Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Tradition

This page groups sacred sites by the specific religion or culture that consecrated them. Wikipedia defines a sacred space as "a designated area, often marked by physical boundaries or symbols, that is considered holy or consecrated by a particular religion or culture." Browsing by tradition lets a visitor read every site belonging to one tradition together.

Facts
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
Monuments and places of apparent ritual use from before writing, whose religious meaning must be inferred from the structures themselves, from what was deposited in them and from their alignments. Nothing here is the sacred site of a named religion: the grouping is defined by the absence of a text, not by a shared belief. 2
Peoples and Traditions Covered
Unrelated societies across tens of thousands of years and several regions - Ice Age cave painters in France, the builders of Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk in Anatolia, the Maltese temple builders, and the megalith builders of Brittany, Britain, Ireland and Orkney. They are grouped by the state of the evidence about them, not by any shared culture, descent or religion. 2
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
These are the monuments most heavily claimed by others: ley lines, lost civilisations, ancient astronauts, and modern ceremonies presented as the builders' own. Rigorous work on alignments exists and is cited on the entries; it is not the same thing as the claims made in its name. Where a monument is used by a modern movement, the atlas records that use as modern. 2
Directory
Category
Sacred Sites 1
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Contested. Whether a prehistoric structure can be identified as religious at all is disputed. The "temple" reading of Gobekli Tepe has been challenged on the ground that the same buildings are equally readable as houses, and the line archaeologists draw between ritual and domestic space may not have existed for the people who built them. 3
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Prehistoric Sacred Sites

This group gathers prehistoric sacred sites, monuments and places of apparent ritual significance from before written history, whose religious meaning must be inferred from the structures themselves and their alignments rather than from any surviving text. They range from megalithic circles and standing stones to painted caves and ancient sanctuaries.

The browser will find such monuments from across the ancient world. Because their builders left no scripture, the atlas is careful to distinguish what is known of these sites archaeologically from the many later and modern interpretations projected onto them.

Tradition
Filter Results1 entry

Druidry

Tradition
1 entry
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland
Clive Ruggles, Yale University Press, 1999View the Source
3. So Fair a House: Gobekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East
E. B. Banning, Current Anthropology 52(5), 2011View the Source
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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