The Sacredness of Place

THE SACREDNESS OF PLACE

Why do certain places retain a sense of sacredness long after the people who first used them have disappeared? A cave covered with prehistoric paintings, a circle of standing stones, an ancient pathway, a cathedral labyrinth, or even the site of a tragedy may acquire significance that extends beyond the physical objects left behind.

Perhaps sacredness is not created at one moment but accumulated.

Human thought and emotion are forms of energy. When generations of people return repeatedly to the same location to pray, mourn, meditate, perform ceremonies, make offerings, or seek communion with something greater than themselves, they concentrate their attention on a particular place. From a metaphysical perspective, repeated thought and intention may impress an energetic pattern upon the environment, just as repetition strengthens other patterns of consciousness.

The painted caves of prehistoric people may represent an early example. People created images deep within places removed from ordinary life and apparently revisited them over long periods. Whatever their precise purpose, the repeated journey into darkness, the making and viewing of images, and whatever ceremonies accompanied them may have reinforced the cave’s significance. Perhaps the power we experience in such places today comes not only from their antiquity or their images, but from the repeated intentions of the people who once entered them.

The great Nazca ground inscriptions of Peru remain among the mysteries of the ancient world. Their enormous geometric lines and figures suggest a ritual purpose, possibly involving ceremonial walking or a pilgrimage of sorts, although this has never been conclusively established. Some interpretations associate the lines with astronomical or calendrical observations, while others emphasize water, fertility, ritual pathways, and religious ceremony. Their exact purpose remains unknown.

Part of their mystery lies in their extraordinary scale. Monkeys, birds, spiders, geometric forms, and other immense symbols were inscribed upon the desert floor, some extending hundreds of feet. Although portions of the designs can be seen from surrounding elevations, their complete forms are most striking from high above—a perspective their creators could never have experienced, as we do from a modern aircraft.

Whatever their original meaning, the Nazca Lines demonstrate an extraordinary investment of communal effort in creating and repeatedly approaching a particular landscape. If people walked these lines ceremonially, returned to them for rituals, or regarded the figures as connections between the earthly and celestial worlds, the desert itself may gradually have acquired sacred significance.

The mystery remains. Were these enormous inscriptions astronomical markers, sacred pathways, offerings to supernatural powers, symbols intended for the gods, or some combination of purposes we no longer understand? Their silence is part of their power.

The labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral provides a particularly evocative example. A person enters the labyrinth, follows its winding course toward the center, and then returns outward. The destination is only a short distance away, yet the path demands a long, deliberate journey. The physical act of walking becomes an inward experience. Each person follows essentially the same pathway as those who walked it before.

Stonehenge, Avebury, Newgrange, Mount Kailash, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Mecca, and the ghats of Varanasi show different ways human beings continually return to particular locations. Some were sacred from their beginnings; others acquired additional layers of meaning as generations came, departed, and returned. Pilgrimage itself may be part of what sustains their sacred character. The individual comes and goes, but the place remains.

And we can observe this process in our own time.

The World Trade Center site in New York was once primarily a place of commerce. The events of September 11, 2001 transformed it. Since then, millions have visited the site, and every anniversary renews the event in the consciousness of millions more. At the memorial, people stand beside the reflecting pools, touch the names of the dead, leave flowers, pray, remember, and mourn.

But what is actually being commemorated?

Is it the destruction of the towers? The nearly three thousand lives lost? The hatred that motivated the attack? The grief of those left behind? The courage of firefighters, police officers, rescue workers, passengers, and ordinary people who attempted to help others? Is it fear, patriotism, anger, sacrifice, compassion, or love?

Perhaps all these emotions have entered the place’s history.

This raises a larger question. If repeated human consciousness contributes to the energy of a place, does the nature of that consciousness determine what remains? Sacredness need not mean that everything accumulated there is peaceful. Battlefields, burial grounds, places of execution, and sites of catastrophe may carry an entirely different atmosphere from temples, monasteries, and places of prayer. Grief, fear, anger, courage, sacrifice, compassion, and love may all leave their impressions.

But commemoration may do something more than preserve the original event. It may gradually transform its meaning.

At Ground Zero, the public ritual does not reenact the destruction. They read the names of individual human beings. Flowers are placed beside them. People remember stories of courage and sacrifice. Families remember those they loved. Strangers who never knew them stand silently before their names.

The original act was intended to destroy. The continuing act of remembrance does something very different.

If human consciousness contributes energy to a place, then each generation has some responsibility for the quality of the energy it continues to give it. Hatred can be remembered and thereby renewed, but so can courage, compassion, sacrifice, forgiveness, and love. A memorial can preserve the horror of an event without perpetuating the hatred that caused it.

Perhaps this is one purpose of a sacred monument. It does not merely preserve history. It gives succeeding generations a place in which to decide what part of that history they will continue to energize.

If people return to Ground Zero for centuries, will future generations experience it as we experience an ancient sacred monument today? And if they do, what will have created its sacredness—the violence that occurred there, or the generations of human beings who returned afterward to remember?

Perhaps both. But what ultimately persists may depend upon what humanity chooses to commemorate.

Perhaps a place’s sacredness does not reside solely in stone, earth, architecture, or history. Human consciousness may help create it.

A place remembers because humanity continues to remember there.