Sacred Landscapes

close
more_vert

By taking X amount of points and joing them with a pilgramage we are creating a 'ritual landscape' - a landscape linked with ritual.

These patterns do not just involve turning up at certain places via any means. You can't take the high road while everyone else takes the low road. The whole route is part of the pilgramage - every step you take towards the next stop is part of it.

You have to follow a predefined set of stages and a predefined route. Different individual rituals occur at each station, but the whole journey is a ritual that is the sum of its parts, and the paths between these parts are also parts.

Just because I am talking about a Catholic pilgramage here doesn't mean that it's only 900 years old. In fact its use of rock outcrops, wells, tombs and standing stones throws it back at least 2000 years (which is pre-Xtianity in Ireland obviously).

The path to enlightenment is far more rewarding than enlightenment itself!

The only problem with your post is that it means the entire world is a ritual landscape, the term ritual therefore becomes redundant.

I am happy that terms such as ritual and sacred can be so generally applied that almost anything can be seen as ritual, but Nigel's original question was not so general I think. He was talking about the possibly man made hill and asking if there was a deliberate attempt to construct a sacred landscape. I'm not sure there was. to me many of the structures that we think of as part of a ritual landscape come from times so far apart that it is difficult to imagine that they could have been designed together, particulalry when many of these feature may have become overgrown and no longer visible.

The term sacred, as we have argued, would suggest that it was held precious in some way, yet it is not difficult to find examples where earlier "sacred" mnuments have been destroyed by later works, sometimes within a few hundred years of their construction.

To take a bunch ancient monuments and say it all forms part of an ancient sacred landscape, whilst being correct from a personal point of view - today, does somewhat presume a larger scale of planning in ancient times than was necesarily the case.

You just know that when I do my Thornborough bit I'm going to blow a hole in this whole line of argument don't you :)