this realm, the ritual is a form of communicating territorial claims, demands justified via the visitors’ own bodies, using symbols of fertility of land/soil, and rituals of nascence and recreation. These actions emphasize the visitors’ belongings and claims to native lands. Rituals maintain place attachment. It is through ritual performance that the environments attain meanings and configurations. Sacredness and embodiment are spatialized, and sacred places become a path to claim land. In Israel/Palestine, this dynamic of sacred places is becoming central.

This chapter examines how places were established as sacred through miracle, revelation, transformation, or consecration. It analyses Goscelin of Saint-Bertin's story about Saint Mildrith and accounts of the establishment of holy places in Anglo-Saxon England. It describes the processes by which a place can be made sacred including revelation from God through providential intervention, through association with a saint by the laity and/or by an ecclesiastical elite and transformation of the Church through a ritual process and meditation on its significance.

Since medieval times, pilgrims have walked for a month through the plains and mountains of northern Spain, on the Way of St. James that culminates at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. The pilgrimage journey is typically one of affirmation, lending credibility to old or new thoughts about the meaning of life, about transcendence, about faith. Strange places along the Camino take pilgrims out of their familiar ways of life back home, making them vulnerable and receptive to intense insights and spiritual transformations. The rugged terrain poses daily challenges (blisters on blisters) that increase the value and validity of the struggle: truths found there are hard-won and thus reliable. The Way is lined with profane temptations like fancy hotels and handy buses (pilgrims are expected to sacrifice as they walk) that reassert by contrast the significance of the sacred places one also encounters along the path: churches, monasteries, and shrines. The Way is haunted by the footsteps of pilgrims past, which create for later pilgrims an obligation to sustain belief in the transformative and transcendent power of the Camino experience.

This chapter explicates the various narrative strands of Native American healing chants or medicine texts (the author's coinage) and concentrates on the particular strands that feature ancient tribal gods, hero warriors, plants such as corn and tobacco, primal animals, tricksters, and the earth. All the above-mentioned narrative strands are essential to a medicine chant's ritual protocols, but the land narratives are especially important because, in many traditional Native worldviews, the earth is seen as a sentient force with creative capabilities. Medicine texts, such as the Navajo Beautyway or Blessingway, are designed to restore balance. Working as a change agent, the land of the New World, assisted by Passaconoway, a medicine man, began Indianizing or modifying the English settlers. As the colonists were altered, so were their writing habits.

This chapter examines worldview and dualism among Ch'orti' Maya. It discusses data from Ch'orti' Maya ritual text and argues for an underlying dual-gendered ideology that pervades both the sacred and the secular realms. It investigates the notions of dual gender in relation not only to supernaturals, but also to sacred places and objects. It suggests that dual genderedness has two forms in Ch'orti' thought. These are the inherently dual-gendered supernaturals and the dual-gender paired supernaturals.

Drawing on the metaphor of a wall or fence, this concluding chapter argues that places are fundamentally fluid things, as are the religious identities of those who claim them and make them significant. The various contested sites covered by the entire book— Ground Zero, Devils Tower, Ayodhya, Bodhgayā, and Karbala—are reviewed and compared. The conclusion argues that we must cultivate ways to understand this fluidity. Issues including control, othering, and hegemonic discourse are addressed. Because the places explored in this book are constantly changing, in motion, so too must our theoretical and practical interpretations of them be in motion.

Jill Flanders Crosby illuminates the attachment to African ancestry in two small towns of Matanzas province in Cuba of adherents of Arará, a religion descended from the Ewe and Fon of Dahomey—contemporary Benin, Togo, and eastern Ghana. She describes ancestral stories, particular practitioners, ceremonies, sacred places, altars, and the fodunes (representations of deities) that are part of them in Perico and Agramonte. Having also spent years investigating the dances of the Ewe, she returns to Ghana and Togo and notes how relationships with Cuban practice are received there and concludes with evocative Arará dancing at a ceremony at a third Cuban town, Jovellanos.

This chapter discusses not only the rivalry between Christians, pagans, and Jews in regard to sacred places and spaces, but also how these were shared. Even though many groups maintained the separateness and uniqueness of their sacred sites, they could easily move into locations held by other groups. Late antique people commuted between spaces or between different interpretations of the same space. Attention is also drawn to the contradictions between the triumphalist declarations made by church leaders about the destruction of cult places in some regions and the archaeological evidence, which reveals a less dramatic picture, such as the continuity of cult practices or the natural abandonment and decay of shrines. Furthermore, emperors issued laws to protect temples from attacks and plundering. They were regarded not only as cult places, but also as civic monuments, and they were valued as aesthetic objects.

In this chapter the author analyzes the ritualistic inner experience in female sacred places. The author shows the centrality of the body and the “ritual of the body in motion.” As mentioned in the book’s introduction, in the Holy Land, places of veneration and rituals are based on canonical texts or mythologies of particular saints. As such, the assumption was that rituals are a product of texts and their translation into action. However, this chapter shows different dynamics of these rituals. Although the canon and its physical manifestations are robust, it is mostly “the body in motion” that shapes the experience.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about the puzzling aspects of Anglo-Saxon sacred architecture. It analyses how sacred places were created, reasons for the grouping of Anglo-Saxon churches, and the open-air processions between churches. It also explores the form and functions of Anglo-Saxon churches, how Christian rituals were performed within them, and the rites associated with the dedication of churches.