SACRED SPACE

“Epiphaneia has to do with appearing, visibility being the evidence for existence: epiphaneia is visible surface, and testifies to coming-to-light.”

Indra Kagis McEwan (1997, 88)

In the Bible, one of the most significant instances after the Genesis refers not exactly to the ability of Adam’s son to found

cities where for the moment there was nobody to live,1 but rather to a dream the consequence of which is a founding gesture. 2 Here is this

fragment from the Old Testament:

10 Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. 11 When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set.

Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. 12 He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were

ascending and descending on it. 13 There above it stood the LORD, and he said: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of

Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be

blessed through you and your offspring. 15 I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land.

I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” 16. When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought “Surely the LORD is in this

and I was not aware of it. ” 17 He was afraid and said: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God: this is the gate of heaven.

18. Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. (Italics mine. A.I.)19 He

called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz. 20 Then Jacob made a vow, saying: “If God will be with me and

will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear 21 so that I return safely to my father’s

house, then the LORD will be my God and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and of all that you give me I will give you a tenth . ” 3 (Italics

1 In the then loneliness Cain must have gone about it the way Amphion must have proceeded later on in building Thebes.

2 This is invoked by Mircea Eliade as well in his 1957 book Das Heilige und das Profane (French edition, Gallimard, 1965), page 26 of the Romanian edition, Humanitas

Publishers, 1992.3 Genesis, 28, 10-22, University Edition of the Bible, International Bible

Society, Colorado Springs, USA, 1984.

mine, A.I.)

Sleeping in the wilderness, “in a certain place” picked up only because at sunset he had to stop somewhere, Jacob dreamt that exactly

on that spot (we can infer that it was right where he lay down his dream-invaded head) the sky opened, with angels descending and

ascending to the very place, and then the Lord himself showed up on top of the ladder. First of all we must note how Eliade-like is the

sacred space of our story, perfectly camouflaged in the profane. Anonymous and lacking any defining traits, it is situated

geographically in “a certain place” and the way Jacob choose it is random. Eliade himself shows that a sign is needed to distinguish whether there is a sacred space there, and “when no sign becomes manifest in the vicinity, then it is provoked.” (Eliade, 1992, 27)

We are here so remote from that “proud place” demanded by Alberti to serve as foundation for a temple, a place “visible from any

direction” (Leon Battista Alberti, 1988, 195). Two questions arise in relation to the situation of the sacred space which the fragment

does not answer: a) Is Jacob a discovering agent of the sacred space? That is: Is he

unconsciously attracted to that place because he himself is a chosen one and therefore equipped, most likely, with a special type of

sensitivity that intuits where there has always been a place of the Ss-type, even if he cannot explain how he does it (“Surely the LORD is

in this place and I was not aware of it.”?) From this question we can infer that the discovery of this Sacred Space and his presence there

are two different things: The sacred space has always existed/already exists there or, at human scale it anyway precedes

the unveiling of its presence in our world. b) The second question follows if we are not certain of the

answer to the first: can the god be willing to set up , as a prerogative of his power, “a place”, no matter how humble or insignificant and,

showing himself to a subject chosen by himself, he sets up the Sacred Space and thus takes away from us any chance of being able “to

discover”? In the subtext of this second question lies the fact that the setting up by the god of a Sacred Space corresponds in time to its

“discovery” by the one chosen to do it; in other words, that the Sacred Space “begins”, has a temporal origin and that no geographic

or spatial configuration is more favourable than the other to set it up. Once discovered, beyond any discussion on its nature and

beginnings, this “channel” of communication — which the ordinary man has until then passed by and failed to intuit — must be made visible in

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a manner in which the same mortal crossing the wilderness would understand it as not being characteristic to it. Once located, Ss

cuts out of the contingent the place of its location. So Jacob decides to erect a monument, to leave a trace and, more,

to fulfil a setting-up ritual which is equally a gesture of humiliation and enthusiasm. Humiliation because proving blind in

full daylight, he ignored until then the special character of that place. Enthusiasm because at long last, even if accidentally, even if

in his sleep, his blindness has ended. If they continue to want from then on to keep visible the respective sacred place in this world

people have to take care of the respective monument or, better to expand it; it will remind them every time when they pass by that they

are in the vicinity of a “wormhole”,4 of a communication channel with heavens. If they fail to maintain it and therefore to remember, then

the visibility of this happy “accident” will fade away; the stones erected against oblivion will be set back into the wilderness and the

place will return to chaos.

Terms: Definitions and Critique The story stops here for the moment. In order to make headway we

have to introduce and comment on the key-term with which the text operates. What is the sacred and what is the sacred space? A good idea

in such cases is to go to the reference section of a library and consult several good dictionaries, settling in the process the

etymology of the word looked for, too. Le Petit Robert (1993) gives a “territorial” and comparative definition of the sacred, at the same

time limited to taboo spaces: “Which belongs to a separate, forbidden and inviolable domain (by opposition with what is profane) and makes the object of a feeling of religious reverence” (2018), quoting the

4 A space-related term proposed by the science-fiction genre to solve part of the temporary difficulties of space travel. “The wormhole” is a privileged space (or

an accident?) of space, an whirlpool through which once passing the inter-stellar traveller wakes up instantly (time is suspended or rather imploded unto itself

within the wormhole) in a different area of the universe, at a significant distance from the first. “The wormhole” short-circuits areas of space that would

otherwise be separated by the too long duration in which the distance between them is covered; to master the mechanism of this “maelstrom” means to travel by major

leaps from one area of space to another, using such “shortcuts”. Some of the episodes in the Star Trek, The Next Generation series, especially in Deep Space Nine are

built about this strange character of the quadridimensional space. “The wormhole” is a catastrophe (in the sense this term is used in the theory with the same name) in

space, used to evidence the discontinuity enthroned in our world of SS, a discontinuity that Eliade identified in axis mundi, the tree of life, to be found

in expressions such as “the navel of the earth”.

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sanctuary and the temple as sacred edifices. But not all the Sacred Spaces are entirely separated, forbidden domains. The space of the

Christian Orthodox church for example (the comparison can be extended to Egyptian or Buddhist temples too) is characterized from

west to east by successive limitations of the number of the persons who can enter it, the most severe being in connection with the altar,

which, nonetheless, is not “an inviolable space”. To connect the sacred to the interdictions of use means to give it much too

restrictive a meaning, especially in internal contradiction with the very examples of Sacred Spaces provided by the dictionary.

The Oxford English Reference Dictionary (1996) provides a more reserved variant: the sacred is a. exclusively dedicated or

appropriated to some deity or a religious purpose; b. hallowed by religious association; c. related to religion, used to religious

purposes (1270). The dictionary narrows the meaning of the sacred to its association with religion and especially does not define a

territory of the sacred but one dedicated (consecrated) as sacred by man in relation with the rituals of his own religion.

Much more firmly (and, in comparison with the previous, less “cautious” in the analogies it makes, The Concise Oxford Thesaurus - A

Dictionary of Synonyms tells us that the synonyms of the word sacred in English are “a sacred place, holy, blessed, blest, hallowed,

consecrated, sanctified (É) sacrosanct, inviolable, unimpeachable, invulnerable, protected, defended, secure, safe, unthreatened”

(699) with the following antonyms: “profane, secular, temporal.” By ricochet from the antonyms we infer that the Sacred Space is not just

a special type of space, extracted from the territory but also from time and therefore from history. The Explanatory Dictionary of the Romanian

Language narrows down the entire matter of the sacred to religion; it provides only one alternative: “holy”. In other words it does not

offer more clarification than the already mentioned dictionaries. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1992) comes also with the

origin of the term, the Latin sacrare , to devote, dedicate to a divinity, with sacer as adjective (consecrated, holy), and the

related sancire, sanctus (781). Equivalent verbs in Romance languages are the French sacrer , the Portuguese sagrar , and the Italian sacrare.

In his book Das Heilige — Uber das Irrationale in der Idee des gottlichen und sein Verhaltnis zum Rationalen (German 1926, Romanian 1991) Rudolf Ott

speaks very early of the term numinous in connection with the sacred by which he intends to account for the necessary presence of the god

and show from the very beginning that this concept, this a priori category (1992, 165) of interpretation and evaluation “exists as

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such only in the religious field” (12). The shuddering, frightful, fascinating effect of grasping this mysterium tremendum (20-34); the

energy and majestas (absolute power) associated with its manifestation and the colossal, already described in spatial terms,

all these are consequences of the numinous manifest in this world. According to Ott’s filiation, and with considerably more

nuances, thirty years after this book, Eliade introduces in his work, The Sacred and the Profane (German 1957, Romanian 1992) a few

standard definitions of the sacred and of the sacred space that eventually will permeate his entire creation, but which can already

be found in prior formulas of his Romanian study on Babylonian alchemy. Making a synthesis of Eliade’s ideas we will infer that the

sacred, that ganz Andere , the dis-resembling, the radically other, an absolute otherness, a reality of a different order, a break and an irruption into the “lower” reality”: the first definition that can be

given to the sacred is that it is opposed to the profane.” (1992, 13) The sacred appears as hierophany which all at once makes the

indifferent object be, at the same time, “something else, without ceasing to be itself” (14); but since hierophany also involves a

place of its irruption, the sacred space becomes the first element that helps define and than unveil the setting up. of the sacred place.

The manner in which the phrase ”sacred space” is used in the following tries to describe therefore the entire process of projection into our world of something situated in “an entirely

different place” and which is “completely something else” or “an entirely other thing”: the site of a radical, absolute otherness

which appears in this world once, with a certain frequency or which has established a communication channel between “various cosmic

levels” (Eliade). Why, if the Sacred Space is a place of epiphany, don’t I use the phrase “sacred place” ? If we go back in time to the

spatial indication offered by Eliade at various moments in his creation with regard to the sites of the sacred, we will note that he

is constantly speaking of what seem rather the components of a space — center, axis, axle, navel, mountain, hearth. It goes without saying

that after having used the futuristic expression “wormhole”, which presupposes a punctual location in space and also the possibility of

a passage beyond, the following discussion cannot be limited only to a surface. The sacred is a profound quality of space, a vertical

profoundness whose projection is the place. The sacred space is therefore for Eliade a ground of quality

discontinuity that is opposed to the profane, homogenous and neutral space (to note here the similarity between Heidegger’s ideas of space

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and Eliade’s); the sacred space is a foundation and fixed point in men’s lives, a place marked by an obvious hierophany (of the sort seen

by Jacob) or just by a worrisome sign for the profane world which, if not emerging by itself, can be provoked as we have already seen; in

this “conjuring” we can observe a suspension of the “logical” rules of the profane world allowing to act apparently at random as to those

down there, the choice of the deity which is then marked. Eliade insists then on the sacred space defined by an irradiating center

(omphalos, axis, mountain, altar). Because Eliade’s study is exemplary and in many respects still

valid, in the latter part of this text I will focus only on the sacred space whose physical traits are visible, namely on that space which

is basically if not exclusively defined by its limits: lucus (the sacred forest) and by its regulation Raum (the space prepared in

order to set camp), trying to show how the “diffuse” sacred of the filial couple lucus-Raum allows and makes room to the central idea of

this text according to which the sacred space exists also as a trajectory in the smooth/rambling space and not only as fixed, stable

and final. Moreover, in the case study of the “clearing” I show how the

established place of the settlement, consecrated for its stability, is nearly always the final of a migration trajectory; in other words,

neither the sacred space nor subsequently the place of a settlement with a certain degree of permanence are given from the first but

discovered at the end or during a movement. Mobility precedes stability in the history of settlements and subsequently doubles it

in order to become in most recent times, again a privileged instance of habitation/dislodgment and even of the sacred space. After having

found 5 that not even planets are by birth stuck in their attraction to the centre of the solar system but that they have come to the current

trajectories following migrations that have consecrated their shape and movement, the association of the sacred space with the idea of

dynamics no longer seems so dramatically opposed to the traditional, central-static one.

Eliade is obviously — in a match Heidegger vs. Deleuze — on the side of stability, of fixity through consecration of the sacred

space: “when camping is no longer provisional as with nomads but stable as with sedentary people, it involves a vital decision that

commits the existence of the entire community” (33-4) although it accepts for habitation at least that it is sanctified “ no matter the

structure of the traditional society”. This accounts why Eliade’s5 Renu Malhotra, ”Migrating Planets” in Scientific American , Sep. 199, pp. 46-53.

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examples seem to be among those that rather show ends of trajectory, termini of migration: the Scandinavian who deforest Iceland, the

conquerors of an already inhabited space (31) the Muslim dervishes (27), the German tribes, and naturally, Jacob himself.

What can we note from these definitions provided above of the sacred and the Sacred Space that shelters it, as applied to Jacob’s story? That some dictionary definitions limit themselves to

defining the sacred as a quality transferred, conferred by man upon the object, space or place: recognition of something as being sacred.

Moreover, they refer not to the moment Jacob discovers that place endowed with exceptional properties but to the moment of its

consecration as a sacred Place. A place is sacred only to the extent in which and after it has been declared/confirmed to be a Sacred

Place. It is man’s action on it (in two moves: discovery and consecration) that changes its status, isolates it from the

uncircumscribed indifferent space and, as we have seen, suspends it from history. There is an interval that precedes consecration when “a

place” is revealed to Jacob as being sacred. According to dictionaries it would seem that since the unveiling of the sacred is

the privilege of the few it is wiser to let ourselves be guided exclusively by them and to assert what is convenient: for common

mortals there is no other way of putting themselves in the sacred space, of seeing it, than to have it consecrated as sacred by those

who possess the gift of revelation. The definitions based on consecration seem to suggest a weakening of the meaning of Sacred Space: in the extreme, anything

may be sacred only if consecrated; the hallowing seems to cope with any doubt regarding the qualities leading to the election of that

place as sacred before being consecrated. This reserve of calling the sacred the sacred qua , which we account by the sometimes excessive

rigours of linguistics can raise the problem of the voluntary and erroneous gesture, of random institution through manipulation of

the virtue of consecrating spaces as SS which somebody who has it (on whom it is has been entrusted) can abuse — and some actually do.

The above dictionary definitions do not warn us as to the possibility — which is a hybris — of enthroning false sacred places,

and moreover leaves us defenceless in the face of such a possibility. It is not up to anyone to unveil, to make visible such sites of the

sacred or to consecrate them as such; the more cautious must be those to whom — unto a descent from Christ and the Apostles — this privilege

has been granted of not making mistakes and or not abusing this gift. But when it becomes obvious that they do it, what are the strategies

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that we can use to our defence? We should be able to do it since in the Sacred Space, within its radius and in its protection we find

shelter.

In a nutshell, and in more precise terms: the sacred space is made up of a place where the epiphanic event unfolds and also of the

spatial aura situated on the vertical — the quality axis of the space — of the “tunnel” in the dynamics of which there is the tie that unties

what is “below” with what is “above” or, in general,  “beyond”. SS is then the place of the projection, the projection rays and the aura of

the event projected. Jerusalem is a standard example of Sacred Space: it is the mundane projection of heavenly Jerusalem and it “exists”

only together with this. In terms of a theory of ideas6 the Sacred Space would be the territory occupied by “the copy” but also the space

— no matter how hard to imagine this would be in physical terms — between this and the “idea”.

The temple is an example of standard Sacred Space: it contains, decomposed into “primal factors”:

i) a territory that any prayer abode occupies; ii) an interior space, turned sacred by its “contamination”

with the presence of (the Name) of the Lord INSIDE, at consecration(hallowing);

iii) a trancendental model (the temple of heavenly Jerusalem) whose ever more faithful protection is desired (or should be):

iv) a vertical communication channel between “original” and “copy“ which the celebration rituals in the temple are supposed to

keep open; in the case of the church this channel is the divine eye that inspects the Sacred Space. 7

6 The Bible is a privileged territory of practical “in situ” judgment of the relationship between “original”/transcendent and “copy”.

7 The insistence of some clergymen and Christian Orthodox men of culture on the idea that the local Romanian Orthodox church are small because in its domesticity this SS supposedly celebrates better the symbolical habitation among men of Jesus

limits the ascending and transcendental verticality of the SS. A similar effect can be noted in what regards the insistence on the “sofianism” of the Christian

Orthodox sacred space which, by vaults and cupolas would be mirrored back unto itself, like in a perpetual Mobius band, the church space becoming the interior

space. The presence of Jesus painted in the cupola that crowns the turret is not “a closure of the vertical axis” so that the space boomerangs, curving unto itself; on

the contrary, it is a form of symbolically visualizing the destination of the vertical axis that connects the two destinations; here (naos, nave) and there

(heavens).The Catholic churches point to the direction but seem to leave open the finality of the ascendance inviting to humility and also to speculation. The SS of

the Christian Orthodox church, and especially the cupola on the naos, brings into

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The Sacred Space — Public Place — Private Space

“The site should be on an eminence conspicuous enough for men to look up and see goodnes enthroned and strong enough to

command the adjacent quarters of the city.” Aristotle, Politics , 122 to 28-30, Transl. by Barker

“The place should be such as to have epiphaneia so as to see goodness fulfilled and strengthened, so that the regions of the

city might come to be.” Translated into English by I. Kagis McEwan (1997, 88)

The quotation from Aristotle translated by Barker that I chose as motto for this section of the text was interpreted by Irad Malkin as a proof of the fact that in the antiquity, just as Alberti would

urge one millennium later, the selection of a construction site (in particular of a temple) was made according to its special

characteristics (here preeminence) that recommended it as a chosen place. On the contrary, the commentary and the translation of the

Aristotelian fragment made by Kagis McEwan (the second motto) insists not on the special spatial traits of the place (the surface)

where the epiphany occurs but on the presence of the deity as the reason for the choice of the respective construction site.

The two interpretations come from two different scientific traditions. The first author is an archaeologist and, taking for

granted Greek translations he builds his argument relying on their accuracy. The second author comes from the field of classical philology and questions each meaning of the original term; thus, by

changing the translation he provides new interpretations of the same text. We are interested in the fact that each of the two

interpretations answers the questions: “How is the sacred space selected or found?”, suggesting the existence of two different

classes of natural territory on which the sacred space can besituated:

1) the one visible in its physical description as different from those neighbouring it;

2) the one whose location and expanse can be shown only by the

the visible, explaining visually the vertical component of the space, defining it more vigorously as a dash between two clear defined points, not curbing it in any

way or sending it back defeated. Elegant as a metaphor, “the sofianic space” ought perhaps to be relegated to the philosophy of culture and not imported by the

architectural practice.

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ability of the chosen since otherwise its natural appearance does not recommend it as being different from the profane space.

The former, with the sacred visible (also) in its natural (geographic) description can, in its turn, be defined in two ways:

1a) by its limits (“clearing”) and 1b) by its center (omphalos, axis, tree, mountain). Evidencing the second class of territories where the sacred space may be situated presupposes that the gestures

of the one who discovers it should conjure up either or both types described in the first class. The sacred place similar to that discovered by Jacob needs being put in the limelight, needs inaugural

gestures: marking the center or/and its outer limits. Setting up a city on the sacred territory though, no matter the

class in which the respective territory is situated, presupposes the ritualistic establishment of both signs (marking the centre and the

limits), no matter if they pre-exist or not in that place. In other words, the character of sacred place, preceding from the settlement

in view of habitation, is “blocked” in the limelight by the rituals of marking the limit, the center and the interior geometry of the

territory thus “saved” (Heidegger).

I predicate the following: the sacred space is the essential manner in which the territory appears where both the Public Place and

the Private Space find room/draw substance. Building in the realm of epiphany is a fact. Habitation is thus situated on the territory of

the sacred. In relation to how we defined the latter I posit that: i)The sacred space is a prior form of territory pro-posed to

games of visibility; the sacred trait of the space precedes those of the Public Place and those of the Private Space; the emergence of the

dipole Public Place/Private Space presupposes the ante-presence of a form of sacred space in that place or in its proximity.

ii) Subsequently, after the establishment of these two terms, the Sacred Space negotiates — weakening it — their presupposed

dichotomy iii) The Sacred Space, rhythmically brought into the limelight

via the ritual, is an absolute form of maintenance in time, of self- reproduction of the two aspects of the socialized space. The sacred

space must be fixed, stabilized and subsequently, rhythmically remembered in order to preserve its role of support, of substratum of

the socialized space. 8

8 For details regarding the monument and its social role close to that of the SS see an article by Cara Armstrong and Karen Nelson in the magazine Architronic

(www.saed.kent.edu/Architronic/v2n205, September 1993) that the relationship

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iv) So memory (collective or individual) the monuments (traces-cenotaph) of which are outlined/elevated on the spot as a

consequence of foundation rituals, cyclical remaking, separation, revisiting — is the principal engine of maintenance of the Sacred

Space as a territory of the sacred. These traces or cenotaphs fix and order around them/inside them the space as an interpenetration of

territories of visibility. v) In the extreme, such Public Places signalled by the monuments

as sites of memory can be (and have been over the centuries) identified also) as Sacred Spaces. The site of a battle — a major

event likely to consecrate Public Place — can become the territory housing a temple. After all, Heidegger warns us, the statue of the

divinity (which is the divinity itself) is dedicated to it by the conqueror (Heidegger, 1995, 67). This was how Romanian prince

Stephen the Great did when he consecrated the public places of his battles as sacred spaces by building churches on the respective sites

in memory of the various events.9 The sacred space puts a better imprint on the collective memory than a monument erected in the

Public Place and is, therefore, “more efficient” than it as regards “conservation” within the Sacred Space of the memory of the

respective exceptional and unique event.

We have dwelt on the Biblical text in the beginning, building two different scenarios as to what might have happened after the

departure of the one who discovered (and the meaning of the term as“ aletheic ” must not be ignored in the light of what follows) a Sacred

Space. The fragment from the Bible to which I refer is one more time significant for understanding 1) the nature of the Sacred Space, 2)

its physical and temporal “origins” (i.e. the manner in which it is presented to us, makes itself or is made possible to apprehend in our

world, a manner that presupposes a beginning); 3) the mechanism by which the Sacred Space connects with the space organized by man,

between “Ritual and Monument” in the context of the presence of the myth. The ritual and the monument can embody the essence of events. The monuments can provide

a site for a form of permanence in the scenery and imprint the events in the collective memory. By ritual, the landscape can be turned into an operator. Ritual

condition the reading of the monument and of the place through the body and through memory. Monuments remind, warn and suture; they provide public places for

recognition, reunion and mourning.9 The more so as the battles were mostly waged against the infidel, so had the

character of a “holy war”. Consequently, the victims of such a war can be assimilated to martyrs, and the battle spot to a potentially sacred space,

hallowed by that very event.

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being prior to it; and finally, 4) the relations established between the Sacred Space and the Public Place, respectively between the

Sacred Space and the Private Space.

The question is whether inside the dipole Public Place/Private Space there exists an interregnum — territories where the fringes of

the two manners of arranging the space interact. I maintain that after the establishment of a locality and, in time, of a settlement,

SS weakens the presupposed dichotomy between the Public Place and the Private Space. The sacred permeates and informs both form of

enspacement of the events established by visibility. In point of its spatialness, it is either fertile absence by relation to the excess

of the wild presence out of which it is cut ( Lichtung as clearing seen as lucus : sacred forest in Amoroso’s text). Or, on the contrary an

assertion (exclamation?) in a landscape defined by the absence of attributes, of physical landmarks, an anomie (the wilderness, the

desert from the example at the beginning). The Sacred Space is, anyway, a place exposed to divine

inspection, Heidegger (who also oriented it) put it, “under the firmament” (1995, 180), namely left “before the divine” ones. For

these divine, the Sacred Space is a pro-posed place, put therefore before them, under the firmament. Both the Public Place and the Private Space can find room in the Sacred Space. The public place can

take shape anywhere: the battle place was selected not by virtue of its sacredness and yet it was a public place. One specification can be

made here: stable public places, the ones where events occur regularly and are even ritualized, presuppose the preexistence of a Sacred

Space as a strong argument for enspacement on/in it or in direct relation with it the events regarding meeting, negotiation, exchange and decision, all based on mutual visibility and which

barely define a stable Public Place. This being said, we can nuance Heidegger’s assertion that “mortals inhabit to the extent they

rescue the earth” (181) to the extent they not only “pull it out of a danger” (that spelled by the chaos produced by the lack of traits);

and the philosopher goes on, because they would “liberate it unto its own essence” (181). Habitation by mortals as a protection of the

tetrad consists therefore in “saving the earth, protecting the heavens, waiting for the divine, and guiding the mortals.” (181)

Also corroborated to the example of the temple in “The Origin of the Work of Art” the above assertion and all the arguments in

“Construction, Habitation, Thinkingâ” lead us to the following assertion: the abodes mortals put up to inhabit, while protecting the

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tetrad are all situated in the realm of the sacred space. Not any construction is located in the Sacred Space but “all construction

that takes care of growth” (179) is in the realm of the sacred and, on the extreme, (for example in the temple) makes it visible in an

explicit manner. Again: habitation in Heidegger’s sense (i.e. making room for the being and protecting it to attain its essence) is

habitation in the intensity of the sacred space.

I have mentioned intensity: It is possible — Heidegger tells us and in his wake all the theorists of the phenomenology of

architecture, the historians of religions and the anthropologists — because the Sacred Space is (de)limited. The Greek temple reminded by

Heidegger “shuts in itself the figure of the deity and in this concealment it makes it emanate into the sacred space via the open

hall of the columns.” (65) Moreover, “owing to the temple, the deity is present in the temple” (65), an assertion that seems to confirm

across the millennia the wisdom of the Jews who “stabilized” through the Temple the past unpredictability of the emergence and presence of

Yahweh in their midst. The filling with the expression of divinity of the entire space of the temple proves that it was necessary as a

receptacle/cup 10 of the sacred; more, as a resonance box, amplifying the effects of the presence of the deity. “This presence of the deity is, in itself, the unfolding and delimitation of the space as

sacred.” (65) And then in what way does the dichotomy threatening to get

installed between the opening (Public Place) and the cloister (Private Space) weakens the Sacred Space? How does the Sacred Space

stabilize the flight to their extreme significance? The public place is the one that stabilizes, administering it in time through ritual

and therefore by preserving the visibility of the sacred attribute of the Sacred Space. “The place admits the tetrad and orders it.” (189)

“The systematization” means therefore an optimization, “a location in the open” of the intuited sacred space. You cannot establish a

sacred space if you are not chosen — I insist on my opening sentences — but you can improve its public visibility.

The gesture that follows immediately after this “melioration”( einrichtet is translated as “ordering” on page 189) this approaching

and accommodating of the Sacred Space is that of taking it under

10 The cup in “Roman Foundation” by C.F. Meyer, a poem quoted on page 60 and the sacrificial cup the description of which strikingly reminds of the void at the

middle of the wheel to which the spokes go, celebrated in Dao de King, obviously are with Heidegger privileged metaphors.

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protection: “The place is a watch ( Hut) of the tetrad or as the same word would have it, Huis, Haus , a place of shelter. ” (189). After

having been accommodated — or more precisely after having been approached in such a way as to be supported by mortals, the sacred

space (be)comes “Home” to habitation. The place (described the best by its extent) becomes a domestic/interior space ( Hut ), described

with its all around, by the fact that it can contain, and by giving shelter, it can protect. In the realm of the sacred space and only

here does the place of public exhibition become the sole proper to give shelter. It is here that is founded again, detached from the weak (and therefore criticizable) linguistic basis, the connection

between habitation and neighbourhood. Keeping under control through building the way I expose myself (or not) to the visibility of the

others but preserving through the windows of the house my visual control at least over the immediately proximate territory I

domesticate the Public Place to the benefit of its own protection, I change its attributes so that, situated on its territory it may be

constrained by the control that I exercise over the portion that I inhabit, to become a Private Space. Habitation is therefore, in

conformity with Heidegger’s thinking, exclusively habitation together on an insular territory, pro-posed and supported by its

sacredness.

The ritualization of the experience of the Sacred Space is also sheltered by Heidegger in his apparently insignificant household in

the Beskids (i.e. in the peasant vernacular house, par excellence . ) In the insistence with which the philosopher speaks of the unity of the

tetrad we discover the daily, homespun presence of the sacred: “The house did not ignore the corner dedicated to the Lord behind the common table; in rooms holy places have been set up in the rooms for

the birth and the ‘tree of death’, as a coffin is called there, foreshadowing thus for all the ages of life under a single roof, the

pattern of their passage in time” (191-2). The corner of the icons and of the candles, of prayers is situated opposite to the entrance where

the observer is placed, in other words in the profoundness of the private space, interwoven with it.

Each event of life is put in space in a sacred context: the territory of domesticity is hallowed (so the sacred is again invoked,

called again to surface out of the profoundness/height where it keeps vigil) through successive rituals — the one of choosing the place of

the house, the one at the termination of the house, the baptism, wedding, death, the daily prayers at various hours of the day, before

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and after meals. These rituals occur with variable rhythmicity but all have a similar purpose: reinvestment with the sacred or, more

correctly, remembrance of its presence, invocation of the stability of the sacred character of habitation.

The Deterritorialization of the Sacred Space. Dislodged, Mobile Sacred Spaces. Disposable Sacred Spaces?

Let us now try to put together everything shown so far, in the light of the text quoted, of the dictionaries and the opinions about

the Sacred Space of some researchers as Eliade and Ott or of philosophers like Heidegger and then give a minimum theoretical

consistency to the whole, wondering also if the result obtained issatisfactory.

The major quality of the sacred space is its location.11 It is local, distributed in relation with the physical space. It is not the

territory on the whole that can be sacred but privileged (therefore rare) areas of it; the rarer those identified by man as such. The

sacred is not a molar attribute but a molecular one. Despite the ubiquity of the divine glance under the inspection of which we’d say

the entire terrestrial territory and the physical space in its entirety should be situated, it seems that there exist only “vents”

through which the sacred overflows into our world. This thing, applied to the way in which the old cultures regard the space was

sufficiently explained by Eliade and I anticipate, it seems in opposition with the contemporary concepts, especially to Deleuze’s

smooth space of the nomads. There where we want to annihilate a dichotomy felt between the public and the private, Foucault enthrones another. To the “Theoretical Desanctification of the

Space” (Foucault, 1986, 23) occurring in the 17th and 18th centuries he opposes what Carey called “a refractory survival” (1998,, 299) of

“the hidden presence of the sacred” (Foucault, 1986, 23). This perpetuation of a “ space fully loaded with qualities is also

perfectly fantastic.” (23) Foucault sees it situated through others of the same type, in the dichotomy Lp/Sp, in “the space of the family

versus the social space.” (23) In the tension of the opposition between perfectly disjointed places, the uncertain gesture of crossing various spaces seems to be holding, but it is not the sacred

in the sense of the presence/presentiment of the divine but the sacred in its “uncanny” meaning of worrisome incomprehensibility.

In the following I would like to open the Sacred Space to other11 Location, stable settlement on a (de)limited part of space.

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of its forms more stable and not at all unhistorical, to forms open, on the one hand, to instability (and even dynamics) and on the other to evanescence. From the very beginning I would insist on the fact

that both the sacred space identified by Jacob and that described by Deleuze&Guattari are both to be found on the territory of the

wilderness. But if marking the place of an epiphany, rememorizing it through rituals performed on this chosen spot are elements

designating such a stable Sacred Space, the nomads too have such privileged points, landmarks on the road of migration. The ritual is

held at ampler intervals of time that pertain to the rhythm, the pulsation of the migration and the insecurity of the moment of return

to this place. But mostly the monument and/or the trace/cenotaph that move at the same time with the one migrating makes up for the memory’s

longing for stability. In fact, with the exception of Athens, the ancient Greek city-states emerged “with the construction of extra-

urban sanctuaries by the migratory populations.” (Kagis McEwan, 89), which verifies one more time not only the theory of sacredness as

a prior condition for the foundation of a settlement but also the one that I will develop in my discussion on “clearing”, which regards the

original “instability” of the settlement seen not as atemporal given data but as destinations of the migrations and colonizations.

The representations of the sacred, like icons, for example, find their place in a temple but can also exist, in motion, on the

trajectory of its movement. More and more, the representations of the sacred and even the consecrated, hallowed spaces are no longer limited to the church and the house. The triptych, folded, can be

taken with you and unfolded during a stop; small icons, of the type to be carried in wallets, on the computer at our working place and the

dashboard of our motor cars, all these are such memories of the sacred, deterritorialized and recontextualized each time somewhere

else, when the eyes and prayers address them. A visit to Monastery Cernica is impressive today not only by the charm of the location by

also by the considerable number of new cars brought here to be hallowed. Beyond the ready humour of the situation the fact should be recovered (or consecrated) as Sacred Space, even if mobile, even if

it proves (and enhances) the diminution of stability, of the “tradition” location, of the Sacred Space, a process to which the

clergy consents ingenuously. The sacred space itself can be deterritorialized according to

needs, seems to be saying the small prayer rug that each Muslim unfolds, unrolls and lays down anywhere facing Mecca at the time of

prayer. By this minimal gesture, the sacred space —   evanescent — is

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limited as apparition in time and as location by the duration and situation in space of the respective prayer.

The tent of the papal visits and the via regia leading to him have a constantly daring architecture; it would deserve in itself a

study of its aesthetic qualities as ephemeral sacred spaces. In fact, the very dynamic position and orientation of the altar in the

Catholic church after the Vatican II Council also proves the weakening of the location of the traditional Sacred Space; from the

eastern extreme, serving to the east (i.e. to God), in the center of the church serving to the parishioners (i.e. for them). Even the

Christian Orthodox churches, once extremely severe in their orientation, with the altar pointing east, are built today for considerable urbanistic reasons, in various other positions, going

to a ninety-degree rotation from the east. In other cultures, the question of the becoming in time of such a

Sacred Space, therefore the problem of its historicity which one of the early definitions denied, finds some privileged examples too: the Ise Temple (Japan) is redone with a close periodicity (every 15

years), always in wood and always according to the same design. The temple itself moves alternatively from one location to another

(neighbouring), after the construction of its other instance is finished. I do not possess enough details in connection with the

Japanese culture to comment on this example. Nonetheless, I would insist on what seems a common pattern: the sacred inhabits a site, and

not (exclusively) a certain instance that it goes through while preserving   its stability even in the process, although it is used

again and again to reiterate the sacred character of the place. Only its abandonment and not the remaking of the its transient shelters

chases the sacred . Not only Neo-Protestant churches seem to perceive any place

where you pray as favourable to this gesture and therefore potentially sacred. The crisis of churches after 1989 and within

this, the space crisis moved outside and even to other places the religious ceremonies. Now almost all the older Christian Orthodox

churches are building in their yards a belfry for the services when the number of the faithful proves hard to contain inside what was

considered the traditional (and exclusive) Sacred Space. For the Greek Catholic church the situation appeared much more dramatic. An

episode that I witnessed seemed revealing in this sense: At Sighetu Marmatiei, in 1995, Greek-Catholic mass was held not in the church

but outside, and not anywhere but right in front of the monument of the Soviet soldier. The gallows humor of the location was in fact a

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drama taking place right under my eyes and also the sign of a change of mentality, of a de-limitation of the traditional Sacred Space, in the

sense of making it more comprehensive, less “inviolable” and “forbidden” as the dictionary described in the beginning. In fact, as

the experience of my visits to the United States proved to me, almost any territory can be recovered as (or used instead of) a sacred

space,12 up to one and the same abode being used by two different denominations (Orthodox/Lutherans in Queens, NY or Rochester, NY).

And why shouldn’t it? After all, the delocalization of the sacred and its reterritorialization along a migration trajectory

finds a most revealing expression in the way the divine word, written in the tables of law, is moved together with the Jews during the

Exodus, on a long and winding trajectory that unites an “origin”, Mount Sinai, to a “final” destination , the Holy Trinity in the

Jerusalem Temple. Meanwhile, the sacred is present, distributed we could say, not thanks to a fixed spot but to a location relative to the

position of the Jews themselves: the shrine and Jahveh himself were all the time with them, in their midst (i.e. in front of/above them). The sacred space is therefore a trajectory not a place.

About Monuments, Cenotaphs, Memorials or “Almost-SacredPlaces”

We meet such fractures in the smooth space as memorials marking the spot of a deadly accident. Naturally, not all the monuments make

visible a sacred place, not all of them mark epiphanies, like the one established in the wilderness by Jacob. Consequently, not all of

them are of interest to the economy of this text. Yet the mechanism of establishment, and especially that of perpetuation of these

12 Unfortunately, the founders of the Christian Orthodox church, especially those of the day, at the head with those backing the construction of the Cathedral for the

Redemption of the Nation seem to abuse, down to frivolity, this “weakening” of the significance of the SS. Any road juncture, any park, or squares chosen for reasons

of size and relative situation as to the center of a locality have been used as topoi of the sacred. I designed myself and supervised the construction of several

Christian Orthodox abodes and I often found myself shuddering at the lack of sensitivity of the clergy vis a vis this matter. For instance at Urziceni because

of a last-moment decision the church was no longer situated on the holy ground marked with a cross, where the altar should have been placed. I wonder if after the

contest held for the building of the Cathedral for the Redemption of the Nation and the studies made after the hallowing of the road chapel this very variant of the

sacred place will actually be observed (enhanced by the Pope’s kiss!)? Naturally, the final consecration service partly sets right such faux pas, some would tell me but the question remains: what are the criteria according to which today we

identify a place as being sacred?

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memorials invoke, if not explicitly then obliquely or at least in the subtext, the presence of the sacred. They send the reader interested

to a text connected by temporary monuments: “Mourning in Protest — Spontaneous Memorials and the Sacralization of Public Space” by

Harriet F. Senie in Harvard Design Magazine (autumn, 1999) is, first of all, an attempt at accommodation in the social context of the matter

of these “spontaneous and perishable monuments”, like the one set up at the entrance of the Alma Passage of Paris near the place of the

crash involving Princess Diana. Such agglomerations of mourning messages, of love or protest put together, are a “vernacular” form of

establishing a special type by physical marking a place: that of the violent disappearance of somebody.

A grave where the personal objects of someone who die “somewhere else” and whose resting place cannot be located or attained/visited

(a battlefield, a common or an unknown grave in a concentration camp, a drowned person or one who has disappeared without any trace in a

mysterious plane accident, like Antoine de Saint Exupery) is such a monument-cenotaph. That this is about a ”soft” monument-cenotaph, a

site of the immediate memory is proven by their extinction in time, on the one hand, and their extension to other events than the ones

connected to violent death: in Seattle in the area of the marina for private yachts (where many live on their yacht, where they have

addresses with “streets” and “numbers”) I saw, in 1993, a memorial dedicated to Elvis Presley whose vessel must have birthed there sometime. The character of memorable event occurred on that spot

appears diluted though since it is not the sign of a sacrifice. Such monuments-cenotaph are still further weakened by the

imprecision of their location. The grave is a monumentum (including etymologically) since it includes the remains of a deceased person.

But situated — for good reasons of traffic safety — near the Alma tunnel and not in the tunnel, right on the spot of the accident, the

memorial-cenotaph of princess Diana is thus twice weakened by the location, since we known that anyway the death proper did not occur

there but at the hospital and moreover that such temporal memorials developed spontaneously in other places as well, associated for

other reasons with the princess (the gates of Kensington Palace, for example). The monument-cenotaph tries to solve the matter of the

failure to locate the place of death, of the absence of a precise spot for mourning the deceased.

The separation from the place of death and that of the burial, and the marking of the two seem two affect only the roads: other sites

of violent deaths are not just as intensely marked. Sadness and

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mourning must be located, directed unto a fixed spot, which by capturing get condensed. 13 The trajectories of our movements, for

the very reason that they are territories of instability and because they are poorly tattooed with the signs of human presence, situated

somewhere between two civitas (at extremities) and chaos (on both sides) make somewhat necessary, by the very poor signalling of their

humanization, such landmarks of memory whose superior form is the road altar. Thus the memory of the person gone is thus situated

(settled) here (in the cemetery) and there (on the border of the road where the person met with death); more precisely, this memory is

situated on the trajectory that unites the two forms of location, while making each tensional. The first is a space of the body, the other a place of the soul.

The cemetery is a stable territory which by its proximity in relation to civitas , allows that the ritual may be performed regularly,

while the place of the accident is often — especially after a longer period of time and especially if far from the tomb — visited only in

passage, at big intervals. There are also opposite situations when the cenotaph is in the proximity of the habitation and therefore in the most privileged position to attract the ritual, while the “real”

tomb (that contains the corpse) is remote, inaccessible or unknown (battlefield, concentration camp).

The opposition does not occur between a local vision of the Sacred Space and the fluid one of the smooth space but only when on the sacred territory or in its proximity/surrounding the premises of the

Private Space are organized, of a settlement with a certain time duration. The presence of the habitation on the Sacred Space separates it from any possible recovery of the smooth space. Thus

defined, as a territory that is (made?) sacred with a view to the offer of habitation, the Sacred Space becomes synonymous with Raum.

And here I insist: it is not the fact that on/in the Sacred Space there occur enspacements of the mutual visibility that account for

the Public Place established there but establishment ( i.e. stabilization) with a view to habitation is that which separates the

Sacred Space from the smooth space. The latter also has such sacred sites where the performance of the ritual triggers the public place.

The smooth space does not contain though settlements with a certain degree of permanence around/on the territory of the Sacred Space. By

13 In this context, I suggest two extremely interesting studies: “Le cimetiere dans le Moyen Age latin. Lieu sacre, saint et religieux” by Michel Lauwers (in

Annales 5/1999( and Modernism and the Zionist Uncanny” Reading the Old Cemetery in Tel Aviv (in Representations 69 /winter 200).

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setting camp the nomad does not settle down but stops from his advance. The camp is not a locality but a stop, a poor impression of

the trajectory of the migration which even if repeated is notstabilized.

Building churches successively on the same location accounts for the phenomenon of sedimentation, “archive” of the sacred by

means of the memory of the place ( Cristian Norberg Schulz’s stabilitas loci acquires thus a special significance in this context.) It seems

that the miraculous space is never sufficiently visible and therefore, from time to time, also helped by the degradation of the

old church, a founder aware of the sacredness of the place begins to enhance it through an even more important built presence, a presence

ever more adequate to the exceptional character of the settlement. Let us remember that the science of constantly improving sacred

abodes meant the end of Master Manole. In the assuredness with which he which he says that he can built any time another monastery, more

beautiful, there is not only the pride of the creator but also the recognition of this “evolutive” character of church-making. It is

not a matter of option but a necessity: the future one must be superior to the previous, in an endless wheel of accommodating buildings to the sacred space that it acclaims. To this end he does

not seem to spare any effort; on the contrary, as soon as the conditions permit it or the previous church gets deteriorated,

remaking means necessarily an “improvement” of the previous state. If it was made of wood and it burnt down it is “translated” into stone

and, given the possibilities of the material, extended. This thing was the more possible as the notion of “historical

monument”, of building stopped from its becoming, is a very new one and in some cultures still permeated by the traditions that accompany the building proper (as the Romanian one in the rural areas) still not assimilated to this day. 14

14 The fact seems hard to understand, unacceptable and is vehemently condemned by townspeople (I did this myself) that certain villagers of Transylvania abandoned

their wooden churches, historic monuments, and built ample ones, according to their needs (or aspirations, the image of themselves) for the respective

community. Doubtlessly, in their “ignorance” we discover this innocent “organicist” attitude in connection with a house, no matter what, that is used as

long as it is adequate, and then replaced. The disappearance of the token does not mean the disappearance of the sacred place which is again and again reiterated.

Attention must be given to the process, not on its circumstantial (and, ephemeral in the long run) avatars.

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Conclusions Winding up this dissertation on the sacred space a few

conclusions will review even more clearly the ideas expressed: 1. The sacred space is the interface between the unappropriated

territory of nature and the human settlement . Heidegger’s clearing( Lichtung ) becomes thus a particular case of the Sacred Space

described by Amoroso as lucus a non lucendo , namely a Sacred Space described eminently by its limits (the violently unordered forest);

the other case of sacred Space is “composed” of a Sacred Space fixed/stabilized by a vertical space axis.

2. The Sacred Space exists in the stable , local and the mobile posture of trajectory (pilgrimage, for instance, or Exodus). Such a

Sacred Space is visibly marked and celebrated (temple, monument, cenotaph) or is relegated to dynamics (altar) and/or evanescence

(temporary memorial). Among them, the first form of Sacred Space, that enspaced in a fixed place is more stable because it has memory on

its side which reiterates, sediments and thus makes topical itsposition.

3. The temple is a privileged example of such a Sacred Space where its components of place and space are confirmed and

strengthened mutually in their very sacredness. The temple is a place “intoxicated” with sacredness, a place of sacred in excess, where the

redundancy of its presence, of the reference to its presence or nature represents the principle of spatial-volumetric and

decorative organization. 4. Nonetheless, in a locality situated on/in the proximity or

around the Sacred Space whose territory is, in other words, informed by the sacred, the temple is not the only place where it becomes

visible: the house is a different other Sacred Space , situated even — in an ad-hoc evolutionary theory — before the temple (not in the

temporal sense of the immediate connection with the diffuse sacred of the place); the temple can be born in a house (as it did several times)

while the change of a church “back” into house still has an exceptional, somewhat profaning air (shelter, asylum, hospital,

and other daring conversions today 15 ). Further informed of Heidegger’s theory on the essential nature of habitation and of

Eliade’s, the relation between house and the sacred continues to seem one of mutual capitalization, no matter the stable or temporary

nature of the respective place of habitation.

15 ? See the examples of churches converted into housing that I gave in Khora.

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