GEOGRAPHY

GEOGRAPHY . A deeply rooted aspect of human behavior, the ordering of space is an activity that consists of establishing differences between places in terms of varied functions and degrees of meaning. Among peoples of diverse religious traditions, the most significant places are identified with special spiritual presences, qualities that set certain locales apart from ordinary, profane space. Charged with supernatural power, sacred places function as fixed points of reference and positions of orientation in the surrounding world. With the passage of time, sacred places become invested with accumulations of mythical and historical meanings in complex layers of cultural memory. When joined by paths, processional ways, or great routes of pilgrimage, sacred places form networks that may embrace local village or tribal lands, large nations, or vast regions of the globe occupied by major civilizations. These networks form sacred geographies—webs of religious meaning imposed upon the land—where natural features and human-made symbols establish communication between the earthly and the spiritual, embodying collective values and shared norms of conduct. Sacred geographies form a unifying ground, a lasting source of remembrance and renewal for the most important aspects of individual and communal life in many cultural traditions.

The creation of sacred geographies is behavior partly anterior to the development of culture, for it stems from the marking, exploitation, and defense of territories that join humankind to the larger animal kingdom. But the articulation of landscapes with symbolic imagery and the way in which such landscapes are made to reflect layers of mythology and history also correspond to patterns of thought and complex ways of recording meaningful events that seem peculiar to humankind. The widely different ways in which sacred geographies have been organized show how humans have sought to grasp the perceived world and how they have explained their place within the cosmic schema. An examination of sacred geographies thus points to patterns of environmental cognition and ordering and to the wide range of spatial definitions that have evolved in response to different cultural needs, historical circumstances, and ecological possibilities.

This article focuses on four examples of sacred geography. They correspond to the symbolic landscapes of peoples of strikingly different social and cultural complexities who inhabit regions of varied ecologies. The first example is from the Australian Aborigines, whose gathering and hunting life in an austere desert environment was connected to systems of sacred places embedded within nature and unmarked by monumental art or architecture. These places, arranged in certain patterns within tribal territories, were thought to have been established by ancestral heroes in the Dreaming—the time of first creation. The second example is from the Maya Indian community of Zinacantan in southern Mexico, a farming people whose culture stems from an ancient native heritage. These Indians have evolved a pattern of centralization in their sacred geography that echoes similar structures among other peoples of sedentary farming life. The third example is from imperial China, where ancient beliefs concerning the worship of earth, water, and sky were expressed at great mountain shrines and in the sacred precincts of the imperial capital. In China is found the creation of a sacred geography closely tied to the concerns of a powerfully centralized state. The last example touches upon the sacred geography of medieval Europe. Though politically disunited, the peoples of Europe followed routes of pilgrimage to the periphery of Christendom and held Jerusalem, the Sacred City, to be the center of their world.

Aboriginal Australia

The Australian Aborigines are counted among the oldest human races. Their ancestors migrated from Southeast Asia perhaps thirty thousand years ago, when land bridges between New Guinea and Australia were almost certainly exposed. Throughout the millennia the Aborigines pursued an austere gathering and hunting life that was admirably adapted to their barren habitat. The Neolithic agricultural revolution never reached these isolated lands, where nomadic bands traveled within well-defined tribal territories, following seasonal rhythms in the unending search for food. But the inhabitants did not perceive the natural environment in economic terms alone; it was also seen as a storehouse of memory, replete with supernatural meanings. The flat, seemingly featureless terrain contained an invisible, magical domain in which hills, rocks, water holes, and groves were charged with sacred powers and mythical associations. Though apparently obeying the randomness of nature, such features were seen as well in terms of a specific order; people expressed their connection to them through pictographs, rock alignments, wooden sculptures, caches for totemic objects, and ceremonial places designed according to prescribed rules of organization.

The sacred sites of the Aborigines marked places where events in the Dreaming took place. This concept, which is central to Aboriginal cosmogony, concerns a time when heroes and heroines wandered over a land where there were no hills, water holes, or living things. The paths and camping places of these heroes are sacred places described in myths. The ancestral heroes also brought fire to the people as well as the laws by which people live; many such heroes eventually transformed themselves into trees, boulders, and other natural features, thus creating the landscape that exists at present. A symbolic order that related to the time of origins and the travels of creators, rather than the cardinal directions, was called into being. In these austere settings, no sharp divisions were made between animals, plants, inanimate objects, and humankind. The ancestral heroes were not distant entities but integral components of the land, and they were made part of the experience of daily life through religious reenactments of events of the Dreaming. Joined by a network of sacred places, the land itself became symbolic, affirming a coherence of the physical and mythological domains. Among the Aborigines, sacred geography was the source of authority as well as the source of tribal identity. The latter was based on a title to the land that went back to the time of first creation.

Zinacantan

Conquest, colonialism, and the advances of industrial civilization have often spelled destruction or major alteration for traditional religions. In North America, forcible removal of Indian populations from old homelands frequently meant social disintegration for those whose religious sense of belonging to a specific landscape had been destroyed. But colonial cultures have also often produced a range of creative adaptations, as subjected peoples evolved syncretistic religions in which ancient sacred geographies continued to play traditional functions. Latin America, among Indian communities in former Spanish possessions from the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico to the Bolivian Andes of South America, is especially rich in such instances.

Among many examples that could be discussed, the community of Zinacantan in the high, forested mountain country of Chiapas, southern Mexico, is particularly well documented. The inhabitants are a Maya people, ultimately descended from those who built city-states in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and the Yucatán Peninsula during the first centuries ce. Today, these farming people live in hamlets dispersed throughout the hills, around a civic and religious center that consists of a church, school, and administrative buildings.

The visible sacred geography of Zinacantan incorporates mountains, caves, water holes, and human-made crosses erected at shrine sites at determined locations around the civic and religious center. Mountains have important economic meaning in the life of Zinacantan, but certain peaks are also considered to be homes of ancestral deities who live within. These ancestors control the mists and vapors that rise to form rain clouds on the peaks; they are able to direct the rain clouds over the community. Crosses, placed on pathways around the mountains surrounding the Zinacantan center, were borrowed by the Indians from the symbolic forms of Spanish Christianity. But the crosses are not seen in Christian terms; they are perceived as spiritual openings for communication with ancestral beings. Cave shrines are also places for communication with Yahval Balamil, the earth lord, who dwells beneath the surface of the land; he may also be reached through prayers in caves, at sinkholes, and at springs throughout the Zinacantan domain. Sacrificial offerings are regularly made, especially at the sites of cross shrines. They are most often performed by people walking on ceremonial circuits around the whole community. Shamans are the main ritualists, performing prayers and making offerings on behalf of patients. Processions of other worshipers may also follow ceremonial circuits, usually moving in counterclockwise direction. The village church and its Christian images are also frequently included in the processional itineraries. The circuits around Zinacantan are a way of establishing boundaries, a way of saying "This is our sacred center, through which the holy river flows and around which our ancestral gods are watching over us." Circuits are replicated on many levels around individual fields, houses, or other objects, symbolically establishing property rights as well as marking social spaces in the Zinacantan world. The community and land at Zinacantan are infused with the sense of being whole and sacred; sacred geography places the living community in an intimate religious bond with its natural setting and with the ancestors and gods that dwell within that setting.

Imperial China

The sacred geographies of tribes or small agrarian communities are usually encompassed by paths or roadways within relatively restricted zones. But the development of ancient empires embracing vast regions and diverse populations posed different problems of spatial symbolism. For rulers, the problem was to create symbolic orders that might tend to unify such disparate domains and polities. Great ritual centers were designed to communicate the religious and political concerns of state organizations. The symbolic structure of such places expressed the idea of a sacred geography in microcosm, through the use of monumental art and architecture.

In China, where continuity of religious themes has been maintained over millennia, imperial ritual was especially focused on two outstanding places. The first was a sacred mountain, Tai Shan, the central and most important of five sacred mountains associated with the cardinal directions and center. The worship of mountains has an ancient history in China, attested by early texts that describe peaks and the appropriate rites to be celebrated there. Some were local shrines affecting small areas, but others were majestic sovereigns that extended their influence over immense regions. These old beliefs surrounded Tai Shan, and the sacred place gradually was invested with imperial monuments throughout the centuries. In effect, the mountain became a symbol of the cosmos and the state. The mountain was given royal title during the Tang dynasty in 725, inaugurating a practice followed by successive emperors. These honorific names underlined the conception of the mountain as a producer of life forces. It was identified with rain clouds and fertility and figured as an object of worship in spring rites of planting and at the fall harvest season. It was also seen as a symbol of stability and permanence and as a preventer of droughts, floods, and earthquakes. Indeed, it was a divinity with a sacred force that could be touched by prayers and sacrifice.

Just as the mountain was a symbol of order in the natural environment, so did the emperor personify the social and moral order. A close relationship developed between ruler and mountain, for the emperor was the pivot between society and nature. But both the emperor and the mountain were subordinate to Heaven, for it was through the mandate of Heaven that all harmony and validation derived. These relationships were spelled out in the elaborate system of monuments with which Tai Shan was equipped. At the summit, an open circular platform was constructed for the Feng sacrifices, which consisted of burnt offerings to the heavens. Below, toward the base of the mountain, a polygonal open altar was constructed for the Shan sacrifices in honor of the earth. Between these key altars were a host of subsidiary temples dedicated to lesser nature divinities, ancestral heroes, and various miraculous saints and hermits. There were also commemorative monuments to various emperors, a school, a library, a Confucian temple, and many other sacred places scattered among the crags and groves. The whole site was simultaneously a symbol of the land, the empire, and the cosmos—a great unifying topographic icon.

The symbolic order that governed Tai Shan also informed the cosmic imagery of ritual centers within the imperial capital. In Beijing, sacred enclosures featured open platform altars to the sky and earth, with subordinate temples to the sun, moon, and agriculture, each with its own complement of satellite monuments, altars, and secondary buildings. The Chinese love of order, hierarchy, and classification governed the orientation and symbolic ornament of the temples, with their gleaming white marble and carved imagery of mountains, clouds, water, and earthly or celestial dragons. These cosmic figures expressed the notion of a sacred geography in abstract form, becoming universal symbols. The magnificent altars, with their surrounding concourses and processional paths, formed the setting for imperial rites where the emperor offered sacrificial covenants to heaven and earth. The sacrifices expressed a complementary relationship to one another. The mysterious, limitless heights of heaven and the regular movements of the celestial bodies symbolized Heaven's regulative power to keep the universe in stable order and to produce the proper succession of seasons. This power was especially important to an agricultural people, and through sacrificial acts the emperors expressed the harmony of a well-ordered society within the universal schema.

Medieval Europe

The sacred geographies of the Far East and among the Indian peoples of the Americas tend to express a correspondence between humanity and nature and to be arranged in patterns of centralization. By contrast, the sacred geography of medieval Europe did not focus on a single European capital but was cast instead as a vast network that ran through many lands, leading to pilgrimage cities at the extremities of Christendom. From central and southern France, pilgrimage routes ran south over the Pyrenees, converging on a road that led across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, the tomb of the apostle James. Another route threaded down the Italian Peninsula to Rome. There, amid the ruins of antiquity, the pilgrim might meditate upon the early saints and martyrs and visit the old Lateran—the Mother Church and seat of the earthly Vicar of Christ. But the most perilous of routes led farther south to the port of Brindisi, and from there by ship across the Mediterranean, to the most distant, mysterious, and sacred of all goals, the city of Jerusalem.

The physical realities of this complex geography were translated in terms of a mythological hierarchy on thirteenth-century maps. These charts reveal a vision in which the horizontal surface of the earth was shown as a flat disc, with Jerusalem, the Holy City, marked clearly at the center. The outline of the Mediterranean Basin was summarily drawn, as were the features of Europe. Peripheral and unknown regions were shown to be the realms of bizarre or fabled races, sometimes held at bay behind great walled enclosures. On a vertical axis above Jerusalem, the Savior presided over the celestial sphere, while ferocious demons patrolled the infernal regions below. Such imagery was not primarily meant to illustrate an actual, material geography but rather a spiritual landscape whose central earthly icon, Jerusalem, could be interpreted on different levels. It was the Holy City of Palestine, the goal of pilgrims and crusaders; a symbol of the church; a metaphor for the Christian soul; and an analogy for the heavenly Jerusalem, the final Promised Land.

Such patterns were repeated in microcosm throughout Christendom in the art and architecture of cathedrals. In France, where these buildings reached their highest expression, sculpture, architecture, and stained glass formed a symbolic code to show the order of nature, to represent an abstract of history, and to summarize spiritual values. Within the soaring naves of the great cathedrals, at once mysterious and secure against the outside world, the assembled congregation saw the mirror of creation. Yet, like the maps, these buildings represented an essentially interior world, expressing the aims and aspirations of the innermost consciousness of the community. Such sacred places, joined in the larger network of routes to distant centers of faith, formed a sacred geography of a tradition that denied the physical world to emphasize instead theological, conceptual, and belief-oriented values that urged people to rise up, away from the earth, above animals, plants, and inanimate objects, toward a transcendent God.

Conclusion

This article summarizes the structure of four sacred geographies in societies that range from the level of tribal bands to complex civilizations. In all cases, sacred geographies have the functions of creating a sense of place and of creating a certain order in the world. Through the use of symbols, networks of meaning are imposed upon the land; such spatial orders clarify the difference between places by illustrating what is thought to be significant in the perceived world. These symbols may be natural features, such as mountains, lakes, or rivers; they may be pictographs or markings; or they may be elaborate works of art and architecture accompanied by writing. In the context of a landscape, such symbolic systems communicate the difference between sacred and profane space and answer the universal theme of establishing connections between a population and a time and place of origin.

Beyond such essential functions, sacred geographies are as varied as religions. These differences are the result of specific cultural and historical factors as well as geographical conditions. The circumstances of a wandering life in an isolated region; the need to form or unify a state organization; the pattern of an early chain of missions or military conquests; the lasting prestige and sacred quality of an ancient civic and religious center—these and countless other factors may determine how sacred geographies are shaped. By incorporating the imagery of history and related information, sacred geographies make visible a cultural or ethnic domain and signal territorial possession.

The study of sacred geography is especially important in understanding the processes of cultural history, particularly among peoples whose traditions are not documented in writing or whose traditions may be recorded in partly deciphered hieroglyphic texts and figural imagery. In Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, where the native spiritual and intellectual heritage was largely transmitted orally, major archaeological sites must be decoded without textual sources, and early European reports of contact are colored by an Indo-European outlook. Among these peoples, the broad patterns of sacred geography provide indispensable insight on the role of religious thought and symbolism in the evolution of civilization.

See Also

Center of the World; Cosmology; Deserts; Gardens; Jerusalem; Lakes; Mountains; Oceans; Rivers; Sacred Space.

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