This page groups sacred sites by whether their sacred status is still actively maintained. Wikipedia notes that Mircea Eliade "argues that while the concept of a sacred space is often associated with religious traditions, it is not exclusive to them," since secular societies can keep treating a place as significant too. Browsing this way lets a visitor tell a site with living religious observance apart from one preserved mainly for its history.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingSites 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 CoveredUnrelated 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 Learn More
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.
In active religious use
Filter Results1 entry
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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