Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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5th century BCE

This page groups sacred sites by the year their sacred standing is first dated to. Wikipedia notes that the relics of the apostle James "discovered c. 830" are what made Santiago de Compostela a pilgrimage destination. Browsing by start year lets a visitor compare how old one site's sacred status is against another's.

Facts
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
Sites of the wider Mesoamerican world - the culture area whose societies shared a family of religious ideas expressed in pyramid-temples, ballcourts, a 260-day ritual count and a calendar round - held here where a site cannot be assigned to one of the named traditions the atlas records separately. 2
Peoples and Traditions Covered
Unrelated peoples over three thousand years - Olmec, Zapotec, the builders of Teotihuacan, Maya, Mixtec, Toltec and Mexica among them - speaking languages from several unrelated families, and never one polity, one pantheon or one religion. 2
Origins
Whose Classification This Is
"Mesoamerica" is a scholar's category. It was coined by Paul Kirchhoff in 1943 to name the area whose peoples shared a defined list of cultural traits at the time of the Spanish conquest. It is not a name any of those peoples used of themselves, and its boundaries have been argued over ever since. 2
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Category
Sacred Sites 1
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Sacred sites of Mesoamerica

This small group gathers a sacred site of the wider Mesoamerican world, the region of central and southern Mexico and Central America whose civilisations shared a family of religious ideas expressed in pyramid-temples and ritual precincts.

The browser will find the site the atlas classes here. The entry describes its religious significance and history within the Mesoamerican tradition.

5th century BCE
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Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Religions of Mesoamerica, 2nd edition
David Carrasco, Waveland Press, 2013
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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