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45 Chapter2 sACred PlACes And sACred sPACe sacRed sPace: a BRief suRvey The human experience of our environment has always been subjected to the drive to order the cosmos in such a way as to make it comprehensible. This process has been particularly evident in the development of human religious systems and cultures, which often seek to establish as unquestionable the existence of a reality hidden behind the sensual one. This hidden reality is usually considered to be of a higher order than mere visible reality , and human beings have always looked to it for the deepest meaning of human existence and have linked it with the divine origins of creation itself .1 The process of discovering this conceived hidden and sacred dimension of reality is rarely considered easy; by its very nature, sublime reality transcends common experience, and thus human beings must discover or create a way to isolate this deeper reality from ordinary life.In medieval Europe , as in many religious cultures, one means of distinguishing the sacred from the profane was through the ceremonial consecration or blessing of a locale. Before investigating this method of creating sacred space, however, we must first lay out an interpretive model for understanding the nature and function of sacred space within human religious culture, and then examine the historical evolution of medieval methods of creating sacred space, the blessing and consecration. Sacred space is essentially conceived of as significant space, a place where the barriers between visible and hidden reality are believed to have 1.For example,see Otto’s discussion of the numen in the development of human religion: Otto,Ideaof Holy, 1–11,72–135. z 46 sACred PlACes & sACred sPACe weakened sufficiently that human beings may experience both worlds within its confines. Sacred space is thus perceived to be full of potential, a place where nothing is accidental and everything is potentially significant, where humans and gods “are held to be transparent to one another”and may commune freely without the interference of mundane reality.2 While scholarship on the role and nature of the sacred in human religion disagrees over the origin of this concept of sacred space, it is unanimous in acknowledging that it is perceived to differ significantly from the world outside its boundaries.3 Rituals for creating sacred space often include explicit acts or words that delimit the territory where the power of divinity is thought to operate. The idea of sacred space not only provides its adherents with a comprehensible and reliable locale in which to gain access to hidden reality; it also servesthecrucialfunctionofgroundingthehumanwithinthecosmos.Where the sacred is conceived to manifest itself is a point from which to acquire a kind of orientation,to position the individual and community in a meaningful portion of the world, most typically at its imagined center.4 Such a positioning speaks to the human need for order in this world, but it also marks such space as a threshold or place of passage into another world, the realm of the gods or divinity.Sanctified space,be it made such by either human or divine agency,thus “breaches the veil”between realities,allowing passage of knowledge and power between the divine and the human for the benefit of both.5 One such benefit is the identification of the human community with 2.Smith,ImaginingReligion, 54. 3. There are significant differences in the scholarship on the sacred on the question of exactly why and how a place becomes sacred.For example,while Mircea Eliade and phenomonologist scholars such as Rudolf Otto take as a given the existence of the sacred as an active force that manifests itself in the world (e.g., in Eliade’s notion of the hierophany), Jonathan Smith argues that ordinary places become sacred by having human attention directed toward them in a special way (thus implying that nothing is sacred in itself but only in relation).See Mircea Eliade,The Sacred and the Profane:The Nature of Religion, trans.Willard Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace,1959),11–12,20–24;Smith,ImaginingReligion, 54–55. 4.This belief can be seen not only in native cultures throughout the world (for example, in the ceremonial male houses of Waropen,New Guinea) but also in the origins of European religion in the religion of the Israelites,who placed the sanctuary of the temple in Jerusalem at the center of the world,an idea inherited by Christians of medieval Europe who located Jerusalem itself as the center of the...

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