Space, Place, and Religious Landscapes: Living Mountains

Description

Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, Iberia, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, South Asia, and the Andes, and embrace the union of sky, landscape, and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point that fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, and recognises that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place, and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths, and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming/human-shaping landscapes Cover Half title Series Title Copyright Contents List of Figures List of Maps List of Tables List of Contributors Foreword Introduction Part 1 Prehistoric conversations 1 The archaeology of height – cultural meaning in the relativity of Irish megalithic tomb siting 2 How the shadow of the mountains created sacred spaces in Early Bronze Age Scotland Part 2 Medieval conversations 3 Time and place at Brentor: Exploring an encounter with a ‘sacred mountain’ 4 Building paradise on the Hill of Hell in Assisi: Mountain as reliquary Part 3 Animistic conversations 5 Mountains as sources of power in seen and unseen worlds 6 Appalachian animism: Religion, the woods, and the material presence of the mountain Part 4 Storied conversations 7 Mountains talk of kings and dragons, the Brecon Beacons 8 Representing the sacred: Printmaking and the depiction of the Holy Mountain Part 5 Contemporary conversations 9 Are Himalayan peaks sacred?: The paradoxical and polylogical construction of mountains 10 The Black Line of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta; a Red Line for a mountain Index