RELIGION FROM PLACE TO PLACELESSNES Text by Yi-Fu-Tuan Photographs and essays by Martha A.

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GEOGRAPHY AND RELIGION Geography and religion are antithetical. This is my principal thesis. However, I must first address religion as it is a commonly understood. Religion, so understood, bears a close relationship to geography. They are indeed a common undertaking, for if geography is the story of how humans have tried to make themselves comfortable to earth, it is also the story of how, in that very effort, they have produced sacred places and given rise to beliefs and practices that go under the name of religion. Sacred places and sacred rites are an attempt at confining nature within bounds, so that it can be addressed and appeased, with the end that its powers yield more benefit than harm. But, then, all secular efforts from the cutting of a forest to make room for a farm, to the building of towns and cities- are directed to the same end. Nature appeased trough prayers and rites give us religion; nature controlled through the exercising of human physical power gives us geography. In both cases, nature was our adversary. And it still is, though, in developed countries, people tend to forget this in their awareness that human power, indiscriminately used, threatens to degrade nature beyond rehabilitation. But doesnt religions necessarily imply super nature something other than nature? It does. Ethnographic evidence suggests, however, that whether people encounter the strange and mysterious in their daily lives depends either on the degree of ease they feel in the natural environment or they sense of control over it. Ease in the natural environment, by which I mean the ability to make a living without much effort, is extremely rare. Only a few small groups of hunter-gatherers in the tropical forest can be said to know it, and they do because nature there is exceptionally generous. To such hunter-gatherers, sacred places, such as a pool of water here or a strangely shaped rock there, do not exist. Rather, the entire forest is infused with benign spirit. In a curious way, they have managed to do without special places, neither ones marked by awe, as in sacred pools and rocks, nor ones marked by deep sentiment, as in permanent homes. In the sense, they are placeless. Notwithstanding, they are not totally enclosed in this world, for they appear to have a feeling for something all-encompassing, transcendent, and divine. LANDSCAPES OF ANXIETY AND FEAR The idyllic state of placelessnes, even if real, is real for very few people. For the vast majority of humankind, life is not all one of ease but one of perpetual struggle, with seldom any certainty as to the outcome. Where human control is at best tentative, nature seems haunted, filled with beings of power that must be appeased. Paradoxically, people with enough tools and skills to transform nature to extent of creating fields and villages may feel not more but less secure than their less well-equipped fellows, the hunter-gatherers. As weeds and wild animals muscle in on

hard-won clearings in the forest, villagers see themselves under siege by nature that is only temporarily held back. A mere century ago, most people still lived in isolated villages and small towns; that is to say, in a world under siege, a world of numinous power to which a common human response was fear followed by efforts to abate in with the reassurances of magic. We need not trawl the remotes parts of Africa and Asia to show that this was so. Eugen Weber said of France, considered a civilized nation in the 1900s, that, everything (in the countryside) was a fearsome or fantastic portent: the buzzing of insects announced a ghostly hunt; the ribbons of mist above the marshes are mysterious drivers of clouds; newly pruned elms, shadows, or haze turned into sinister fancies. The moonlight was crowded with goblins, sprites, elves, imps, wraiths werewolves (and) bogeyman Before World War I, fountains, wells, and springs were a widespread cult in rural France, so much so that some fountains of high repute must have looked, according to Weber, like Japanese temple groves, with votive rags, ribbons, and articles of clothing draped over them and over all the surrounding growth. In the United States, as late as the 1940s, backwoodsmen in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri lived in an omen-filled landscape. Some folks wouldnt drive down a road if they saw a little whirlwind on it, for to do so could bring bad luck. Other folks buried the entrails of a black hen under the earth on January 6th, or Twelfth Night, to protect their homes against destruction by lightning or fire. In the remote hills and hollows of Tennessee and Kentucky, as late as the 1920s and 30s, ghosts and witches were as much part if a living tradition as dying in ones own home and maintaining the family graveyard. A country lane or covered bridge, so picturesque to the passing tourist on a sunny day, could seem threatening to the man, woman, or child trudging home as the shadows deepened. CHINESE COSMIC SPACE AND PLACES In societies that boasted farms, villages, and great cities, a sharp of outlook opened between the educated and uneducated, the literate and illiterate. The educated found themselves living in a larger, more impersonal and abstract world than did their untutored country cousins. Equipped with greater knowledge, their attitude to nature shifted in a benign direction, form dread and fear to wonder and awe, and their world from one of multitudinous spirits to something simpler, a cosmic space overseen by one supreme deity. Cosmic space is not homogeneous space. Certain points of the compass have more significance than do other; certain localities emanate more significance than do others; certain localities emanate more power and so command more attention and call for greater deference than do others. These points and localities, however, do not derive their authority from the earth; they are not emanations of chthoian power. These points north, east, south and west- look to heaven; they are heavenly coordinates superimposed on earth in the interest of predictability and order. As for the localities is cosmic space, they are more likely to be human-made than natural features more likely to be shrines, temples, and places than water holes, springs, and rocks.

Take traditional Chinese society as an example. It is hierarchical, with power and education concentrated in a mall Elite. Elite and ordinary folk have one religious practice common-ancestor worship. Ancestral shrines occupy an honored place in both wealthy and humble homes. Outside the home, however, the religious worldview diverges. The attention of the elite is directed to sacred spaces, whereas that of ordinary folk is directed to sacred places. The sacred space of the elite is defined by the cyclical motions of the stars, their capital city being a clear diagram of cosmic order. Events in it are stately and predictable, with critical points, such as the equinoxes and solstices, marked by rituals in which the emperor and court officials participate. Sacred space and its ritual are, however, of little concern to common people. Their focus is on particular places within the city: a tree, a well, the corner of a wall, or building where an unusual event, such as a suicide or flash of lightning, is believed to have occurred. Both a sacred space and sacred place can evoke awe: the one by its scale and spatial-temporal order, the order by its unpredictability and strangeness. Unlike the elite, who have known power and have used it to impose a certain order on reality, the common people, habituated to powerlessness in almost all areas of life, see nature as made up of capricious force that need to be located, propitiated, and, if need be, threatened with curtailment of offering and a appeal to higher authority, which may the emperor himself. Another important difference is that, whereas the sacred (haunted) places of common people are, as we have noted, location-specific, the sacred spaces familiar to the elite, based on an invariant heavenly template, can in principle- be established almost anywhere. EUROPEAN SACRED SPACE AND PLACES European religious culture from that of China in that it lacks the clear notion of cosmic space demarcated by the cardinal points. What it has is a universe created by God that shows. His power and artistry. The picture of that universe owes little, however, to Judeo-Christian beliefs; rather it is something built on the ancient Greek idea of the harmony of the spheres. As for that tiny speck in the universe, Earth, it reveals Gods providence, an idea in natural theology that came into prominence during the eighteenth century. Europes society, like chinas, can be divided into the educated and uneducated: the one lived (or could have lived) in the light of cosmic and terrestrial harmony if they so chose; the other, lacking this alternative, lived in fears of spirits and demons that haunted the natural landscape. To the educated, the natural landscape was not especially holy. Mountains and streams might pose a danger to travelers, but they did not command reverence proper to the sanctified and the holy. What did command such reverence were the churches and cathedral in the landscape. A difference between them is that, whereas a sacred natural feature is location-specific, a sacred building, such as a Christian church, can, in principle. Be raised almost anywhere with the appropriate rites of consecration.

A COMPARISON WITH AN AMERICAN-INDIAN WORLDVIEW Having just given encapsulated accounts of Chinese and European notions of sacred space and sacred place, it may seem a diversion to take up the worldview of preliterate American Indians. My reason for doing so is to offer, for comparison, an instance of a people the American Indianswho, unlike the Chinese and the Europeans, have not sundered their along class lines, with one group (the more sophisticated) emphasizing space and another group (the less sophisticated) emphasizing place. For their part, the elites of Europe and China, who were habituated t, yet often frustrated by, their complexly segmented world, have periodically yearned for the one that is more organic and sensorial rewarding, which they believe existed in the past or among simpler peoples. A value deeply shared by both Chinese and American-Indian peoples is harmony the maintenance of balance and mutuality among all being, which include Sun and Moon and other heavenly bodies; meteorological phenomena, such as cloud and rain, thunder and lightning; earths features, such mountains and rivers, lakes and springs, plants and animals, and human beings; and certain human artifacts, such as building and tools, are also included. All these beings are imbued with the powerful; each has some sway over another. In this closely integrated system, people can promote or subvert harmony, and do good or ham as can all other beings. The multitude of beings in the universe would produce utter confusion if there were not easy of ordering them. The two ways adopted by American Indians are story lines and spatial gird of cardinal points with a center. More reliance is put on the former than on the latter, on significant events rather than on locations in space. A rock, a lake, a tree, and even the most inconspicuous objet in the landscape can become a sacred place, filled with numinous aura, because of what a mythic ancestor has done there or because an unusual metrological event, such as lightning, has occurred there. The entire landscape and the sky come alive by virtue of the narratives and the rituals that may accompany them. Both Chinese an American Indians subscribe to the notion of spatial gird of cardinal points, but they differ in the emphasis they put on narrative. The Chinese depend less on narrative. True, there was a time in China when stories of mythic heroes who performed wonders of creation were common, but they were largely excised by the time of the Han dynasty. What the Chinese scholarcensors allowed to remain or could not control, were the more or less fabulous tales that ordinary people told to explain their spirit-filled world. The result, as I noted earlier, was the emergence of distinction, drawn along class lines, between the sacred places of the people and the sacred spaces of the elite. Narrative is, of course, central to Christianity and to the Christian worldview. It may be cosmic, beginning with creation and ending with consummation, or, as is more common, it is life story of Jesus. But unlike American Indian accounts of mythic heroes, Jesus passage through life is inscribed on the landscape only to a limited degree. As told in the gospels, the savior was always on the road, going somewhere. Being on the road carried more religious weight and resonance than the places where he paused to rest, preach, or perform miracles. At a high mountain where

Jesus stopped in one of his many peregrinations, he appeared with Moses and Elijah (Elias) in dazzling light. His overawed disciples wanted to set up three tabernacles to mark the transfigurations. But a bright could (God) would have none of it (Matthew 17; 1 -5). That mountain was not allowed to be a sacred place for his followers. One can imagine that, if the tabernacles were built, they and the mountain would have become a major center of pilgrimage and worship for Christians. Another significant difference between American Indian and European religious geography is that, in North America, the Indian sacred places are almost all natural features. In Europe, by contrast, only the uneducated may still see a rock, tree grove, or spring as sacred. To educated Europeans, natural features may be valued for ecological and aesthetic reasons, but that does not make them sacred. If, in vestigial faith, anything is still regarded as not wholly of this world, it is the consecrated building: a shrine, church, or synagogue. Lastly, and most importantly, the American Indian worldview is informed by a morality that is ambivalent and contextual. Although a few spirits are consistently benevolent, and few others are consistently malevolent, most can be both, dependent on the circumstance. Human behavior, whether it be judged good or bad, has a similar ambivalence. American Indian morality is, in this sense, realistic and practical a matter of doing the right thing at the right time- having the effect of benefiting a community as a whole. By contrast, the common-sense morality of the Chinese and the Europeans, derived from the practical needs of their respective communal living, is overlain by higher morality. To the Chinese, the higher (or deeper) morality is inscribed in the core of human nature, which, to Confucians, is fundamentally good. As for European Christians, it comes from God in the form of commandments and, more inspiringly, as stories that illustrate moral principles so exalted as to seem beyond human reach and not of this world. SIMILAR YET DIFFERENT Geography and all widely practiced forms of religion are, in the final analysis, attempts at establishing places that answer human needs; there is, however, an important difference. Although both focus on material and practical means, religions add another layer to them through powers on top of another more than just practical step in construction: both the stone and the construction take on extra meaning a glow, as it were- through incantation and ritual. Yet, notwithstanding this extra meaning, the ultimate end of most religious practices is still to make a home for humans. Religions are still, in the sense, secular and worldly. They still lie within the compass of geography. To make my case, I now examine a number of key religious ideas, among them apartness, order, wholeness, and completion. Their intimate bond secular beliefs and practices should then become evident. Apartness.

Religion is typically concerned with the sacred. But what is sacred? What does it mean? The word`s etymology sheds some light. Sacred is from the Latin sacer, which carries the general sense of restriction but whose specific meaning is an area that stands apart and has limited access, because it caters to the gods. The Hebrew root of k-d-sh, which is usually translate as holy is also based on the idea of separation. A peculiar feeling of dread marks off the holy from the ordinary. Ronald Knox, in his version of the Old Testament, chooses to emphasize this idea of separation in the meaning of k-d-sh. Thus, stirring lines from God that ye shall be holy; for I am holy (Leviticus 11:44) turn into the rather pallid I am set apart and you must be set apart like me. As a thing becomes holy it is a cut off from surrounding space. A template is a sacred template. The Latin templum is derived from the Greek templos, and the root tem means to cut out. Carl Hamburg writes: What is a cut out, delimited, is at first the space devoted to a God, later any section of space (soil, garden or forest) belonging to a king, hero or chief. This act of delimitation also extends to the heaven whose constellations and divisions are related to the templa (divisions) of divine effectiveness; it established property as that around which boundaries may be draw {an idea that} eventually penetrates the realms of social, political and legal relations Among the oldest of know forms of human-made sanctuary was a simple enclosure of stone. It outlined an area of concentrated divine power and warned profane man of the danger to which the would be exposed if he were to enter without undergoing purificatory rites- city walls were enclosures of a larger scale, and what they enclosed was a space occupied by both humans and their deities. Walls protected against human enemies but also demons and other forces of chaos. During a siege or a epidemic, the whole population-people and effigies of the gods-might gather and parade around the city walls for the purpose of strengthening their magico-religious potency 12. Where a physical boundary is inconspicuous or absent, processions alone establish apartness. In ancient Roman times, the head of a household marked the borders of his domain by circumambulating his fields, singing hymns, and driving sacrificial animals before him. By such means he hoped to waken the gods and direct their power to satisfy his needs. 13. In Britain, the custom of beating the bounds required the parish priest to walk around his parish and strike certain markers with a stick. In traditional China, a religious procession through a ring of villages defined the domain of the temple god housed in the central marketplace. 14. Delimitation, definition, and keeping the categories apart are not only intellectual, but also primordially religious procedures. The Lord said to Moses Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee (Leviticus 19:19). a holiness. Mary Douglas writes: requires that different classes of things shall not be confused. {it} means keeping distinct the categories of creation. It therefore involves correct definition, discrimination and order. 15. Order

In the beginning, the book of genesis in The Holy Bible tells us that Earth was without and void, darkness hovered over the face of the abyss, and a mighty wind swept over the surface of the waters. In the end was prefect order. Saint John saw a new heaven and new Earth on which there existed neither sea nor darkness, light. Confusion reigned in the beginning. In the end Saint John beheld the holy city of Jerusalem, which God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband (revelation 21:2). The city stood heavenly order. Within its walls one found just rules and discriminations; beyond them lay chaos and arbitrariness. WHOLENESS AND COMPLETION In addition to separateness, the Word sacred connotes the whole and the complete. Everything presented at the temple, including people, must show physical perfection. Sacrificial animals should be without blemish. A priest, according to Leviticus, cannot be a mutilated being; he must be a whole or holy man. In action or work, wholeness implies that any task, once begun, must not be left unfinished: what man is there that hath built a new house, and hath not dedicated it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he in the battle, and another man dedicate it (Deuteronomy 20:5). Several biblical passages urge us not to put our hands to the plow and then turn back. These ideas apply to the city and wilderness as types of sacred space. A city that symbolized cosmic order also projected an image of wholeness and completion. The principal components of an ancient citywalls, streets, and important buildingsmight take only a year or so to construct. By building rapidly with an army of workmen, a ruler could believe that his capital had descended from heaven complete. In contrast, wild nature beyond the walls looked unkempt, unfinished. Our age has reversed these perceptions. To us, it is the city that looks raw and protean. Buildings are constantly being torn down and raised again, suburbs grow and decay, so that it is hard for anyone to associate wholeness and completion with the modern metropolis. On the other hand, people see stability and permanence in wilderness areas. Ecologists contribute to this feeling when they describe the tropical rain forest and desert life-forms as climax communities. Having achieved climax, such communities will resist further change. Since the 195os, more and more people in the affluent West have come to regard nature (idealized as wilderness) not as something raw but as an achieved work complete, whole, and even holy. SACRED STATE The state, not only the Christian State but the State as such, has a divine role. So wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury, Arthur Michael Ramsey, in 1964. He was expounding a doctrine that goes back to Saint Paul (Romans 13: 5-6) but which. To this day, has application. How? Consider some of the attributes of divinity, beginning with order. The state imposes and maintains order. When an atheistic government in Moscow or Beijing declares that one may drive only on one side of the street, it is fulfilling a divine role.

Completeness is an attribute of the sacred. The modern nation-state has at various times sought for self-sufficiency, for a shape and a size that can provide an illusion of completeness. It has also been described as organic, a term that suggests the completeness of an integral whole that must not be violated or contaminated. A boundary or limit is a characteristic of sacred space. The modern nation-state, unlike an ancient empire or a medieval fiefdom, has well-defined boundaries. People who cross them are required to perform the appropriate rites, which cam stringent or lax depending on the travelers degree of purity. Power is an attribute of the sacred. The state has great power over is people and substantial influence over neighboring peoples. We even personalize modern nations and call them sovereign powers, with rights and dignities, as though they constitute an order of angels. The states power is, at times and even often, overweening and oppressive. Yet it must be deemed good to the degree that it sustains an overall order under which people can get on with their lives. Addressing the nation as motherland or fatherland is commonplace and seems natural. From time immemorial, political leaders have sounded the alarm, Our sacred soil (that is, the motherland or fatherland) has been violated. To this cry, citizens are expected to respond and do so by offering their lives. The ultimate sacrifice is appropriate to the defense of the sacred VIOLENCE Sacred power is also manifest in outbursts of energy or even violence. Consider again the state. Is primary reason for being is the maintenance of socio-political order, but to do so effectively requires that it use force from time to time. A functioning state has, of course, a benign face: it takes care of its own, creating institutions of justice and welfare that are the particular embodiments of the abstract ideals of order, wholeness, and completion. Toward foreigners and foreign countries, however, the state is amoral, its behavior being guided only by rational calculi of advantage. State is a moral, its behaviorthe immoral society of Reinhold Niebuhrs Moral Man and Immoral Societycan be brutal, with war as its as ultimate weapon. That violence lies at the core of religion is well known to, and widely accepted by, scholars. Central to religious practice is sacrificethe notion that God or the have to be gentled by some kind of offering. In ancient times, only an offering of slayed humans could satisfy. In later ages, animals replaced humans, but the temple remained a bloody place. All ancient Greek cities hand altars for the ritual killing of animals. And we fail to their culture if, as G.S Kirk writes. we overlook the ubiquitous altars reeking with fresh blood, the constant throat-slitting of bulls, cows, sheep, goats, pigs and occasionally dogs. Greek cities had no abattoirs. The slaughtering of animals was done mainly in front of temples. Priests were also butchers, hacking up corpses for the altar, selling parts of the carcass to the worshipers, and keeping back portions for themselves. As for ancient Israel, the early books of the Hebrew Bible make in clear that birds and animals were slaughtered and presented as burnt offerings to Yahweh in the temple. The ostensible motives were giving thanks and making atonement for sin, but there was also the underlying,

more primitive desire to propitiate an angry deity. Great prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE attempted to shift the emphasis away from the slaughter of sacrificial victims toward the inner sacrifice of the broken heart-away, that is, from cattle and sheep gushing blood and bellowing on their death throes at a public place to the quiet, inner transformations of a repentant individual. Not much had changed, however, by Jesuss time. Jerusalems temple, a holy place of blood and greed. Significantly, the one occasion in which Jesus became violent was when he used a whip to drive the animals out of the temple and overturned the tables of the moneychangers and proclaimed, make not my fathers house a house of merchandise (John 2: 16). Men and women in modern times tend to see religion as essentially moral and peace-loving and to regard sacred places as oases of peace and sanctity. Thus, they repress, or simply demonstrate, their ignorance of the following plain fact: one, as noted, ancient temples were also sacrificial slaughterhouses: two, throughout human history, religious zeal has resulted in bitter feuds and wars; and, three, holy temples and cities, were passions come to a focus, easily turn into sites of conflict and violence. Consider Jerusalem, holy to three major religious: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Far from being a beacon of light and harmony through is long history, Jerusalem has all too been a place of bitterness and hatred. IRONIES OF PIETY Tragically, religious devotion itself can bring about violent deaths if worshipers turn into frenzied crowds, as happened repeatedly during the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca: in 1990, 1,426 were trampled, to death; in 2004, the figure was 251, and, in 2005, at least 345. An especially dangerous time is last day of three day ritual, during which pilgrims surge at the devil, represented by three pillars, to throw stones at him and so show their willingness to resist temptation. And what is the temptation? Ironically, the specific temptation commemorated by the ritual is devils suggestion to Abraham, that he refrain from killing his son, even as God commands it. By curious twists of the human imagination, it is God who orders the death of a child and the devil who tempts man not to kill. A final twist: man then punishes the devil-throws stones at himfor urging him to be merciful. The word Islam literally translates to obedience. Man shows his piety by unquestioning obedience. He also shows his piety by going on pilgrimages, submitting to physical hardships and elaborate rites of purification. But what is piety? What does Allah demand of the faithful? The Quran ( Koran) has God say that piety lies not in turning your face East or West in playerbut in distributing your wealth to needy kin, orphans, vagrants, and mendicants (2: 177). In defining piety thus, God pays His creatures a high compliment, for it is much easier to show it by praying to the right direction, submitting to prolonged fast, or even whipping, than by giving secretly to those in need, kin and stranger alike. The first acts, after all, also earn the praise of men, since they are usually performed in public place, whereas the second-anonymous charityis known only to the humble recipients and to God. GOD AND MORALITY

We say God is good. But how so? Is the good that is equivalent to God compatible with good as understood by and applied to humans? One meaning of good- namely, the virtue of submission -cannot be applied to god or, more precisely, to the godhead. Many religious thinkers consider it god that mortals recognize their limitations and submit to the great forces of nature; this is, ultimately, submission to god. But god cannot submit, for god is great. In jewish thought, gods greatness is contrasted with mans smallness. To job complaints about unjust treatment, god thunderously replied, where wast thou when I lad the foundations of the earth (job 38:4) and where the foundations thereof fastened ? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of god shouted for joy? (job38: 6-7) Even more that Judaism and Christianity, islam has made submission to gods majesty and power is the heart of religion. To humane and liberal thinkers, however, power is suspect, especially when it is draped in majesty. Power, being an inherent property of god hood, must be considered good. Gods power is also good from a human perspective. For he is believed to help humans out of a bind occasionally, as when he (through Moses)Parted the red sea to allow his people to escape (exodus : 14:16-31). However, in almost all religions, Judeo-Christianity included, gods help is fickle. heavenly father, Chrissuch call him but as a father he is not as dependable and solicitous as even a good human father can be. Human experience hardly validates the phrase God is good or God equals good Using such phrases threatens to make the word good meaningless. The German theologian Rudolf Otto has the courage to say outright that the divine has no concern whatever with moral qualities. It acts like a hidden force of natural, like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near, it is incalculable and arbitrary FROM AMORAL ENERGY TO POWER FOR GOOD. Rudolf Otto probably has in mind the fate awaited Uzzah when he tired to steady the wooden shrine (the ark) in which Gods covenant with Israel was placed. It struck him dead on the spot, as though it was charged with electricity. The philistines captured the ark in battle and took it to Ashdod, where they put it in the temple of their god, Dagon; Thereupon the energy emanating from it smashed Dagons statue. Its presence frightened the people ofAsfdod and infected them with tumors and a plague of mice. They sent it away, but everywhere it went it had the same effect, until it arrived at Bethshemeh , where seventy men who looked onto it fell dead. The survivors quickly returned it to the Israelites ( 1salmos 4-6) Even in medieval Europe, people could still see of God as exuding dangerous energy, rather like deadly radiation leaking from a nuclear reactor in our time. William of Malmesbury, a Benedictine monk who died in 1143, said of the church at Glastonbury that it projected such power that, if any building were erected in its vicinity, which by its shade obstructed the light of the church, it would instantly become a ruin.

To the extent that a building owed its sanctity to the relic of a saint or to the good people who lived there, the energy that emanated from it was benign. People could approach it with respect and hope rather than in fear and trembling. The house of God was a powerhouse for good. Spain gave evidence of this beneficent turn during the sixteenth century when the landscape was speckled with convents. Rural folks expected them to radiate benefits upon the whole neighborhood. In their proximity, quarrels and dissensions decreased, interest in loans fell, and alms-giving became more generous. God took another decisive turn toward the moral when, during the Middle Ages, he offered his house to societys outcasts. He and his saint would anyone who stepped inside the borders of his house, which became a sanctuary. In England , Beverly Minster was the most celebrated sanctuary, its privilege to protect extending a mile and a half around the church; the closer to the center of this zone the venerable frithstool, the Anglo-saxon for peace chair), in the nave, he enjoyed complete immunity. Beverly accumulated numbers of the permanent sanctuary men, and they were absorbed into the life of the minster. Churches were not eager to claim the status of sanctuary, however, for it could attract more refuges than they were able to handle-refuges that included some of the worst criminals and most flagrant Debtors in the country . In 1623, parliament, under james I, abolished the general right to sanctuary, but churches continued to offer it, and state that is especially difficult to resolve in England, since there the church is the established church and a part of the state. Interestingly enough, as we have seen, the state itself has a claim to being sacred; there-fore it is under obligation to offer sanctuary to political refugees from other countries.

THE RISE FALL OF PLACE SPECIFICITY. Place-making, by setting up boundaries, gives rise to the polarities of in and out, us and them. Being in, an insider, is good; Being out, an outsider, is bad. And so it is a great misfortune to be exiled- as an outcast or only a little less so, to be a stranger or foreigner, raised in villages and towns beyond the pale. The distinction between in and out may sharpen over time, so that people living in separate communities, but within the same general religion, speak different dialects and end up speaking in mutually incomprehensible tongues. The customs and routines that govern their daily life may also be initially similar, being depend on the same techniques of livelihood, whether this be farming or livestock herding. As Time passes, the rules and regulations of community multiply. Differences grow, especially those that pertain to religion. Places acquire more and more distinctive character. Social and cultural cohesion within each place gains at the expense of its peopless sympathy for outsiders and the outside. Antagonism between communities, building up over the years, can eventually lead to war.

Against these tendencies are forces that loosen a peoples identification with a particular locality. These forces include marrying outside ones own group (exogamy), trade and pilgrimage. Exogamy dilutes differences and encourages contact between groups but at the micro-social scale of families and kinship nets. Trade und pilgrimage involve far more people and operate over a afar larger area. By its nature, trade transgresses borders and bridges separateness. It occurs because one people can see usefulness and virtue in the products of another that can be called friendship. The stranger becomes a possible source of knowledge an new products and thus is no longer automatically suspect. Care and respect are due the stranger as they are due the stranger as they are due to ones kin. The distinction between us and them weakens, as is also the distinction, following exchanges of goods, between one place and another, whether a town, city, country, region, or empire. TRADERS AND PILGRIMS. The trader abandons temporally his village for the larger world, and he does so in the name of economic again. The trader is thus seen as worldly, even irreligious. Yet, looked at another way, going to the market town is liberation- a again that is not restricted to the material. The farther a villager moves away from this village, the more he is disencumbered of its taboos, local gods, and narrow loyalties. Ina market town of acquaintances and strangers, one packed with gods, activities, and customs he has not previously known, his human sympathy is enlarged. This enlargement of human sympathy may be considered a step in the direction of mental and spiritual progress. Applying the word spiritual to traders and trade, though a stretch, is justified by drawing attention to certain similarities between trading and going on a pilgrimage. A pilgrim leaves the familiar habits and customs of this community for the hazardous journey to a sacred place. There, he is one individual among multitude of like-minded individuals, and there his tribal loyalties and obligations are transcended by a strong desire for truth and by the averarching value of universal brotherhood. Centers of pilgrimage are,point of fact, also centers of trade. At any pilgrimage site, stalls selling religious trinkets invariably mushroom, and this is in addition to a bustling traffic of non-religious commodities that arise from the coming together of many peoples. In ancient Arabia, the two sites-pilgrimage and trade were considered inseparable, because both served as sort of sanctuary that exempted them from divisive local customs and rules. NEW ENGLAND PILGRIMS. From a worldly viewpoint, the move from a home base to a sacred place is like moving from the center of a rich experience to the periphery of a thin, though elevated, experience. A religious viewpoint sees the same move, from periphery to center, even when a home base is a large city and a sacred place is a mere circle of stones in the wilderness. The idea that, in moving out, one may paradoxically arrive at the center-even a new center- is well-known to students of

American history. As Daniel Boorstin puts it. there is hidden precision in the revered clich which describes the earlies New England settler as pilgrims. The first puritans and separatists embarked upon a one-way pilgrimage that took them from their rigid communities in the old world to the periphery. And New England, a wilderness to European settlers, was their goal the sacred place upon which they would rebuild Jerusalem . Exogamy, trade, and pilgrimage all entail displacement, which is necessarily an ambivalent experience. Exogamy is, to say the least, disorienting for the woman who has to abandon her family to settle in her husbands family in strange town. Yet in can also be, for her, a liberation. The trader sacrifices the cozy familiarity of his hometown when he sets out with his merchandise, material and social, in a larger sphere. There first puritans abandoned a culture-rich Europe for the unmarked spaces of the New World, but it was precisely there-in the wilderness-that could hope to rebuild Jerusalem.

RELIGIOUS GEOGRAPHY-OR JUST HUMAN GEOGRAPHY? Not long ago, when one stepped off a country road almost anywhere in the world, one risked stepping on the toe of a spirit, god, or goddess. Whole landscapes were haunted-sacred in the sense of being the habitations of powerful spiritual beings. Sacred places are far fewer now. Still, where they exist, they continue to draw a host of pilgrimage and can arouse in them the strongest passion. Moreover, even in liberal secular states, serious efforts historical reasons, have a certain aura an places that native peoples, such American Indians in Canada and Australian aborigines in Australian, continue to consider sacred. Although the leaders of a liberal secular state may themselves be nonbelievers and skeptics, they wisely encourage the maintenance of religious sites, because they recognize them as playing an essential role in group cohesion and identity. They recognize, in other words, religious as a powerful force for place-making. But if religious is that- if religion makes people feel at home in the world- it merely does what culture as whole feel does. Why, then, treat religion as something different, something that rises above culture? Religion understood as a subset of culture makes religious geography a subset of cultural geography. Both aim at creating a livable world. This commonality is all important, compared with which the differences between then are of minor significance, having to do with whether an artifact or practice is exotic or commonplace; Whether, for example, the millers humble water wheel. To rise above culture, religion must reach beyond these efforts at palce-making to happenings that are not of this world. Experiences that are not of this world, Though very rare, do exist and are an affect the minds extraordinary ability to respond to, or conjure up, the aesthetic sublime and the ethical sublime.

THE AESTHETIC SUBLIME: VASTNESS, PLACE, AND SPACE.

Vastness is an instance of the aesthetic sublime. It can be bounded, as in the Chinese cosmos, and unbounded, as in the Hindu universe. Within limits, vast space does not dislodge the idea of place, an example being the Chinese cosmos, which is not only bounded, but has man at the center. Further contributing to its familiarity is cyclical time, monitored by the daily and seasonal courses of the sun. As for the Europeans, long before the era of modern astronomy and telescopes, they acknowledged a universe that was awesomely large but bounded, like the soaring interior of a cathedral. Coupled with it was a conception of time that stretched a mere 4.000 years from the first act to creation to the birth of Christ. Bounded space and a time span that did not overwhelm helped Europeans to feel at home in gods creation. In the course of time, however, new conception in astronomy corroded the large but bounded universe so that, by the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal could say that the eternal silence of the infinite spaces frightened him.

SPACE VERSUS LOCAL PLACE AND CUSTOM. Appreciation of vast space diminishes visceral loyalty to place: with eyes trained at heaven, one forgets that ones feet remain planted on the group. Conflicts arise when, in the same society, some people loo to heaven for inspiration, others to earth for sustenance. We have already noted this difference in traditional Chinese and European societies. It persists to our day, though necessarily in very different contexts. Two events come to mind. In January 1995, more than 2.000 astronomers convened in Tucson, Arizona, for the American astronomical societys largest meeting to that date. While the astronomers were excitedly discussing the latest findings in the miracle of creation-naked quasar and flaring stars-a number of Americans Indians and their environmentalist supporters were protesting the building of a large telescope that, when completed, would infringe upon and offend the local mountain god. Knowing more about flaring stars did nothing to endure a better harvest, whereas offending the local mountain god could have bad consequence for all the creatures that lived on or near the mountain, including humans. To the American Indian, making a home and sustaining a livelihood an Earth were all important. But these activities, notwithstanding the rituals that go with them, are pure geography. By contrast, watching the sky, despite its origin in the quest for scientific knowledge, is tinged by a quasi-religious feeling for the sublimity and mystery of the great canopy overhead. The second event took place on an airplane of British airways, which left New York city for London on October 9, 1976. There were 164 passengers I economy Class, and ten in first class, including a VIP, Rudolf Nureyev. Five Of the meals were vegetarian, and two were kosher. In the darkened cockpit, without visual reference points, there was no sense of motion. The aircraft seemed frozen in time and space. A capsule of human domesticity hung 30.000 feet in the air. Suddenly, First Officer Jevons spoke from the cockpit and pointed ahead to his right. look, he said, as a thin silver horn rose in the southeastern sky. Captain Cross stared at the apparition and said without affectation, thats one of the glories of flying

Meanwhile, a minor crisis brewed in the passengers cabin. An oven had been set aside to heat the kosher meals, but a Jewish passengers was afraid that it had been used on a previous flight to warm non-kosher food. What to do?. Certain emergencies were anticipated: for example, captain cross and first officer Jevons ate different meals at different times to preclude the possibility of both becoming incapacitated by tainted food. But no one thought of providing an oven so pure that even the most acute religious conscience would be appeased. In the end, the passenger ate meal cold. In this account, we see, on the hand, extraordinary devotion to the tenets of religion, obeying to the letter the need for apartness (Keeping kosher and non-kosher foods separate) and, one the other hand, deep appreciation for heavens beauty. To most people, the stoical Jewish passengers exemplified religion, in comparison with which the captain and his first officer merely showed a commendable aesthetic sensibility. I have argued for the opposite view. To me, the Jewish passangers devotion was more to culture that to religion or, rather, to religion at a stage when it exhibited culture at its most rigid, which is another way of saying at its most insecure. UNBOUNDED VASTNESS AND PLACELESSNESS. Space can be large and still be within imaginations power to endow it with certain sensorial qualities and, in so doing, turn it into a type of place. There is a limit, however, to imaginations power. Confronted by mind numbing immensity, not only will imagination fail to convert space into place, but the very idea of place-human in scale and dense with feeling-vanishes. Take the Hindu universe, it is a size of beyond anything known to native Chinese or to European thought, until the modern period. Over-Whelming, too, is the Hindu conception of time, measured in kalpas, each of which spans 1.28 billion years. And as if this not enough, time is conceived to have neither a beginning nor an end. How un-homelike such the Europeans. Confronted by numbers in the millions and billions, zeros swarm before ones eyes and induce a sort of numbness and nausea. Hindu and Buddhist thinkers, no doubt well aware of this, have provided resting places for the imagination in their cosmology. These are the multiple levels of heaven and hell as hell as the pure lands; and thought pure lands, too, are numbered in the millions, a few, serving as archetypes or ideals, are given a specific geography in which the mind may find anchorage. But if there are places in Hindu and Buddhist universes, they are purely of the imagination and exist only through the medium of words and, possibly, of images. They cannot be built as the Chinese cosmic city and the European cathedral-a model of the cosmos-can be built. Nor can they be invoked by ritualized gestures: one cannot dance the complex geography of a pure land into being as one can a sacred hoop of the plains Indians of north America. THE AESTHETIC SUBLIME: TRANSIENCY AND THE ETERNAL. Since the eighteenth century, the word sublime is used increasingly for sensations of vastness and power, light and darkness, ecstasy and despair-the opposite of what are considered human

scale. Sublime is not, therefore, the appropriate word for such geographical features as a landscape, town, and house, which, whether designed well or poorly, beautifully or plain, are human in scale and cater to the routines of human life. Strange to say, objects that are utterly frail and events that quickly pass, such as a butterflys wing, a rooftop burnished by morning sunlight, the dying notes of a Bach cantata, or a gesture of surpassing tenderness, can catapult one into an order of reality that seems out of this world ineffable. The ineffable is not the same as the sublime, though both rise far above ordinary experience, which means that to describe them adequately requires a language that is figurative and verges on the mystical. By contrast, plain language normally suffices for descriptions of landscape, town, house, and other things of the middle scale. Religion, to the extent that it hints at the ineffable and the sublime, is poetry. Geography, to the extent that it shows how humans make themselves at home on earth, is prose. Prose is adequate not only to the usual anthropological accounts of religion and religious practice, but also-apparently-to profound probings into the nature of God, as theologians since Thomas Aquinas have demonstrated. What remains elusive is God as known to direct human experience. One hint of it is the aesthetic sublime. To be overwhelmed by the aesthetic sublime is to be touched by the finger of God; or, to put it less categorically, to feel that one ha been so touched. Given the inadequacy of language to express the experience and so pass it on to others, it should not surprise us that us that news of God is so rare.

THE ETHICAL SUBLIME: CHIRISNITY Christianity, like Buddhism, offers an exalted ethics. Both religions call for a shift of attention from communal loyalty to universal compassion, from place to placelessness. Jesus began his ministry by showing a partiality for place and community. To the twelve apostles he said, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 10: 5-6). When a Canaanite woman come to Jesus for help with her stricken daughter, he at first ignored her and then said that he was sent to help the Israelites and them alone (Matthew 15: 22-24). From this narrow view of helping only ones own people, first Jesus, then Paul, made help for those in need so encompassing and inclusive as to seem impractical even to starry-eyed universalist of our own time. Moral inclusiveness disregards boundaries, which makes it incompatible with geography, in general, and religious geography, in particular: geography, after all, is about boundaries and bounded places, whom to exclude. Though incompatible with geography, moral inclusiveness is compatible with the ideal of a God who is everywhere and nowhere. Sir, a Samaritan woman said to Jesus, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship (john 4: 19 -20). Jesus answered the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet in Jerusalem, worship the Father But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth (John 4: 21 and 23).

Christian thought has enlarged the idea of community to embrace the idea community to embrace the whole of humankind: not just the living, but also the dead (the saints) and, beyond them, the angels and archangels. A conspicuous lacuna is compassion toward animals, a Buddhist hallmark. Yet Christianitys ultimate communitythe heavenly kingdomwill include animals as part of a generally redeemed nature at the end of time. In tandem with the expansion of community is the emergence of an ethic that distances itself not only from the bad reciprocity of revenge, but even the good one of mutual help when it is too narrowly conceived. As Jesus famously put it: Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for hemaketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5: 43-48). Christianity, with its message of universal love and perfectionism, was planted in a pagan empire of many religions, each of its existence, Christianity made good headway among Romes lower and middling classes. The best families, however, resisted it. A major social reason for the resistance was that Christians showed little respect for ancestors; they did not worship them and other presiding deities at the family hearth. In other words, they were deficient in family values. A common name for Christians in early antiquity was people of the way or people of the road; that is, drifters. A Christian, to a Roman patriarch, was a pilgrim (peregrinus), and the patriarch would have used the word in a condescending way, for, to him the word meant wayfarer, bird of passage, foreigner, or resident alien. Rootless and unburdened