Environmental Forms: Landscape Sources of Sacred
Résumé
The natural landscape forms a mediation or a link, between the here below and the beyond, between the faithful individual and the divinity. The issue here is not so much the way in which religions or spiritualities grasp the environment, but in the way in which believers use environmental forms to access the divine. The sources and experiences of the sacred are determined by, or even subjected to, specific ecologies and typologies in ways that are simultaneously social, psychological, cultural, geographic and historical. We observe the spiritual potentiality of many environmental forms. For example, a mountain, by elevating the soul along with altitude, by associating both beauty and immensity to ecstasy, symbiosis and admiration, does indeed appear to be the environmental form most apt to bring forth the sacred. Conversely, swamps – organic miasmas, ecosystems of chaos – combine the pair dread-fear with the dichotomy death-life: these marshlands call forth the disquieting supernatural, Charon, the mythological ferryman of Hades, as well as the witches and warlocks of lore that are associated with the vast European wetlands.