Reading is central to the project of BOOKS & CULTURE. And it is clear from even a casual perusal of its pages that reading applies no less to the “culture” half of the title than to the “books” component. It is, I think, in large measure to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz that we owe the idea that human culture is a text that can be read, a kind of document in need of interpretation. To think this way, Geertz once noted, “shifts the analysis of cultural forms from an endeavor in general parallel to dissecting an organism, diagnosing a symptom, deciphering a code to one in general parallel with penetrating a literary text.” We are, by now, familiar with this line of thinking and with the diverse range of ways in which we routinely apply the notion of reading: we read books, maps, musical scores, mathematical formulas, movies, political situations, religious rituals.
Places can also be read. Cultural geographers have long been speaking of landscapes as texts that can be translated. Indeed it has become commonplace to use the fundamentally religious language of “iconography” to interrogate the cultural meanings that are inscribed in landscapes. The spaces humans occupy are thus to be seen as symbolic formations. Space, we have come to realize, is not an empty container within which human action takes place, or a mere stage on which the human drama unfolds. Rather it is constitutive of social interaction.
Getting a handle on some of the ways in which space is produced has done a good deal to open up fresh lines of inquiry at every scale from the routine spaces of daily life, to global geopolitical relations. For the spaces through which we transact the affairs of social life are both the medium and the outcome of human interaction. Consider the different venues that act as the arenas in which we encounter other people—the factory floor, the sports field, the dinner party, the church building, the lecture hall, the home—to name but a very few. In each case, these sites provide us with repertoires of meaning that facilitate communication.
How people behave and relate to one other in each of these sites is radically different, but in each case it is clear that the signs and symbols meant to give meaning to human actions are spatially linked. For this reason, making sense of even the simplest of gestures and behaviors requires an understanding of what has been called the “imaginative universe” in which the occupants of any particular locality participate. Without a familiarity with what we could call the “local customs” of the boardroom or the library or the building site or the church sanctuary, it is extraordinarily difficult to sort out the coded messages in which communication is embedded.
All of this suggests that the meaning of space is of fundamental importance in social life. But this does not imply that places have only one meaning. To the contrary. Places are polysemic; their meanings are unstable, contested, equivocal. And it is for this reason that “the geography of the mind” is so important. For the meaning of landscape is shaped by mindscape. Places are perceived in different ways by different people. And this indicates that spaces and sites assume different meanings for different cultures at different times.
Thus while the early New England Puritans, for example, found the wilderness a place of moral jeopardy and spiritual peril, the Romantics spoke of it as a surrogate civilization bursting with innate vitality. And while early visitors to the English Lake District thought it barren and threatening, a later generation of Wordsworthians found grandeur and glory there. Again, while early explorers found the world of the tropics exotic and paradisial, their later heirs typecast it as pestilential and morbid; the tropics were as much, if not more, an imagined realm as a regional reality.
It is not at all surprising, then, that places feature prominently in the cartography of the religious mind. One has only to mention Mecca or Lourdes or Rome or Fatima to realise that such places are overlaid with layers of religious significance. Indeed within the biblical narrative, places assume immense importance in the corporate memory and collective identity of the people of God: Bethel means one thing, Babylon another; “that night in Gibeah” calls to mind a different moment from Calvary. All this suggests that alongside the standard salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) familiar to biblical students we might profitably elucidate a salvation geography (Heilsgeographie) in which the “where” of moral encounter and spiritual engagement is systematically interpreted. Places carry with them the memories of their own stories.
Of course the religious significance of space is not restricted to symbolic sites of this sort. The medieval world maps produced in European scriptoria were a kind of spatial sermon in which the key sites in the history of Christendom were depicted for the spiritual instruction of the faithful. That Jerusalem often (though not always) featured at the center, and that the map was oriented to—well, the Orient, were also spatial expressions of what were taken to be divine realities. In Islam, the need for daily prayer in the direction of Mecca, encouraged an early interest in the determination of “the sacred direction” by mathematical and instrumental means unparalleled in the history of human civilization. For medieval Christians and Muslims alike, space mattered, and it mattered a lot.
And things have hardly changed. What Conor Cruise O’Brien has, of late, referred to as “manic holy nationalism” is hardly conspicuous by its absence in the modern world. From Ireland to Israel, and—as recent events have only too tragically shown—in many places in between, territorial theology is alive and well, and the presumption of sacred geography a good deal more than merely academic.
Given the historical and geopolitical significance of the subject, Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land may sound like a book much in need of reading. Sadly, as it turns out, Sacred Space is a book still in need of writing. The opportunity to elucidate the profound and complex imbrications of the sacred and spatial, in a coherent and systematic way, remains wide open. This is not to say that the volume at hand fails to relate anything of significance; to the contrary. But its format as a series of essays, originating from a conference on the theme in 1992 (organized in honor of Joshua Prawer), means that it is difficult to find a clear line of argument running through its pages.
Its scope, indeed, is forbiddingly expansive, as even a sample of the subjects under scrutiny will readily convey. Temporally we travel from 3500 B.C. (in a study of Hattusa, capital city of the Hittites) via the high Middle Ages (in an examination of cultic centers in Germany and Italy) to the late twentieth century (in a report of the psychiatric disorders induced in some tourists visiting Jerusalem’s holy sites). Geographically we move between Mount Hiko and Mexico City/Tenochtitlan, and from Kasi in South India to Mecca and Medina.
If the vast territory over which the book ranges makes it difficult to en gage, its internal architecture, as it were, makes threading one’s way through the edifice no less daunting. Organizing a book about space in remorselessly temporal terms doesn’t help. Much better to have used scale, or type, or topic as building blocks out of which to raise the structure. The editors’ prefatory decision to “dispense with grouping the articles into artificial thematic clusters, and present them in a rough chronological order” may have convinced them that “in a book dedicated to space, time has emerged once again as the superior organizing principle”; but we can hardly mistake editorial inertia for persuasive argument. What it does highlight is the paucity of the spatial vocabulary of many scholars and the need for a spatially sensitive lexicon in which to think about geographic significance.
Having said this, the editorial introduction does present a number of insightful observations which, if taken seriously, might do a good deal to retrieve the religious significance of spatiality. Surely it is right to be re minded that “on our mental as well as physical pilgrimages we traverse territory transformed into maps” and that the human race has been persistently engaged in the spiritual construction “of inner and outer, mental and cosmic space.” At the same time the introduction tellingly recalls our attention to the remarkable diversity of the sites of spiritual encounter.
Reading these essays exposes several themes that congregate around the reciprocal constitution of the spatial and the sacral. First, the textuality of sacred space is confirmed time and time again. Spaces are read in many ways, and readings are influenced by many factors. Take the case of Mount Hiko in Japan, a sacred space which is the subject of the essay by Allan Grapard. The site has been the subject of many competing interpretations and geo-typifications which in turn reflect the geographical and social configurations of the local region. But it is not just that the whole site has been differently read over time; different zones of the mountain em body different meanings.
Whereas in the lower tracts the cultivation of various agricultural products is permitted, the uppermost region is taken to be “ideal space” and thus must be left untouched, for it is believed to be the place where “the pure land of the buddhas and the world of humans merged.” Mount Hiko thus turns out to be a hierarchical sequence of symbolic geotypes, each with its own distinct set of ethical prescriptions. The mountain is therefore, at once, physical space, sacred space, and moral space. The lowest level has “the smallest number of taboos and restraints on the body” while the highest denies natural bodily functions altogether. Indeed the mountain’s four zones are each associated with the major phases of life—birth, maturity, old age, death. Throughout, the meaning of the physical space makes manifest the mental space of the region’s esoteric Buddhism.
How the text of space is read may be influenced by other factors too. One suggestion is that the way the human body is construed may well have significant implications for the reading of national territory or state space. Differences between Christian and Jewish ideologies of the state in the medieval period, apparently, relate at least in part to different ways of conceiving the body. Thus, according to Kenneth Stow, while Christianity during the Middle Ages tended to spiritualize human corporeality and subordinate it “to the needs of the greater mystical body of the Church,” the Jewish concept of the body em braced a much more willful physicality. Whether this typification is entirely accurate is immaterial. What is important is the suggestion that differences in how personal holiness was envisioned produced different understandings of sacred space, and that these had implications for how medieval Christians and Jews thought about the body politic. In Stow’s telling, this is what led to the sixteenth-century creation of the ghetto as a means of insulating Jews from Christian conceptions of urban sacred space.
It is clear then, not only that the text of sacred space can be read, but that these readings have far-flung implications. But more. A second insight that these essays collectively convey revolves around the links between spatial meaning and mobility. According to Sara Japhet, transience is a central element in biblical concepts of sacred place. The movable tabernacle is a paradigm case. For its very mobility meant that places which had what she calls “no intrinsic sanctity” were temporarily sacralized by the passing presence of God’s symbolic abode in the midst of the moving camp of the Israelites.
Much the same is true of those occasions when Old Testament heroes like Moses and Joshua were commanded to remove their shoes because they stood on holy ground. The sanctity of the spot on which they found themselves was thus entirely temporary with no sequel precisely because the revelation of God’s presence there was fleeting. In biblical religion, Japhet argues, “any place can become sacred, but no place is sacred.” Impermanence, then, must be thought of as a diagnostic feature of biblical understandings of sacred space.
But mobility is important in other ways too. Just what happens when a community finds itself, for one reason or another, separated from the sacred sites of its cultural heritage? This is a subject that surfaces in Jonathan Smith’s investigation of the creation of miniature hallowed sites intended as reproductions of an original holy place. When a sacred space becomes inaccessible through war, emigration or conquest, strategies need to be devised to bring the place to the people, rather than the people to the place. In order to overcome the tyranny of separation or distance, a replica is frequently created in order to keep a cultural group in touch with its most sacred icons, narratives, and traditions. Reconstructing key sacred sites is thus one means of literally mobilizing the sacral.
Something of the same impulse surfaces in Evelyne Patlagean’s analysis of how the New Jerusalem came to be identified with Constantinople during the era of the Crusades. The thrust of the argument here is that the idea of the Christian Holy Land “was not necessarily identical with or exclusive to the real Palestine.” Working the territory between the literal and the symbolic, she discloses a campaign originating in the Christianized Roman Empire to ensure that Christianity “should legitimately supersede a now obsolete Judaism in the very space where the Incarnation had taken place.” Then having appropriated Jerusalem itself as a Christian symbol, the next step was to move the Jerusalem-of-the-mind out of Palestine and into the heart of the twelfth-century Byzantine empire. By thus conceiving of Constantinople as a New Zion, the mundane expression of celestial reality, it was possible to view the emperor as the earthly figure of Christ.
All of this means that the idea of the holy is extraordinarily mobile. Take the temple, for example. Not only did various Hellenistic temples conjugate ethnic difference, with Memphis, Thebes, and Shechem serving different ethnic constituencies, but in Judaism such “holy spaces were [increasingly] filled with none-too-holy political and economic activities.” And yet such flexibility was not boundless. The temple’s survival crucially depended on its resonance as a holy space: “Once God left the Jewish camp … ,” Doron Mendels writes, “the Temple was no more than a political space. Without its holiness, which had persisted to a degree even in the worst period of Hellenization, in the seventies of the second century B.C.E. the Temple could not survive.”
A third suite of issues that this volume raises relates to diverse spatial experiences of the spiritual. Two in stances will suffice to illustrate something of this theme. In an account of ideas about divinity and place in Jewish mysticism, Haviva Pedaya takes as starting point Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” in which space and time are taken to be, not objective entities in themselves, but patterns of perception located in the observer. Pedaya seeks to enlist this subjectivising move as a justification for turning to esoteric Kabbalistic concepts of space and time in order to challenge our taken-for-granted assumptions about these phenomena. I must leave for others to judge just how compelling this argument actually is about the religious experience of space as time and time as space; but there is doubtless insight in the umbilical ties the author discerns between outer and inner journeys. The ideal pilgrimage is as much an internal voyage of discovery in perceptual space as an external excursion in material geography.
The experiential power of place is also dramatically unveiled in the sense of psychological crisis frequently induced by sacred spaces. In less than a decade dating from 1978, it seems, over one hundred pilgrim-tourists in Jerusalem underwent psychiatric hospitalization. Many of these cases, according to the analysis of Moshe Kalian and Eliezer Witztum, were people seeking what has been called a “geographical solution to internal problems.” These experiences, and others like them, constitute a species of behaviour that is the subject of what has come to be called psychogeography, a quasi-discipline engaged in the study of “how issues, experiences, and processes are symbolised and expressed in a wider social and natural context, creating cultural maps which often depict the image of things belonging to one’s group rather than a true reflection of the world.” In such circumstances the profound and disturbing experience of a sacred space is modulated by the mental geography guiding the pilgrim-patient and is arguably as much a product of perceptual topography as of the landscape of fact.
Finally, something of the ways in which space can be mobilized as a geo political tool are also to be found in this collection of essays. Sacred spaces, it is clear, are cultural re sources that may be enlisted for a host of political agendas. That ideas of hallowed land have frequently undergirded nationalisms of various stripes is perhaps the most conspicuous way in which space can be deployed as a geopolitical tool. The rhetoric of the Holy Land, Holy Russia, Holy Ireland, the Promised Land of America, as Hedva Ben-Israel shows, has exuded immense political power. Throughout, religious symbols have been marshalled into the spatial service of nationalistic patriotism. Small wonder that modern nationalisms often take the form of civil or surrogate religion.
Nor does the mobilization of sacred space in the cause of cultural projects have to be restricted to this scale of operations. Richard Nebel, for example, argues that while the shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in what is now Mexico City represented an initial indigenization of Christianity, it was subsequently mustered in the cause of both Hispanism and, later, Mexicanism. The result of this historical process is that the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe has become an expression of the “soul of the Mexican people, a symbol of national unity transcending racial barriers.”
Living as I do in a part of the world where grace and space, territory and theology have been locked together for too many generations, I have a special sense of the need to unravel this explosive politico-religious mix. In a city—Belfast—where educational structures, extraordinarily high levels of residential segregation, sectarian violence, friendship networks, and the political symbolism of church attendance, all conspire to sustain community tension, I do not have to be persuaded that the idea of sacred space matters a whole lot. In a country where large numbers of Christians feel that the flourishing of the gospel depends upon the protective shield of the state—that the preservation of their theology requires the maintenance of their geography—I realize that sacred space is multidimensional space, at once material and metaphorical, physical and social, ideological and iconographic. And most of all, I know that coming to terms with the historically deep and psychologically volatile nature of sacred space in all its variety is a task that extends beyond the academy and into the everyday lives of count less modern men and women. It is my hope that decades of violence will not be needed to persuade readers that the study of sacred geography should not be relegated to the margins of our college curricula.
David N. Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is the author of several books, including Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, and The Geographical Tradition. Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, which he coedited with Darryl Hart and Mark Noll, has recently been published by Oxford University Press.
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