It is, or is founded upon, a natural topographical feature, e. It is recognised as carrying special manifestation of wildlife, natural phenomena and ecological balance. It is embellished with man-made symbols or artifacts, e. It is partially or wholly man-made, e. It is a memorial or mnemonic to a key recent or past event in history, legend or myth, e. Spiritual It is recognised as having a palpable and special energy or power which is clearly discernible from that of a similar landscape or surrounding.
It is recognised as a special place which acts as a portal or cross-over to the spirit world. It is identified as a place where the ancestors are present and especially respected, e. It is a place of spiritual transformation for individual persons or the community, e. Functional It is a special place where relationships, both interpersonal and throughout the whole community, can be expressed and affirmed, often through a specific form of observance, e.
It is a place especially associated with resource-gathering or other key cultural activities, e. In addition, there was obviously a lack of a consistent planning concerning the economic efficiency of cults and sanctuaries.
Modern attempts to combine the assumed efficiency-intention with the handling of landed property of the gods, or for example with the sale of priesthoods, does not work. The leasing of land does not seem to have been a routine kind of basic income for all cults in Greece, Asia Minor or Western Greece from Classical times to the Roman Imperial period, and the sale of priesthoods was likewise uncommon or at least not widespread.
Most of the Greek-speaking regions like the whole of Greece did not make use of the priesthood-sales as a possibility to guarantee income and upkeep of a cult.
In Greece at least, religious traditions as well as specific political attitudes were obviously speaking against the sale of priesthoods for public cults. Four philosophical treatise and theoretical texts, which offer different aspects of the function of sacred land, may illustrate the variants in approach to the subject and the far from unanimous notions of sacred land in the theoretically motivated literature of classical times. He discusses causes and remedies for pollution, and the role the gods take in the purification of the polluted.
In this text he mentions his opinion concerning the boundaries of sacred land Morb. In addition, according to Hippocrates, these boundaries were made by man, they were decided on by the community for just this very purpose, the appropriate veneration and worship of the gods and deities only purified men and women could accomplish.
Marked boundaries should therefore safeguard men of ignorance of the specific sacred status of a grove or shrine.
Hippocrates has presented in his study a specific concept of pollution and purification with its consequences for the sacred property and the sacred land the pilgrim wants to enter. Like Hippocrates, Hippodamus in the fifth, and Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century, speak of man-made boundaries of sacred land. But all three authors chose another perspective than Hippocrates and concentrate exclusively on the economic and political aspects of sacred land.
The land should be divided into three parts: sacred land, hiera , public land, demosia , and private land, idia. This partition receives a political and economic justification based on a specific idea and concept of polis-societies:. He also divided the land into three parts, one sacred, one public, the third private: the first was set apart to maintain the customary worship of the Gods, the second was to support the warriors, the third was the property of the peasants.
Plato in the Laws Nom. Their respective argumentations differ, as do their concepts of societies and polis-structures. Moreover, privileges for sanctuaries granted by Hellenistic kings and later by the Roman senate or the emperor had in most cases economic consequences for the sanctuary and the city—the asylia , the panhellenic festivals, the regulations and privileges for markets and fairs in connection with sacred feasts.
Already mentioned is the prohibition of agricultural usage for economic purposes of the Hiera Orgas belonging to Demeter and Kore at Eleusis. A second example of this kind is the arbitral verdicts and accounts of disputes between several poleis on the isle of Crete. In the case of Hierapytna and Itanos, the conflict concerned land: the Hierapytnaeans stated that it was the sacred land of Zeus Ditaios , a cult probably organised and maintained by the city of Hierapytna. The Itanaeans, however, argued that the land was agriculturally used, cultivated and had at least one building on it, thus, obviously it could not be the property of a god.
The sacred character of the cultivated land was inconceivable—at least for the Itanaeans and the Megarians. The hieromnemons were obliged to control the observance of the prohibition of cultivation and other rules by regular inspections.
All these and more potential forms of usage of uncultivated land make it obvious that such sacred land did not had to be unproductive. In addition, no epinomia rule is known in the context of a sanctuary. I have already mentioned as well, that the modern viewer, perhaps even the ancient visitor was not always able to recognise such a place as sacred at first sight. Therefore, I would venture to suggest that sacred land was not automatically part of a religious landscape.
Cultivated land, land leased out for agricultural usage had no other visual and probably religious impact on the peasant who cultivated the land, on the passer-by who travelled over land or had some business in the chora of a city—at least the cases in which the cultivated sacred land was part of a cultivated environment.
As the long and nearly unreadable text of the Athenian inventories, such inscriptions demonstrated the strength of the deity and the prosperity of the cult.
This might have been the land that immediately surrounds the walled sanctuary with shrine and altar. In such a case it might not have mattered if the land was cultivated or not, as long as it was clearly connected with the sanctuary. Land surrounding a sanctuary could eventually or temporarily receive a specific religious quality or one might argue a less religious but social and economic quality—for example in all cases when a festival with fairs and markets took place in the proximity of the sanctuary.
The natural sanctuaries with groves for example became only visually and virtually specific if there was something that made them different from their environment. In many cases it may have been the change from human culture to divine nature, from the normal, for example a normal tree, to the exceptional, a tree divided by lightning, that made the place so specific, so sacred.
Concepts of sacredness as combined with nature, with humanly untouched, with uncultivated nature, might have been a strong implement to transform a domesticated human landscape into a divine one. Therefore at least some problems, discussions and potential differences might be addressed in these final remarks. As concerns the Roman period, it may be questioned if there is a visible and obvious gap in the treatment of sacred land and in the concept of sacred landscapes.
However, it is difficult to discuss the results of these changes in detail. Robin Osborne claims that the end of the autonomy of the Greek city furthered the urban limitation of cities and made the countryside a more or less independent part of the Roman province.
Their local elites were economically strong and politically self-conscious—not only because of their cultural heritage. The Greek most often democratically organised cities with astu and chora , with demos and boule , with archontes and hiereis etc.
The financing of some of these sanctuaries with the leasing out of sacred land is attested well into the Roman period. However, as concerns the differences between mainland Greece and Asia Minor and the various changes in the treatment of sacred property in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Period, there is still work to be done.
First Conference Proceedings , ed. Livy Baumer, Kult im Kleinen. Pollution and Purification in Ancient Greece , Oxford , pp. The horos-inscriptions , New York 2 , esp. Horster, Landbesitz , pp. See below for pastoralism and for grazing flocks on sacred lands. Hildesheim , pp. Small ed. For detailed studies see Gerald V.
For these Apache elders, places were not just names and stories — their landscape itself was a living sacred text. At different national and international venues, Lakota leader Dave Archambault Jr. Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. Deloria described how Lakota religious leaders went to these stones in the early morning to read their messages.
Deloria shared the experiences of an Episcopal minister from Old Indians came to me… and said that the lightning would strike someone in camp that day, for a picture wowapi on this holy rock indicated such an event…. And the lightning did strike a tent in camp and nearly killed a woman…. I have known several similar things, equally foretelling events to come, I can not account for it.
The Americans renamed it Cannonball. Historians, anthropologists and religious thinkers continue to learn and write about Native American religious ideas of place. In so doing, they seek to analyze complex religious concepts of transformation and transcendence that these places evoke. However, despite their contributions to the academic interpretation of religion, these understandings do not often translate into protection of Native American places for their religious significance.
As legal scholar Stephen Pevar tells us,.
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