Çatalhöyük was a large Neolithic ritual center in the Anatolia region of Turkey occupied from 7500-5700 BC. Found in the ruins of these structures, were platforms and panels decorated with etched bulls and bull-horned pedestals. Presumably rituals took place there. Animal or human blood was found on some of the alters. What’s interesting to me, however, was that the entrance into the sacred space required a formal transition from outside to the inside. Archeologists Lewis-Williams and Pearce describe entrance into this ritual center like this:
“Access between rooms was afforded not by full-length doors but by small porthole-like openings through which people were obligated to crawl . . . Entry into a complex of rooms thus entailed, first, descent into a dimly lit area; secondly, having descended, people had to crawl or bend low in order to move from one walled space to another and thus deeper into the structure.” P. 105
In other words people had to transition from the secular, ordinary world, of day-to-day, to the world of ritual. Sacred spaces had to be entered formally. This holds for later civilizations as well. Ancient Israel. Egypt. Most ancient ritual centers unearthed by archeologists all over the world, even those which predate civilization and domestic crops, like Göbekli Tepe from the 12 Century B.C., seem to provide openings and borders that allowed a prescribed transition into sacred space.
We too do this when we enter our temples. We begin the process by preparing and changing from regular clothes to church clothes. This is just the first step. We often will fast, or prepare in other ways. When we arrive, we enter through a process of passing through guardians, set to ensure we have the proper credentials to enter the sacred space, we transition further by entering an area specifically set aside to put on the white clothes that will be worn during our ‘work’ within the temple. All of these activities and preparation ready us to enter sacred space. These transition places form an ecotone of sorts, as I talked about in Part I. A transition zone. A border area.
One point. I don’t think we can think about sacred space, ether, without thinking about sacred time. Like the space-time manifold we live in, I’m quite certain that, while sacred space and sacred time can be decoupled conceptually, the lived experience of sacred space requires, at least, a temporal dimension. I’m not sure the reverse holds, as I’ve had sacred experiences that do not seem to rely on the concept of sacred space. But I’ve never been in a sacred space without a kind of sacred time being an explicit part of it.
Besides formal, set-aside-as, sacred spaces that we must transition to, there are sacred spaces that emerge from the complex relationship between the spatial location, memory, its history, or the complex relationships of sociality.
Consider this event:
As a young man during the time I was serving in the Army, I was in touring in Israel with a tour group from Germany where I was stationed. About half of us were LDS, including my Army chaplain and his family. He brought them there, in part, in order to baptize his son in the Jordan River. At some point on the trip (I don’t remember where we were along the river—I just rode the bus and got on and off when they told me) we piled out of the bus and I watched as my chaplain, dressed in white, waded into the muddy water with his son. Nothing about the place seemed remarkable. It reminded me nothing so much as the little dry-land rivers we used to fish in near Evanston, Wyoming when I was a kid—desolate and wind-riven places. Something like tamarisk grew along the sides in patches of mud. It seemed an unpleasant place. Dirty and mucky. There was some exasperation in the group, as some seemed impatient and eager to move on to our next stop. Maybe I was one of them. But suddenly, as he raised his hand to the square, Primary pictures of John the Baptist and Jesus standing in the same river that I now stood beside popped into my mind. The place changed quite dramatically. I was on the banks of the River Jordan, watching the same thing that was done anciently. The river was no longer a muddy creek. It was shifting to a new place under my very feet. The boy came out of the water. It felt holy. And then a dove cooed. I looked up and saw a pair of doves sitting high some trees overhanging the river. No one that knows the ecosystems of the Holy Land would be surprised by doves along the Jordon River. But at that moment, in that place, the a sense of the sacredness of the place filled me up, “And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him.” I could not speak. I tried to say something about the doves, but could not say anything. I pointed them out to someone, but they were not interested. I, however, was breathless. What took place in that instant between standing beside a common muddy river, and suddenly standing in a holy place? It took both place, recognition and memory. The holiness stretched from horizon to horizon, as if for me the entire world had been made holy for me by this one place. A place contextualized by the events, people and memories coming together in complex, emergent ways. Like an ecology, several layers added to the depth and meaning.
Sacred space always involves a transition from secular to sacred in that location deemed holy. This transition is not something we often talk or think about, yet is seems an important part of defining and interacting with our sacred spaces. Like an ecotone, these inhabit an area of in-between-ness that is unique and contingent upon its standing as a boundary between the spaces.
What are your experiences with these kinds of spiritual ecotones? (Remember, I don’t want to talk about sacred spaces per se, but the movement and transition from secular to sacred). How do we transition between these spaces and it what ways might this matter?
*Lewis-Williams, David and David Pearce. 2005. Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods. Thames & Hudson. New York.