Celtic Sacred Landscapes

Celtic Sacred Landscapes PDF Author: Nigel Pennick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500282014
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book aims to 'show us the holy sites of Britain Ireland and mainland Europe through Celtic eyes', which means that it inevitably takes a somewhat spiritual 'mind body and spirit' tone. That said it offers a fascinating introduction to oral traditions of celtic religion and its ties to the landscape.

Celtic Sacred Landscapes

Celtic Sacred Landscapes PDF Author: Nigel Pennick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500282014
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book aims to 'show us the holy sites of Britain Ireland and mainland Europe through Celtic eyes', which means that it inevitably takes a somewhat spiritual 'mind body and spirit' tone. That said it offers a fascinating introduction to oral traditions of celtic religion and its ties to the landscape.

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity PDF Author: Ralph Haussler
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789253349
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

Sacred Landscapes

Sacred Landscapes PDF Author: A. T. Mann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781402765209
Category : Sacred space
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Captures magical spaces - archetypal and architectural manifestations of the sacred. This title illustrates the ways in which people have used and understood their sacred landscapes throughout history and around the world, from hillside Celtic oak initiation groves to Megalithic open-air sanctuaries to Macchu Picchu and Oregon's Crater Lake.

At the Centre of the World

At the Centre of the World PDF Author: John Michell
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 9780500016077
Category : British Isles
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The powers of ancient rulers emanated from the ritual center of the tribal territory. This center was also regarded as the birthplace of the tribe and belonged to the people as a whole. Installed upon this sacred rock (the omphalos or "navel of the world"), at the polar axis around which all revolved, the king could survey his realm, ordered from the center according to the divisions of the cosmos itself, reflecting the harmony and balance of paradise. Akhenaten's city in Egypt, Megalopolis of Ancient Greece, the world-centers of Roman Gaul and Celtic Cornwall, all provide clues to lead John Michell to the geographical and sacred criteria for locating a center. From studies of symbolic geography, particularly that of Celtic and Norse territories, he has discovered the leading principle for the siting of the "Thing" places, the main centers of religious and state ritual in Shetland, Orkney, the Faroe Islands and the Isle of Man. He considers the possible locations of the most hallowed centers of ancient Druidry and of the High Kings of Ireland. Finally, the esoteric foundation plan for these ancient societies is disclosed: the sacred geometry, the symbolic numbers. Symbols of the center are among the most persistent elements of myth and belief between cultures widely separated in time and space. Now John Michell traces their genesis, and suggests that their reflection of the ideal Platonic order of the universe can be relevant to the modern world.

The Thin Places

The Thin Places PDF Author: Kevin Koch
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532639848
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
In Irish Celtic lore, "thin places" are those locales where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous, where there is mystery in the landscape. The earth takes on the hue of the sacred among peoples whose connection to place has remained unbroken through the ages. What happens, then, when a Celtic view of nature is brought home to a North American landscape in which many inhabitants' ancestral connections to place are surface-thin? In a quest to find a deeper spiritual landscape in his own home, Kevin Koch applies eight principles of a Celtic spiritual view of nature to places in Ireland and to the American Midwest's rugged Driftless Area, an unglaciated region of river bluffs, rock outcrops, and steeply wooded hills. The Thin Places brings onsite mountaineering guides, spiritual leaders, geologists, and archaeologists alongside scholars in the fields of Celtic studies, religion, and conservation. But the text never strays far from story, from a trek through the Wicklow Mountains and the bogs of Western Ireland or among ancient Native American burial mounds and abandoned nineteenth-century lead mines in the bluffs above the Mississippi River.

Royal Inauguration in Gaelic Ireland C. 1100-1600

Royal Inauguration in Gaelic Ireland C. 1100-1600 PDF Author: Elizabeth FitzPatrick
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843830900
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
An investigation of the places in the Irish landscape where open-air Gaelic royal inauguration assemblies were held from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.

Living Between Worlds

Living Between Worlds PDF Author: Philip Sheldrake
Publisher: Darton Longman and Todd
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Philip Sheldrake explores the roots and context of Celtic Christianity, its choice of particular landscapes and sacred sites, the ideal of enclosure and religious stability, the theme of pilgrimage, its strong sense of boundaries, and its reverence for the sacred in nature. He also seeks to explain the lure of Celtic spirituality for many church people today who are disillusioned with the institutional church and seek an alternative religious sensibility with strong roots and a capacity for wonder and surprise. Excellent for a parish or group study.

What Life was Like Among Druids and High Kings

What Life was Like Among Druids and High Kings PDF Author: Time-Life Books
Publisher: Time Life Medical
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Provides a portrait of life in Celtic Ireland, from A.D. 400 to 1200, through an examination of legends, ancient texts, artifacts, art, and architecture of the time.

Thin Places

Thin Places PDF Author: Tracy Balzer
Publisher: ACU Press
ISBN: 0891129685
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Thin Places introduces contemporary Christians to the great spiritual legacy of the early Celts, a legacy that has remained undiscovered or inaccessible for many evangelical Christians. It provides ways for us to learn from this ancient faith expression, applying fresh and lively spiritual disciplines to our own modern context.

A Landscape with Dragons

A Landscape with Dragons PDF Author: Michael D. O'Brien
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681490129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The Harry Potter series of books and movies are wildly popular. Many Christians see the books as largely if not entirely harmless. Others regard them as dangerous and misleading. In his book A Landscape with Dragons, Harry Potter critic Michael O'Brien examines contemporary children's literature and finds it spiritually and morally wanting. His analysis, written before the rise of the popular Potter books and films, anticipates many of the problems Harry Potter critics point to. A Landscape with Dragons is a controversial, yet thoughtful study of what millions of young people are reading and the possible impact such reading may have on them. In this study of the pagan invasion of children's culture, O'Brien, the father of six, describes his own coming to terms with the effect it has had on his family and on most families in Western society. His analysis of the degeneration of books, films, and videos for the young is incisive and detailed. Yet his approach is not simply critical, for he suggests a number of remedies, including several tools of discernment for parents and teachers in assessing the moral content and spiritual impact of this insidious revolution. In doing so, he points the way to rediscovery of time-tested sources, and to new developments in Christian culture. If you have ever wondered why a certain children's book or film made you feel uneasy, but you couldn't figure out why, this book is just what you need. This completely revised, much expanded second edition also includes a very substantial recommended reading list of over 1,000 books for kindergarten through highschool.