49The Signiﬁcance of Sacred Places: The Contribution and Limits of Cognitive Approaches to ...
The Signiﬁcance of Sacred Places:
The Contribution and Limits of Cognitive
Approaches to Their Research
Rudolf Havelka, Faculty of Arts MU, Department for the Study of Religions1
and
Faculty of Humanities UHK, Department of Archaeology
e-mail: rudolf.havelka@mail.muni.cz
Abstract
This study is concerned with the theory of anthropological and archaeological
research of sacred places in the cultural context of hunter-gatherers societies. The
cognitive approach is suggested as principal however some limits of its possible
application are considered, as shown on the example of ritual behavior and of
possible meaning and signiﬁcance of the sacred places themselves for the members
of hunter-gatherers societies.
Key words
Archaeology and Anthropology of Sacred Places, Hunter-gatherers Societies,
Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Culture, Perception of the Environment
Klíčová slova
archeologie a antropologie posvátných míst, lovecko sběračské společnosti,
kognitivní přístup ke studiu kultury, vnímání prostředí
Introduction
The main subject of this paper is the problem of theory of anthropological and
archaeological research of places with explicit2
symbolic-religious meaning (further
PSRM) and their role in the religious systems of prehistoric and (sub)recent huntergatherer
societies (later HGS) of Europe and of boreal zones of Eurasia. Although
the primary goal is the explanation of the signiﬁcance of the PSRM of prehistoric
HGS, the prior ethnological research may be seen as a necessary one. This should
be focused on a direct survey of how, in those recent cultures, the character
of subsistence, relations to the environment and religion are connected and
interwoven. Especially on a theoretical level is this survey essential; the potential
imperfections of those later discussed cognitive theories may not be evident when
considering the archaeological material only. Or more precisely, to do so may cause
1
This study was written with the support of the Grant fund of dean of the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk
University.
2
It is very important to emphasize that in the context of hunter-gatheres societies the whole land
is sacred (e.g. under the protection of some superhuman egent). The places considered here are of
exceptionall “sacredness” and are almost exlusively appointed to ritual practices.
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50 Rudolf Havelka
the complete omission of fundamental phenomena for those prehistoric cultures,
as will be shown later.
The importance of the research of the PSRM
From an archaeological perspective we may consider the PSRM as one of the
most valuable sources for researching prehistoric religious systems, as well as one
of the most neglected. Yet it seems that in these structures the relation between
environment, character of subsistence and religious practices archaeologically
is most evident. Why are such relations important for the understanding and
explanation of the prehistoric religions and maybe for the religions in general?
The answer is possible on two levels. The ﬁrst is of an evolutionary kind and is
represented by the fact that the ﬁrst evidence of symbolic or possibly religious
behavior comes from the early upper Paleolithic period as a side-effect of the
middle-upper Paleolithic transition. It is more than evident that these very
ﬁrst forms of a behavior and thinking which we call “religious” were intimately
related to hunting and other subsistence activities. Actually the oldest known
representations of supernatural beings are the statuettes and paintings of
anthropomorphic animals and zoomorphic humans respectively. We may infer
to some kind of animistic thinking with ritual activates of “shamanistic” nature
(e.g. Mithen 1996: 16–179). The signiﬁcance of a particular place in landscape3
designated to socio-ritual activities is apparent even in this period in the form
of caves with paintings, but is more clearly apparent in oncoming period, i.e. in
Mesolithic, where we can distinguish for example places of seasonal gatherings
provided with rock engravings and paintings, peninsulas and islands dedicated to
dead (Zvelebil 2008: 38–52), and maybe even hardly archaeologically discernible
offering places well known from ethnography of north for later periods or from
presence (e.g. Rydving – Kristoffersson 1993; Kharyuchi – Lipatova 1999; Bradley
2000; Jordan 2003; Bergman – Östlund – Zackrisson – Liedgren 2008).
The second level of answer to the question why research of the signiﬁcance of
the PSRM is important for the understanding of character of religious systems of
HGS, is the ethnographic evidence. It is evident that those places do not serve as
merely spaces for the transmission of religious ideas neither for the performance
of autotelic religious rituals. This matter will be discussed later.
Now we may highlight some indicators of those relations between the character
of subsistence, environment and religion as are those evident in the PSRM:4
The place itself is bound to some unusual or striking features of landscape.•
The relational placement to the landscape refers to other particular features•
of wider landscape, including the elements, most distinct to the landscape.
The orientation towards the points of the compass.•
Frequent orientation towards the planets and stars in deﬁnite phases.•
The location of the place is related to the seasonal movements of HG groups.•
Ritual manipulation with animal species most important for the society.•
3
For the emergence of “places” from “locales” in Paleolithic see Gamble 1999.
4
Evidenlty do not every places “contain” all of this indicators.
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51The Signiﬁcance of Sacred Places: The Contribution and Limits of Cognitive Approaches to ...
Cosmological symbolism of the place as a whole and of its artiﬁcial inner•
structure.
Material representation of the superhuman agents.•
Archaeological evidence of ritual behavior or its observation in ethnology.•
Here we see that the PSRM should not be overlooked in our scientiﬁc endeavor
after the understanding of religions, nor are they just simple objects which offer
themselves to easy interpretation and explanation; on the contrary, they are rather
complex entities. It is obvious that for the scientiﬁc purposes it is necessary to
follow this – or similar – logic of the deconstruction of the PSRM:
The place itself in its landscape context as perceived by the participants.•
The features of the place itself (both natural and artiﬁcial).•
The superhuman agents (later SHA) as core of the religious concepts to which•
the acts performed in this place which refer.
Cognitive theories as a device for explanation of the PSRM
Following this way of deconstruction we may choose, as initial body of theories
for the research of the PSRM, concepts from the broad family of cognitive sciences
mainly for the following reasons:
Generally, they enable paradigmatically coherent research of particular•
aspects of the PSRM.
Explanation of human perception of environment and the way of creation of•
the cognitive maps with signiﬁcant locales and points of reference.
Explanation of the emergence of the emotional place attachment.•
Explanation of the signiﬁcance of material objects for data storage, cognitive•
anchoring, and social symbols construction.
Explanation of the emergence of the religious ideas.•
Characteristic of the superhuman agents.•
Explanation of the way of the transmission of the religious ideas (including•
the signiﬁcance of the PSRM).
Description and explanation of diverse forms of ritual behavior and the•
connection of particular forms with particular type of society.
Theories of cognitive science of religion (later CSR) formulate the causal•
connections between partial phenomena of religious kind, and through this
they enable modeling of the whole – though bare – structure of the prehistoric
systems of religion, even while based on a fragmentary body of archaeological
data.
And besides this:
They are based on experimentally falsiﬁable knowledge.•
They are open to future theoretical extension while new data are found.•
Now let us describe particular cognitive approaches to the explanation of
the PSRM a little closer and highlight some concrete advantages of theirs
application.
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52 Rudolf Havelka
First we must deal with a problem of the perception of the physical environment
itself, because the PSRM are just a signiﬁcant part of it. There is a possibility
to do with the well developed phenomenological approach of the Post-processual
archaeology (e.g. Tilley 1994; 1996; 2004; 2009). This approach is, despite of its
esthetic beauty and impressive results, rather elitist, based on researcher‘s ability
of “re-experiencing” the perception of the landscape as it was experienced by
the concrete group of ancient people. And what more – from the archaeological
perspective is this approach feasible only when working under very special
conditions, when the considerable body prehistoric structures exist in rather well
preserved “natural” landscape, where striking natural features are present.
The cognitive branch of human geography provides better explanation (rather
than interpretation) of the phenomenon of perception of environment and of the
creation of the cognitive maps. Generally said the geographical environment is
perceived by moving through landscape in order to accomplish certain task and
through the process of way ﬁnding. The geographical information is intentionally
and more often unintentionally stored in working memory and partially in
long-term memory and they are represented in a schematic way. This internal
representation is called “cognitive map”, though it is agreed that we do not store
the spatial information in map-like way:
“What the term cognitive map does imply, however, is that there is deliberate
and motivated encoding of environmental information so that it can be used
to determine where one is at any particular moment, where other speciﬁc
perceived or encoded objects are in surrounding space, how to get from one
place to another, or how to communicate spatial knowledge with others.”
(Golledge 2003: 30).
From this perspective are the PSRM just one of the points of reference and
concrete place in both natural and build environment and as such is represented
in participant‘s mind in the web of relations to other places. The speciﬁcity of this
kind of place may be seen 1) in its association with striking feature – both natural
and artiﬁcial – in a landscape, which is in matter of fact very common case, or 2) in
the personal or social emotional attachment to any arbitrary place based on some
special event (Mazumdar – Mazumdar 2004). The choice of natural place to which
the special religious meaning is ascribed is probably culturally conditioned and
depends on the way and purpose of the movement in the landscape (Golledge 2003:
30) and in the form of subsistence activities respectively.5
Now we will turn brieﬂy6
to the cognitive account of the role of material objects
(again both natural and artiﬁcial) and their signiﬁcance for the 1) external storage
of information, 2) social meanings construction and transmission, 3) and cognitive
anchoring, in respect to the PSRM and their features.
The use of material object for mind-external storage of information is apparent
since the beginning of upper Paleolithic or maybe even earlier. The most striking
example are the “memory sticks” in the form of symmetrically notched ribs and
other bones as well as stones (d´Errico 1998). Also to the Paleolithic cave paintings
is the function of external symbolic memory storage ascribed (Mithen 1988). The
5
See also e.g. Portugaly 1996; Golledge – Stimson 1997; Kitchin – Blades 2002; for spatial perspective
on symbolic behavior in prehistory see Zubrow – Daly 1998.
6
This topic I closely discused before (Havelka 2008).
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53The Signiﬁcance of Sacred Places: The Contribution and Limits of Cognitive Approaches to ...
general notion about the signiﬁcance of the external symbolic storage (later ESS)
for the development of ever more complex forms of culture was made by psychologist
Merlin Donald (1991; 1993; 1998). Donald´s notion was extended by Colin Renfrew
(1998). Renfrew emphasized that the material culture itself, in its everyday form,
can be seen as very important kind of the ESS and that it can be assumed that
the whole stage of culture(s) development, preceding the age of common usage of
writing, can be seen from this angle as a the period of the “symbolic material culture”
(1998: 3–4). This leads us to the question, which is discussed in archaeology (e.g.
Dobres 2000) and cultural anthropology for long time, if is the material culture
just merely the passive storage of human ideas or if does it posses an active agency
as well. It is commonly agreed that the material objects to which is some meaning
ascribed play an active role on the social level7
(e.g. Mauss 1999; Appadirai 1986;
Hodder 1982; Tilley 1999; Knappett 2005) – this is quite common sense. But we
can go further: According to Renfrew the material symbols do precede the concepts
(2001) in the sense that they enable the very possibility of construction of the
institutional (or social) facts (Searle 1995). The classical examples quoted by
Renfrew are the concepts of measure, value, commodity, exchange and religions
(esp. the ritual behavior) which would be meaningless without the substantial
object on which they are based (see also Renfrew 1994; 1998; 2003). So here we
see that the material objects, including the PSRM, play as active agents in the
society when some value is ascribed to them by people. But are they active agents
by themselves? Do they actually make people to behave and thing in certain way?
These questions, and the given positive answers proposed e.g. by Clark (2008) in
philosophy and by Knappett (2005; 2008) and Malafouris (2008) in archaeology,
are of twofold importance for the research of the PSRM.
First, the idea of active “material agency” and of in-the-word-extended cognition
supports and provides the theoretical background for our claim, i.e. that the concrete
environment and speciﬁc way of acting in it shape the cognitive processes and their
outputs in the form of mental and public representations in general or the forms
of “religious” thinking and behavior in particular. If we relate this statement to
the research of the PSRM, we can see them as active participants in the interplay
of people (i.e. the mind-body totalities) acting in the environment which results in
speciﬁc forms of culture (including religion), and not as mere forms of “external
symbolic storage” where are “stored” and represented the ideas emerged just in the
heads and between heads of people.
Second, the emphasis laid to the signiﬁcance of the active acting in the
environment for human cognition may negotiate the apparent problem of the model
of purely representative thinking (e.g. Shanon 1993), which stands also in the core
of CSR as one of the cognitive sciences. This may also indicate the possible way to
the interconnection between the CSR and the notions of the ecological perspective
for the study of culture by Tim Ingold (2000) which are of signiﬁcant importance
for the study of the HGS, as will be shown later.
Finally, the Donald´s theory of ESS,extended by Renfrew was related by Steven
Mithen (1998) to the problem of representation of the superhuman agents (as
characterized by Guthrie 1993; Boyer 1994; 2001) in prehistory. Mithen (1998) sees
7
On this notion is based long time unfeasible understanding between processual and post-processual
archeologies.
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54 Rudolf Havelka
the “material anchoring” of religious ideas as substantional for the possibility of the
transmission of religious ideas in general. We may consider Mithen´s hypothesis
as applicable for the explanation of the role of the material representations of
the superhuman agents for the transmission of the religious ideas in all societies
without the literary tradition. In speciﬁc regard of the PSRM we see this possible
“anchoring” function in two respects: The ﬁrst is the simple presence of the
representation of the SHA at the place in the form of statuette, or in the form
of some natural object. The second is that that if the actual representation if not
present, the “anchoring” function may rest upon the place itself, as it is understood
as the abode of the SHA – other human-like attributes are then more easily to the
SHA granted.
Now lets summarize in pointwise8
the main advantages of some theories of the
CSR applied to the research (in the ﬁrst instance the archeological one) of the
PSRM.
The predictability of the basic attributes of the SHA based on the assumption•
of their existence as by-products of common cognitive domains. (Boyer 1994,
2001; Atran 2002; Pyysiäinen 2009)
The “limited catalogue” of their contra intuitive aspects, based on the•
assumption of a constrained amount of possible interferences between the
cognitive domains (Boyer 2001).
Explicit stress laid on the contra intuitive aspects of the SHA may be expected•
in their material representations. (Mithen 1996)
Predictable structure of ritual action and of various role of participants.•
(McCauley – Lawson 2002)
The formulation of causal relations between the psychological and socio-•
political features of the divergent modes of religiosity → the possibility of
rough reconstruction of the main features of concrete prehistoric systems of
religion based only on archaeological evidence of only some of those features.
(Whitehouse 2004)
These theories provide us with the terminology and background in the form of
“blueprints” of the basic features of religious thinking and behavior which enable
us to organize and describe the data acquired by the ethnographic research in
the manner compatible with the other ﬁelds of cognitive science. The research
of the PSRM is not exception (see the logic of deconstruction mention above).
Their favourableness for the archeological inquiry is obvious, for they enable the
modeling of past actions and to some respect even thinking of people in prehistory.
This quality of predictability of the theories of the CSR is really apparent precisely
when set against the “dumb” archeological data.
Insufﬁciency of the cognitive approaches
Although the cognitive theories provide us with stimulating body of devices for
explanation the PSRM including the ritual behavior which takes place there and
the supernatural worlds which these behavior refers to, we should not stop our
inquiry just by application of those theories. The main reason is, that by doing so
8
For these are well known in the ﬁeld of the study of religions.
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55The Signiﬁcance of Sacred Places: The Contribution and Limits of Cognitive Approaches to ...
we would just conﬁrm the already made assumptions made by those theories and
we would have omitted the whole level of importance of the “religion” of the HGS
which consists in the actual meaning and signiﬁcance of those for the people living
in this speciﬁc way.
When considering the ethnological data, it appears that in the case of HGS it
is hardly satisfactory to think about “religious systems” as about some auto-telic
epiphenomenal domain. On the contrary, it relates to the basic spheres of life in
these societies, not in a form of a constructed “counterintuitive world”, but as part
of actual living-through world.
In advance, these so-called religious ideas make perfect sense and are closely
related to the subsistence strategy of particular societies, when seen through the
lens of a speciﬁc way of life in a speciﬁc environment. It is apparent that in the case
of HGS, “religious” concepts do not emerge only in the head, or between the heads,
of people (in the pure social context), nor do they reside there just in the forms of
mental representations. They may as well emerge through everyday engagement
with, and in, the environment. “Religious” ideas are also bound to the environment
and can only be seen as meaningless when driven out of it.
From this perspective it is possible to understand the religious systems of HGS
as an abstraction of known natural agents, relations between these agents, and
as techniques of focusing awareness towards detection of those agents and the
relations between those agents and people. Such abstractions are held in a variety
of cultural forms – which we may see as religious – in the form of performances,
narratives and solid objects, natural features and artifacts. And vice versa, it can
be hardly imagined any better way, at least in the non-literary and out-of-Westernscience
societies, how to preserve and enable the generational transmission of such
complex and extensive knowledge. Cognitive domains used for gathering partial
knowledge are used in the same way for gathering complex, general knowledge
about the environment preserved and “stored” in “religious” concepts and acts,
which is enabled by the phenomenon of inference between the evolved cognitive
domains, or by “cognitive ﬂuidity” Mithen (1996) puts it.
These claims, if they prove (by the ethnological inquiry) to be right, may indicate
some imperfections in the cognitive approach to the study of religion. Although
this approach was developed by anthropologists with notable ﬁeld experience with
indigenous peoples, it seems, paradoxically, that at present the ethnological and
archaeological data serve almost only to verify experimentally gained pieces of
knowledge of the functions of the cognitive system. Or, in a somehow inappropriate
case, is experimental research, which should verify the preliminary theories of
cognitive scientists, executed on and among indigenous people without any interest
in the speciﬁc way of life of those.
The importance of such complex research, of a culturally speciﬁc way of using
the potential of the human cognitive system in a given environment, seems to
withdraw from the focus of academic inquiry. Aphoristically said, we should
not only study human cognition, but the embodied and distributed cognition of
people dwelling in a particular environment. Below are sketched two examples,
related to the research of the PSRM, on which we demonstrate the possible way
of complementation of the scientiﬁc inquiry of the study of religions of HGS
preliminary based on the CSR.
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56 Rudolf Havelka
The meaning of the PSRM
Following the cognitive theories only, we might have stressed the PSRM serve
merely as a) the peculiar form of the ESS of the religious ideas in the sense that
they “are” the places in which the material representations of the SHA are present
or where the SHA actually dwell or places, where the SHA left some apparent traces
of their actions; b) the selected “sacred” places appointed for the performance of the
religious rituals. Although the PSRM have probably both of those functions, in is
not the whole story. When we left the purely scientiﬁc level of on general cognitive
processes based common features of human perception and thinking, and take
into account the on social level observed way of “making the world” (rather than
“construction of environment” – Ingold 2000: 74–78) of the HGS, we might see that
the character of the PSRM is rather more complex.
Our common idea of establishing the PSRM is based on the assumption that
the way of perception of environment of the non-Western societies is culturally
constructed (i.e. that the cultural representations are laid over the “nature”, which
exists as opposite to the culture) and the environment, “as it really is” is accessible
only by scientiﬁc enquiry. Ingold (2000: 42) opposes this view asserting that both
of above mentioned statements are the result of:
“Western ontology whose point of departure is that of a mind detached from
the world, and that has literally to formulate it – to build an intentional world
in consciousness – prior to any attempt at engagement. The contrast [...]
[between the Western and non-Western way of perceiving the environment]
is not between alternative views of world; it is rather between two ways of
apprehending it, only one of which (the Western) may be characterized as
the construction of a view, that is, as a process of mental representation. As
for the other, apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of
engagement, not building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world
but of taking up a view in it.”
The people of non-Western societies are drawing their knowledge about the
world by “moving about in it, exploring it, attending to it, ever alert to the signs
by which is it revealed” (Ibid: 55). The information, Ingold continues, “is not in
the mind but in the world, and its signiﬁcance lies in the relational context of the
hunter‘s engagement with the constituents of that world” (Ibid: 55). Due to limited
length of this article we must rather vulgarly assumed, that the knowledge of
the relations between the constituents of environment is acquired by participant‘s
distinct lived-through experience. This experience is gained through a participant‘s
direct, hardly representational, perception of those features of the environment
and the through by immediate engagement with them. This perception is modiﬁed
mainly by the subsistence strategy of that particular society.
ConcerningthePSRM,the“focusingofattention”isoneofthemaincharacteristics
of ritual places in general, as for example Renfrew (1994: 51) has shown, having
apparently in mind the focusing of attention on the ritual practices, performed in
such places. But we suppose, drawing from Ingold, that in the case of the PSRM
we should not think only about the focusing of attention on something (like ritual),
but predominantly about the focusing of attention towards something, towards the
environment and the features in it. Thus the symbolic meaning of the PSRM is not
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57The Signiﬁcance of Sacred Places: The Contribution and Limits of Cognitive Approaches to ...
laid over or in some place or landscape, but is driven from it, through the everyday
engagement with it (Ingold 2000: 54–56).
Even from this (unhappily brief) glimpse to the Ingold´s writings, it is apparent
that the sacred places of the HGS are not chosen randomly but on the background
of intimate experiencing of the landscape and that those also refer to and direct the
attention of a participant towards the broader environmental context, towards its
particular features and relations between those features (e.g. the landscape and
its inhabitants). In this places are those partial relations “connected” in a striking
way – the place is kind of their “embodiment”, as felt from the perspective of the
participant.
This perspective of interpretation of the PSRM may lead us to change our
understanding of the meaning and signiﬁcance of ritual behavior, SHA and in the
end the whole signiﬁcance of religious systems of hunter-gatherers societies.
The signiﬁcance of ritual behavior
As many ethnological sources show us, a considerable number of ritual behaviors
in religious traditions of “iconic mode of religiosity”, do not contain any verbally
handled messages, or put in other words, there is not direct transmission of the
public representations with “religious” content. The understanding of these rituals
as religious activities consists only in their very vague reference to some SHA.
Pascal Boyer (2005: 10–17), for example, quotes some of most striking examples
of (oral) message non handling rituals (like violent initiatory rituals) and explains
them as a socially shared forms of obsessive compulsive disorder, for they act
against some unknown and unapparent danger. Such rituals (using little less
violent and “obsessive” examples) are discussed also by Harvey Whitehouse and his
colleagues (2004; Richert, R. A. – Whitehouse, H. – Stewart, E. 2005). Whitehouse
sees their signiﬁcance in the production of what he calls “spontaneous exegetical
reﬂection”, when the participant under given circumstances of emotional arousal
gets the meaning of the ritual action by himself in the form or revelation. Such
understanding of the meaning of the ritual is more long lasting than if the meaning
was given orally.
It is possible that the rituals of the forms of religion with a prevailing “iconic
mode of religiosity” are very closely related and referring to the types of high
important activities performed in the context of HGS (e.g. hunting or local warfare).
What, then, is the purpose of the pursuit of achieving the “spontaneous exegetical
reﬂection”? These acts may suggest the emergence of an increased awareness
towards the environment and its dynamics under the circumstances of mental
sensitivity increased by the stirring ritual action; in other words, the ritual action
may cause the increased openness to the very possibility of drawing knowledge
from the environment, knowledge hardly graspable at the oral level. In this sense
is possible to consider this kind of ritual action as rather extreme (yet such rituals
are performed under extreme circumstances) form of “education of attention” when
the experience of through ritual action achieved “spontaneous exegetical reﬂection”
can be seen as “guided rediscovery” (Ingold 2001):
“My argument is that the differences between the activities of hunting and
gathering, on the one hand, and singing, storytelling and the narration of
myth [and performing rituals? – R.H.] on the other, cannot be accommodated
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58 Rudolf Havelka
within the terms of a dichotomy between the material and the mental, between
ecological interactions in nature and cultural constructions of nature. On the
contrary, both activities are, in the ﬁrst place, ways of dwelling. The later [...]
amount not to a metaphorical representation of the world, but to a form of
poetic involvement. But it is not different with the activities of hunting and
gathering which entail the same attentive engagement with environment,
and the same exploratory quest for knowledge. In hunting and gathering, as
in singing and storytelling, the world ´opens out´ to people. Hunter-gatherers,
in their practices, do not seek to transform the world; they seek revelation
[emphasis R.H.].” (Ingold 2000: 56)
Concluding remarks
The PSRM are important source for ethnological and archaeological study•
of relations between environment, religion and character of subsistent
activities.
The ethnological inquiry must precede the archeological one, for the•
imperfections of applied theories are not obvious when set against the
archaeological body of data only.
The PSRM materialize important indicators between above mentioned•
relations.
The PSRM are complex entities and the deconstruction is necessary for the•
explanation of their signiﬁcance.
The explanation of the features of the PSRM can be based on the cognitive•
theories, esp. in the case of the archaeological research.
The application of the cognitive theories only is insufﬁcient, for it omit•
the singularity of way of life in particular environment under speciﬁc
conditions.
The endeavor for understanding of the meaning and signiﬁcance of the PSRM•
and whole system of “religious” ideas and behaviors in concrete society must
be included for complementation of research.
In the case of the HGS the “religion” can be seen as a system of abstracted•
forms of known natural agents, relations between these agents, and
techniques of focusing awareness towards perception of those agents and the
relations between those agents and people.
The PSRM do not serve as mere physical background for the transmission of•
religious concepts, but direct the attention towards the broader environment,
its features and relations between these features; the symbolic meaning of
PSRM is not “laid” over this place or the whole landscape, but is driven from
it, through the everyday engagement with it.
The ritual action of the HGS can be seen as referring to the elemental•
types of activities performed in a given environment; increasing by “guided
rediscovery” the awareness towards the environment and its dynamics.
sacra-2009-02w.indd Odd2:58sacra-2009-02w.indd Odd2:58 16.1.2010 13:13:5416.1.2010 13:13:54
59The Signiﬁcance of Sacred Places: The Contribution and Limits of Cognitive Approaches to ...
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